The Forest (103 page)

It was remarkable – Colonel Albion was bound to admit – what had happened in the last year. When Esdaile and Lord Henry had both impressed upon him the need to gather public support, he had dutifully gone to his London club and talked to all sorts of people like himself who had written some well-considered letters to
The Times
. And they had certainly done some good. But what he had not been prepared for was the public outcry from other sources. While Mr Esdaile had mastered the commoners’ legal case, it was the landowner from the northern Forest, Mr Eyre, who had proved brilliant at marshalling this new public support. Scientists, artists, naturalists: the newspapers were bombarded with letters. ‘Where the devil do you find these people?’ he had genially enquired. ‘Wherever I can,’ Mr Eyre had replied. ‘These are the people, you see, who form public opinion. We need them most of all.’

‘Oh,’ said the Colonel.

And now the Committee hearings had begun. Though Albion was not giving evidence himself, Lord Henry had arranged for him to attend. It was a strange sensation to find himself going through a process so like the one he had witnessed seven years before when he had come up to London with Pride.

There had been a great change in the Pride family recently, and he had been pleased to see it. After young George had been dismissed by Cumberbatch, it seemed that he and his father had been reconciled. Albion had given George a cottage to tide him over and employed him on the estate. But though he’d been happy that the Pride family was reunited, the whole incident of the dismissal had made the Colonel more determined than ever to see the efforts to save the Forest succeed.

He had a different companion this time. For some reason his wife had insisted on coming with him.

Generally he was glad of her company, but on the fifth day of the hearings he was not a little irritated when, because of some quite unnecessary shopping, she had caused him to arrive late. By the time they reached the Committee Room, it was already full and they had been obliged to sit at the back. He didn’t even know who was being called that day.

So he was entirely taken by surprise when he heard Mr W. H. Smith addressing the next witness.

‘Mr Furzey, you are an artist living in the New Forest, I believe.’

Colonel Albion wanted to leave. Even his wife’s restraining hand on his arm might not have kept him there, but for the fact that, to get up now would have caused an embarrassing commotion. He therefore sat there, bemused and furious, while Minimus gave his evidence.

‘You believe, Mr Furzey, that the New Forest is an area of particular value to artists?’

‘Without a doubt. I would draw your attention to the petition that has recently been signed not only by me, but by some of the most distinguished members of the Royal Academy.’

The petition had certainly achieved massive publicity. Many of the greatest names in British art had given their opinion that the New Forest was superior even to the Lake District for its natural beauty.

‘There is a romantic wildness in the Forest, a sense of primitive nature untouched, that is without equal in southern Britain,’ he heard Furzey say. ‘The play of the light is quite extraordinary upon the ancient oaklands.’

The Colonel stared. Was it really possible Furzey could get away with this sort of florid stuff in a Select Committee of the British Parliament? Yet several of its members were nodding.

‘I should also like to mention the extraordinary resource that the Forest represents for the naturalist,’ Minimus continued. ‘You may not be aware, but the following species …’

Colonel Albion listened in a daze. Flies, insects, stag beetles, English and Latin names he did not know, Furzey gave them a list of bugs that must surely have bored these gentlemen to death. Yet again, several of them were looking impressed. And so it went on. Opinions that mystified him, terminology he only vaguely understood, Minimus was in his element. Then he came to his peroration.

‘This extraordinary area is a national treasure without equal. I say national for, although historically it was a hunting forest for the Crown, it is now a source of inspiration, of study and of recreation for the people of this island. The New Forest belongs to the people. It must be saved for them.’

Minimus had ended. The Committee took a brief pause. People started to file out. As Colonel Albion sat there, hardly knowing what to think, Mr Eyre came smilingly towards him.

‘That was strong stuff,’ he remarked. ‘Just what was needed, don’t you agree?’

Albion was still in a daze when his wife took him up to Regent Street at the end of the day. Mr Eyre and Lord Henry had arranged a reception there and, though the place they had chosen was hardly one where he would feel comfortable, the Colonel had felt it would seem like discourtesy not to attend.

There was no doubt that the exhibition of New Forest art that Mr Eyre had organized in the Regent Street gallery had been a very clever idea, and it had attracted favourable attention in the newspapers. Paintings of animals and landscapes were always liked in Britain, and since Queen Victoria had made the wild scenery of Scotland so fashionable, almost any landscape containing heather or a stag was sure of a ready market.

With as good a grace as he could muster, therefore, the Colonel let himself be led inside.

There was already a throng of people in the gallery when they entered. Mercifully, as far as Albion could see, most of them did not seem to be artists, but looked like respectable people. It was not long before he found himself having a perfectly reasonable conversation with a retired admiral from Lymington with whom, the previous year, he had shot a large number of duck. And he was feeling considerably cheered when his eye happened to be caught by a small painting of a sunset, seen from Castle Malwood, looking down over Minstead church.

‘That’s a lovely thing,’ he remarked. ‘I’ve got one just like it. Don’t know the artist.’

The admiral didn’t either. But just then they were joined by Lord Henry who, glancing at the picture, gave Albion a puzzled look.

‘My dear friend,’ he said genially, ‘you are right to like it because it is a very good painting indeed, by a very fine artist. It is by Minimus Furzey.’

The
New Forest Act
of 1877 was to settle the shape of the New Forest for generations to come. The provisions of the Act, following the report of the W. H. Smith Committee, could hardly have been more decisive for the commoners. The Office of Woods were to have no new allowance of land. They were to protect and not pull down the Forest’s ancient trees. The commoners, on payment of the usual fee, were explicitly to have their year-round grazing on the Forest.

But the real sting in the tail came in a provision the W. H. Smith Committee thought of themselves.

The ancient order of verderers, that had ruled the medieval Forest through its Swainmote courts, was to be given a new life in a new form. Under an Official Verderer, nominated by the Crown, six local landowners were to be elected as verderers by the commoners and parishioners of the Forest. They were to rule the Forest. It was they who would now make the bye-laws, administer the grazing, collect fees, hold judicial courts and, above all, protect the interests of the Commoners. If the Office of Woods misbehaved in the Forest, they would have to answer to the verderers. It was a complete reversal. The Office of Woods had, so to speak, been railed off in their own inclosures.

Mr Cumberbatch, on hearing the news, left the forest, never to return.

At a celebratory party given by Lord Henry at Beaulieu, Colonel Albion gravely, albeit hesitantly, took the proferred hand of his son-in-law Minimus and declared:

‘We’ve won.’

1925

It was Jack’s wife Sally, George Pride’s daughter-in-law, who persuaded the old man to talk. He was still the same spare, upright figure she had always known, but he was eighty-three years old.

‘Once you’ve gone,’ she reminded him, ‘who’s going to remember all this?’ Sally’s family came from Minstead. She had trained as a nurse, and was a great one for writing things down. So in the spring of 1925, George Pride sat in the wooden chair he loved in his little cottage at Oakley and talked for an hour or two, until he got tired, each afternoon.

Sally had been quite surprised, once he had started, how soon she had filled the notebooks she had bought. Indeed, she had already used up two before, at the start of the fifth afternoon, he reached the point that really interested her.

‘Your Jack was the last of our children born,’ he began. ‘I think we knew he would be.

‘That was the summer of 1880. And three days later,’ he smiled, ‘I was summoned to Lyndhurst.

‘The Queen’s House, next to the Verderers’ Court, is quite an impressive sort of building, so you can imagine I was a bit nervous the few times I ever went in there, and this was the first time I’d had occasion to meet the new Deputy Surveyor that took over after Cumberbatch. But say what you like about him, Mr Lascelles was a gentleman. A tall, sporting sort of man, very polite. He looked at me, as if he was measuring me, and then he said:

‘“I’ve heard all about you, Pride. Both the good and the bad.” He smiled when he said that. “My predecessor dismissed you. How would you like your job back?”

‘As you can imagine, I was nearly bowled over. But I thought I’d better be careful, so I said: “May I give you my answer on Monday, Sir?” It was a Friday that day. And he said: “Yes, you may.” So off I went.

‘The first thing I did was go to Albion Park to see the Colonel. After all, he was employing me then and he’d done everything for me. He was also one of the verderers on the new Verderers’ Court. And I told him: “Mr Lascelles just offered me my old job back with the Office of Woods.”

‘“Did he?” said the Colonel. “You come back here on Sunday evening and we’ll see about that.”

‘That was when he offered me the job as Agister.

‘The Agister’s job was much the same then as now. You’re in charge of all the stock in your part of the Forest. It’s a riding job, chiefly, checking the cattle and ponies. Sometimes you help collect the marking fees and licences. The pay was better than the other job: sixty pounds a year. You had to find your own cottage. “But I’ll help you buy one,” the Colonel said.

‘Above all though, it meant a choice. I could work for the verderers or the Office of Woods. Those were the two sides in the New Forest then. They are now and I should think they always will be. I had to choose whose side I was on.

‘So I said yes to Colonel Albion and no to Mr Lascelles.

‘My patch was the northern part of the Forest. I was glad to go back up there. The cottage we found was up at Fritham. So that’s where Jack was brought up almost from birth.

‘We were very happy up there. I had a good horse and I’d ride out each day. I’d got rid of my whiskers and grown a long moustache then. They say I looked somewhat dashing. I’d take my son Gilbert out with me on his pony because I imagined that was the sort of job he might like to have one day, too. He could spot if a cow was getting sick even better than I could and I’d send him off to tell the owner. He was sixteen or so then and a great help to me.

‘But it was Dorothy who was the best of all. The Furzeys had been very good to her during the years after I lost my job with Cumberbatch. They’d kept her in their house and paid her, which was a considerable help to us. And besides being a good training for her, they had taught her a great deal. She had read books quite beyond what the other girls had. Every year she would do my wife and me a painting – they were really lovely – as a present for Christmas. We had them up on the wall. We were so proud of her. And although I say it myself she was a lovely-looking girl, tall and slender, with her long, dark hair. She was wonderful at keeping house, a second mother to the children so that when we moved up to Fritham my wife was very glad to have her there. We imagined she could have the pick of the Forest when it came to a husband.

‘She decided to work from home then as many girls do, taking in laundry. She’d go round the local villages. But every week or two she’d go to collect from the Furzeys. By the time Jack was two years old she had as much as she could handle. Sometimes she’d be out delivering for hours. She must have been twenty then.

‘Do you ever go up to Eyeworth pond? I can just remember when Eyeworth was a pretty little keeper’s lodge. It’s only half a mile walk, as you know, from Fritham. But then the Office of Woods sold it – to a man who wanted to make gunpowder there. Can you imagine such a thing? A gunpowder factory right in the middle of the Forest? But that’s the Office of Woods for you. Then a German company bought it. So the Schultze Gunpowder Factory it became and they made the pond as a little reservoir for their factory. They had quite a collection of sheds up there, though fortunately they were mostly hidden by the trees. But they made their presence known in other ways.

‘The waste that trickled out of that place! Dark and sulphurous. Stinking. And it seeped down into the Latchmore Brook, which runs past that place and so it got carried westward for miles across the heath. Part of my job as Agister was to make sure the cattle stayed away from that stream because if they drank the water it made them sick. One or two died.

‘I was riding past Eyeworth one summer afternoon about two years after we got to Fritham when I saw Dorothy, looking very pale. I could tell she’d been waiting for me.

‘“I’ve got to talk to you, Dad,” she says. I asked if we couldn’t talk at home but she shook her head and said: “I can’t go home.”

‘So I got down and we stood by that stinking little brook. And then she told me she was going to have a child.

‘As you can imagine, I was so surprised because I knew nothing of any young man. And I thought to myself, I hope it’s a good man at least. And then I thought, I hope he doesn’t work for the Office of Woods.

‘“Oh,” I said, “I reckon you’ll be getting married, then.” But she just shook her head again. “If you want me to go and have a word with this young man,” I said, because sometimes they needed a little persuading, you know.