| John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington | |
| Birth Date: | 18 February 1743 |
| Birth Place: | Southill, Bedfordshire, England |
| Death Date: | 8 January 1813 |
| Death Place: | London, England |
| Other Names: | The Hon. John Byng |
| Known For: | Travel journals |
| Education: | Westminster |
| Occupation: | Army officer and civil servant |
| Viscount Torrington; Baron Byng; Baronet, of Wrotham | |
| Party: | Whig |
| Spouse: | Bridget Forrest (d. 1823) |
| Relatives: | Earls of Strafford |
John Byng, 5th Viscount Torrington (18 February 1743 – 8 January 1813), previously styled The Hon. John Byng for most of his lifetime (until 1812), was a British aristocrat and celebrated 18th-century diarist.
Byng's fifteen extant diaries, covering the years 1781–94, describe his travels on horseback throughout England and Wales during twelve summers.
The younger son of Major-General George Byng, 3rd Viscount Torrington, whose father Admiral of the Fleet Sir George Byng, KB, was created a baronet in 1715 before being elevated to the peerage as Viscount Torrington in 1721, his family were formerly seated at Southill Park in Bedfordshire. He was a great-uncle of the politician Lord John Russell and in 1847 his cousin, Field Marshal Sir John Byng, GCB, was created Earl of Strafford.
After attending Westminster School, Byng was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards, retiring as Colonel of the Regiment in 1780. On 14 December 1812 he succeeded his elder brother, George Byng, 4th Viscount Torrington,[1] formerly HM Minister Plenipotentiary at Brussels, in the family titles but died before he had the opportunity of being introduced in the House of Lords. The paternal seat of Southill Park had been sold by his elder brother for the repayment of debt, and Byng thus found himself titled but landless.
On 3 March 1767 he married Bridget Forrest, daughter of Commodore Arthur Forrest[2] and Frederica Marina Cecila Lynch, daughter of Colonel John Lynch.[3]
Lord and Lady Torrington had 14 children, 13 of whom survived infancy:
Lord Torrington died in 1813 being buried in the Byng Mausoleum at the Church of All Saints in the parish of Southill in Bedfordshire.[7]
The historian Donald Adamson believes there to be a missing diary of Byng's tour of Devon.
Byng's journeys encompass England and Wales in the summer months of 1781–1794. After this time he gave up his journeyings, feeling he was too old to cover so many miles on horseback with only a servant to accompany him and sometimes to ride on ahead to book the inn for the next night's stay.[8] This servant, who was the person variously of Thomas Bush, Garwood, young Thomas Bush or an unlikeable unnamed valet, had the duties of carrying his master's bedclothes on his own horse,[9] making his master's bed,[10] attending to both horses,[11] calling his master in the morning[12] and "give him consequence".[13] Viewed in a literary light, Bush or Garwood resembles Don Quixote's Sancho Panza.
Byng wrote no travel journal for Scotland though he may have been acquainted with that country. He travelled through the Midlands in 1774 without leaving any record of his impressions, returning there in 1789/90.
On his travels Byng displays the training and attitude of a retired Army officer (subsequently, from 1782 to 1799, a Commissioner of Stamps) together with the intellectual outlook of an antiquary steeped from his schooldays in Shakespeare and in the classics of Greek and Roman antiquity. He delights in ruins, such as those of Tintern Abbey,[14] Crowland Abbey[15] and Fountains Abbey,[16] studies gravestones in many or most of the churches he visits, and records the inscriptions on some of them. He makes detours to view historic mansions while taking care not to stay at any of them even when they are inhabited by his aristocratic relations. He does not, for example, enter Woburn Abbey although it is the home of his niece's brother-in-law, the future 6th Duke of Bedford. Nor does he stay with his brother the 4th Viscount Torrington but rather at the Sun Inn at Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, which he calls his "country seat".[17]
In keeping with his military training Byng is gifted with his pencil. Like Turner in the Lake District, he uses his paintbrushes to sketch charming but somewhat naïve watercolour scenes, for example of Barfreston Church in Kent,[18] Greta Bridge[19] or the "tortur'd tree" at Bell Bar.[20]
Like Horace Walpole or William Thomas Beckford, he admired Gothic architecture, thus foreshadowing the Romantic movement. (It is the attitude satirised by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey). He deplores any "ugly, staring, red-brick house",[21] such as Dunham Massey,[22] Adlington Hall, Etruria Hall[23] or Attingham Park in North West England.[24] And yet, as befits a former Army officer, he admires orderliness and the well-kept economy of a flourishing country estate.
There is a vividness and an immediacy about Byng's documentary record which is seldom if ever to be found in the work of any other British diarist.
Byng is a laudator temporis acti, or "praiser of times past". As a Whig he looked favourably on the Hanoverian settlement and expressed a strong dislike for Scotland. He lamented that Scotland seemed to be taking over England: “like their native thistles, they never can be weeded out”.[25] He was a countryman at heart, far happier fishing and shooting than endeavouring to adapt himself to the airs and graces of polite London society, for which he had little affection. He fondly recollects his visits to Yotes Court, Maidstone in about 1755.[26] Yet emotionally he was rooted in Bedfordshire, the county of his childhood.
Faithful to the established Church of England (although conscious of its imperfections), he had only limited sympathy with Methodism – while recognising its potential to rejuvenate traditional churchgoing.
He was aware that great social changes were afoot and did not totally disapprove of them. Concerning the new industries, he was full of admiration for Cromford Mill[27] in Derbyshire, and for the pioneering technology of Richard Arkwright. He admired the silk-mills at Overton near Basingstoke,[28] the mining and the navigation tunnel at Sapperton in Gloucestershire,[29] and Josiah Wedgwood's potteries at Etruria, Staffordshire.[30] But this was the picturesque side. Of the Derbyshire mills he writes: “These cotton mills, seven storeys high and fill'd with inhabitants, remind me of a first-rate man of war and, when they are lighted up on a dark night, look most luminously beautiful".[31] Politically, however, he dreaded revolution or even reform.[32]
In the course of his journeyings Byng provides much information about the inns and alehouses of the time. Often included in his diaries are the bills he has paid at his various stopping-places. Partly because they were so often on his routes, there were four inns he especially liked: the Sun at Biggleswade, the Haycock at Wansford, the Ram's Head at Disley, and the Wheatsheaf at Alconbury (Hill). People travelled with their own bed-sheets,[33] merely renting a bed at an inn in preference to sleeping in "damp house sheets".[34] At Leicester the diarist's bed was "sheeted, contrary to [his] orders".[35] A rushlight would faintly illuminate his bedroom during the hours of darkness.[36]
Byng rose early in the morning and sometimes breakfasted as late as nine.[37] Broadly speaking, dinner (lunch) was at two o’clock. However, it could be called for as late as four.[38] Supper could be at any time between seven[39] and nine o'clock. At both meals there was sometimes a fairly wide range of dishes. The breakfast drink was usually coffee.[40] The food was standard fare, with recipes that were fairly identical in whichever part of the country Byng happened to be. Breakfast costed 10 pence, dinner was 1 shilling 6 pence or 2 shillings, and supper 1 shilling: at Boston, Lincolnshire it is called a "gentleman's supper", at 1/9d.[41] Wine, the cost varying with the quantity consumed, was an additional charge. Also additional were the horses' hay and corn,[42] which generally cost 3/6d to 4/-.
The quality of inn fare varied enormously. At Bedford Byng lifted the lid of a damson tart and decided not to have any of it – plastering it down "for the next comer", and adding caustically that "it was not the first time of the lids being removed".[43] A good "pigeon-pie, with a pint of good port wine" was one of his favourite collations.[44] James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, had for "supper ... a provincial dish, cook'd from his directions".[45]
At the Sun Inn at Biggleswade Byng had not only his own parlour,[46] where he could eat privately, but was also provided with his own lockable chest of drawers (complete with "nightcap, shirts, fishing-tackle"[47]) and with grazing for his horse while he was in London. Though at Broadway, Worcestershire he enjoyed the luxury of a "spacious and clean parlour",[48] he was often in the "public parlours";[49] and this was all the more remarkable because of the great disparity which then existed between the grand bedrooms and dining-rooms of historic houses and the cold, draughty, ill-lit "gallery chamber[s]"[50] where he so frequently had to spend the night. In the era of inns and alehouses, hotels had scarcely come into existence (though there was one at Buxton[51] and in Manchester there was the Bridgewater Arms Hotel.[52] The bedrooms in these inns and alehouses could be very primitive indeed. There might be "dirty blankets" (25 August 1782). At Settle his "windows, door and chimney board kept an incessant clatter".[53] A traveller, or tourist, might even be made to share a servants' bedroom.[54] At Lewes Byng and Isaac Dalby had to share a double bed.[55] On the more positive side, it was sometimes possible to have supper served in one's bedroom.[56]
On his travels Byng met up with, or glimpsed, many of the prominent people of his age. In August 1788 he undertook a tour into Sussex with the mathematician Isaac Dalby. At Biggleswade, in 1792, he met Humphry Repton.[57] At Birmingham, in the same year, he encountered Sarah Siddons.[58] Two years later, at Ampthill, he glimpsed Lord Monboddo travelling post-haste from London to Edinburgh. Byng leaves unforgettable memories of Blenheim Palace (its grounds, gardens and gardeners[59] but not of the Duke of Marlborough himself). His meeting with Colonel Johnson,[60] told with economy, lingers in the imagination.
The overall impression is that of a man keenly aware of social change: that is Byng's head; but in his heart he yearns for the old ways.
In England and Wales Byng set out, year after year, on his own sort of Grand Tour. The Grand Tour, a leisurely exploration of outstanding cultural features of the European Continent, was undertaken by many young men—though not by Byng himself—before and during the 1780s. Byng, intensely patriotic, believed that there was just as much of interest in Britain as in France or Italy, particularly as England and Wales contained so much that was picturesque.
He writes in his Fragment of a diary of a Tour in Hertfordshire, June 1788:-
Now I should be glad to ask of our Travellers, who brag of every country but their own, where they will find a cheaper charge than this [18/3d for 2½ days]; which was on a high road, [at [[South Mimms]],] near the metropolis of Europe!
Talk not, therefore, gentlemen, of foreign parts, till you have seen and learnt something of your own country: – ye, who drive by Canterbury Cathedral, without deigning a look, and return boasting of rialtos, eclipsed by the work of the most ordinary Welsh masons.
“If my journals should remain legible, or be perused at the end of 200 years", he writes elsewhere,[61] "there will, even then, be little curious in them relative to travel, or the people; because our island is now so explored; our roads, in general, are so fine; and our speed has reach'd the summit".
But it is impossible to agree with his assessment that The Torrington Diaries or Rides Round Britain have no enduring historical value. Like Samuel Pepys, Byng conveys a most vivid impression of what it was like for the diarist to live from day to day in the society of his own period.
| Crest: | An heraldic Antelope statant Ermine horned tusked maned and hoofed Or. |
| Helm: | That of a peer |
| Escutcheon: | Quarterly, Sable and Argent in the 1st quarter a Lion rampant of the Second. |
| Supporters: | Dexter, an heraldic Antelope Ermine horned tusked maned and hoofed Or standing on a Ship's Gun Proper; Sinister, a Sea-horse Proper on a like Gun. |
| Motto: | Tuebor (Eng: "I Will Defend") |