A HAPPY ENDING

The bride wore a dress of cream satin trimmed with lace, with tuile veil and a wreath of orange blossoms.  The Bridesmaids were Miss Julia, Miss Lucy and Miss Mary Bullen, sisters of the bride, who wore dresses of crimson cashmere, trimmed with plush and toques to match.  In conclusion of the ceremony Mr and Mrs Bullen entertained a few friends to breakfast at the Vineyards.  After the service the choristers were entertained to a capital dinner at the White Horse Inn.

Also there was a silver sugar tong and a jam digger, a brass kettle with spirit lamp, a breakfast cruet, a gold horse and show brooch and repousse card tray, nut crackers, tea set, soup ladle, butter knife, marmalade glass, antimacassar, pencil case, tea caddy... and so on.  All now still to be found in the Great Baddow Antiques Centre.

It seems that the reverend Bullen's daughter suffered a caesarean that sacrificed the mother to save the baby, without saving the baby. Great Baddow’s medical community had had another bad day.
 
Two years later in 1888 the Essex Country Chronicle announced: "The news of the death of rev.  A.W.Bullen, vicar of Great Baddow, which took place on Thursday last, and was received with deep regret by his many friends and parishioners.  The deceased gentleman was 67 years old..."
 
Hardly what we would think of as ancient.  Given the world he lived in, his blood pressure must have finally got the better of him. He had been in failing health since his daughter’s death and had been compelled to abstain from all public work for some months past.
 
But in 1888, a mere twelve years after the start of the Reverend’s campaign, the Baddow Brook was finally diverted into a drain! And the sewage works was stationed at the Barnes Farm a long way from Mr Tabor.
 
Of course, when digging these drains, they disturbed various medieval drains which are perhaps the mysterious tunnels people talk about. And this attempt to create better drainage and cleaner water, disturbed those old excavations causing subsidence that undermined The Bell Pub at the top of Bell Street. Eventually that had to be pulled down, ostensibly to improve the access of traffic, leaving an interesting plot of land only recently put to use a mere hundred and fifty years later.

In Noel Coward’s “This Happy Breed” there’s a speech that says how the English like to take their time and let things just grow at a natural pace and that this is the patience of gardeners. It smacks of incompetence, indifference and bad management to me, but I’m not a gardener but if you recall the beginning of this essay, I mentioned how I had spent thirty years in the colonies probably following in the footsteps of many of similar dispositions. A much misunderstood literary quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind referring to what motivates a man to sail up that river: “The horror, the horror!” Hurrah!