Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [604]
In the New Theatre, Salisbury, the little crowd was half expectant, half amused. The auctioneer paused, feeling that, after all, the moment should be invested with a little drama, yet half afraid that murmurs of derision might intervene instead and adversely affect the sale.
He cleared his throat.
“Lot 15. Stonehenge.”
The heir to the local Antrobus estate had already been killed in action. Now his father, Sir Edmund Antrobus, had died. The estate – a huge tract of Salisbury Plain – was for sale; and it included Stonehenge.
The old monument had nearly been sold before. A decade earlier, the American John Jacob Astor had tried to buy it from Sir Edmund for the British Museum. The staggering price of £25,000 had even been mentioned. But Sir Edmund had feared it would fall under control of a government department and after tiresome negotiations, the matter had been dropped.
Others, too, had shown an interest in the place. An organisation called The Church of Universal Bond had suggested that ownership be transferred to a public company of Druids and Antiquarians. By act of Parliament two years earlier, Stonehenge was also protected against demolition and export.
The bidding was not excited. The price rose quietly to £6,000, then seemed to stop.
It was then that a local gentleman raised his hand.
He did so, he confessed afterwards, on impulse.
Mr Cecil H. E. Chubb, of Bemerton Lodge, Salisbury, had begun his adult life with a brilliant Cambridge degree in science and law. But he had never practised his profession. Instead, he had taken control of the Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury, which had been left to his wife by her adoptive father. He had also recently bought an estate.
It seemed to him a good idea that a local man should own the place.
He bought it for £6,600.
In 1918 he gave it to the nation.
Lloyd George made him a baronet the same year.
THE ENCAMPMENT
1944: MAY
Soon the mighty offensive of D-Day would begin. No one, of course, not even the Supreme Commander, could be certain of the date. But, God willing, very soon. The time for the European war’s last act was drawing near.
In the month of May, 1944, had a German spotter plane been granted free access to the southern coast of England for an hour or two, it might well have directed its flight to a point a few miles west of the Isle of Wight, to the low hill and sheltered harbour at Christchurch and thence followed the little river Avon up its lazy course to the north.
Had it done so, its careful observers might have picked out several things to interest them.
They might firstly have noticed numerous small air bases. They might have made out Hurn, at Christchurch, Ibsley, just north of the small town of Ringwood, some ten miles inland, Stoney Cross, on their right hand side, in the New Forest; or others, carefully camouflaged, where a close inspection would have revealed numbers of P-38 Lightnings and P-47 Thunderbolts to astonish them and send them scuttling back across the Channel with the news.
But the spotter plane would probably first have continued on its way north, over Fordingbridge, Downton, and up the Avon to that great junction at the foot of Salisbury Plain, where like the outstretched fingers of a man’s hand, five rivers met.
It would have been an obvious place to aim at: for it was a point on the map well known to anyone in the Luftwaffe. It was, after all, a perfect natural signpost. The pattern of the five rivers, even seen by starlight from thousands of feet above, was completely unmistakable. It was for Sarum that the bombers had usually made on the huge and devastating runs when, coming in from the west and taking their precise directions from the rivers as from a compass, they branched off to devastate the port of Bristol, or the unlucky midland towns of Birmingham and Coventry.
Indeed, though the citizens of Salisbury did not know it, the city had almost