PECULIAR POSTCARDS
JAN BONDESON shares another deltiological discovery from his prodigious collection of postcards. This month’s pictorial blast from the past celebrates William Bell, who gave up a life of labour to live in the forest with his two dogs.
The Hermit of Hainault Forest
6. THE HERMIT OF HAINAULT FOREST
We live in the meadows
And we toil in the soil;
Far away from your cities and glooms;
More cheery are we, Though in rags we may be,
Than the pale faces are in your rooms.
These were the defiant poetic exhortations of William Bell, alias ‘Old Dido’, the Hermit of Hainault Forest, when he stood before the Stratford magistrates in late 1903, charged with keeping two unlicensed dogs.
The antecedents of this remarkable hermit are worthy of a short discourse. He claimed to have been born in Bethnal Green in 1831, the youngest of eight children and orphaned at the age of 11. He worked as a fishmonger, and as a labourer in the East India Docks, but did not like it very much. He had always been fond of nature, and in the 1870s he gave up work altogether and settled as a hermit in Hainault Forest. He hunted hedgehogs, rabbits and wild birds, killed snakes, and picked blackberries to sell at the market. His home was a primitive hut he had erected himself, but it was surrounded by a nicely cultivated little garden, in which he grew potatoes, cabbages and beans. He had a charcoal fire in a bucket as his only means of cooking and keeping warm. How the hermit survived the sometimes freezing-cold winters is difficult to imagine; he must have been exceptionally hardy.
Bell was fond of herbal cures, making ointments to treat lumbago, sciatica and indigestion, and treating children for colds and whooping cough. Proud of his medical knowledge, he called himself Dr Bell, although the locals used to refer to him as ‘Dido Jones’ or ‘Old Dido’. He was well known locally as a quack doctor. It is remarkable that the local peasants trusted the minuscule medical knowledge of this unprepossessing, bushybearded old man, who never washed or had a bath, but he seems to have abided by the quack’s golden rule, namely never to treat any person who was seriously ill; anyway, his harmless nostrums did not have the potency to kill off any of his patients. The hermit’s second career was that of a market trader: he sold birds, berries, and tea he had made from dried hawthorn and blackthorn leaves. The authorities tolerated him, since he did no harm and minded his own business.
In December 1903, Bell was prosecuted before the magistrate at Stratford for keeping two unlicensed dogs. The hermit showed a postcard where he was depicted near his hermitage, and recited another of his doggerel poems:
I have been squatter at Hainault Forest for many years;
‘Tis well known my work was there more or less every day, For fifteen years I never asked anyone for pay.
I kept hedges up in repair, So cattle could not get out as was a-straying there.
I thought in my mind, Sir, I was a very good forest keeper, And keepers and shepherds, I’ve heard, can keep dogs without pay,
And I never let mine go astray. The hermit looked as scruffy, dirty and bedraggled as ever. When asked what kind of doctor he was, he replied: “I am Doctor Bell, and a bit of a doctor of divinity as well!” He needed his dogs as protection, he explained, and had never thought of paying the dog tax. He was fined 10 shillings plus four shillings costs, but said he had no money. The bonhomous magistrate said he could be trusted over the Christmas period, and the hermit politely thanked him for this courtesy, promising to pay his fine as soon as he was solvent once more.
Bell’s appearance before the magistrates meant that the authorities now knew all about the Hermit of Hainault Forest. Since it was argued that he had damaged the trees with his digging, there was an injunction to prevent him from erecting a hut or tent in the forest. In May 1904, he was given three weeks to move, but decided to stay in his hermitage until the last; as a result, a troop of bailiffs came to destroy his hut and garden. The 73-year-old Bell left his hermitage for the last time, accompanied by his dogs, Jack and Snyder. He told a journalist that he had managed to get lodgings nearby, allowing him to spend the days in the forest with his dogs, although he would now have the luxury of a warm bed to sleep in at night.