The Survey was not delayed by mourning, however, and Sheet 2000, now overseen by Whitton-Whyte’s son, Captain John, was published as a single sheet in London on October 5, 1822, some two months after the Ordnance Survey sheet of the same area.
Comparison of the two sheets shows that Hoskyns’ reservations about the accuracy of Sheet 2000 were largely unfounded, save in one area just north of Colnbrook, where the village of Stanhurst is marked. No such village appears on the OS sheet, and indeed no such village has ever existed in this location.
Quite where the inaccuracy came from is unknown, and the surviving field drawings offer no clue. It is known that, despite his advanced years, the General made many on-site surveys himself. Whether he mapped ‘Stanhurst,’ or whether one of his hired men made this inexplicable error, is not known. However, due to Whitton-Whyte’s dispute with Henry Hoskyns, the error was allowed to stand.
1 Sheet 2000 was revised by Captain John Whitton-Whyte in 1830 and 1831, the revised state being published in 1833. This revision was undertaken to bring the sheet into line with the James Gardner printings of OS Sheet 7 between 1824 and 1840, and exhibits many of the Gardner revisions.
However, far from removing the spurious village of Stanhurst from the original state, the revision shows it as having grown in size and been joined by a neighbouring hamlet named Adam Vale, on the outskirts of Colnbrook. A contemporary account tells of Captain John taking ‘a particular interest’ in this portion of the map, and spending many weeks in the Windsor area, where he died of pneumonia in December 1842.
2 With the death of Captain John, his son, Lieutenant Charles Whitton-Whyte, then twenty-two years of age, found himself in charge of the Alternative Survey, overseeing new revisions and the first electrotype printings of Sheet 2000.
The first electrotype printing was published in 1849, and instead of correcting the errors in its predecessors, compounds them. Surviving field drawings show an increase of interest in the area around Windsor, and a corresponding decline of accuracy elsewhere on the sheet. The 1849 printing of Sheet 2000 therefore largely resembles the 1833 state, save in one area.
The 1849 state erases Colnbrook altogether, replacing it with an Adam Vale the size of a small town. Stanhurst’s cathedral (St Anthony’s) is recorded in one set of field drawings, while in another set the spurious villages of Vale, Minton and Holding have obliterated Harmondsworth.
By the revisions of 1851 and 1855, this small corner of Middlesex is all but unrecognisable. Spurious villages, hamlets and towns have sprung up seemingly overnight. West Drayton has gone, and all that marks its former position on several sets of field drawings is the legend ‘Drew Marsh’ and the symbol for a large pond.
From the few surviving records, it appears that the rest of the map, while perfectly accurate, was to all practical purposes ignored, being reproduced from earlier sheets or (some accounts have it) from Ordnance Survey sheets.
The quite imaginary area around Stanhurst appears to have obsessed Charles Whitton-Whyte, a reclusive man by all accounts, presiding over a family fortune mortally damaged by the cartographical endeavours of his father and grandfather. In 1846, he resigned his commission in order to devote his time to map-making.
Charles took to spending much of his time in Windsor while various family holdings fell into decline due to his neglect. At the time of the 1855 revision, he bought a small house in Datchet, and is reported to have spent many hours walking in a countryside which, according to his map, did not exist.
In 1860, aged forty, Charles met and married Jane Breakhouse of Windsor, twenty years his junior. They would spend the next twenty years trying to have children.
3 Much controversy surrounds the so-called ‘Black Sheet’ revision of 1863. No examples, notes or field drawings survive of this state, but from contemporary accounts it is possible to reconstruct how it must have appeared.
In this electrotype printing, Windsor is gone, as are Staines, Uxbridge and Brentford. Into the area bounded by them is inserted the ‘county’ of Ernshire, complete and entire with towns, villages, hamlets, roads, streams and a rail link to Paddington. The Thames cuts unchanged through the southeastern corner of Ernshire, as do other existing watercourses and physical features.
‘If Mr White (sic) thinks this a joke, let him be assured that the residents of this lovely part of the nation do not consider it so,’ wrote one irritated resident of West Drayton in a letter to The Times dated August 22 1863.
Certainly, others shared this correspondent’s irritation, because on November 12, 1864, the Black Sheet became the only map in British history to be banned by order of Parliament. ‘For the good of the Nation,’ wrote one Minister to Whitton-Whyte later that month. Whitton-Whyte’s reply has not survived.
4 The final revision of Sheet 2000, the illegal ‘Natal Sheet,’ was published on July 7 1890, the day of Charles’s son’s birth. His wife lived barely long enough to see the child and name him Edwin.
Only two examples of the Natal Sheet were ever printed, of which this is the single survivor.
On it, we can clearly see the final flowering of the Whitton-Whytes’ peculiar obsession. Ernshire has consolidated itself – in Charles’s mind if nowhere else. Its county town, Stanhurst, is a bustling place roughly the size of present-day Loughborough. It has rail links to the four points of the compass, an extensive road network, a barracks in Anselmdale, farms, churches, post offices, all the amenities of a real county, even a manor house at Eveshalt.
The Parliamentary banning order notwithstanding – it was, after all, simply a revision of the banned Black Sheet – the Natal Sheet was displayed in a gallery in Islington, and seems to have engendered a curious wave of hoaxes.
All through the summer of 1890, newspapers and public institutions were bombarded with communications from the towns of Ernshire. The Times received letters from the inhabitants of Stanhurst and Eveshalt. Buckingham Palace received an invitation for the Queen to review the garrison at Eveshalt. A picture-postcard of St Anthony’s Cathedral in Stanhurst is reported to have been delivered to the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, inviting him to make a pastoral visit. And a woman in Margate claimed to be having a correspondence with a young man from Adam Vale. In a fit of madness which was later to result in the sacking of one manager, the prosecution of another for fraud, and the forcible retirement to a coastal sanatorium of a third, the South Western Railway produced posters advertising day-trips to the ‘historic’ town of Stanhurst.
In September 1890 a special Act of Parliament was passed forbidding any member of the Whitton-Whyte family from ever publishing another map. Imprisonment was considered for Charles but rejected ‘due to his infirmity.’ A fine was similarly rejected due to the parlous state of the family’s finances.
In the event, punitive measures proved unnecessary. The following year, Charles Whitton-Whyte left his little house in Datchet (where he insisted on living despite the fact that on his map Datchet did not exist.) He locked his front door, handed his infant son to his wife’s sister, Mrs Margaret Allen, and walked away down the road.
‘Of his illness there was no sign,’ Mrs Allen later wrote to a cousin. ‘His head was held high, his step was firm and sure, and he swung his stick with vigour as he walked away from Edwin and myself.’