Punch Bowl purchase
In the app trail, George recalls bumping into an anxious Sir Robert Hunter at this spot in October 1905, two days before the auction in Godalming for the Devil’s Punch Bowl. It’s a conceivable fabulation: Hunter, one of the three founders of the fledgling National Trust, had been a Haslemere resident for 20 years and knew Hindhead extremely well.
Since 1867 Hunter had worked as a lawyer for the then newly minted Commons Preservation Society, a reaction to landlords selling off historic commons for development, especially near Britain’s burgeoning cities. In 1895 he and his colleagues, Octavia Hill and Canon Hardwick Rawnsley, brought the National Trust into being. When Hindhead came up for sale – after the manorial ‘lord’, the convicted fraudster Whittaker Wright, took his own life – Hunter and the Haslemere branch of the Preservation Society were galvanised to raise the cash. The lot went for £3,500, and the Hampshire Post reported that, while neighbours had given generously, the commons would have been lost if it hadn’t been for the determination of the society and the £500 donation of a resident, Mrs Thackery Turner, who was in the room.
While Hunter’s guarantors backed him on the day, the society was still significantly short and he found himself repeatedly writing appeals in the press for donations in order to complete the purchase. In one long article in The Sphere in February 1906, headlined ‘The Preservation of Hindhead: A National Playground’, Hunter put the case for the outstanding £1,000. Hindhead, he said, had transformed over the preceding half century, especially after the eminent scientist John Tyndall moved there in the 1880s in search of Alpine air – “an air fresh from the sea, and down and bracken, an air as exhilirating as Champagne”. Following Tyndall’s lead, “country houses, weekend cottages sprang up on land which but a few years before was considered worthless. Hindhead became a health resort, and shops, hotels and pensions followed.” But now, said Hunter, there was a chance to save “this windswept hill and the grand view which it commands, the long narrow ridges and deep hollows, the broken ground and secluded depths of the Punch Bowl … a source of pleasure alike to the wayfarer on the great road, and to the rambler over turf and heather”.
Ultimately the cash was raised, and the Devil’s Punch Bowl was conveyed to the Trust a month later – an early and significant acquisition, and one that brought more donations in its wake. Hunter chaired the local preservation society, and the next year, 1907, he saw the National Trust Act passed, which meant that the Trust had to hold its land in perpetuity.
