Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk
Part One — The Early Sports, Before 1871
Let me hand over to Philip to talk about sport on Wandsworth Common, Part One.
You have Stephen to blame for the fact that this is in two halves — first half, second half — because I really wanted to do something on sport on Wandsworth Common, not because I am particularly interested in sport as it happens, but because sport had a fantastic, very profound effect on the Common itself: on its structure, its landscape, almost everything about it. Many things about the Common were caused, obviously, by the railway lines, but principally by the sport being played there.
Stephen kept encouraging me to talk about the very early, rather strange sports that no one has ever heard of — or that seem very surprising — not just football and rugby and hockey and the like. I took him at his word, got completely bamboozled by the early material, as you will see, and that is why this is in two parts. I call it Turf Wars, which sounds flippant, but as we will eventually see, there was indeed a battle over the turf: should it be rough everywhere — a Common with furze, bushes and trees — or should it be smooth and lawn-like, dead flat, because you cannot play ball games unless the ground is flat?
Rugby had an advantage, because you could at least run across bumpy ground. Cricket not so much, though as long as you had a decent pitch area you could manage. In a sense, there were almost no team ball games on Wandsworth Common until after the 1870s, when the Common was saved for local people. Until that time, all games had to take into account the very rough nature of the ground.
Tonight I will be covering: hare and hounds, pedestrianism, hopping, trotting, velocipede racing, stag hunting, cockfighting, shooting, and the very start of cricket.
Just to orient you: we are here, on a Common that was once roughly twice the size it is now. John Rocque's map of the 1740s shows what it looked like — mountains, all sorts of plants and vegetation — and you cannot play smooth ball games on ground like that. You might say it is artistic licence, merely evoking a difference between cultivated land and pasture, but we also have Grimm's images from the 1770s showing lakes and ponds scattered throughout, a few odd houses, willows, elm trees in the distance. Gordon Bradley's image of 1835 gives a sense of how different the Common was in the early nineteenth century: St Paul's Cathedral perfectly visible from here, Westminster Abbey too. In the 1850s, when the clock was placed in the Victoria Tower, you could hear Big Ben from the Common. Sheep, donkeys, horses, cows, ducks, geese, pigs. You cannot play football or bowls on that kind of ground.
This is the earliest example I have found in the literature of sport on the Common. It is a letter from a small schoolboy:
Dear Sister, we hunt upon the Common and one of the great boys is the hare and the middle boys hunt it. Pray will you give my best respects to Captain Hails. I am very sorry to acquaint you of the death of my poor Aunt. Give my duty to Mama, my compliments to John. I am, dear sister, your most affectionate brother, George Bruno Bruce.
You can see what his priorities were: sport first, then condolences, then duty to Mama. George Bruno Bruce was the first cousin once removed of the Brudenell who became Lord Cardigan, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade. The family, I believe, lived locally — perhaps near where Honeywell School now stands — and the boy himself was almost certainly boarding at All Farthing Manor, where Garratt fields school is now.
The game of hare and hounds continued throughout the nineteenth century, at least until the 1860s. Two runners — the hares — would set off about fifteen minutes before the pack, with a hare embroidered on their chest. The journeys they covered were absolutely prodigious. Here is one, starting at Shepherd's Lane (which is now Acre Lane in Brixton):
Good order and bright sunshine rendered this run on Saturday very pleasant. The hare started at 25 minutes past three from the ground; the hounds followed after 50 minutes. Cutting across the neighbouring fields they picked up the scent down Acre Lane, Herne Hill, down Norwood Lane, took the grass on Thurlow Hill, cleverly kept almost entirely on turf for the greater part of the run, over the hills to Streatham Mineral Springs, a stretch of common, over the common through the fields in a circuit to Tooting Common. The hares proceeded to Wandsworth Common, but doubling through some capital grass fields to near Balham Station, crossed the line and worked to the end of Nightingale Lane; when striking across Wandsworth Common again they went past the Patriotic Schools and, passing the Black Sea and over Clapham Common, at last parted from the turf and made straight tracks for home — where they ran to earth in one hour fifty-seven minutes, having covered a distance of not less than fifteen miles.
This is heroic stuff. And it is all on turf: fields everywhere, common land, no tarmac. The first hound, one Rainsford, turned up in one hour forty-eight minutes. A little round of applause, I think, for that magnificent achievement.
When the land between the commons was gradually covered with urban houses, this kind of long-distance hare and hounds could no longer continue. It gave way to a different style of cross-country running, where the whole field sets off together, often in teams. And there are still running clubs called Hare and Hounds — Thames Hare and Hounds among them — or the older name, Harriers, which is the same thing: the harrier being the bird supposed to catch hares.
Here are Thames Hare and Hounds running across Wimbledon Common, heading towards Wandsworth Common. Their route takes them from Roehampton across Dunsford Road, Copper Mills Bridge, past the Wonder, past the Plough on Garratt Lane — not the Plough at Clapham Junction, the Plough on Garratt Lane — where they were cheered by news that the hares were but a little way ahead. The hares, however, had made a bad choice for Garratt Green, which they missed, and found themselves on the grounds of the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum — Springfield Hospital. They were hotly pursued by a large detachment of keepers and physicians who, unaccustomed to paperchase costume, not unnaturally mistook them for escaped maniacs. However, not being in athletic training, the keepers tired after a few fields, and the chase was resumed by the legitimate pursuers, around Tooting and onto Wandsworth Common, where the hounds caught sight of the hares near Burntwood Lane, and ran them down on the Railway Bridge near the Patriotic Asylum.
They then started again from All Farthing, went over Sundance Hill, North Street, Wandle Bridge, Wandsworth High Street — to the utter astonishment of the natives — up West Hill and Cutthroat Lane, and back to Putney. You get the picture: still a semi-rural environment.
Running as described above was the sport of amateur young men — clerks and early-career professionals, broadly speaking. Running alongside it, and completely separate, was a parallel tradition called pedestrianism, conducted almost entirely by working-class men. Pedestrianism did not simply mean walking, as I originally assumed. It included walking, yes, but also leaping of various sorts, sprinting, and middle- and long-distance running.
I am going to follow one person in particular: Robert Inwood of Tooting. Here is the first reference I have to him, from November 1844:
W. Barry of Lambeth and Robert Inwood of Tooting are to run 125 yards, five pounds aside.
Note that there are no standard lengths in the nineteenth century. They do not always run 100 yards or 220 yards or a quarter-mile. They run any agreed length. Sometimes they gave each other starts — ten yards, five yards, a couple of seconds — because this was not purely about winning. It was about making money. Five pounds aside means that Inwood's backers — his "friends," as they were called — and Barry's friends would each lodge five pounds with an innkeeper, who held the stake, and whoever won the race took the whole pot. I have at least three hundred accounts of that kind of event on Wandsworth Common alone.
I thought I would never find a picture of Inwood, but I searched Ancestry and traced his family, found a descendant living in Tenerife — Sue Horwood, who grew up in Tooting — and she very kindly took the glass and backing off an old photograph and did a fine scan for me. The card reads: Robert Inwood of Tooting, Surrey. Winner of upwards of fifty races. A fresh-faced youth, hands in the characteristic pedestrian's pose.
Here are a few of his triumphs. In 1845, on Wandsworth Common:
Robert Inwood's first attempt at a mile race. Five pounds aside. There could not have been less than 1,500 spectators present. He was eighteen years of age and until then had never run that distance — he was a sprinter — but it was clear he would be a mile runner.
A week later he issued a challenge, won, then lost to Rodwell:
Match to run one mile for five pounds aside, in the presence of nearly 2,000 spectators, many of whom sported their money freely on the London man. Rodwell ran in a winner by about two yards. The road was exceedingly heavy, being covered with several inches of snow.
Nothing stopped them. A couple of weeks later, Inwood beats Williams:
Some women from Carshalton Green were seen to bet twelve to eight on Williams, who seemed to be their pet. But Inwood ran in a winner by at least a hundred yards. The friends of Williams seemed thunderstruck.
"Thunderstruck" is a word that comes up very frequently, because it is clear that one of the runners — sometimes Inwood himself — would sometimes throw a match. If you keep winning, nobody will bet on you, so you have to lose occasionally, and if your friends bet on your opponent, you make money that way. Here is a case in point:
Those in the know could see that a screw was loose and left the ground without staying to witness the race, although they had previously been caught having laid thirty to twenty pounds several times on Inwood. He has large blue eyes and quite the greyhound symmetry; has beaten a vast number of men at all distances; but lost in the most barefaced manner. He gammoned — those quotation marks are in the original — to be deadbeat, running all over the road to avoid winning. Backers of Inwood lost upwards of £150. The spectators vowed vengeance. We understand it is the intention of Inwood to go round the country flat-catching, so we advise our provincial pedestrians to keep a sharp lookout.
Having built up his reputation in London, he was off to make his fortune in the provinces.
Then there is twilly — does that name ring a bell? Twilly Street. Not named after Arthur Twilley specifically, but after his family: the Twilleys lived on and around Wandsworth Common, an enormous family, intermarried with the Roughs and the Neals of Neal's Nursery; they were dairymen, gardeners, did all sorts of things. Arthur clearly wanted to run, and had a successful career, though not as large as Inwood's. Inwood beats Twilley:
Twilley had not a chance; gave up half the distance, deadbeat. Inwood running in an easy winner. Twilley's friends seemed thunderstruck, and he said he had not done his best to win.
And now, a small digression. What connects Robert Inwood, Arthur Twilley, and an asteroid? Asteroid 5500 Twilley is named after Royston C. Twilley, who was headmaster of Earlsfield School. A boy at the school grew up to become an astronomer, discovered an asteroid, and named it after his favourite headteacher — who was one of the Twilley family. I thought you had to know that.
The earliest Wandsworth sportsperson I know of — earlier than George Bruno Bruce — is the Hopping Calico Printer of Wandsworth. That is not my description; that is how he was billed. In 1873 he competed on Clapham Common, but this particular event was:
Matched for a hundred guineas to hop sixty yards in twenty hops on Mitcham Common. He performed the same in nineteen hops, two yards over. The bets were numerous, the odds six to four against him. The same day the said man was matched for twenty guineas to hop five yards backwards — each hop a yard — which he exceeded by hopping sixteen feet each way.
This is what passed for sport in the eighteenth century. You did not even have to compete against another person. You would say: I am going to do this, you do not believe me, I will offer you a certain sum of money — and people would say: you could not possibly do it. He worked on the Wandle, where all the calico bleaching and printing works were. One can imagine it was very boring, which is perhaps why he took to hopping.
And the money? A hundred guineas — £105 — in 1735 would be worth approximately £16,474 today. Not a bad day's work for a couple of hops.
Rather later, another entry:
Wiggly ran, walked, wheeled a barrow, trundled a hoop, and hopped on one leg over a distance of five miles, in separate feats of a mile each, within one hour, for twenty pounds — and won with two minutes to spare. The feat was performed on Wandsworth Common.
That was reported in the Home News for India, China and the Colonies. Wandsworth Common was part of the great Empire at that time.
Trotting races were very popular on Wandsworth Common, and the reason is straightforward: the Common had the only straight two-mile stretch in South-West London — Trinity Road, dead straight, built in the 1820s, and a two-mile course was the standard trotting distance. A hundred guineas at that time would have bought you six horses or eighteen cows, and represented a skilled worker's wages for around two years.
Here is a trotting match from 1866: Nelly v. Tommy. And what takes over from trotting, at least in one notable race, is velocipede racing.
In a velocipede race on Wandsworth Common, two-wheeled bicycles were demonstrating their superiority over the traditional three- or four-wheeled machines. Monsieur Canton from Paris took part — because the French, until 1871 and the Franco-Prussian War, were far in advance of Britain in bicycle manufacture. Their industry was largely destroyed by that war, after which Britain partly took over, before the Tour de France eventually won it back. The two-mile course was extraordinarily slow: the last half-mile took two minutes twenty-eight seconds; the full two miles took the winner ten minutes thirty seconds. As Philip observed: you could almost run that.
The winning machine was very beautiful — no chain, the pedals driving the front wheel directly — and as the years went on, to achieve a larger gear, the front wheel grew larger and larger while the rear shrank. That is how the Penny Farthing came to be.
Stags — or rather hinds — were hunted on Wandsworth Common, and this is one of the most extraordinary stories. The Earl of Derby (hence the Derby, the race run at Epsom) would send out his staghounds to chase deer. But why hinds rather than stags? Because stags have antlers, with which they can kill dogs, injure horses, and attack people as they career through the streets. So they almost always used female animals.
From 1826:
The stag set off away to the right of Lord Spencer's Park — Wimbledon Park — over the River Wandle, the bank of Wandsworth, across Wandsworth Common, along part of the Turnpike Road, into the meadows between Battersea Open Fields and Wandsworth Road, taking an unhurt and safely housed within a few yards of the Thames at the back of Cumberland Gardens, Vauxhall. The chase lasted two hours and a quarter. Few were in at the taking — I am not surprised.
From 1844, meeting at Malden:
The hounds were trotted on to Banstead, where the Harrow hind was uncarted.
The Harrow hind — a professional athlete, reared to run, transported in a box to various parts of South-West London and released. She then set off in absolute terror. The field went away to Cheam, Nonsuch Park, Worcester Park, crossed the Malden Road to the brook where many a horse and rider parted company, over Wimbledon Road, taking the River Wandle just below the mills — at which point one of the field came very near being drowned by getting under his horse in the river. After all.
And from 1878, past our cut-off point of 1871 but too good to leave out:
The quiet suburban villas between Wandsworth Common and Tooting were startled by the arrival among them at full speed of a hunted stag and its attendant pack. The stag cleared a garden wall, took refuge there until it had recovered, then went away again. The hounds waited in the street quietly until about five-thirty, when the huntsman cast them away towards Tooting, and one of the quietest suburbs of London settled down to its usual stillness.
And as a postscript, big game was also hunted on Wandsworth Common. In 1846, a leopard escaped from a show at Wandsworth Fair — held every year on Fairfield Street, now Fairfield Road — and ran to the Common. A man, noticing it, approached thinking it was a dog, then took to his heels. A fearless mob assembled, scoured the Common, and after a short chase the creature took up residence in a cart shed and quietly permitted its keeper to secure it.
Cockfighting took place either outdoors or indoors in local pubs and beer-houses. Two birds were matched against one another, again with money on the outcome. We know of this from 1737: a butcher, a baker and a gardener of Wandsworth were sent to jail because, having lost heavily at a cockfighting match and finding themselves without funds, they tied up their horses and proceeded as footpads. You were not generally punished as severely if you were on foot as if you were a highwayman on horseback. The nearest indoor cockpit I know of was by the side of Wandsworth Common itself.
As for shooting: every time a game bird was found on the Common, somebody shot it, and having shot it, it made the newspapers — which tells you it was becoming less and less common. Snipe were shot in Battersea fields and on Wandsworth Common. A great bittern, rare bird, was shot in 1846 — naturally, because it was rare, it was valued highly, and therefore killed. And in a remarkable case, a bustard — all the books will tell you the bustard became extinct in England in the 1830s — was shot on Wandsworth Common by two lads who were out shooting small birds:
Lads had guns, and shot this bustard.
All the bird illustrations, incidentally, are by Henry Meyer, buried in Battersea Cemetery — a great ornithological artist of the early nineteenth century.
Then there was sparrow shooting, which might seem humble by comparison, but was taken very seriously:
Mr D., one by one, bird-killing twenty-two sparrows in first-rate style. Next, Mr Toby and a Gentleman will shoot at twenty-five birds each for ten pounds, and other matches will be shot.
This brings us, by a roundabout route, to Jack Black — rat-catcher to Queen Victoria, who earned his living not only catching rats but catching sparrows for shooting matches, and breeding curiously coloured rats to sell as pets. Henry Mayhew, the great social investigator, visited him in 1851:
Mr Black was out sparrow-catching, as his wife informed me — for he had an order for three dozen, which was to be shot in a match. When I called, Mr Black had returned, and I found him kneeling before a big rusty iron cage as large as a sea chest, transferring the sparrows from his bird-catching apparatus to the more roomy prison. Mr Black informed me that the cage had been constructed by him for rats, and that it held over a thousand when full. "Sparrows is the rats of birds, sir, for if you look at them in a cage they always huddle up in a corner like rats in a pit, and they're a most vermin in colour and habits, and eats anything."
It is said, by the way, that Beatrix Potter bought the rat she used as the model for Samuel Whiskers from Jack Black, who bred sport-coloured rats as pets. Whether their timelines overlap sufficiently is another matter.
And finally, songbirds. Goldfinches, linnets, and nightingales were caught on Wandsworth Common to take part in bird-singing competitions, which were popular in the local pubs — particularly at The Carpenter's Arms on Chatham Road. Here is a notice from their 1880–81 season:
Final handicap for the season. A handsome lamp presented by the proprietor of The Carpenter's Arms, Chatham Road, Wandsworth Common. Thirteen pairs of goldfinch mules put up. If Russia's bird won by three score eight. A linnet handicap is now coming on for two handsome prizes, and other races to follow.
Note the connection with the pubs. Almost all the sporting activity on Wandsworth Common relates to the Plough on the Common, the Freemasons Hotel (now The Roundhouse), the Surrey Tavern (now Brinkley's), the County Arms, and others. They started at pubs, ended at pubs, lodged their stakes with innkeepers who were often the judges as well. It was win-win for the publicans: if two thousand people turned up for a race, the drinking was prodigious.
As for the birds themselves, observers noted that despite the scale of catching, in spring the Common would still swarm with them — until the builders moved in:
Owing to the buildings, the birds were getting fewer and fewer. It is not the bird-catchers now; it is the builders.
Eventually the Metropolitan Board of Works put a stop to it formally. Bylaw number fifteen prohibited: bird-catching, bird-trapping, laying or placing any net or trap for the taking of birds, taking birds' eggs or nests, or shooting or chasing or attempting to shoot or chase any bird, game or animal, or throwing any stone, stick or other missile with intent to injure or catch any bird, game or animal on the Common.
We no longer have nightingales on Wandsworth Common, so far as I know. But we do have Nightingale Lane. And on that note, I shall have to stop — though I have roughly another three hours of material to cover.
Audience (Wendy): Jack Black — was he really appointed rat-catcher to the Queen?
Philip Boys: He always described himself as such, and had the official insignia — the sash — and yes, that was his pitch. Henry Mayhew devotes a whole chapter to him in one of his books. He clearly was a remarkable person who could practically talk rats out of their holes. Mayhew is well worth reading, any of his accounts. And yes, it is said that Beatrix Potter, who lived locally on Baskerville Road, had a pet rat that came from Jack Black, who whenever he found what they then called a "sport" — a rat with an unusual colour — would breed them and sell them as pets. The rat in Beatrix Potter — Samuel Whiskers — is said to have been bought from Jack Black. Whether the timelines quite overlap is the question.
Audience (Richard): Where does that aerial photograph come from — the one showing all the pitch markings?
Philip Boys: If you use Bing rather than Google, and go in close, that is what you see. I can send you a very high-resolution image; it really is crystal clear. You can also see the desire lines of the runners. It was taken in 2020, slightly before the drought, and I could not quite work out why the white lines had come up so green — whether the white paint acted as some kind of fertiliser, or whether it was the early stages of a drought, or towards the end of one, with some areas recovering before others. This year you could see the marks coming back at different rates across the Common.
Audience (Vicky): Did they eat the sparrows they shot?
Philip Boys: I have never come across people eating sparrows, though I cannot rule it out. But the point of sparrow shooting was not the sparrow — it was the difficulty of the shot. They say sparrows are harder to hit than pigeons. In fact, some people trained for pigeon shooting by shooting swallows first, because swallows are really hard to hit. The gambling was entirely the point, and the money very substantial. People would club together so that large sums were pooled on each side, lodged with an independent innkeeper who was often the judge as well. Win-win for the pub.
Audience: Cricket was all about gambling too, wasn't it?
Philip Boys: Absolutely. You would get thrown out for it now, but not then. Accusations of throwing matches, side bets on everything. The difference is that cricket eventually developed sufficient institutional structure to suppress it — mostly. The Wandsworth gentlemen would compete against the MCC, and win — for money. One day you will hear the story of how the Wandsworth Gentlemen beat the MCC. But that is for another talk.
Audience: Boxing is another sport you are coming to — were the Gypsy community involved in any of the sports you spoke about this evening?
Philip Boys: Not that I know of, in the sports covered tonight — that is a really interesting question. With pugilism — spoiler alert — the very first world championship fight was between an American and a Briton who had learned his craft on Wandsworth Common, but he does not appear to have been Romani. Subsequently, yes: nearly all fairground pugilism involved Gypsies. But that is for the next episode.
Turf Wars, Part Two — Post-1871 sport — will be scheduled in due course.
This is a History Boys Magic Lantern Show.
Website: History: Wandsworth Common