Journal of the Voyages and Travels of John Hy.Robinson Molson, 1841
Once in London they took the Angel Hotel
near the Strand. But they had not much time to relax as their first duty
was to family. Thomas boarded his two children on the mail coach at Holborn
to travel the 120 kilometres north to Spalding. Having been reduced to
take their places outside the coach Jackey found that the night air was
cold but comfortable and the roads were remarkably good, much better than
the roads in Canada. The coach also had a method of going safely down hill
by means of a chain fastened to one wheel; something Jackey would remember
later when having to get out of a coach at Rouge Hill near Toronto.
“We arrived at Spalding the place where our friends reside on Sunday the 13th of June at 6 A M and immediately went to live with them (my aunt Mrs. Molson). On Tuesday we went to see a sister of my grandfather’s (an aunt of Papa’s named Mrs Rayment) who resided near the church at Boston.”
Spalding was the market town in Lincolnshire where the Molsons
came from as far back as the sixteenth century. Nearby were Moulton, Cowbit,
Crowland, villages rich with Molson ancestry. Jackey visited the graves
of his great-grandparents at Moulton, the Georgian mansion, Snakehall,
that at one time belonged to his grandfather, more tombstones at Cowbit,
churches at Boston and Crowland and the unique fourteenth century Crowland
bridge with its three arches. And, in keeping with his education as a brewer,
Jackey visited two breweries, one belonging to Henry Bugg the other to
Richard Carter of Spalding. What fascinated Jackey most, however, was the
bonemeal factory where bones were broken by means of two large iron cylinders
with spikes, finally passing through a coarse kind of bolting machine.
The fine bone powder was then mixed with fertilizer to improve the soil
of Lincolnshire which was considered the most fertile in England.
Since Jackey does not mention his sister Mary Anne by name until a year later in a letter to his Mother, she may have stayed in Spalding with her Aunt, “I intend to write to Mary Anne by the next English mail as I have not written to her since she has been in England.”
Upon his return to London Jackey moved with his Father into private lodgings much like taking a bed and breakfast today. It did not take long for Jackey to find a native Londoner who was delighted to show Jackey the great city.
“During the time I was in London I became acquainted with a gentleman who had lived upwards of 50 years in the city and consequently knew every place in it and he very kindly took me to see several of the principal places such as the Museum, The Zoological Gardens, The Wax Works, The Thames Tunnel and several other places well worth seeing.”
These he describes in detail along with St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Polytechnical Institution, Adelaide Gallery, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, The Monument and eight bridges across the Thames.
Included in his tour were the Royal Hospital in Chelsea “for old soldiers” and the Greenwich Hospital “for naval pensioners.”
Jackey rounded out his tour of London by visiting the Tower of London. Although he describes it extensively, he did not have time to write down all he saw. “There were so many things in the Tower that if I wished to explain them all I should have to raise a subscription in London to buy paper to write it on.”
“On Saturday the 10th of July at 10 P. M. left London for Leith in the steamer Royal Adelaide, a vessel with two low-pressure engines each 100 horse power; she goes at the rate of eight miles an-hour. At the time we started the tide was so low that we were a-ground at the wharf and had some difficulty in getting away and as we went down the river we rubbed every now and then on the sand untill we were hard-a-ground and so we laid there untill 3 A M. When the tide came up and raised us off, we started and had a most beautiful view all the way for the country was covered with the richest cornfields and the neatest houses that I think I ever saw.”
Jackey passed Fern Island, the scene of the famous wreck and rescue of the steamship Forfarshire, in 1838 in which a fisherman’s daughter braved the stormy sea to save eleven passengers. Docking at Leith, Jackey took in the sites of Edinburgh, passing on to Glasgow. At Glasgow he toured Port Dundas Distillery, still in operation today. He left the Broomielaw (by which the port of Glasgow is known) in the iron steam ship Princess Royal, to arrive in Liverpool and back in the cars of the Grand Junction Railway and London, eight days after he left.
On the day after his return to London, Jackey took the cars of the London and Brighton Rail Road as far as Haywards Heath. Here he transferred to coach ending up in Brighton, “a very fashionable watering-place and a very handsome town and in my humble opinion is the prettiest town in England.” Jackey stayed for a week taking in the Chain Pier completed in 1823 and William Cromwell’s Keep at Lewes. Jackey claimed to have sat in the same chair King John sat when he signed the Magna Charta in 1215. The Molsons continued along the coast of England west of Brighton through Shoreham to Worthing, then back to London by rail.
Prior to leaving London Jackey took a seat in the Haymarket Theatre to watch Romeo and Juliet played by Charles Kean and Ellen Terry, both of whom played in Jackey’s grandfather’s Theatre Royal in Montréal when they toured North America in the 1830’s. After watching the play, “which I liked very much,” Jackey continued on to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, which had “a beautiful collection of paintings and contains many very natural ones.”
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