Part 3

As for Bilston, where is the man heroic enough to sound its praises? Passengers by railway, passing through Bilston, see only deserted slag-heaps, cinder mounds, and a general area of desolation, but the road reveals Bilston in an added squalor of grimy houses and frowzy courts. The collieries and ironworks that created the town are things of the past, and their ruins only remain to tell of what it was a century ago. Surely never was there a more second-hand looking place than Bilston is now, with its long street apparently divided between old-clothes shops, “marine stores,” pawnbrokers’ establishments, and public-houses. Even Bilston gritstone, once prized for the making of grindstones, is under a cloud, and the old saying, that “a Dudley man and a Bilston grindstone may be found all the world over,” takes a new significance in the fact that the enterprising native, if he wishes scope for his enterprise, must go forth in the world to places as yet unexhausted. But the decay of the town perhaps dates more certainly from the fearful times of the cholera epidemic of 1882, when Bilston suffered more severely than any other place; when so many died that help had to be brought from other districts to bury them; and when hundreds of children were left fatherless and motherless in the stricken town. Of a population numbering 14,492, no fewer than 742 died.

You enter Bilston across a tract of abandoned coal mines, and leave it for a similar waste. The forlorn and derelict condition of these deserted mining fields, strewn with shale and piled with fantastic, but always grim and forbidding, rubbish heaps, is a blot upon these busy districts, and a reproach to the condition of affairs that permits such things. Apart from the certainty that the mineral wealth of a country should be the property of the State rather than of the individual landowner, the question of the deserted coal-fields is a very serious one. Here, in these barren and absolutely unproductive wastes, the cynical selfishness of the landed class is abundantly evident. The coal measures exhausted and the collieries closed down, the land is unoccupied and contributes nothing in rates or taxes. It may lie thus, unfenced and hideously sterile, until such time as it is wanted for building operations. In many instances it will never be required for that purpose, and so much land has thus permanently become as useless as the Sahara or the stony deserts of Arabia. There is no reason, beyond individual self-interest, why such a state of things should exist. Before the pits were sunk and coal dug, these wild and uncared-for tracts were in many cases cultivated fields, from which the soil was removed when the colliery companies began operations. In leasing ground for this purpose, landowners usually insert a clause protecting themselves in the event of the coal being exhausted and the works deserted; a clause binding lessees’ to restore the surface soil, or to pay a fine of £30 an acre. In practice, it is much cheaper to pay the £30 fine on every acre than it would be to remove the refuse-heaps and to spread the nutritious soil over the land again; hence these abominations of desolation that else might become fields once more, grow the kindly fruits of the earth again, employ industry, and contribute toward the rates and taxes of the community.

The old red-brick toll-house still standing by the wayside, about two miles from Wolverhampton, where Gibbet Lane toll-gate once barred the way, is in midst of these wastes. The modern settlement of Monmore Green, as little like the picture of a village green, conjured up by its name, as possible, is beyond. It was here in September, 1829, that the “Greyhound” coach came to grief on its way to Birmingham. The breaking of an axle, that fruitful source of disaster, threw the coach over, and of the five “outsides” who jumped for their lives, one was killed, and the other four badly injured.

The great and progressive town of Wolverhampton now looms ahead, a busy and thriving contrast with the scenes just passed, and a place second to none in the forward strides made towards improvement in these days of its expansion.

IX

The old entrance into Wolverhampton, before the making of Cleveland Road in 1830, was by the narrow Bilston Street, still remaining as an object-lesson in old-time thoroughfares, and thence by Snow Hill along Dudley Street, and so into what was then called “High Green,” now known as “Queen Square.” Darlington Street did not come into being until 1821, and before that time the rest of the way through the town and out at the other end, followed a devious course, by lanes long since swept away, or widened out of recognition. Coaches changing horses at the “Peacock” in Snow Hill, a house still existing as the “Swan and Peacock,” had the privilege of driving through its yard, and so by a short cut into Bell Street, across into Barn Street (long since re-christened Salop Street), and right away for Chapel Ash, and the open country again. The coaches thus privileged were the “Tally-ho,” “Hibernia,” “Crown Prince,” “Emerald,” “Reindeer,” and “Beehive.” The mails and other coaches using the “Swan” in High Green, or Market Place as it was indifferently called, or the “Lion” in North Street close by, had a longer journey, and threaded a mazy course utterly vanished and forgotten since the broad and spacious thoroughfare of Darlington Street was made.

Wolverhampton has nothing to do with wolves. It was never the “wolves’ town” of Dr. Mandell Creighton’s contemptibly childish etymology, but probably derived its name from Wulfrun, sister of Ethelred II. She it was who in 994 founded the great collegiate church of St. Peter, that, collegiate no longer, stands on the crest of the waterless ridge forming the site of the town. It is true that there had been both a church and a town here before that time, for Wulfhere, first Christian king of Mercia, dedicated a church to St. Mary at “Hamtun” in the year 657, and the names of both founders have such close points of similarity that there must ever remain some uncertainty as to which of them really gave Hampton its distinguishing prefix. It may be noted as a curious fact that the town is still known in the surrounding districts as “Hampton.”

Although it is not approached from Birmingham and Bilston by any appreciable hill, Wolverhampton is seen by one standing in Queen Square—now, as ever, the centre of the town to occupy an elevated site, sloping rapidly towards the west. It is, indeed, situated, very curiously, three hundred feet above sea-level, and on the great watershed dividing the river-system of the Midlands. To the east flows the Trent into the German Ocean, and to the west the Severn and its tributaries empty themselves into the Bristol Channel; but, decreeing though it does the destinies of those rivers, this ridge itself sends forth only the rivulet called the Smestow.

Wolverhampton is (not very happily) called the “Capital of the Black Country.” That title is misleading, for the reason that, although it has grown enormously, and has long ceased to be the agricultural market-town it once was, it stands, not in the centre, but at the very edge of that busy and grimy tract. Coming through the Black Country from Birmingham you suddenly, on taking leave of Wolverhampton, step over the threshold again into a land of grass and trees and clear sunshine.

It is a fine and an interesting town, not wholly given up to factories and soot, and still keeping a hold upon ancient memories in the great church of St. Peter, a noble building that, about 1450, rose upon the site of Wulfrun’s church, and presents as magnificent an example of the Perpendicular style as anything to be found in the Midlands. Much might be said of St. Peter’s if this were the place for it—of its rich interior, of the curious and beautiful carved stone pulpit, and its grotesque lion, goggling with its stony eyes, erected about 1480, and of the life-sized bronze statue of Admiral Sir Richard Leveson, by Le Sœur, that supreme artist who wrought the beautiful equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross. But these pages are not for lengthy archæological disquisitions, and so St. Peter’s must needs he thus summarised, and even that fruitful source of angry discussion, the so-called “Dane’s Cross” in the churchyard, must be but mentioned. It is not a cross, but a circular pillar of red sandstone, standing twenty feet high, and covered with interlacing ornament that may be either Saxon or Norman, and is thought by some to be the memorial of a seventh century battle of Tettenhall.

St. Peter’s and its surroundings form the pleasantest part of Wolverhampton, and though electric tramways and the press of commerce make the neighbourhood anything but reverend, the lawns and beautiful gardens on whose grass and variegated flowers the ancient tower looks down prove that, although the town is very earnest on the subject of getting on in the world, it does not, for all the striving, forget all those gracious things that make life better worth the living.

Of old times there is little, besides the church, remaining, and the one notable thing, curiously enough, is, or was, connected with the church itself. This is the old Deanery, built in the reign of Charles II., and reminiscent of the time when the oddly conjoined Deanery of Wolverhampton and Windsor lasted, together with the collegiate establishment dissolved in 1846. The Deanery, a grand old mansion of red brick, standing in its own grounds, is now a Conservative Club.

To ask a catalogue of what they make in modern manufacturing Wolverhampton would mean a lengthy and varied list; but to specialise is an easier task. Locks stand at the head of all products, with more than sixty firms—Chubb’s the most generally known—engaged in a weekly output of close upon 400,000 locks; probably as eloquent a testimonial to the world’s ingrained dishonesty as anything likely to be advanced. Thirty firms make the attendant keys. Tin-plate working and japanning come next, with cycle-manufacturing; and at the end of a long list of hardware industries, five “soot merchants.” There must be great scope for their business in this neighbourhood of the Black Country, and the only wonder is that there are not more of them.

X

Little indeed is left of the Wolverhampton of the coaching era—a fact not very greatly to be regretted, because the old town had no architectural pretensions, but a great many squalid cottages and lanes, of no real interest or antiquity. High Green was the exception. It must be borne in mind that the Wolverhampton of that time was a very small place compared with the great manufacturing town of to-day, and that the “neat market-town” of Wigstead and Rowlandson’s tour in 1797 contained only some 11,000 inhabitants. To-day it numbers 96,000, and extends along the Holyhead Road as far as Tettenhall, a distance of nearly two miles, more than a mile beyond what was, a century ago, the “small village” of Chapel Ash, a place forming now an integral part of the town. High Green was a place well named in the adjectival part of its title, for it occupied the highest part of the commanding ridge on which Wolverhampton was first built. Whatever there was of a green on its site has vanished these centuries ago, and as a market-place it has long been superseded by the great market-buildings near by, and by the Corn Exchange; both erected about 1851. Before that time it was thronged with the stalls of butchers, and with country folk come to sell their vegetables, fruit, eggs, butter, poultry, and other produce. Farmers and corn-dealers met there, in the open air, careless of the weather, as their grandfathers and remote ancestors had done before them, holding forth samples of golden grain in their great outstretched palms, and doing business with a hand-shake and a convivial glass at the “Swan,” to the great content of the pigeons that hovered numerously over this then picturesque centre of the old market-town, not yet transformed by the discovery of the mineral wealth of the district.

The “Lion” was the principal inn of old Wolverhampton. It stood on the site now occupied by the Town Hall, and was originally built about 1750. Thirty coaches a day are said to have changed horses in its yard, or to have started from its doors, and under the sway of Thomas Badger, who died in 1799, and of his successor, Richard Evans, it enjoyed for a long series of years the chief posting business. The yellow-jacketed and black-hatted postboys of the “Lion” for nearly three-quarters of a century rode the pigskin, bumped and plied the whip in front of the best in Staffordshire, Shropshire, and Warwickshire.

Richard Evans was highly successful in the combined parts of coach-master, horse-owner, and innkeeper. The variety of his business was surprising, and his methods matched every shade. He ruled his stable-yards with a passionate storm of objurgatory eloquence, bore himself with a tactful but self-respecting deference to the great ones who honoured his house, was popular with the townspeople who used his assembly-rooms, and at one with the Town Commissioners, a body first established in 1779, and meeting, in those days before Town Halls, under his roof. One of his strange guests was the body of the Duke of Dorset, killed in 1815 in an Irish hunting-field, and brought to England for sepulture with his forefathers in the Sackville vault at Withyham, in distant Sussex. A kind of lying-in-state, with the public admitted to view, took place at every town where the mournful procession halted. The next year, 1816, Napoleon’s travelling carriage, captured after Waterloo, was here, being shown in the stable-yard for a week at sixpence a head to thousands of country-folk and colliers. The pit-men were not content with gloating over the capture: they wanted to mark their hatred of “Boney” by dragging his carriage out and burning it.

[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1797. _After Rowlandson._]

Richard Evans in 1821 sold his coaching business to his son, who took it to the newly built “New Hotel” in Bell Street, itself now a thing of the past. Shortly afterwards he relinquished the “Lion” into other hands, but in a few years the old house began to decline. Landlords and landladies succeeded one another at increasingly frequent intervals, and at last it was closed in 1838, to be used for a period partly as a private house and partly as a chemist’s shop. The growing dignity of the town and of municipal life had by this time begun to demand the provision of a Town Hall, and it was acquired and altered at a large cost for that purpose, only to be found so highly inconvenient that it was pulled down in 1869 and the building erected that now stands upon the site.

Next in importance to the “Lion” was the “Swan,” already mentioned, which stood on the east side of High Green, where Lloyd’s Bank now is. In the old theatre down its yard, built in 1779, the Kembles, Mrs. Siddons, and many another trod the boards, and from the balcony over the “Swan” entrance Daniel O’Connell addressed excited crowds before the passing of the first Reform Bill. Reform, however, did not still political passions, for it was in front of this house that the election riot of 1835 took place, with the result that the military were sent for, the Riot Act read, volleys fired, and several persons—not rioters, but women and children—severely wounded.

It was ill work that destroyed the old “Star and Garter” inn, that stood, a picturesque brick and timber house in Cock Street (since re-named “Victoria Street”) until 1834. In that old house, on a night in 1642, Charles I. slept, on his way from Shrewsbury to London, to be intercepted, and his army defeated, at Edge Hill. The inn was rebuilt and opened again in 1836, with a make-believe “King’s Room,” a spurious bedstead, and such incongruities as portraits of the King and Cromwell on its walls.

Beside these hostelries, and the “Coach and Horses” on Snow Hill, the old inns of Wolverhampton were of a minor sort, where the simpler business-men of those times repaired in the evening to drink a jovial glass and smoke a companionable pipe; to play bowls or quoits and enjoy themselves in what the present generation would consider a very free and easy, not to say low, manner.

[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. _From an Old Print._]

XI

Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from 1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head, and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.

In that view, the coach, making so stately an exit in the direction of Birmingham and London, is the “Prince of Wales,” from Maran’s Hotel, Holyhead, to the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn. It reached London from Birmingham by way of Henley-in-Arden, Stratford-on-Avon, Woodstock, and Oxford. The imposing-looking coachman with the three-caped coat was Miller, said to have been of Dunstall Hall, reduced in circumstances, and driving a coach as to the manner born. As for the monumental structure, like the second cousin to a lighthouse, standing in the middle of the road, that was erected in 1821 by the “Light Committee” of the town, to celebrate the establishment of the first gasworks and to illuminate the Market-place. As a monument it was successful enough, and the patent refracting gas-lamp that crowned it shed a light visible for miles around; but its height was so great that the Market-place itself remained in darkness. It only served to illuminate the bedroom windows of the surrounding houses and light the good folks to bed. The “Big Candlestick,” as the pit-men of the neighbourhood called it, was a failure, and, after several proposals had been made to crown the pillar with a statue of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, or other heroes of that time, it was removed in 1842, to be succeeded some years later by that warlike trophy the captured Russian gun, seen in the picture of “High Green, 1860.” Railways had then long abolished coaches, and cabs waiting to be hired form a feature of the scene, eloquent alike of altered manners and of Wolverhampton’s growth. Some of the houses are also seen to have been rebuilt.

[Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1860. _From a Contemporary Photograph._]

In the “Queen Square” of to-day the gun is replaced by an equestrian statue of the Prince Consort: a Gothic stone bank stands on the site of the old inn, and on the right hand stands a newer new building, with sundry other reconstructions and changes. High Green became “Queen Square” from November, 1866, when Queen Victoria unveiled the statue. History does not tell us why the Prince Consort should have been especially honoured at Wolverhampton, which owed him nothing, nor he it. Local association he had none, and in the placing of his effigy here we find only another example of the tiresome excess of loyalty that has planted statues of Royal personages thickly all over the kingdom, and has produced a dreary and unmeaning repetition of “Victoria” and “Albert” squares, streets, stations, museums, and what not, to the blotting out of really interesting local names that had endured for centuries before the wallowing snob came upon the scene, like some evil pantomime sprite.

Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and formless character of the town into something very different; while pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.

XII

At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse, the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,” where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.

Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.

[Illustration: OLD HILL, TETTENHALL.]

In the crowded churchyard they show the confiding stranger a stone with the much flattened and battered figure of a woman, and recount the legend of it being the memorial of a seamstress who worked on Sundays, and when reproached for it replied that if it were wrong she hoped her arms would drop off. Her arms dropped off accordingly the next Sunday, when plying her needle! The stone is really a much mutilated effigy from some ancient tomb, cast out of the church so long ago that every feature has been worn away; but it will be noticed that the arms have been hacked off at the shoulders.

[Illustration: THE SABBATH-BREAKING SEAMSTRESS.]

On the hill-top is Tettenhall Green, where old road and new meet, and so go past a park and hamlet oddly named “The Wergs” to Wrottesley Park, fenced off for the length of a mile by as ugly a stone wall as it would be possible to find in many a long journey. “The Wergs” is a corruption of the ancient name “Witheges,” itself a mangled form of “withy hedges.” It is probable that the name was derived from the sallows with which some early squatter fenced his land, instead of the rude cut-wood fences of primitive times. Wrottesley Hall, burnt in 1896, still lifts its ruined and blackened walls between the trees.

Five miles beyond Wolverhampton, passing the “Foaming-Jug” Inn, Staffordshire is left behind, and the borders of Shropshire crossed.

XIII