TO ALL TOPOGRAPHERS

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By GRAHAM GREENE

RALPH THORFSBY, the topographer of Leeds, traced—rather dubiously—his family back to the reign of Canute ; and certainly he could not have picked a better origin for a topo- grapher than the reign of a king who tried to turn back the tide. That is the hopeless task on which they are all engaged, beating time back from a gravestone, a piece of pottery, a

grassy mound. One finds them on their knees in little country churches rubbing brasses : they push ungainly bicycles up steep country lanes towards a Roman vallum : they publish at their own expense the churchwardens' accounts of Little Bibury. Vestry books and Enclosure Acts ruin their eyesight. It is one of the most innocent—and altruistic—of human activities, for a topographer never becomes a rich man through his researches : no Kidd's treasure has ever been discovered under a hawk-stone, at best a piece of Roman piping ; and fame in their lifetime is severely limited to men of their own kind and after death to historians' footnotes, unless like Aubrey or Anthony a Wood some eccentricity, some untopographical malice, catches the attention of posterity. Often they are clergy- men—they have so much to do with churches, sometimes they are civil* engineers (the profession somehow goes with the bicycle), and sometimes, as in the case of Thoresby, merchants.

Thoresby, the -unsuccessful cloth merchant, will never be a popular figure like Aubrey and Wood, although he kept a diary—the town he chose is perhaps against him, for who today will trouble to hunt through the streets of that black city for the sites of his mills and bridges ? But none the less in honesty, disinterestedness, piety, and precision he may be taken as the pattern of a topographer. I don't know what the dictionary distinction may be between a topographer and an antiquarian, but I think of an antiquarian as a man who dwells permanently among the hawk-stones and vallums, never coming nearer to his own day than a wapentake, one with little interest in human beings—in So-and-So who must pay to the Church use " at Wytsentyki next a stryk of mawllte " and somebody else who was a "defrauder " and owes 2d. The topographer takes a small familiar patch of ground and repopulates it : he experiments with time as much as Mr. Dunne, so that it is not Leeds—or your own country parish —as you know it that he presents, so much as a timeless God's- eye Leeds with all the houses that ever stood there re-erected, interpenetrating. Is the result something nearer Leeds than a guide book, a collection of photographs, a map ? One doesn't know, but certainly men like Thoresby, and earlier men like Plot and Aubrey, thought so, and even if we do not share their religious belief (I have yet to come across an atheistic topographer), their work attracts—dare one say it ?—by its very- inutility. Out of wars and the decay of civilisations the historian may spin theories which whether true or not can affect human lives, but this—this is beautifully useless, this precise painstaking record of superseded stone.

" A little above this is the Moot-Hall in the Front of the Middle- Row, on one side of which is one of the best-furnished Flesh-Shambles in the North of England ; on the other the Wool-Market for Broad- Cloth which is the All in All."

There speaks the lover, the lover of what you see in the plate called " The Prospect of Leeds "—two churches, a town hall like a German toy, a little river with a few sailing ships and a bridge, and perhaps two hundred houses trailing gently off into the fields where an artist sits on the grass.

What sort of life do topographers lead ? We know the bicycle and the back bent by brasses, but if we want to knoll/

more we cannot do better than read Thoresby's diary. For the times, with topographers, hardly change. Born just before the Restoration, Thoresby's period included the Popish Plot, the Revolution, the wars with France. The wars did affect him—they made the price of paper dear and delayed a little the publication of Ducatus Leodiensis, and at the time of the

Revolution the rumour that the Irish were ravaging the country, spread by God knows what Orange agents, struck home in Leeds with a night alarm—" Horse and arms ! Horse and arms ! Beeston is burnt, and only some escaped to bring the doleful tidings ! "—a fine topographical lament. Yet Thoresby admits himself that he was " more immediately concerned " that year with a little fire in his house which burnt his chil- dren's coats hanging on a line. No, he had little interest in great events, in his trade or even the government of his local town. He paid a fine of L2o rather than be an alderman and his eventual "conversion " from nonconformity was partly, one feels, due to the presence of good antiquarians on the bench of bishops, partly to his desire simply to avoid trouble —for the sake of his studies. There is a charming passage in which he refers to a friend's "little Paradise, his library," but Thoresby himself was no bookworm. He would ride miles to hear a story, to copy an epitaph, to preserve from time . . . Topographers are not selective—everyone who ever lived, any building which ever existed, contributes to the ideal city, so that the habit of collecting grows and Thoresby's museum included such various things as a toothbrush from Mecca, the Crown of an Indian King, a large Prussian Boot, the hand and arm of quartered Montrose, just as his successors collected postage stamps, cigarette cards, even tram tickets. Pedigrees of all the leading families, " strange accidents " like the " Stones that came out of the Hands and Feet of the Rev. and pious Mr. Blackbeard, once Lecturer at Leedes "—all were part of this city in the mind. Sometimes he arrived too late : we watch him peer in vain at an inscription : " Alexander Foster, who departed this life the 27th June, 167 . . . aetat 61 :

' Once to our liking growing daily fast, But by Death's . . . at the last.'

The rest not legible."

But one is glad he was in time to preserve from weather and lichen :

" Under this Stone doe lye six children small Of John Willington of the North-hall,"

and this sad conceit :

" Here near God's Temple lies at rest A Martyn in his Earthly Nest."

Alas ! a topographer needs a topographer in turn to preserve

what he has preserved. Thoresby's book, of course, is there, but his collection left to .a clerical son was sold, scattered, destroyed. Montrose's arm found a temporary home with a Dr. Burton, but against other items in the auctioneer' cata- logue there are grim notes. " Eggs—All broken," " Serpents —Thrown away," " Plants—all rotten and thrown on the dunghill." And as for Leeds itself—well, we may question whether the dunghill, too, was • not its proper destination, though Thoresby would not have thought so, glad of a chance to record another century of sooty life. He would have said, perhaps, with his plainness and simplicity and the smirk of satisfaction you see on his portrait, that one can fare further and fare worse, and it is true that his own family came to an abrupt end in far away Calcutta, in a worse Black Hole than his ideal city was ever to become.