Europe in Autumn (38 page)

It’s said that, following the disagreement with Hoskyns, Whitton-Whyte himself reinstituted the original state of the map and delivered the draught in person to its engraver, Mortimer Heathcoate, charging him to ‘change not one line nor one triangulation point.’

PUBLICATION HISTORY

General Whitton-Whyte never lived to see the publication of Sheet 2000. In September 1822, aged eighty, he suffered a stroke while travelling through Dorset, and died at Poole two days later. It is a testimony to the old man’s stamina that, despite the difficulties of travel around England, Scotland and Wales in those days, he had managed to cover so much of the country during his life.

The Survey was not delayed by mourning, however, and Sheet 2000, now overseen by Whitton-Whyte’s son, Captain John, was published as a single sheet in London on October 5, 1822, some two months after the Ordnance Survey sheet of the same area.

Comparison of the two sheets shows that Hoskyns’ reservations about the accuracy of Sheet 2000 were largely unfounded, save in one area just north of Colnbrook, where the village of Stanhurst is marked. No such village appears on the OS sheet, and indeed no such village has ever existed in this location.

Quite where the inaccuracy came from is unknown, and the surviving field drawings offer no clue. It is known that, despite his advanced years, the General made many on-site surveys himself. Whether he mapped ‘Stanhurst,’ or whether one of his hired men made this inexplicable error, is not known. However, due to Whitton-Whyte’s dispute with Henry Hoskyns, the error was allowed to stand.

1
Sheet 2000 was revised by Captain John Whitton-Whyte in 1830 and 1831, the revised state being published in 1833. This revision was undertaken to bring the sheet into line with the James Gardner printings of OS Sheet 7 between 1824 and 1840, and exhibits many of the Gardner revisions.

However, far from removing the spurious village of Stanhurst from the original state, the revision shows it as having grown in size and been joined by a neighbouring hamlet named Adam Vale, on the outskirts of Colnbrook. A contemporary account tells of Captain John taking ‘a particular interest’ in this portion of the map, and spending many weeks in the Windsor area, where he died of pneumonia in December 1842.

2
With the death of Captain John, his son, Lieutenant Charles Whitton-Whyte, then twenty-two years of age, found himself in charge of the Alternative Survey, overseeing new revisions and the first electrotype printings of Sheet 2000.

The first electrotype printing was published in 1849, and instead of correcting the errors in its predecessors, compounds them. Surviving field drawings show an increase of interest in the area around Windsor, and a corresponding decline of accuracy elsewhere on the sheet. The 1849 printing of Sheet 2000 therefore largely resembles the 1833 state, save in one area.

The 1849 state erases Colnbrook altogether, replacing it with an Adam Vale the size of a small town. Stanhurst’s cathedral (St Anthony’s) is recorded in one set of field drawings, while in another set the spurious villages of Vale, Minton and Holding have obliterated Harmondsworth.

By the revisions of 1851 and 1855, this small corner of Middlesex is all but unrecognisable. Spurious villages, hamlets and towns have sprung up seemingly overnight. West Drayton has gone, and all that marks its former position on several sets of field drawings is the legend ‘Drew Marsh’ and the symbol for a large pond.

From the few surviving records, it appears that the rest of the map, while perfectly accurate, was to all practical purposes ignored, being reproduced from earlier sheets or (some accounts have it) from Ordnance Survey sheets.

The quite imaginary area around Stanhurst appears to have obsessed Charles Whitton-Whyte, a reclusive man by all accounts, presiding over a family fortune mortally damaged by the cartographical endeavours of his father and grandfather. In 1846, he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to map-making.

Charles took to spending much of his time in Windsor while various family holdings fell into decline due to his neglect. At the time of the 1855 revision, he bought a small house in Datchet, and is reported to have spent many hours walking in a countryside which, according to his map, did not exist.

In 1860, aged forty, Charles met and married Jane Breakhouse of Windsor, twenty years his junior. They would spend the next twenty years trying to have children.

3
Much controversy surrounds the so-called ‘Black Sheet’ revision of 1863. No examples, notes or field drawings survive of this state, but from contemporary accounts it is possible to reconstruct how it must have appeared.

In this electrotype printing, Windsor is gone, as are Staines, Uxbridge and Brentford. Into the area bounded by them is inserted the ‘county’ of Ernshire, complete and entire with towns, villages, hamlets, roads, streams and a rail link to Paddington. The Thames cuts unchanged through the southeastern corner of Ernshire, as do other existing watercourses and physical features.

‘If Mr White (sic) thinks this a joke, let him be assured that the residents of this lovely part of the nation do not consider it so,’ wrote one irritated resident of West Drayton in a letter to
The Times
dated August 22 1863.

Certainly, others shared this correspondent’s irritation, because on November 12, 1864, the Black Sheet became the only map in British history to be banned by order of Parliament. ‘For the good of the Nation,’ wrote one Minister to Whitton-Whyte later that month. Whitton-Whyte’s reply has not survived.

4
The final revision of Sheet 2000, the illegal ‘Natal Sheet,’ was published on July 7 1890, the day of Charles’s son’s birth. His wife lived barely long enough to see the child and name him Edwin.

Only two examples of the Natal Sheet were ever printed, of which this is the single survivor.

On it, we can clearly see the final flowering of the Whitton-Whytes’ peculiar obsession. Ernshire has consolidated itself – in Charles’s mind if nowhere else. Its county town, Stanhurst, is a bustling place roughly the size of present-day Loughborough. It has rail links to the four points of the compass, an extensive road network, a barracks in Anselmdale, farms, churches, post offices, all the amenities of a real county, even a manor house at Eveshalt.

The Parliamentary banning order notwithstanding – it was, after all, simply a revision of the banned Black Sheet – the Natal Sheet was displayed in a gallery in Islington, and seems to have engendered a curious wave of hoaxes.

All through the summer of 1890, newspapers and public institutions were bombarded with communications from the towns of Ernshire.
The Times
received letters from the inhabitants of Stanhurst and Eveshalt. Buckingham Palace received an invitation for the Queen to review the garrison at Eveshalt. A picture-postcard of St Anthony’s Cathedral in Stanhurst is reported to have been delivered to the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, inviting him to make a pastoral visit. And a woman in Margate claimed to be having a correspondence with a young man from Adam Vale. In a fit of madness which was later to result in the sacking of one manager, the prosecution of another for fraud, and the forcible retirement to a coastal sanatorium of a third, the South Western Railway produced posters advertising day-trips to the ‘historic’ town of Stanhurst.

In September 1890 a special Act of Parliament was passed forbidding any member of the Whitton-Whyte family from ever publishing another map. Imprisonment was considered for Charles but rejected ‘due to his infirmity.’ A fine was similarly rejected due to the parlous state of the family’s finances.

In the event, punitive measures proved unnecessary. The following year, Charles Whitton-Whyte left his little house in Datchet (where he insisted on living despite the fact that on his map Datchet did not exist.) He locked his front door, handed his infant son to his wife’s sister, Mrs Margaret Allen, and walked away down the road.

‘Of his illness there was no sign,’ Mrs Allen later wrote to a cousin. ‘His head was held high, his step was firm and sure, and he swung his stick with vigour as he walked away from Edwin and myself.’

Charles was never seen again.

5
Edwin Whitton-Whyte took his mother’s maiden name of Breakhouse, and under his aunt’s care showed no interest in cartography. Despite the shame of his father’s madness he was accepted into Eton, and later went up to Oxford to study ‘Greats.’ In 1914 he enlisted and was sent to the Western Front, where he acquitted himself with distinction, rising to the rank of Sergeant.

Edwin kept meticulous journals, but only once did he refer to his father and to the Alternative Survey.

My father believed,
he wrote,
as did my grandfather and great-grandfather, that he had discovered a county where none exists, a landscape overlooked by the very people who occupy it. My grandfather writes of maps having a power over the land, and theorises that if an imaginary landscape is mapped in great enough detail, it will eventually supplant the actual physical landscape, as a wet cloth wipes chalk from a blackboard.

My great-grandfather, on the other hand, wrote of all possible landscapes underlying each other like the pages of a book, requiring only the production of a map of each landscape to make it real.

Whatever their motivations, my family have spent over a century exploring these theories by documenting in great detail the growth of a county called ‘Ernshire,’ which patently has no existence in the real world.

And yet today I received a letter purporting to be from my father! If he is still alive, he must be nearly a hundred years old, but though I have no memory of him I recognise his handwriting from his diaries and memoranda.

In his letter, he wishes me well, and says he is proud of me, though I do not know how he could be aware of my life-story, unless Aunt Peggy has been in contact with him. He claims to be living in ‘Ernshire.’ He begs me to visit him, and gives detailed instructions on how to get there. He says the eight-seventeen from Paddington sometimes calls at Stanhurst, and that he has ‘confidantes’ among the staff of the Windsor Branch of the South Western Railway who will ensure my safe passage to a county which does not exist.

Madness. This is patently a hoax, and I have despatched a letter instructing my solicitors, Messrs. Selhurst, Barley and Cainforth, to trace and prosecute the writer of this awful missive. I suspect one of my father’s ex-employees, though I have also been led to believe that during the scandalous summer of my birth, a member of the South Western Railway’s staff was prosecuted, in part due to the hysteria brought about by my father’s maps. I have instructed Mr Barley to trace this man as a matter of the gravest urgency.

6
Edwin Breakhouse was killed leading his men ‘over the top’ on the Somme. Many of his personal effects were never delivered to his aunt in England, among them the letter to which he refers in his journal. All record of his contact with his solicitors was destroyed when the offices of Selhurst, Barley and Cainforth burned down in April 1918, shortly after the deaths of all three senior partners in the Staines Train Disaster of March of that year.

7
Sheet 2000 may be the last remaining example of a peculiarly English sensibility, the same sensibility which induced land-owners to build ‘follies’ on their estates. A folly most often took the form of a structure with no function other than the satisfaction of its builders’ vanity, and Sheet 2000 could be seen as the Whitton-Whytes’ folly – in both senses of the word. It remains as merely an extraordinarily-detailed scrap, a remnant of a work which occupied the lives of hundreds of people over a century and a half, and perhaps a remnant of an age now long-gone.

Students of cartography will note the painstaking detail lavished not only on the spurious area of ‘Ernshire,’ but on all other areas of the map. Comparison with contemporary Ordnance Survey sheets shows a certain elegance of execution absent in the OS material. Sheet 2000, for all its faults, remains gorgeously custom-made, with all the care and attention – indeed, if the word can be used to describe a map, all the poetry – that entails. It is something which we today, with our satellite-assisted, computer-drawn maps, have lost, and recalls a time when maps did exercise a power over the landscape – if only in the imagination.

8
One anecdote remains, and though its source is uncertain and there is no way to confirm it, it is in keeping with the story of Sheet 2000, and perhaps deserves to be set down here.

In the year 1926, at the age of 94, Mrs Margaret Allen was visited by a young man who claimed to be her nephew.

Sister Ruth, who ran the nursing home where Mrs Allen spent her final years, is reported to have told a friend that the old lady was extremely excited by the encounter. Sister Ruth recalled that the young man, who called himself Stephen, spoke with an indefinable rural accent, and left Mrs Allen a certain document.

Mrs Allen jealously guarded the document given to her by Stephen, and after her death it was nowhere to be found, but Sister Ruth claimed to have seen it once, and described it as ‘a map.’

Sister Ruth, as far as is known, never described the map to her ‘friend,’ but she did mention one feature. It was marked, she said, in the bottom right-hand corner:
Whitton-Whyte and Sons. Mapmakers. Stanhurst
.

3.

“S
OME KIND OF
novel,” Lev hazarded. “A utopian fiction.”

Rudi sat with his hands clasped to the sides of his head, like a man with a horrible hangover. “This is insane,” he murmured, looking down at the decrypts of the loose typewritten sheets arranged on the coffee table in front of him.

According to Lev, the code was quite arcane, a variation of something which had been developed for commercial use in England in the late eighteenth century. The cloth laptop had taken three days to crack it, but now it was happily delivering pages of cleartext at a rate of two or three a day. They were already several pages into the handwritten parts of the notebook. Columns of digits and letters were scanned into the laptop, and out came descriptions of towns, villages, hamlets, ratings of pubs and restaurants and guest houses.