¥
ah
ata
hai
ETA
ry
oe! an
ff DCA AN
tae Em,
Wily!
Pert mt 3 f
i Wye
Ue 17 vg Hy Pla Moy pats)
: Re ; uae Nera tate , ; ye 7
ae sdk meh ‘é e} . L i in ak ;
‘ F ’
‘
a 5
> ‘
2
Tad :
u r
u .
1
= 1“
i
\
\
'
‘
ef
a
/ F, ’
i
ss : F
rt
2
)
kel
«
'
.
1
i
,
ral
‘4 3 tee TNA : Wey
-
iy
i “4
nat { +]
blac Re
sity t f h ut
RY ens
Ta Yh
NDON PERAMBULATOR
.
THE
-ONDON
PERAMBULATOR
BY
JAMES BONE
Meee TLL USTRATIONS by
MUIRHEAD BONE
NEW YORK:
foe PRED A. KN OPE
de
”
COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
oh ,
‘
:
#
‘
q
,
j
' ats
4
.
‘
t
.
‘ ‘
ia ad ; 2
mt .
. oe
;
tev
i v
0 . oh
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED
’
viands is oi cleo an » ardent mi de
Be ene Perea |i
CONTENTS
t
-Lonpon CALENDAR
TREET OF THE Giant GoosEBERRY
O’ Euston
SEES AND WATERMEN
4
> VIEW AND THE Arr View
iV
¥
‘
ie
‘
i
*
% bs e
=i ite ;
GD ere
Pa tee ‘
< :
7
als ;, »
Dae? I im
Pe i
i
III
131
149
157
171
179
at
Sr oe
if oes
=" -
Py
A.
‘ Bkiut)
ILLUSTRATIONS
THe CIty FRoM THE STRAND Frontispiece
WATERLOO BRIDGE | 24
Tue Enp or THE Circus 30
Lonpon N. W. 40
Tue Horst Guarps 48
Kine’s Bencu Watk, TEMPLE 60
THE CENoTAPH, I919 78
BLOOMSBURY 92
PiccapILLy, NigHT — THE SAVILE CLUB 104
BERRY’S SHOP 114
St. PAuu’s ovER AMEN CORNER : 142
Nortu O’ Euston 150
Tue SHot Tower 162
PorTLAND PLACE 172
DissoLuTION oF EcyrT1an Hau 182
Dawn, NewcateE Prison 188
PREFACE
NE November afternoon a child was looking out of
the window in my Temple attic. Suddenly she asked,
‘Whose keys are those on your tree?’ Looking out at
the bare elm tree, blotted by starlings sounding their ringing
note, I discerned a bunch of three old keys hanging on a bough.
How long they had been there one could not say. ‘They hung on
a little top bough. I said, of course:
“Those are the Keys of London.’
‘Who put them there? How do you get them? Can you go in
anywhere with them? Are they the birds’ keys?’ asked the child.
A long time afterwards I was awakened one morning by shouts
and swishing noises and cracks. The elm tree in King’s Bench
Walk that had changed very little since the days when the old
gateporter, looking on at its fall, had been Dickens’s office boy,
was now a stump. Its crown was on the ground. I thought
of the little girl and with some curiosity went down to get the
Keys of London. But they had vanished. Some alarmed star-
ling must have gone off with them to the trees of the Savoy
Chapel, or to Lincolns Inn Fields, where the trees look like
forest trees. The Keys of London were gone. |
One likes to suppose that there could be such keys, keys to
unlock the heart of London. How invaluable to a topographer
of her moods and secrets! But failing such keys, one must
perambulate early and late in all weathers, to know a little about
London—no one can know much more than a little about
London. One must know St. Paul’s in all lights and must never
walk east on the south side of Fleet Street like the beasts that
perish; one must know and love the empty muted handsomeness
of the Bayswater and Regents Park terraces in the summer
dawn
dawn; one must have studied the backs of London which differ
from all other backs of great cities, especially the lordly and
explanatory backs of Stratford Place over the huddle of little
depreciating buildings; and the shadowy backs of the Waterloo
Bridge Road houses as they rise from the partly-charted river-
side region, dark and sheer but for the line of protuberant
balcony-hutches at the end of which on a sooty rope a monkey
sometimes swings ; one must know the sallow squares and courts
of Mayfair and Belgravia with little dubious shops in their
mewses that sell truffles and forced fruit for expensive houses
that have ‘run short;’ one must have seen from the squalid
balcony of a Limehouse tavern the brown-sailed Thames barges
beneath putting about as they beat up the river; one must know
something of the waukrife London that the homeless perpetu-
ally cross and recross, the blanched dreary streets when you
have seen
. the old things come creeping through
Another night that London knew.
And you must have rejoiced in Piccadilly and the Strand when
the May sun was shining and everybody’s eyes were bright.
But even if one knows all that and much more, one knows only
a little of London. These pages are some of the experiences and
fancies gathered in twenty years of London life. The artist and
writer planned this book many years ago, and since then Nash’s
Regent Street is gone; Gilbert’s Eros and his fountain have been
banished from Piccadilly Circus; our noble Waterloo Bridge is
fighting for existence against an astigmatic London County
Council; and, while Wren’s City churches are in danger from
their own guardians his mighty St. Paul’s Cathedral is sinking.
So we must out with our testimony of the London that the sun
shone on in the first quarter of the twentieth century —even
though it read like an obituary.
James Bone
Inner Temple, London.
FACE OF LOND
ON
I
Swe go] ONDON !’ it has the sound of distant thunder.
fysseei@) Only one other great capital has its might rever-
nS berating in its name. Rome— Roma, however
EES you say it, sounds like the shout of legions or long
Saar] waves breaking on the shore. London with its
equipoise of syllables seems to hold its power, to impend, almost
to threaten. ‘To some it sounds like a warning, to some like ap-
plause, but always distant, distant! How the name rolls over
the country calling up the recruits! And how did it sound in
alien ears, to the generations of exiles who have sought shelter
here through the ages: the Dutch refugees who were given the
church of Austin Friars; the Huguenots driven out by the
Catholics, the Catholic émigrés fleeing from the revolutionaries,
the Communists fleeing from the Republicans; all to settle and
mingle in Soho: the Italian liberators; the Russian revolution-
aries fleeing from the Czarists, the Czarists in turn fleeing from
the Bolsheviki; then the coming of the refugee Belgians in their
thousands. To them all the growl of London must have softened
to a purr.
If the name suggests thunder and its association of darkness
and vastness and the beauty of lightning, something of that may
be found in the inchoate, interminable, soot-darkened mass of
London itself, assembled without plan or control, with its sud-
den apparitions of grace and beauty springing so often out of its
obstruction and confusion. Unlike other royal capitals, the re-
planning
3
4 Ihe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
planning and ornamentation of the capital, so popular and
pardonable an extravagance of continental monarchs, have not
been practised here, and London owes little beyond its parks,
and a few buildings, to the Court. The genius of the people for
half-measures and compromise and distrust of logic and sym-
metry has resulted in nearly all the finest things being half
reluctantly displayed and rarely connected in an architectural
effect. The winding of the river Thames creates curious topo-
graphical illusions by which St. Paul’s and the Abbey seem
constantly to be appearing and reappearing in the wrong places.
Then, there are the weathering idiosyncrasies of Portland stone,
of which the chief London buildings are made, which creates a
world of shadows and high lights all of its own. These are the
ever-salient factors that profoundly affect the form and com-
plexion of London, adding mystery to all her qualities.
London differs organically from other ancient capitals. It has
not the grand scale planning and uniform dignity of facade of
the main part of Paris, nor the grandeur of stupendous building
and flashing fountain that still is Rome, nor the wooded hand-
someness and drilled impressiveness of Berlin, nor the gaiety of
baroque and garden that was the old Vienna; nor has it anything
like the historic highway that runs between the crowded lands
of Edinburgh from its ancient castle to the shadowy palace of
Holyrood, nor the surprise of Stockholm with its water front
from which rises its new Town Hall, the most remarkable
communal effort in architecture in our time. The character of
London is its bulk and multitude, and the quality of London is
its accidentalness. It never seems to have set out to be or to
look like a capital.
Its relations with royalty have never been intimate. William
the Conqueror built the Tower of London on its eastern edge
to
The FACE OF LONDON 5
to overawe its citizens, and, unlike all other capital cities, it has
never been the regular seat of the sovereign, who has always
held his Court in Westminster. In no other capital city in the
world has the king to ask permission of the civic ruler before
he enters it, nor any where the king’s soldiers may not march
through its streets with fixed bayonets and drawn swords save
with the City fathers’ permission. The little ceremony at Temple
Bar on every official royal visit, when the Lord Mayor and his
Swordbearer with the Pearl Sword and Sheriffs wait at Child’s
Bank, has an historical significance that marks out London from
all other capitals. With the powerful City of London, with its
privileges and charters always beside them and usually con-
fronting them over questions of rights and funds and taxes, the
sovereigns of England have never felt towards London as
sovereigns of other states have felt towards their capitals.
The Popes in Rome, Francis the First, Louis XIV, Napoleon
and Louis Napoleon in Paris, Frederick the Great and the
Hohenzollerns in Berlin, the Bavarian kings in Munich, the
Bourbons in Madrid, the Czars in Moscow and St. Petersburg,
all reformed their capitals after theirown desire. Itis impossible
to imagine these cities without them. Once there was a grand
possibility for London and a great man ready, but even Charles
II failed in one of the few things he cared about, and Wren’s
plan for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire remained
on paper. The Hanoverian Georges had their hearts elsewhere
until George the Regent and latterly the Fourth of the name
helped London to something really spacious and fine, and the
gracious urbane composition of Regent Street set London
moving to a statelier measure. (And we of this generation have
exchanged it for a mess of architectural pottage!). Queen
Victoria, who reigned when England had reached to heights of
unparalleled
6 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
unparalleled prosperity, had no particular love for London, nor
taste for showiness in capitals, and the Prince Consort, who cared
for Italian primitives before they were the fashion, and had
enlightened ideas of the responsibilities of sovereigns in the ad-
vancement of the arts and the industries, died before he had the
power to do more than hatch the Crystal Palace. The Tudors
and the Stuarts sometimes had the power and the money and the
taste to do what was fashionable in their day to give their
capital a new fame for beauty. But what they did in that cause
was mainly done at Windsor, Richmond and Hampton Court
and Greenwich, and so with the exceptions of the three parks,
our peerless Westminster Hall with its aged hammerbeams,
the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, Holbein’s Gateway to St.
James’s Palace, and Chelsea Hospital, London owes little to
the taste and generosity of kings.
II
She owes something to the taste and business activity of her
noblemen of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth
centuries, who laid out the residential squares which give inner
London so much of its comeliness. Inigo Jones designed the
squares of Convent Garden and of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, both of
which still contain examples of his art. In the same century St.
James’s Square was laid out ; Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square
and the Bloomsbury squares followed in the next century.
Some squares have or had a grand town mansion occupying one
side, as Landsdowne House does in Berkeley Square or Hertford
House in Manchester Square; sometimes a side was left open so
that the inhabitants could enjoy a view of distant heights, as the
Guilford Street end of Queen’s Square was unbuilt to allow the
people of the Square to look out to lovely browed Hampstead
(but
The FACE OF LONDON ;
(but now they have only the prospect of boarding-houses).
Belgrave Square and Portman Square are splayed at a corner to
give room for a nobleman’s house and garden. All have gardens
occupying the centre, with statues usually of a harmless sort
symbolizing noblemen who drew the first ground-rents. One
of the puzzles of London is the delay in throwing down their
railings and letting the public enjoy them. The merit of these
squares was so clear and so much a matter of pride to the
Londoners, starved as they were of the beauties of royal and
official architecture and sculptural adornment, that the topo-
graphical artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
fastened upon them, after St. Paul’s and the Abbey, as the
admired London feature. Malton’s great aquatint series shows
with the right gusto their semi-rural grandeur. It was charac-
teristic of the English, whose mansions, as has been said, are
country houses in town as compared with the French country
houses, which are town mansions in the country, that they should
seek to mix their urbanity with country sweetness. How differ-
ent a summer morning walk from the Temple to Euston would
be but for the misty greenery of the shrubs and trees and lawns
one sees passing through Lincoln’s Inn Fields and on past the
rounded corners of Russell Square with its scent of lilac and the
birds tuning up, and under the plane trees of Tavistock Place
to the wider leafiness of Euston Square. There are moments
when the squares give London the look of a country town. The
part about the old Foundling Hospital, with Mecklenburgh
Square to the east and Brunswick Square to the west, has a
delectable Whiggish charm quite its own.
Inigo Jones took the idea from the Italian piazzas when he
designed the first London square (and in a John Bullish way
we have attached the word piazza, not to the parallelogram of
Covent
8 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Covent Garden, but to the arcaded side that still remains), but
he produced something quite different in the residential square
with a common garden in the centre. The nobles moved to
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, St. James’s Square, Berkeley Square, and
Soho Square from their riverside mansions secluded in private
grounds, and began to live in a house that was only one of a
row of similar houses, each owned by an equal and immediately
in contact with public opinion. It must have opened a new life
to the early settlers—and especially to their children —in the
Stuart squares; and from then on the squares must have had a
social significance in the disposition of upper and middle class
London life. The square also maintained a standard of archi-
tecture and amenities that gave way too often to muddle and
pretentiousness when the aristocratic landowners ceased to lay
out and build, or parted with their ground. They had given the
work to their own architects, who were men of repute, maintain-
ing a level of taste throughout the design even in its humblest
details, whereas the newer developers of suburbs were usually
content to do without an architect at all. So Bloomsbury remains
to-day with an unpretentious urbane charm of good propor-
tions, and shy hints of elegance in fanlights and balconies.
Some evil genius in the Bedford Estate Office did his best to
debase Russell Square by inserting odious terra-cotta mouldings
round the windows and doors, and other apostates cleared away
many delicate Georgian fanlights and left the space naked in
woetully many houses. But that phase is past. People of means
and taste are coming to prefer the houses of these squares to
the ‘maisonettes’ and flats of the West End, having learnt by
now how many of our pre-war ‘necessities’ were only the chil-
dren of convention.
So the square did something to provide the symmetry that was
SO
The FACE OF LONDON 9
so ignored in London, and extended the greenery from the
West-end parks to Finsbury Circus, while the little churchyard
remnants keep the heart of the City green. The next great
feature in the picturesqueness of London did more for the sym-
metry than the squares.
Stucco! The material that seemed to express all that was sham
and genteel and showy of the nineteenth century was to inspire
our architects to give London its chief effects of metropolitan
dignity, its aspect of a governing mind expressed in considered
and generous design. Nash’s Regent Street that is gone was its
most sweet and finished expression, but the crescents and quad-
rants opening on Regent’s Park and the serried terraces of Bays-
water overlooking Hyde Park, and the ‘groves’ to the north,
have, if not elegance of detail, an urbanity of mien and appro-
priateness of shape that, however much you may have been
taught to dislike them, affect you at times like the beauty of
flowers. They seem curiously congenial to the capricious Lon-
don weather, their long painted surfaces responding to every
whim, melting into the mist and glowing out again like the
chalk cliffs of Weymouth. Some foreign critics speak of Stuc-
covia as the outside sign of English hypocrisy and sham, but
gesthetically it can be stoutly defended and surely there is some-
thing to be said for the ethics of a building material that, so to
speak, keeps us up to the mark like an active and unfailing
conscience. Nothing can look so shabby as unpainted and peel-
ing stucco, unrivalled for communicating a sense of discom-
fiture and evil.
III
After the squares and the stuccoed glories of the Regency
came the embankments — Victoria, Albert, and Chelsea —the
chief
10 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
chief contribution of the Mid-Victorians to the facade of
London. The chief of these, Victoria Embankment, was de-
signed in the sixties by Bazalgette, on the shore of the river
from Blackfriars to the Houses of Parliament, a distance
of over a mile, making a noble promenade from which
the citizens could enjoy the beauties and humours of their
river. This work was carried out with dignity and a certain
imagination in its colossal ornamental arches and projecting
piers, but although bordered at parts by public gardens
and adorned by statues, it always looks as though it really
was the avenue to Scotland Yard which Norman Shaw made
its main western feature. The Embankment marches hand-
somely, heavily, importantly, significantly ornamented like a
London policeman. How often on a return from the Continent
does one sigh for something different, something related to the
‘intimate life of the Londoner! Memories arise of the Paris
quays with the cafés and shops and resident population, the
loungers browsing among the bookstalls, children playing on
the wide pavement, and little trades and domestic affairs going
on at house-doors and at the kerb. Only at Chelsea round the
old square-towered church has the Embankment established —
any connection with the intimate foreground life of a London
district. Only there can you see people sitting at their doors and
talking in the summer evening. For the rest, the people on the
Embankment are passengers, in motor-cars, in tramway cars, or
on foot, and they all hurry along except those who come at
night and stare fixedly into the dark glinting water or sleep on
the benches so sinsterly ornamented with the sphinx heads on
the arms and the crouching camels on the ends. The spectacle
of these dispossessed men on the benches in front of Somerset
House
WeRNCh OF LONDON © 11
House that is crammed with the wills of possessors has a definite
irony.
But the Ironic Spirit must have many moments on the Em-
bankment. I realized a very strange one when after a night on
a bench the dawn came and a chill breeze awakened the sleepers,
and we looked at one another to discover whose were the voices
that had spoken half through the night. The man next to me
regarded me closely and took off my hat, saying: ‘Here, mate,
that hat won’t do for your job. I’ll smarten it a bit. A clerk’s
got to look all right applying for a job.’ (I had told him some
story in the night.) And this good-natured, feeble cabinet-
maker (he had confided that he was a cabinet-maker who had
lost his union membership and pawned his tools) worked away
at my hat till it looked almost, decent. I could not tell him the
trouble I had taken, pouring cocoa on it and rubbing it in
ashes, to reduce it to that state. I could only wonder and feel
ashamed in my masquerading at this grotesque and fine hap-
pening in the Embankment dawn. Here was a man hungry,
dirty, and worn, with a day’s dull misery before him, giving his
first thoughts to a stranger and trying to help him!
Strange it was that not until the Thames had long ceased to be
the main highway of London were the Londoners able properly
to seeit. Save for the barges coming up and down with the tide,
and a few tugs and police boats, the Thames is an empty river
at the part which was once gay with craft of all kind, with royal
barges and livery company barges, and family parties with mu-
sicians on wherries, and flyboats rowed by jolly young water-
men. It is all pictured in Canaletto’s amazing drawing of the
Thames in the transition moment when old London Bridge
with its street of houses existed along with Wren’s bright new
churches, and in Zoffany’s family portrait boating groups going
off
12 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
off for a river picnic, each member with a musical instrument.
How much music there must have been on the river in those
days! And in Pepys’s time there would be more. He tells in
his Diary a pretty story how, being rowed down to Deptford
one early morning, he began to sing a song from his new song-
book, and a stranger following in another wherry took up the
song, singing seconds, and in this pleasant manner they made
their voyage to Deptford.
In our own day an effort was made to revive the business of
the river by the London County Council by a jolly fleet of little
steamers, but a stupid Fleet Street ‘stunt,’ inspired by caprice
and municipal politics, deprived the London people of that
chance of using their river in the middle of London. Although
the Victoria Embankment with its Chelsea extension and the
Albert Embankment over the river bound the town together
by great processional roads in the airiest places and handsomely
proclaimed the belief that London was a sight to enjoy by pro-
viding a place to enjoy it, there are moments when one would
wish it away for the spectacle of Somerset House rising from
the water with boats passing through its great archway. But
something had to go to get so grand and useful a work as these
embankments with their trees and gardens and great views.
Something always has to go, but the result is not always worth
it. The half-domestic, leafy Gainsborough charm of the old
Mall with its middle walk of lime trees was given up for Sir
Aston Webb’s new Mall, with its wide boulevard displaying
Carlton House Terrace and culminating in Brock’s elaborately
flabby Victoria Memorial. The London County Council made
in Kingsway one big effort to do for this generation something
comparable with what was done in Regent Street a hundred
years earlier. The scheme was boldly discussed and boldly
minuted
The FACE OF LONDON 13
minuted, until the idea of a controlling architect who would lay
down the general design for the street elevation was given up,
and we got the present varied, confused effect of the good and
the indifferent rubbing cornices not quite together. The rally
at the southern end with Treherne and Norman’s two corner
buildings surmounted by low octagonal towers and Mr. Harvey
Corbett’s Bush House saved something from the wreck. It is
only in their housing policy that the London County Council
have been able to carry through complete architectual schemes,
and at Roehampton and Bellingham they have given London
something which can be compared, not to its disadvantage, with
the notable works of this kind in the early nineteenth century.
The Garden Suburb, too, despite some eccentricities and self-
consciousness, is the best thing of its kind in Europe. In this
list, which seems small, I have not touched on the famous and
historic works of architecture which give London its glory, but
only on those efforts, few in number, which have been made
from time to time in its ordinary building to confer symmetry
and the dignity of considered architectural effect expected in a
capital city. But the City churches cannot quite be left out even
under this view, for by the extraordinary chance of the time they
have nearly all the impress of one great mind and are related in
groups to a principal church and to the great Cathedral. The
Inns of Court, the lawyers’ great boon to London, I leave to a
separate chapter.
IV
London guide-books, until Queen Victoria’s Jubilee set them
boasting, are mainly apologetic. There was a tremendous lot to
be said for London, but first one had to explain why it didn’t
look better. That amiably written and scholarly pocket-guide,
The
14. The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
The Picture of London (1819), for instance, says honestly
enough: ‘Nations that prefer the pomp to the enjoyments of
social comforts and the convenient performance of social duties
must include the buildings of London among its greatest de-
fects.’ And again: “There is a winding irregularity and want of
uniform appearance in many of the streets of London by which
it is greatly disfigured and all grandeur of aspect lost . . . with
a few exceptions strangers may traverse the whole metropolis
without the least knowledge that such large buildings have any
existence.’ Ruskin has said everything that its outside critics
had left unsaid, and the average Londoner will add something
to that. You may hear a good word said for Battersea Park or
for the view from Denmark Hill, or for Wimbledon or Stoke
Newington or Ladbroke Grove, or indeed of most districts,
but never for London. Still, London pride exists and was well
expressed by the story of the Cockney who in the war joined up
in Canada. The recruiting officer, pointing to his form, asked,
‘London— London, Ont.?’ ‘London Ont.!’ cried the recruit,
deeply resentful, ‘London all the bloody world.’ Only in
moments of real excitement like these would a Londoner give
way to boasting of his city. This is true right along the social
scale. It is a well-identified English trait, intensified in Lon-
don, having no relation to traditions of public-school reticence
or natural inarticulateness. I would associate with a character-
istic of London itself as though the Cockney dislike of super-
latives and the unwrapping of his loves had been imposed by
him on the physiognomy of his city. ‘Rayther a shy place, sir,’
replied Morgan, Major Pendennis’s valet, when asked what the
Temple was like. ‘Rayther a shy place’ is London itself.
The secrecy of the City where a number of famous churches
can only be tracked down by the aid of guides and friendlies,
where
The FACE OF LONDON 1s
where many City Company halls of historic and architectural
importance cannot be found at all, where some of the most
charming things in modern architecture (such as Belcher and
Bate’s Chartered Accountants’ Hall) cannot be seen when traced
because of the dark, cramped court that contains them; that
secrecy can no doubt be put down to the persistence of the
medieval plan of the City, almost everywhere, up to our day.
But it cannot be urged in the West End, where the examples are
even more remarkable.
Let us take, for example, such a famous instance as Victoria
Street. The problem was evidently to cut a new processional
thoroughfare from Buckingham Palace Road to the Abbey, to
connect the new quarter of Pimlico with Westminster Bridge
and to link with Parliament Street. Victoria Street was planned
and was very slowly built. Victoria Station was built and hidden
behind it, and it missed the Abbey altogether! If you study the
street on a big map, you will see how adroitly its line was bent
in the middle, so that instead of the obvious centring on the
Abbey and curving round to the line of the bridge, our architects
avoided anything so banal. It was found impossible, I suppose,
to divert the street so that we should not see the Abbey at all;
but the view was cleverly withheld till the last moment and the
proper Round-the-Corner effect obtained. In the case of
Bentley’s fine Roman Catholic Cathedral the effect was attained
at once by placing it at the end of one of the few little streets
that actually twist off Victoria Street. Northumberland Avenue
was built at great expense so that it might end with a side view
of an ugly railway bridge and a cab-shelter, and no stranger
would dream that it might have ended in a prospect of the
great river. Nash’s Picadilly Circus, being designed as a pivot
feature of a great architectural scheme, had to be altered so that
its
16 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
its symmetry would be destroyed and an effect of confusion
artfully obtained. Even St. Paul itself cannot be adequately
seen, for it has no place, and Ludgate Hill, although rebuilt
several times, does not centre on the West Front. The British
Museum has a courtyard but no approach. (Nevertheless, it
can be seen from the boarding-houses opposite.) The Records
Office is in a narrow side street. London’s Bourse can only be
discovered with guides. Yes, even the executive centre of the
Government of the British Empire, the most famous house in
the whole political world, is in a little cul-de-sac, and so mean
a structure that it deserves to be there. How often the Spirit
of History as she winged to No. 10, Downing Street, must have
thought what an odd place to call at on such high business —
how her accompanying Ironic Spirits must have relished it all
as they hovered down to the old spot again! |
‘Ye go along a street an’ ye come to a lane, and ye go along
the lane an’ ye come to a passage, and ye go alone the passage
an’ ye come to a plank, and ye go over the plank an’ ye come
to a public-house. An’ that’s London,’ was how an Irish friend
put all his London impressions in perspective. Whenever you”
set out to walk in a straight line, you soon find the street be-
comes a lane, and so on. If you try to go straight from West-
minster to the Tower, you will find yourself at the Elephant and
Castle Tavern. (The London bus’s journeys still mostly end
in public-houses, as you can see from the tickets.) The Thames —
itself, with the long ‘S’ it describes between the Tower and
Chelsea, is in the conspiracy of London mystifications, and by its
devices St. Paul’s seems as movable as Easter, appearing where
you never expect it and not appearing where you do expect it.
Glancing from Whitehall down Horse Guards Avenue, you
discern it somewhere in ‘Southwark; in South London it seems
to
The FACE OF LONDON 17
to move about the sky like the moon. You gaze in vain from
Westminster Bridge for St. Paul’s until you sight it somewhere
about Waterloo Station.
Then, this reticence of London in populace and architecture,
is related to a primal elusive factor which affects both: its
weather. The winds do not blow differently in London, nor
can the sunshine and moonlight be different; but nevertheless,
London has an atmosphere of its own. Westminster is built
partly on a swamp, and the Victoria Tower of the House of
Lords, for instance, should have been many feet higher but the
foundations on the old river-bed would not stand it. Evening
mists rise through the stones and tar, and in the autumn the
golden haze, veil upon veil, comes between London and its
business. The coal-fires and the river-mist still produce the
famous London fog in all its varieties, from the white volatile
clouds to ‘London particular.’ In a great many days of the year
it is impossible to see the City Church spires from Waterloo
Bridge. In the spring the colour of London is like the flower
and grey-green leaf of lavender, and often a blue grape-bloom
appears on the silhouetted stone buildings. There are days with
a sparkle amid faint purple haze like the depths of an amethyst.
London has more than its share of fitful days when the Portland
stone towers and spires of the City seen from Waterloo Bridge
whiten and vanish, brighten and vanish, like lights turned off
and on by the Lord Mayor himself. Sometimes the sun-gleam
sweeps over the City with a majestic movement, transfiguring
the noble facade of Somerset House, bringing sacred fire to the
cross of St. Paul’s. And in an instant all is grey again.
There is no denying London’s beauty, but it is a beauty that
seems to come in spite of herself and of the efforts of so many of
her sons. Often it makes you think of natural scenery rather
than
18 Th LONDON PERAMBULATOR
than the handiwork of men: its profuse rank undergrowth of
low, mean houses spreading in all directions; its tall groves of
flats and office palaces; its heights of St. Paul’s and the Abbey
and Westminster Cathedral, all seem to be grown where they
are by natural processes or upheavals. 3
And how often do the London nights with their moist softness
and delicate shadows seem to have beauties bred only there.
The London lover likes to remember that it was in London
that Whistler discovered the nocturne. In the wide reaches of
the river at night he found the silence and space in the midst of
the complicated resounding town that his exasperated nature
sought, and into these nocturnes he has imparted a strange ten-
sion of beauty as though at any moment something might snap,
and the chartered Thames and its warehouses and lights along
the banks might suddenly not be there, only a wide, nameless
creek, with forests at its swampy sides, swooning under the night.
P.
P
ay, Li cem eee
Cake Se Gye Gp Sa Gaia arte Ge A290 Ob
SEES eE LEEPER EEEEEE EES
PORTLAND STONE
I
| came from that beautiful and enduring stone that
>I is so little considered yet is almost London itself
in he memories of her visitors and in the unconscious thoughts
of Londoners. How strange it is that in the articles and books
on Wren hardly a word appears about Portland stone! You will
look through scores of indexes without finding the name. There
is no book on it even in the R.I.B.A. Library. No poet has
sung of Portland stone, although great ones have sung of sofas
and mice and marine engines. Yet it is a great and magical
stone, more beautiful, I think, even than the Roman travertine,
with its marmoreal quality that responds so exquisitely to wear.
Portland stone seemed ordained to form the face of London, its
surface so finely mirroring the fitful lights that break through
her river-mists, blanching in her towers and spires to a finer
whiteness as the darker grow the coats of grime at the bases and
sides. How those towers and spires come and go through the
mists as you watch from Waterloo Bridge over the grey-blue
Thames on a spring morning! Who can ever forget his first vi-
sion of it all as he beheld, round the bend of the river, the ap-
parition of the mighty fleet of Wren, with their top-gallants and
mainsails of stone?
The nautical simile leaps to the mind at the sight of Wren’s
white
21
22 Th LONDON PERAMBULATOR
white spires and towers, and it is appropriate, too, to the material
in which Wren worked. Portland stone is a marine deposit of
the Jurassic period before Britain first at Heaven’s command
arose from out the azure main. Its beds are full of fossils of
marine creatures, cockles, sea-urchins, starfish, and oysters. You
can see shell imprints on the freshly cut whitbed stone on the
top of the new Bush Building, and you can see ‘horses’ heads’
—as certain shell fossils are called by masons — on the weather-
beaten south parapet of St. Paul’s. ‘You can see and feel the
shells projecting from the plinth of King Charles’s statue at
Charing Cross. It is a strange thought that the majesty of the
capital of this sea-joined empire should come itself from be-
neath the sea, and that all the stone glories of London should
be stamped so secretly with the seals of the creatures of the sea.
How could our poets, how could Mr. Kipling, have missed such
a theme? i
The relations between Portland stone and the characteristic:
London light have been mentioned. The smoke and the way-
ward direction of the wind buffeted in the confined irregular
streets of London are other factors in the complexion of the
town. The weathering of stone is affected by hundreds of
chances—the arrangements and accidents of the drips, the qual- —
ity of the jointing and bedding when tested by the rains, the flat-
ness of the surface, and the eccentricities of small mouldings, as
well as the prevailing rain-bearing wind that whitens projections
and cleans every surface on which it has free play. “Portland
stone,’ an architect once said to me, ‘is the only stone that washes
itself.’ His theory was, that once your building is up, the stone
begins to gather a crust of dirt which greys down its first delicate
lemon tinge; after it has accumulated a certain quantity the
crust comes off by its own weight, and the air then plays on the
clean
PORTLAND STONE 23
clean stone, which has thus already had a certain weathering,
and the surface gradually whitens to the ashen colour that is the
beauty of London. But this is a matter for expert agreement.
The chemists and mineralogists are still in controversy over the
real process and causes of the weathering. Unlike most stones,
it decays by powdering off in a uniform way, so that its surface
continues flat. You can see in the Strand just now the process
going on in four buildings of different periods. The new Bush
Building has the lemon tinge— still with the nature in it, as
masons say — Australia House, beside it, has greyed down, and
the Law Courts, which is about fifty years old, has a tinge of
green in its white, while Wren’s St. Clement Danes has an
ashier white and rich delicate blacks. The bases of nearly all
London buildings where the wind has not free play soon turn
black, and spires and towers soon become white, but strange
pranks are played on the body of the building. Every one must
- notice how the general tendency in London buildings is to
whiten towards the south-west, growing darker on the far sides,
with the chief darkness at the east and north-east. St. Paul’s
colonnade and cornice, and especially the upper drum, are the
most conspicuous examples of this. But it can be seen in most of
our great buildings: in the portico of the National Gallery, or
in Somerset House with its silvery river front and its dark back
to the Strand, and particularly in the public buildings in White-
hall and in the British Museum.
An intimate little illustration of the process of stone weather-
ing can be studied at the pump that stands against the corner of
Bonomzi’s classical building in Serjeants’ Inn off Fleet Street.
_ Here you can see plainly how the splattering of the rain on the
metal top of the pump has whitened the stone wall in a radius
round it, and the drip from the projecting stone course has cut
white
24 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
white marks in the stone above it. Another example is the balls
on the piers of the garden entrance at the end of the western lane
at Chelsea Hospital, where the rain, having free play, has washed
the round surface clean. The gateway is a piece of Portland
stone, delightful to examine. |
Pretty it is, as Mr. Pepys would say, to study the doings of
the rain-bearing south-west wind all over the town, how it puts
its own high lights on London, touching the Portland stone with
silver and spotting the plane tree-trunks with gold. In spring,
especially when the light is fitful and the plane trees are shed-
ding their bark, a sudden brightness will discover at times a
secret London rhythm in these spotted buildings and trees, and
even the flocks of pigeons suddenly wheeling round, like the
spirit of Portland stone detaching itself from the buildings, play
their part in the symphony. It is a vision one often has in the
spring from the Temple windows. |
But it is in autumn when Portland stone discloses its rarest
- beauties, when London is again the capital in a river swamp and
the mist oozes up out of the marshes of Westminster — the
swamp-mist that destroys all frescoes in St. Stephen’s unless they
are under glass, and tarnishes the Templar’s silver spoons three
times a day—and the river and city fade away. Then the
watcher at that unglazed window on Hungerford Bridge sees
gently emerging the lovely facade of Somerset House with its
triple screen, as its smooth, fine stone catches the coming light
like a mirror, while Cleopatra’s Needle and the granite Water-
loo Bridge are still invisible; and as the light threads through the
mist you are aware of gracious phantoms in the distance: St.
Bride’s and the City Steeples and towers, and high over them
the peristyle and lantern of St. Paul’s. The relationship of the
granite bridge and the limestone Somerset House is always
changing
ee
ed
‘ %
a ey
auf Anh oly, St ns,
‘fis gt 2 o=
a Te a he. ahiv %
lt By a
ath
WATERLOO BRIDGE
PORTLAND STONE 25
changing. There are certain foggy days when the stone disap-
pears, but the dark granite still looms out.
The facade of St. Martin’s, Ludgate Hill, with its black-
pointed shapes at the base, is one of the many strange transfor-
mations that Wren never foresaw. So many and so incalculable
are the effects created by the weathering of the stone that the
fanciful might discern a gothic genius loci of London fighting
against the spirit of the classic that modernity has imposed upon
it. A city of mist and fogs, capital of a nation that gets along
comfortably with a labyrinthian law based on precedent, and a
monarchy that may not rule—what has it to do with the lucidity
of orders and the hard clarity of sunny lands?
My favourite pieces of Portland stone are the plinth of the
Charles I statue at Charing Cross, which tradition says was
designed by Wren, the lovely vases and coping on the wall of
the doomed Devonshire House, the flat buttress at the foot
of the clock tower of the Law Courts, and Pennethorne’s
cherubs and dolphins on Somerset House west front. But these
are personal preferences. Many Londoners have their favourite
stones; and one is often struck by the sensitiveness among
Londoners about this material. Discussing stone with a hard-
working, shy man of business, I spoke about the blackness of
Portland stone. ‘Oh, don’t call it black,’ he said quickly, “don’t
call it that, or you and I shall quarrel. It’s not black. It’s the
most delicate dark grey and purple, and all sorts of colours.
Dark — if you like.’ It was like Charles Lamb’s shrinking from
so hard a word as ‘fat’ about the young roast pig.
Phrases like ‘leprous,’ ‘piebald,’ and ‘skeleton’ have been used
against the London Portland stone. Certainly the milk-white
quality of its lit shapes against the night sky at first have an
uncanny effect on the mind. The look of London is so different
from
26 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
from that of other cities. Manchester buildings are uniform rich
black, with a delicate surface, as of adhering textile fluff, so that
on some days it seems a velvet city, with black velvet buildings
and white velvet clocks. Glasgow buildings darken quickly into
a hard, morose quality, with smoke quietly about them. Edin-
burgh is a grey city, its Craigleith stone and method of cutting
reflecting little light, but deepening its tall dignity. Liverpool
has Portland stone, but its atmosphere does not whiten or darken
it, as London’s does. So when a young man comes to settle in
London it seems a strange, uncanny place, and Wren’s great
cathedral and churches, and the long front of Chambers’s
Somerset House, and the many great buildings, excite him much
and perplex him a little. It is usually after many years that he
comes to understand why London looks so dramatic, or—shall
one say? — ‘theatrical.’ He is aware of something against which
his reason is fighting. It is the weathering of Portland stone;
the appearance of great shadows where there can be no shadows,
throwing blackness up and down, and wreathing towers with
girdles of black, and cutting strange shapes on flat surfaces.
Mystery hovers over the city, everything is slightly falsified,
almost sinister; ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’ ; there is magic about.
Strangeness is allied to beauty, and that is romance. That is the
final secret of Portland stone.
I have said that no poet has written about Portland stone, but
that is not quite true. Henley’s ‘madrigal in stone’ for St.
Bride’s showed thought for the material. He must have had
the right sense of it. But it was John Davidson who alone under-
stood it, for he wrote:
‘Oh, sweetheart, see! how shadowy,
Of some occult magician’s rearing,
PORTLAND STONE 27
Or swung in space of heaven’s grace
Dissolving, dimly reappearing,
Afloat upon ethereal tides
St. Paul’s above the city rides.’
II
The character of the chief building is as determining a factor
to the aspect of a city as the species of tree is to a landscape,
and London without Portland stone is now not conceivable.
The subject, I think, has been so little considered by London
topographers that with the gentle reader’s permission some notes
may be included about my perambulation of the quarry-island
of Portland from which the material comes.
Even before Inigo Jones’s time this stone was used intermit-
tently in London. There are records of its use for repairs and
additions at the Palace of Westminster at the end of the four-
teenth century, and a quantity was also used at the Tower; but
for 150 years after that it seems to have been forgotten till
Inigo Jones perceived its properties and built the Banqueting
Hall and several other London buildings of which only the
noble fragment of the Watergate of York House remains. The
accepted story is that Jones as Surveyor-General visited the Isle
of Purbeck and Portland, and, discovering the value of Portland
stone, at once decided to use it for the new buildings he was
designing for the king. Against that I would advance the
theory that it was to Nicholas Stone, statuary and mason, that
we owe the introduction of Portland stone as the chief building
material of London. Stone, so far as the records go, has always
been a static name in Portland, where the names are almost
tribal. It is one of the signatures in the agreement with Wren
for the provision of stone for St. Paul’s, and the name is common
on
28 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
on the Portland gravestones and in the villages to-day. Nicholas
Stone was born at Woodbury, near Exeter, son of a quarryman
and stonemason. It is not known whether his father was born
a Portlander, but the name, as I say, is one of the most common
in the island, and Portland stone had been used for building and
repair work at Exeter Cathedral since the fourteenth century.
Nicholas Stone married a daughter of Hendrik de Keyser, the
Dutch sculptor, from whom (according to the Dictionary of
National Biography) he acquired a share in quarries in the Isle
of Portland in which de Keyser had large interests. All research
into the history of Portland shows the unlikeliness of main-
landers, let alone foreigners, having any holding in Portland
quarries, so it seems more likely that Stone, with Portland rela-
tives, got his father-in-law to invest some of his money in Port-
land quarries, but in any case his connection with the Portland
quarries is established. Stone worked for Inigo Jones in such
beautiful existing examples as the Banqueting Hall and York
Gate and Greenwich Hospital, as well as many buildings that
have disappeared, and it was Jones who established Portland
stone as the monumental building stone of London. All the
probabilities are that it was Nicholas Stone who interested the
ereat architect in this stone, and that he had financial as well as _~
masonic reasons for doing so. Wren followed Jones, and as
Palladian architecture settled down on London, Portland stone
available in large blocks was eagerly welcomed by the architects
until the late eighteenth century with its more domestic ideas,
for a little, favoured Bath stone.
Wren followed Jones in his material as in some other things.
His memorial to the Bishop of Rochester about the decay in
Westminster Abbey stone outlines his researches on the subject
at
PORTLAND STONE 29
at the time when he was designing the western towers in Port-
land stone:
I find after the Conquest, all our artist masons were fetched
from Normandy; they loved to work in their own Caen-
stone which is more beautiful than durable. This was found
expensive to bring hither, so they thought Rygate stone in
Surrey the nearest like their own, being a stone that would
saw and work like wood, but not durable, as is manifest; and
they used this for the renewal of the whole Fabrick, which
is now disfigured in the highest Degree. This stone takes in
water, which, being frozen, scales off, whereas good stone
gathers a crust and defends itself, as many of our English
Freestones do.
Elsewhere he writes:
The best is Portland or Rock Abbey stones, but these are
not without their faults.
He decided for Portland stone and so, settled the complexion
of London as he did the form of her features.
Wren built his cathedral and fifty city churches, his part of
Greenwich, the towers of Westminster Abbey, the Monument,
the stone parts of Chelsea Hospital and several City companies’
halls and Marlborough House, and many other works, with the
limestone of Portland. Gibbs, Hawksmoor, and Kent followed
him, and Chambers and Robert Adam could find nothing better,
and so Portland stone, like the plane tree, became the essence of
London. When Rygate and Chilmark decayed it was used for
Henry VII chapel, and when the Caen stone of the Carlton
Club failed in the London acids Sir Reginald Blomfield gave it
a new mantle of Portland stone. Mr. Ralph Knott’s London
County Hall, Mr. Harvey Corbett’s Bush House, and Sir Edwyn
Cooper’s
30 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Cooper’s Port of London Authority building, are all of this
stone. It is completely established as the monumental material
of London. Its only challenger now is the soulless ferro-
concrete.
In the island of Portland, at the headquarters of the quarry
company, is a garden of fossils which contains among other
wonders enormous stone ammonites (Ammonites giganteus) as
big as a ship’s lifebuoy. Millions of years ago the creature was
evolved which has left so plainly in this noble limestone the
curves and articulations of its massive form, and beside it is the
matrix slab in which it lay. And as one studies in this petrified
garden the structure and detail of this strange structure, so
decorative and architectural, one’s thoughts turn at once to
other intricate and symmetrical structures in the same material ;
to St. Paul’s and St. Bride’s and Somerset House, that the later
and conscious inhabitant of Albion had left as the monuments
of their minds. The matrix is the same.
Hardy speaks of Portland as the ancient home of the Slingers,
a peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches
out like the head of a bird into the English Channel. In a letter
printed in the Journal of the Society of Dorsetshire Men in Lon-
don, he writes of the feelings that must be aroused in the minds
of Dorset men as they look up at the great mass of Dorsetshire
stone that is St. Paul’s. 7 |
Portland is singular in all respects, and if man had had the
making of it as a quarry, it is hard to see how he could have
improved upon Nature’s arrangement. The Chesil Beach, a long,
thin neck of pebbles cast up by the sea, unparalleled in Europe,
provides railway access to the mainland, and the peninsula, being
mainly of a uniform 400-foot height, allows a gravitation railway
to be used for bringing down the stone, the weight of loaded
trucks
NDOF THE CIRCUS
*
4
THE E
PORTLAND STONE 31
trucks in descent pulling up the empty ones. The whole place
is scored with fissures running north and south, with other breaks
running east and west, so that open quarrying can go on with
advantages unknown elsewhere. The stone is of an accommo-
dating and tractable character which does not require to be
blasted or cut, but, once the whitbed is reached, hit by a tap
on the wedges and ‘feathers,’ splits down to the shelly base,
usually from 4 to 6 feet thick. This bed is usually in three tiers
separated by softer shelly divisions. The ordinary section of a
good quarry shows: Rubble, 24 feet; cap, 11 feet; roach, 4 feet;
whitbed, 15 feet (in three tiers). The cap has often to be blasted,
but explosives are not used on the whitbed. The roach is a
harder, rougher, heavily pocked stone, mixed with shells, used
chiefly for breakwaters and quays; but it is within the possi-
bilities that its turn may yet come with our architects for general
use in the bases of buildings, its natural rustication offering
attractions, as can be seen in the Cunard Line offices in Liver-
pool.
There is only one inlet in the peninsula where boats can now
land, a pretty spot called Church Hope Cove, the scene of the
moonlight interlude in Hardy’s The Quest of the Well Beloved,
and on the path between this place and the prison, round which
Borstal boys now play football, you look down on a mile of
-undercliff which seems at one time to have been the edge of the
plateau that had fallen forward. These banks are called “The
Weirs.’ Disused quarries, great boulders, stone debris and blocks
of stone ready for shipment lie around, with green roads run-
ning through the confusion. The stone has an old grey look,
not like the silver Portland stone in London, although it has
been exposed to the wind and rain for 250 years. A few stones
bear Wren’s private mark, that some interpret as a ‘y’ and some
as
32 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
as a wineglass. It was from these ‘weirs’ that the stone of St.
Paul’s and the City churches was quarried. One quarry is still
called ‘St. Paul’s.’ |
Wren’s contractors cut the stone from these quarries, much as
it is done to-day. No cranes were then in use, and the stone
was worked down by trolleys, jacks, and crowbars to the little
pier that can still be seen. There it was shipped into sailing
ketches, much the same as those you see at Castletown on the
other side of the island, that carry the undressed stone to-day to
the Vauxhall wharves. The ketches take any time from five days
to six weeks to bring the stone to London.
One would think that by this time the little island would have
been rifled of its treasure and rebuilt of discarded stone: but it
is not so; the main part of limestone has not yet been touched.
The area, for instance, of the east cliff above the ‘weirs’ from
which St. Paul’s was built is only now about to be cut. The
yield of stone is enormous, rising to 30,000 tons an acre.
Walking over this part with a mentor whose decisions and
activities mainly rule its quarrying affairs, I spoke of the strange-
ness of the great cathedral and the London churches having lain
there in their brute formations until the magician Wren sum-
moned and fashioned them into the wonders that rise over
London. My friend, tramping down the grass, said: “There’s a
whole new London down there. Perhaps a better London than
Wren’s. It all lies with the architects. The stone’s here.’ He
stamped on the ground as though signalling to something below.
Yes; it all lies with the architects—and the patrons. Looking at
the fresh stone cubes and the open sides of the quarries beside
the sea, one gets a strange physical sense of the relations of
geology and architecture, of the procession of creatures through
‘unreckonable geologic years’ that had gone to make coral and
limestone
PORTLAND STONE 33
limestone just of that particular structure and quality, and of
the creatures of this age that have fashioned it after their imag-
inings into the stuff of architecture.
‘Do you know the Royal Automobile Club in London?’ asked
my mentor, as we gazed down on a large quarry-space active
with cranes and men. ‘We took it out of that corner at the back.’
He pointed out where this and that building used to lie before
it was cut and transported. It was the same with statuary. An
unusually large block lay ready forthe trolley. ‘Oh, after they’ve
cut away what they don’t want they’ll find the statue of Kitch-
ener inside.’ It was about 8 feet by 6 feet deep and weighed
about 12 tons, not so big as the block from which was carved
the copy of the Farnese Hercules that stands in the hall of the
Geological Museum. That must have been over 12 feet long,
and probably was the biggest perfect block ever cut. It was
presented to the Museum in 1851 by Stewards, the quarry-
masters. In the masons’ shed at Portland I saw the lions for a
war memorial being squared, each in three blocks, and the caps
of the great fluted columns for a London business palace, and
many other things that will be gazed at for a long time to come.
Entering the high street of what Hardy calls “The Village of the
Wells,’ opposite the ruined stone cottage with mullioned win-
dows that people point out as the home of Avice Caro, I noticed
a small excavation, and asked my host what was being built.
He replied that that was a quarry, a little quarry. They had cut
the Cenotaph out of it!
The people of this singular island are a community still curi-
ously primitive in many of their ways, and self-contained almost
beyond belief in these days, particularly when one remembers
the world-famous character of their commodity and their old-
standing relations with London. Even to-day the right to work
in
34 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
in the quarries is restricted to natives of the island. ‘The stone-
masons who work in the sheds dressing the stones are mostly
‘kimberlins’ (foreigners from the mainland), but every quarry-
man (with an exception to be mentioned) is of island stock who
has inherited the right. The right goes with the land cut into
strips called ‘paddocks’ or ‘lawns’; but, although one ‘lawn’ may
have any number of owners, it is rarely bought or sold. If a
daughter of a native marries an alien and has for her dowry a
‘paddock’ of land, she can, by virtue of it, invest her husband
with the freedom of quarrying. Each ‘lawn’ is devisable into as
many parts or shares as the owner pleases, and each part has
equal right to the quarries with the others. Conveyance is made
in a simple patriarchal way.
The Portlanders hold tenaciously to their ancient rights, and
have withstood all.efforts of the ‘kimberlins’ to work in Portland
quarries. At the beginning of the century, when there was an
enormous development in the use of the stone in Government
buildings, and 2,000,000 cubic feet of stone was supplied for
these contracts, Cornish quarrymen were by agreement allowed
to work in Portland, but, except for a few who married Portland
women, and so received the freedom of the quarries, none was
allowed to remain. One is struck at once, on a visit to the island,
by the strongly developed physical characteristics and signs
of race in the men, and by a pervading family resemblance.
‘Island custom’ that tinges the plot of “The Well Beloved’ was
that of people pairing together before wedlock and marrying
only when the woman was with child. If no child was coming,
the couple parted without stigma. The custom was probably
bound up with the holding of property and rights and the
importance of progeny to inherit them. Despite the apparent
freedom of this custom, illegitimate births were very rare. The
custom
PORTLAND STONE 35
custom seems to have died out by the middle of last century.
Although there must have been much close breeding, weaklings
are rare, and a great many of the quarrymen continue at their
arduous work until after threescore and ten years. They are
said to be very independent, intelligent, proud of their skill and
position, and, although tolerant, not too flexible in their dealings
with ‘kimberlins.’
A strange island, a strange people, and a strange destiny
to its merchandise.. Out of it came the wonders that are Lon-
don, and within it lie the wonders of the London that is to be.
we
_ LONDON CALENDAR |
a)
t ’ ‘ ‘
f eclechnsiectecincieciacieciacte
Veycoy / 4 Uy 4 4 4 U f 4, U 4 4 ' ' 4 4 4 4 4 4 U U Uy
A LONDON CALENDAR
I
SPRING
] VEN the most hardened Londoner has misgivings
©91 when Spring comes round, and, like all town-dwell-
($\5|| ers at this season, he is stirred yearly by the idea
Nae 2071 of his lost inheritance in Nature. The children ~
RES] feel it keenest, and all over London you meet little
bands, generally with a decrepit baby-carriage to carry the
youngest and the commissariat, setting out for a park, some-
times with wild ideas of getting to Epping Forest or Hadley
Wood. These ambitious ideas are usually found in groups of
very small boys, and often end in football in the Green Park,
with sleeping tramps as goal-posts. City workers swarm in
Farringdon Street market, where the barrows are charged with
pot-flowers and packets of seeds with pictures even more brilliant
spread for the eyes of the possessors of little gardens in the
suburbs, and they take heart again. The motor-bicycles and
push-bicycles are overhauled and off go the young City folk in
groups or couples, and in the evening the Portsmouth Road —
if it were not for the petrol—would be fragrant with the may-
blossom or the bluebells they are bearing home. Thoughts of
the Royal Sovereign, that noble steamer that makes her landfall
at the Old Swan Pier after taking the citizens to Margate,
thoughts of the budding green over the backwater at Wargrave
and the near joys of daffodils at Kew and the chestnuts at
Bushey, are with all Londoners, and the week-ender acquires a
temporary
39
40 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
temporary popularity. But, even in inner London Nature is
showing a jewelled finger in the parks everywhere, and on the
window-boxes in Mayfair. But it is not of this that the London
Perambulator would write, but of the Town Spring, of the signs
and portents by which he who knew nothing of Nature would
still be able to identify the season and to rejoice —
‘Rejoice, O London hearts, rejoice;
Rejoice, true lovers dear!’
Let us see how it would seem to a fog-hardened, club-pickled
Tim Linkinwater of our day. This is his story.
Tim (log.). Certainly your Primavera is beautiful, artistic and
that sort of thing. Crocuses and daffodils are pretty to see—I
always think nothing looks better on a luncheon-table— but to
people living the town life as we do, why should we gush about
budding trees and green fields, and so on? There’s nothing in it.
We live among bricks and mortar and lamp-posts. Your Coun-
try Spring has nothing to do with them — makes no change here.
Everybody knows the time of year without looking at your trees
and birds. We have our own good signs. I’ll tell you something
of the Spirit of Town Spring. (Have a liqueur?)
I see my Town Spring, Primavera Urbana, something like
this. She is a lavender person — with eyes like amethysts if you
like —in a desperate hurry. She has a smart lead-grey hat with
high lights, like the dome of St. Paul’s, and one sleeve dark blue
and the other sleeve light blue, and she wears at moments horn-
rimmed spectacles. She moves along on one roller-skate. Above
her fly cherubs of two kinds, putti and amorini, as I think they
are called by those who study Spring in Italian pictures. The
putti carry ladders and pots and paper-bags and newly painted
green chairs, and one of them has in his purse a pinch of “scent-
less
BT th te
BS wastetige AY ied:
ee
yee
LONDON N. W.
A LONDON CALENDAR en
less and delicate dust’; the amorini adore her hat. Swittly, pro-
pelled by a movement of the left foot, she fleets along the Em-
bankment, the smoke from the railway bridge dividing to let
her pass, and the policemen holding up their arms as Spring
rides through the street. The cab-stand under the railway bridge
marks her well. The cabmen call to one another, and, leaving
their cabs, run towards her with ready feet. As they advance
the putti shower down pink papers. The cabmen grasp them
and retire, triumphant or abashed. For, to them, Spring is the
Lincoln Handicap and the City and Suburban.
On runs the jocund procession, with never a look behind.
They are in the Embankment Gardens. Some of the silly putti
touch the grass with their bright feet, and little yellow and white
paper-bags and banana-peel appear, as though children had been
picknicking. Spring pauses under the statue of Sir Bartle Frere.
It is mottled and dingy. She touches it with her beautiful finger,
and a shiny black streak appears on the face and drips down the
coat. Again! The beautiful black colour covers his head and
shoulders. Again! The other side of his coat, his trousers, his
boots. Then, the} hand of Spring dons an old glove—rub, rub —
there is the inscription bright and plain! Then on again to the
other statues, and they too shine out in sweet glimmering black.
In another flash she is in Piccadilly, but as she passes she
twitches the long blue coats from the backs of the policemen,
and they stand revealed all in tunic and trousers, tall and fine,
like irisis that have burst their sheaths. But now are we in
Mayfair.
Quickly, quickly, she and her white company spread, and soon
the merry riot of pot and brush and ladder bursts upon many
a tall building. See the glowing beds of yellow ochre, of Indian
red, of cream and pink, suddenly aflame in the pallid faces of the
buildings
42 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
fe eee
buildings; watch how the chocolate hedge spreads along over
pilaster and entablature; observe the thin lines of red and green
peeping up the architraves of the doors. Mark well the fine frills
of white and lilac on the little pigeon-breasted houses of Park
Lane. Now the ambient air is fragrant with the sharp, sweet
smell of turps and varnish. Every citizen sniffs it as he passes,
and knows well that Spring has come. “Tweak, tweak!’ comes
the happy noise of the pulleys as the painting-cradles are hoisted
up. There’s music for you! | |
Spring hurries on. In Oxford Street she touches the shoulders
of the clerks and the shopmen as she passes. They look down.
(Confound!) The clothes they thought so decent, and even
smart, now look spotty and shabby. They sigh and go to the
tailors. : |
Now is she in Bond Street. She scatters little white scrolls
which float like apple-blossom adown the wind till they touch
and adhere to their appointed place on the side-doors of the
notable milliners’ shops. They bear legends on them in scrawly
handwriting, such as ‘Good Improvers Wanted’ and ‘Good Skirt
Hands Wanted.’ |
But where is Spring? She has gone— and, search as you may,
you can never come up on her now. But signs of her passing
may be traced, just as Farmer Hodge can trace the footsteps of
your Country Spring by the flowers that have sprung up where
she has trodden. In the Temple a long serpentine thing crawls
across King’s Bench Walk and spouts water on the road. Spring
has been here. And look! You can see six o’clock on St.
Martin’s clock!
Hark, how all the town is alive with sweet voices! The chars-
A-bancs with deep ‘honk-honk’ begin to swarm at the Abbey,
and the bottles are out at the lake in St. James’s Park and shout
it
ee eee ee |r Si eet. Ue sa al « re al
eae Ss ne resale ee a ve
= _ Re ee seen neg SSO ge See
nT ee a eR NPE Fe aes
aes
wee :
A LONDON CALENDAR 43
it good sticklebacking ; hope revives in the breast of the Confi-
dence Trick Man as he cleans with india-rubber his Bank of
Engraving notes; the sand-blast workers on the face of the
hotels call down for beer to be prepared when the appointed
time arrives; the new tweed caps have swarmed at Anderton’s
Hotel and at the Northern stations, for the Cup-tie is all over
and gone. The tariffs in the hotels are beginning again to raise
their heads, and there is a feathering of nests in Bloomsbury.
White and canary-coloured waistcoats reflect the sun in Throg-
morton Street, and even walk-clerks clank their chains and
rejoice.
The voice of the vacuum-cleaner is heard in the land, carpets
are dangling from the window, and married men are dining in
restaurants. Hurrah! Hurrah! Spring is here. Sing “‘Sweep-
weep. Summer is coming in!’
That’s what Spring is in London. (‘What about another
liqueur ?’)
I
SUMMER
The Beadle of the Bank of England is authorized to discard
his caped overcoat of crimson and black and appear in full
glory of puce and scarlet and gold when the temperature of
70° Fahrenheit is registered. Visitors to the Bank on warm days
must have noticed how anxiously that functionary —the Best
Dressed Man in London — consults the Big Bank thermometer
hung on the interior wall at the entrance, when the temperature
begins to approach that figure. So it has become the custom
with old City men who want to be sure that Summer has arrived
in London to pop in for a glance at the Beadle, and if he 1s
coatless their calceolarias and geraniums will need watering.
For
44 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
For the variegated Beadle would make anyone think of flowers ;
indeed, he is probably dressed as he is, and the Bank messengers
in their puce swallow-tailed coats and scarlet waistcoats are so
coloured, because some high official of the Bank who originally
decided these costumes wanted to be reminded of some favourite
flowers, just as one First Lord of the Admiralty named the new
destroyers after his favourite foxhounds and another after his
favourite liqueurs.
The Beadle of the Bank of England, then, registers when
Summer is at par, and the City men go on holiday with a con-
tented mind. It will probably rain or chill, but they have done
their best.
London is not a Southern European capital. All the big Ox-
ford Street drapery shops face the south and take the sun with-
out anxiety. Neither is it a Northern European capital, for the
great shops in Brompton Row and Kensington High Street face
the north without misgivings. The sun here is neither an enemy
to be dreaded nor an ally to be courted. The more exclusive
shops certainly are in streets running north and south — Bond
Street, Dover Street, Savile Row, Sloane Street, Baker Street;
but there the shop-window wares are not the important con-
sideration. The one pervading sign that tells the stranger that
he is now well south and nearing the Continent is the prevalence
of sun-blinds fitted on the windows in the West End; but
persiennes are very uncommon, and the great mass of London
houses have no defences against the sun. The persiennes or
jalousies are seen mostly in the late Georgian houses round the
parks or in Chelsea, along with open balconies with little
umbrella-like canopies and porches, suggesting, like Thomas
Shotter Boys’s tinted lithographs of the early Victorian period,
an era of cleaner, gayer sunshine than ours. There is a little
modest
A LONDON CALENDAR 45
modest row of white houses with such balconies and jalousies
standing back from the highway at Holland Park that is a very
refreshing sight on a hot day, like a fragment of Weymouth or
Lyme Regis that has come to town.
Of course, the sun glares down sometimes, and even the City,
for all the narrowness of its streets and alleys, is like a grill. The
people in the poor quarters come out of their stifling cubicles to
sleep in the street, and on occasion the police recognize the
practice and stop certain by-streets to traffic in the night. There
was a spell of heat in 1911, when crowds went to bathe in the
Serpentine by moonlight in the teeth of rules and regulations,
providing London with one of its most romantic spectacles. But
summers that produce these eccentricities are rare. No Bencher
of the Middle Temple has ever been seen to take a header into
the Temple fountain, although small boys cannot be kept out
of the fountain in Trafalgar Square. London on the whole is a
temperate capital, full of citizens who have never shed a waist-
coat in town in all their lives.
III
AUTUMN
The fogs of the London autumn do not come as it were full-
grown, heavy-bodied fogs, but arrive rather like the young of
the species, delicate and playful and in a way charming like a
young pig. One day when the yellow plane-tree leaves are fall-
ing on tall hats and wigs in the Inns of Courts and on the Em-
bankment and round the City churchyards, you are aware of a
delicate mist entering the town, faint and volatile, coming and
going in the currents of air. It seems to have no connection
with such gross food as coal-fire smoke, but as a distillation from
the ground under London. The shapes and textures of the
buildings
46 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
buildings soften, but the Portland stone still glimmers a little as
the sunshine gilds the mist, and with the fluttering leaves the
scene glows and sparkles like a topaz. It is one of London’s
memorable moments.
The adult fog is a different story, but I must confess, although
it is to write oneself down as old-fashioned, I have never lost my
taste for a London fog. Stung they ever so sharply your eyes
and lungs, their chemistry precipitated your sense of London
anew and linked you with the phantasmagoria of the Victorian
romancers and M. Taine’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journals
and old volumes of Punch and Gustav Doré’s London drawings.
There is a rough, fantastic, Gargantuan goblin London lying
waiting for these fogs, taking corporal existence only when the
hour comes; a London’s Particular makes visible a certain world
whatever it may obscure. The motor-bus and the taxi-cab make
it only the more apparent.
I remember one demonstration of this, although it is difficult
to convey exactly how it did affect one. The fog had possessed
London for two days. On the second day bus traffic stopped
at six o’clock, although an occasional bold bus ran the blockade
of the fog. The night before there were long hold-ups and you ~
came on buses stranded by the kerb along the chief thorough-
fares. A strange procession appeared after midnight. Out of
the fog there came with noise and bleary lights an empty bus,
and one after another with slow thunder came seven other
empty buses in a melancholy line. They had been lying by the
wayside until the first courageous bus came along, and the
others then summoned up power and fell in behind. A little
later came six ‘No. 9’ buses one after another, all empty, lum-
bering eastward. It does not sound very queer when written,
but the apparition of these empty, misty buses coming out of
the
A LONDON CALENDAR 47
the obscurity and staggering blearily on and being swallowed
up in the fog was extraordinarily disturbing.
The voices in the air of unseen busmen and carmen and dray-
men take on a rounder heartiness excelling their own best efforts
when they are visible men, and the policemen loom up in the
fog with an added grandeur. They require it all, for there is a
spirit of misrule abroad; newsboys play tricks and cry strange
news, and strait-laced citizens find themselves in public-houses,
strange companionships are formed, judges and prisoners on
bale lose their way and are reported missing at the courts, people
go to the wrong theatres, accidents occur and the ambulance
gets lost. Cats come out into busy streets and sit on the pave-
ment as if it was night. Anachronisms like torches and links
appear. Only twenty years ago a man going home about mid-
night in a fog saw a glare of torches and a body of men passed
with King Edward walking in the middle. The torches were
carried by footmen and policemen; then came the king, heavily
wrapped up, with two of his gentlemen then more policemen ;
then some stragglers of the night, attracted by curiosity or by the
chance of a safe guide to Buckingham Palace. The procession
came so silently out of the fog and vanished into it again that the
spectator later in the night was not sure that he had not imagined
it. But it was King Edward, who had been dining with a Court
lady in Portman Square, and, finding it impossible to go by
carriage in the fog, had decided to summon torches and a guard
and walk just as a Stuart king would have done.
A humbler street pilot who made good use of a torch was the
old‘ news-seller who sold evening papers in the Strand near
Somerset House. During one bad fog just before the war many
people were anxious to cross, but some traffic was still moving
despite the density, and they hesitated, ventured, and returned.
| The
48 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
The old news-seller with Cockney readiness twisted up two of his
papers, set them on fire, and marched over waving the torch
while the others followed. If he had been a young man and one
of his followers an alert millionaire, he would no doubt have been
a big figure to-day, but he was an old man, and none of his
followers was any sort of millionaire.
Then there are the raree-shows of the fog that every observant
Londoner knows. People light up their rooms, but they do not
pull down the blinds, so the fog street effect is always curiously
different from a night effect. It is a little uncanny as you drift
along the stately old parts of the town, such as Lincoln’s Inn
Fields and Bloomsbury, and see before your eyes hundreds of
lit interiors with figures like stage scenes framed in the darkness.
You can study ceilings and panelling and mantelpieces in the old
houses that it had often been your wish to see. London is so rich
in historic rooms like that one with the tall narrow windows and
carved door-heads in the office that was once a Lord Chancellor’s
in which the bank of England Charter was signed. Another
great room I remember had no lights, but a fire was burning
in the grate, throwing moving shadows on the ceiling and out-
lining an extraordinary projecting mass with branching shapes,
which one slowly identified as an enormous moose’s head with
vast antlers. :
London always changes quite suddenly her autumn for a win-
ter look. There is no great city, I think, where there are so many
trees growing, not only in the streets and squares but in the
little courts and alleys and in all sorts of corners where relics of
old churchyards and gardens still keep green the memory of the
London of Plantagenets, Tudors and the Stuarts. Paris looks
more leafy, but her trees are mainly in the boulevards and
centres
SaGuUVND ASYOH AHL
—s — = ae heed ee
we a Se ge -
ee ee ee
t yn ee OS a
ae, 2 + Pipe 6 v:
a EY a
Pe ati
eee omens
. 2 a ne I et A
A LONDON CALENDAR 49
centres, and when the leaves fall they do not come like a sudden
green snowfall all over the city as they do in London.
One week the plane trees are still spreading luxuriously, mak-
ing deep shadows in the autumn sunshine. Next week they have
lost most of their foliage, and everywhere you go in the older
parts you find drifts of leaves, sometimes ankle-deep where the
sweepers have brushed them off the passage-way. The peculiarity
of the London leaves is that, being mainly plane tree, they are
large and strong and half green even when they fall, and quite a
small number make a big heap. It is a noble leaf, and the soot
only adds to the subtlety of its red and russet and green colour-
ing.
In the high winds they fly about everywhere, whirling like
birds in the forced draught of the Temple Courts and other en-
closed spaces. They flutter in at every open window, and law-
yers reading “Bigelow on Torts” or “Emmett’s Notes on Perus-
ing Titles” find suddenly the laws of nature placing a delicate
green and russet paw between them and the laws of man. They
scurry through these draughty chambers, and Temple cats know
how to play with them. They drop, too,’on the tall hats of law-
yers, and even try to make a coronet on the wigs of K.C’s. as
they pause on their front steps in Pump Court and King’s
Bench Walk. The little Embankment trees go quickest, and
their leaves fall into the Thames to sail back and forward on the
tide till they join the deposit of immemorial London leaves that
lie below.
Only with snow-fall and leaf-fall does Nature interfere pic-
turesquely and intimately in the Londoner’s affairs and he can-
not avoid seeing either of her hints, for they lie on the ground,
and that is where his eyes are mostly directed.
Winter
so The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
IV
WINTER
It may be reasonably objected that this London Calendar is
haphazard, lacking proper order and balance, fog belonging to
Winter rather than Autumn, and snow nowadays pertaining to
Spring, while rain, which plays a very large part in London
weather, is not mentioned. Well, I admit it, I admit it, as the
Edinburgh man replied when someone said that it was a nice
day. But there is this defence, that in attempting to give a
recognizable picture of London’s seasons one must be a little
unsatisfactory and capricious. Thinking over my London
winters, I remember rain and again rain, but I can remember
rain at all seasons. Snow, I think, is better worth the recording.
It also excitingly affects the spectacle of London, although it
is a rare happening. Still, I remember one Christmas night
when the snow came handsomely. For just a few people it made
a marvellous London. It did not begin until about midnight,
and as it was Christmas night, hardly a soul was about at that
time. The few drifting, silent black figures walked crouchingly
close to the houses ; the cabs had gone home; the omnibuses had
ceased running. So I saw all the Strand pure white from end to
end, with only a track or two across the new snow, like the
tracks of rabbits outside a wood on a snowy day. The long vista
in the lamplight was as if one were looking through gauze, but
just round each lamp the flakes fluttered suddenly bright, like
birds flying into the glare of a lighthouse. Walking with bent
head, I saw that under each lamp-post the flakes were dancing
with their own shadows, which flickered up and down as if the
snowflakes had found a new game which they could not play
in the country roads, where they fly in darkness. For the first
time
SS
ee Se ee ee ee ee ye ee a
ey Ly a ee . .
A LONDON CALENDAR 51
time in my life I made a visible mark upon London. All the
way along the pavement, when I looked back, I could see my
track, and it was almost alarming to watch oneself so palpably
traced down into the side-streets and up with a curve to one’s
own doorstep. It was a shock to one’s sense of London as a
place that destroys all traces, and even a slight discomfort to
have left signs of one’s abode; it felt horribly public.
One other vision of this virgin London has been permitted to
me. It was during the latter part of the war, when acting in
a Fire Watch on St. Paul’s during the air-raids. One winter
morning about two, after snow had been falling for four hours,
I went up the little spiral stair to the Golden Gallery. The cir-
cumstances of the climb in the darkness with the point of an
electric torch dancing on the screw-stairs and on the great bulks
of old timber in the vast brick cone, no doubt wrought up the
mind to a pitch of unusual sensitiveness, but the intensity of the
vision as I fumblingly opened the door and stepped out on the
balcony of the Golden Gallery seemed not of the ordinary
world. The City of London lay open white and silent to the
steady moonlight. No lights showed, for it was war-time and all
fires were out at that hour, and the snow lay fresh and unbroken
on the cold roofs. Immediately below, the nave and a transept
of the cathedral were outlined by their gutters and the shadows
in the great wells; the river seemed near and very dark till one
noticed the blackness of bridges. The church towers and spires
somehow were not very plain, except the beautiful fountain-like
shape of St. Mary-le-Bow. Their Portland-stone whiteness, for
once, was lost against a whiter London. The houses that moon-
lit morning did not seem asleep so much as dead—dead and
shrouded and shriven in the light of a last moon. We lived in
Apocalyptic times then, with ghostly visitants raining death
from
Bal 7 he LONDON PERAMBULATOR
from above and the earth suddenly giving voice with a thousand
reverberations and fearful bonfires sometimes in the sky. But
that vision of London, peaceful and silent and white, could only
have been under conditions of war.
FOUR INNS
FRR RK I RO SFB CR I I FF RK
anf re Daa Gs Qa Gee Dead. Moa GsK
Pe tekeeedee ebb hee eee eee ee ee ee hed
The FOUR INNS
I
a, a)F* all the sights of London, there is none so sur-
i ‘ "i YW prising, so grateful, so quickening to the imagina-
G ae 2 JS] tion, as the Inns of Court, that lie so discreetly
¥ Z| round the western end of the City just outside the
emi) line of its walls. The ill-conditioned may hint that
the lawyers encamped there to take toll of the rich citizens going
west, but others see them like a sort of Swiss guard defend-
ing the West End against the City. There they stand, four
ancient Inns of Court— Middle Temple, Inner Temple, Lin-
coln’s Inn, and Gray’s Inn, their red and grey alleys and courts
and spacious green gardens making an arc in three links from
the river to Gray’s Inn Road. With the crossing of a few streets
you have an almost continuous thoroughfare through the Inns
from Middle Temple Gateway on the Embankment to Theo-
bald’s Road on the north, the passages over Fleet Street, up
Bell Yard to Lincoln’s Inn Gate in Portugal Street, across
Chancery Lane and Holborn to Gray’s Inn Passage, adding the
savour of contrast. All four Inns have been there for 500 years
and more.
Think of London without them! A hive of close-set streets
would have covered the area of each of these precincts; the dull
congested districts to the north of the City boundary tell us
what would have happened on the west. And not only do the
Inns give light and space and comeliness within their precincts,
but they affect happily their vicinity. But Oe its business with
Gray’s
55
56 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Gray’s Inn, Bedford Row, that nobly spacious William and
Mary place, would never have survived, once its old residents
had gone, without solicitors ; nor could Ely Place have lived to
ring curfew into the twentieth century. Essex Street, with its
watergate of old Essex House through which summer waves her
first green flag at the Strand, backs on the Temple. Without
Lincoln’s Inn the great square of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that Inigo
Jones planned so seignorially would have lost all its state and
sunk to the level of Red Lion Square, instead of being a place
where in real life, as in novels, lucky unsettled people call on
solicitors and hear of ‘something to their advantage.’
And round the Inns of Court, too, cluster curious and indi-
vidual shops: tobacco-shops with traditions and snuff-jars, tea-
shops with scoops of Queen Anne’s date, gunsmiths, makers of
legal robes (and of peers’ and peeresses’ too), law stationers who
sell parchments and vellum, heraldic stationers who can still
produce on occasion a hatchment, clockmakers of famous
bracket-clocks ; and taverns, one of which has the grandest cast-
‘ron stove in the world, of romantic-classical order, stamped
with the arms of Gray’s Inn, to whose hall it once belonged, and
whose clerks in winter warm their noggins on its wide, flat top,
and another with a richly carved Jacobean ceiling, (part of it
original) which in Victorian times looked down most days on
three or four judges at lunch. There are, alas, very few old
bookshops now near the Inns, although there were many twenty
years ago; and the last of the old fishing-tackle shops — how
thrilling were its giant stuffed tarpon and the ticket,
‘TARPON FROM THE GULF OF FLORIDA.
RODS, ETC., SUPPLIED’
—has deserted Fleet Street for the West.
But
The FOUR INNS 7
But all this keeps one from the Inns themselves, as indeed they
have delayed many an ardent-minded, grateful-hearted peram-
bulator. Temple, Lincoln’s, and Gray’s, there they be, perma-
nent as the law itself, and, like the law, their origins are lost un-
der the dust of antiquity. Despite all the prodigious researches
of the learned Inderwick and Williamson, the early history of all
these societies is conjectural. It is not known how the Temple
lawyers came to be divided into two houses, and what their his-
tory was before they left Holborn for the old quarters of the
disbanded Knight Templars, whose hostel had passed to the
Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and what is the meaning of
their symbol of the Flying Horse. There is evidence of some
sort of hostel for students in the manor-house of the fourth Baron
Grey de Wilton in 1370, and Lincoln’s Inn has official records
back to 1422, at which date it was evidently an active organiza-
tion. Matter enough for centuries of dispute between the Inns
as to which has precedence, priority, or superior antiquity over
the others, but by agreement they are held to be equal in the
sight of God and man and law students. The four Inns of ‘Court’
stand upon a footing of equality. Nihil prius aut preterius, nihil
majus aut minus. They form together one university. Their
powers of jurisdiction and privileges are co-equal.
Studious lawyers have had their bowers in these historic pre-
cincts since the fifteenth century. They have kept their trust
jealously, and, on the whole, wisely, although, like the Church,
there have been times when they sinned grievously against the
light, and pulled down what was worthy and put up what was
not worthy. In our day they have brought their Inns to some-
thing like the gracious seemliness of a cathedral close. The
spirit of Shakespeare hovers about them. T'radition says that he
played in Twelfth Night in the Middle Temple Hall, and the
Comedy
58 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Comedy of Errors was played in his lifetime in Gray’s Inn
Hall; his patron, the Earl of Southampton, was a member of
Lincoln’s Inn, and on the wall beside the ancient gateway his
friend, Ben Jonson, is said to have worked as a bricklayer.
‘Gray’s Inn for Walks,
Lincoln’s Inn for a Wall,
Inner Temple for a Garden
And the Middle for a Hall,’
an old doggrel sings. They resemble and differ like Oxford
colleges.
Francis Bacon laid out the garden and walks of Gray’s, and.
the decrepit old catalpa tree on crutches in the garden is be-
lieved by Gray’s Inn men to have been grown from the slip
Raleigh brought home from the Indies and gave to Bacon.
Bacon’s statue stands in the court, his portrait is in the hall, and
there is a part named Verulam Buildings. On Grand Night in
July it is the custom that each man there should drink ‘to the
pious, glorious, and immortal memory of good Queen Bess.’
Thomas More is the great man of Lincoln’s Inn, the home of the
Chancery Bar. It has a Gothic chapel by Inigo Jones, and in
Taylor’s Stone Buildings the noblest terrace of any inn (and on
its quadrangle is the sharpest memorial of London in the War
in the cut and pitted facades made by two Zeppelin bombs that
burst there). Its most ancient court is Old Buildings, with its
branching stairs behind stairs and queer little cock gables, one
set of chambers having three rooms, each on the top of the
other, and a stone floor in the topmost; a vine that bears grapes
and two fine fig-trees in New Square, and a great rural prospect
over lawns and flowers, with the background of the grand old
plane trees of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
But
The FOUR INNS 59
_ But the Temple—in esthetic consideration the two houses
are one — is, of course, the noblest, with its Norman church and
Tudor hall that has the best open-timbered roof in England,
apart from Westminster Hall; its Wren gateway and his brick
doorways in King’s Bench Walk; the surprise of the Master’s
house, like a small country manor-house set behind Fleet Street,
and somehow suggesting a meet with the hounds in Tanfield
Court; and, to enlarge and freshen it all, the shining Thames at
the bottom of the gardens. No wonder literary men came to the
Temple and the Victorian dramatists set scenes there in roués’
chambers for guilty philandering. Chaucer, Fielding, Gold-
smith, Johnson, Thackeray, Dickens, and, of course, Charles
Lamb, who was born there, have won the Temple a mortmain
on eternity.
But the literary men in the Inns of Court are only decorations
in the history of those great functioning institutions whose in-
fluence has penetrated throughout the national life for five or
six hundred years. They are a legal university whose degree is
a right to plead in English courts, and, unlike other ancient
universities, they formed in the past a community into which
the student usually entered for his active life. Consequently the
records and traditions of the Inns contain all the illustrious
names and events in English law.
II
Charles Lamb, whose birthplace has at last been identifiedin
Crown Office Row, has written of the Temple, as all men know,
and to write anew of its ways and graces is hard even in 1924,
for things alter least of all in the Temple, though new fortunes
are made and old legal family names die out of the letterings
on the doorways. Motor-cars now park—how Lamb would
have
60 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
have scrutinized that word !——in the broad slope of King’s Bench
Walk and under Goldsmith’s windows in Brick Court. Women
barristers practise without remark, and the newspapers now
sometimes forget to put ‘Portia’ in the headlines dealing with
their cases. Dark faces from the east and south are almost as
common as white ones in the lecture-rooms. We had in the war-
time a taste of Elia’s days when the Temple nights were very
dark, so dark that the Benchers had broad white rings painted
round the trunks of the trees in King’s Bench Walk to protect
the trees from hard-headed Templars (you can still faintly dis-
cern white paint on the-bole of the tree to the right of Mitre
Court gateway). The Inner Temple gardens look greener than
ever, but much of it is fresh turf brought from Greenwich —
another memorial of the War. The gardens had been worn
almost bare by the feet of the Inns of Court soldiers training for
the War, and the grass would not grow again. Many Templars
who trained there never came back to this Jardin des pas perdus.
Thanks to a Coleridge, the Temple fountain has been returned
again to the old flat, round shape that young Elia knew; rooks
have twice come back to the trees in Fountain Court and twice
been harried away ; the old pear tree in the Master’s garden had
to be cut down and a branch of it was flourished by Caliban at
an Old Vic performance of The Tempest. It was believed to
have been there in Shakespeare’s time. The river no longer
washes the garden-foot of the Temple but is confined by the
Embankment, and electric tramway cars roll and clang between
the Temple and the Thames. Some old buildings have gone
and new ones have taken their place, and the Benchers and Sir
Reginald Blomfield have seen to it that the newest at Brick
Court is not unfriendly to the kindly old buildings it flanks.
But anyone who has had the wonderful good fortune to live
in
S BENCH WALK, TEMPLE
J
KING
The FOUR INNS 61
in the Temple for twenty years or so, when he lets his mind
dwell on the past, can perceive many changes even there. ‘There
must have been a phase in Temple life succeeding the Pendennis
days when the Temple grew even more Bohemian, Alsatian
almost, and odd indecorous things happened. Some of this phase
is luridly—possibly over-luridly —reflected in one of Mr. George
Moore’s books, but from old Templars the new residents used
to hear a good deal, and much of it was all summed up in the
anecdote of a much-respected Master of the Temple disturbed
by rumours, who had a rule made that all ladies entering the
Inns after the doors were shut must write in a book at the lodge
their name and that of the person they were visiting. Next day
it was found that the lady visitors had given names, clearly,
romantically unreal, and each had put down the name of the
Master as the person she was visiting. The book was with-
drawn. But that was long ago. Nothing can now be more in
keeping with these grave shades of the law than the decorum of
life there. It has its Bohemian side, but that-consists rather in
the lonely, self-absorbed life of some of the old residents and the
ups and downs of legal fortune, and the relationship of the
Temple and Fleet Street, which is as old as printers’ ink.
The sinister side of Temple life, into which Dickens had so
uncanny an insight, seems to belong to a far-off time, but no
imaginative stranger who spends his first few nights there can
escape some hint of it. The wicket in the great door is opened
by the porter, and the sound of it slamming behind you cuts
off all the noise and humanity of the streets. The silence of the
empty courts with the many names on the entries suggests the
busy day life that has receded and left its secrets to the buildings
and their shadows. The ‘air of consultation’ seems still to hang
about the flagged courts and red, well-trodden walks, and you
imagine
62 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
imagine whispers that are only the rustling of the trees. And
the Temple trees have their own queer rustlings, like the noise
of dead ‘silks.’ In enclosed places like Hare Court and Pump
Court there are strange currents and draughts that set the plane-
leaves to nudge one another when no stir of air can be felt.
Footsteps echo in the distance, and a black figure moves slowly
through the light and into the shadow of a doorway. You hear
his tread on the old wooden stairs, an oak slams, and a light
shows at a window — probably the only light in the whole court.
Black cats, of whom there are unholy regiments, slink round
corners in narrow passages that seem specially made for their
furtive ways. Who knows what may come round that crazy
corner at Lamb’s Buildings? Who knows what has come round
it? On the thin strip of green churchyard beside the ancient
church you can see a few medieval gravestones lying long and
narrow to remind you of the earlier Templars. When one is
weary and tired with things, this ancient place, with its load of
secrets, its inscrutable face, and the loneliness and mystery of
the hidden life around, can be very sinister. One can believe
that a time comes to many of its denizens when they see it with
a sinking of the heart. The story told at the inquest one day of
the lonely, friendless man in his Pump Court chambers who was
found by his laundress dead with a revolver in his hand might
have had anywhere for its setting, but somehow it seemed more
significant in a Temple court.
Dickens has one grisly tale of the Temple in his discourse on
utter loneliness of life in chambers, and a very queer one of
Lyon’s Inn. But it is of Gray’s Inn that we read in the Uncom-
mercial Traveller his wild tale of the man who, after many
years of living in it, had found London unsatisfactory, and
had one day given his watch to the man who lived in the cham-
bers
The FOUR INNS 63
bers above him, asking him to keep it for him while he went
away for abit. The tenant above knew little of the man below,
but took the watch, and thenceforward day after day watched
its owner’s letter-box in his oak bulge with letters and circulars.
Finally he grew suspicious, and communicated with the porter
of the Inn.. Together they forced the door, and saw the body
of the man who had found London too small for him hanging
there.
In all the Inns of Court are chambers that seem to be the set-
ting for the uncanny. Lincoln’s Inn has some particularly in-
viting to such thoughts, with strange recesses of sets of chambers
with in sets, and small unlikely staircases and inner bridges.
The Temple has some strange chambers with cherubs’ heads on
arches that catch the light furtively, and attics that must have
been built from the debris of the Great Fire and rooms that look
into rooms, but the oddest I know is in one set where long ago
the panelling was covered with canvas and papered over. The
mouldings of the panelling were planed down to give smooth-
ness, but on stormy nights the wind gets behind the wallpaper
and the rooms seem to move on every side. In the same part
the light at the entry throws up through the windows the sha-
dows of the tree on the ceiling and walls, and when, your lamps
are out you sit in a shadow forest with the black leaves moving
and twining above and around you. It is exquisite to watch the
shadow leaves playing over a white Madonna panel on the wall.
Most of the King’s Bench Walk windows still retain small panes
of crown glass, tinctured with delicate colouring which the sun-
shine brings out, and at sunset the curving panes, catching the
light from slightly different angles, twinkle and wink jocosely
all along the Walk, as though remembering all they had seen
and known since Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, waited in her
great
64 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
great coach for her lawyer there till it was dark, and her lackeys
lit their torches.
I can remember summer nights when these many-paned win-
dows among the dark trees were full of the dancing deviltry of
moonlight, as though all the moonbeams over the City had
gathered in this silent, secluded place for their revels. Why ever
did crown-glass with its quality and gentle camber from its
spinning disappear from our houses for the dullness of rolled
plate-glass? How happily the sunshine rests on the old red-
brick faces of the buildings with their subtleties of recessings and
string-courses, and the sure reticent mouldings in the soberly
charming entrances in which Wren surely must have taken some
pride; and how it splashes on the stone flags of the upper plat-
form, and on the separate pathway of small stone setts that run
the whole length of the Walk to the line of the gardens, looking
as though it had been there before there was any pavement at
all. I always think of it as the original walk of the King’s Bench.
III
In all these ancient fastnesses of the law men of marked
character and curious ways appear and live congenial lives. The
table-talk and record of the Bench and Bar are spiced by their
sayings and doings. Sometimes they are pleaders without a plea,
sometimes judges who make the Bar gasp. One such original,
most dignified and picturesque of them all, died during the
War. W carried his eighty years very lightly on his broad
shoulders. He seemed to have made up his mind about the
period of his life that he would make a permanency, for he
remained a man of the seventies in costume, characteristics, and
rank individualism until the end—a remarkable figure even in
the Temple, where individualism is tended and relished. His
black
The FOUR INNS 65
black, half-Muller hat, his Inverness cape and leggings, his
healthy, well-coloured face, with grizzled side-whiskers, and
clear eye, made up a personality that it was particularly pleasant
to meet in the leafy avenue of King’s Bench Walk.
Literary pilgrims from America used to rub their eyes when
they saw him, so far did he exceed their dreams of what they
might find in the Temple in the twentieth century. He was like
a figure straight from a Millais illustration in a Trollope book.
But he was no lay figure. He had been a famous rowing Blue,
and won the Diamond Sculls. A hard rider, he also thought
about riding, and had a share in making the steeplechase rules.
He wrote a couple of novels and a book of reminiscences, and
he claimed that he inspired Pasteur in his hydrophobia dis-
covery. He wrote 4 Modern Layman’s Faith, and, adventuring
into history, he investigated the parentage of James I.
As a lawyer he was chiefly famous for the cases produced by
his own actions. He had many cases against railway companies,
the most quoted being his Christmas Eve case when his train
was delayed owing to a fog and he missed a connection. The
company refusing a special train, he travelled in a goods train
and sued the company for lost time, getting £1 damages in the
County Court but losing on the appeal. He objected even to
have his railway ticket clipped, holding that it was his own
property until the end of the journey. He was a terror to bus
conductors, refusing to pay his fare until he reached his desti-
nation, for who knew but what the bus might break down on
the way? No wonder he quitted an England that grows more
sheep-like every day.
Another old worthy of the Temple, not a lawyer but a gate-
man, also calls for portraiture. He lately retired from those
dusty purlieus. He was a tall man with grizzled hair and
whiskers
66 Th LONDON PERAMBULATOR
whiskers, and wore his tall hat as policemen do in old-fashioned
pictures. No one could refuse entrance to the Temple to
strangers on Sundays with more dignified authority, or relax at
moments when he decided there was sufficient occasion to relax.
If a newsboy taking a short cut through the Temple from Tudor
Street were to raise his voice and try to sell his papers, the
astonishment which precluded his tremendous rebuke was a
thing to be remembered. It was said that he knew of a statute,
still unrevoked, by which news-sellers and criers of last speeches
on the scaffold could be taken into the Roundhouse and have
their ears slit. He could tell you (and did tell you) the secret of
the Temple altar before it was repaired, and he was full of
old Temple lore. He knew how many pigeons were found dead
in the Temple Gardens on St. Valentine’s Day — and why. His
wife had been a Temple laundress for forty years, he told me,
and her grandfather had been a gateman in the Middle Temple
before that, so that this old man’s connection with the Temple
must have gone back to the times when Johnson and Goldsmith
were there. He was a freeman of London, and his father a free-
man before him. He carried the two faded old certificates with
their griffin symbol in a little wooden cylinder, stained and dark
and much handled. He had lived most of his life in Neville’s
Court, one of the least altered of the old labyrinths, north of Fleet
Street. For about half a century he had worked in one capacity
or other under the signs of the Lamb and the Flying Horse.
He had seen much of many famous lawyers in his time, but
it was all rather blurred. Only one shining figure seemed to
remain among the dusty phantoms of his memory. “What did
you do in your youth?’ I asked him. He drew himself up with
more than usual rigidity. ‘I was office-boy to Charles Dickens,
the great writer,’ he said. He had served at the office of 4// the
Year
The FOUR INNS 67
Year Round, at the corner of Wellington Street, in the sixties.
_ He used to carry Dickens’s bag for him to Charing Cross station,
which had just then been opened, when Dickens went down to
Gadshill. ‘What was Dickens like?’ ‘Well, you wouldn’t fancy
much the way he was dressed, sir. He had a black velvet coat
with big smoked pearl buttons, and trousers of shepherd’s plaid,
the biggest check you ever saw.’ ‘Did Dickens ever wish you a
merry Christmas?’ I asked him. ‘No,’ he replied, after thinking,
‘you see my master didn’t take much notice of me, sir. He got
a lot of notice. I remember one fine day, at the corner of
Villiers Street, a man coming up to me (me with the bag) and
says, “Is that a showman?” and I says, like that, “That’s the
great Charles Dickens.” People used to look at him every-
where he went.’ That was about all Dickens’s office-boy, now
the retired Temple gateman, could remember. Still, he had
‘seen Dickens plain.’ How strange it seemed !
The last years of his life in the Temple had, of course, made
the deepest impression. I remember his rich Church of England
voice shouting up ‘All Clear!’ after a bad night’s bombing and
barraging. I think it annoyed him especially, with his strict
ideas about the Temple, that when all the gates were locked
anything should come in even from the sky. He was personally
annoyed about the aerial torpedo which split in two and smashed
right through the north side of Pump Court, half of it coming
out in Hare Court, exposing its ugly ochre filling. Had it
exploded, the Temple Church would have been ruins. The old
porter, who somehow always managed to have a piece of any
Temple object of interest at the moment in his pocket, did not
have a bit of that bomb. He had, however, various shrapnel
items. ‘Strange things to be happening, sir, in the Temple.’
He knew a good deal about the Temple cats, and could some-
times
68 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
times give you news that ‘your cat passed up the Walk about
half-past eleven, sir,’ and so on. He had been failing lately and
was rather depressed, like many people, when the tension of the
War relaxed. Even in the Temple change enters and faces are
missing, but though he has ended his official work, I think he
will haunt the Temple lanes for some time before he takes his
stiff salute and his grizzled whiskers and his innocent, officious
manner and his freeman’s ticket of the City of London to some
gate job in the shades.
To live in the Temple is to come to terms with the shades as
they steal so softly over the compact of your life. Clocks within
and without strike the hours — Big Ben’s voice is borne at night
on favouring winds, St. Paul’s is always plain—but it is the
many sundials on the Temple walls that strike on the heart
‘Shadows we are and
Like shadows depart,’
whispers the ancient sundial near Blackstone's chambers in
Brick Court, and on sunny afternoons in the long vacations,
when the Temple is quiet but for the laundresses gossiping in
the courts, the sundials make their presence felt ; you feel Time
gathering his forces. There is a walk in the Temple when the
flagstones become gravestones engraved with the names of old
lawyers; busy men flit by you with the same kind of wig and
gown as men wore in Queen Anne’s day to plead with instances
far older than their costume, using phrases such as ‘only as
recently as 1750,’ and the like. The horn that is still blown be-
fore the hall at six each evening to summon the Templars to
dinner is used because a bell would not have been heard across
the Thames by young Templars out coursing hares.
In the Temple you are as close as an echo to the past. How
often
The FOUR INNS 69
often as one climbed the wooden staircase late at night did the
old tenants of another age seem so close that their forms and
faces might appear any moment round the old balusters! But
this sense of continuity bred in the aged place acts both ways,
for the future haunts as well as the past. One strains at times
for a glimpse of those who will climb these stairs a hundred,
two hundred years after we have all vanished like the hours
marked by the Temple sundials.
é ate
4 UTA
Waa”
ee
a ee
Cer
Pott we
‘
‘7 Cad
a 7
ay
eaven eaten eavan
cpanesceneeere ee
eee ee ter eee ee ee Te Tee Eee ee ae
LONDONERS
I
not to break the windows of an enemy ambassador
on the outbreak of war and to allow fat and sleek
A Eo9\ Va pigeons to craw] at their feet in their busiest places.
No Zag. 3 They have never been tried by siege except briefly
from the air nor by famine except through poverty. With no
memories of suffering and humiliation at the hands of an in-
vader, with civil wars fought far from their borders, and the
ships at their wharves uniting them in trade with all the world,
the lot of Londoners through the centuries has been blest beyond
that of the citizens of other ancient capitals. If they are not
more humane, more tolerant, more liberty-loving and slower to
wrath than others, the fault is theirs. A case that they are so—
and the Londoners like to believe that they are so— can be out-
lined. How many cities and peoples of the world have benefited
in their calamities and distress by the Lord Mayor’s Fund?
And what other capitals produce such a fund of succour for the
world’s distress? London’s charities have almost kept pace with
her wealth, and her vast system of hospitals maintained by vol-
untary subscription, if a failing in a communal sense, is a credit
to her private munificence. No cause is too lost not to find funds
and sympathy in London. The Jacobites are allowed to hang
their wreaths and inscriptions on King Charles’s monument on
an appointed day ; communists and anarchists may preach their
doctrine in Hyde Park. When the Lord Mayor of Cork died in
prison
73
74. Ihe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
prison by his refusal of food and the body was brought through
London with a long Irish procession at a time of bitter guerrilla
war, the streets were cleared for the procession, and the
Londoners stood respectfully, and most of them uncovered as it
passed. After the Great War, London was the first capital of the -
Allies where our ex-enemies could be met again in social life.
It is a commonplace that partisans of conflicting political beliefs
meet together in friendliness as they do in no other centre of
politics. In London, too, those publicists of other nations who
have gone furthest in abuse and innuendo against England run
most chance of becoming social lions. Perhaps the explanation
is that this cynical, humoursome old city will not take anything
very seriously even those who write in such big headlines that he
who runs may read. Whatever it may be, it makes for the large-
ness and unconsciousness that one expects in a world’s capital.
But how to write of the Londoner? Is there a typical Lon-
doner? ‘I don’t believe there’s no sich person’ as that great
Londoner, Betsy Prig said of that typical Londoner, Mrs.
Harris. It is admitted nowadays that there is no typical Scot,
no typical Welshman—how, then,-can there be a typical inhabi-
tant of a city that contains more people than both these coun- —
tries, that contains more Scots by birth or parentage than
Edinburgh and more Irishmen than Dublin, more Welshmen
than Cardiff? All nations of the world are, or have been, repre-
sented in this capital of the world. Even the Thibetan has at
last come to it.
Yet in the past there have been men that were recognizably
Londoners. Only in such a centre of men of education and
leisure, of unsatiable appetite, constantly fed by sayings and
doings beyond the common interest, with the belief that there
would be nothing better, could Samuel Johnson have adequately
lived
LONDONERS 76
lived his life. Only in such a city would people have put up
with him. Carlyle had to come to London, although he mixed
little with its people and affairs, but lay deep in Chelsea like a
great fish which must come to a particular bank for some ocean
chemistry necessary for fertilization. Carlyle, Coleridge, Ros-
setti and Swinburne were London characters rather than Lon-
doners, for the sign of a Londoner is that he is one who desires
to be part of the race-tide of human existence in its fullest.
Browning alone of the major poets was such a one till he settled
in Italy. |
Dickens, Mr. Beresford Chancellor has advanced a theory, was
not a real Londoner, for he said things about London that no
London lover would say. There are no things too hard for a
London lover to say at times of this monstrous mistress of his.
Slattern, wanton, feather-headed, heavy-footed, lunatic as she
so often is, Dickens must have loved her to have given so much
of his life to her and to have exalted her with all his art. If
Hokusai did not love the mountain Fuji Yama which he drew
every day, if Shakespeare did not love England, if Balzac did
not love Paris, then Dickens was not a lover of London.
And Thackeray! He was a captious Londoner. With him it
often seemed as if London were his disease, and he could not
help telling all the symptoms (that is another sign of a true
Londoner). How clear-drawn, how workable, how familiar is
his London; how easily one recognizes it as one goes about in
any mood, while as a rule it is only in clairvoyant moments
that we know we stand in the immortal London of Dickens.
Thackeray with all his genius makes London seem a small
place; Dickens makes it as big as the skies or the human heart.
London brought Henry James from New York, Barrie from
Scotland, Shaw from Dublin, Wells from Sussex, and Bennett
, from
76 Th LONDON PERAMBULATOR
from Burslem; and each has enriched her with fine gifts that in
turn increased the lure of London to the youths of succeeding
generations. All of them could be counted true Londoners who
participated in the race-tide of London life. Of statesmen one
would say that Gladstone and Chamberlain were not Londoners
in the sense that London was not a necessity of their existence,
great though the part they played in it, while Palmerston and
Disraeli are inconceivable without London.
II
In the search for the true Londoner—in an exact use of the
term—one would have to discard many accepted types, the
counterpart of which would be found in any great city. The
bachelor of leisure who once populated Mayfair, and particu-
larly The Albany, is almost extinct, and the survivors live a good
deal abroad. There is little leisure in Mayfair now, not because
most of its young men profess to have some business, but
because motor-cars and their consequences, and the flood of
new-comers ferocious for gaiety, expressed by movement and
the new freedom of women, have ended leisure. No saunterings
now in the Locker-Lampson manner along Piccadilly and real
good yawning club-life. No long afternoons at Christie’s dis-
cussing their friends’ pictures and the disaster that has led to
their sale. Only the retention of family portraits lead to gossip
and innuendos now. The younger sons of the biggest families
cannot make ends meet, except the lucky ones who can join
them with the purse-strings of an heiress, and those who retire
on pension from the Army or Navy or Indian Service can hardly
live on it even if bachelors. The West End is full of beach-
combers in these days, although it looks the same as ever. If the
gentlemen of the Dilettanti Club came down from their frame
in
LONDONERS 77
in Reynold’s picture they would find little left of the old May-
fair men about town and the old Mayfair leisure that they knew,
although they would have found both in plenty in King
Edward’s reign. In Victorian times the young Englishman of
means differed from the young man of means in other countries
in his passion for sport, athletics, and travel ; but to-day, when all
nations have adopted the English games and everybody travels,
he is less distinctive, and the Milor, like our cavalry regiments,
only exists on sufferance.
Of course, in the vast social microcosm of the West End (which
in George V’s reign has its arc from Hampstead to Wimbledon)
there are still Major Pendennises and Sir Mulberry Hawkes and
Mr. Waggs and a thousand survivals of the Victorian Londoner,
but even to themselves they are not the true variety. They have
dwindled, lost plumage, lost crest, lost spurs, lost heckle. The
brilliance of the capital was expressed in their glossy high hats,
their punctilio of clothes to every detail. Now they go about
in their most Eleusinian streets in broad daylight with soft
collars and travelling hats and anyhow coats as though they were
all in the motor-car trade. Reflective foreigners visiting London
after an interval get the impression of a society that is homeless
and on the move. The young Pendennis of our day may pos-
sibly be as authentic a London type as his ancestors ; night-clubs
and country-clubs and the tremendous improvisation of the
London life of richer classes must throw out some perfect
specimens, but the universal restaurant entertaining and the
averaging of town costume have destroyed him as the London
spectacle that in the nineties bade the rash gazer wipe his eye.
The motor-car, indeed, has destroyed very quickly — more
quickly than steam destroyed Georgian elegance—a whole
elegant aspect of the Victorian capital. The London of the
young
78 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
young man coming up from the country twenty odd years ago
is a good period to look back upon. A pioneer motor-bus or
two (‘mustard-pots’) had added a new stench to the streets, and
the horse-bus people looked on them as comical freaks of the
moment, as the Thames shipmasters looked on Denny’s Rob
Roy when it puffed its way up the Thames less than a century
before. The hansom, swaying delicately in unison with the
horse, the whip: poised like a lance in its holder, and, to protect
the enamel of the top of the cab, the cotton summer cover in
colours or white with tassels, made in most cases by the cabby’s
wife, as the wives of the gondolieri still makes covers for the
cabin-tops of gondolas, seem now as far away as the clean, gay,
leisurely London streets in Thomas Shotter Boys’s lithographs.
At night the waiting hansoms from the Gaiety Theatre door,
serpentined along the Strand, with their lamps tinkling in the
summer twilight, was a happy sight. There were still state
coaches of grandees to be seen, and one night at a Coronation
reception at the India Office the coaches, after discharging their
jewelled freight, were drawn up side to side at right angles to
the streets from Craig’s Court to Montagu House. The horses
were taken out and the coaches left with only one tall footman
with powdered hair and rich livery sitting on the great box
with its embroidered hammercloth. It was their last rally, for
at King George’s Coronation there were hardly half a dozen
private coaches, and now there are only the royal ones and the
Lord Mayor’s. In the Park it was still the fashion to drive in
Victorias, the footmen wearing evening dress, and the sight of
ladies sunning themselves in these open, airy vehicles had a
Venetian charm, a spectacle at once intimate and leisurely, con-
trasting curiously with the closed-in appearance and harassed
look of restrained speed that the grandest motor-car gives. The
: youths
“ial
FCN | P aS eo
$5 nt
Fernial a8 '
An ag
jal
TMG apis x
Ng Oa
praca
wait F.
3 ni ght
: hi ny Ae te tek v,
‘ o) ‘st hae mn us ue Ga y; ;
THE CENOTAPH, I9I19
LONDONERS 79
youths of to-day can have no more idea what the Park was like
in those days than their elders can have of Mayfair with sedan-
chairs and linkboys.
If the London fastuosus Londiniensis is now ararity, there are
still, however, a few West London varieties more difficult to
identify, but as indigenous and characteristic. The upper Civil
Servant that Mr. Bennett has drawn so discerningly in Mr.
Prohack is one: usually a public-school and university man,
member of an esteemed club, often of old family, close to the
great worlds of fashion and finance, but not of them, concerned
in affairs and taking decisions that matter to millions, acquainted
with secrets of highest financial and political value, but living
quietly his office, club, and home life in a sort of priestly service
and obscurity.
Another West London type of a very different sort that can
be produced only in a capital is more difficult to discern. One
is always reading how this or that royal princess excels in
statuary or water-colours or marquetry work, or is organizing
some astonishing miniature city, or has become a Ruritanian
dog-fancier; or that a royal prince, in order to excel in some
manly or artistic accomplishment, is taking lessons from some
unnamed expert. All this activity means the forming of con-
nections between the Court and numbers of usually humble in-
conspicuous people, leading often to curious ramifications and
surprising encounters. A little modeller of deceased royal dogs,
for instance, living in the depths of Camden Town, has had
many royal visitors, and at least one who stopped to tea. (What
a theme for Henry James — with the arrival of country relatives
thrown in!) I have heard of one such specialist who, after a
great visitor had gone, told a friend: ‘I chatted His Royal High-
ness into a bronze.’ These connections, if long maintained, are
humanly
80 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
humanly recognized on the Court side, and the offspring of
such teachers and specialists keep them alive in an almost
Oriental way.
This variety of Londoner is perhaps too inconsiderable to
deserve mention, but it touches something very characteristic of
West London. Every one who has mixed much with Londoners
of all classes must have been struck by the frequency of reference
to royalty, not only in the middle class, but among the poorer
people. The abundance of processions, the writings and photo-
graphs in the popular Press, of course, have much to do with it;
but again and again one seems to detect in the latest street
legend or in remarks in the crowd at a procession that there is
some latent understanding and sympathy with the old traditions
of a medieval capital. The story, for instance, that went every-
where in the streets in 1924 about the girl who swallowed the
octipus egg, and the octipus had growed inside so was
dying and ’ad to be smothered, and they were waiting now for
_ permission of the King in Buckingham Palace, was only one of
the many sporadic Cockney stories with a royal reference that
has gone round the town. The stories of Queen Alexandra, who
has so gracious a hold over so many London hearts, are trans-
lated into the terms of life of the teller, sometimes very strangely.
The death of King Edward turned the thoughts of so many
London women only to Queen Alexandra, and one Battersea
charwoman told with tears how ‘it took six of them, they say,
to get her out of the room, screamin’ and strugglin’ awful.’
There was a vision as old as Troy in that sympathetic woman’s
mind. That habit of translating life into their own terms is
characteristic of the Cockney. I remember about dawn on the
Coronation morning of King Edward a discussion at a coffee-
stall in front of the Abbey about the King, and an old woman
there
LONDONERS SI
there said: ‘He’s led a gay life, he has; there ain’t a slum in
Whitechapel he ain’t bin in!’ Her second sentence only meant
that that was her idea of life set free from decorum. At royal
weddings the comment of the crowd has often a breadth of
licence that Herrick or Pepys would have recognized and liked,
but it is often curiously informed about the personal relations
of the grandees like the talk of medieval citizens. The gusto of
it, too, is astonishing. These modern Romans must have their
shows adequately provided for them, for their expert admiration
or mockery —more often for a combination of both.
_ A unit in a London crowd may not give an idea of the multi-
tude any better than a drop of water does of the ocean, but for
analytical purposes it has its value. Those students of London
life who were hanging on the railings outside Richmond Ter-
race near the Cenotaph in Whitehall on Princess Mary’s wed-
ding day had an unusual opportunity for such study. Typical
of many thousands of London women of poor but not poverty-
stricken circumstances who had come many miles to see the
wedding procession and intended that they should enjoy them-
selves, holding that the pageant was all part of their lawful
rights as Londoners, was a mother with two children and three
female friends from East Ham. She wore (she explained in
conversation) four skirts and two petticoats, and her children had
each an additional layer of clothes. It had not rained, the Feb-
ruary sun was bright and almost warm, and life for the moment
was in flower. It soon became clear from what she said and what
her friends said about her that she was a social leader in her
district, and she deserved to be, having wit, audacity, and an
intense sense of human contact. 7
Of course, she had also the traditional old London lore. “When
the soldier goes so—sharp—it means that royalty is comin’,
7 and
82 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
and when you see a hunting party in a red coat and top-’at by
himself it means the same thing. Why a’nt the police put down
the sand?’ She wore a faded velvet long coat with big buttons,
but some fastenings tied by tape, and a rabbit-skin muff. Her
test of worth was whether people could smile or not. ‘Coo-ee,’
she cried to a hard-faced old lord as his carriage pushed past,
‘’Ere we are, Henry —smile at your Susie. Not him! He don’t
smile once a month for all his money.’ She and her friends
cheered most of the guests in a gay, friendly and critical sort of
way. “There y’are, ’oorah! I do like to see a kerrage and pair
after all them motors. Put on your gloves, dear. You'll be there
in a minute. Nice—ain’t she?’ She approved, but critically.
Once she was really shocked, declaring that a footman had
wiped his nose on his glove and that wasn’t manners. It was
extraordinary to see how her chaffing broke down before Queen
Alexandra. "Ow, you dear old dear!’ she cried, as the coach
went slowly past. “That’s her— always goes slow so you can see
her. She’d stick her head out the carriage window if she got
half a chance.’ About Queen Mary she said—‘Naice, sitting
there with her two sons.’ She had some sharp things to say about
many of the eminent people who went past. ‘Hallo!’ she shouted
to a very grand lady in a carriage, ‘who’s that with your
That ain’t your husband, Flossie! Nice carry-on at a royal
procession. I am going to put a lot to dy down in my diary.
I’m keeping a diary, you know— same’s Margot. It won’t make
half a sensation in East Ham when it’s printed, I promise
you.’
This was greeted with great joy by her friends, who now
numbered the whole ledge on which she was seated and all the
railings and a good bit of pavement. She got a little out of
hand when she elaborated the possible consequences of this
_ wedding
LONDONERS 83
wedding and weddings in general, but when the crowd somehow
indicated when she was too Rabelaisian she said, ‘Well, I’m
going to talk genteel now, just like I did before.’ “There he is!
Al-fred, wiv your fevvered hat and jewels. Here we are. We’re
all here. Smile a bit, can’t you?’ She prophesied what she was
going to say when the Princess would pass. ‘Princess— Princess
Mary. You'll be Mrs. Lascelles, my love, in a minute . . . and
when she hears me shouting out she’ll stick her head out the
window thinking it’s a bomb going off. You'll see.’ But when
the Princess came along with her glittering escort and grand
coach collecting all the sunshine out of the dark lavender sky,
and we had a glimpse of the delicate costume and the bright
face with a wavering smile, the lady from East Ham was all eyes
and said nothing at all.
III
While it is admittedly impossible to give a typical Londoner,
the lady from East Ham may properly be identified as a fore-
ground figure whose presence gives life and emphasis to the
pictures of London that remain in ones mind. There is another
sort of London foreground figure less lively but better known
because their occupation keeps them always in public view at
a particular spot and whose disappearance we feel is a personal
grievance. There were, for instance, almost up to the War years,
Mother Kitchen and Mother Bury, who kept the milk-stall in
St. James’s Park. No record existed how long the stall had been
there, but the old ladies believed that their family had been
given the privilege of the site in the Mall by Charles II, because
they had given a glass of milk to his father when the White
King was being marched across the Park to his execution at
Whitehall. The stall, at any rate, had been in the family for
several
84 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
several generations, and middle-aged people can remember
their two cows they kept there to milk. ‘Buy a glass of red cow’s
milk,’ they used to cry. Old Londoners used to remember how
they sold syllabub here. Moorland made a charming print of
their ancestress with cows. When the new Mall was made they
were turned out. The old ladies sat all night on their ginger-
beer boxes, with their cow beside them, while the old railing,
to which their cow had been tethered, and the friendly tree
which had shaded them, were brought down. All London was
stirred, and the Office of Works in the end was forced to grant
them a stall at the lake for the rest of their lives.
Ancient rights and vested interests of a humble kind now and
again get publicity in the Press, but the extent of them is not
realized. Nearly all newspaper-sellers and flower-sellers with
a settled pitch where they display their papers or place their
flower-baskets have established by some means or other a
~ recognized right to their position, and in many cases could sell
them at a good figure. Newspaper stances near an inn of court
or hotel and flower-sellers’ near a hospital are most prized. In
a number of cases the pitch has been seized and held against
all comers in the past by some ancestor of the present holder.
A few pavement artists, too, have established a right to certain
well-placed flags by favour of police. There are unauthorized
men who attach themselves to a particular tavern simply by
being always somewhere about the door, and after they have
been sent an errand or two and helped a tired customer to a
taxi-cab, they somehow come to be accepted, even by the land-
lord, as having some sort of right to be there, and by touching
their hats to regular customers they establish a tip-giving circle;
if a new landlord comes, their position is usually consolidated as
one of the fixtures. London is full of Silas Weggs with claims as
unsubstantiated
LONDONERS 8
unsubstantiated as many of our oldest landowners. Often they
are known to cabmen and kerb-folk by the name of the tavern
to which they have connected themselves. There was one
middle-aged nondescript in Parliament Street known as ‘Red
Lion,’ because he was always on call there and fetched cabs for
the house. Usually he did nothing but polish his nose with a
red cotton handkerchief. One day Fate took the Red Lion in
hand, sending a party of runners and stokers to the tavern on
their way to Victoria Station to take train to a port where two
new Russian storeships were going east at the time of the Russo-
Japanese war. The Red Lion that day found life blossoming
unto him in quarts and pints, and he departed in the midst of
a hilarious band. There was some public interest in the event,
and I went to the station to see the train go. It was a confused,
swarming, noisy scene, seamen and friends and followers, and
there in a crowded carriage, with his arm around a seaman’s
neck, joining in a bawling sea-chorus, was the Red Lion,
flushed and happy. He never came back again, and as the
ships were taken by the Japanese, he probably found in ‘Tokio
or Kobe or somewhere his old familiar sign. I like to think
of him in a kimono outside a shop with a Red Lion sign regard-
ing the eastern world without curiosity and calling rickshaws.
It would be curious if all sorts of queer privileges and posts
were not claimed and accepted in such a city as London, with
its rights of ancient lights, its sale of sites on 999 years’ leases,
and the fact that in London to-day, if you search for it, you can
find, worn as a regular costume, not as fancy dress, some cos-
tume of nearly every period from the reign of Henry VII to that
of Queen Victoria. The last point seems incredible, but I think
it is probably understated rather than overstated. The Lord
Chancellor’s robes date at least from Henry VII; the Yeoman
of
86 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
of the Guard from Henry VII; the Blue-coat boy’s costume is
that a servitor of Edward VI; bishops and City councillors
look much the same in prints of Elizabeth’s reign. I shall leave
the Jameses and Charleses to the learned men to sort out such
uniforms as that of the Life Guards’ Band with dark blue jockey
cap and long gold-braided doublet and jackboots, and the dress
of many City company dignitaries, and pass to the judge’s
full-bottomed wig and gown of William and Mary period, the
counsel’s wig and gown of Queen Anne, and the beautiful
costume of the Children of the Chapel Royal and girls of the
Foundling Hospital. The Doggett Coat that is raced for on the
Thames every year dates from George I; and our present Court
costume and the liveries of the Mansion House footmen belong
to the Regency or the reign of George IV. It might be a good
game for amateurs of London to try who can find the greatest
number of such ancient costumes still existing in London. How
many pure Victorian costumes does one notice in the streets?
Soldiers of most regiments, bank messengers and walk-clerks,
firemen with their brass helmets, city policemen, toastmasters,
butlers, fish-porters, Eton boys, Epping Forest rangers, waiters,
and so on. But it is to be noted that, except in a few charitable
institutions and in religious bodies, female dress never became
static at any period.
A queer survival of a supposed ancient right was the elderly
man who swept a little passage between Landsowne House
and Devonshire House, a narrow right-of-way from Berkeley
Street to Stratton Street, through which, according to tradition,
a mounted highwayman once escaped, hence the upright iron
bar at the east entrance to prevent it happening again. Some
one had given the sweeper an old huntsman’s coat and cap, and
he was an odd figure, as odd as the passage he swept. He came
into
LONDONERS 87
into the police court once as a witness, and the judge was amazed
at his appearance, as this dialogue shows:
_ THE JupGE: Are you a field-marshal?
THE MAN: No, my lord. I am the sweeper of Lansdowne
Passage.
- THE JUDGE: Very well then.
The elderly sweeper has gone now, and the passage itself is
about to go.
The stout woman whipminder of Covent Garden Market will
probably be the last of the long succession of minders who have
guarded the whips, and, when required, given correct informa-
tion as to the tavern where the owners were, ever since there
was a market.
An excellent beadle of the Royal Opera Arcade in Pall Mall
(which has long survived the Royal Opera House there) still
parades that elegant little-known corridor, giving his salute to the
famous personages who go to the discreet barber’s shop there
with the wax bust of the lovely gentleman in Dundreary whisk-
ers — auburn and silky — staring impassively from the window
like the last of the milors.
But as an animate London memorial the most interesting of
all was, I think, the old lady of Charing Cross. All observant
Londoners knew her. She had been an institution of West
London for more than half a century. She sold newspapers at
Charing Cross. She once told me that when she was a baby her
mother used to nurse her in her arms as she sold newspapers
outside old Northumberland House, in the Strand. Northum-
berland House was pulled down, the Percy lion went to wag its
tail at Isleworth, and the family pitch of this newspaper dynasty
was removed to Charing Cross. There it remained until the
buses made things too busy, so the pitch was moved again to
the
88 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
the rounded headland where Northumberland Avenue curves
into Charing Cross.
She was a little old woman, over seventy, but well preserved,
keeping the red in her cheeks like a country-woman almost to
the end, and with a pair of blue eyes—remarkably blue, like
for-get-me-nots. You used to see her in all sorts of weather sit-
ting there on a little kitchen chair, a curiously domestic figure
in the centre of the world. She had taken the chair at Charing
Cross for as long as anyone could remember, and, sitting quietly
there with her papers, or standing on her chair when there was
a procession (vacating the chair, like the Speaker, when there
was disorder), she had seen London history. She had seen the
Trafalgar Square riots, when Mr. Cunninghame Graham and
Mr. John Burns fought the police, and she had seen all the
women’s suffrage riots, and all that had taken place between
these events. She must have seen the Garibaldi pass, possibly
even Wellington, and General Gordon, and other figures in the
flesh which afterwards appeared in stone or bronze over in the
Square. You can conceive her as a sibyl, or as the ancient
spirit of London holding a review in Trafalgar Square, with all
the notables of the world filing past her.
When the advent of the motor-bus drove her from her old
place down Charing Cross, the lamp-post against which her
rickety old chair used to stand was also removed, and the kerb-
stone was marked to show, I suppose, where the gas-pipe was.
That mark, which is in the form of a cross, is still there, and the
cross will remain until it is rubbed out by people’s feet as a
memorial of the Old Lady of Charing Cross. :
As a Londoner, however, rather than a London memorial, she
had her superior in the Old Lady of Fleet Street. She could only
have existed in a great capital. Conceive a little woman, care-
fully
LONDONERS 89
fully and tastefully dressed in worn-out clothes, with a neat
bonnet, carrying a tray of collar-studs, matches, pipe-cleaners,
and such little articles. With her clear skin, a touch of red on
each cheek, and silvery hair, she reminded you of a Dresden
china figure that had been rather roughly used. Most remark-
able of all was her smile, a sweet smile of sociability and self-
respect, which she did not keep for her regular customers, but
for anyone who conversed with her. All the other kerb-hawkers
sought her society when they could, and after lunch-time, when
trade was quieter, she used to hold a little court in the flagged
passage at St. Bride’s church, and the hawkers would hold her
tray while she set her bonnet straight and would tell her loudly
— she was rather deaf — of their luck and of the new iniquities
of the police and the motor-buses. She was a ruling figure in a
big circle, holding her position by her charm and social tact
and her good looks in an environment and occupation that ought
humanly to have left nothing but anxiety and hardness.
Down in Dockland there was—perhaps still isa woman
who resembled her, though not in appearance, for Mary of Can-
ton Street was a little hunchback creature who never had time
to think of her dress. She was the drudge of a boarding-house
where needy sea apprentices stayed when they came ashore to
attend the sea-coaches and face their examinations as second
mate. It was a dingy place that even the second-rate performers
of the third-rate local music-hall would not go to except when
they had been unfortunate in their betting, yet even ship cap-
tains and chief engineers, to the abashment of the youngsters,
would occasionally look in when their ship was in dock. They
came to see Mary, and to look at the loose, dingy, fly-marked
mirror which was a focus of the Seven Seas. Round its glass,
where many a brassbounder had taken a serious look at himself
| before
go The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
before going to face the dread examiners with their new gadgets,
were letters with strange stamps and postmarks, some over a
year old, a few much older than that. One I remember with
the ‘Mr.’ carefully crossed out and ‘Captain’ substituted in
Mary’s scrawling hand, showing how events had marched since
friends last met. Iquique, Bahia, Riga, San Francisco, Bilbao,
Montreal, Hankow, Galveston, and most of the world’s ports,
had been seen in postmarks round this tarnished mirror or in
the pile of letters on the mantelshelf. Mary looked after these
letters ; a number of them were addressed simply “Care of Mary,
200a, Canton Street, London.’ There were other and official
rendezvous for seamen’s and ships’ officers’ letters, but these lads
are doubtful of everything but personal relationships, so they
held to Mary for this service. And for more than that, for Mary
spent laborious hours following the ships of her lads over the
world by the news from the comings and goings of mariners in
the district, and by loans of Lloyd’s Shipping Gazette. She had
always some knowledge where the ships were, and who had leit
the old Strathendrick and got a berth on the Concordia, and why
the Red Rock had not returned, and the innumerable changes
in the personnel of tramp shipping. So Mary of Canton Street
with her inexhaustible patience and kindness did service for these
lads whoes lives were hard, with few edifying women in them,
for it was not the Conway-Worcester type of the Mercantile
Marine who came to Canton Street, but mainly a needy lot,
some of them after many years before the mast, who were mak-
ing their bid for the quarter-deck late in their seafaring life.
Many mariners would come to Canton Street on the chance of
letters, but mainly for a gossip with Mary about the lads: who
had got promotion, who had got into trouble; who had swal-
lowed the anchor, and who was drowned. And Mary would do
little
LONDONERS gi
little offices for them, buy a present for a sweetheart, or lend a
hand in correspondence, or do some clothing repairs, or give
advice about etiquette or irregular affairs. She was human and
kindly and honest, and the best woman many of these young
men were likely to know. She will be missed in many ports and
seas when the news comes that Mary is no more in Canton
Street.
IV
All great cities have the gift of anonymity for those who seek
it, but in London, where districts are so widely separated and
interests so plentiful, there is the added reticence of the English
character and his desire to make his home his castle, and the
gift comes almost without seeking. It is a commonplace that
most Londoners do not know the name of their next-door
neighbours, the main exceptions to this being among the very
rich or the very poor; many know nothing about the private
life of their business colleagues, and are usually surprised to
hear that a well-known man lives in their district. You may
know a man for years without learning whether he is married or
single. That is a sign of a very large city, for it is only where
distances are great, that the male is usually free from his home
ties for the day, mixing his social and business arrangements in
the metropolitan manner, returning at night to his home, which
may be elsewhere, for thousands of middle-class London men
have their homes in Brighton or Guilford or Sevenoaks, or in
enlarged old towns and villages in Bucks or Hertfordshire. The
tendency of a great community is to make for smoothness in the
conduct of life; for the social units are usually so many that you
need not meet the same discomforts twice; people find it easy
to surround themselves with a circle of others of like type, and
social
92 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
social cotton-wool is in constant use. Understatement, the hu-
mour of the Londoner, is really only a form of self-defence.
In a London street see your real Cockney moving like an eel
through the press, hardly touching as he goes, always giving
way yet always going on with an eye impersonal and interested
at the same time. He is used to blocks, scents them before he
is entangled, knows the alternative ways to anywhere, never
asks questions except derisive ones, for he has learnt early that
nobody really knows till next day what has happened. But the
average London man of the street will accept and make fixed
ideas of dramatic, dubious stories of big events. “he Kaiser
said he would eat his Christmas dinner at Buckingham Palace.
What about that?’ was a common question in 1914. “Kitchener
wasn’t drowned. He’s a prisoner in Germany. I know a man
who seen a letter from a man in the same camp.’ He keeps his
credulity for large romantic things, especially for dreams and
portents about race-horses, and he has a pathetic belief that some
day the tipster of his favourite newspaper will make him a rich
man. But this is a digression. In London, the largest of all
cities, a man can only get about by minding his own business,
and he learns that lesson too well.
Public opinion, except in the very poor quarters, hardly exists
in the sense that it exists in an ordinary city, and men of repu-
tation and position who elsewhere would be forced by public
opinion to play their part in civic affairs and on the bench never
even trouble to vote, and their only appearance at a police court
is probably as defendant for motoring too fast. “Who is the
Londoner’s eminent fellow-citizen?’ has been posed as a ques-
tion that is inconceivable. Yet take a hundred good men from
the London suburbs and set them down in a country town —
what a figure they would cut! They would distribute prizes,
move
BLOOMSBURY
LONDONERS 93
move resolutions, make pulverizing anti-Socialist or Socialist
speeches, present drill-halls, give profound judgments from the
bench, resist or impose some sorts of oppression, and the town
newspapers would print their speeches in full and they would
be labelled as ‘our eminent fellow-citizen.’? But in London no
one knows much about them or even of the really eminent until
one finds out in a roundabout way that Sir James Fraser of the
Golden Bough has left the Temple where he has been living for
years, or by the news of his death learns that Hudson the great
bird-lover and wanderer had long lived in a Bayswater terrace.
How many people—despite the modern gossip columns in the
newspapers — know where our celebrities live? If you look up
Who’s Who, you will find that the only address given of some of
the most distinguished is ‘care of? their publisher. This brings
me to the point that London is the only city in the country with
a large number of people with telephones who will not allow
their names to appear in the telephone-book. There are a few
houses in inner London with the name of the householder on
the door, and there are many districts where it is almost im-
possible to get the names of the residents. And any visitor to
London who expects to get the address of a relative at his place
of business will draw the blankest refusal. The double lite must
be more easy to live in London than anywhere. The cases that
are found out appear in police news, but from the length of time
in which it appeared they were practised before discovery, it 1S
fair to assume that very many cases are never disclosed. I have
read of a number of instances where the man maintained two
households in the same district.
But it is the innocent double life that circumstances and the
national characteristics have forced on so many middle-class
Londoners that is, I think, the strangest product of the place.
The
94 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
The disconnection between the business life and home because
of the distances has curious results. Smith lives in West Nor-
wood and is a consulting engineer in Victoria Street. Gradually
he finds himself one of a group of eight or nine men of the
region whom he gets to know through business or chance, and
they lunch together nearly every day. A social unit is created,
they come to call one another by Christian name, even by nick-
name: their conversation is mainly on minor business points,
jokes about Scotsmen and Jews, restaurants, drinks, motor-cars,
tobacco, the latest murder, old popular songs, music-halls,
theatres, the Derby, repartees, novelties in metal pencils or note-
cases. [he game is confined to the pawns; politics and religion,
the large pieces are rarely moved; art, poetry, and love are not
on the board at all. In the unit I have in mind women are rarely
mentioned and the salt joke is almost extinct. The group may
continue to meet for twenty years with changes. One man will
turn up in black and the others will learn somehow that his
wife is dead and that is the first they have heard of her. I have
heard of cases where Tom or Bill or ‘Pumps’ would simply fall
out, and whether he had gone elsewhere or had dropped dead
no one knew. One will say: ‘We haven’t seen much of Tom
(or Bill or “Pumps”) lately. Wonder what he’s after?? And
oblivion will close over the missing one except where one of the
others may meet him again by the chance of a golf-draw at
Brighton, and learn that the absentee’s firm has now organized
a luncheon inside the office, or some one reads an obituary of
him in a newspaper and finds that he had done something showy
in the War, and was an authority on Hydro-Electric Ship-
Propulsion.
These units exist in large numbers in many varieties all over
London, meeting in restaurants, clubs, and tea-shops, apparently
old
LONDONERS 95
old friends with common ties and passwords, spending a fair
slice of their sojourn on this earth together, yet with no join
between that life and their warmer life elsewhere. Not only do
many Londoners lead this innocent double life, but sometimes
they have two names. A man becoming proprietor of Blank’s
business may become known by the name of the firm accepting
the demands of customers by visit and by telephone to speak to
Mr. Blank himself. The Englishman’s inclination not to ex-
plain himself and not to fuss is at its strongest in London.
Being in London is a little like being on a ship. ‘You are sup-
posed to know, and it is bad manners to ask questions.
As an illustration of the casualness of a Londoner about his
own identity and his appalling good nature, I may give the case
of A. E. Prince, a little office manager of a group of small
agency businesses in the City. There were three of them where
Mr. Prince presided and worked for them all, but he was em-
ployed by one firm who charged the others for his services.
For some reason this arrangement terminated and one of the
other firms went elsewhere, and Mr. Prince went with it. After
some years he married, and his employer thought so much of
him that he presented him with a ‘handsome black marble
clock,’ of course, with a tablet on it engraved with his name and
good wishes. Mr. Prince received it with gratitude, but latterly
he asked if his right name could be put on it, as his bride would
not like it as it was. The agent, much surprised, asked what his
real name was. He had always known him as ‘Mr. Prince,’ and
every one called him ‘Mr. Prince.’ What was the point? he
point was, it turned out, that his name was Albert Edward
Brown. His friends had jocularly called him ‘Prince’ because
of the Albert Edward. A new office-boy heard him called
‘Prince,’ so ‘Mr. Prince’ began, and other office-boys, of course,
did
did the same. He had noticed the spread of the habit nee
and then when the change of office came he didn’t like to put his
new employer right. He was not one to fuss. And so it came
about that he accepted ‘Mr. Prince,’ and only the wedding could
have brought him to the point of explanation. He had reache
a double life by pure inadvertence and hatred of fuss. _
_ There I must leave the Londoners, feeling painfully conscio
how inadequately one has faced the subject. Who can pa
compass over Leviathan?
The CLUB STREETS
Se a
The CLUB STREETS
ra Ne ONDON has hundreds of specialized and charac-
2) fears teristic streets that could exist nowhere else, de-
peo scoet| manding as they do an area of support that could
> ee Sy x only be possible in a very great city and having a
Derr A character that is patently English and metropoli-
tan. There are streets of publishers, of fish-merchants, of bed-
ding manufacturers, of idol-merchants, of tea-dealers, of stock-
brokers, doctors, fur-traders, fruiterers, dog-sellers, and scores of
other professions and trades. The medieval city system of pre-
scribed quarters for each trade still lingers voluntarily in Lon-
don, although the quarters sometimes change, as with publishing,
which is moving from Paternoster Row to Bloomsbury, and
silversmiths who have departed from Fleet Street and the Strand.
You will still find in some parts prosperous remnants of a trade
that once occupied the whole neighborhood but passed elsewhere
with the change in the lives of the population. One of the oddest
things in the London of to-day is the group of millinery and
drapery shops in St. Paul’s Churchyard, a relic of the pre-Fire
London when this district was a centre of the mercery trade.
When people ceased to live in the City and very few middle-
class women ever ventured there, these shops must have had thin
times. It was such a long way for a carriage to come from Den-
mark Hill or Highbury or Clapham, and the horses would get
cold waiting and the enamel of the brougham or landau would
run fearful risks in the rough City traffic. However, the shops
} | have
oe)
100. The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
have survived and prospered, and have now reached a time when
about a quarter of the City day population is women. There is
a pleasant mid-Victorian flavour about this part, with its pastry-
cook’s shop with ‘Routs supplied’ on its inside sign, and knick-
knack shops, and societies that receive subscriptions ‘for the
blacks’ —I am sure I have seen here a cabman with a blue rib-
bon in his buttonhole. There is a congenial twisted little street
that connects St. Paul’s Churchyard with St. Paul’s Station, a
street with little shops where you can buy a pint of shrimps,
or watercress, or a glass epergne or six-bottled cruet, to take
home to Blackheath or Dulwich. |
In the West End a characteristic that one notices all the more
as it is passing away is its distinctively male and female streets,
even districts. Old Regent Street at one time had not a single
tobacco-shop, and even to-day the Strand has not a shop where
a woman can buy a blouse or a reel of cotton. Nobody decrees
these things except the Spirit of the place. Millions of smoking
gentlemen in their time have promenaded Regent Street, and
the Strand has always had its actresses and chorus-girls and
hotel population. Sackville Street and Savile Row are still
exclusively male, and Sloane Street almost exclusively female.
Panton Street, Haymarket, until the other day, was perhaps the
most comprehensively male street in town. It begins with a
famous repository of chutnees, pickles, sharks’ fins, béche-de-
mer, cocks’ combs, caviare, and elephant’s foot jelly, and its chiet
restaurant, a very old-fashioned place of the Tom-and-Jerry
period and aspect, will not allow a woman within its doors; its
finest shop sells only men braces; military and naval prints,
guns, sporting boots, camp outfits, tobacco and snuff, and family
plate, occupy its other shopkeepers. :
Then there are the club streets. I like Charles Street best, its
one
The CLUB STREETS 101
one end opening on the gardens of St. James’s Square, with its
equestrian statue on its Portland stone block, and the vista the
other way ending with Nash’s sedately elegant Haymarket
Theatre. On the north side the Junior United Service Club
dominates the street with its handsome Victorian facade and
impressive bronze lamp-standards, and on the other side the
funny little entrance to the always almost deserted Royal Opera
Arcade discloses a perspective like a linear drawing of the
forties, and further along is the discreet brick face of the
Caledonian Club. The street most charged with town romance
is, of course, St. James’s Street, with the old brick palace of the
Tudors at the bottom and Whig and Tory clubs guarding the
approach, and the venerable shops of Lock’s the hatters and
Berry’s the wine-merchants, and the air of macaroni fantasy that
has never quite left the street. Nor ever can leave it. Its slope
and leisurely pavement and the diamond-shaped clock on the
palace gateway provokes a strut in the wits as well as the legs.
Sir Herbert Tree was much at home there. A young gentleman
passing up this street met the actor, who had just come out from
a club with his hat in his hand. They spoke and the young
gentleman, rather at a loss what to say, remarked as he looked
at the red lining of Tree’s hat, ‘What a nice lining your hat has!’
‘You like it?’ asked Tree with a rich, generous accent; ‘then it
is yours.’ He tore out the lining of his hat, presented it to him,
and strode away, leaving a dismayed young gentleman on the
pavement of St. James’s Street holding a red hat-lining in his
hand. There are many old stories of the street, but that modern
one is as appropriate as any.
But the most clubby street of all is, of course, Pall Mall. Pall
Mall! It sounds like no other street, and it is like no other street
in the world. Its name came from a game played by Stuart
princes
102 Tie LONDON PERAMBULATOR
princes near their palace, and it has been a street of gallant
leisure to those nearest the Court for nigh 300 years. The
palace of the Tudors is at one end, and Trafalgar Square at the
other. Marlborough House, where the great Duke lived, and
where the eldest son of Queen Victoria took up house on his
marriage, and remained until he became King, has its gates
entering on its western end. Pepys wrote of it as a place for
clubbing, and even to-day it is virtually a street of clubs. The
club is an English institution, and although it has spread all
over the world, there is no city except London that has a whole
street of clubs. They set the tone and pace of the street.
Ordinarily, this is a street of leisure, where people walk with
pleasure and expect every yard or two to see a friend. The
returned Anglo-Indian, or big-game hunter from Africa, or
official from distant parts of the earth, does not feel that he is
back in London till he has taken his lean brown face along Pall
Mall, and exchanged nods with old friends and (if in an expan-
sive mood) a word or two with the old commissionaire of his
club. Pall Mall was home to most of the originals of Kipling’s
stories. Truly the unknown poet expressed the cri-de-ceur of
his countrymen when he wrote:
‘There’s no place like club.’
Most of these ‘material monasteries’ (in Mr. Lucas’s fine
phrase) date from the first half of last century. The United
Service Club, on the east side of Waterloo Place, was the Duke
of Wellington’s favourite club, and the members benefited by
his intrepidity, for here he bearded the Committee and had the
price of his midday chop reduced to a shilling. Peace hath her
victories. On the other side of Waterloo Place is the Atheneum,
guarded by Minerva over the porch, the only lady who has so
| far
The CLUB STREETS 103
far taken a permanent place in a Pall Mall club. The club-
house is the work of Decimus Burton, who built the Hyde Park
Corner entrance, and it has the finest club library in London.
Membership of the Atheneum connotes eminence in the Arts
or in the Church. It is a favourite retreat to-day of Sir James
Barrie, and there, in an atmosphere of Anglican bishops and
the greatest living authorities on the most difficult subjects, and
guarded by their silence, Sir James writes his fairy stories and
his Scots dialect romances. Many eminent Americans have been
members there, and Mr. Henry James has described its peace in
phrases as soporific as its writing-room. It is within fairly recent
memory that smoking came to be permitted within its precincts.
Next to the Atheneum is Barry’s Travellers’ Club. Its mem-
bership is limited to those who have travelled at least 500 miles,
a much easier qualification nowadays than when the club was
formed, but it is still a very exclusive body and keeps out of the
newspapers. Then comes the Reform—also by Barry —with its
grim Italianate exterior that recalls the Farnese Palacein Rome.
It looks like a place of secrets, but is really the final gesture of
the Whig Party, and it now houses such democratic figures as
Mr. Arnold Bennett and Mr. Wells. The Carlton Club, sepa-
rated from the Reform by a little alley, is a more ornate edifice,
which lately changed its coat of Caen stone and polished granite
for one of well-cut Portland stone designed by Sir Reginald
Blomfield. Every Conservative Member of Parliament is eli-
gible for membership.
The Marlborough Club, at No. 52, was established not long
after his marriage by that Prince of Wales who was afterwards
_ Edward VII. Every candidate for membership had to be ap-
proved by the Prince, who found at this club, a few steps from
his own door, a place where he could meet his friends without
ceremony
104 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
ceremony. It was the custom in the club that he was treated
only as a fellow-member, and it was considered bad form if any-
one put down his newspaper when he entered the room. He
often sat in the bow-window overlooking Pall Mall, but his
favourite place was in a room on the ground floor. The club
has been little changed, and it still has the steel engravings and
comfortable furniture of the mid-Victorian period, and the
members still dine at separate square tables with well-oiled cas-
tors, so that when one member desires company at his meal he
simply pushes his table along until it joins his friend’s.
Next to the Marlborough Club, and separated by the entrance
to the little inlet of Pall Mall Court, the Guaranty Trust’s office
occupies the site of one of the most famous London literary
rendezvous of the eighteenth century —the bookshop with the —
sign of ‘Tully’s Head.’ It was kept by Robert Dodsley, footman,
poet, and playwright, who made enough money by these three
activities to set up here as a publisher and bookseller. He pub-
lished Sterne’s Tristam Shandy and several other works which
‘struck the gong of London’ in those days. In this shop was
published the'first volume of the Annual Register under the ed-
itorship of Edmund Burke, a compendium of information and
selective taste which has lived well over a century. The shop
was one of the sunniest slopes of Parnassus for many years.
Pope, Johnson, Burke, Chesterfield, Goldsmith, Sterne, Horace
Walpole, Garrick, Reynolds, and other great ones of the period,
met often at ‘Tully’s Head,’ and stayed late. No. 51 must have
been at that time a near approach to the Mermaid Tavern in
Shakespeare’s day. |
But to return to our clubs. Pall Mall also houses the Junior
Carlton, whose windows look out on St. James’s Square.
‘Junior’ does not mean that the members are youths, as anyone
can
E SAVILE CLUB
PICCADILGY NiGH Tea Urs
106 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
No. 79, on the north side, and at the foot of her garden she
once leant over her wall and had a saucy talk with Charles IT,
walking in the Mall, as the scandalized Evelyn reports in his
journal. Her house was swept away long ago, and the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel sanctified the spot with its
headquarters; but even the godly Bishop Cox, of New York,
who stayed in the house in 1850, let his thoughts stray to that
Mistress Nelly, and came to the conclusion that mercy would be
found for her. On the north side she lived for some time in a
house whose site is now occupied by the Army and Navy Club,
and the mirror that reflected her fair and provoking face hung
there for a while.
Next to Nell Gwynn’s house, in a building that still exists,
although shorn of one wing, another lost lady of old years held
a sort of court. Emma Lyon, a Cheshire village girl, who after
many adventures became Lady Hamilton, figured here as
Hygeia in the ‘Temple of Health’ of a quack doctor named
Graham. There Gainsborough saw her, and in his studio, which
was in the same building, he painted her as ‘Musidora Bathing,’
in the picture that is now in the National Gallery. Cosway
painted her too, and later Romney began his great series of
pictures with the ‘divine’ Emma as his theme. It was in Naples
that Nelson met her. And to-day,in Christie’s auction-rooms
in King Street, a stone throw away, collectors still scramble
for her letters, and her face in millions of reproductions haunts
the world. Nelson loved her. Hers was the face that launched
a thousand ships. Some say that she inspired him (Nelson said
so) as she inspired Romney. She is lighted down the ages by
the blaze of Nelson’s fame and the glow of Romney and Gains-
borough’s art. Time cannot close his shadows over her beauty.
Gainsborough died in that Dutch-looking house, old red brick
and
The CLUB STREETS 107
and stone dressings and its caryatided porch, and, according to
the story, he said to his rival, the great Sir Joshua, at his bedside,
‘We are all going to heaven, and Van Dyck is of the company.’
The Duke of Cumberland lived here after Culloden, and in a
house somewhere in the street Charles Edward Stuart, ‘Bonnie
Prince Charlie,’ the man the Duke vanquished, is said to have
held a secret meeting of his remaining friends four years after
the battle. He would not then have had the long springy step
of the Wanderer in poor tartans who marched and hid in the
Islands after Culloden, for the ‘lad that was born to be king’
was already sinking under dissipation and frustrated hopes.
The trumpets and drums from St. James’s Palace probably
sounded out as they sat at the meeting, and the last of the
Stuarts would look at the faithful fifty who were there and think
of the thousands that lay under the heather. One imagines
a disguised figure stepping along Pall Mall, perhaps through
the queer, narrow, lackey-haunted passage of Pall Mall Court,
that still keeps some of its eighteenth-century air, and away
to his lurking coach or sedan-chair, and so farewell to England.
Pall Mall is a street in which history never has a holiday.
" " . ' " f 9 \ 0 '
dospatochosfosiocd PadiPali bad Rael Pati rel Faly Pai
SER ee ee EER Guat tGika totroo to kos
EEELEE EEL EPP EL EEE PPP PL EL
SHOPS
I
Seco) LE antiquitiy of a shop and its traditions and
KE es | relics, its struggles, vicissitudes, and triumphs, are
<s,| surely more interesting to the correct mind than
FEM the story of medieval castles with their plots of
KSY obscure motives and maniacal violence and
psychology of an alien time. The shop, if not the real romantic
stuff, is a fabric shot with curious patterns, with the scarlet and
gold of Lord Mayordom at its heart and fringes of exotic con-
ventions. It contains everything from economics to supersti-
tions. Even a comparatively modern shop like Liberty’s, for
example, has an Eastern idol that has to do with the luck of the
house, and in bad times the shopmen would put offerings in his
bowl, and when the electric cranes set up Ye Olde English
Mansion for the firm in Great Marlborough Street the shop-
men bore the god in triumph to his new home. The four Chinese
gods that sat for fifty years over the fascia of Liberty’s East
India House, which found favor with Rossetti and Whistler and
Watts, were thought also to be linked with the fortunes of the
business, and are being reproduced for the facade of the new
Regent Street building. But nearly every big shop of any age
has its totem that is half-jokingly, half-seriously regarded, the
prudent deciding to take no risks. The tragedies of great busi-
nesses which fathers build up and sons pull down, of the
marriage alliances of scions of such houses, of bold invaders
from across the Atlantic that came to live in the mansion of the
proudest
Ii!
112 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
proudest family of England, a house in which, till our day, it
was said, no tradesman had ever sat down, are too like the
stories of the English country-side to have an interest of their
own. But the family or the dynasties of shopkeepers who take
their house as a trust and their assistants as cadets is an attrac-
tive though rare feature that distinguishes and sweetens a part
of London life. |
Being a ‘nation of shopkeepers,’ it is natural that London
tradesmen should take pride in the pedigree of their houses.
There is no other capital where shops are so often dated as they
are in London. ‘Established eighteen-something,’ ‘Established
over fifty years,’ ‘Established over a hundred years,’ and so on,
appear on fascia or window of most shops of any character
(except, for some reason or other, shops for ladies’ dress), and
one careful wine-merchant in Regent Street announces ‘Estab-
lished in 1667 a.p.!’ The object presumably is to convince peo-
ple that there is nothing flyaway or mushroom about the busi-
ness. Here they are and here they rest.
A gentleman from a newer region settling in London struck
by these quiet advertisements in the face of its shops, decided
to buy his household commodities only from houses that had
been in business for at least 200 years. He found that he could
buy his tea, wine, bread, tobacco, groceries, string, boots, clothes, —
jewellery, gloves, hats, plate, pictures, dustbins, haberdashery,
paints, violins, fishing-tackle, books, fish-sauce, drugs, wigs,
saddles, chairs, clocks, confections, glass, fire-engines, and
many other things, from firms that had been in business for
longer than 200 years. He found, indeed, that he often had a
choice. He could choose, for instance, between a tea-shop that
had had a principal painted by Hogarth and a rival that had
owned the tea that the Yankees threw into Boston harbour and
ae
SHOPS 113
so began the events that separated England from her southern
colony in North America. He could buy violins from Hill’s in
Bond Street that supplied Mr. Pepys, and wine from Berry’s
in St. James’s Street that supplied Queen Anne, and probably
had had the earliest intimation of her death, a deep, low-roofed
shop that not only supplied coffee, wine, and brandies to the
eighteenth-century nobility of St. James’s, but weighed and
measured its customers, and there they are, 30,000 entries in
sixteen tall folio volumes, with the two great weighing scales
(one dating from the seventeenth century) and height post, still
in the front shop and used by the present princes over the
way. The Prince Regent has a page in his own handwriting,
and from 1791 to 1804 his weight varied, at one time over
17 stone, but only 13 stone 3 pounds on the last recorded visit.
The elder Pitt’s weight was 11 stone 11% pounds ‘shoes and
frock’; Byron in 1806, 13 stone 12 pounds; Fox in 1781, 14
stone. The cellars of Berry’s were probably part of Old St.
James’s Palace— something like a shop! Several wine-dealers
were qualified and many tobacconists, for these are meditative,
differentiating trades that are the better served with an aroma
of tradition and old confidential relations. That exquisite old
tobacco-shop in the Haymarket that has so marvellously pre-
served itself, with its many-paned, pot-bellied little windows, its
narrow door with a fanlight and two little steps up from the
street, and its open Adams screen separating the shop from the
office, has sent snuff to all the crowned noses in Europe, and
had made even Napoleon sneeze. Near Friburg and Treyer’s 1s
Wishart’s tobacco-shop, once in the Haymarket, now in Panton
Street. Its ancient sign is a Highlander in Stuart tartan, not ina
kilt, but in trews, and according to the tradition of the house, it
is a portrait of the Old Pretender. If so, Wishart’s must have
had
114 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
had difficult days, especialy when the Young Pretender reached
Derby and London was mustering the trained bands. At that
time the tobacconists who sold Scots snuff and were known as
the rendezvous of Scotsmen were wrecked by the mob, and their
wooden Highlanders, if they existed then, would probably be
burnt. David Wishart, the founder, opened his shop on the day
Charles Edward Stuart was born.
Fleet Street has two tobacco-shops with long pedigree, al-
though one of them has no close connection between its past
and present tobacconists. However, the name HARDHAM still
stands over the shop at the corner of Ludgate Circus, and on
the narrow old counter snuff is still weighed by hand-scales
from battered brown jars with such enticing names as ‘St.
Domingo Carrotte,’ ‘Martinique,’ and ‘Proctor’s Mixture.’
Reynolds, Johnson, and others of “The Club’ went to Hard-
ham’s, and you can see the old snuffmaker’s tombstone at
Chichester, with a lengthy elegant epitaph by the great Garrick.
But more of the old personal tradition lingers about Redford’s
shop at the corner of Wine Office Court. You usually see ‘a
gentleman connected with the Press’ (as the phrase used to go)
seated on one or other of the two long, mellow mahogany chests
which had crossed the ocean crammed with thousands of cigars
before the Cuban growers thought of small cigar-boxes. There
is always conversation going on, and sometimes a gentleman
from Virginia who has been lunching at the Cheshire Cheese
up the court drops in, and lighting his green cigar at the little
iron gas-jet in the shape of an elephant’s head, gives some news
of the plantations. It is a pleasant shop, Redford’s, with a good
pedigree from ‘William Hoare, the only apprentice of John
Hardham Deceased,’ as the original sign, painted on metal
embellished with the symbol of the Ship and Star, declares in
the
dOHS SAUNA
SHOPS Lis
the window. Another fine, friendly tobacco-shop — although my
friend with the, pedigree passion would have scorned it— was
in Rupert Street, Soho, off Leicester Square, consisting of a
small front shop adorned with a miniature wooden Highlander
on a bracket, and a small square back room with a decrepit
horsehair arm-chair and a pedestal mahogany table. It was, in
brief, the cigar divan in which Robert Louis Stevenson had set
Mr. T. Goodall, the ex-Prince Florizel of his New Arabian
Nights. Prince Florizel was founded on Edward, Prince of
Wales. Old ‘Happy and Glorious’ one of the disrespectful
young men of “The Dynamiter’ calls him. The book is full of
clues.
But the connection between this shop and the Prince of Wales
in his more Bohemian moments is a real one. In that capacious
horsehair arm-chair in the back shop the Prince had sat after
midnight, and that pedestal mahogany table had borne beverages
for his refreshment. It happened in the seventies, when the
Prince conceived a fancy for going out with the London Fire
Brigade, and at the end of these adventures he desired refresh-
ment when driving back, usually in a hansom from the brigade
headquarters in the City. To call at an hotel was considered
irregular, but the problem was solved by the Prince remember-
ing a remarkable and amiable cigar-merchant in Rupert Street
whom he had patronized, and it was arranged that the cigar-
merchant should have refreshments ready when required for
the Prince and his gentleman. So here in this quiet back room,
with the sage tobacconist standing by, the Prince and his escort
would talk over their adventures of the night while the London
night-life of that romantic time roared along Coventry Street.
Stevenson probably knew the shop and heard of the Prince’s
visits, and he took them both into his fantasy. The shop re-
mained
116 Ze LONDON PERAMBULATOR
mained little altered till last year, when its business was taken to
a street near by, and the divan that was hallowed by Habana
smoke from royal lips is now a woman’s hat-shop.
Near it was another romantic Soho shop in Coventry Street,
also in age under the qualifying period, but a real delight to
any true London perambulator. It seemed the very expression
of English treasure-trove, a perfect period piece with no altera-
tions since it was founded in 1808. It had square projecting
windows with small panes of crown glass, and a fine piece of
lettering over its whole fascia:
‘LAMBERT, GOLDSMITHS AND SILVERSMITHS
TO THEIR MAJESTIES AND THE DUCHESS OF KENT.
A century had slipped by and Lambert’s seemed not to have
noticed that the Duchess of Kent no more drove to their door
in her high-springed carriage, and that George III and his queen
had passed away. The long reign of Queen Victoria must have
escaped the attention of Lambert, for there were no “Their
Majesties’ between the reign of William IV and the coronation
of King Edward. Possibly Lambert then thought that things
would work out just as well with the Duchess of Kent part, and
at one time that dukedom of Kent seemed likely to be revived
—but the time is not yet.
Mention must be added here of the sign over Burgess’s old
sauce-shop, a deep aromatic grotto that used to delight the eyes
and noses of passengers in the Strand. Burgess’s sign in mice
lettering proclaimed that he was |
‘PURVEYOR TO H.R.H. THE DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER. 5:
Some interfering person in 1905 drew attention in the Press to
| the
SHOPS 117
_ the demise of that lamented princess. Burgess thereupon altered
his sign to read:
‘PURVEYOR TO H. late R.H. THE DUCHESS OF GLOUCESTER.
This would not do either, for you could not purvey to a late
anybody. This also was pointed out, and for that or other
reasons Burgess decided to leave the Strand (they once had
behind their shop a quay of their own on the river for schooners
with limes and oil), which was obviously too near the pernickety
people of Fleet Street.
Lambert’s, as I said, also went west. It was a sad day to the
head of the firm, who like his father and granddaughter, had
been born over the shop. They are like most of the Soho trades-
men, descended from an old Huguenot family. One misses the
rich, glowing masses of old gold and silver vessels — chalices,
goblets, table-ships, racing cups, bells, salvers, and chased coral-
and-bells for princely babies. It all gave an extraordinary im-
pression of richness and grandeur, almost at your hand, which
helped to keep alive the old legend of London being —well, if
not exactly paved, lined with gold and silver. Sometimes on
foggy nights the little projecting square windows, crammed
with treasure, looked like ships (anybody’s ships) that had come
home. It looked just like that when our Waterloo soldiers came
home and wandered up and down Coventry Street, and some
of our men when they came back from the Somme must have
missed it on their way to say farewell to Piccadilly or to Leices-
ter Square.
Weddowson & Veal’s, which kept in a case in the front shop
in the Strand an Admiral’s hat that Nelson had left for a clasp
repair, before he put off hurriedly to sea and never returned,
and Chapple and Mantell, other old silversmiths of the Strand,
who
118 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
who had made family plate for generations, have gone west to
Bond Street; and so, too, has Strong i’ th’ arm—whose name -
alone was better than a discount —in Pall Mall, which special-
ized in portraits of the heads of favourite dogs set within crystals
and ultramarines and mounted as tie-pins or brooches for hunt-
ing squires and their daughters. Garrards,in Albermarle Street,
were founded in 1721, and ever since they have been making
plate and wedding presents and silver buttons and setting the
jewels of the great. The queerest entries in their ledgers is a
purchase by Sir Robert Walpole of seventy-two mourning rings
as mementos, and two gold toothpicks for Queen Charlotte.
Garrards recut the Koh-i-noor diamond in 1851, and the Cul-
linan diamond for Queen Mary, and they reset the Imperial
crown for King George’s coronation. Among the sporting cups
they made is the America Cup which Lord Anglesey presented
to the Royal Yacht Squadron and America captured in 1851
and still retains.
You can have your hair cut in a shop in the Royal Arcade |
that has had a continuous existence since the Cavaliers had their
curls trimmed by the founder. You can buy to-day a properly
stocked seaman’s medicine chest in a handsome old druggist’s
in the Minories where Smollett’s heroes could have bought their
medicine chests on the way to their ship. Indian rajahs still
buy cockspurs for their cock-fighting at a shop off Cockspur
Street, and the East End has at least one house where you can
buy flints for flintlock guns and pistols, and you can buy bi-
noculars from a City shop at which Nelson bought his and as he
stood at the door tried them on the cross of St. Paul’s.
My friend with the passion for permanence in his shops re-
joiced especially in grocers, and his rarest joy was the discovery
that there is one City grocer that has had an account with the
London
SHOPS 119
London Hospital since 1754, continued without a break. A
firm of druggists, still drugging, opened a free medicine stall
in the Spital Market during the Plague of London in 1665.
The descendants of the publisher of Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wake-
field still carry on business in Charterhouse Square. London has
scores of taverns that have quenched London thirst since the
Great Fire. One London Tavern still has the old coffee-pots
hung from its roof to show its descent from a Queen Anne
coffee-house. But I shall leave taverns out of this chapter.
They have been too carefully and affectionately dealt with in
Mr. Wagner’s and other works. Suffice it is to say that my
friend had no difficulty in slaking his thirst in qualified taverns.
But his joy was rather, as I have said, in the grocer’s shop. He
loved that marvellously preserved old double-windowed grocery
in Artillery Row, which still keeps its statein that squalid neigh-
bourhood, with the grocer still living above his shop in his Queen
Anne panelled rooms, although the East End in its most alien
form has oozed over the whole quarter where the old customers
lived and ‘Peter the Painter,’ that romantic partisan, conducted
one of his adventures a street away. He was devoted to the
great shop in Piccadilly, which had provided hampers for the
Derby ever since that institution was founded.
But the time to see this shop collector at his best was when a
shop was first flowering into the decreed antiquity that justi-
fied its consideration as a shop. I remember especially a small
grocery shop that had survived miraculously enough in a court
off Leadenhall Street. Banks and insurance offices towered up
around, and the only other domestic link with the City’s past
was in the adjoining court, an ancient chop-house believed to be
the last in London to give up the use of pewter plates. It seemed
as unlikely there as a child’s bassinette or a collie dog. On cer-
tain
120 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
tain days in that deep court, where the light filters down from
projection to projection, it is like a ghost of a little shop that once
was there in the homely era of the City. But it is real enough,
and so is the proprietor, a sensible man with no illusions, who
sells all sorts of things from pickled cucumber and tumblers for
parties on Lord Mayor’s Show day to smuggled cigars. Of
course, the cigars came lawfully enough to him; he buys them
at the sales by order of H.M. Customs of Tobacco seized from
the contrabandists, but if you look into it you'll find most of
his wares have a curious and interesting tag. Great bankers and
walk-clerks and office-boys are among his customers, and he
must hear a good deal about what is doing in the world of
finance. The legend on the shop reads:
‘Established in 1723.’ :
My friend could not discover the day and the month, so he
had perforce to wait till the year had ended. Then with eager-
ness he repaired to the little shop, wished the shopman good
day, tried a scrubbing-brush, bought a bottle of gherkins and
a smuggled cigar, and discussed the price of apples. He had
not been so happy since one of Twining’s shopmen told him
that when he was young he was allowed to go down below to
test teas on his birthday.
II
In the social history of our times the tea-shop has been
strangely neglected, yet as a rendezvous of both sexes its function
is much more important in modern life than the much-bewritten
tavern. It began in the memory of middle-aged people, and its
pedigree can be traced and certified. There was an Aerated Bread
Company shop near London Bridge Station, served by an
elderly lady of a kindly nature who once shared her own pot
of
SHOPS 121
of tea in her back shop with one or two favourite customers.
The lady’s name is not known nor the names of the customers
who shared that historic meal. Anyway, it was a success, and
she made a habit of giving tea to selected customers. One day
she suggested to the company that they might make the serving
of tea part of their trade. That was in 1884. The company
thought the idea worth a trial— up to that time they dealt only
in bread and cakes — and so the tea-shop as we know it began.
Pearce and Plenty’s shops followed for a poorer class of Lon-
doner, and Robert Lockhart at the time of the Moody and
Sankey crusade opened shops at Liverpool and afterwards in
London, first for cocoa and latterly also for tea, all in the cause
of temperance. The Express Dairy Company began with milk,
and it, too, came to tea, and Slaters, and then the great Lyons,
came on the scene, and the pioneer A.B.C. found itself in a
world of tea-shops. Of course, there were before that a few
isolated pastrycooks with customers of a richer class and hotels
that served tea when required, but the London tea-shop as an
institution was founded by the A.B.C. I like the A.B.C. shop,
although I will admit that it has shortcomings. There is some-
thing domestic and Victorian about it, an air of plain fare and
no nonsense, and food that might do you a power of good.
The London tea-shop, when you come to think of it, fills a
very big part in the Londoner’s life. It is democratic in a sense
that the tavern never was in the mixture of classes that you see
therein seated together drinking and eating the same things.
You may touch chairs with a peer—the late Duke of Norfolk
was partial to a tea-shop in Parliament Street, and the late
Marquis of Salisbury, even when Premier, is said to have fre-
quented them—or a millionaire, or a great artist or writer or
soldier, or a great man’s valet, or a policeman in plain clothes,
or
122 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
or your barber or milkman, or a notable criminal. The inclu-
sive character of the tea-shop came out very curiously in the
trial of the thieves some twelve years ago who stole what the
newspapers called “The Great Pearl Necklace.’ It was shown in
the trial that the chief pearls were passed from the one gang
to the other in this way. A man went to the smoking-room of
a tea-shop in Holborn, sat at a table and, producing a cigar, felt
his pocket for matches, and, not finding any, turned to a man at
the next table and asked for a match. The other man tossed a
box over and told him to keep it. The first man lit his cigar
and put the match-box in his pocket. It contained the pearls.
Acquaintances are made, even friendships formed, in tea-shops,
but not often, for decorum is carried on to the most English
degree within their walls. Romance, of course, can no more be
kept out of tea-shops than out of a department stores, but it is
on sufferance. Business, too, must not be overdone, and pencil
figures on the marble-topped tables are discouraged. Nobody
breaks into song as they do sometimes in public-houses, nor
are there outward quarrellings or debate, and rarely laughter.
Its function is very different from the foreign cafés where men
sit in groups and others arrive and join in endless discussion
far into the night. Relaxation is the note of the tavern and the
café. The tea-shop (with the males, at any rate) seems like one
of the duller parts of daily routine. Meredith’s Rajah wrote of
the English having the look of a people begotten in business
hours. He may have studied them taking their pleasure in a
tea-shop.
The old-fashioned pastrycook’s shop that sometimes sold tea
fulfilled a different rdle, was individualist in character and pur-
veyed for one class. It was rather like an old sailing ship owned
by the master mariner and no more fit to deal with the pressure
of
SHOPS 123
of modern crowds and business than the barque or brig was
able to compete with the standardized liner. The most indi-
vidual of all the pastrycooks I have known was B ’s,a sedate
shop in a by-street off Regent Street, that closed its doors about
the end of the war. There was nothing particular about it
except that the shop and its manager had character, which its
modern rivals have not. It had been seventy years there, the
proprietor had worked for fifty years in the business and lived
above his shop. When he began business the nearest pastry-
cook to the north was near the Queen’s Hall, and the nearest to
the south was in Trafalgar Square. Downstairs, the place looked
like a baker shop, with all sorts of special biscuits of its own,
and a dozen tables where a special class of customers — usually
comfortable ladies from the far suburbs, and the heads of the old-
fashioned shops behind Regent Street—took tea. It was prob-
ably the last place in London where a lady’s sealskin bag could
be seen. Upstairs was a very good restaurant, where almost the
same people had lunched for years and years.
On the staircase, in a little goldframe, there was a letter from
one of these customers. It said: ‘Kindly send me one of your
bills of fare— an old one will do. I want to see what variety you
have. I have eaten 5,500 of your steaks in the last thirty-five
years, and I think I would like a change.’ What other restau-
rant than B 5 would have had the humour and modesty to
have given that letter a place of honour? It was the key-note of
the shop. Prices had gone up since the War, but B ’s refused
to change a figure. It was a fully licensed place, and might
have made a good deal of money by exploiting that side, but
although tired ladies might come in for a glass of port and a
biscuit, nobody ever attempted to order whisky. It was known
that Mr. B. wouldn’t like it.
On
124 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
On the last day the old proprietor and his assistants said good-.
bye to their old clients. ‘There were no notices outside the shop,
no fuss, no claim for license compensation. B——’s have gone
out of London life decorously and with honour, and when the
assistants were asked by their customers, “Where can we go to
now — where can we get a sort of place like this?’ the assistants
spoke the truth when they said that they were afraid there was
no place like B sin London.
Another fine old pastrycook was in High Street, Kensington,
where, if anywhere, pastrycooks should flourish. It was ‘sold
off’ a few years ago—another War casualty. The glass discs with
the bevelled edge bearing in faded gilt “‘Routs supplied,’ the
old ‘property’ birthday cakes in the shape of mills with prac-
ticable wheels, the slightly battered tall biscuit caskets with
‘Abernethy’ and ‘Wine’ in a kind of Chinese lettering on a
centre panel, the decanters with silver labels attached round their
handsome necks with silver chains, the short, portly silver-gilt
teapots, and all the nice well-flavoured old things that suggested
Kensington well-to-do-ness— even ‘country folk’ might have sup-
ped a jelly there — all, all had gone. But there was a point about
this shop much more interesting to remember. One day waiting
on tea, which always arrived here hot but leisurely, I took up
an old morocco-bound volume, and found that it was full of
testimonials to a former proprietor of the shop. The letters
mostly began ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Beckswith-Jones presents his
compliments and has pleasure in saying that everything on the
evening of the 5th was done to his utmost satisfaction, and that
he encloses cheque.’ Some of them were apologies for the delay
in sending cheque for purveying on the occasion of the marriage
‘as Mr. Hussey-Hussey-Thornton had been in India and only
recently returned.’ The important point came out in the more
personal
SHOPS 125
personal ones, which began ‘Dear Mr. Pan.’ Now, Sir James
Barrie, who lived near, must have known this shop in Mr. Pan’s
time, and here clearly, I think, we have ‘Peter Pan’s’ father.
And who could have a more suitable father than a Kensington
pastrycook?
The delectable art of the pastrycook and the confectioner has
died out because we are not worthy of it. There is no place
for it in an age of cocktails and universal smoking. That great
social authority, the late G. W. E. Russell, said that in his
father’s day the officers on duty at the Horse Guards, after they
had been strapped and trussed into their tight and wondertul
uniforms, were not supposed even to walk about in them, there
being a belief that even a few steps ruined the set of something
or other. The theory then was that it was best for an officer
in full uniform to sit down. He remembered his father de-
scribing a friend of his in the Blues sitting in a window in the
Horse Guards in Whitehall, his arm leaning on a special kind
of cushion they had there which opened outwards over the
window so that the whole sleeve was protected; well, Mr.
Russell’s father saw the friend in the Blues sitting in this way on
duty eating jellies! The thing would be impossible to-day.
And it was not only the soldiers. In those days all young men
took an intelligent interest in confectionery. This taste lasted
up till near the end of the last century. ‘The young man went to
Grange’s in Piccadilly for dainties and to Gunter’s in Berkeley
Square for ices. And he went alone for these indulgences, he
was not entertaining ladies. Mr. Russell admitted that these
doings must seem vastly entertaining to the young man of
to-day with (as he put it) the odour of stale tobacco in his
clothes and ridiculous pieces of papered tobacco in his mouth,
but he pointed out that it was tobacco that killed this early love
just
126 Tse LONDON PERAMBULATOR
just as it was tobacco that was killing our taste in wine andin |
all delicate food. And if this present generation was taking to
the simple life and the simple food, there was surely no reason
for them to make a fuss about it. They of the leather palate
knew no better. Mr. Russell did not live to see every second
woman smoking. With that his last hopes for our dainty feed-
ing would have gone.
But before leaving this subject, Birch’s of Cornhill must have
its niche. Like the Haymarket snuff-shop, its very existence in
these times is a wonder; all the chances of change and economics
were against survival. Yet here it is, the shop too cramped to
accommodate more than eight shipping magnates or stock-
brokers, with (say) six more being served over their shoulders,
balancing their plates and glasses as they may. It isa littlegreen
shop of George III’s date, with three round-headed windows and
a round-headed door just large enough for a Lord Mayor, but
hardly wide enough for his coachman, the woodwork all carved
with innocent Renaissance decorations. A plain wooden floor
and narrow oak counter worn by generations of scrubbers, a
small plain settee of Chippendale period, are the only furniture,
but in the national convention of separating Englishmen when-
ever possible, there is a sort of open screen of an earlier period
dividing the little place in two. The open beams under the ceil-
ing have been hewn by the adze. In this little low-roofed bower
you may see the soundest. and stoutest men on the London
’Change: standing and eating a special three-decked jam sand-
wich and drinking sherry or whisky-jelly or coffee, while upstairs
turtle soup and oysters at surprising prices are being consumed.
One of the happiest touches about the shop is the funny little
wedding-cake ornaments set near the small panes in the nar-
row windows — wedding cakes in Cornhill! There’s a City idyll
for
SHOPS 127
for you. Another is a little royal crown in a case. I used to be-
lieve that it was Queen Victoria’s crown, mislaid when she was
opening the new Royal Exchange over the way and put there in
case she came back for it. It was not so, but it had to do with
the ceremony, being used as a symbol in the decorations.
Yes, every one must have wished at times that he or she had
a shop of his or her own. It will be a duller existence when all
the world is a capitalist or co-operative stores.
: ET 6g BE
SLE eee
The STREET of che GIANT GOOSEBERRY
J
OBODY is impressed by Fleet Street. It is so
¥] short and undistinguished a thoroughfare that if
you are on a bus or a motor-car you may pass
aac ee! through it without knowing. Its salient feature is
Ka Jv 28] the mass of lettering outside its offices as though
some one had been trying alphabets of different sizes on the
street front. Wren’s noble gateway to the Middle Temple, the
building at the entrance to the Inner Temple, Hoare’s Bank,
designed by Smirke, the Cock Tavern with its mock Tudor front,
the Daily Telegraph’s dull but important mass with its project-
ing clock, St. Dunstan’s Church with its open belfry that entraps
the sunset so happily, and the glimpse you get of Wren’s St.
Bride’s with its delightful diminishing stages, are the main
things of the street. There is only one big London newspaper
published in Fleet Street; the other papers crouch in the nar-
row streets that run down to the Embankment, where the motors
and cyclists can get away quickly, or to the north, where they
have wide Holborn for their racing track. Banks and insurance
offices are all over the street. But the tattooing on the building _
does stand for something. You can trace the names of news-
papers from Shanghai to Saskatchewan, from Cape Town to
Riga, from Melbourne to Baltimore. Some represent spiritual
geography — The Church Worker, The Methodist Recorder, The
Catholic Herald, The Flying Roll. Then, the birds and animals
seem to have their interests consolidated in and about Fleet
| Street
Moe (Ge
w= AE
| < SS 4
131
132 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Street: The Race Horse, The Poultry World, The Beekeeper;
and the trade journals: The Licensed Victuallers’ Review, The
Baker, Automobile Engineer, and so on. It is fascinating, it is
dumb-foundering to study all the names on the house fronts and
on the boards at the foot of the narrow stairs. All interests seem
concentrated here. What could not happen if Fleet Street one
fine day spoke to the whole world in one voice with one message.
Several peers, their wealth and title coming from their papers,
decorate its roadway every day. Millions have been made by
proprietors of journals and large fortunes lost by others. It
dictates to Parliament, to the Church, to the people, and some-
times its dictation synchronizes with what comes to pass. The
greatest generals and admirals quail before it. The Throne is
not unmoved by its praise. It can make wars, though it cannot
make peace. In short, it’s capable of almost anything. Yet, as
I have said, Fleet Street is a short, shabby street, and, for all its
lettering is curiously anonymous, like its denizens. Taverns,
cook-shops, tea-shops, tobacconists, cheap tailors, chemists,
tourist agents, stationers, bag-shops, one post-office and one
book-shop make up its shops. It is the only street in the City
with a night population. The ugliest monument in London >
streets greets you as you enter it, its southern streets are narrow
sloping alleys, only one of them ‘svete the river, its two little
northern tributaries are ludicrous. No, Fleet Street is not im-
pressive. Yet to thousands of youths just come to Fleet Street
with a beating heart it is as Yarrow to Wordsworth:
‘And this is Yarrow.
This is the place my fancy oft hath haunted.’
How the young men flood in from the east, west, south, and
north — particularly from the north—‘so many and so many
with
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY 1 ee
with such glee’ — how fast the stream runs, how quickly the faces
change, yet how many seem to have been always there! Here
fortune, fame, and power sit and have been seized by penniless
men who came up just as they did, fortune and power so vast
that in the end they challenged reason itself. The history of the
street is full of stories as unlikely as fairy tales. Here Delane,
who found himself at twenty-three editor of The Times, rode
from his house in Serjeant’s Inn to warn, counsel, and command
the Great in Whitehall; here famous editors, leader-writers,
war-correspondents, special correspondents, and the flower of
two centuries of journalism have pulled down and set up govern-
ments, worked for privilege or reform, denounced the good or
the wicked, raised panics and unveiled the truth.
‘Look at that, Pen,’ Warrington said. “There she is—the
great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassador in every
quarter of the world, her courier upon every road. Her officers
march along with armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen’s
cabinets. They are ubiquitous. Yonder journal has an agent,
at this moment, giving bribes in Madrid; and another inspecting
the price of potatoes in Covent Garden. Look! here comes the
Foreign Express galloping in. They will be able to give news
to Downing Street to-morrow: funds will rise or fall, fortunes
will be made or lost. Lord B. will get up and, holding the paper
in his hand and seeing the noble Marquis in his place, will make
a great speech; and— and Mr. Doolan will be called away from
his supper at the Back Kitchen, for he is foreign sub-editor,
and sees the mail in the newspaper sheet before he goes to his
own.’
And the Press has not changed in essentials since Thackeray
wrote that enthralling passage, except that the foreign news may
come by wireless and there is now no Back Kitchen. The street
itself
134. Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR ©
itself does not resound to the printing press—that terrific pulse
of the news that once heard by a youth in his first newspaper is
never forgotten till his own pulse runs down.
It is heard in the regions on the north and south of Fleet
Street. In the hinterland on the north lies an amazing mass of
courts, alleys, and passages, unchanged in plan, and in some cases
in the buildings themselves, since the Great Fire, and there the
printing trade has its lairs and every other man is a typesetter or
printer or concerned in printing, and in the heart of it is the
house where Samuel Johnson compiled his dictionary, and near
in a rambling old congeries with an old-fashioned lion and
unicorn in gilt and metal over the outer gate, Blue Books are
born. There is one general printer thereabouts who prints the
most unlikely assortment of weekly journals— religious (five
denominations), political, ethical, advertising, boxing, racing,
and housewifery. One teases oneself with the thought what
might happen some week-end if one of the staff were left a
fortune and in a general celebration the copy got mixed. The
press clicks, pants, and thunders in this region as though it were
doing a lot of good in the world. In one aged structure with a
rich ceiling, ascribed to Wren, there is an attic cage of small-
paned glass windows, a long composing-room where elderly
compositors still set by hand and take their pinch of snuff to
clear the case-dust from their nostrils as they work on The.
Philosophical Magazine. There are even hand-presses here just.
as there were a hundred years ago when The Philosophical
Magazine was young. It must be a favourite haunt to the shade
of old Wynkyn de Worde, whose own press was near by in
the shelter of St. Dunstan’s Church. He would have much in
common with the grey respectable old compositors in that
learned and mysterious old William and Mary House behind its
| high
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY 135
high wall and palisadoes with a sort of drawbridge before its
door.
The distribution men with their motor-vans and motor-cycles
and push-cycles and the newsboys who can snatch a penny and
leave a paper in your hand with a single expert motion, are
apparent enough, day and night, in Fleet Street, but the mul-
titude of compositors, readers, stereotypers, and machine men
rarely betray their existence to the public. It takes the Lord
Mayor’s Show or something even more spectacular than that
to bring them buzzing out of their fastnesses. Only once have
I seen the muscular oil-browned men in overalls swarm into
Fleet Street, and that was the night when the first Zeppelin
arrived over London. The searchlights caught it fair as it
turned north. ‘God,’ cried one of them, ‘see it going up Fetter
Lane!’
II
Meredith speaks of dark moments in life when as you walk
along Pall Mall it seems to rain black balls. There are moments.
known to every denizen when Fleet Street seems to begin with
the Sea Serpent and end with the Giant Gooseberry. Common
sense tells you that it is the Griffin at Temple Bar and the dome
of St. Paul’s in the east, but there are times when the writ of
common sense does not run in Fleet Street. There are times
when Fleet Street can magnify the visit of a kinema prodigy
into an international event and can minify London into a
village. It cannot yet make all people think alike, but it can
make them think about a like subject. There are moments
when it seems sensible enough for the newsboys to refuse to
distinguish between one evening paper and another, crying
them all with the general name of ‘Winner.’ You can appre-
ciate
136 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
ciate the point of view of that Fleet Street man, back from his
holidays, who said, ‘I’ve been completely out of things — I don’t
even know what murder we’re at!’ Fleet Street’s favourite and
cruellest jest is the creation of the Temporary Important—a
jest that the victim never apprehends but is soon made to feel.
It is never tired of treating London as a village pretending that
some unimportant event is engrossing the mind of millions,
ordering the lieges to crane their minds towards The Man on
the Roof or The Fat Boy of Peckham’s Bicycle.
Fleet Street itself at times—on weekdays in August with trains
of country and American tourists; on Sundays with hurrying
church-goers — assumes a look of the avenue to the Cathedral,
the Via del Duomo of London, that is disturbing to its children ;
but at most times it has to them something of a village look
that shines clear through its hurrying stream of motor-buses
and bands of strangers. I have seen it on a sunny Saturday
afternoon, when old Mr. Bond the chemist, after a busy morn-
ing syringing pressmen’s ears (for the House was reassembling
on Monday), coming to his door for a breath of air and seeing
old Mr. Madford, the tobacconist across the way, standing at
his door, gave a grave wave of the hand. ‘The motor traffic
roared between, so they couldn’t pass the time of day, but the
tobacconist pointed in a sly way to the chemist’s cat, which
was sitting snugly at the cook-shop next door. ‘There were two
brothers in the old tobacco-shop and two brothers at the chem-
ist’s. They have other ties. The policeman can tell you usually
if Captain Shannon has gone home or if Mr. Pendennis has
crossed over to the Temple. The kerb people know you and
tell you that the old party what you gave the overcoat to ’ad a
fit at the Rowton last night and at the correct time ask if you
had a nice holiday. The Bank of England chief official lived
over
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY hey.
over the Bank, and once there was a baby there. Every one knew
the Bank of England Baby. Her passage in her baby-carriage
across Fleet Street to the Temple entrance (Bank of England
babies have an ancient right to sun in The Temple Gardens)
was a village event, viewed with great sympathy by every one,
especially the kerb-folk.
A word must be said about the banks of Fleet Street which
are far older than the oldest journal. Three famous banks
decorate the street — Child’s, Hoare’s and Goslings. Child’s has
an assured history from the reign of Charles the Second and a
fairly good pedigree from Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It is really
“No. 1 London” for it is the first house in London city at its
western entrance. It is, of course, the original of “Telson’s
Bank” in the Tale of Two Cities. “Telsons’s” disappeared
with the Old Temple Bar, which adjoined it and was used as a
store room of the Bank, and Blomfield’s frigid building replaced
it in the eighties. But so potent and pervading are the tradition
and nature of Child’s that its modern domicile makes no dit-
ference. The main office is still called ‘the shop,’ and its open
fireplace with a few seats round it suggests couriers waiting for
packets before setting off for France by the Dover coach. ‘The
shop appearance is increased by the desks and high stools in the
large open part outside the counter. The back portion is still
called “the counting-house.”
In the first of the strongrooms you notice stout parchment-
bound ledgers with “1667-73” and so on inscribed on their backs
and in those ledgers you can see most of the names of the Eng-
lish nobility at the head of pages of their account, with Charles
the Second’s unsatisfactory account flowing over many pages.
Oliver Cromwell, the great Duke of Marlborough and his Duch-
ess, Titus Oates, Dryden, Lord Chesterfield, and the Lord Ox-
ford
138 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
ford who originated the South Sea Bubble were among Child’s
customers.
Madame Eleanor Gwynne was another customer. She died
£6,900 in debt to the bank, and the entries show that her son,
the Duke of St. Albans, paid £6,091 back in plate and money.
It is all set out in the slow, rounded hand of some ancient clerk,
who probably paused some time to peer over this ledger at
Mistress Nell as she came into the shop, perhaps to sign the
large unskilful but not ungraceful “E. G.” that you can see on
her drafts there. And how strange to see the wages of sin kept
by double entry! Another ledger gives the accounts for the sale
of Dunkirk. What masses of secrets that once were life-and-
death affairs lie in these old business volumes that row on row
line the walls of the long, narrow strongroom. __ co
But the document that permits a dry gleam of satisfaction to
appear on the faces of the tall, grave members of the staff is this.
It is a faded seventeenth century letter from the Duke of Leeds
of the period to Messrs. Child, stating that “the subscriptions to
the new bank do fill so fast that £700,000 has been given,” and
instructing the firm to take up £4,000 for the Duke. “What
was that new bank?” The Perambulator asked. “Oh, it was what
they call the Bank of England,” the official replied — “a mush-
room, you see, compared with Child’s.” There is nothing equal
to that, I think, except a Winchester boy dealing with the mush-
room college of Eton.
Upstairs on the landing is the bust of Apollo and a framed —
panel with Ben Jonson’s poem, from the Apollo Room of the
Devil’s Tavern, on the site of which part of the bank stands. It
seems a dangerous influence to keep loose in a prim, responsible
banking-house, but Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s laughter do not
ring through the bank at night, nor do the ghosts of the wits of
3 Apollo
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY _ 139
Apollo keep the clerks from sleeping in the bedrooms upstairs.
The ghosts are all tucked away, tight and numbered, in Child’s
great bound ledgers.
Then, there is Hoare’s ancient bank, housed in a discreet and
serious early Victorian building, by Smirke, but with a hint of
heartier things in its sign of the Golden Bottle over the door-
way. The original Leather Bottle, which legend says was the
only possession of the founder when he walked up from Devon-
shire to seek and win his fortune, is kept in the office. Possibly
the sign of the Bottle enticed Pepys to the house. He was a
faithful customer as were hosts of grander people of the Restora-
tion, and several of the families, whose names are in the first
ledger in 1673, are still on the books of the bank. ‘The muskets
served out to the clerks in the Gordon riots still decorate their
walls, and their cellars, packed with iron-clasped chests and
coffers of many shapes, are undoubtedly the cellars of the old
Mitre Tavern, that kept the wine that Goldsmith and Garrick
drank. The light trickles in at one end through windows of
rough bottle-end glass. 7
Child’s, for all its history, disappoints the connoisseur, lack-
ing warmth and ripe decoration, but Hoare’s is like a bank in
an old novel. A wide staircase of noble mahogany balustrade
leads to lofty rooms, and in one of them, hung with the old
family portraits, where luncheon is served every day, is a perfect
set of chairs that Thomas Chippendale made for the bank
which still holds his own receipt for them. The old silver sand-
casters which had dried the ink of many a settlement now act as
pepper-casters, and the wax-taper sealing boxes as mustard
pots. The front room on the first floor which looks on Fleet
Street is (of all things!) a billiard room, and there is a swim-
ming bath in the little back court behind the irises and daffo-
dils. Hoare’s
140 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
Hoare’s is, indeed, “a banking house.” It is a bank, and the
house of the bankers, as it was when Richard Hoare, Lord
Mayor of London, lived over his bank and drilled the trained
bands to meet the Jacobites if they ever reached London. One
of the family must always live over the bank, and by the same
ancient custom he must preside in the morning at the opening
of the great front door. A lady of quality with her maid, for
instance, may be waiting there to place her plate and jewels in
custody before a hurried visit to the Continent or to take them
out for an elopement. Hoare’s still remains independent, out-
side all combinations or liasons of banking. Gosling’s has an
old history, but the only thing which distinguishes it from the
other branches of a great Joint Stock Corporation is a quiet
little sign in the window of the three silver squirrels of the
Goslings.
There is no village pump — although there is a Pump Court —
in the Fleet Street village, but never was there such a place for
gossip, where people know other people’s business better than
their own, where rumour is quicker than wireless. When a
Fleet Street worthy is getting a title even the news-sellers seem
to know, and when a paper is changing hands conferences are
going on about it in the compositors’ taverns as well as in the
Press Club. The turnip blight, the potato disease, the boll
weevil of Fleet Street is amalgamation. At that terrible word
the stoutest leader-writer turns pale, art critics see red, and
dramatic critics see lawyers. All Fleet Street, whether its cab-
bage-patch be Tory, Liberal, or Labour, come together at these —
junctures and sympathize and scheme for the benefit of the
stricken men. Every one is known by headmark and often by
nickname in Fleet Street, and a great deal is known. Sir James
Barrie has only once visited a Fleet Street office, I believe, but
if
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY 141
if he spent a week or two there he would see its resemblance
to Thrums.
There are other strange aspects of this enthralling street that
most of us never notice because it is ‘not in the news.’ The
great vegetable wagons laden with hundreds of cabbages or
cauliflowers or lettuces move along the glossy surface of Fleet
Street in the summer dawn, the lantern burning yellow, the
wagoner half asleep and his companion snoring, just as they
trundled along the cobbles of Fleet Street and steered through
the old Temple Bar. Mostly it is motor traffic now, but the
vegetables don’t change. *Tis very pleasant on a summer morn-
ing when work is ended looking over a F leet Street balcony
as the wagons with their bright vegetables go by. They leave
sometimes more than their scent of vegetables, for Fleet Street
has more butterflies and moths than any other region except
Covent Garden. Sheep sometimes pass through in the early
morning on their way from Kent over Blackfriars Bridge to
Islington Market. There is a local story of a Fleet Street man
surprised by such a happening, who could not help exclaiming,
‘What an extraordinary thing to see in the heart of the greatest
city in the world’ — he wasa leader-writer —‘a pastoral spectacle
like this!’ A Figure of the Night who had drifted beside him
said, ‘Yes, guv’nor; would you like to buy a gold vatch?’ It is
an absurd story, but somehow with the flock of sheep, the leader-
writer, and the pick-pocket getting home in the dawn to the
East End, it has a lot of Fleet Street in it. Old pressmen hold
that there is nothing like a walk in the morning hours just after
dawn between Chancery Lane and Ludgate Circus in spring
and summer, and even in autumn. One veteran Scot used to
declare that there was a breeze broke around St. Paul’s at that
hour just as it breaks on Ben Lomond, and he had many a time,
: whilst
142 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
£460 EE EE ee
whilst approaching St. Paul’s, been reminded of a breeze from
a Highland loch. And there is a good deal in the belief that
Fleet Street air in the early morning is fresher than other
London air, for there being no domestic fires in the City and
the offices closing before six, the morning finds it clearer of
smoke than any other London quarter.
Then, even in these times there comes the clop-clop, clip-clop
of great horses in the night, and you look out of your window
and see a dark shining carriage with its candle-lamps burning, a
giant coachman and footman in fawn coats and tall hats on the
seat, and perhaps a glimpse of a uniformed figure or two in the
interior. You see the armorial crest on the door, the stately
Georgian harness on the great horses with touches of red in
the leather. It is one of the Lord Mayor’s carriages taking a
guest home from a Guildhall or City company dinner. Look
well at these tall horses, for they and the few teams in the royal
stables are now the last of the kind left in London. In the night
in Fleet Street this spectacle of old London pride, quiet and
stately, among the vegetable wagons and newspaper vans, looks
somehow like the squire’s carriage going through the village.
It always impresses me more sharply than the Lord Mayor’s
Show itself, for it never fails to come as a surprise, and seems
to hint a secret habitual life of the City that goes on silently
when Business has gone home and lights spring up in the
ancient City companies’ halls and strange ceremonies and
archaic costumes begin to move again, and maybe the dim old
portraits on these worshipful walls come to life. The Worship-
ful Company of Parish Clerks, for instance, who convene in a
little old hall in Silver Street and dine round a large, queer
table shaped like a bass viol, and probably sing glees and catches
together in the heart of the deserted quarter where Manchester
goodsmen
cae i
ORNER
Cc
ST. PAUL?S OVER AMEN
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY 143
goodsmen bargain and deal and crowd through the day, must
be a piece of a dream by Charles Lamb that has somehow taken
corporal existence.
But thoughts like these make Fleet Street only a thoroughiare,
not a place. To the public it is indeed a place, a place that
grows peerages like runner beans and makes and loses fortunes,
buys and sells reputations and makes the world dance to the
queer tunes of its medicine men: a sort of magic village with
tom-toms beating every morning. But that is, of course, not
all there is to say about Fleet Street; a puzzling place, however
you like to take it, with nothing spectacular to show for its
power and wealth, or for its great deeds done and the rare
hearts that have worked in its service and great causes it has
served (few memorials for its heroes in its village church of
St. Bride’s) ; Fleet Street is a mystery speaking with the tongues
of men and, at moments, of angels. _
Even the kinema people could make nothing of our vague,
shabby Fleet Street, and had to prepare and ‘feature’ their own
effects — Fleet Street which could give three headlines to any-
thing in a minute had no headline for itself. It was-so blank,
so insignificant that the kinema kings had to invent a Fleet
Street of their own. Once, soon after midnight, there descended
a fleet of big motor-wagons surmounted by enormous search-
lights on straddling legs frizzy with tubes. They were accom-
panied by other cars with strange-looking men and big film
cameras. About one o’clock the fun began. Four great moons
were turned on Fleet Street, and the cameras hummed while
the news-carts came thundering out from the printing offices.
‘Play on the clock— play on the clock !’ roared the stage manager.
It was important to have the time right. Long strings of press-
agency and cable-company boys came hurrying along on. bi-
cycles
144 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
cycles, and newsmen with news-bills sallied out from unexpected
places.
As some of the news-vans came along young kinema men in
plain clothes jumped onto the footboard with a paper in their
hand pointing out the significant thing in the leader to the
gruif, unresponsive driver. This was presumably to represent
young journalists in their enthusiasm going to uncontrollable
lengths. A char-a-banc full of men in evening dress came along
— presumably theatrical critics returning to their offices after a
first night. Large, expensive cars, with ladies in shiny dresses
turning wondering eyes on the great newspaper offices, edged
gently through the crush.
The street was cleared a little while four important ical
stout gentlemen, presumably editors: and chief sub-editors,
marched importantly out of an office across the street, supers
making way for them. But at a shout from the stage-manager
that it wouldn’t do they scurried back again to their entry and
came again as important editors and chief sub-editors.
These were only a few of the wonders that were recorded that
night so that the world might know something about its chief
informant. But one thing sticks. Like every other journalist, I
had writhed over that line in Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights
where he described Prince Florizel’s companion as ‘painted and
disguised to represent a gentleman connected with the Press.’
That night I saw that gentleman. |
As an epilogue to this chapter let me mention a Fleet Street
scene which I saw in my early London experience and always
expected to see again as an epilogue on the stage. It was in the
old Press Club. Two friends were sitting together over their
beer in the late afternoon. One was rather showily dressed
wearing a morning coat with white slip and a moss-rose bud
in
The GIANT GOOSEBERRY 145
in his buttonhole; his friend was a tired-looking man with
baggy pockets who seemed as though he sat most of his life.
The first was the reporter of a fashionable daily who described
weddings; the other an agency sub-editor who handled the law
reports, mainly divorce reports. The two were great friends,
and their talk usually turned on their work. The sub-editor
would speak of the divorce case he had been working on that
day and the reporter would often be able to recall the marriage,
with details of guests, clergymen, dresses and presents, and the
scene at St. George’s, Hanover Square, or St. Mary Abbot’s,
Kensington. The sub-editor on his side would mention the co-
respondent, the private detectives, the counsel, the judge, the
jury, and incidents of the case. Then they would talk probably
about the bright new wedding that the reporter had attended
that day and sub-editor meditatively would sharpen his blue
pencil.
ONL ety a ae
Abs a
NORTH O’ EUSTON
54
BBP SBE SRR SR SES SS
BE EBA AS BAAS BR ARR RR BAAN BN RN AAA ON ABE
NORTH O’ EUSTON
@a%e|N modern life the great railway stations are the
xiG| City gates. Here are gathered much of the sad-
y| ness and misery, the joy and fulfilment of ex-
| istence, the suspense and hopes and hates and
@EWAEOS)| loves that the eye confesses at last as the train
steams out or in. Strangers from afar are welcomed face to
face; men on adventurous errands go out as through sally-
ports (what a sally-port to eternity was Victoria Station from
1914 to 1918!) ; the handkerchief waves for an instant, but that
is only the pennon, and we de not see them grow to pigmies as
they troop over the plain. At these gates of the modern city
people arrive and depart at full stature. The Great arrive in
their noiseless trains a carriage door opens and there, large as
life, stands a king or the head of a Republic; the band plays
its eight bars of music while the Great shake hands with the
Great and the military guard stiffens for inspection. Five
minutes later and it is all over and the station is on the move
again and ordinary passengers are swarming into their trains.
It is all so sudden, so life-size, so soon over that it seems as un-
real as the white-painted coal on the tender of the State train.
And to the sensitive onlooker this air of unreality touches all
the station happenings: the meetings looked forward to so eager-
ly by flaming hearts, the farewells of the old with the young, the
last words said. In a few minutes the platform is empty but for
a few porters and old ladies asking for trains. If the scenes of
strong
149
150 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
strong human emotions were really haunted by the shades of
the actors, what dense assemblies there would be on every rail-
way platform! 7
Some emanation of the tragic, or at least of the sinister side of
the drama of coming and going, hangs about the neighbourhood
of the great railway termini. It is potently present round Water-
loo with its shabby confusion of railway arches and rows of
dark little houses lying in ambush in its intricacies, its second-
rate music-hall rendezvous, and a peculiar South London blight
near the river suggesting wharfland. It is present in a particu-
larly romantic form at Fenchurch Street Station—in a shop at
the corner you can buy ‘Malay Self-Taught’ —that half-secret
station tucked away from any thoroughfare, with a little lagoon
of a yard before its dingy front, where some days no cab can
penetrate because of the bodies of shivering lascars waiting
silently with their belongings for the order to mount the stairs
and take train to their ships at Tilbury. Fenchurch Street
Station’s dark roof resounds less than it did to the final bitter-
nesses of sailors and their women, but there are still more voices
raised in anger here than in other London stations. At night,
when the City shops are shuttered and the streets deserted, this
station sometimes splutters with life and song and oaths and
sailormen’s cries: But the emanation thickens to a cloud in
the region behind the three great termini in Euston Road, that
may be called, for convenience’ sake, North 0’ Euston. —
King’s Cross lurks within a sort of stableyard, its campanile
with the clock, too, having a domestic look, like the feature of
a stable of a great house. It seems the right place for the Flying
Scotsman to bearaway in reserved compartments carefully se-
lected people on the 11th of August. St. Pancras is like a ca-
thedral to an unknown saint — called St. Pancras for the moment
— raising
> EUSTON
NORTH O
NORTH O’ EUSTON 161
— raising the whole skyline of the north with Gothic outlines and
its nobly spanned interior, whose great height reduces trains
and people to something like performing mice in a cage. But
best of all as a work of imagination is Euston with its tremen-
dous granite Doric portal, by which Hardwick recognized
Euston as London’s Gate. How the lights of London sparkled
in the old days as one drove through it in one’s first London
hansom! How its shadow fell as one drove back! What a set-
ting was the gigantic portal to the dreams of young men who
had come to London to seek their fortune!
But the region round Euston does not suggest the young man
seeking his fortune at all. All great railway stations surround
themselves with a sort of debatable land that is neither resi-
dential, commercial, industrial, trading, nor theatrical. It has
shabby hotels and makeshift lodgings, bawdy houses, pawn-
brokers’ shops, second-hand dealers in all sorts of articles from
muddy mock-ermine furs to rings of rusty keys. A strange
temporary look hangs about the place as though the denizens
were always packing up, many of them moving on, and moving
on too quickly to pack up, and the place was organized for
immediate disposal of their goods. The only touch of new paint
is where a new pseudonym has been lettered on the front of a
shabby hotel. A strange sort of conflict seems to be waging all
the time up an down these streets with routs and forays as
though London was defending itself against these adventurers
and trying to drive them back into the stations and away, and
the needy folk were making a last stand.
Another fancy one has in North o’ Euston is of strangers who
sought London not as a land to conquer but as an asylum.
Police reports show that every year a large number of the petty
criminals, fraudulent tradesmen, shopmen who have falsified
books
152 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
books, and clerks who have embezzled, and all sorts of criminals
through weakness flee to London to escape justice, and many
who have taken their punishment to escape further shame. Do
many of them when they come out of their station and see the
rush and turmoil and spacious, incoherent metropolitanism of
Euston Road recoil abashed, settle down in the hinterland of
the stations, marry and breed furtive little children in these
furtive streets? Doubtless the people North o’ Euston are as
honest as people elsewhere, but that is the effect of much obser-
vation and cogitation there. It is a queer region, with a popula-
tion that moves much at night, and its streets of two-story
houses with forlorn gardens with broken iron railings and secret-
looking tiny squares and courts entered through archways con-
taining a hamlet with higgledy-piggledy tiny gardens with
washings hung out to dry and over-sized public-houses. Even
the dead do not belong to the district, but came there by chance,
for the obscure graveyard of St. James’s that is so hard to find
is packed with bodies that were carted up half a century ago
from St. James’s Churchyard, Piccadilly, when their lairs were ©
wanted for a new restaurant. Their tombstones, incommoded
and alien, are ranged round the walls, depreciating this un-
fashionable site for Piccadilly tombstones. I wonder if any of the
broken men of the region who eat their luncheons here in the
summer have a fellow-feeling for these tombstones. ‘Gentleman’
is the description cut on many. |
The most furtive, and in its way the most sinister, spirit of
the region resides, I think, in a dingy crescent with a shallow
convex curve and a distant echo of gentility in its arched win-
dows and faint glimmer that tells of stucco beneath its grime.
Its small houses are divided and subdivided among many
tenants, but it is curiously quiet at night, with naked lights here
and
NORTH O’ EUSTON - £52
and there behind curtainless windows. It is an uncanny ex-
perience to strike this crescent in a winter’s dawn when killing
time waiting on an overdue train at the station. I remember
well striking the place on one such aimless itinerary. The
crescent seemed to curve endlessly on and on in its shabby
symmetry, each number looking more mysterious and sinister
than the last with the dawn and the gas-light discovering its
discoloured face. Suddenly behind me I heard shambling foot-
steps. I looked back, but by the curve of the crescent could see
no one, and as I went on with the steps of the unseen figure
getting closer and closer, it was like an ugly dream that would
never end. In this mood with the mind seeking for something
tangible to give substance to my obsession of the night, my
thoughts fastened on a gigantic demi-jar over the fascia of a
shabby shop that had once been a drysalter’s. It seemed a sym-
bol of the mystery and abominable menace one sensed in the
locality as though the genie of the region waited on the ap-
pointed day to be unsealed and discharge his malignity against
the honour of the City. In the morning I had forgotten it all,
but the vision came back again this summer when the inquest
was held on the body of a famous man of learning full of years
and honours, who, arriving in London one night for a family
wedding, dined at a railway hotel, strolled out for an hour into
these streets and met shame and death; a great light in the world
of knowledge went out in guttering smoke. It was this and
other disasters to honour rather than the Camden Town Murder
with its relation to the railway stations and the night-life around
them that seemed to express the measure of dingy horror that
lurks in the region.
And what fiction-writer would be bold enough to introduce
such an incident as this?
Te
154 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
It might have happened to anyone hurrying to work in the
dreary Euston morning, but it was a policeman on his rounds
who noticed a man’s finger with a cheap ring upon it impaled
on a spike on the top of a gateway. The relic was taken to
Scotland Yard Museum, where the finger-print experts identi-
fied it as belonging to a notorious ex-convict. A week later a
man was arrested at Elephant & Castle as a pick-pocket. He
asked how he could pick pockets with a hand like that, showing
a heavily bandaged hand. At the police office he was found to
have lost a finger, and his finger-prints were found to agree with
the severed finger.
Modern Art with its eye instinct for the expressive ' was
bound to come to North o’ Euston, and in due course the Cum-
berland Market School was mee in which Walter Sickert,
from its anxieties, its ennui, its sorid makeshift bedchambers,
its ugly wallpapers and hard brittle-faced public-houses, distilled
and decanted an essence that will preserve it all for future
generations when all that one connotes as North o’ Euston has
gone. It is going steadily as the rebuilding goes on; it will
some day be untenable for the discouraged and needy popula-
tion that camp round the great stations like a rabble round the
city gates who have lost the pass word. :
i
4
5” at ee
Sep snanennane anne iRs
Et S08 GOB EGU oT Oe 78
BARGEES AND WATERMEN
I
ae
‘ O realize the immensity of London one must know
x al
that although it is the greatest seaport and port-
26, market in the world, most Londoners have never
Digepy seen a ship in dock and many have never seen a
40} ship. Only on business do people go to the docks,
and very few people have casual business there. To the great
majority of Londoners dockland is an unknown country lying
to the east that is as far from their thoughts and affairs as Hull
or Bristol. People go off by train to embark somewhere for
India or Australia or the Cape, there are dock strikes that upset
business and give shopkeepers a chance to raise prices, a new
dock costing millions is opened by royalty and historical articles
on Thames shipping appear in the Press, some benevolent so-
ciety seeks to raise money by showing parties round selected
dock warehouses, subscriptions are asked for seamen’s institutes
and, homes. The War, which recalled to us for a little many of
the realities upon which our civilization is based, made us starkly
aware of our ships and seamen upon whom we depended for
our daily bread, and at the end of it we had a look at the seamen
as they rowed in a procession of boats up to the Houses of
Parliament; very few of us knew the house-flags of the steam-
ship lines or could visualize the ships they manned. West of
Fenchurch Street we never see a ship’s officer, although nowa-
days they are not always in their shore clothes, but wear their
honourable uniform although not enthusiastic about its diamond
_ knots
157
158 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
knots. You can discern Jack ashore sometimes lolling up Fleet
Street, working his way west, his eyes ranging at about the first
story of the buildings, his hands rope-hooky and his new clothes,
bought through a runner, stiff and bad. Most of the seamen
paid off in London stay about Commercial Road and are con-
tent with the excellent entertainment and company of Jack’s
Castle, with an occasional stroll west or an excursion in force,
or stay in a body in a lodging-house kept by a man from their
home district. Shetland and Orkney seamen, for instance, can
usually be found in a good boarding-house kept by an old Shet-
lander. The seaman is still preyed upon, no doubt, but he has
now a better chance than any other stranger in London to live
and enjoy himself decently. Only, he is different from a lands-
man; the abstinences of the sea are not helpful to weak men.
A tramp seaman’s London must be a curious place with diffi-
culties and embarrassments all of its own, and extraordinary
licence too, for he would probably not see very much difference
between one landsman and another. Landsmen are notoriously
queer fellows, and you’ve got to look out, stand by, and don’t
let them put it across you. Watch them. The sort of incredible
thing that seamen propose and often bring to pass in London
_is illustrated by this story, told to me by one of the men con-
cerned in it.
Six sailormen sat in a Sydney bar talking about such matters
as how the mate worked the ship and the nght way, when one
of them, who had read in a newspaper about the coming coro-
nation of King George, proposed that they should all meet in
London and see the procession. The others agreed. Where
should they meet? Only one of them knew anything of London,
and he told them about Cleopatra’s Needle on the North Em-
bankment. It was quite simple. When they got to London
they
BARGEES AND WATERMEN 159
they were to work their way west up the north shore till they
came to Cleopatra’s Needle, and there they would all meet at
six o’clock on Coronation morning. Right. It was about nine
months to the event. They drew up a document with a penalty
clause that the last man to arrive was to shout the dinner on
Coronation night. None of them knew how they would get
there, but they each pledged their word. Coronation morning
arrived, and at six o’clock one of them was pacing in front of
Cleo’s needle. He was a Finn. Time wore on and he kept his
tryst so faithfully that he was too late to see the procession.
The Englishman, who had arrived in a mutton boat two months
before his time, spent his money and had to go to sea again.
He met the Finn a year afterwards in Bombay and heard of his
punctuality and disappointment, and during the War he fell
in with the New Zealander and Tasmanian and heard of their
bad luck in failing to get ships at the right time. He never
heard of the other two.
So when you notice a young, stiffly dressed, brown-faced man
with curved hands and eyes ranging on the first story of the
houses, it may be that he is going to some appointment that was
made long ago in another part of the world with a man he didn’t
know.
One type of seamen, however, the Londoners do know — those
wonderful men whom they see working the barges up and down
the river, usually a solitary, rather statuesque figure with one
sweep out making her do all sorts of wonderful things, he work-
ing one side, Father Thames with his current on the other, as
they manceuvre to shoot the bridge. His is one of the very few
callings, old as flint-knappers, that has not altered very much
since the first London Bridge was built. He would be at home
in the Roman galley, dug up from the foundation of the Lon-
| don
160 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
don County Hall, that is in the London Museum although he
would not like the look of the narrow shell planking. He has
his own traditions and sea-learning, river-learning, and canal-
learning, and belongs to a community that is almost a race
apart. Many of them have been born on barges like their
fathers before them, and a moving structure underfoot is more
natural to them than the hard land.
We know that bargees live on barges, while lightermen live
ashore and work on sailless barges (dumb barges) that load goods
from ships, and are licensed by the Waterman’s Company, but
there are very many sorts of bargees and watermen. There are,
for instance, barge-folk who are always on canals and never
smell salt water, and real sailormen bargees who sail their boats
round the coast to Portland or up to Yarmouth. The lighter-
men, you might say, are the descendants of the wherrymen,
the jolly young watermen of Dibdin’s song and Marryat’s
stories; they have to serve an apprenticeship on the river, and
every year the lads who have ended their apprenticeship com-
pete together for the Doggett Coat and Badge, a sculling match
instituted by Thomas Doggett, actor-manager, to commemo-
rate the accession of George I and the Hanoverian succession.
The competitors are often watermen from the villages up-river.
The race provides a jolly London sporting event, rarely
noticed except by watermen and fishmongers, the policemen
on the Embankment, and people who happen to be on the
bridges as the race goes by. It passes London City, Westminster,
and Chelsea, and by all the rights of sportsmanship and skill in
the element that is supposed to be the Englisman’s special
concern, it should bring a throng like that at the University
boat-race, yet even the devoted sportsmen gathered in Bouverie
Street and Tallis Street to wait for evening newspapers with the
race
BARGEES AND WATERMEN 161
race results never take a turn down to the Embankment to see
it pass. This is strange. If we were to read of the Doggett
race with its wonderful gruelling struggles and expert water-
manship, as an event of the past, most of us would say: ‘Ah, we
would like to have seen that. All the fun has gone out of the
river nowadays. How dull the Diamond Sculls would look if
compared with singles through the crowded river traffic, shoot-
ing nine bridges. Yes, that would have been a sight worth
seeing! How colourless modern life is to be sure!’ Well, every
first of August the race is run and the cardinal doublet, breeches,
and hose and silver badge of George I pattern are presented
to the winner that night at the Fishmongers’ Hall. Let me
describe one of these noble contests.
At the pistol-shot the six skiffs under London Bridge de-
tached themselves from the boats of advising pot-hatted people
that held their stern, and moved swiftly out of the bridge arches
into the glancing, chippy water. Several hundred men staring
over the bridge shouted ‘Hoorah,’ and the stout, blue-shirted
porters on the wharves and at the warehouse windows also made
approving noises. ‘he three steamboats at the Old Swan Pier
were all signal bells and flurry, smoke, and betting cries. A
flock of row-boats on the Surrey side were moved to wilder
agitation. Bulky men in pot-hats rose in them and cried
hoarsely, ‘Pocock,’ ‘Jeffries,’ and “Joe Beckett-Beckett’ just as
if they were on dry land. Big white and gold clouds sailed
overhead in the blue, flags flapped, red-faced men looked out
of the classic stonework of Fishmongers’ Hall, the tarnished
golden thistle on the top of the monument glinted in the light.
Great horses pulling lorries packed high with beer and sur-
mounted by bullet-headed, big-bodied Bacchuses in red caps
began to move forward again, men on bus-tops held tight to
their
162 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
their hats, and smoke-wreaths from the steamers and the
wharves combed themselves out on the face of London City.
It was a bustling, hearty scene, brimming with the older side of
London life. It might have been a Turner painting. It was,
indeed, the very day for Doggett’s Coat. and Badge race. Our
complement on the good steamer Pepys was partly made up
by coalmen from Erith, bargees from Limehouse, rogue rider-
hoods, and other riverside characters. Five aquatic bookmakers
were in attendance, and on the inviolate Thames fearlessly
shouted the odds in the beards of the pier policemen. Pocock
of Eton, Joe Beckett of ‘Lime’us,’ Young Jeffries of Erith, and
Rough of Putney were the fancied ones, and Gibson and Bland
were any odds you liked. Pocock, however, was the big favour-
ite, and he showed himself the winner from the first, his big,
long body in dark green getting clean away at the start (the
rest were ‘the fie-uld,’ by the way, not ‘the water’ or ‘the river,’
as the aquatic bookmakers should have known). It would take
the Water Poet himself to sing the glories of that great race.
Everyone agreed that no man could wish to see a better race
till the day he died. Off went Pocock in the centre of the river,
tossing the spray as high as his head before he steadied to it.
Beckett, in white, was close behind, and Rough next. Pocock
shot Southwark Bridge well ahead, with the river fairly clear
before him, the steamers hurrying well behind, and dodging
round a couple of dumb barges with sweeps out, he went through
Blackfriars easily. In the long stretch to Waterloo the race came
on a fleet of seven sail of compressed hay well in the fairway,
and just at Waterloo we saw that Rough had slipped inside of
them, and in smoother water was shooting the southmost arch
of the bridge at the same time as Pocock. And so the race went
on through the river traffic, each man guiding himself as best
he
YAMOL LOHS AHL
.
nl ne Si
soseanhe
4 t ees et i. Ty ROA, ee x
“ Te mt. bali ee a Me : e *e
‘ - P 7
™ 7
ast
A
en
BARGEES AND WATERMEN 163
he could. At Charing Cross one year the leader found himself
suddenly hoist on a whirlpool made by the escaped air from the
tunnelling deep below for the Bakerloo tube, but there was no
such accident this time. Nor was any competitor struck on the
head by a bottle nor pulled out of his boat with boat-hooks by
the well-wishers of another competitor, nor upset by them.
These things have happened at the Doggett, but it’s a long
time ago. Nor was any man even impeded on his lawful occa-
sion. High on the bridge of the Queen Elizabeth, which carried
a Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, stood a man ina cocked
hat with a port-wine coat and light blue trousers and a gold
badge like a tray on his arm. He was the bargemaster of the
company and the father of Pocock, yet never once did he run
down any of his son’s rivals, nor give them his wash more than
is customary. Pocock won by half a dozen lengths, covering
the four and a half miles in thirty-three minutes, and he took —
a turn up the river before he lifted his 6 feet 3 inches of young
manhood into the launch. Jeffries and Gibson, who had kept
within three lengths of one another for half the course,
making spurt after spurt and reducing even the coaimen to
speechlessness, so that they couldn’t in the end say, ‘Dig 1t,
boy — dig it — dig 1t, my bully-boy —hoorah,’ had to be taken
from their boats. The giant young waterman.had rowed
them out.
I might add as a predella to my picture of that great race a
vision given to me of life on the waterside by a young water-
man on the steamer, who, like his friends, wore a big red bow
to show he was from Erith. After some talk, he said: ‘You
wouldn’t think it, I know, but I’m the only kid on the river
what’s got twenty-one teapots. That's truth.’ His friends said:
‘Elfred’s got twenty-one teapots, won fair in pairs and fours.’
(This
164 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
(This referred to the sort of races, not to the teapots.) Asked
how his wife liked keeping them all clean, he said: “This boy
ain’t got a wife, but ole mother’s proud enough — have ’em all
out in the little back garden when we ’ave a party — twenty-one
of ’em. What have you got to say about that?’ No one had
anything but good to say about it, so he told me how he had won
a dinner service. ‘Silver?’ asked some one. ‘How could a dinner
service be silver?’ asked Elfred. ‘I don’t know about them
things,’ said the other, ‘but why shouldn’t it if it was a big
enough race you won?’ We passed a crowded tug, and he said:
‘See that man— him wi’ the P. and O. cap and his foot up on
the side. That Jeffries father of him what came in second
to-day. He’s my friend. I sees him over the garden wall every
day. Well, that’s his father—father of Jeffries what was sec-
ond for the Doggett to-day.’
The bargemen— the sailor bargemen— too, have their regat-
ta, but it cannot be seen from London, and it has the likeness to
the watermen’s race that very few Londoners ever see it. It is
sailed each year from the Medway round the Mouse lightship
and home, and the cement folk from Chatham and Rochester
and the barge population all along the river make a day of it,
if they can. Those who only know barges in their workaday
gear, lumbering down the Thames, dirty, mastless, under the
guidance of two men with large oars, or coming up heavy
laden under a mainsail tucked in at the end of the sprit, do not
know what a barge can rise to. Had they seen, as I did one —
Saturday, a noble seven of them coming round the Mouse light-
ship, with their clean decks and gilt-lined sides, their brown
mainsail, white topsail and jib, and perky little brown mizen,
all drawing baggily but to fine purpose, they would have been
astonished to a demonstrative degree. Even the nautically
dressed
BARGEES AND WATERMEN 16s
dressed barge-owners themselves, as from the committee steamer
they view the race at the turning point, cheered to a man.
The boats in the vicinity, and there were many of them, set
up a great noise. The steamers whistled with all their horse-
power, and a lonely old dredger carrying mud out to sea drew
near at the uproar and gave five hoarse toots. Even at that point
there was no doubt about the winner, for the holder of the Cup,
Giralda, put about for the run home nearly a mile ahead of
the Genesta and Sara, which came struggling along together,
now one jib ahead, now the other.
The course was a beat down the Medway past the Nore and
on to the Mouse lightship, and a run home — some 45 miles in
all. Eight barges, each of which (one was sorry to see) bore
yacht-like names rather than the kindly old ones, put out at a
quarter-past eleven from Gillingham Reach. A barge race does
not start like a yacht race. As the second gun went the crew,
which stood till then impatiently aft, rushed forward, and the
boats, which lay in a line a length from each other, broke stay-
sails, shook out their boomless mainsails, and payed off on the
wind. No jockeying for position here. The sails were loosened
and away they went. The Sara, which lay on the weather side
of the river, had the first of the wind and the longer slant, so
she rushed across the noses of the others in the gallantest way.
Thus the race began, with a spirited vocal accompaniment
which rose to quite a wild passage when the boats worked down
to the floating powder-magazine at Chatham. Here the Tor-
ment, a, smart new boat with a blue stern, which had been first
to make sail, fouled the Genesta and hung her topmast on the
magazine side. As we passed we heard the reproaches of the
crew of the Torment and of the Genesta. It was amazing to see
the clever handling of the barges in this narrow channel, the
quick
166 T4e LONDON PERAMBULATOR
quick way these heavy-looking craft put about, avoiding one
another when it seemed impossible and beating quite close into
the wind with the big lee-boards they let down from the side —
an idea which suggests the origin of the American centre-board.
The 22 miles to the Mouse were covered by the Giralda about
two o’clock, which meant, as she sailed about nine miles more in
the beat, a pace of about ten miles an hour. Let who will sneer
at a barge after that!
The best bit of the race was the keenness of the sailing. After
Giralda had the lead the others settled down in couples. Genesta,
which lost about seven minutes by the foul, paired with Sara.
Edward VII and Philippa came side by side, and, rather than
leave Thelma to go her solitary way, Torment, with her top-
mast gone and her sail tucked in to the mast (as though by
pins), took a short cut and joined her. The boats watched each
other like rival terriers — went indeed, out of their course trying
to blanket one another. Possibly crew taunted crew, like the
Greeks they were. Anyway, they seemed to have a grand time,
and one felt almost sorry for the Giralda ploughing its lonely
furrow. The sea, which had worn a gummy look all morning,
turned blue as the sky cleared, and the sun glinting on the
barges’ sails showed them, some ruddy as the cherry and some
light coffee colour, and made their dress topsails and jibs very
white. .
The wind was blowing steadily. It was a glorious English
sight. ‘The barges staggered along before the wind on upright —
keel, the big jib, kept out by a pole on the opposite side to the -
mainsail, acting as a kind of spinnaker. Although the wind came
and went, the barges went merrily, their weight carrying them
on where a yacht would have slackened. Giralda arrived a few
minutes after five, Sara, a length ahead of the Genesta, four
minutes
BARGEES AND WATERMEN 167
minutes later. Then, neck and neck, came Edward VII and
Philippa. This was the real excitement. No one could say
which was first as they bore to the line. The river was alive
with excited bargees (arms round each other’s necks) on un-
steady boats, and the noise was loud. ‘Hurry up—bhurry up,’
they cried to the stout old person who stood monumentally at
the stern of the Philippa. But the result was in the hands of the
gods and the club committee, who came to the finding that it
was a dead-heat. Then there was a great ceremony on the club
steamer, presided over by a kindly commodore, who was not
quite of a mind whether, after all, we should toss up for the
-cup—committee-men, guests, and bargees. However, it was
handed over to the Giralda’s owner, and every one seemed to
get handsome silver cups. The awarding was, to the unitiated,
a little puzzling, but it seemed to satisfy the honest bargees,
who, one found, were not dressed in white flannels, but in
clean white corduroys. The master of the Giralda, besides the
trinkets, received a large baggy bundle which very soon was
revealed as an immense red flag waving at the end of the sprit
of the winning barge. Its legend read, ‘Medway Challenge
Cup.’ It was all a long time ago, but when I see a dismasted
barge drifting like a lighter down through bridges I can see
again a noble squadron of brown sails.
esleslestesleslestesleslesleslcslesleslestestesleslesicsieslcsic Sestestesleole
ee ee ee
NERA ON A AN BAAD ANAK AN ADO A AN AD AER
Bap Fae Ree Ga aS IGS Fpl op aaa
The ROAD VIEW amd the AIR VIEW
ISS Bay] N the later Victorian era the average middle-class
; \ Londoner with the development of the suburban
y| railways and the advent of the Underground Rail-
way lost the extensive knowledge of London which
his gig-driving and long-walking father had, and,
apart from his own district and bus route, he knew London
chiefly from railway carriage windows. The old coaching high-
ways to the East Coast by Whitechapel, to Dover by the Borough
and Shooter’s Hill, to the Great North Road by Barnet, to Ox-
ford by Uxbridge, to Portsmouth by Kingston, and Cobham, all
were forgotten. The outer ring of London was invaded only by
delivery vans, and few people could tell any roadway out of
town except the way to the Derby. Who can tell of the long-
decayed rambling inns, like the White Hart at Godstone, where
horses were changed for the last stage coming into London?
Or how Charles Dickens went on his night strolls from Doughty
Street to Gadshill? London roadcraft was dying away, the old
road itineraries were closed and forgotten like most of the old
coaching inns on the great highways. Cycling revived road in-
terest among the younger men, but the real revival was to come.
- About the beginning of the century came the motor-car, at
first with a red flag carried by a walker in front of it, then
without such assistance. The pioneers came to know the outer
suburbs well and the possibilities of repair work at each suburb ;
but
171
172 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
but better engines and better roads came quickly, and after the
War, when tens of thousands of young men used to motor-cars
and motor-cycles came back to civilian life, the motor public
found itself an enormous force ranging from the millionaire to
the artisan. The public were on the road again, using skill and
cunning to find the best ways out of London to their journey’s
end, and learning the districts like the old stage-coachman.
Then the motor char-a-banc thundered on the scene and the
long-distance motor-bus extended its routes. Every Londoner
began to know something of the lie of land in London and how
suburb telescoped into suburb on the big roads, where the hills
were and where the busy cross-roads, where the barrages of
factory workmen set in as the dinner or closing hour whistle
blew, and the talk in many a home and club turned back to
the road again, and how to weasle out of London, north, south,
east and west, with the fewest possible obstructions. London
has lost something of the grand isolation that had come to her
with the accomplishment of the railway era, as a country by
itself, connected with the rest of the land by straight steel lines.
The new generation see London rather as a great centre and
conglomeration of towns on roads leading to other towns. It
seems in a new way part of England—a place you can detour or
pass through on your way elsewhere. The motor-car has made
London a smaller place.
The aeroplane has made it yet smaller. It gave, of course, a
new vision of London, unknown before, except to those rare
souls who had gone up in the Crystal Palace balloons or taken
part in the exploits of the Hurlingham Balloon Club, and then
it was not quite the same as looking down from the purposeful
aeroplane emerging from the clouds, or from the side of an
airship.
My
|
-
f
cactheiiiinireaenenans
ead ee
¥
PORTLAND PLACE
The ROAD VIEW and the AIR VIEW 1173
My first sight of London from the air in war-time from a big
Handley-Page machine, left a very definite impression. I was
on the rear platform, and it is interesting to see cities from this
point of view. When flying over other places on the front seat
the machine seemed to be eating up the land below. From the
rear one saw the terrestial world drifting away as if one were
saying good-bye for ever. Looking down on London with this
emotion, the last impression one had was of civilization as a
terrible sausage-machine which received humanity and pressed
it out into close, red, squirmy residue.
The streets of Hampstead and Camden Town, with their
coiled, elongated crescents and curving roadways and circuses,
were close, compact, and essential as though produced under
tremendous pressure. In some places the backs of the houses in
different streets seemed almost to touch. The garden suburb
was a pretty geometrical pattern, like a toy village on an zesthetic
architect’s plan. It seemed impossible that a world like this
could have created anything so symmetrical and decent.
The only other symmetrical thing I noticed was a disc of
dull silver. I was looking down at the moment between the
wooden spars of the cage that I stood on. It glimmered cu-
riously, and I thought for the moment that some one had
dropped a half-crown. Then I saw that we were over the round
pond in Kensington Gardens. Bloomsbury was close-set
thickets of dull rosy hue. Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, and Ken-
sington Gardens made a huge grey-green oasis among the tiles
and slates. We did not go over St. Paul’s, but curved round the
north of it. Milan Cathedral, I remember, looked from above
like a wonderful intricate shell on a little green cloth; Venice
was the colour of old cork with the canals twining like pieces
of
174 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
of wire as though the gods indeed had made merry there and
drunk deep. The Cathedral looked a lop-sided, crooked build-
ing, butting up with its dark dome like a turquoise set in its
silvery intricate setting of Portland stone. How wonderfully
blue-white the Portland stone of London is from the top, and
yet how the whole fleet of Wren’s spires are lost in the smoky
sea of London, and how few of them could be discerned!
The river was bright enough—the traitorous Thames which
had signalled London to the enemy by day and night. For all
the smoke, it proclaimed its presence, gleaming sullenly in all
its twists and writhes like an ancient eel. Even when the Crystal |
Palace ceases to refract and the skylights do not twinkle, old
Father Thames turns his bleary eye to the sky and winks to the
enemy in the air. He is older than England, and only cares
for sport. The bridges over the Thames seem fragile, thready
things. Even the Tower Bridge, with its mock-turtle Gothic
fabric, took its place in the airscape as a delicate, modulated
structure. I could not discern a flag in Whitehall. It was cu-
rious to see how the smoke of London seemed to stop about 600
feet from the ground, and how it lay in a circle of the Thames
Valley, with the clouds browsing on the hills around it.
A stranger view of London from above comes on days when
your machine has been flying high and you have been travel-
ling over the clouds. I shall never forget a wonderful passage
from Paris, at 9,000 feet up for the main part, over a world of
clouds in sunshine, sierras of pale amber and purple nothing
else could be seen but a long gap in the distance over the ©
Channel. Where was London? We descended sharply. One
last look back over the sunlit glories that blushed and bloomed
and we were down into the cloud-floe, wriggling through milky
whiteness
igs
Tie ee.
The ROAD VIEW and the AIR VIEW 175
whiteness that streamed past, and down into a darkened cham-
ber with a dull-green carpet on its floor, and the twin-towers of
Crystal Palace as ornaments on a shelf of smoke.
London does seem a small place when you come down to it
from the heavens!
EOE Sie Gis ies
‘GONE!’
aco] ONDON is the auction-room of the world, and
S=l@| by way of business it is constantly selling off it-
ES) self. Somewhere the hammer is always falling:
| | “Going! Going! Gone!’ The items fall; the last
= ees of the great City mansions that had survived from
Plantagenet times, a famous theatre, an inn of Chancery, a
prison, a historic school, the General Post Office, an entertain-
_ ment palace, a City church, hotels and taverns with long pedi-
grees, a meeting-house. Any Londoner of twenty years’ stand-
ing can remember the passing of every one of these, for after
the auctioneer’s hammer falls on such unportable property the
housebreaker’s pickaxe is soon heard and it tumbles down like
London bridges and penny rolls. And in a few years we are
disputing over its site as though it had happened before the
Great Fire. Events march quickly in London once they march
at all, and memories are short, as befits a trading capital.
Hurricanes of ‘development’ have swept over districts that for
one reason or other had survived their money-making service,
and in a year these parts have been so transformed that recent
tenants lose their way in them. Many of these places had kept
their good looks, despite shabbiness, to the last, and the senti-
mental Londoner regretting their passing must often have
wished that they could have been somehow turned out to grass
like a favourite horse that had done fine service in his day.
Something of this kind, indeed, was done with the great city
mansion
179
180 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
mansion, Crosby Hall, that was so carefully conveyed from St.
Helen’s and set up in Chelsea by the river near the site of Sir
Thomas More’s garden. And many a piece of old London has
been sent out of town. Old Temple Bar is now the entrance
to Theobald s Park, and some day the present owner may soften
his heart and agree to return it to the City as an Embankment
gateway to the Temple. The Seven Dials column, round which
so much of London’s vice and poverty had convened, now preens
itself on Weybridge Green and pretends to be a memorial of a
pious royal duchess. The queerest transference of all was ac-
complished by a City contractor who settled in Swanage and
brought there all sorts of London fragments. But perhaps those
old house-fronts and obelisks should be regarded, not so much
as London relics living out their old age in the sea-coast town, —
but rather as old Dorsetshire natives retiring to their birthplace
after years of hard service in London, bearing all their City airs
and City stains upon them. Here surely is subject for a poet!
But the list of such escapes is, of course, a very short one, and
the record of notable casualties seems to grow larger each year
to make up for the lull in the War. The appetite of the des-
troyers sharpens with exercise, for now Waterloo Bridge and
several of the City churches are demanded, although one can-
not help noticing how many things have been bitten off and left
unconsumed. In St. Martin’s Street, off Leicester Square, there
was a comely little house with some curious features, one of
which was a cut-away in an attic ceiling to allow free play to a
telescope; the man who had lain and gazed through the telescope
there was Isaac Newton. It was a polite old place with many
small panelled rooms, and it was easy to visualize its later ten-
ants, Fanny Burney and her father, there. The house was sold
during the War and broken up, all but the ground floor, a mel-
ancholy
‘GONE!’ ISI
ea AL SS ld
ancholy stump of an honourable roof-tree, and so it has remained
till to-day. Very greedy!
A favourite exercise of eighteenth-century architects — Soane
devoted much of his time and gifts to it—was the designing
of ideal compositions of buildings that never were built. As one
muses over the lost London buildings that stand out in one’s
perambulations of twenty odd years and are now as if they had
never been, they group in a mental composition until it seems
almost as though half the character of the London one first
knew had vanished off the earth. They compose oddly in one’s
memory, not by architectural importance or size or by their
history, but rather by the vividness of the colour they gave to
the pattern of London enrolled in one’s memory. I shall rather
neglect the show-pieces and record the more curious buildings
that have gone and the manner of their going.
There is, for a beginning, old St. James’s Hall in Piccadilly,
unimportant except as a London institution. Over its dust and
ashes played a rainbow of vividly contrasted memories. To
some of us it meant the music of Joachim and Sarasate, to others
Sammy Bones and Jim the Cornerman, and the laughter of
children who have now ceased to take much interest in their
birthdays; to others the aftermath of the Boat-race and a
smashed hat. The shade of its memories depended on whether
St. James’s Hall was to you “The Concert’ or “The Minstrels’
or ‘Jimmy’s.’ When the housebreakers were in the thick of
their work they were much annoyed by relic-seekers, but it was
impossible to say to which of these three sections the seekers
belonged. Another place of popular resort that one did not
know properly how to place was the Egyptian Hallin Piccadilly,
that went in the same year. It was about a hundred years old,
with a facade supposed to be in the form of an Egyptian temple,
and
182 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
and it had from the beginning harboured natural and artificial
curiosities. In it the allegorical painter Haydon brooded in his
empty exhibition while fashionable London thronged to the
other entrance to see Tom Thumb, and at last he came out and
blew away his brains. Haydon’s Diary keeps his memory alive,
but Albert Smith, who lectured there, and Artemus Ward, who
introduced American humour to an appreciative England, are
almost forgotten. The earlier years of the New English Art
Club brought honour to the hall— Wilson Steer, John Sargent,
James Guthrie, Augustus John, William Rothenstein, and Wil-
liam Orpen showed some of their best work there. But Maske-
lyne and Cooke brought fame. It vanished with its stucco mon-
oliths and gods and goddesses like one of the acts of those
great illusionists and a huge stone building appeared in its place.
Then, there was Exeter Hall with its tall dark portal that one |
somehow associated with Charles Keene’s drawings in Punch.
To me the Strand will never be the same when there is no full-
ness of black-coated figures in May breaking into streams to
spread like spilt ink all over the neighbourhood.
An Inn of Court is a rarity in any auctioneer’s list. It seems
to stand for permanency and law without end. Yet two have
gone in this century. Old Serjeant’s Inn, that adjoined Clifford’s —
Inn—which itself is now a dead limb of the law that the gar-
dener of Limbo has forgotten — and New Inn in Wych Street,
have gone. I remember a legarthic, seedy crowd in the square
of New Inn, and a rapid auctioneer knocking down to them the —
stone, the lime, the windows, the woodwork, the chimneys, and
the lamps of that musty old legal hostelry. Of all the Inns of
Court the New Inn could be spared with least regret. Although
it is said that the students of the Strand Inn rested here after
they had been routed thence by the great Duke of Somerset
when
DISSOLUTION OF EGYPTIAN HALL
‘GONE!’ ) 18 3
li al Ci
when he built the palace whose site is now covered by Somerset
Flouse, it had little of antiquity or beauty to recommend it.
A dingy square, with a rather quaint little hall, and a squat
ash tree, surrounded by a grass-plot, in the centre, formed the
whole Inn. Some of the houses were of Queen Anne’s time,
and there was at least one picturesque turret corner. But the
whole effect had none of the urbane charm of the large Inns.
During the sale it looked particularly forlorn, with its doors
chalked for execution. There was a wealth of suggestion in
‘Lot 169,’ marked on a door where generations of litigants, with
all their hopes and fears, had knocked. Even the very pave-
ments had been torn up and stones propped against the wall as
samples for purchasers. Up the narrow staircases with the heavy
twisted rails the crowd of brokers swarmed to examine the few
old lamps and grates, and in one or two places the fine classic
carving over fireplaces. These chambers, many of which had
been shut for years, were strange places to go into. A cat which
was sunning itself among old law papers in one room appeared
to be too much astonished at the intrusion even to put its back
up. A pigeon at one window refused to believe that there were
real people about, and perched quite still until some one put the
window up to let clean air into the ghostly rooms. It was the
very dickens of a place.
It was all carted away like so many decayed, curious, roman-
tic relics that stood in the way of the Strand to Holborn scheme
that gave us Aldwych and Kingsway. Its operations acted as a
sort of delayed action mine exploding piece by piece destroying
the whole formation of the district, wiping out Wych Street
with its Caroline picturesqueness and bawdry, blemishing the
strange dusty seignorial precinct of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It
took the Sardian Embassy Chapel with its triple gallery and
memories
184 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
memories of the Gordon rioters and the old dark archway be-
neath it, and (the other day) a discreet small tavern, the Ship,
at the corner of Little Turnstyle, where in the troubled times
the priest said mass to an apprehensive congregation with pots
of porter before them lest the rioters break in.
The loss in this neighbourhood, however, that as a sentimen-
tal Londoner and a humble lover of beauty I most deplore, did
not come about through the Strand to Holborn operations, but
in the usual way through a change of ownership. It was some-
thing one selfishly kept apart as a London sight for friends
worthy of it. Just as there are pools in some Highland rivers
that the gamekeeper keeps to himself and never tells the castle
or speaks of at the village inn, so in London there are quiet,
secret places that your true Londoner hugs to himself, and,
even if he be a writing-man, restrains his pen lest the dealers
swoop down with their lures and drags to catch his treasures, or
the curious public come in hordes and the owners make the
place inaccessible. Such a place is —or rather was, for its noble
staircase is gone, and although its architecture has been repaired
and preserved, its whole character is changed—that large, gloomy
house, No. 35, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which turns an obdurate
face upon that almost deserted pleasaunce. It is a four-storied
building of early eighteenth-century character, and superiicially
the mansion seems of little interest, although the height of the
first story, with its central window draped, as it were, in a long
periwig, hints at something. You went through a wide, domed
passage into a darkened hall, whence arose the most astonishing
staircase in London — if Wren’s great geometrical staircase in St.
Paul’s,is excepted. It was of the same character — an open stair-
case is a great round well, with the stairs supported only at their
jointing in the wall and their pressure on one another, there
being
‘GONE!’ 185
being in no central newel or support of any kind. Is there any-
thing more graceful in England than the beautiful (almost un-
known) stair in the south tower of St. Paul’s, with its delicate
leat-like curves and its mystery of lighting? The stair in Lin-
coln’s Inn was almost as graceful, with a steeper wave of its
four flights. It was likea fine Piranesi drawing, with its apparent
defiances of the laws of gravity and its strange accidents of
lighting from the top dome and from lights from doorways left
open on the landings. The ironwork was worthy of it. It was
believed to be the production of a London smith in the early
eighteenth century, who was a disciple of the great Tijou, the
French smith who made the ironwork of St. Paul’s and Hamp-
ton Court. Perhaps it was the work of Huntingdon Shaw. The
balustrading of the first flight and landing was of the lyre pat-
tern, embellished with acanthus leaves in repoussé work. It
was carefully taken to pieces and presented by the new owners
of the building to the Victoria and Albert Museum. The house
is much the poorer by the disappearance of this enchanting
staircase, but something remains there of the formal spirit and
beauty of the early eighteenth century, of the pot-pourri ele-
gance of Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera,’ while most of its companions
have vanished suddenly and violently like the lives of the men
who died on the scaffold outside in Lincoln Fields.
There are strange things in the old house. In the back rooms,
which are not more spacious than the ordinary London drawing-
room, there are on two floors noble open screens composed of
tall fluted Ionic columns supporting three arches like a triptych
in a Highmore picture. The doors in the big rooms are im-
pressive structures, with columns and pediments and cushion
mouldings, and the lighting is curiously broken with these
stately screens and with the eccentric window-frames. a on
older
186 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
older form there was something uniquely formal and gloomy
and periwigged about the whole building, with its lofty rooms
and its great mysterious curtsying staircase. When I first visited
it, many years ago, and the old clerk there, who darted out of
one of the doors of the secret-looking lawyers’ offices that opened
on the landing as an old pike might dart out of a recess in a quiet,
deep pool, developed almost human qualities and supported with
some heat his view that it was Wren himself who designed that
staircase before he completed the great staircase in St. Paul’s,
just as he tried his ’prentice dome at St. Stephen’s, Walbrook,
before tackling the great dome of St. Paul’s. But every detail
of this house spoke of Lord Burlington’s taste. It was, indeed,
designed by Robert Taylor about 1730.
Its staircase is now in South Kensington Museum, and there,
too, are some relics of another fine old London house that —
probably in common with many another amateur of London —
one deceived oneself at first in thinking a personal discovery.
That was the old house in Botolph Lane that by local legend
was once the house of Wren.
You turned off one of the little fishy lanes that stagger down
from Eastcheap to the back of the Monument, through a large
square entry just big enough to admit a decent-sized wagon
with a careful driver, which led to a small neglected court
cobbled with very old stones that were probably even older
than the soberly beautiful seventeenth-century London mansion
that stood with two warehouses as supporters facing the entry.
It was said to have been the residence of Sir Christopher Wren.
London is inexhaustible in surprises, but the existence of this
mansion in the heart of the City, and not a word of it in the
thousands of books that have been written about London, was:
both
‘GONE!’ 187
both a surprise and a mystery. The date ‘1670’ was carved
above the great staircase.
The most striking thing in the interior was the spaciousness
of the hall and stairway, which went back the depth of the
house. The hall, which was about 30 feet deep, was paved with
chequers of black and white marble, and the oaken staircase had
finely carved balustrades and balusters. On the ground floor
there was one interesting room, with painted panels and a rich
plaster ceiling. These paintings are signed ‘R. Robinson, 1696.’
Redgrave knows no English painter of that name in the seven-
teenth century, and possibly this is all that is preserved of his
works. It was dim at all times in the old mansion, but on the
dull afternoon of my first visit the rooms were very dark. The
caretaker ran his candle up and down the panels, giving glimpses
of strange figures clad in feathers and skins, of rhinoceroses and
monkeys and lions and curious trees — “That’s the tobacco tree,’
said the caretaker about one of them; ‘party come from Ameriky
knew it when he saw it, and told me,’— serpents, and mysterious
groups of armed men. I took it that the artist’s subject was
possibly the legend of Pocahontas, which must have been an
old favourite at the time. The upstairs rooms had been con-
siderably altered, and all that remained of their old beauty was
the richly carved doorways. A door on the top floor led to the
flat leaden roof, still haunted by pigeons. If Wren had ever
come there to take the air he would have seen the Monument
rise straight before him, most of his fifty churches, and the dome
of St. Paul’s in the making. Here he could have brooded like a
god over his mighty works. It had been used as a house up to
the fifties of last century, and in its last years it was a school.
‘Gone!’ There were some things one was not so sorry to see
go. One said good-bye gladly to Old Newgate Prison, although
1t
188 Zhe LONDON PERAMBULATOR
it was a work of art designed with terrible significance by the
elder Dance, who took his inspiration, they say, from the Carcer1
series of Piranesi. It was a black romantic old pile that looked
more like a stronghold of Crime than a building where honest
men were on top and the knaves had no say; the nightmare iron
door on the front wall made to imitate stone (it could hardly
have deceived a blindfolded man—not the blindfolded men
who were led through it!) ; the leering old Caroline statues of
Flora and Ceres and those other stony virgins who used to stand
in niches on the terrible wall; the little spiky gates —the whole
menacing thing had gone and in its place is a sort of Renaissance
palace with lace-curtained windows. The prisoners now live
at Brixton, and there is no place but the dock for them in the
New Newgate. You felt sorry for George Selwyn, the amateur
of the macabre, who did not live to see the sale of Newgate.
Behind the facade of Newgate and the floor of the yard there
was a space of a foot or so that went down to the foundations,
some sort of device to make escape more difficult. This was a
graveyard of pigeons. The warders had different theories. One
said the pigeons — they flew about Newgate over the Murderers’
Walk (how the prisoners in the Exercise Yard must have fol-
lowed them with their eyes!)—slept on the top of the wall, and
the older ones would fall or be knocked off their perch and
drop into the space and be unable to flutter up, and after a bit
would be still; so even to the birds Newgate became a prison
and an execution.
The sale of the old Bailey relics was carried through in an
orderly enough manner, but the scene in the old court during
the auction and in the cells and rooms in the preceding hour
was a piece of that leering, grotesque humour that a London
crowd understands perhaps better than any crowd in the world.
It
ee ee
NOSIUd ALVOMAN ‘NMVG
¥
¥
be if
‘GONE!’ 189
It gambolled and guffawed down in the cells, yet with plenty
of mock-decorum and a good deal of rough satire that Hogarth
would have liked. How well he could have drawn the scene
of the bored auctioneer selling the judge’s bench, with the royal
arms above it, for six guineas—bid from the dock, I think —
and of men bidding for the gallery, over which generations of
friends and relatives had craned and sweated and cursed its
angles as they tried to peep at the prisoner in the dock. The
reporters’ seats, the counsels’ seats, the benches of the jury and
witnesses, were knocked down for the old wood they were.
Then came the gems of the collection — Lord George Gordon’s
cell (£5), Jack Sheppard’s alleged grating (£710s.); then,
most delicious of all to the amateur of horror, the worn old dock
— £10! Three men struggled hard for it. It was crowded with
sightseers at the time, with red, jocund faces. Hogarth could
certainly have made a masterpiece of that.
Sometimes the sales are heart-breaking, for something is going
that is unique in our world yet no buyer can buy it. Such a
commodity was Beazeley’s old Lyceum Theatre of Henry Irving
in the lifetime of Irving, when his financial affairs had exiled
him from London. Many of the old Lyceum properties, even
play-parts, were in the sale, and in the dark, damp purlieus be-
hind the scenes— where King Edward and Mr.Gladstone so
astonishingly went — cases of old playbills and letters lay about,
many on the floor that it was no one’s business to examine. I
noticed a letter of Edmund Kean’s that must have been one of
Henry Irving’s treasures, and bundles of letters, probably only
partly read, that belonged to some American tour, most queer
gawky letters from youths in stores and offices, ambitious to go
on the stage, written in stilted stagey language breaking down
into slang. Something Irving had said in his speech at the Te-
ception
190 Tie LONDON PERAMBULATOR
ception at the Literary Atheneum or something in his eye as
he came to this or that passage in The Merchant of Venice
seemed to have been intended for the writer, so he presumptu-
ously, and so on, all lying on the muddly floor of the Lyceum on
the sale-day. What had become of those young store-clerks
and mechanics in the distant continent whose ambitions had
flared like tinder as Irving passed through these humdrum lives
and places with his dark fire? I never saw so many elderly men
with the mien of supers from romantic poetic plays as tramped
about the Lyceum rooms and passages that day, or so many
men that looked both grotesque and sad. A tall tower had
fallen.
For some secondary reason one associates Irving’s Lyceum
with another London institution much approved of Americans,
highly respected and unchangeable, that could not live beyond
its era. Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square, having outlived
the age of hotel privacy, sold itself off, and its shell now houses
the showrooms and offices of a Dominion. The sale was a sad
sight, for Morley’s triumphed over its position on the ‘best site
in Europe’ so thoroughly that it remained exclusive, almost
secret, to the end. No ordinary visitor ever dreamt of ringing
up Morley’s —it had a telephone— even if all other hotels were
full; no one gave a dinner there; no one ‘frequented’its smoking-
room. Although its clients were mainly American, it had no
cocktail bar. It lived its life apart from the ‘Hotel Splendids’ of
modern Babylon. It had about a hundred bedrooms with a
Bible in each, but its dining-room would hardly seat forty peo-
ple. Its long, darkened corridors, broken by corners and flights
of steps, led to small suites of rooms with rosewood tables
and curly walnut easy-chairs in crimson Utrecht velvet. The
hotel kitchen was so small that one got the impossible idea that
| the
‘GONE!’ 191
the guests’ servants cooked for their own gentry. Feather beds
and bolsters, lace antimacassars, and candlesticks figured in
the sale, but there were no antiques beyond mid-Victorian
times. |
Wallpaper with art vegetables and late Edwardian fireplaces
had altered the faces of the rooms without making them modern.
The early Victorian fireplaces rallied in the attics and went down
with the ship. If the sale ever got into the American papers,
old-fashioned Americans would recall first visits to London and
remember—as Henry James remembered—how they had
looked out of Morley’s into the blue mists and lamps of Trafal-
gar Square and took a first deep draught of London.
Morley’s was perfect of its kind, like the Lyceum. It was mid-
Victorian, worthy and dependable, with no fal-lals and no need
to explain itself. There was another sort of hostelry that fell to
the hammer in numbers during the last few years as banks and
tea-shops began more eagerly to prowl about in the City. I
would single out the Ship and Turtle in Leadenhall Street as
typical of many good houses that have vanished like Falstaff’s
Boar’s Head in East Chepe. It was an elderly tall building of
to a faded greenish-yellow, tightly strapped at each story with
something of the look of an old City retainer who has given
up his livery as every one knows him by head mark. A roomy
passage decorated by large turtle-shells with gilt dates on them
led to a stair at the foot of which was a very high, dim smoking-
room. As you drank your coffee you became aware through the
smoke of what seemed large tapestry panels hung along one
side of the room. It was a solemn, leisurely place; the men who
sat around comfortable, possibly tubby. By and by you per-
ceived a strange thing—there was movement in one of the
panels, faint yet unmistakable. When you went nearer a more
disquieting
192 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
disquieting vision appeared; in the centre of the greenish panel
was an uglier thing than ever Cruikshank drew, a huge, fattish
body with marks on its back as though for carving, out of which
an impossible little viper’s head hung or raised itself, and shape-
less flappers which made now and then a languid tap on the
water. It was, of course, a turtle awaiting its invitation to an
aldermanic feast. Probably each tank had one.
If you asked the waiter how long the turtles floated there in
the water regarding the smoking man, with their small, vacant
eyes, it was a thousand chances to one that he would say: ‘It all
depends, sir. It is, you might say, a case of here to-day gone
to-morrow with them turtles.’ That was the official reply at
this famous establishment, just as the thin waiter at the Cheshire
Cheese Tavern replies to the diner who asks how can they have
the heart to put larks in their puddings; “These are not the
singing variety, sir.’ The turtle usually floated slantwise, a dark
ghostly mushroom in his green cavern. But if you did not know
that he was a turtle, and had to puzzle out the vision through the
smoky air, it was an uncanny business. Bibulous, short-sighted
men, it was said, had signed the pledge through a single move-
ment from the flapper of what was, after all, only calipash and
calipee.
On the last day, when all its mysteries were unveiled, it was
strange exploration to its old customers who came to pick up
a relic or two. The service-rooms, dressing-rooms, still-rooms,
Masonic temple, larders, kitchens with their wonders of troughs
and hot plates, cabinet-pudding moulds and turtle-soup boilers,
all open to the hoarse and honest brokers’ men who marched
over carpets that had been trodden by some of the greatest
merchants in the Candlewick Ward. In one darkened room
were
‘GONE! | 193
were chessboards and chessmen worn and dignified by constant
usage in business hours.
Possibly some of the old customers in the house were among
the horde that sniffed and barged about the place. But how
different their thoughts! Here, perhaps, their fathers had
brought them when they were young, bright lads entering the
business, secure in the thought that they were the governor’s
son. In this room they had had such a chop or steak. In that
grander room under the mid-Victorian furniture-man’s con-
ception of an Empire mantelpiece they had had such a trout
and that bottle of ’67 claret such as you don’t taste nowadays.
Perhaps their fingers had toyed with one of the ‘24 stem erogs,’
perhaps even some of the ‘51 hollow-stem champagne.’ The
great rooms looked gaunt and sad that day for all their gilding.
The auctioneer swings his hammer every day in the homes of
the old Sedleys and Veneerings and Disturnals of our time.
Every now and then he opens the door of a famous house and
the crowd comes to gape and get in the way of the buyers.
There is usually some resemblance between these dishevelled,
carpetless houses with their intimate things taken away by the
family and the heavy ornamental objects and bedroom and
kitchen furniture remaining, but a word must be said about two
exceptional sales in notable houses. One was the breaking up
of that most hospitable house in London, the bow-fronted old:
brick house at the corner of Piccadilly and Stratton Street, where
the Baroness Burdett-Coutts had lived for three-quarters of a
century. At its top corner window Queen Victoria sometimes
sat watching like a child the stream of traffic in Piccadilly.
‘Yours is the only place where I can go,’ Queen Victoria said
to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, ‘to see the traffic without stop-
ping
194 The LONDON PERAMBULATOR
ping it.’ For all her life the august lady cout only by stealth
see London moving!
How much social history in hero-worship, in fashion, in phi-
lanthropy, in sentiment, in art, was embedded in the strata of
generations in that famous house in Piccadilly then being so
casually quarried out and dispersed throughout London. So
much of the sale seemed to be fossils. A gilt shrine containing
a set of four-inch carved wood figures of Austrian nobles —the
gift of the Archduchess Elizabeth of Austria—a pair of ‘im-
portant life-sized bronze Egyptian figures with coloured onyx
drapery,’ an umbrella, a coloured print of Hamlet in frame, an
ivory group of faggot-gatherer, beggar and poodle, black marble
model of Cleopatra’s Needle, carved Swiss casket containing an
address, three carved models of birds in glass cases, a globular
timepiece with seated figure of Napoleon kicking the globe, an
engraved African gourd, and four gold scarf-rings and gentle-
men’s brooches — these were among the fossils, and the dealers
there on business and West End people there to see fair play
proved the slump by paying very little even for the great
chandeliers and carpets and rugs and bookcases.
Some of the items sold did not look the least like fossils. The
strangest of these was a ‘gentleman’s cowhide leather dressing-
bag, part silver-mounted fittings,’ of an ancient shape, with
capacious, well-strapped outside pockets, well worn, particular-
ly in the bottom, as though it had fallen off diligences and
slipped half-way down the Alps on one of old Coutts’s journeys.
It looked strong enough to carry half a hundredweight of gold,
and, powerfully framed though it was, it had had contents that
dragged it out of shape. Yes, it looked the sort of bag that old
Coutts might have gone marketing with all over Europe.
The other home sale was of furniture and effects of the late
Miss
Se Soh
1p ok ia ONE
‘GONE!’ 195
Miss Marie Lloyd. Her house in its way had been almost as
hospitable as the Baroness’s. But Marie of the Open Hand had
died without leaving enough of all the tens of thousands she
had earned to buy a grave for her body, and the funeral, to
which tens of thousands went — while half the taverns in London
tied crape to their mirrors and nearly all the music-hall men
in Leicester Square and York Road came out in black neckties,
an honour they had done to no one since King Edward died —
was paid for by outsiders. And the sale of her home that quickly
followed deepened the feelings aroused by her funeral. Nothing
in the house from attic to basement suggested that any person
in particular had ever lived there. All the furniture might have
been ordered in a hurry from the average shop in Tottenham
Court Road, by the average colourless person, and then ill-used.
One searched the place for anything characteristic of the most
racy and idiosyncratic artist of the century. But there was
nothing in the ‘semi-Carlton writing-table,’ ‘carved blackwood
oriental shaped jardiniére stands with marble centres,’ and
‘Austrian decorated china plaques’ and the rest of it, that sug-
gested anything but a seaside hotel. There were no memorials
for the auctioneer to sell and the faithful to buy. That great
comic spirit of lower London had revealed its life with lark
and jest across the town, and vanished leaving nothing material
behind, only a rare enrichment by her art of the inarticulate
life of her generation. And lower London knew and mourned
at her funeral and put crape on its bars.
ae a Bee a!) ee See? eee - \ « “— ?. a as « i ire Aah = >. Soa » 5
Pi =4 bel irs I a te é ; Pee eo 2 oe My. § ae he Whe ea
r a : ~ ‘ es! ak, 5 Rhy 4
A NOTE ON THE TYPE IN
WHICH THIS BOOK IS sg
The type in which this book has been set (on the linoty
i
is Caslon Ola Face, a faithful and authentic ree :
cally considered, Caslon’s old face types are the ae
portant contribution the English speaking world has ev
made to the art of pear aphy. No other fae has |
+,
THE WORTHY PAPER ASSOCIATION COMPANY, ‘
NEW YORK, N.Y. * BOUND BY ay ex
THE PLIMPTON PRESS,
NORWOOD, MASS.
~
4s
i
'y
ee eg
Tibtat
if Ky
: r) ‘
i ‘! a : ue
AREER Gl Bi
; maa Way nai} fy Y
SME Si Lee
Y to
Ve
PY
[ } Nes i
Waka
Pd pe
Fei
oy
ah 75" ; 4 E ‘
+. Ya } 1 . Ce te A Stee 3 3 4 4 & ' , 3
At ey PL 4 $F eh, ‘ ne (oh winle Site ore ‘ ¢ ey cs .
*
a Oye e -
é at
Oe aie eke
. 1
) as
bee wy ate to ds Mae tae
ekki Ftd is 0