MY FRIENDS THE PLAYERS
NEARLY opposite the old Gaiety Theatre in the Strand stood the offices of
Gaze and Co., the tourists’ agents. And in the early seventies the upper
part of the premises had been let to a retired old sea-dog of portly
person and convivial habits called Captain Harris. This gentleman had
made a somewhat extensive acquaintance among the lesser lights of the
stage, the music-hall, and the newspaper world, and he had taken the
upper part of the Gaze office with the view of turning it into a Bohemian
club.
For a while the institution flourished greatly. It was named the Savoy
Club—on the _lucus a non lucendo_ principle—and by those who had not been
chosen for membership it was nicknamed “the Saveloy.” A continuous
conviviality was the dominant note of the establishment. The hours kept
by the members were astounding. The pace, in a word, was too fast. And
in a couple of years the Savoy closed its doors, the unfortunate mariner
who founded it having lost in the venture the savings of a lifetime.
It was at the Savoy that I first met John Hollingshead. After the
closing of his theatre he would drop in of a night, generally accompanied
by one or two members of the Gaiety company. No man ever undertook the
management of a playhouse with less practical knowledge of the stage than
Hollingshead; no man ever conducted a theatre more successfully, and to
no man is the public more indebted for the amelioration of the condition
of that portion of it which patronizes the drama. Hollingshead was a man
of sound common-sense, never hide-bound by tradition, and always
possessing the courage of his opinions. These were the characteristics
which he brought to bear on the unknown enterprise of theatrical
management. And so considerable was the success attending the
application of his principles to the unfamiliar task which he had
undertaken, that in the course of a few years he became known all over
“the profession” by the sobriquet of “Practical John.”
It is true that after a successful managerial career lasting over many
years his luck deserted him, and his theatre fell into other hands, but
the period of undimmed success during which he kept burning that which he
called “the sacred lamp of burlesque” was one upon which he might look
back with considerable satisfaction. He was in many directions a
reformer. He abolished the programme fee. He refused to sublet his
cloak-rooms to the harpies who at that time held an undisputed monopoly
for at once incommoding and fleecing the playgoers who booked for the
stalls and boxes. He was the first man in London who installed the
electric light. He did not, indeed, use it as an illuminant inside his
theatre—electric lighting was in its infancy, and had not as yet been
tried as an indoor illuminant—but he burned a fierce, if blinking,
electric globe over the main entrance to the Gaiety, and he should have
the obituary honours due to the pioneer.
Gradually I became on intimate terms with Hollingshead, and remained a
friend of his until his lamented death. Some millions—I am speaking by
the card—had passed through his hands to actors, authors, musicians, and
the rest of the vast army required to carry on the business of a
successful theatre. Yet he died in somewhat straitened circumstances.
His courage and his equable temper, however, did not desert him. He was
a bit of a fatalist, I fancy. He spoke jauntily of being “equal to
either fortune.” Originally he had been on the Press. He was one of the
staff of Charles Dickens on _Household Words_ and _All the Year Round_.
He wrote for Thackeray on the _Cornhill_, and for Norman Macleod on _Good
Words_. Indeed, in the sixties his work was in general demand by the
magazine editors. The daily paper with which he was most intimately
associated was the _Daily News_, for which his particular friend Moy
Thomas was dramatic critic. When he severed his connection with
journalism, he characteristically observed that a journalist is like a
barrel-organ—wound up to play so many tunes, and that when he has “run
down” it is time for him to retire. Which, I may parenthetically
mention, would have been a sad doctrine for some of us.
No figure was more familiar in the Strand, Garrick Street, and the West
End than that of Hollingshead in the halcyon days of the Gaiety. His
good looks, his neat attire, his silvery hair, his hat cocked a trifle on
one side, his brisk walk, his cheery expression, and his generally
debonair appearance, suggested even to the outsider the busy, competent,
yet good-natured, man of affairs. He was an excellent talker, very fond
of paradox. A utilitarian philosopher, he was a follower of Jeremy
Bentham. It was difficult to gather from his views as given in
conversation what his political convictions really were. I once asked
him the question. He readily replied in that curious but modulated
falsetto of his. “I’m a Tory Socialist,” was his answer.
The stalls of the Gaiety—more particularly the front row of the
stalls—were filled with the _jeunesse dorée_ of the period. These young
gentlemen were each interested in the career of one of the shapely
vestals who tended Hollingshead’s “sacred lamp.” A somewhat lavish
display of figure was then _de rigueur_ with the chorus ladies. It had
not yet become the fashion for young men to marry into the chorus—so to
say; but the young swells made other arrangements which—in those days—the
chorus lady regarded as eminently satisfactory. So the fortunes of the
chorus ebbed and flowed. I have called at the ineligible rooms of a
chorus lady while she was lunching on fried liver and bacon; her hair was
in curling-pins, and her principal article of attire was a far from
cleanly peignoir. She has called me by endearing terms, and there was
nothing in the world she would not surrender to me in return for a
newspaper notice a line long. In a week’s time I have seen the same
young woman drive up to the Gaiety in her own victoria, loaded with
jewels, dressed in a Parisian inspiration, and with a crop of golden hair
which spoke volumes for the prolific nature of the foreign soil in which
it grew. Her attitude toward myself had changed as perceptibly as had
her coiffure, “Hello, old chappie!” she has cried, with an amusing
affectation of high-bred hauteur.
The swagger stallites who had organized themselves into a beauty cult at
the Gaiety displayed every variety of what Tennyson called “the gilded
forehead of the fool.” These young gentlemen were known as “mashers”
(the object of their temporary devotions was known as a “mash”); as
“Johnnies” and as “members of the Crutch and Toothpick Brigade.” In this
race for the overrated favours of the chorus lady they were often beaten
by the elderly “masher”—the fatuous old _roué_ of the wig, the stays, the
pigments, and the unguents. In these, as in all other civil contracts,
it is money that matters, after all.
If Hollingshead played burlesque as his trump card, it must be recalled,
in justice to his memory, that he instituted the matinée in London; and
that he instituted it, not as the vehicle for amateur authors who played
with problems, and called the result “problem plays,” but as the means of
introducing to the London public (or re-introducing) the greatest living
exponents of the highest examples of dramatic literature. He brought
over from Paris the entire company of the House of Molière. He engaged
Charles Mathews to play in a series of his memorable and delightful
performances. And if I don’t mistake, he gave that veteran actor the
opportunity of enacting a new part in a new-play, “My Awful Dad.” He
afforded us the opportunity of seeing Phelps in his rendering of Sir
Pertinax MacSycophant in Macklin’s “Man of the World,” probably the
finest all-round bit of acting I have even been privileged to witness.
Knowing “Practical John,” I soon came to know the members of his company,
the bright, particular star of which was Miss Nellie Farren. Miss Farren
was the embodiment of the very spirit of burlesque. She was fun
personified. And although she had the support always of a distinguished
company—it included such men as Toole, Edward Terry, Royce, and John
MacLean, and such women as Constance Loseby and Kate Vaughan—the whole
weight of the production seemed to fall on Nellie Farren’s shoulders, and
she lifted it how, and where, and when she pleased. Off the stage Miss
Farren was quite as amusing as on. She had the rare gift of spontaneous
humour, a fine flow of animal spirits, an unfailing good temper, the
whole shot through with a certain indefinable Cockney quality which gave
to everything she said its hall-mark. I do not think I ever spent more
enjoyable afternoons than on those Sundays when Miss Farren was at home
to her friends at Sunbury. She had bought two cottages near the gates of
Kempton Park, and had them knocked into one. And here, on Sundays, the
merry little _châtelaine_ received her friends. And some very jovial
gatherings we had on those Sunbury sabbaths. The outstanding
characteristic of the average actress when off the stage is an obvious
artificiality. The charm of the Farren’s society was in her frank
naturalness, her ingenuous honesty.
Nellie Farren was the wife of Robert Soutar, the stage-manager of the
Gaiety, a comic actor of limited range, and the author of some popular
farces. An extremely convivial soul when off the stage, he was regarded
as a martinet while on it, and during the entire period of his
stage-management hardly a day passed without a rehearsal being called on
some pretence or another. For this reason he was highly disapproved of
by the chorus, toward the members of which his sentiments were sometimes
conveyed with brutal directness. “It’s the only sort of language they
understand,” he once said to me. Perhaps he was right, although the
polished shafts of Byron’s irony often went home quite as surely. I have
known a girl at rehearsal burst into tears under the suavely-spoken
sarcasm of Byron, and I once received a letter of complaint from a member
of a chorus illustrating one of his burlesques, in which the talented
author of “Our Boys” was described as “a nasty, sneerin’ beest.”
The inauguration of the old Gaiety and the passing of it, roughly
speaking, cover the period of my own experience of the London stage and
its interesting entourage, which must be my excuse for according to my
memories of the Gaiety what may seem to be an undue space.
If anyone were to ask me who, in my experience, was the most
mirth-provoking actor I had ever seen, I should, without the least
hesitation, mention a name which is quite unknown to the playgoers of
this generation, and is being rapidly forgotten by those who belong to
the last. And the name that I should mention would be that of John
Sleeper Clarke. The house at which he originally appeared was the little
Strand Theatre, merrily associated with the burlesques of the Broughs and
Byron, and subsequently with the less artless productions of H. B.
Farnie, in which so much laughter was made for the public by Marius and
Edward Terry, and that plump, inimitable Angelina Claude. J. S. Clarke
was an American, and, although he appeared with great success in some of
our dramatic masterpieces—he was the finest Bob Acres and the best Dr.
Pangloss of his day—he preferred to enact characters written for him in
pieces of which he held the copyright.
Clarke’s favourite characters were Major Wellington De Boots and Toodles.
It is always a hopeless task to attempt to convey to those who have not
witnessed it the effect of a comic performance on the observer. It would
not be correct to describe Clarke as an “eccentric” actor. His
thoroughly artistic and masterly impersonation of Bob Acres and Dr.
Pangloss quite forbid any hasty generalization of the kind. It would be
more just to say that he selected eccentric characters for
representation, and in the illustration of these characters he employed
for all they were worth certain quaint methods of voice, expression,
gesture, and gait which were quite his own. The pieces in which he
introduced himself as an irresponsible eccentric were as a rule flimsy
compositions, entirely negligible from a literary and dramatic point of
view. But in the mouth of Clarke the inanities of the dramatist became
precious gems. He would utter an author’s commonplace with such an air
of comic gravity—if I may use the expression—with such an inimitable
facial note of enjoyment in the delivery, that the little house in the
Strand would rock with laughter over sayings which in cold print would
appear to be the veriest drivel.
There must be many men about town who retain a vivid recollection of
Clarke’s acting. They will bear me out as to the statement just made.
They will remember how their sides shook as Clarke in “De Boots” made the
entirely empty declaration: “My dear Felix, I call you Felix because you
are my best friend!” What an extraordinary quality of irresistible
humour he imparted to that absurdly puerile line! Again, what a weight
and world of dramatic humour he imposed on the trifling sentence
addressed to the pump in “Toodles”! The scene is one in which he depicts
a man imperfectly sober. Stumbling about a yard, he knocks against the
pump. He grasps the handle, snakes it heartily up and down, exclaiming
the while, “Excuse me, my friend—er—will you take anything?” Banal to a
degree, I quite admit. But Lord! how often have I roared over the words,
and to how many of my own day who read this page do they not recall an
ineffaceable and delightful recollection—an they would but acknowledge
it.
I hate to apply the money test as a standard by which to measure the
value of artistic work. In many instances it is no test at all. The
artistic charlatan sometimes amasses a fortune. But this does not hold
so literally with the actor who has to appeal in person to patrons drawn
from all classes of society. In his case the making of a fortune must
surely be a reliable test of the possession of the real sort of genius.
Clarke in a very few years in London made a fortune, purchased the lease
of the Haymarket, and retired from his profession into private life
without any formal leave-taking. Years after I first roared over his
impersonations, I was introduced to him in a little hotel in one of the
streets—Surrey Street, or another—close to the old Strand Theatre. Here
the merry-maker was in the habit of sitting alone. He was the most
moody, melancholy, shy, and reticent person with whom I had up to that
time become acquainted. There was no slightest trace of the spontaneous,
irrepressible, and irresistible fun which seemed to possess him when he
made his welcome entrances on the stage. I met him many times
afterwards. I made a point of meeting him. The desire to understand the
problem presented obsessed me. But I found him always the same—polite in
a grave way, willing to converse to the extent of answering a question or
passing a shy opinion when it was challenged. But he made no jokes, told
no anecdotes, indulged in no reminiscence. Others who knew him told me
the same tale of him. In the roaring Strand John Sleeper Clarke was as
much a recluse as though he lived in a hut in the depths of a forest.
Reticence is not usually the characteristic note of the actor. Of all
the companionships that I formed during my Press experiences, none were
so enjoyable as those I made on the stage. There are, of course, some
pompous asses among them. But you will find these in all callings. And
the pompous mummer was never the most successful one. As a rule, the
more distinguished and gifted the actor, the more genial and accessible
he is. The players are full of amusing early experiences, which they
relate with delightful candour. Actors’ stories are, as a rule, well
told, and are worth telling. Nor is this extraordinary. Making points
off the stage should be very good practice for making points on it.
There were two classes of raconteur in my day. The one was the
reminiscent or quasi-historical man; the other was the simple retailer of
good stories. Of the former class the two finest examples were John
Ryder and John Coleman. Of the latter were Lionel Brough and Arthur
Williams. I should not have used the past tense in alluding to Arthur
Williams, who, I am happy to know, is alive and well, and still
entertaining a public in whose smiles he has basked for many years.
My first introduction to Lionel Brough—“Lal,” as he was always
affectionately called—was at Covent Garden, where he was stage-manager
during the career of that costly experiment “Babil and Bijou.” The late
Lord Londesborough was a determined supporter of the stage, a great
friend of actors—and actresses—and a generous contributor to theatrical
charities. His lordship financed the Covent Garden Opera House when it
was taken by Miss Fowler. Boucicault did the play—a sort of pantomime,
we should call it to-day—with processions, and ballets, and comic relief,
and popular songs, and all the rest of it. There was an army of Amazons,
headed by the statuesque Helen Barry, who had started her artistic career
in a cigar-shop in Piccadilly. The armour of these ladies cost no end of
money, being very beautiful and substantial. A few weeks since I met a
manager—a provincial manager—in the North who informed me that some of
the properties and armour made for “Babil and Bijou” were being taken
round the country by fifth-rate travelling companies to this day.
But to get back to “Lal” and his stories. The majority of these were, I
have every reason to believe, “made up” by Brough. Everything was in the
telling. One of them occurs to me now. A certain young married couple
had been rendered very unhappy by the betting habits of the husband.
They had an only boy of some seven summers. They were in debt all over
the place. The servant had been discharged. There was little food in
the house. At this tragic juncture a cheque for forty pounds arrived.
The relieved and delighted husband embraced his wife and hurried off to
the city to “melt” the cheque, promising to return immediately, settle
all outstanding accounts, and take the family out to dinner. There was
racing at Kempton that day, and the unfortunate man knew of one or two
“certs.” So when he had received the proceeds of the cheque, he ran down
to Kempton Park, fired with the benevolent idea of doubling, or even
quadrupling, his forty pounds. The usual thing happened. Far from
winning, he dropped every sou, and returned home a sad, despairing man.
He hoped for sympathy from his wife; but, for the first time in their
married existence, the wife rose to the occasion, and, in unmistakable
terms, denounced her stricken and shamefaced spouse. He slunk from the
room, and silently closed the door behind him. She heard him mount the
stairs. But her heart was hardened against him. Ten minutes after the
exit of the gambler her little golden-haired blue-eyed boy dashed into
the room.
“Oh, mummy!” he cried, in his eager, happy way, “daddy’s cut hisself
shavin’.”
“H-h-h-has he cut himself much?” asked the woman, rising.
“Cut hisself much!” exclaimed the innocent child; “he’s cut his bally
head off!”
Brough used to tell another story in which the same note of exaggeration
was the salient characteristic. It had to do with a Scotsman and a kilt,
and afforded a sort of current phrase in his clubs for a time. The
quoted phrase was: “I’m a maun o’ few wor-r-r-ds!” The story is not of
the kind that can easily be conveyed in cold print.
Some years before his death I went into the Eccentric Club with him.
There had been a considerable making of theatrical knights at or about
the time; and when we entered the club-room, we found a smart young
journalist of the new school inveighing against the knighting of stage
folk. Brough, who did not care a red cent one way or the other, but who
felt himself bound to stick up for his order, asked:
“But why should not actors be made knights?”
“Because,” answered the adolescent Fleet Streeter, with professional
glibness, “they belong to a wandering, a nomadic, race.”
“Sort of Arabian knights, I suppose,” suggested Brough, closing the
discussion with the acquiescent ridicule that kills.
“Lal” Brough and John L. Toole were the especial favourites of
Londesborough among the players, and they might frequently be seen on his
drag—his lordship was an accomplished “whip”—driving down to
race-meetings near London, or enjoying in his company the beauties of
Scarborough.
Another indomitable patron of the stage in the seventies and eighties was
the Duke of Beaufort. His Grace was particularly quick in discovering
budding talent in pretty actresses. To his fostering care was due the
great advance which Miss Connie Gilchrist made in an education outside
the meagre accomplishments demanded in an actress of burlesque—an
education which fitted her for taking that high place in Society which
she was destined to fill. Ah, dear me! it seems but a little while ago
since the Duke was giving those luncheons in the upper room at Rule’s in
Maiden Lane, at which the time passed for all of us so quickly and so
gaily. Yet how few of those who sat at the board have survived to tell
the tale!
In a public-house kept by one Beck in that part of the Strand which
backed on to Holywell Street, and has disappeared under the advance of
the County Council improvements, there was established a small club of
actors and journalists, called the Unity Club. This was a coterie to
which admission was not quite so easy as its surroundings might suggest.
The talk there was excellent because, I think, there were always a
sufficient number of butts upon which to exercise the ingenuity of the
wits. It was in this select assembly that George R. Sims was first
enabled to give a taste of his quality. His butt-in-ordinary was a very
boastful actor named Harcourt, and the verses—chiefly in parody of great
poets—which Sims wrote on one of Harcourt’s big boasts will still be
recalled by those who were privileged to read one of the few copies
printed. The “house-dinner” at the Unity Club was one of the most
enjoyable feasts to which I ever sat down. The fare, indeed, was plain
and substantial, but the sauce provided by the cheery players and
pressmen who sat round the table was the most piquant to be obtained in
all London.
At the Unity might sometimes be met David James and Tom Thorne, of the
Strand Theatre. The club was just opposite to the theatre. When James
and Thorne left the Strand, and, in partnership with Harry Montague, took
the Vaudeville, a great amount of public interest was displayed in the
venture. The new managers relied on burlesque as an opening experiment,
preceded by comedy. The comedy was provided by Andrew Halliday. I
forget who wrote the burlesque—Byron, perhaps. But the fortunes of the
managers were to be founded by the new work of a new man, and the two
burlesque actors from the House of Swanborough were to be enabled to rely
thereafter on comedy, and to dispense entirely with burlesque. The new
author was James Albery; the new play, “Two Roses.” For this production
the services of Henry Irving were engaged—an engagement which evinced
considerable managerial discretion, and, incidentally, gave Irving his
first real opportunity of making a hit with the London public. All the
members of the managerial triumvirate were provided with strong parts.
George Honey gave a memorable impersonation of a good-hearted bagman—the
“Our Mr. Jenkins” of the bills. Some of his lines were delivered with
great unction. He comes under the influence of his wife’s religious
belief, and evolves into what he calls “a shining light.” He and his
wife are encountered by the heroine of the play.
“How do you do, Mr. Jenkins—or perhaps I should ask, how do you shine?”
“With the mild effulgence of the glow-worm,” is the answer of Our Mr.
Jenkins.
“We are all worms,” interpolates his wife.
“Yes, my dear; _but we don’t all glow_,” was the answer, given by Honey
with a half-deprecatory, half exultant expression that was simply
inimitable and delightful.
But the Digby Grand of Irving was, after all said and done, the gem of
the production. In all his after-life he never surpassed it. Only once
did he equal it. I have seen Irving in every impersonation he gave in
London, and I shall always hold that he reached high-water mark with the
selfish swell of “Two Roses,” and that he touched that mark for the
second time with Matthias in “The Bells.”
Albery’s “Two Roses” was succeeded by a comedy from the same author
called “Apple-Blossoms.” It was not a success. Nor, indeed, did Albery
ever produce another play to equal his first. I came to know him well;
collaborated with him in a small way; and visited him when he was living
at Evans’s Hotel, and after he had furnished some pleasant chambers in
Southampton Street, Bloomsbury. He was an admirable talker, a splendid
listener, and possessed a pretty turn for unexpected epigram. The
Suffragette existed in those remote days. But she practised under
another name. And the questions of Woman’s Rights and Female
Emancipation were argued as warmly then as now. The subject came up on
one occasion at Albery’s rooms. His visitors were taking sides. One
strong believer in tradition took his stand on Genesis, and asserted
woman’s inferiority on Scriptural grounds.
“Woman was made out of the rib of Man,” he declared.
“And was thus a mere side-issue of creation,” suggested Albery.
Albery ended sadly. He became addicted to a habit which ruined a good
many of the best fellows of a convivial period. His great gifts were
wasted entirely in conversational sallies, and among boon companions at
the Savage Club and other Bohemian resorts. He had married a lady who
subsequently “went on the stage,” and greatly succeeded in her vocation,
becoming one of the most popular actresses of her time and of our own. A
story of the days of Albery’s decadence has come to me. Some time before
his lamented death, and in a contrite mood, he called his wife to his
bedside, and said:
“Ah, my dear, you should have married a different man!”
“I _did_, Jim,” was the tearful reply.
And there, I think, we plumb the very deeps of pathos.
It would be, however, an endless, exhausting, and uninteresting task to
pursue my friends the players through their various theatres. The easier
way is to catch them during their hours of relaxation in their clubs and
in their pubs. The billiard-room of the Junior Garrick between half-past
eleven at night and two in the morning was a covert always successfully
drawn by those in search of theatrical game. Pool and pyramids were the
games most in vogue, but more especially pool. Here you were sure of
encountering “Jimmy” Fernandez (I never knew an actor, however sedate and
inaccessible, who, being christened “James,” was not called “Jimmy” by
his confrères), a devoted exponent with the cue; H. B. Farnie was rarely
absent. He was a great hulking Scotsman with a slight limp, of which he
hated to be reminded. He had originally been a medical student at
Edinburgh. John Clarke, of the Adelphi—no relation to John Sleeper
Clarke—was another of this coterie. He was a fine comic and character
actor. He was the husband of Miss Furtado, a favourite Adelphi actress
of the time. He played with unvarying success under many managements,
including that of the Bancrofts, was of a grumbling disposition, and was
known as Lame Clarke, to distinguish him from the other John
Clarke—Sleeper of that ilk—lower down the Strand.
Clarence Holt, the tragedian, greatly fancied himself at the game of
billiards, and had succeeded in cutting more billiard-cloths than any man
living. Clarence Holt (his real name was Jo) was a barn-stormer of the
old school; and although in general conversation he scowled, and made use
of weird expletives, he was as good-hearted a fellow as ever lived. At
the Saturday house-dinners of the club he invariably gave a recitation of
“The Old Clock on the Stairs,” and always accepted with a sort of
condescending and regal dignity the ironical cheers which it invariably
evoked. His mingling of oaths with endearing epithets was one of the
quaintest things in the world.
“How is Miss Holt?” one would ask.
“Oh, the dear, darling, bally little idiot—she’s well, dear boy, well!”
James and Thorne were also habitués of the billiard-room of the “J.G.,”
as it was affectionately called by its members. And, indeed, in the
stifling atmosphere of that room, which was situated in the upper part of
the house, you would meet from time to time one half the actors in town.
It was the favourite resort of the Swanboroughs, and of many others whose
names have escaped my memory. In the Savage Club there was no
billiard-room, but there was always a good attendance of actors after the
closing of the theatres. The Garrick itself was never an actors’ club in
the exclusive sense of the word. One or two of the upper crust of the
“profession” always belong to it, to justify and perpetuate the use of
the title. But to the rank and file of the calling it stands in the
relation of Paradise to the Peri. So that, beyond the Junior Garrick and
the Savage, the noble army of actors had no clubs. Their usual
meeting-places, therefore, became pubs. And these seemed to be selected
with a view to obtaining the utmost discomfort conceivable combined with
the highest scale of charges possible. Thus, in the seventies the chief
meeting-place of the theatrical fraternity was a wine-bar in Russell
Street, Covent Garden, next door to the “Hummums,” and occupying a site
now covered by a market tavern. From one to four o’clock of an afternoon
the wine-bar at Rockley’s was crammed with all sorts and conditions of
stage folk, and their contributory artistic aids—managers, costumiers,
authors, artists, journalists.
About half a dozen times in my life did I visit Rockley’s, but I retain
the most vivid recollection of the close atmosphere, the mingled smell of
sawdust and port, the loud buzz of conversation, and the frequent laugh
that followed the last new story or the smartly uttered retort. It will
suffice here to record the impression of a single visit. The little man
standing close to the bar, the centre of an eager group intent on his
poignant utterance, is Shiel Barry. Barry was an Irishman, an actor of
extraordinary intensity, and a man of considerable general knowledge. He
was an omnivorous reader, and, when I first knew him, a great admirer of
Carlyle, some passages of whose “French Revolution” he recited with a
wonderfully lurid effect. I have recorded elsewhere in this book my
impression of his masterly interpretation of the part of the miser in
“Les Cloches de Corneville.” His rendering of certain of the characters
in Dion Boucicault’s Irish plays was equally memorable and impressive.
He was a master of pathos and ferocity, and could at once attract or
repel by the strange realism of his embodiment of either emotion. The
flamboyant gentleman with the Louis-Napoleonic moustache is William
Holland, of the Surrey Theatre, the North Woolwich Gardens, the Circus at
Covent Garden, and finally manager of the Corporation’s amusements at
Blackpool, which became this particular Napoleon’s St. Helena.
Conversing with him is Dr. Joseph Pope, familiarly known as “Jo,” and
nicknamed “Jope.” Dr. Pope had been a surgeon in the army, serving in
the Royal Artillery. He was a brother of Mr. Sam Pope, Q.C., of the
Parliamentary Bar. Jo had been celebrated as the fattest man in the
army, and Sam was distinguished as the fattest man at the Bar. Sam was a
bachelor making an enormous income. Jo was a bachelor living on his
half-pay; and it used to be said, that when Jo was in need of a
remittance wherewithal to set right his balance at Cox’s, he would apply
to Sam. If Sam proved irresponsive, Jo at once threatened to go on to
the music-hall stage. That always “fetched” Sam, who hated the
Bohemianism in which Jo wallowed.
William Brunton discusses costume designs with Alias, and Harry S. Leigh
hums a new lyric which he has composed for a production at the Alhambra.
Brunton, espying me, edges through the crowd to me.
“Have you heard George Hodder’s _non sequitur_?” he asks.
“No. What was it?”
“George was sent down to Stony Stratford by the _Daily News_. When he
woke up in the morning, he had forgotten the name of the place. He rang
the bell, and desired the chambermaid to send ‘boots’ to him. When that
menial appeared, George asked: ‘Wh-wh-what’s the n-name of this p-place?’
‘Stony Stratford,’ answered ‘boots.’ ‘Ah!’ said Hodder, ‘you may well
c-call it Stony Stratford—_for I never was so b-b-bitten with bugs in the
whole course of my l-l-life_!”
Rockley’s was at best a cramped and pestiferous inferno, ill ventilated,
and without a chair to sit down on. But its customers made long stays,
notwithstanding, and I understood that a considerable amount of
theatrical business was done on the premises. It was a sort of rialto of
the “profession.” From Rockley’s, the actor and those who do business
with him migrated to the new Gaiety bar opened in the Strand. This was a
horseshoe-shaped bar next door to the theatre, much patronized by the
Brothers Mansell, by Henry Herman, by the then unknown D’Oyly Carte, by
several of the Nationalist Members of Parliament, and by many of the
shapely members of the chorus from burlesque theatres in the immediate
vicinity. It was leased by one “Bill” Bayliss, who in after-years, and
during the Beaufort period, conducted Rule’s, in Maiden Lane. For some
years the Gaiety bar remained a great afternoon centre for the
actors—particularly those who happened to be out of an engagement and to
retain an expensive thirst. During a Gaiety _entr’acte_ I have smoked a
cigarette in the place, but regret that I have had no great personal
acquaintance with it. Its history for ten or twelve years from its
opening would be well worth writing by a man possessing the requisite
qualifications.
It was the last public-house meeting-place of stage people. There are
clubs now to suit every grade of actor. And chorus girls are no more
seen in bars. They affect the swagger restaurants—and I, for one, cannot
blame them. A greater propriety in attire is observed by the actor of
to-day. He no longer affects a Quartier Latin Bohemianism. He takes
himself quite seriously as a social unit. And with reason. For just as
every citizen of the United States is a possible President, so is every
actor a possible Knight, and every actress a possible “my lady.”
To record the number of my theatrical acquaintances, and my
recollections, pleasant and unpleasant, of our forgathering, would fill
many chapters. The foregoing stray notes on my friends the players are
remarkable for the omission of many names which I recall with the most
lively sentiments of gratitude for many a dull hour enlivened, and for
many a joyous moment heightened and prolonged.