A CROSS-SECTION OF WESSEX
By E. L. WOODWARD
AWET afternoon, and one's walking clothes slowly drying after a wet morning ; a room with one book, and, happily, no crossword puzzles to vex my plodding brain. I took the one book : Kelly's Directory of Dorsetshire, for the year 1923. Nineteen hundred and twenty-three was not a particularly good year for French wines, and possibly not for English directories, but this Kelly was certainly a first growth. Immense labour had gone to its cross divisions and classifications. First of all there were the sheep and the goats ; the " private residents "—and everyone else. The Earl of Shaftesbury towered above the private residents ; the " also rans " included all the farmers and craftsmen of the county: Many of the farmers had a mysterious mark (o) against their names. In France one would have assumed a lavish distribution of diplennes de merite agricole ; but these English messieurs de cores were none other than the farmers of 150 acres or more. Mr. Kelly, like the compilers of Doomsday Book, does not mention by their names the landless labourers, so that I did not find lists filled with old names—the Durbeyfields and Priddles of the county. In the table of trades, which includes " convents " (between " contractors, milk," and " coopers "), there were neither reidlemen nor tranters ; but I discovered 4 higglers, 83 thatchers, in spite of corrugated iron and cheap tiles, 2 herbalists, 2 cordial manufacturers, 19 booksellers (leaving out W. H. Smith and Ryman), or 1 autochthonous bookseller for every 12,000 inhabitants, and only one stock and share broker. I wondered how many counties could produce 33 thatchers for every stock and share broker.
The land, or rather the landed, still kept pride of place. " Gardeners, private," as distinct from " gardeners, landscape," and " gardeners, market," and gamekeepers were listed with their employers' names, styles, titles, decorations, and degrees. The value of every living, the acreage of every glebe, the seating capacity of nearly every church were given in detail. There were statistics of the amazing amount of money sunk in nonconformist chapels in the fifty years before 1914. Bridport, with less than 4,000 souls, had three Anglican churches and a mission church, a Roman Catholic church, Baptist, Congregational, Unitarian and Wesleyan (2) chapels, and meeting houses for the Friends and the Plymouth Brethren. For all their diversity of belief, the people keep the King's peace ; iii 1923 there were only 218 constables of the county police (incidentally, there were nearly ten times as many bulls as county policemen).
So much for Dorset present. I leave out the Vice- Admiral of the county. I leave out the Iguanodon who has left his footprint on a rock near Swanage, the Pliosaurus who dropped a tooth some 18 inches long in the Kimmeridge Beds. I leave out all the geology ; there is a great deal of it, in layers beginning with " blown sand on the coast," and passing through oolite, the Combrash, the Coral Rag, the Oxford Clay, the Great Dirt Bed, and what not. to the respectably ancient has. I turn to history. Herein lies Mr. Kelly's charm. He is full of knobbly, pleasant, even exciting facts. lie knows the name of every public-house in Dorset : the `Cornopean Inn,' the 'European Inn,' the Shah of Persia,' the sixteen Royal Oaks,' the ' Old Ox ' and the New Ox,' the two Mermaids,' the two Jolly Sailors,' and The True Lover's Knot.' lie may be, at times, a little reticent about the inns ; lie leaves one to guess that !The St. Peter's Fingers' is the St. Peter ad Vincula. He is more expansive about gas and water ; indeed, he has lost nothing of our great-grandfathers' pride in the new -devices of sanitation, road-making, and street-lighting. We may take these conquests for granted ; the Directory -keeps an older sense of proportion. Thus of Beaminster it is said : " the town is paved, and is lighted with gas by a Company, and supplied by water from works . . . a fire-engine is maintained." Even Cranborne " is lighted with oil lamps," while Weymouth is a blaze of municipal and private enterprise for the public good.
After the evidence of a proper corporate spirit, the history of the churches and great houses is told gravely and almost primly. There are few digressions. Tolpuddle is accurately placed in its parliamentary and petty sessional division, its hundred, union, county court district, rural deanery, archdeaconry, and diocese ; but nothing is said about the labourers who were transported a century ago. Kingston Russell House is a " stately and -historical mansion " ; it does not remind Mr. Kelly of Burke's famous disquisition on the House of Russell, or even of the story of John Russell, who was brought from Bridport by Sir Thomas Trenehard to speak in continental languages to the shipwrecked father and mother of the Emperor Charles V. (John Russell went with the Archduke and Archduchess to Windsor. He found favour with Henry VII ; he was at court in the reign of Henry VIII when rich abbeys and forfeited lands were being doled out to the adroit). Mr. Kelly describes Ford Abbey—richly rebuilt by its last Abbot within twenty years of the Dissolution ; but he does not mention Jeremy Benthamn's tenancy of the place, or the conver- sations of Bentham and James Mill against this curious mediaeval background. Yet, if there are omissions, how rich, how varied is the narrative. There are Roman amphitheatres, tombs of grandees, and stories of the deaths of kings. Canute died at Shaftesbury nine hundred years ago this year. Two of Alfred's brothers were buried at Sherborne. Two or three miles from the splendid- manor-house where Angel Clare brought Tess on their marriage night, there lies the tomb of Prince Clarence, second son of the late king of the Mosquito territory, Central America, who came to this country for the purpose of being educated." Tragedy is not confined to princes. The tourist who admires the exquisite uniformity of Blandford may remem- ber that only six houses in the town escaped the fire of 1731, and that this fire came during a severe outbreak of smallpox. So great was the confusion that fourteen aged people were forgotten, and left to die, and the smallpox patients housed under the arches of a neighbouring bridge.
So one reads on ; one might speak of the odd pieces of jet known in Kimmeridgea.s " coal money " ; of the ware- houses at Poole built on beds of oyster shells ; of Bond Street, London, which might have been called Creech Street, if the builder (who was nearly ruined by his enterprise) had called his new street after his house or his birthplace, and not after his family name. These names ; everyone knows the Latin distinction of so many Dorset place-names—Toiler Porcortn,- Ryme Intrinsica, Whit- chu nth Canonicorurn. Yet who remembers the names of the hills—Bulbarrow, High Stoy, Nettlecombe- Tout, Lewesdon Hill and Pilsdon Pen—with their sea names) The Cow and the Calf—or the names of the little rivers-, the Brit, the Simenc, the Wim, the Cale ? A man may have sailed up the Amazon, or crossed the new bridge over the source of the Nile ; but he has missed something in this world if he has not seen the head waters of the Simene and the Brit.
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