The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Hastings Road and the "Happy Springs of Tunbridge"
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs; Hastings Road
Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance
to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street,
is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old
Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down
which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its
crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep
angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of
the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best
thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses,
strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is
the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to
it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at
the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form
excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are
as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in
the rendering of it.
Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric
epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport
to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local
celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be
anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual,
unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the
epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he
did _not_ see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn
that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:
Here lies an only darling Boy
Who was his widow’d Mother’s joy;
Her grief and sad affliction prove
How tenderly she did him love.
In childish play he teas’d a mule
Which rag’d its angry owner’s soul,
And through whose angry blows and spleen
This child so soon a corpse was seen.
His Mother now is left to mourn
The loss of her beloved Son.
Though sighs and tears will prove in vain,
She hopes in Heaven to meet again.
The name of a modern public-house in the town, the “Kicking Donkey,”
near St. Clement’s Church, would appear to have derived from this,
although the pictorial sign represents the quite different scene of a
seaside holiday-maker trying to keep his seat on the back of a restive
jackass.
The second unusual epitaph is to a smuggler:
This Stone
Sacred to the memory of
Joseph Swain, Fisherman
was erected at the expence of
the members of the friendly
Society of Hastings
in commiseration of his cruel and
untimely death and as a record of
the public indignation at the needless
and sanguinary violence of
which he was the unoffending Victim
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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