How one writer/campaigner attracted the literati to Tilford
SALT plus vegetables drew celebrities – including George Bernard Shaw, Beatrix Potter, William Morris and G.K. Chesterton – to Tilford in the latter quarter of the 19th century after an Eton schoolmaster decided to retire to the village with his wife Kate. In 1885 Henry Shakespear Stephens Salt and Kate made the decision to move into Gorse Cottage (now renamed South Bank Cottage) where Salt, an Humanitarian reformer and author ‘hoped he would be free from intrusion.’
However, this wish was denied him and many of his former friends and colleagues came down from London to visit although, in the case of George Bernard Shaw, the day trip from London was not as successful as he, GBS, had hoped.
In an article published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1888, Shaw described his journey by train and then on foot from Farnham Station.
“London was clean, fresh and dry, as I made my way to Waterloo after rising at the unnatural hour of seven on Sunday morning. Opening a book, I took care not to look out of the window between stations until, after traversing a huge cemetery (Brookwood) and a huge camp (Aldershot), we reached Farnham.
“As usual in the country, it was raining heavily. I asked my way to Tilford, and was told to go straight on for four miles or so. As I had brought nothing that could hurt Salt’s feelings by betraying my mistrust of his rustic paradise, I was without an umbrella; and the paradise, of course, took the fullest advantage of the omission.
“I do not know what the downs of the South Coast may be; but I can vouch for the ups and downs as far as the Surrey roads are concerned… I trudged uphill on my toes and pounded downhill on my heels, making at each step an oozy quagmire full of liquid gamboge. As the land-space grew less human, the rain came down faster, reducing my book to pulp and transferring the red of the cover to my saturated grey jacket…
“I looked down at my clinging knees, and instantly discharged a pint of black dye and rainwater over them from my hat brim. At this I laughed, much as criminals broken on the wheel laughed at the second stroke. A mile or two more of treadmill and gamboge churning, and I came to the outposts of a village, with a river… spanned by a bridge constructed on the principle of the Gothic arch, so as to extort from horses the maximum of effort both when drawing carts up one side, and preventing the carts from overrunning them when slipping precipitously down the other…I need not describe my walk back to Farnham after dinner. It rained all the way…
“Should my experience serve to warn any tempted Londoner against too high an estimate of the vernal delights of the Surrey hills, it will perhaps not have been wasted.”
Henry Salt was born on September 20th, 1851. He was an influential English writer and campaigner for social reform in the fields of prisons, schools, economic institutions and the treatment of animals.
Salt was also well-known as a literary critic, biographer, classical scholar and naturalist. In addition he was a noted antivivisectionist and pacifist. It was due to his abhorrence of seeing other masters at Eton eating meat that he became a vegetarian and at Tilford he and Kate grew all their own vegetables and lived on the proceeds of his writing.
The son of an army Colonel, Salt was born in India but was brought back to England when he was a year old. He was educated at Eton College and graduated from Cambridge University in 1875 then returned to Eton as a schoolmaster to teach classics. He remained at Eton until 1884 when, in addition to the dislike of his colleagues’ eating habits he also despised the reliance of them on servants, persuading him to leave and concentrate on his writing.
His first of more than 40 books was A Plea for Vegetarianism which was published by the Vegetarian Society in 1886. Other works included an acclaimed biography, in 1890, of the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. These two interests later led to a friendship with Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1891, Salt formed the Humanitarian League. Its objectives included the banning of hunting as a sport (in this respect it can be regarded as a forerunner of the League Against Cruel Sports). Henry Salt died on April 19th, 1939. Although only eight of his 88 years of life were spent in Tilford the books which he wrote while living there (including A Plea for Vegetarianism and his biography of Thoreau) plus the formation during that time of the Humanitarian League may suggest that Salt was a man who should receive more kudos in this area than he has done up to now.
Farnham Diary, May 2010, p. 2