Stonehenge (16 page)

23. The astronomer John Herschel’s drawing (above) was made on 12 August 1865 with a camera lucida of the sort illustrated below from the
Magazine of Science
, 1840. The resulting image is something between a drawing and a photograph and shows, on the left, stones 21, 22 and lintel 122 which later fell and were restored, at a slightly different angle, in 1958.

The lavish picnic, as rhapsodised by Coventry Patmore, became an important part of the Victorian Stonehenge visit, for the local inn, the Druid’s Head, was a place of ‘small accommodation’ where little more than ‘bread and cheese and ale’ were on offer. The inn was popular at the solstice, however, when it stayed open all night attracting a somewhat raucous assembly of locals. By the end of the century celebrations had reached such a pitch that it took fifteen policemen to keep order. But it was the supposedly respectable tourists who did the real damage. Already at the time of Emerson’s visit ‘the marks of the mineralogist’s hammer and chisel’ had been visible ‘on almost every stone’ and the numbers continued to grow as Stonehenge felt the other side of the Victorians’ changing relationship with time. While on the one hand it was being so vastly extended by geology, in everyday life it was shortening and speeding up. In 1847 the railway arrived at Salisbury and after 1857 a direct service from London made Stonehenge available to day trippers. Organised excursions ran from the station on Saturdays. ‘The annihilation of space by time’ was the great catchphrase of the railway builders. Space, however, was not the only thing the steam train might annihilate. Stonehenge was caught in a dangerous pincer movement between the rival London & South Western and Great Western Railway companies, which were ruthless in their attempts to penetrate one another’s territory. In 1886 the LSWR proposed a line that would have ploughed straight through the Cursus. This was prevented, but ten years later the GWR put forward a plan for a line just to the east of the circle with a Stonehenge and Amesbury station. This too was avoided, but what with the railways and the litter and the local farming which,
Murray’s Guide
lamented, was ‘creeping over the hills, and is indeed now advanced to the very precincts of Stonehenge, within a gunshot of which are farmbuildings and cottages … whitewashed’, it was clear that ‘the genius of the Plain’ and the other monuments were under serious threat. In the last quarter of the century a campaign began to protect them. It marked the dawn in Britain of the conservation movement and it embodied – eventually – a profound change in national attitudes to the past and to the nature of private property. John Lubbock was its leader and Stonehenge was, very often, the focus of debate.

24. A tourist photograph of about 1896 showing the fallen western trilithon and the timber supports propping the leaning stones. The owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, thought such measures safer and more honest than restoration.

It was Lubbock’s friend Ruskin, in his
Seven Lamps of Architecture
of 1849, who first put the moral case for shared ownership of ancient buildings: ‘We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.’ Twenty years later many others agreed. ‘It should not be left to chance and a single person’, Dickens wrote, discussing Stonehenge in
All the Year Round
, ‘to do that which the State should consider it both its pride and its duty to undertake.’ The immediate spur for Lubbock to act was not Stonehenge, however, but Avebury. In 1872 he received a desperate telegram from the rector warning him that part of the circle had been sold off for housing. Lubbock
immediately bought all the building plots. Later he bought Silbury Hill and West Kennett Farm, which included the West Kennett Long Barrow and Hackpen Hill. He could not, however, buy everything. Instead, as Liberal MP for Maidstone, he introduced a National Monuments Preservation Bill into Parliament in 1873. It proposed a commission and a list of monuments over which it might exercise a ‘power of restraint’ if, after due warning, the owner intended to damage them. The bill failed. Lubbock introduced it again every year for the next six years and every time it failed. He campaigned. He read Ruskin to the House of Commons. Yet his modest proposals for the protection of ancient sites were seen as a threat to property rights and repeatedly rejected by Disraeli’s Tory government.

The concept of the state having any authority at all over private property was unacceptable to many MPs and almost all of the Lords. The principle of state ownership of monuments had long been established in France, but that very fact made it unattractive to English Conservatives. There was also another more subtle point at issue. Although compulsory purchase was established to facilitate railway lines and other developments, this new law went beyond pragmatic issues and proposed to censure landowners on ethical grounds, to criticise what they did with their own property. Where would it end, Sir John Holker, the Attorney General, wondered? Such powers might be extended to ‘those old abbeys and castles which were quite as interesting as the Druidical remains’ even private houses, even their contents. ‘If the owner of … Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy” proposed to send it out of the country, were they to prevent him on the ground that the matter was one of national concern?’ Sir John’s fears
were well grounded, for that was just where it did lead eventually. At last, in 1882, after Gladstone and the Liberals had returned to power, an Ancient Monuments Protection Act passed into law. It had no powers of compulsion but it was the thin end of that wedge the Attorney General so dreaded. Dickens, as usual, had been right about the national mood and other preservation campaigns soon followed. William Morris’s Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings had been founded in 1877 and the National Trust was established in 1895. Conservation and the idea of heritage had entered the culture.

The first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, appointed in 1888, was Lubbock’s father-in-law, the archaeologist General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, whose career, inspired directly by his reading of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
, was dedicated to a theory of cultural evolution. He was another flamboyant man, whose assistants rode behind him on bicycles wearing boaters with ribbons in his heraldic colours, but he was also highly methodical. He began by approaching the owners of the twenty-nine English monuments, including Stonehenge, to be scheduled under the Act. In Sir Edmund Antrobus, however, the General met his Waterloo. Sir Edmund did not wish to place the monument in the guardianship of the commissioners, nor would he sell it to them, nor take their advice about its preservation, and he maintained this position until his death in 1898. This was the first confrontation between public and private interests at Stonehenge and it demonstrated that complex of issues that has characterised debates about conservation in general and about Stonehenge in particular ever since. Sir Edmund was a firm believer in the rights of private property but he was no philistine, unlike the
public for whom the stones were supposedly being saved. A survey of Stonehenge in 1886 by the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society revealed a terrible toll of devastation. Trippers slid down the fallen western trilithon until it was worn smooth, they carved their names, they took sledgehammers to it. Sir Edmund did his best to protect the site but was told by one irate visitor that the monument was public property. No wonder he was glad it was not and the experts were not always, in his experience, much better than the outright hooligans. Among the proposals he rejected during his ownership, in addition to the many requests from archaeologists skilled and unskilled to excavate, were the replacement of the whole of the centre of the circle with concrete, the erection of a policeman’s cottage next to it and the digging of a ha-ha round it, all of which would have caused irreparable damage. On the advice of his architect J. J. Cole, Antrobus adopted a solution in line with the most radical conservation thinking of the day. He did what the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings would have done. He propped up some of the leaning stones with stout scaffolding that made it obvious where he had intervened. Otherwise he left it alone. ‘To restoration I am distinctly opposed,’ he wrote, ‘but this might be considered in the light of preservation.’ It could have been William Morris speaking.

After Sir Edmund’s death his son, another Sir Edmund, exposed a different problem with the concept of public ownership. He offered to sell Stonehenge to the government and named a sum of £125,000, which the Chancellor of the Exchequer pronounced ‘absolutely impossible’. Rumours went round the press that the stones might be sold off privately ‘to some American millionaire’ who would export them or that they might be used as advertising hoardings. So, as the century drew to a close, nothing was resolved. Stonehenge was still largely unprotected in law and in practice from the crowds, who were now joined by soldiers from the military camps at Bulford. In 1897 the War Office opened negotiations with local landowners and by 1902 it had 43,000 acres of Salisbury Plain to the north of Stonehenge which were used for infantry manoeuvres. A branch line brought more trippers on the railway to Amesbury. Then came the motor car. Easter 1899 saw the Automobile Association hold a rally at Stonehenge. By now the solstice was a cacophony of ‘bicycle bells … coach horns [and] … the brutal staccato notes of a banjo’ issuing from a crowd made up of locals, soldiers, tourists, ‘snapshotters’ and possibly Druids. An earlier, less scientific age would have read an ominous significance into the events of the dark and stormy night of 31 December 1900. On this last day of the nineteenth century, in a howling gale, an upright in the outer sarsen circle, number 22 in Petrie’s scheme, fell. It took its lintel with it, which broke in two. These were the first stones to fall since 1797 and they left the monument sadly depleted. Three weeks later, at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, the old Queen died. For many of her subjects, who had known no other monarch, it was as if ‘some monstrous reversal in the course of nature’ had occurred. Hubert Herkomer, designer of the Herald Bard’s robes, was one of two artists summoned to paint her on her deathbed. Her reign had seen Stonehenge better and more fully understood than before. It had set it in a broader intellectual and scientific context, in geological rather than biblical time, measured it more accurately, photographed it and compared it with similar monuments all over the world. Despite which, the departing Victorians left Stonehenge more damaged and more vulnerable than any previous age.

25. By the end of the nineteenth century there was increasing support for taking Stonehenge into public ownership. When this did happen, some decades later, the result was, as
Punch
anticipated, mixed.

‘So does Time ruthlessly destroy his romances,’ wrote Thomas Hardy. Hardy, a Victorian as well as a Romantic, was profoundly affected by the consequences of Darwinism. His writing is saturated with the influence of evolutionary theory and he was haunted by the terrible price his generation paid for their increased knowledge. Like Huxley, he saw that ‘the “fittest” which survives in the struggle for existence may be, and often is, the ethically worst’, while the best and purest, like Tess, last of the dying line of the D’Urbervilles, may be driven to extinction. The species that had, in its infancy, built Stonehenge was now, he believed, ‘too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions … this planet does not supply the materials for happiness’. In taking Tess to her fate at the Altar Stone, Hardy set out merely, as he thought, ‘what everybody nowadays thinks and feels’, the cruelty of the human condition. It was not only a romantic tradition that died with Tess but a certain intellectual innocence.