'APPY' AMPSTEAD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 263, 5 November 1932, Page 7 (Supplement)

'APPY' AMPSTEAD.

THE 'EATH GOES MGHBROW.

Uterary ghosts and MEMORIES.

A *MODWf REVIVAL.

London's literary salons—gegarious like every other society—have made another move. They used to cluster around the western riverside quarter of Chelsea, where Thomas Carlyle lived and the veteran George Moore still resides. But the exploiters of cities came along with apartment buildings and fake Tudor cottages, and the prosperous bourgeoisie followed; the literary colony fled. They flapped their wings and headed for the northern heights. So to-day you will find them scattered over the hills and valleys of the beautiful suburbs of Hampstead and Highgate; reviving, thereby, the longest and most picturesque literary tradition in Anglo-Saxon-dom. The areheologists have been very busy since the literary influx, and the streets and houses which wind up and down the Hampstead and Highgate hills are dotted with new memorial tablets on walls, stones, trees, gate pillars, indicating that on such and such a year some celebrity lived here, or until such and such a year this spot was the site of some famous building, well, pound or gallows. Literary ghosts and literary memories, these hills and vales are as thick with them as a meadow with daisies in spring. In the Conqueror's day they formed the domain of the abbots of Westminster. "Hampstede" is written down in Domesday Book at a value of fifty shillings. It would have been a stretch of cornfield and pasture then, with woods along the height. Highgate was a small hamlet in a clearing in the forest of Middlesex. .The abbot's park stretched between the "two. He cut the first road across the top of the hill and charged an admission fee at his toll gate—the Highgate. For centuries it was the last toll gate on the road north out of London. Near it the abbot had a gallows. ' On the top of High Gate Hill' is the stone where Dick Wliittington In Hampstead there is an old monuturned back to London. ment crediting one Armigall Waad with the discovery of America. Waad's claim seems to have rested on a voyage he made to Newfoundland in 1536. He was a bucaneer of sorts in the Drake and Raleigh manner, and later, becoming clerk of the Council of Henry VIII., leased the submanor of Belsize, on the south side of Hampstead parish, and was buried in the church. "Save The Earl of Burford." From an upper window of Lauderdale House Nell Gwyn dangled the King's son by the foot. She was the pretty redhead who was Charles ll's mistress. For a long time Charles had evaded Nell's demands that he should recognise their son and do something for him. One day, as the King came up the garden path for a little tete-a-tete, he was astonished to behold the lady dangling their boy upside down from the third, floor window. "In God's name," he called, "what are you doing there, Nelly?" "You may well ask," she shrilled, "for if you will do nothing for this poor boy of yours it were sinful that he should live to learn of the ungratefulness of kings. And I swear, to you that if you will do nothing for him now I will let him drop, and his blood will be upon your head." "Ah," cried the King, "cruel Nelly, save the Earl of Burford!" ."An earl?" said Nell. "Well, that will do to be going on with." And she drew the babs. into the room and went down to meet her lover. The Earl of Burford later got two steps up and was created Duke of St. Albans. The Kit Kat Club seems to have been mainly responsible for putting Hampstear on the literary salon map. That was a famous early eighteenth century club devoted to chat, scandal and good cooking. Dukes, earls, gouty old wits and all the celebrated writers and painters of the day who were also good fellows were, in the Kit Kat circle. They would make excursions out to the Bull and Bush or the Upper Flask to gossip and drink. Then somebody saw the chance of making a regular spa of Hampstead and piped the spring down to a marble bowl, put up a well room and an assembly room and waited for the rush. He was not disappointed. Spring, summer, and autumn the big top-heavy coaches came toiling up the steep hill. Private coaches clattered up the hill, too,..and ladies in lace hoods and ruffles to match stepped out on the points of high-heeled shoes and let their hoops expand gracefully before toddling across to take tea in china cups without handles in bun shops or ransack .the raffling shops for gloves, fans, and trinkets. Fashion and Frolic. The assembly room was lit by candles in pewter Sconces. There was dancing all night and card playing all day, and all the beauties of the town went out and staked and lost diamonds, money, and reputation. The literary lights were in their element. In the long day the Poet Laureate Colley Cibber read a birthday ode, and a little man with the eyes of a clever monkey passed round this epigram: In Merry old England it once was a rule, The King had his poet and also his fool; But now we're so frugal I'd have you to know it, That Cibber can serve both for fool and for poet. The satirist was Pope, who lived in Well Walk and shared in the fashions and follies of the place. Richardson, who initiated the English novel, lodged in Flask Road. Smooth, precise, placid, and platitudinous, he leaned against the trees and thought out new moral sentiments for his latest story, and sat in quiet corners bf the pump room or the long room on the lookout for a fashionable debauchee who would serve him for a character. Later started the saturnalia of " 'Appy 'Ampstead." It is that festival of the London masses, sacred to the Easter and Whitsuntide national "bank holidays," and not its literary associations, which has made Hampstead internationally known. For a day the slums and tenements of the capital turn their inhabitants out for a "blindo" on the heath. The costers come with their mokes and "old Dutches." There are swings and roundabouts and coconut shies? also beer and gin by the bucketful. Wraiths of Great Figures. Presently Hampstead and Highgate were left to the writers and artists, who could appreciate their beauties and amuse themselves without the aid of assembly rooms, medicinal waters, onenight marriages, and fashionable «outs. ,

Oliver Goldsmith's favourite Hampstead haunt was the Jolly Pigeon. He liked to take his friends to see the view over six counties from the mound in the garden. Samuel Johnson liked the inn but not the views. He had lodgings in Priory Lodge —his rooms can still be seen—and wrote there his "Vanity of Human Wishes," taking the air daily across the hgath and carefully touching all the trees and posts as lie came back (he could not bear to miss one). The ride from his Bloomsbury house out to Jack Straw's Castle—the inn is named after an old highwayman who had a hangout there—allowed Dickens to kill two birds with one stone. He got his exercise and he met his friend, Forster, to whom he would read over what he had written and invite his comments. Sometimes they would go on for lunch to the Spaniard's Inn. Very popular was the Spaniard's for a long time, and this was the reason for it: Its coffee room stands on the boundary between two parishes. For a long time the license at the Hampstead end expired at 12.30, while that of the Finchley end finished at 11. So at 11 all the company' at the Finchley end moved over to the Hampstead end, often to the indignation of the persons comfortably drinking there. When- Lamb, Shelley, and Keats had all gone, and the lustre of the heath as a literary retreat seemed to be fading, Joanna Baillie, the poetess, remained and gave it a new lease of life by drawing out to her salon all the most celebrated men and women in England and abroad. Joanna Baillie's poetry is forgotten now; her salon is still remembered. And now those days have come again. The Shelleys and the Keatses, the Johnsons and the Richardsons, the Gays, Popes, and Dickenses, Hogarths and Congreves of to-day, and the latter-day salon makers like Hunt and Joanna Baillie, are back on those old verdant hills, and a century hence the history that is being made there, in a walk, a talk over a glass of wine or a tankard of beer, will be dug out by a new generation; for by then men will have decided who of all the creative artists functioning to-day shall live and who shall be forgotten, and the trifles of chat, action, and frustration which to-day have no significance, by then will have acquired meaning and the power to interest minds and move human hearts.