When I was a child I had the signal honour of being seated upon the knee
of an old lady whose great-great-great-great-uncle once shook hands with
a man whose grandfather remembered seeing green fields at the spot which
is now covered by Carmelite House. How short is the history of the
Metropolis!
Everybody, of course, is aware that Professor Joff committed one of his
notorious "howlers" when he derived "Carmelite"--in the street
name--from "Cromwell's Heights." The latter, needless to say, must have
been a deal nearer the South Kensington Museum than Whitefriars, famed
for its sanctuary. CROMWELL _may_ have wandered in the meadows (if they
still existed in his day) where the 6.30 _News_ now leaps from its
machines every afternoon about half-past five; he may even (as Plip and
Johnstone surmise, in their ponderous tomes, _Odd Corners in London_ and
_More and Odder Corners in London_) have supped at the Pig and
Mortarboard, which stood on what is now the site of the Ludgate Hill
station booking-office (Plip, by-the-by, wrongly says not the
booking-office, but the "book_stall_," an amazing error in one usually
so careful). But whatever else CROMWELL did or did not do, he certainly
never gave his name to any district further east than Knightsbridge.
I flatter myself that Professor Joff's preposterous surmises were
finally silenced by my monograph, _A Hundred Queer Things about Bouverie
Street._ Curiously enough I wrote this with a pencil borrowed from a
friend whose aunt once caught sight, as a girl, of a prisoner being
taken to the Old Bailey to be tried for murder. That prisoner was the
notorious Budgingham. And now comes the interesting part of the story.
Budgingham, as transpired at the trial, had bigamously married the
step-daughter of a man whose godfather's mother's cousin's
great-grandmother remembered hearing the bells of Bow Church tolling on
the day when Henri de Bouverie landed in England to attend the funeral
of his niece, the beautiful Mrs. Coop.
London's history is indeed crowded, though (to the antiquarian) oddly
short in its perspective. Next week, having sketched the romantic career
of Henri de Bouverie (concerning whom Professor Joff has made several
incredible mistakes), I shall give a still more startling example of the
links which lead us so abruptly to the antechambers of what we might
have supposed to be the dim and distant past. The Metropolis, to anyone
who appreciates historical research and can write as easily as I can, is
a gold-mine; fortunately few pressmen realise its possibilities, and
that of an _Index Rerum_, as I do. If, as I anticipate, this article is
printed and paid for with the usual eagerness and a series ordered,
nothing can stop me---- [Wait and see.--ED.]
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Our Gallery of Happy Phrases. I.
"Mr. Tooth, whose name was in everybody's mouth a generation or so
ago."
_Dublin Daily Express._
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