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Alan Munro on Cecil Roberts

Romance of the Road

It is curious how a long sought-after book can suddenly reveal itself. Such was my luck when browsing among laden shelves beneath the old castle in Hay-on-Wye. Some years earlier a friend had lent me a copy of Cecil Roberts’s fascinating venture into the romance associated with the old Bath Road – that extended artery running westward by river and plain from London to England’s most elegant social watering-hole. The book’s vivid mixture of history and myth, grandeur and scandal, resolved my wife and me to retrace the author’s steps along this lifeline in our national story. It took ten years of searching before I found a first edition, wedged inconspicuously into the Hay bookshelves. At last we were off, guide and companion in hand.

Cecil Roberts, novelist, poet, dramatist, war correspondent, antiquarian and, I dare say, snob, was born in Nottingham, left school early and joined a local newspaper. He developed into one of the most prolific writers of the mid-twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1976 he had written 51 published works, including 21 novels, hardly one of which appears, tellingly perhaps, to have been reissued. But for anyone interested in places and their associations And So to Bath (1940) is a gem. Writing at the end of the 1930s under the shadow of war and in a succession of stages along the road’s hundred miles, Roberts conjures up a fascinating historical panorama from prehistoric times to Rome, the Plantagenets, the Tudors and Stuarts, the cultural glories (and social misdemeanours) of Georgian England and the Victorian prosperity and reforms that followed it, through to a philistine twentieth century which he laments. With a magpie’s zeal Roberts has gathered it all for us. For occasional fellow travellers he has the scholarly and spinsterly Miss Whissett, and Rudolf, an enthusiastic young Austrian student of English literature whose companionship may have held more than a passing charm for the bachelor

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It is curious how a long sought-after book can suddenly reveal itself. Such was my luck when browsing among laden shelves beneath the old castle in Hay-on-Wye. Some years earlier a friend had lent me a copy of Cecil Roberts’s fascinating venture into the romance associated with the old Bath Road – that extended artery running westward by river and plain from London to England’s most elegant social watering-hole. The book’s vivid mixture of history and myth, grandeur and scandal, resolved my wife and me to retrace the author’s steps along this lifeline in our national story. It took ten years of searching before I found a first edition, wedged inconspicuously into the Hay bookshelves. At last we were off, guide and companion in hand.

Cecil Roberts, novelist, poet, dramatist, war correspondent, antiquarian and, I dare say, snob, was born in Nottingham, left school early and joined a local newspaper. He developed into one of the most prolific writers of the mid-twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1976 he had written 51 published works, including 21 novels, hardly one of which appears, tellingly perhaps, to have been reissued. But for anyone interested in places and their associations And So to Bath (1940) is a gem. Writing at the end of the 1930s under the shadow of war and in a succession of stages along the road’s hundred miles, Roberts conjures up a fascinating historical panorama from prehistoric times to Rome, the Plantagenets, the Tudors and Stuarts, the cultural glories (and social misdemeanours) of Georgian England and the Victorian prosperity and reforms that followed it, through to a philistine twentieth century which he laments. With a magpie’s zeal Roberts has gathered it all for us. For occasional fellow travellers he has the scholarly and spinsterly Miss Whissett, and Rudolf, an enthusiastic young Austrian student of English literature whose companionship may have held more than a passing charm for the bachelor author. The original Roman road from London to Bath started from today’s Marble Arch, though Roberts prefers to set off through eighteenth-century Kensington, with its royal palace and fields which were now being invaded by the tidy villas of the newly wealthy. The Albert Hall allows a digression on the glory and eclipse of Gore House which previously stood there, grand home of the scandalous and prodigal Countess of Blessington and her paramour, Count d’Orsay. There will be more tales of aristocratic pride and fall along the way: Holland House, soon after obliterated by a German bomb, with its eighteenth-century salon; Syon House and Osterley, high points of the Adam brothers’ genius for interior design; Lord Burlington’s Palladian pastiche at Chiswick House; riverside Walpole House nearby, the model for Miss Pinkerton’s academy in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; Tudor Littlecote Park, beset by a sinister haunting; and the Berkeleys’ Jacobean mansion at Cranford – for Roberts another source of fascinating family drama. Benham Place near Newbury inspires a rollicking chapter devoted to Lady Craven, later Margravine of Anspach, celebrated courtesan and indifferent poetaster – ‘Lord Craven married a handful.’ At magnificent Bowood, historic seat of the Lansdowne dynasty, Roberts lets himself go:

The third marquis inherited a shell and turned it into a palace . . . A cascade, a classical temple, an island, a heronry, terraces of roses guarded by bronze stags, great lawns, clipped yews, here Diocletian himself would not have felt the splendour of his setting unworthy of a retired Emperor . . . The house, its treasures of art, the gardens, the private mausoleum, the whole picture is that of a nobleman expressing himself in an age of unlimited wealth, such as England will never know again.

Joseph Priestley, cantankerous preacher and pioneer scientist employed as resident librarian, used his time at Bowood to discover oxygen in 1774; the tablet sought out by Roberts beside the River Marden in nearby Calne still marks the ‘Doctor’s Pond’ where he carried out his experiments. There is a sympathetic account of the publication in 1917 of a letter from the fifth Marquis, a former Foreign Secretary, prompted perhaps by the loss of his son and heir, which called for an end through negotiation to the slaughter and misery of the Great War, and of the storm of protest and abuse his action aroused. We saw a touching exhibit of mementos of this family tragedy when we visited on the centenary of the war’s outbreak. Today Barry’s grand Golden Gate no longer leads to the great house, a major portion of which has been demolished, but to a more humble golf club. The towns and villages along our highway all have their intriguing histories and characters, grist to the author’s insatiable curiosity and evocative pen. In Brentford a diversion down Ferry Lane brought us, like the author, to an old wharf. There a dilapidated granite pillar still commemorates the spot where an invading Julius Caesar forded the Thames in 54 BC, as well as King Edmund’s defeat of the Danes in 1016 and the Battle of Brentford in 1642 during the Civil War. Roberts has plenty more to say of this seminal conflict in a chapter on Newbury, ‘England of the market town . . . with roofs of all shapes and hues’. The scene of two crucial battles between King Charles and Parliament, it had witnessed another struggle for the crown five centuries before between Queen Matilda and the usurping King Stephen. Here we also meet the rags-to-riches drama of Jack of Newbury, who made his fortune in local broadcloth, raised a militia troop for Henry VIII, and furnished the town with its splendid Tudor church. At Reading, no longer today Roberts’s ‘thriving manufacturing town of biscuits, seeds and sauce’, there is much to tell of the powerful medieval abbey, founded by Henry I and destroyed six centuries later by Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell, when its abbot was hung, drawn and quartered before the great gateway that still survives amid the abbey’s ruins, and under the shadow of the gaol that later incarcerated Oscar Wilde. There is a detour to nearby Silchester, a strategic Roman town now buried amid scrubland. Not a soul was to be seen on our visit one misty morning as we clambered over its walls and came upon the vestiges of a grass-covered amphitheatre concealed in a wooded glade. Surprisingly perhaps Slough, already afflicted by new suburban sprawl though as yet unaware of John Betjeman’s invocation of ‘friendly bombs’, catches the author’s attention. The Montem mound, scene of annual revelry by the scholars of nearby Eton, Thomas Gray’s elegiac churchyard at Stoke Poges, and grand Cliveden of the Duke of Buckingham, doomed favourite of James I, are eclipsed by a homage to Sir William Herschel, composer and musician, who turned his talents to the study of the skies and, with his sister, built a succession of gigantic telescopes through which he first discovered the planet Uranus. His reputation was celebrated throughout Europe and earned him an audience with the Emperor Napoleon. George III, a generous patron, paid a visit from Windsor:

The King looked at the enormous tube which had not yet received its reflector or been raised skywards. Some of the company thought it amusing to walk through the telescope. The Archbishop of Canterbury found it not easy. ‘Come, my Lord Bishop, I will show you the way to Heaven!’ cried the King, giving him a hand.

Such is the engaging style that infuses Roberts’s narrative. In 1939 he tracked the workshop and bits of telescope to the garden of Herschel’s Regency villa; our more recent attempt ended abruptly in the Herschel multi-storey carpark – prosaic memorial to a heroic endeavour. There is plenty more to savour as we navigate the placid valley of the Kennet and the uplands of Wiltshire, for much of England’s history was made in these parts. Marlborough, ‘town of boys and teashops’; Savernake Forest, where Henry VIII married Jane Seymour; The Bear at Hungerford, where the surrender of the Catholic James II to his Dutch brother-in-law, William of Orange, heralding the Glorious Revolution, was negotiated. The bar still displays the rare Act of Parliament clock, dating from George III’s tax on clocks, imposed to pay for the War of Independence in America. Sad however to see how once prosperous Chippenham and Calne, still famous for cheese and the Harris brothers’ bacon when Roberts passed through, and with their great medieval churches built on fortunes from wool, are today silent towns, their handsome high streets hosts to charity shops. As ever Roberts comes up with delightful snippets – green baize from Chippenham’s looms once covered the world’s billiard tables, while prehistoric Avebury Ring brings an improbable tale of the restoration of its sarsen stones a century ago by Mr Keiller of Dundee marmalade fame – whatever next? The great highway itself resounds to the rumbling wheels of the coaches and chaises that once clattered over its rutted carriageway. Roberts’s lively prose illuminates the discomforts and perils of stage-coach travel, through night and day on hard benches exposed to the elements, with hurried stops for a change of horses and ale and a pie at once famous hostelries – The Bear, The White Hart, The Pelican, The George and The Lansdowne Arms – their yards ‘always in a bustle with innkeepers, ostlers, waiters, postboys, coachmen and travellers anxious to be on their way’. Here is a contrast with the romantic image of the coaching print. The road out of London leads across lonely Hounslow Heath, the first of several haunts of highwaymen wont to plunder coaches and their passengers, even royalty on their way to Windsor. Many were discharged soldiers and sailors, others like Dick Turpin have entered legend. Those caught and hung had their corpses suspended from gibbets – there were said to be thirteen such between Hounslow and Heston. At the Ostrich in Colnbrook, notorious for its ‘gruesome story of the Sweeney Todd variety’, the ghosts are still in evidence today. Three hundred coaches a day once cantered down the narrow street until the Great Western Railway brought their era to a close. The Methuen Arms in gabled Corsham sees us off on our final stage through Pickwick – a name which once caught the fancy of a Bath-bound Charles Dickens – and down steep Box Hill into Beau Nash’s capital of fashion beside the sparkling Avon. Here our fascinating excursion through history and legend culminates in a warm welcome in a friend’s elegant home of honey-coloured stone. Do seek out Roberts’s book, and discover its treasures – ‘et bon voyageas Miss Whissett would say.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Alan Munro 2016


About the contributor

When not engaged in diplomacy abroad, Alan Munro has lived at the London end of the Bath Road for fifty years. His light-hearted memoir of a diplomatic career, Keep the Flag Flying, has recently been reissued in paperback.

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