Wilton in the old days was a great place for processions, which seemed to spring up spontaneously, as if from some fundamental instinct for pageantry. My earliest childhood seems largely to have consisted of climbing again and again on to a box which stood in one of the nursery windows, to watch processions pass outside.
They were not all of them festive ones. There were those which went by regularly throughout the year, giving to the town an individuality regrettably lost to-day. On Sundays and Saints’ days, when the church bells rang for Matins, there could be heard advancing upon the Rectory from Crow Lane, the hard treble pit-pat of small marching feet. We hopped on to our boxes to see the Free School boys going to church. There were about twenty-five of them, and they marched in perfect step, wearing the enchanting suits which had been the uniform of the school since its founding in 1706. So they were dressed in the fashion of Queen Anne’s day, as if that good queen were not dead, as the moderns say she is. The boys wore smart cut-away coats of fine buff cloth, faced with hyacinth blue, and they had little buff caps with black peaks. The Free School boys added beauty and charm to the Wilton streets, not only when they marched in line, but, still more, when they lounged about at the crossroads, or played marbles on the pavement.
Probably another procession was converging upon the church at the same time. This was composed of the Park School girls. They came from the fantastic Baroque pavilion in the park, which Lady Georgiana Herbert, a daughter of the Russian Lady Pembroke, some time in the eighteen-thirties, had converted into a school for the daughters of workmen on the estate. In winter, these girls wore cloaks made of lovely warm crimson cloth, and in summer they had little grey shoulder capes. They did not stamp their feet as the boys did, though they too walked in step, but very primly, watched from the opposite pavement by the tender but unrelenting eye of their governess, Miss Aikman. She called them her ‘ little duckies’, but she was both pious and particular, and she saw to it that the behaviour of her pupils was, like their sewing, above reproach.
These two schools were very small and practical forerunners of the senior schools of to-day. Attached to the Free School was an Apprentice Fund, and on each boy’s fourteenth birthday, he was ‘bound apprentice’ to a tradesman in Wilton or Salisbury. Apprenticeship is a freer and more lasting kind of Continuation School than those we know now. Those boys of fourteen were out in the world. They had entered upon the trade of their lifetime. They earned a small weekly wage. But their master was still in a way their schoolmaster, and they were under discipline. Even now, many of the leading tradesmen in Wilton and its neighbourhood were once boys in the Wilton Free School.
It was the same with the Park School girls. They all belonged to the upper standards, and with their two teachers for twenty-five girls, they were well taught; but from the time they entered the school they began to be specialists. Needlework was their craft, and the making and marking of the Wilton House linen was their duty. When they left school, and each received her grown-up outfit packed in its own little travelling trunk, they were in demand all over the country as under-nurses and sewing-maids.
I regret the passing of these little schools. They did something which is not done to-day, and which cannot be done while the aim of educationalists is so to collect the children from small scattered country communities, that they can be handled in the same manner as are children in large towns. Individuality has given place to uniformity; and the traveller through Wilton sees no more in its streets the unusual dresses which did indeed imply something unusual in their wearers, and Sundays and Saints days are no longer distinguished by the passing of those striking little processions.
But we had other processions, devised with the conscious purpose of making a show.
On Whit-Monday ‘the Clubs’ came to church, where they heard divine service, sang some tremendously loud hymns, and listened to a sermon from a clergyman imported from a neighbouring parish. Then they marched to the various public houses for their annual dinners.
As these clubs still exist, I imagine that they still eat their dinners, but these must be hole-and-corner affairs compared with the flamboyance of the past.
In those old days, the town band led the procession, generally playing ‘The Cock o’ the North’, and behind it marched some five or six clubs, each preceded by its own banner. These were enormous pictures painted on silk and displayed between two poles, while their corners were held taut by ropes. The banner bearers wore the traditional costumes of their clubs. The pictures were highly coloured and very realistic. There were weeping widows being comforted by members of their late husbands’ clubs, or sick men visited by fellow Oddfellows or Foresters who wore medieval dresses of the Waverley Novel date. I seem to remember a corpse laid out on a bed, and surrounded by disconsolate orphans. The more harrowing the picture, the more artistic it seemed to be.
When these processions reached the Rectory, the band turned in through the gates, and as the banner bearers pressed through behind it, they closed ranks for a moment, converting the pictures into confused streaming jumbles of gay colours. When they were all inside, my father came and stood on the steps and made a short speech. Non-club members remained outside, peering through the gates; and upstairs in the nursery, we stood on our boxes looking excitedly down upon the scene.
But the best processions of all seemed to us in those days to be quite unpremeditated. They sprang spontaneously from the Wilton soil, and were the town’s prerogative. To
