Travelling abroad—Munich—Lack of comforts—Baths and bathing,
then and now—A careless traveller—A carriage on a railway
truck in recent years—The last of the Sedan-chairs—An
eccentric menu—Abraham Hayward—Acclimatising crayfish—English
truffles—Change in dinner hour—Old English fare—Careless
housekeeping—Cookery books—Soyer and his wife—An obsolete
custom—The triumph of tobacco.
Travelling on the Continent in old days was attended with many
discomforts, which to the present generation would appear almost
inconceivably irksome. In the first place, there was the passport
nuisance, whilst the Customs regulations were infinitely more
complicated and tedious than is at present the case. I remember that, in
1844, I nearly involved an old lady we knew—Miss Astley—in very
serious trouble through innocently begging her to take a sealed packet
to my sister, then staying at Mayence. In my little parcel were, amongst
other things, four pairs of Tyrolean gloves, then much in fashion, and
these nearly caused the arrest of this poor lady on the Belgian
frontier, where the officials threatened the most frightful penalties,
amongst them a fine of £50, for attempting to smuggle a lesser number of
pairs of gloves through the Customs than the Belgian law allowed—the
regulation being that nothing under a dozen pairs could be carried by
travellers without liability to a very severe penalty. The postal
arrangements abroad in old days were also totally inadequate.
As a child at Munich, in 1837, I recollect that our opportunities of
communicating with friends in England were extremely limited, for we
were practically dependent, so far as sending letters was concerned,
upon our Minister or upon stray travellers passing through the city.
Unfortunately for our correspondence, the English Minister had very
little to communicate to the Foreign Office at home, and only sent a bag
of dispatches about once a month, whilst the arrival of an English
visitor was, in those days, quite an event in the old Bavarian city.
Many of the habits and customs of the people of Munich were very strange
and uncomfortable. The great families, for instance, entertained a
strong dislike to having servants to board and sleep in their houses,
and the consequence of this was that ladies, on returning from some
grand party or other in a gorgeous carriage with two footmen behind,
dressed in rich liveries and hats loaded with plumes and feathers, used
to descend from their chariots, light their solitary night-lamps from
the flambeaux of their departing footmen, and then sadly creep up to bed
amidst the dreary and dismal solitude of a dark and deserted mansion.
At that time it was not at all an unusual thing on a cloudy day to see
Bavarian officers, in full regimentals covered with enormous military
cloaks, walking about attended by their footmen carrying umbrellas. Some
of the young officers were very pleasant; we used to meet them at the
_table d’hôte_, where, when tired of our own company, we used
occasionally to dine. On one occasion I was very much amused at a newly
fledged subaltern—a lieutenant, as he told us, of but six weeks’
standing—bashful and timid as a girl. That evening, for the first time,
there happened to be a band at dinner, which surprised my mother, who
inquired of the young officer—“D’où vient cette musique?” Blushing up
to the eyes, he answered, “Madame la Comtesse, de la part du diable.” We
had been talking of the opera, and the poor young man thought that my
mother was asking what was the music which the band had been playing,
which, oddly enough, happened to be a selection from a piece called “De
la part du diable.”
We were all convulsed with laughter at this incident, which was rendered
the more amusing on account of the complete mystification of the
lieutenant as to what indiscretion he could have committed; however,
when the matter was explained, he himself laughed just as merrily as the
rest of us.
At that time an open fireplace was seldom seen in Munich, whilst carpets
were practically unknown. In the house which my father took there was
not even a drugget in any of the rooms, though in other respects they
were quite elegantly furnished. The whole life of the place was quaint
and old-fashioned—a certain amount of state and magnificence being
pervaded by a homely simplicity which would arouse amusement in these
more luxurious days. In the early morning or as late as noon, for
instance, all of us used to go with my father to the market, where he
himself would choose and buy vegetables, fruit, and game, some of which
he would stuff into his pockets, whilst the main portion was placed in
an enormous basket which two of us would carry, and so would we
perambulate the principal streets back to our palace. After a great
“chasse” of the king’s a good deal of the spoils used to be put up for
public sale, and on these occasions my father would add a man-servant to
our marketing party, in order to assist in carrying home, as if in
triumph, the roebuck which it was his usual custom to purchase.
Well do I remember the extremely meagre provision which in those days
was made on the Continent for the performance of the ordinary ablutions,
but even at home in England things were not very much better. Very few
country houses had bathrooms, and even where they did exist the hot
water had generally to be brought up in cans. Baths, indeed, were
considered more as luxuries than as anything else, whilst children,
owing to the water being generally cold or at best lukewarm, regarded
their weekly tub with dread rather than affection.
That Saturday tubbing of my youth is now, I suppose, in these days of
almost universal bathrooms, quite a forgotten function. Modern
mechanical arrangements provide a more or less constant supply of hot
and cold water, and children are very rightly brought up to regard a
daily bath as one of the necessities of life, which was, of course, not
the case in the days when can after can of hot water had to be
laboriously carried all over the house from the kitchen. Saturday night
tubbing was, indeed, a sort of regular English institution, dating, I
believe, from the reign of King Henry VIII., who is declared to have
performed certain partial ablutions on occasional Saturday evenings, on
which occasions His Majesty’s barber, John Penne or Penn, was expected
to be in attendance. This John Penn was an ancestor of the famous Quaker
who bore the same name, and was a man of some importance in his day.
In the famous picture by Holbein of Henry VIII. delivering a charter to
the barbers and surgeons on the occasion of their amalgamation into one
body, John Penn stands out as a prominent figure. There is a story,
indeed, which, I fancy, rests upon no solid foundation, that the first
Sir Robert Peel always expressed the greatest admiration for this
painting on account of the fine portrait of the royal barber, and once
actually offered the Barbers’ Corporation £2000 to allow him to have it
cut out after a copy had been made to put in its place. An even more
fantastic legend used to declare that Sir Robert had often expressed an
intense desire to be allowed to have a bed made up upon the dining-table
of the Barbers’ Company, in order that on awakening in the morning his
eyes might rest upon his favourite Penn. The table in question, as a
matter of fact, is an ancient dissecting table on which, previous to
1745, the bodies of criminals and malefactors were laid—the executions
at Tyburn furnishing the Barber Surgeons’ Company with a constant supply
of anatomical specimens.
Up to comparatively recent years the country houses, as I have said,
which could boast a bathroom were very few in number, whilst in the
’forties and ’fifties, and even later, such conveniences were
practically unknown. In some houses, indeed, there were no big baths at
all, guests being expected to perform their ablutions in the so-called
foot-baths, which were a sort of cross between a wine cooler and a soup
tureen. At the same time it must be added that people were probably not
so very much dirtier than they are to-day, for the modern practice of
lying in hot water need not necessarily be any more cleansing than the
vigorous rubbing of a soaped flannel which, in old days, children were
taught to apply. I remember going to stay at a country house, shortly
after my marriage, where there were no baths at all. However, I
determined not to be beaten; I sent to the laundry for a large wooden
wash-tub, which was brought up into my bedroom, and answered its purpose
uncommonly well.
Some people there were who declared baths to be dangerous, as inducing a
tendency to catch constant chills. Untidiness in dress and the like
were, on the whole, I think, regarded with more tolerance than is the
case to-day—to go even farther back, the beautiful costumes of the
eighteenth century, there is reason to believe, in many cases covered
people none too careful about their personal toilet. The travelling of
the past, when comparatively little luggage could be taken, was rather
apt to promote careless habits of dress, and several great travellers
were quite notorious for this sort of thing, their economy of linen
being regarded with considerable lenience.
I recall to mind a story which used to be told of a celebrated traveller
who, almost alone, had made several wonderful journeys into the Far
East, and wandered over many strange and wild places on the earth’s
surface, in the course of which wanderings he was declared to have
contracted a supreme contempt for some of the ordinary ways of civilised
society. Careless to a degree, the changing of his shirts appeared to
him as nothing but an irksome usage, and, consequently, it was by no
means often that a snowy expanse of shirt front graced his breast. On
one occasion, when about to visit a country house at which he was to be
the lion of the party, his wife, who was not accompanying him,
determined that this once at least he should do her honour. The visit
was to last three days, and so carefully packing three spotless shirts
in his bag, she bade him at their adieu to take particular care to don
one of these shirts regularly every evening. The three days passed and
her husband returned. “I hope you did as I told you,” said she. “Of
course I did, my dear,” was the reply. “I put on a clean shirt every
evening, so with the one I started in, that makes four I am wearing at
the present moment.”
When travelling on the Continent in old days we drove most of the way in
our own carriages, which, when we came across the few railways which
then existed, were hoisted up on to trucks. This practice was not very
agreeable, for one was exposed to many discomforts, and I had always
supposed that it had long been totally extinct. This, however, appears
not to be the case, for such a mode of railway travelling has been seen
in England as recently as the summer of 1889, when, I am informed, the
nieces of the late Archdeacon Hindes Groome (the friend of Edward
FitzGerald, and a most delightful character, who remembered the
rejoicings after Waterloo), saw at Bournemouth Station a large open
barouche standing on an ordinary truck at the end of a train which had
just arrived. In the carriage sat—quite at their ease with their
sunshades up—two elderly ladies. A coachman and footman met the train;
the carriage was drawn on to the platform with the ladies still in it,
and from thence it was hauled outside the station, where, a pair of
horses being quickly harnessed, the whole party, with the addition of a
maid who had travelled in a second-class compartment, drove off.
Another curious survival was also witnessed by Miss Hindes Groome, who,
when staying at Cheltenham in the early ’sixties, was told by her mother
one cold Sunday morning in the winter: “I shall send for a Sedan-chair
so that we can go to church in comfort. Perhaps they still have them at
the place where in former days I remember that they could be hired.” The
message was sent, and to the surprise of the household the Sedan-chair,
borne by two men, duly arrived. The chair was brought into the house,
the front door being shut, and Mrs. Hindes Groome and her little girl
got in, being carried to Trinity Church, into a sort of inside lobby, in
which, after the service, they once more entered the chair, and were
carried home and deposited in the hall, being on both journeys
completely protected from the outside air and quite immune from
draughts. It may be assumed that this was about the last time that a
public Sedan-chair was made use of for ordinary purposes, though I
believe that at certain health resorts invalids still make occasional
use of a somewhat similar conveyance. Mrs. Hindes Groome, it appears,
was rather surprised, though very pleased, when she saw the men bringing
up the old chair, which revived in her memory many recollections of a
past age. She always declared that no modern vehicle could match a
Sedan-chair for comfort in wet or rough weather. This lady’s father, who
had been born in 1779, remembered the first stage-coach which ran from
Cheltenham to London, at which time it was considered a wonderful
improvement, for, previous to its introduction, everything came across
the hills on pack-horses.
The early days of railway travelling were very unpleasant in many ways,
whilst journeys on the Continent were regarded as positive adventures.
Such a thing as a train _de luxe_ was, of course, undreamt of, whilst
feeble linguists were terribly handicapped on account of there being no
officials well acquainted with foreign languages as is now the case;
only too often the instructions to travellers purporting to be written
in English were quite unintelligible. Even in comparatively recent years
mistakes in the phraseology and spelling of English in foreign
guide-books, time-tables, and the like, have not been uncommon; but I
think the following menu, which dates from the early days of the station
refreshment-room at Modane, is an almost perfect example of “English as
she is wrote.” It was sent to me by a friend, and I was so much struck
with it that it has been given a prominent position in a scrap-book of
mine filled with cards and menus of every kind, interesting souvenirs,
in many cases, of political and other banquets. One side of this menu, I
must add, is printed in French, the following translation being appended
on the adjoining sheet. It runs exactly as I give it here—