The making of Gosport Park

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I'm always fascinated by the landscape stories that it's possible to unearth using readily available sources. Yesterday a question was raised in the Gosport Memories group in Facebook about the origin of "The Dell", a recessed and banked oval of land in Gosport Park, Gosport, Hampshire (see Bing Maps).

With this kind of thing, it's always worth checking the excellent Old Maps map archive site, which readily finds that The Dell and the Park itself existed in 1898 ...

Gosport Park, 1898 OS map. Historic map data is (© and database right
Crown copyright and Landmark Information Group Ltd. (All rights reserved
2009). Low-resolution image reproduced for small-scale non-profit
use under the terms described in the Old Maps FAQ.

... but didn't in 1881, when the area was just a tract of common land called Ewer Common, on a peninsula between two creeks, Stoke Lake to the south, and Workhouse Lake to the north.

Ewer Common, 1867-1881 OS map. Historic map data is (© and database right
Crown copyright and Landmark Information Group Ltd. (All rights reserved
2009). Low-resolution image reproduced for small-scale non-profit
use under the terms described in the Old Maps FAQ.

This Martin Snape lithograph (found at www.richardmartingallery.co.uk) gives a good idea of what the land was like: heath and very low-grade pasture.

A look in the British Library 19th Century Newspapers archive finds that the land was transformed in the late 1880s, the driver behind the project being Colonel Charles Mumby. See Charles Mumby & Co., Gosport and Portsmouth: Memories Evoked by the Isle of Wight Steam Railway for a good biographical summary. (He wasn't a 'real' colonel, by the way - this was the kind of era when the local bigwig automatically got parachuted into some medium-high rank in the regional volunteer battalion - roughly equivalent to the modern Territorial Army). An all-round Victorian entrepreneur who'd become rich chiefly from mineral water manufacturing in Gosport, he'd risen in the town hierarchy to become chairman of the Local Board (precursor to borough council), and one of his projects was the proposal in 1886 to develop Ewer Common as a public park.

The Chairman said that while at Ewer Common some time ago he thought that this large tract of land which measured nearly 30 acres, would form a very desirable place of public recreation. While paying a subsequent visit to London, he saw the Chief Clerk to the Secretary of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. who were the Lords of the Manor at Alverstoke, and learned from him that no revenue was acquired from the land. He then wrote a letter to the Commissioners stating that the Common was merely used as a squatting place for gypsies and for digging gravel for the repair of roads, and that to his knowledge no common rights had been exercised for many years and he therefore asked whether the Commissioners would be willing to hand over the land for a public recreation ground. A favourable reply had been received, and he now moved that the question be referred to the Roads and Works Committee, for them to negotiate with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners with a view to acquiring Ewer Common.
-  The Hampshire Telegraph, February 13, 1886

It seems fairly high-handed of Mumby to present the plan at such an advanced stage, and there were objections - particularly from a Mr Treacher, who argued that this, like a previous deal to acquire land for building Thorngate Hall, amounted to misrepresentation and fraud. (I assume his implication was that Mumby was exaggerating the worthlessness of the land in order to get the owners to relinquish it). However, the resolution was passed. Treacher's objections continued over the next few years - chiefly about the general expense and the legality of the funding process:

Mr JF Treacher said that if he went according to his belief, he would oppose the motion [to borrow money to fence the park under construction] tooth and nail, but as the ground was commenced, he would remain neutral. He could hardly say that they had carried out this work in a strictly legal manner, as they had been drawing funds from the general district rate, for which no resolution had been passed. The total sum spent on Ewer Common would have been sufficient to build an Infection Diseases Hospital. Besides the Common was not in a central position, and would only be of use to a portion of the parish.
- Hampshire Telegraph, May 16, 1891

The Park was  completed in 1891, at a total cost of some £3000, and was opened on June 17th 1891.

OPENING OF THE GOSPORT PARK
Wednesday was a red letter day in the history of Gosport. In magnificent weather the new Park at Alverstoke was formally opened to the public. … A piece of land that was useless, except as a camping-ground for gypsies, is now transformed into a well laid-out recreation ground, with a capital cycle track and running path. The track itself, which is about three laps to the mile, is egg-shaped, the curves making easy sweeps. An unsightly gravel pit has been turfed, and will make excellent courts for tennis, the sloping sides sheltering the players, and effectually keeping the balls from straying too far. A spacious carriage-drive runs round the whole ground, and altogether the Gosport Park is an ornament and a credit to the parish.
- Hampshire Telegraph,  June 20, 1891

The Dell, although not named as such in the account of the opening, is clearly the site of this egg-shaped track.

The Ewer Common peninsula has other historical interest as the site of the former Alverstoke House of Industry, one of the first radially-designed workhouses (hence the adjacent creek being called Workhouse Lake). You can see a detailed ground plan on Old Maps, which has a 1:500 town plan:

Alverstoke House of Industry, 1875-1880 town plan.
Historic map data is (© and database right Crown copyright and Landmark
Information Group Ltd. (All rights reserved 2009).
Low-resolution image reproduced for small-scale non-profit
use under the terms described in the Old Maps FAQ.

Closed after WW2, the workhouse site was used as an industrial unit until its demolition in 1989, and all that remains is its northern gateway, converted into a house. See The Workhouse / Alverstoke for further details and pictures. There's a slight Isle of Wight connection I didn't know about: Valentine Gray, the 'Little Sweep' who's commemorated in Church Litten park, Newport, was a former inmate.

- Ray (with thanks to Christopher Pope and Gary Baltao)

Sporting mistakes

A few posts back - None so fast as stroke - I mentioned a reference to Maxwell Gray in the 1923 article, Novelists' sporting blunders, which concerns sporting bloopers in novels. I just managed to hack the whole article out of the Google snippet view.

Novelists' sporting blunders
Curious mistakes in good stories

Ouida's classic hero, who rowed twice as fast as his fellows in the Boat Race, is the supreme example of the errors into which authors who venture to deal with a phase of sport of which they are ignorant may fall. But Ouida was not much more ignorant than most of her contemporaries, and mid-Victorian literature teems with similar blunders.

Writers, however, of a later date are expected to be meticulously accurate in all of their references to or descriptions of sporting events. Everyone plays some sort of game or follows some sport nowadays, and it is therefore astonishing to find that even modern authors are guilty of errors which are obvious to the most casual reader.

Maxwell Gray's Boat Race
Maxwell Gray, the author of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," makes a curious reference to the Boat Race in "The Great Refusal," published in 1906.

Once he remembered — on a boat-race day — when every coster cart fluttered light or dark blue ribbons and the colours were in shop windows and ladies' dresses, and expectation was on tiptoe for the result of that five minutes' swift sweep over Thames waters — he remembered thinking that the sixteen god-like youths smiting the river with strokes too swift to count were, after all, of real flesh and blood like himself.

These inaccuracies are the more inexplicable as it does not require a knowledge of rowing to know that about twenty minutes is the average time for the race from Putney to Mortlake, and that it is perfectly easy to watch and count the strokes of the oars as they are seen rowing past.

How many extras?
Mistakes in scoring at a cricket match may sometimes be made, but it is not for a author who is describing a match to make them. And of all authors, Mr. P G. Wodehouse, himself no mean cricketer, should be the last to fall into this sort of trap. In that most delightful of school-books, "Mike," Mr. Wodehouse describes how, in the third over of a House match, the bowler bowled three wides, in addition to which a leg-bye had already been run. Yet.—

At four o'clock, when the score stood at two hundred and twenty for no wicket, Barnes, greatly daring, smote lustily at a rather wide half-volley and was caught at short-slip for thirty-three. As Mike had then made a hundred and eighty-seven.

Now, thirty-three and a hundred and eighty-seven added together, would appear to make two hundred and twenty, as Mr Wodehouse no doubt realized. But what has happened to those four extras, of which we have already been told, to say nothing of others which most inevitably have been given during the course of play!

An incredible catch
Mr Wodehouse’s mistake is, of course, due, not to ignorance, but to carelessness. But Mr Ian Hay, in relating the earlier cricketing fortunes of “Pip,” makes a couple of statements which has, as a practical cricketer, can scarcely expect his readers to swallow. The first relates to a House match.

One of the batsmen played just inside a ball from the Hivite fast-bowler, Martin. The ball glanced, off his bat, and almost at the same moment Pip became conscious of a violent pain , suggestive of red-hot iron in his right armpit. He clapped his hand to the part affected, and to his astonishment drew forth the ball to a storm of applause.

If not physically impossible, this feat is quite incredible. Good fielders—and “Pip” was one—do not catch cricket balls in their armpits, a feat which would in any case to be possible only to a professional contortionist. It should be added that the scoring in this match is as peculiar as in Mr Wodehouse’s book.

RG: A quick aside: the author of this article, JPH, is completely wrong on this point. I don't know much about cricket, but a quick Google shows there are plenty of examples of fielders catching in the armpit. On with the rest of the piece ...

Advice from a Flapper
The other incident concerns “Pip’s” Blue for Cambridge. He is a left-handed bowler, and the Cambridge captain is not quite sure whether to play him against Oxford, The heroine — at this stage about sixteen years old — takes the matter in hand, and tackles the captain boldly:

"Have you ever tried him round the wicket?” asked Elsie."With his run he would pass behind the umpire just before delivering the ball." The captain was fairly startled this time. He turned and regarded the ingenue beside him with undisguised interest and admiration.”

Well he might! For this flapper of sixteen has already advised “Pip” to bowl around the wicket, to that hero’s undisguised wonder and amazement. But does Mr Hay really think that the old Blues and other great men who had a hand in training “Pip” would have suggested a device which, as a matter of fact, left-handed bowlers have nearly always adopted?

But enough of criticism. The story, after all, is the thing, and such faults affect our pleasure no more than Conan Doyle’s racing mistakes in "Silver Blaze" affect our interest in Sherlock Holmes. One of the most popular writers of school stories, the late Talbot Baines Reed, was incredibly careless as to the accuracy of the many sporting events he had to describe. But his stories still sell well and remain popular, and perhaps to notice such faults is to be hypercritical.
- JPH, Novelists' sporting blunders, page 580, T.P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, Volume 1, 1923

The mistakes may well be egregious to those who know about such matters, but the author's assumption that every reader knows likewise, or cares, is if anything weirder than the mistakes.

As I mentioned in None so fast as stroke, the citation of the rowing story to the much-ridiculed Ouida is false. Apart from Maxwell Gray's The Great Refusal (Internet Archive ID: greatrefusal00gray), the books referrred to are Ian Hay's 1917 "Pip": a romance of youth (Gutenberg #34136), and PG Wodehouse's 1909 Mike (Gutenberg #7423), the first of his four his"Psmith" novels.

Conan Doyle himself acknowledged the technical errors in the 1892 racing-related Silver Blaze:

Sometimes I have got upon dangerous ground, where I have taken risks through my own want of knowledge of the correct atmosphere. I have, for example, never been a racing man, and yet I ventured to write 'Silver Blaze', where the mystery depends upon the laws of training and racing. The story is all right, and Holmes may have been at the top of his form, but my ignorance cries aloud to Heaven. I read an excellent and very damaging criticism of the story in some sporting paper, written clearly by a man who did know, in which he explained the exact penalties which would have come upon all concerned if they had acted as I described, Half would have been in jail and the other half warned off the turf forever. However, I have never been nervous about details, and one must be masterful sometimes.
- Sidelights on Sherlock Holmes, Memories and Adventures, 1924.

Conan's Doyle's sporting paper reference isn't immediately findable, but a post in a Digital Spy forum, A-Z of Horse Racing (Part 2) - 65918576 # 2389 - explains the issues:

Holmes is an accessory after the fact to the crime of horse theft. He's also guilty of concealing a horse with a view to manipulating its price in the betting market.
...
Furthermore the rules of racing do not permit a horse to run against description i.e. if it has a silver blaze it must run with one. What the Winchester stewards were doing allowing this to happen one can only wonder. They should resign in shame. Holmes should be warned off for life and never allowed to investigate a case involving racehorses ever again.

Talbot Baines Reed was yet another example of a massively prolific but virtually forgotten 19th century author. He specialized in school stories, which mostly first appeared in the Boy's Own Paper, but were later published in book form by the Religious Tract Society. However, as the Wikipedia article says (see Talbot Baines Reed / School stories) they weren't overtly moralizing or religious like some of their predecessors. Nevertheless, they dealt in clichéd boarding school dramas and motifs ...

"... the stolen exam paper, the innocent who is wrongly accused and ultimately justified after much proud suffering, the boating accident, the group rivalries, the noble friendships. Adult characters are largely stereotypes: a headmaster known as "the Doctor" and modelled on Thomas Arnold of Rugby, "the jabbering French master (pointed beard and two-tone shoes)", the popular games master, the dry pedant, the generally comic domestic staff ..."
-  Quigly, Isobel. The Heirs of Tom Brown: The English School Story. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1984

... that have been widely recycled ever since, right up to the piss-poor Harry Potter series. Many of Talbot Baines Reed's books are on Project Gutenberg (author #9657). I can't say I care enough about the genre to search them for sporting mistakes.

- Ray

None so fast as stroke

An out-take from the Maxwell Gray work: I just ran into a MG reference in a 1923 article, Novelists' sporting blunders, which concerns sporting bloopers in novels.

Ouida's classic hero, who rowed twice as fast as his fellows in the Boat Race, is the supreme example of the errors into which authors who venture to deal with a phase of sport of which they are ignorant may fall.
...
Maxwell Gray's Boat Race
Maxwell Gray, the author of "The Silence of Dean Maitland," makes a curious reference to the Boat Race in "The Great Refusal," published in 1906.

Once he remembered — on a boat-race day — when every coster cart fluttered light or dark blue ribbons and the colours were in shop windows and ladies' dresses, and expectation was on tiptoe for the result of that five minutes' swift sweep over Thames waters — he remembered thinking that the sixteen god-like youths smiting the river with strokes too swift to count were, after all, of real flesh and blood like himself.

These inaccuracies are the more inexplicable as it does not require a knowledge of rowing to know that about twenty minutes is the average time for the race from Putney to Mortlake, and that it is perfectly easy to watch and count the strokes of the oars as they are seen rowing past.
- Novelists' sporting blunders, page 580, T.P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, Volume 1, 1923

The Maxwell Gray error is verifiable. The Ouida one is not. A little Googling finds that its attribution to Ouida (the novelist Maria Louise Ramé) seems to have been a popular meme of the early 20th century. The quotation generally took the form"All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke" ("stroke" being the rower at the stern who sets the pace for the whole crew), and it seems to be an abbreviated paraphrase of this passage ...

The word sounded clear from the mouth of the 'Varsity captain of boats, and at once Ralph exerted the full force of Herculean arms. His blade struck the water a full second before any other; the lad had started well. Nor did he flag as the race wore on… as the boats began to near the winning-post, his oar was dipping into the water nearly twice as often as any other.

... which comes from Desmond Coke's 1903 Sandford of Merton. Written under the pseudonym Belinda Blinder, it's a comic novel of Oxford university life, a pastiche of The History of Sandford and Merton - and the howler is of course a deliberate joke.

I can't find any precise origin of the accretion of the story to Ouida. The first citation I can find for the "... none so fast as stroke" line is 1908 ...

In one way and another, however, the crowds which watch the practice of the crews have come to know more about rowing than any earlier generation. ...  And there is certainly not a novelist left who could write with a grave face that "all rowed fast and furiously, but none so fast as stroke."
- The Boat-Race, The Spectator, 28 March 1908

... and in the same year, it was ascribed to a female novelist (for no reason I can see beyond sheer sexism):

We do not know whether or not it was a lady novelist who wrote gravely that "all rowed fast and furiously, but none so fast as stroke," but we suspect it was.
 - 'Varsity Howlers, The Press (Canterbury, NZ), 14 Hōngongoi 1908, Page 6

By the 1920s, the story was solidly attached to Ouida (see Google Books hits). Probably the connection was forged because of the female pseudonym of the author of Sandford of Merton, and the easy target that Ouida made as an eccentrically florid stylist known for such inaccuracies. The misattribution has been repeatedly debunked - notably via the correspondence column of The Spectator in 1937, and by Elizabeth Knowles on page 21 of What They Didn't Say: A Book of Misquotations (OUP, 2006) - but it refuses to die, and has been given new currency by the usual quotation websites.

Addendum: I find a clue in a contemporary review of Sandford of Merton:

"The Oxford Magazine" once published a delicious chapter on the Eights extracted from an imaginary novel by Ouida ...
- Reviews,  The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, page 817, Volume 95, 27 June 1903

If this is accurate, it might be identifiable as the source that kicked off the meme.

- Ray

"This is for everyone"

I am not watching the Olympics - I think sport, and any celebration of it, is loathsome - but I did hear that the Olympic opening ceremony featured Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. For example, from CNET News, Berners-Lee, Web take bow at Olympics.

The opening ceremony of this summer's London Olympics obliged that sentiment, as Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee got the star treatment during the extravaganza.

A hip-hoppy dance routine featuring legions of fist-pumping club-types gave way as a stage-set suburban house rose from the ground to reveal a lone keyboard jockey surfing away in solitude.

None other than Berners-Lee it was, and with a flick of his wrist, he lit up the stadium with a grandly flashing tweet: "This is for everyone."

I recall that on a number of occasions, Sir Tim has (rightly, in my view) vigorously criticised the egregious practice of commercial organisations operating a 'legal chill' to prevent hyperlinks to their sites. For example:

It is difficult to emphasize how important these issues are for society. The first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for example, addresses the right to speak. The right to make reference to something is inherent in that right. On the web, to make reference without making a link is possible but ineffective - like speaking but with a paper bag over your head.
- Tim Berners-Lee, Axioms of Web Architecture / Links and Law: Myths, 1997

It's highly ironic, then, to see the terms of use for the London 2012 official website:

5. Linking policy
a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that your link is in a text-only format. You may not use any link to the Site as a method of creating an unauthorised association between an organisation, business, goods or services and London 2012, and agree that no such link shall portray us or any other official London 2012 organisations (or our or their activities, products or services) in a false, misleading, derogatory or otherwise objectionable manner. The use of our logo or any other Olympic or London 2012 Mark(s) as a link to the Site is not permitted.

So, as Padraig Reidy of Index on Censorship comments at Free Speech Blog, "You’re only allowed [to] link to the official site of the Olympics if you’re going to say nice things about the Olympics."

- Ray