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Ancient sport lives on in Cheltenham

By Peter Neville-Hadley Meridian Writers’ Group CHELTENHAM, England—One of the last surviving sites of the ancient sport of deer coursing, Lodge Park, about 25 kilometres east of Cheltenham, has itself to be hunted down.

By Peter Neville-Hadley

Meridian Writers’ Group

CHELTENHAM, England—One of the last surviving sites of the ancient sport of deer coursing, Lodge Park, about 25 kilometres east of Cheltenham, has itself to be hunted down. Despite maps and instructions, my approach on winding lanes was unintentionally cautious and circuitous, but I finally caught sight of the property down a long, straight and very narrow road, marking the edge of the grand Sherborne Estate it had once served.

The compact, two-storey hunting lodge of 1634, constructed from the warm yellow stone of the region and now prettily dappled with lichens, was described as “built at the great Cost and Charges of a noble true hearted Gentleman, more for the pleasure of his worthy Friends, then his owne profit.”

This was one John “Crump” Dutton, who was given permission by Oliver Cromwell to take bucks and roes from nearby Wychwood Forest to fill the park he had constructed on a swathe of otherwise useless wasteland.

The grounds and lodge are today owned by the conservation charity the National Trust, but “Crump” Dutton was also public-spirited in his day and he made the facility available to his countrymen — or at least to those rich enough to indulge in such expensive pleasures:

“It is agreed upon that the keeper shall put up his Deer at a days warning for any Gentleman to run his Dogs paying his Fees which is half a Crown a Dog and twelve pence to the Slipper for a breathing Course.”

Coursing is hunting by sight rather than smell, and the principle entertainment of deer-coursing was to race a pair of dogs against each other for gambling purposes, not to obtain something for the pot. A “breathing Course” left the deer alive. Half a crown in those days would be more than $25 today, a very handsome sum of money for the time.

The “Slipper” was the man who held the dogs in a special double collar allowing them to be released at the same time. The winner was the one closest to the deer at the time it leapt a small ditch opposite the lodge, before leaping to safety across a second ditch too wide for the dogs to manage.

Deer-coursing gets a revival each October when modern deer-hounds are let slip in a recreation of the ancient sport, but in pursuit of a mechanical lure in what is described as “the Formula One of 1634.” Dogs are brought in from as far away as Switzerland, and many participants dress in 17th-century costume.

The lodge itself was disembowelled by several subsequent owners, and successively remodelled as a dower house, labourers’ cottages and a private residence again before being bequeathed to the Trust in 1982, which started its own hunt for the building’s original form. Vast forgotten basement kitchens were discovered, once used to produce banquets for those enjoying a day’s sport.

The ascent to the flat roof is past portraits of several generations of Duttons to a sweeping view similar to the one they must have enjoyed themselves: England at its most green and pleasant.

 

ACCESS

For more information on Lodge Park visit the National Trust website at www.nationaltrust.org.uk and click on “Visits & Holidays.”

For information on travel in Britain go to the Visit Britain website at www.visitbritain.com .

 

 

 

PHOTO CAPTION

Most of Brookwood Cemetery is well-maintained, but the northeast section, where Edith Thompson lies buried, is not.

PHOTO CREDIT

John Masters/Meridian Writers’ Group

 

 

All aboard for Britain’s biggest burial place

 

By John Masters

Meridian Writers’ Group

BROOKWOOD, England—When the London Necropolis was designed it was meant to be not just the dead centre of town, but a town in its own right: a veritable city of the passed-on.

The necropolis was one of those grand Victorian schemes based on enlightened social reform. The idea was that, for health reasons (and just because imperial London liked to build big), henceforth all of London’s dead would be laid to rest in the same place, well outside of the capital.

The London Necropolis, about 50 kilometres southwest of the city, was originally meant to cover 810 hectares. In the event, only 180 hectares were ever opened, but that still makes Brookwood Cemetery, as it’s now called, Britain’s largest burial place, with 250,000 residents.

It’s simple enough to reach: from Victoria Station take the train to Brookwood, just past Woking; the trip takes 30 minutes. Walk through the railway underpass and you’re in the graveyard.

It used to be even easier to get to: from 1854 until 1941 it had its own railroad. There were two stations in the cemetery (six had originally been planned) and a London terminus next to Victoria Station. It still stands, at 121 Westminster Bridge Road, with a passageway for hearses. The year 1900 is inscribed under its crowning arch.

For half a century the London Necropolis Railway had scheduled service, and not solely for the deceased. The living would make a Sunday of it, taking a picnic or stopping for refreshments at one of the cemetery stations, North Bar (in the Nonconformist section) or South Bar (Anglicans), both of which served tea, food and liquor.

Second World War bomb damage ended the train service. The stations continued on as cafés for a while. North Bar was pulled down in the 1960s when dry rot set in. South Bar operated until 1967, then was used for paint storage until 1972, when vandals set it alight in a spectacular blaze that could be seen from Woking.

Only the foundation remains of North Bar, but at South Bar, next to the small St. Edward the Martyr Church, is a Russian Orthodox monastery.

Two bearded monks worked in the vegetable garden the day I visited, and Father Niphon was in the church. He gave me some literature on his order and told me stories of the cemetery.

One was about Edith Thompson, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. She’s in Brookwood’s northeast corner, a creepy, poorly kept section, with tombstones tilted at angles or swallowed in underbrush.

“She could have escaped hanging,” Father Niphon told me, “if she’d pleaded insanity, which the judge told her to do, but she refused.”

Unlike London’s better-known Highgate Cemetery, whose citizens include Karl Marx and George Eliot, Brookwood has few notables. Freddie Mercury, of Queen, is supposed to be one, but Father Niphon said, “I’m not sure he’s even really buried here.”

He isn’t mentioned in John Clarke’s definitive book, London Necropolis (on sale in Father Niphon’s church), and I couldn’t find a marker.

But it’s a very big cemetery.

 

ACCESS

For more information on the London Necropolis visit the Brookwood Cemetery Society website at www.tbcs.org.uk .

For information on travel in Britain go to the Visit Britain website at www.visitbritain.com .