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NDON PERAMBULATOR 
 
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THE 
 
 -ONDON 
 PERAMBULATOR 
 
 BY 
 JAMES BONE 
 
 Meee TLL USTRATIONS by 
 MUIRHEAD BONE 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 foe PRED A. KN OPE 
 
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 COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
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 -Lonpon CALENDAR 
 
 TREET OF THE Giant GoosEBERRY 
 
 O’ Euston 
 SEES AND WATERMEN 
 
 4 
 
 > VIEW AND THE Arr View 
 
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 171 
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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 
 
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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 
 
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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. 
 
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