Now I dont want to get you overexcited but…looks like we have just gotten ourselves an ‘artisan boulangerie’. And a greengrocers has just opened near the corner with Hedge Lane. And Westlakes, though its sadly closing, will be taken over by another family hardware store.
Ooh: Get us!
Now Palmers Greeners, you do know what you have to do if you want to keep them, dont you…?
Now, can we stretch to a butchers…? And I want a deli. And a book shop. And…
Theodore Royle, the gentleman bard of Palmers Green, seemingly had words for every occasion and Christmas was no exception.
And so, at this most special of times, I give you his poem, Christmas, which I am sure will make the season just that little more special. No, no need to thank me.
Tales from the annuls of Palmers Green continue in the new year.
Merry Christmas! Take it away Ted:
Christmas has come, and once more the earth Wakes to the song of Christ's wondrous birth ; Once more with joy renewed old and young meet, Under the roof tree, old Christmas to greet. The robin salutes us at morn's early dawn, The chorister, brightest that ever was born, Perched up aloft on the snow cover'd spray. He pipes to us all a glad Christmas day. Thrice happy time in the world's busy round. When peace and goodwill on earth should be found ; When men's evil passions for once should succumb, For all should be brothers when Christmas has come. Merry old Christmas, true gladness imparts, The warmth of its greeting thaws all frozen hearts ; And souls that are cheerless and cold as the clay, Wake up to fresh life on the bright Christmas day. The old year is speeding on fast to its close. And soon will be buried its troubles and woes ; May each year to us as we down its stream glide, Bring fresh faith and hope each glad Christmastide. Then hang up the mistletoe and light the yule log. Draw closer the curtains and shut out the fog, Joy, song, and mirth should resound in each home. For bright as the holly glad Christmas has come
If you are thinking of a winter’s Sunday walk, you could do worse than spend a few moments on the tube to Cockfosters, and take a wander around the beautiful undulating and Repton designed grounds of Trent Park, once part of the Royal Hunting Forests of Enfield Chase. Head past the café on the path that goes north of the lake and you will eventually come to the mysterious green waters of Camlet Moat, a scheduled ancient monument.
It may be centuries old but the C shaped enclosure, full of ancient trees, has a kind of unknowable life of its own, with letters carved into trees, charms and tokens wedged and tied into the branches, and tinsel and streamers laid over the limbs of the ancient trees. Druids say that it’s a spiritual place, where one can experience the earth’s energy. It’s certainly eerie as the low winter sun slowly sinks and the shadows grow longer, a place where anything might happen.
But our story begins, not in Enfield, but in Egypt in 1923 when manicured socialite Sir Philip Sassoon was invited by Lord Carnarvon and Harold Carter to witness the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun. Returning home, unaffected by the famous curse of King Tut but excited by the prospect of hidden treasure, Sassoon’s thoughts turned to the ancient monument on his own property, Trent Park, where he regularly entertained the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Rex Whistler, and George Bernard Shaw in tasteful opulence. Before many months had passed, Sassoon’s team had started to dig.
Camlet had for some centuries been reputed to have been the home of Sir Geoffrey Mandeville, the first Earl of Essex and Constable of the Tower of London, though some say it was first the home of King Arthur. In ancient times it was right at the centre of the Royal Forest: the moat made it capable of defence, and so Camlet was ideally placed to manage and police the forest. The earliest records show that permission was granted to crenelate an existing house on the site in 1347, but that the house was demolished 100 years later so that the materials could be sold to pay for renovations to Hertford Castle.
And so, Sassoon drained the moat while the locals watched and waited.
Within a little while, the remains of a huge drawbridge were found, and a long wall, in some places 5 feet thick, plus Roman sandals, ancient daggers and horseshoes. Remarkable though these finds were, press reports soon began to focus not so much on the finds, but of the risk of disturbing the ghost of Sir Geoffrey Mandeville, who, as legend had variously described it, had buried treasure under the paved bottom of a well on the site to keep it from his many enemies or alternatively had fallen in with his treasure and drowned, his spirit lingering to ensure its eternal protection. The remains of an ancient well were indeed found, in the north east corner of the area enclosed by the moat.
Well might the naysayers have worried.
There were no sightings during this excavations, but this may have been because Geoffrey had apparently forgotten about his treasure – perhaps his hard currency was no good in the spirit world – and flounced off. According to a local writer calling himself the Philanderer, he had moved to East Barnet, first to a stable, which was unfortunately then pulled down by the council, and then to the house of Nora O Callahan and her sister, where he set to terrorising them by knocking on the door, thumping around, rattling their letterbox and generally terrifying their normally fearless dog. Next, he was seen by persons unrecorded, in full regalia of red cloak and spurs.
The national press descended, and by all accounts, Barnet became a place of ghost hunting bedlam and police had to be brought in to regulate the traffic. One William Stutters complained of the racket that Sir Geoffrey was making and warned that local building work was waking the dead. Paranormal activity was now also bedeviling the building which is today the Prince of Wales pub. Curiously though, by 1930 the Philanderer was saying that Sir Geoffrey was back stalking around Cockfosters at Christmas time though in December 1932 he was seen in full armour in East Barnet by the members of the local psychic research society, which was lucky, because they just happened to be staking the place out at midnight. By this time, it was being said that Sir Geoffrey made an appearance on Christmas Eve every six years.
Sightings of Sir Geoffrey have continued intermittently, though they haven’t occurred at 6 year intervals as specified or even in the same place – he has been spotted in Hadley Woods and at East Barnet church. If the legend is correct, he is next due to appear at Christmas in 2016. Who knows where he will have moved to by then?
If your interest is piqued by the story of Sir Geoffrey, do read Jennie Lee Cobban’s brilliant, hilarious and entertaining Geoffrey de Mandeville and London’s Camelot. Currently out of print but available in libraries.*
This article originally appeared in the December 14 issue of Palmers Green and Southgate Life
*Addendum – new edition available at Barnet museum.
The final film this year from Talkies Community Cinema is Downhill, the story of four school friends who reunite for a walking holiday as they come to terms with the joys and disappointments of middle age.
Shot in double-quick time in documentary format, Downhill follows the four as they drag themselves 192 miles along Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire. The film was put together on a micro budget, and was filmed over three weeks in various locations along the path, including in pubs where no one knew there was a film being made and acted scenes took place among the hustle and bustle of the regulars.
The film will be followed by a Q&A with co-star and Palmers Greener Jeremy Swift, currently on our screens as Mr Spratt, Maggie Smith’s snobby butler in Downton.
Downhill is being shown on 10 December at the Fox.
And if you havent booked yet, there are still a few tickets for The Muppet Christmas Carol at Christchurch Southgate on Saturday, and for World War One drama Joyeux Noel at the Dugdale Centre on 4 December.
To book, visit http://www.talkies.org.uk/
At the beginning of October we once again celebrated National Poetry Day. Now, as we know, the Palmers Green and Southgate area is a veritable wonderland of literature, with our notables including Stevie Smith, V S Pritchett, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Hood and Paul Scott to mention but a few.
But there are very few poems about the area. At least that is what Theodore Royle may have thought, when he stepped into the breach in the early 1900s with his remarkable Rambles in Rhymeland.
Little is known of Royle, except that he was born in High Holborn in 1840 and by 1901 was living with his wife Fanny at the Rowans in the southern part of the borough, roughly New Southgate – his parish was the then largely rural St Michael at Bowes. His trade was as a printer and engraver and therein might lay a clue to how he came to have the wherewithal to publish Rambles, seemingly his only book, printed for private circulation.
Royle made no great claims for its literary merit. The frontispiece bears the quote from Byron, Royle’s jovial bewhiskered face beaming out next to it:
Tis pleasant to see one’s name in print
a book’s a book, although there’s nothing in’t
I think that we might have liked Royle, had we met him in The Fox or Cock Tavern or out for a walk in rural Palmers Green. Though I think that Royle might have liked Royle a bit too.
He was certainly nothing if not a sentimental fellow, for several poems tell tales of nature, love and tragic death, often in the traditional I-met-my-true-love-but-then-she-carked-it genre. One can only wonder what Fanny Royle thought of Regrets in which the poet meets his love in the summer, but she is cruelly snatched away, though her memory brings comfort in his dreams. I rather hope that Fanny and not, say, the kitchen maid, inspired the poem The Glorious Summertime, in which he meets his love, apparently covered in foliage –
The birds were singing merrily
In heavens blue vault above,
When in the glorious summer time,
I met my own sweet love;
A wreath of fairest jessamine
She’d twined around her hair,
And on her cheeks the winds rough kiss
Had left some blushes there.
Reader, he marries her.
The inspiration to finally publish may have been due to aspirations political as well as poetic – a good deal of the verse is about the comings and goings in the local administration. On the evidence of Rambles, one wonders why other poets do not decide to plough this obviously rich furrow, for Royle manages 17 pages of verse on the subject of Sir Ralph Littler and the separation of Southgate from Edmonton.
For those who do not know the story, by the 1870s the well to do of Palmers Green and Southgate had become very dissatisfied with the local board’s neglect of the western part of the borough. The final straw had been when Sir Ralph Littler, then resident of Broomfield House, had woken to find the fish in the lake in front of the house dead, the casualties of sewerage from a cracked and ill fitting pipe. He sued the authorities, and efforts were stepped up to separate the borough into two. Of course, the other motivation may have been that rich and well to do Palmers Greeners in their rural idyll didn’t much fancy paying rates for the needs of working class Edmonton, something not entirely disguised in Royle’s doggerel.
Events culminated with a public meeting to vote on the issue of separation in early 1881, coinciding with a great snowstorm, which prevented most of the Edmonton anti separatists from attending. History was, as they say, made, and Southgate Local Board was established. In 1894 Southgate become an Urban District.
In 1882 Royle, delighted with the outcome, apparently got up at a meeting in the village hall in Southgate and sang a ditty, in honour of the good deeds of Sir Ralph Littler and Southgate’s other valiant heroes, sung in swashbuckling terms and packed liberally with in-jokes. The full text is reprinted in the book, and alas, the space I have here cannot do full justice to it, so you are going to have to check it out for yourself.
Enough of that. My favourite poem leaves the travails of Southgate independence behind, and turns to the subject of Royle’s bicycle
My bike! My bike! I gaze on thee now
With quickening breath and a joyous brow…
And who can honestly say they haven’t felt like that?
You can read Theodore Royle’s Rambles in Rhymeland in full at https://archive.org/details/ramblesinrhymela00royl
Picture of T Royle by kind permission of Enfield Local Studies and Archive Team.
(c) Sue Beard 2014. This article first appeared in Palmers Green and Southgate Life.
November has come round again, and its time for Creative Exchange’s amazing Autumn Design Craft and Art Fair, featuring products to buy direct from local designers. It’s great fun and last year did wonders in ticking off people on my Christmas list.
You wont get these presents in Marks! Go!