Thames Ditton - Cultural References

Cultural References

Thames Ditton is mentioned in a letter from Charles Lamb to William Wordsworth of 19 October 1810:

A very striking instance of your position might be found in the churchyard of Ditton-upon-Thames, if you know such a place. Ditton-upon-Thames has been blessed by the residence of a poet who, for love or money, I do not well know which, has dignified every gravestone for the last few years with brand new verses, all different and all ingenious, with the author's name at the bottom of each. This sweet Swan of Thames has so artfully diversified his strains and his rhymes that the same thought never occurs twice,--more justly, perhaps, as no thought ever occurs at all, there was a physical impossibility that the same thought should recur, It is long since I saw and read these inscriptions; but I remember the impression was of a smug usher at his desk in the intervals of instruction, levelling his pen. Of death, as it consists of dust and worms, and mourners and uncertainty, he had never thought; but the word "death" he had often seen separate and conjunct with other words, till he had learned to speak of all its attributes as glibly as Unitarian Belsham will discuss you the attributes of the word "God" in a pulpit, and will talk of infinity with a tongue that dangles from a skull that never reached in thought and thorough imagination two inches, or farther than from his hand to his mouth, or from the vestry to the sounding-board of the pulpit. But the epitaphs were trim and sprag, and patent, and pleased the survivors of Thames Ditton above the old mumpsimus of Afflictions sore.

In 1834 Theodore Hook composed the following lines while angling in a punt at Thames Ditton:

"Here, in a placid waking dream,

I'm free from worldly troubles,

Calm as the rippling silver stream

That in the sunshine baubles;

And when sweet Eden's blissful bowers

Some abler bard has writ on,

Despairing to transcend his powers,

I'll ditto say for DITTON."

The poet Eric Wilson Barker (1905–1973) spent his childhood in Thames Ditton, attending the old church school in Church Walk before his family emigrated to California for health reasons. Barker became a celebrated poet and was offered the laureateship of California, which he declined. He revisited his Thames Ditton birthplace in 1959 and wrote to a friend: 'I visited an ancient pub, The Old Harrow near Weston Green. I always remember the lines on the signboard of that inn when I was a kid.... There it was too and the old weatherworn sign with the letters a bit dim but still legible!' Barker wrote a poem "IN THAMES DITTON" in 'Looking for Water', published by Crighton House Inc. New York, 1964: "In Thames Ditton I remembered a clock....."

Ernest William Hornung wrote about Thames Ditton in The Amateur Cracksman (1899):

• • 'I had let my flat in town, and taken inexpensive quarters at Thames Ditton, on the plea of a disinterested passion for the river.'
  • 'Imagine my excitement and delight! I managed to pay what I owed at Thames Ditton, to squeeze a small editor for a very small check, and my tailors for one more flannel suit. I remember that I broke my last sovereign to get a box of Sullivan's cigarettes for Raffles to smoke on the voyage.'

Thomas Babington Macaulay spent a year in rented accommodation in Thames Ditton while writing some of his famous History of England. His nephew and biographer Otto Trevelyan wrote in 1876: "His brother-in-law had taken a house in the village of Esher; and Macaulay accordingly settled himself, with infinite content, exactly in the middle of the only ugly square mile of country which can be found in that delightful neighbourhood. 'I am pretty well pleased,' he says, 'with my ... pleasant, small dwelling, surrounded by geraniums and roses... The only complaint I have to make is that the view from my front windows is blocked by a railway embankment.' Macaulay's cottage, which stood in Ditton Marsh, by the side of the high-road from Kingston to Esher, was called Greenwood Lodge."

The Monty Python sketch, 'Blackmail', featured a scene set in Thames Ditton, although it was actually filmed in a west London residential road.

Thames Ditton is also mentioned briefly in the safari park scene of episode two of Reginald Perrin, series one.

The BBC TV series Little Britain featured sketches shot in and around Thames Ditton's Dittons Library. A fictitious postbox can be seen outside the library in one shot.

The exterior scenes for the 1980s sitcom After Henry (TV series) were shot on the village High Street.