Transcribed from the 1907 Elliot Stock edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to the Royal Borough of Kensington and
Chelsea Libraries for allowing their copy to be consulted in making this
transcription.
[Picture: Book cover]
CREMORNE
AND THE
LATER LONDON GARDENS
* * * * *
BY
WARWICK WROTH
ASSISTANT-KEEPER OF COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM;
AUTHOR OF
‘THE LONDON PLEASURE-GARDENS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’
* * * * *
WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS
* * * * *
LONDON
ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C.
1907
[Picture: Waterside entrace, Cremorne. From an etching by W. Greaves,
1871]
PREFACE
THE open-air resorts described in this volume lack the romantic
associations of the classic pleasure-gardens of the eighteenth century,
and it is impossible to impart to Cremorne or the Surrey ‘Zoo’ the
historic dignity of a Vauxhall or a Ranelagh. Yet, if these places are
undeserving of the detailed treatment that has been accorded to their
prototypes, they may claim at least a brief and modest chronicle, which
may seem the more necessary because it has mainly to be constructed, not
from books, but from stray handbills and forgotten newspapers. Already,
indeed, we are growing accustomed to speak of the nineteenth century as
the ‘last,’ and to recognize that the London of Dickens, and
Thackeray—the London of the thirties, the forties, and even of the
sixties—had a physiognomy of its own.
Such places of resort, for the most part, enjoyed no kind of fashionable
vogue; they were frequented (if invidious distinctions must be made) by
the lower middle classes and the ‘lower orders.’ Yet they offer some
curious glimpses of manners and modes of recreation which may be worth
considering. I have endeavoured to describe some twenty of these places,
selecting those which seem, in various ways, to be typical. To the
general reader this selection will be enough—though, I trust, not more
than enough—but the London topographer who turns to the appendix and the
notes will find a quite formidable list of tea-gardens and
tavern-gardens, which, if my aim had been to omit nothing, I could have
described in greater detail.
I have taken some pains in compiling these lists, partly from
topographical curiosity, partly from the conviction that their
enumeration almost rises to the dignity of pointing a moral. The main
contrast is between the tavern and public-house of former days and the
gin-palace, with whose aspect—externally, if not (in any sense of the
word) internally—we are only too familiar. A description that I have
found in a London guide-book of 1846 of the tea and tavern gardens of
that date has already an old-world air: ‘The amusements are innocent, the
indulgence temperate; and a suitable mixture of female society renders it
[our guide means _them_] both gay and pleasing.’ The public-house was
then, as now, no inconspicuous feature of the Metropolis; yet in the
earlier half of the nineteenth century it had, if not exactly gaiety and
innocence, some characteristics which tended in that direction—its little
gardens in summer, its tavern concerts in winter-time. In the fifties,
or earlier, many of these garden spaces—often, it is true, of Lilliputian
dimensions—were marked out as building-ground, which was either sold to
alien contractors or utilized by the proprietor of the tavern when he
thought fit to erect thereon a roomier and more imposing edifice. At the
same period, or some years later, the increase of music-halls, of local
theatres, and places of entertainment, rendered the tavern concert, with
its unambitious glee-parties and comic singing, a superfluity. The
disappearance of the tavern concert may not be a matter of keen regret,
but the abolition of the garden has altered—and for the worse—the whole
character of the public-house.
In the garden a man might sit with a friend or chance acquaintance as
long as his pleasure and a treacherous climate permitted. In the
gin-palace he practically cannot sit at all, but is huddled, sometimes
with his wife and children, into a kind of pen, from which custom and a
sort of shy politeness bid him depart at the earliest moment to make room
for new-comers. The London public-house has thus become a mere counter
for the hurried consumption of drink; it has lost any convenience or
merit it may once have had as an improvised club and a cheerful resort.
The proprietors of the larger houses seem, indeed, to have had a
suspicion of this, for they sometimes offer, for the behoof of their
wealthier customers, a comfortable lounge or smoking-saloon. But this
does not benefit the humbler classes, and it has often seemed to me that
a good way of discouraging intemperance in a great city is not to attempt
the heroic, unpopular, and impossible task of abolishing the traffic in
drink, but to compel the owners of licensed houses to dispense their
stock-in-trade under more rational and recreative conditions—_to give us_
‘_clubs_’ _for_ ‘_pubs_,’ or, at any rate, cafés and café-restaurants.
We have our obvious models on the Continent in the large café, the
beer-garden, and even in the small café. The poor man would not be
‘robbed of his beer,’ nor would the change be quite ‘un-English,’ as the
record of our little tavern gardens will show. Even in London at this
moment there is an (almost solitary) instance of a café-restaurant of
this kind, in Leicester Square.
The one feature common to all these Continental places is the custom of
sitting down at a table; there is no standing at a bar, or the rapid
displacement of one customer by another. The coffee, the liqueur, or the
lager, is not only drained—shall I say, to its dregs?—but is spun out and
husbanded to the utmost, and for an hour or so there is at least the
semblance of the comfort and convenience of a club.
It is too late now to restore the little summer gardens, but it should be
possible to convert our public-houses, not into coffee-palaces, which do
not meet the general need, but into cafés, by which I mean places where
varied drinks, strong or otherwise, would be obtainable, though under
less absurd and demoralizing conditions than at present. Every one
should be made to sit down, should be waited on—by a waitress if we
like—and the great bar itself should be dissolved, except as a counter
for the attendants. There could be cafés both large and small—places
that the London Baedeker would describe as (relatively) ‘expensive,’ and
others to suit the pence of the people. The café might even be musical,
though perhaps a line would be drawn at the _café chantant_. Probably
many small places would not be able to conform to these conditions, and
would have to be closed; but, in view of the diminished competition, the
larger houses could be called upon without hardship to undertake the
necessary reconstruction.
But I am converting this preface into a temperance pamphlet, and, before
is it too late, I break off to ask a kindly consideration for a little
volume which recalls, I think, some interesting and not uninstructive
features of old London life. In reading the proof-sheets I have had the
kind help of my brother, Mr. A. E. Wroth.
WARWICK WROTH.
1907.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
CREMORNE GARDENS 1
MANOR-HOUSE BATHS AND GARDENS, CHELSEA 25
BATTY’S HIPPODROME AND SOYER’S SYMPOSIUM, KENSINGTON 30
THE HIPPODROME, NOTTING HILL 34
THE ROYAL OAK, BAYSWATER 37
CHALK FARM 39
EEL-PIE (OR SLUICE) HOUSE, HIGHBURY 42
WESTON’S RETREAT, KENTISH TOWN 44
THE MERMAID, HACKNEY 46
THE ROSEMARY BRANCH, HOXTON 48
SIR HUGH MYDDELTON’S HEAD, ISLINGTON 52
THE PANARMONION GARDENS, KING’S CROSS 54
THE EAGLE AND GRECIAN SALOON 57
ALBERT SALOON AND ROYAL STANDARD PLEASURE-GARDENS 68
NEW GLOBE PLEASURE-GROUNDS, MILE END ROAD 70
THE RED HOUSE, BATTERSEA 72
BRUNSWICK GARDENS (OR VAUXHALL PLEASURE-GARDENS), VAUXHALL 77
FLORA GARDENS, CAMBERWELL 79
MONTPELIER TEA-GARDENS, WALWORTH 81
SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 83
LIST OF MINOR LONDON GARDENS, NINETEENTH CENTURY 93
INDEX 98
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
WATERSIDE ENTRANCE, CREMORNE _Frontispiece_
From an etching by W. Greaves, 1871.
THE STADIUM, CHELSEA 3
From a lithograph, published in 1831.
‘BARON’ NICHOLSON AT A ‘JUDGE AND JURY’ TRIAL 3
From _Life in London Illustrated_, _circa_ 1855.
PLAN OF CREMORNE, _circa_ 1870–1877 6
THE DANCING-PLATFORM, CREMORNE, 1847 9
From the _Pictorial Times_, June, 1847.
CREMORNE GARDENS IN THE HEIGHT OF THE SEASON 11
By M’Connell, 1858.
THE FIREWORK GALLERY, CREMORNE 17
From an etching by W. Greaves, 1870.
THE DANCING-PLATFORM, CREMORNE 23
From an etching by W. Greaves, 1871.
MANOR-HOUSE GARDEN, CHELSEA, _circa_ 1809 25
ADMISSION TICKETS, NEW RANELAGH, PIMLICO, 1809, ETC. 28
THE HIPPODROME, BAYSWATER (NOTTING HILL), _circa_ 35
1838
PLAN OF THE HIPPODROME, NOTTING HILL, 1841 36
THE TEA-GARDENS, ROSEMARY BRANCH, 1846 49
ADMISSION TICKET, ROSEMARY BRANCH, 1853 50
SUSPENSION RAILWAY, PANARMONION GARDENS 55
From an engraving, _circa_ 1830.
A TAVERN-CONCERT SINGER, MISS FRAZER (OR FRASER) 59
JAMES, _circa_ 1838
PLEASURE-GARDENS, EAGLE TAVERN, _circa_ 1838 67
NEW GLOBE TAVERN PLEASURE-GROUNDS 71
From a lithograph after H. M. Whichelo, _circa_
1846.
THE RED HOUSE, BATTERSEA 73
From a view published by J. Rorke, _circa_ 1845.
BARRY, THE CLOWN, ON THE THAMES 74
(Cp. Red House, Battersea.)
A SOUTH-EAST VIEW IN THE SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 83
After a lithograph published by Havell, 1832.
STIRRING UP THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON (SURREY ZOO) 87
After George Cruikshank, 1844.
‘OLD LONDON’ AT THE SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 89
After a lithograph published by Webb, 1844.
CREMORNE GARDENS
THE old house by the river had often changed hands, but the new
possessor, who was reputed to be a Baron, somewhat puzzled the quiet
inhabitants of Chelsea. Great oaks and elms surrounded the grounds, but
through the fine iron gates, which were left half open, it was not
difficult—as on this summer morning of 1830—to catch a glimpse of the
owner, engaged, apparently, in the survey and measurement of his estate.
He was a man of over sixty, dressed in a faded military uniform of no
known pattern, but which seemed to have done service in some company of
sharpshooters in the days of Napoleon. In the middle of the lawn was a
table, on which a rifle reposed amid a litter of plans and papers. But
if the Baron had a gun it was not to shoot _you_, but one of the targets
at the far end of the garden, and his successive bull’s-eyes certainly
proclaimed the hand of a master. A little intrusion he did not seem to
mind, and as you advanced he only offered you a prospectus: ‘THE STADIUM,
Cremorne House, Chelsea, established for the tuition and practice of
skilful and manly exercises generally.’ {1}
The estate of Cremorne House (or Farm), which was afterwards to be
developed into the notorious Cremorne Gardens, had once belonged to the
pious Lady Huntingdon, and George Whitfield had prayed and discoursed
within the house. Later on, it passed to the Earl of Cremorne, then to
his widow, a descendant of William Penn. The last owner was Granville
Penn. {2a} The purchaser of 1830, in whom we are interested, was Charles
Random de Berenger, who styled himself Baron de Beaufain, or, more often,
the Baron de Berenger. His name seemed French, but he boasted of ancient
Prussian lineage, and long before this date had settled in London. He
was a skilful draughtsman, an inventor of peculiar guns {2b} and
explosives, and believed to be the owner of innumerable patents, which
had only brought him to a debtors’ prison. In the summer of 1815 he had
emerged from a term of imprisonment in the King’s Bench, for it was he
who with consummate skill and audacity had carried through the great
Stock Exchange hoax of 1814, in which Lord Cochrane and his friends were
so painfully involved. {2c} In fifteen years these things were nearly
forgotten, and the Baron, who was a sportsman and a dead shot, found
himself well supported when he opened his Cremorne Stadium in 1832.
[Picture: The Stadium, Chelsea. From a lithograph, published in 1831]
The subscription was two or three guineas, and the members, under the
Baron’s tuition, could shoot, box and fence, and practise ‘manly
exercises generally’ in his beautiful grounds. He also established, so
to speak, a ‘Ladies’ Links,’ with its clubroom, ‘which Gentlemen cannot
enter,’ unless (such is his quaint proviso) ‘by consent of the Ladies
occupying such.’ In 1834 George Cruikshank made a design for a ‘Chelsea
Stadium Shield,’ which was quite Homeric in its form, and showed every
conceivable kind of sport and exercise, including pole-jumping and golf.
{2d}
The Stadium flourished, or, rather, lingered on, till 1843, but only with
the adventitious aid of occasional galas and balloon displays that
already foreshadowed Cremorne. {3}
[Picture: ‘Baron’ Nicholson at a ‘Judge and Jury’ Trial. From Life in
London Illustrated, circa 1855]
The transformation of this failing arena of British sport into the
full-blooded pleasure-garden of Cremorne was effected by another Baron,
though he was such only by the courtesy of Bow Street and Maiden Lane.
Renton Nicholson (for that was his name), like most of the managers of
Cremorne, was a man who knew a thing or two. He was born early in the
century, and his boyhood was spent in the quiet village of Islington,
where his two sisters kept a young ladies’ seminary. His tastes early
led him to the distractions of Sadler’s Wells, and at sixteen, {4a} when
he became a pawnbroker’s assistant in Shadwell, he began to acquire his
remarkable knowledge of the ‘flash’ life of London in all its grades.
About 1830 he opened a jeweller’s shop in the West End, which supplied
the ‘swells’ of the day and their female friends, and by this time his
London acquaintanceships were extensive and peculiar, consisting, as we
are told, of shady journalists, players, tavern vocalists, and rooks of
all shades from the welsher to the skittle sharp. He knew the taste of
his public, and in 1837 began to issue the scurrilous journal called _The
Town_, for which Dr. Maginn and other lively contributors used to write.
After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of
various kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in
Bow Street, and here, in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up
like a law-court, he presided—as Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the
judge and jury trials that were so attractive to the Londoner of the
forties and fifties. The causes that came before this tribunal were
chiefly matrimonial—the _crim. con._ cases of the time—and were such that
their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of
wit) often made the most hardened sinner shudder. Nicholson presided
over similar trials at those famous haunts, the Coal Hole and the Cyder
Cellars, till his death in 1861. He was impudent in manner, obese and
sensual in appearance, yet a man of real talent and geniality, gone
hopelessly upon the wrong track. His apologists describe him as a sort
of nineteenth-century Robin Hood, who plucked the aristocratic pigeon,
but was ‘the soul of good nature’ to the poor Bohemian. {4b}
His connexion with Cremorne was brief, and his capital inadequate. In
1843 he replaced the timid prospectus of De Berenger by flaming bills
announcing a ‘Thousand Guineas Fête,’ which during three days (July 31,
August 1 and 2), at one shilling admission, provided, among other
diversions, a mock tournament, a pony-race, a performance by Tom Matthews
the clown, and a _pas de deux_ by T. Ireland and Fanny Matthews.
In 1845 De Berenger died, and this year Littlejohn (the refreshment
caterer to the gardens) and Tom Matthews managed the place between them.
Charles Green, the balloonist, was called in, and began that long series
of Cremorne ascents which a spice of eccentricity and danger always
rendered popular. For example, in September, Green went up with a lady
and a leopard—the latter a magnificent animal, so perfectly subdued in
the presence of his mistress or her ‘livery servant,’ as to lay
(according to the bill) at her feet or crouch in her lap at command. In
August the balloon party consisted of Green, Lord George Beresford, and
Tom Matthews, who preluded the ascent by singing his ‘Hot Codlings.’ The
balloon went up at seven, and, after visiting the General Post Office and
passing over Stamford Hill in perilous proximity to the New River
Reservoir, landed its occupants, after a voyage of two hours, cold and
shivering, on a marsh at Tottenham.
In 1846 (or more probably a few years later) Cremorne was purchased by
Thomas Bartlett Simpson, who guided its destinies till the beginning of
the sixties. {5} Simpson had been head-waiter at the Albion, a
well-known theatrical tavern that stood opposite Drury Lane Theatre in
Russell Street, and was afterwards its lessee. He was a shrewd man of
business, and, according to George Augustus Sala, ‘a kindly and generous
gentleman.’ Sala, who knew the gardens well from about 1850, tells us
that, unlike the Vauxhall of the time, Cremorne was a real pleasaunce
surrounded by magnificent trees, with well-kept lawns and lovely flowers,
and melodious singing-birds. Nothing was pleasanter in the summer-time
than to saunter in at midday or in the early afternoon (for the gardens
were not properly open till three or five), and find Mr. Simpson’s
daughters there with their work-baskets—to say nothing of the pretty
barmaids employed by the kindly and generous gentleman, who were busy, in
their cotton frocks, arranging the bars, and paying, it is implied, no
ordinary attention to Mr. G. A. Sala.
[Picture: Plan of Cremorne, circa 1870–1877]
Five thousand pounds was spent in preparing for the opening of 1846, and
a banqueting-hall and theatre were constructed, as well as some
‘delightful lavender bowers’ for the accommodation of the 1,500 persons
who were likely to need a bowery seclusion. The gardens were rapidly
getting into shape, and we can now survey them almost as they appeared
till their close in 1877.
They were about twelve acres, to which must be added, from 1850, the
grounds of Ashburnham House on the west, in which flower-shows and other
exhibitions were held. Cremorne lay between the river and the King’s
Road, Chelsea. The grand entrance was in the King’s Road, where a big
star illuminated the pay-box. On a summer evening, if you did not mind
the slow progress of the threepenny steamer from the City to Cremorne
Pier, you entered by the river gate at the south-east corner of the
gardens. The grounds were well lit, but on entering there was not that
sudden blaze of light that was the visitor’s great sensation when he came
through the dark pay-entrance into the garden of Vauxhall. The most
conspicuous feature was the orchestra to the south-west of the gardens—a
‘monster pagoda,’ brilliantly lighted with hundreds of coloured lamps,
and surrounded by a circular platform, prepared, it is said, to
accommodate 4,000 dancers. Here the dancing took place from 8.30 till 11
or later. There was always a dignified master of the ceremonies (in 1846
Flexmore the pantomimist), but little introduction was required in that
easygoing place. There was a good band of fifty, for some years under
Laurent, of the Adelaide Gallery Casino in the Strand. {7} In the early
part of the evening—at any rate, in the seventies—the dancing was left to
the shop-girls and their friends: the gilded youth and the ‘smart’ female
set of Cremorne began their waltzing later on, after the fireworks.
The gardens had a tendency to become congested with side-shows, flaring
stalls and shooting-galleries, too much suggesting a fair; but, unlike
Earl’s Court and the later Vauxhall, Cremorne remained a garden. There
was still the encircling fringe of ancient trees, and an avenue on the
west stretching from north to south; on the east side was the broad lawn
from which the balloon ascents took place.
Cremorne had the usual pleasure-garden equipment of fountains and
statuary; refreshment-bars, boxes, and tables were placed at every coign
of vantage, though the right place to go was the Cremorne House (or
Hotel) dining-room, or the upper and lower tiers of supper-boxes in the
south and south-western corner. Here there was a half-crown supper, and,
if you aspired no higher, the Cremorne sherry, that fine old wine, ‘free
from acidity, and highly recommended to invalids.’ In the centre of the
grounds was an American bowling-saloon, which made its appearance,
together with American drinks, in ’48 or ’49.
On the west side was the circus; the theatre was in the south of the
garden. A smaller theatre, north of the lawn, was appropriated to a
troupe of marionettes, introduced by Simpson in 1852. They were great
favourites of the public and of the proprietor, who liked ‘the little
beggars who never came to the treasury on Saturday.’ Besides this, there
was a maze and (as Vauxhall had its hermit) a gipsy’s tent and a
‘double-sighted youth.’ The admission to the gardens was one shilling,
and the season tickets cost one guinea or two guineas.
Simpson’s management (_i.e._, till 1861) provided some special
diversions, of which the most curious, perhaps, was an Aquatic Tournament
or Naval Fête (1851). About eleven at night a fortress (either St. Jean
d’Acre or Gibraltar) on the river esplanade was vigorously attacked by a
squadron consisting of fourteen steamers of the Citizen Company (whose
‘entire fleet’ was embarked in the enterprise), seconded by the hull of a
retired Citizen steamer, which was laden with combustibles. To this
attack the land battery—its necessary smoke, fire, and noise supplied by
Mortram and Duffell, the Cremorne fireworkers—made a suitable reply, and
eventually the old hull was blown to pieces amid the cheers of the
spectators.
The Italian Salamander, ‘Cristoforo Buono Core,’ was, later on, in 1858,
another attraction of a fiery kind. Like Chabert, the more famous
Salamander of 1826, {8a} this man entered a burning furnace with apparent
unconcern, and (as he informed an inquisitive spectator) ‘titt as fell as
he cott,’ though the performance made him very ‘dursty.’
In contrast to these popular shows, the manager on Friday, July 9, 1858,
gave an ‘Aristocratic Fête,’ arranged by a committee of gentlemen
assisted by lady patronesses, who are said to have been very chary of
issuing tickets to other ladies whom the gentlemen proposed to invite.
But the invitations mattered little, for the 9th turned out to be one of
the wettest days of an English July, and the aristocratic ambitions of
Cremorne were damped down for ever. {8b}
In the balloon ascents of Cremorne (as already remarked) there was often
a dangerous element, usually a parachute descent. Without dwelling on
the ascents of balloonists like Lieutenant Gale and the celebrated
Charles Green, who made his three hundredth and sixty-fifth voyage (of
course including his ascents at Vauxhall and many other places) on August
2, 1847, we can notice only the Bouthellier, Poitevin, and Latour
performances.
In August, 1852, {9a} a French aeronaut named Bouthellier ascended on a
trapeze attached to the car of a balloon, and when the balloon was at a
respectable height began to twist himself round ‘almost in a knot,’ then
to untie himself, and finally to suspend his body as he hung, first by
his neck, then by his heels. The reporter tells us that this was done
‘to the evident mingled alarm and pleasure of the spectators,’ and the
whole thing was considered to ‘redound greatly to the credit’ of Mr.
Simpson.
[Picture: The Dancing-Platform, Cremorne, 1847. From the Pictorial
Times, June, 1847]
In September of the same year (1852), Madame Poitevin, ‘in the character
of Europa,’ ascended from Cremorne on the back of a heifer which was
attached to her balloon. This was nothing new to _her_ or to the
sight-seers of Paris, where she and her husband had made hundreds of
ascents on the backs of horses, and even ‘a great many ascents with a
bull.’ A pony ascent had been made by Green at Vauxhall in 1850, {9b}
but the English magistrates drew the line at a heifer, and Simpson and
his Europa were fined at the Ilford Sessions on September 7, 1852, for
cruelty to animals.
This wretched exhibition was not, of course, repeated, but risky
parachute feats were by no means to be abandoned. On June 27, 1854, at
about seven o’clock, Henri Latour, a balloonist of the age of fifty, went
up lashed to a parachute which was formed like a horse, and suspended
from W. H. Adams’s balloon. As the balloon was rising an attempt was
made (by means of a trigger-iron) to release the parachute, but it
somehow got twisted, and its two guiding ‘wings’ did not expand. The
descent of the balloon continued, and in the Tottenham marshes, which it
had now rapidly reached, struck the earth, and the unhappy Latour was
dragged over the ground and through the trees, and died a few days after
of his injuries. {10a}
The programme of the theatre and the concert-room was less exciting. The
Cremorne theatricals never aimed much higher than the farce and the
vaudeville, but there were some good ballets, in which (_circa_
1847–1851) the Deulins took part. Under Simpson some of the old
favourite comic singers were engaged—Sam Cowell in 1846, Robert Glindon
in 1847 and 1850. {10b} Herr Von Joel, who appeared in 1848, was ‘a
peculiar old German’ {10c} who had made a sensation—which became a
bore—at Vauxhall Gardens. His business was to appear at unexpected
moments and in unsuspected parts of the gardens, to yodel. Swiss
ditties, and to give imitations, on his walking-stick, of birds and
feathered fowl. In his later days he was a familiar figure at Evans’s
Supper-Rooms, where he used to retail dubious cigars, and dispose of
tickets for benefits which never came off. J. W. Sharp (‘Jack Sharp’),
who sang at Cremorne in 1850, was at one time the rage of the town, and
his comic songs were in demand at Vauxhall and at such places as Evans’s
and the Mogul in Drury Lane. But he took to dissipated ways, lost his
engagements, and died in the Dover Workhouse at the age of thirty-eight.
{10d}
Simpson’s varied enterprises resulted in a substantial profit, even if he
did not make (as he told the impecunious Baron Nicholson) the sum of
£100,000 during his first years at Cremorne. His patrons were people of
all ranks, and of varying degrees of virtue. But Cremorne was never able
to parade in the newspapers that array of fashionable and distinguished
personages who ‘last night’ visited Vauxhall. It was not, for one thing,
a place that ladies (in the strict sense of the word) were in the habit
of visiting, unless, perhaps (as Mr. Sala puts it) ‘in disguise and on
the sly,’ or, at any rate, under the safe conduct of a husband or
brother. Ladies of some sort were, no doubt, considerably in evidence
there, though we are not to think of Cremorne as so entirely given over
to ‘drink, dancing, and devilry’ as its sterner critics declared. If it
was a place for the man about town, it also attracted a number of worthy
citizens and country cousins who went there for an evening’s pleasure
with their wives and daughters, and were ‘not particular.’ A livelier
element was imported by the medical students—a high-spirited race made
responsible in those days for the sins of many non-medical youngsters—by
Oxonians and Cantabs, by temporarily irresponsible clerks and shopmen,
and ‘flash’ personages of various kinds.
[Picture: Cremorne Gardens in the Height of the Season. By M’Connell,
1858]
In 1857 the Chelsea Vestry had presented the first of many annual
petitions against the renewal of the licence, setting forth the
inconvenience of the late hours of Cremorne, the immoral character of its
female frequenters, and its detrimental influence generally on the morals
(and house property) of the neighbourhood. Such petitions, like the
annual protests against old Bartholomew Fair, were a long time in taking
effect, but, as Cremorne grew older, the rowdy and wanton element
certainly increased, and finally, as we shall see, not undeservedly
brought about its downfall. In spite of all this, we know of more than
one respected paterfamilias who has still somewhere a Cremorne programme
or two, the relic of some pleasant and doubtless romantic evening in the
sixties or seventies, when he imagined himself to be seeing something—if
not too much—of ‘real life’ in London. In the sixties some charming
little folding programmes were issued, printed in colour, and presenting
on every page a view of Cremorne. Portions of the programme were
ingeniously cut out, so that on the front page there was a view up the
long walk, flanked by its trees and lamp-bearing goddesses, right to the
great fountain. Another page depicted the supper-table spread with its
choice viands and ‘rarest vintages,’ and on another was a view of the
circus, the supper-boxes, and the promenade enlivened by a peripatetic
band—all for a shilling admission, and the patron, Her Majesty the Queen.
{12a}
Time has cast a veil over the orgiastic features of Cremorne, and though
this is just as well, some of its old frequenters may cherish the feeling
that there are no ‘intrepid aeronauts’ now, no fireworks like Duffell’s,
no gaily-lighted tiers of supper-boxes, and no waltzing on circular
platforms with beauteous, if little known, damsels.
Simpson retired in 1861, {12b} and on July 30 there was a new manager,
Edward Tyrrell Smith. {12c} He has been denied, somehow, a place in the
great _Dictionary of National Biography_, but one cannot turn over a
programme of London amusements in the fifties or sixties without
encountering the name of E. T. Smith—an interesting man, of boundless
energy and resource, and a lucky, if wayward, speculator, who was
everything by turns and nothing long. He was the son of Admiral E. T.
Smith, but his aspirations were not lofty, for he began life—he was born
in 1804—as a Robin Redbreast, one of the old red-waistcoated Bow Street
runners. When the new police force was established Smith was too young
for superannuation, so he was made an inspector. But he soon tired of
this, and after trying his hand as a sheriff’s bailiff or auctioneer,
went into the wine trade. In 1850 we find him landlord of a tavern in
Red Lion Street, Holborn, attracting custom by dressing his barmaids in
bloomer costume. From about this date his speculative genius turned to
the management of London theatres. He took the Marylebone, then Drury
Lane, where he made quite a lengthy stay, and even plunged into opera at
Her Majesty’s. One of his eccentricities was to present silver
snuff-boxes and watches to his master-carpenters and property-men, each
presentation taking place on the stage, accompanied by an appropriate
speech. He was lessee of the Lyceum, of the Surrey, of Astley’s (when
Ada Menken appeared as Mazeppa), and he took Highbury Barn for one
season. He also founded the Alhambra in Leicester Square, making short
work, for his purpose, of its instructive predecessor, the Panopticon.
He effected another transformation by turning Crockford’s gaming-house
into the Wellington Restaurant, and opened a second restaurant—but this
was a dismal failure—in the vaults of the Royal Exchange. He further
made a handsome profit out of a French bonnet-shop which he established
at Brighton, under the alluring name of Clémentine. He financed Baron
Nicholson at the Coal Hole, became proprietor of the _Sunday Times_, and
finally settled down in the metal trade. If Smith had little money of
his own, he had a marvellous talent for extracting it from others, for,
with some managerial humbug in his doings, he was a good-natured man,
with plenty of friends who believed in his speculative _flair_. One of
his early devices was ingenious. He hired from a money-lender at the
rate of £1 a day a £1,000 banknote, which he always carried in his
pocket—not to spend, but to deposit when he made a purchase, and to
inspire confidence generally. He retired from Cremorne in 1869, and
managed just to outlive the gardens, for he died in 1877, on November 26.
Smith began his enterprise with a startling novelty—a ‘female Blondin’
who undertook to cross the Thames. Late on an August afternoon of 1861
thousands of spectators thronged the river banks and the esplanade of
Cremorne, or waited in small boats to see this new heroine of Niagara. A
tight rope was stretched across the river at a height varying from 50 to
100 feet, and at last the female Blondin appeared. She was a
delicate-looking little woman, who called herself Madame Genvieve. Her
real name was Selina Young, and she was the granddaughter of James Bishop
the showman. One has seen the male Blondin making a careful inspection
of his guy-lines and supports before starting on his perilous course.
His female imitator began her progress at once. When she had traversed
about two-thirds of the distance, she paused to rest on the narrow timber
ledge of one of the main supports of the rope. The rest was a long one,
and it was soon felt that something was wrong when the attendants were
seen tightening the remaining 600 or 700 feet of rope. At last, after
this trying pause—she had started three-quarters of an hour earlier, and
it was now growing dusk and chilly—she moved a few feet forward; then she
halted, and then moved again. But the rope was now swaying like a garden
swing, for the guy-lines had been cut—apparently by some scoundrel who
wanted the leaden weights. Attempts were being made to throw cords over
the rope, when suddenly she let go her balance-pole. It was a terrible
moment, but with infinite pluck and presence of mind the female Blondin
caught the rope with both hands, then a couple of weights suspended from
it, and next the cords by which that part of the rope was steadied.
Descending by the grasp of a three-quarter-inch cord, she reached a boat,
and was saved. {14a} But the warning was disregarded, and the very next
year the female Blondin was performing at Highbury Barn. Here she fell
from a rope which was damp and slippery, and was made a cripple for life.
{14b}
Another sensation, though void of peril, of Smith’s management was the
Cremorne tournament, which began on Wednesday, July 8, 1863, {15} and
lasted two or three days. It was suggested by the famous Eglinton
tournament of August, 1839, which is said to have cost the Earl of
Eglinton £80,000. The Cremorne imitation was held, not in the park or
tilt-yard of a castle, but in the large pavilion of the Ashburnham
grounds, which was gay with flags and garlands and the escutcheons of
medieval heroes. The velvet and the gold lace may have been less costly,
but the effect was equally impressive. At Eglinton Castle the Queen of
Beauty was the lovely Lady Seymour; the Marquis of Waterford was one of
the knights, and Prince Louis Napoleon one of the squires. The knights
and squires of Cremorne came chiefly from the theatre and the circus, and
the pages were ladies described by a journalist as ‘no strangers to the
choreographic stage.’ The Queen of Beauty was Madame Caroline, a
circus-rider well known at Vauxhall and elsewhere, who is believed to
have resided in the New Cut.
The Scottish tournament was a fiasco, and was carried out under the cover
of umbrellas and great-coats in the intervals of drenching rain which
lasted for three days. The opening day at Cremorne was bright and sunny,
and the procession of 300 made its entrance in imposing style: heralds in
their gaudy tabards, yeomen in Lincoln green, men-at-arms in glittering
armour—a whole _Ivanhoe_ in motion. The tournament King, the Queen of
Beauty, and their suite, were escorted to a tapestried tribune, and their
gorgeous array contrasted strangely with the tall-hatted and
coal-scuttle-bonneted spectators who occupied the seats on every side.
The heralds made the proclamation, and the jousting began. First, there
were trials of skill between knights of different countries all in
armour, and mounted on chargers with emblazoned housings. Some sports,
like tilting at the ring and the quintain, followed, and then came the
grand mêlée between the two companies of knights. Finally, one of the
combatants was unhorsed—_pro forma_—and his antagonist received the prize
of valour from the Queen of Beauty.
Bands of music and facetious clowns, or rather ‘jesters,’ enlivened the
proceedings, which were at first exciting and a fine spectacle, though
they tended to grow monotonous. {16a}
Among the minor entertainments of Smith’s management was the exhibition,
in 1867, of Natator, the man-frog. This human frog was a young man of
twenty, who was to be seen through the plate-glass front of a huge tank
filled with 6 feet of water. He imitated the motions of fish, stood on
his head, ate a sponge-cake, or smoked a pipe. A more rational
exhibition was the appearance of the Beckwith family in 1869. {16b}
In his last year (1869) Smith exhibited the French ‘captive balloon’ in
the Ashburnham grounds. This balloon was made of linen and indiarubber,
and held thirty people. It was attached by a strong rope worked by an
engine of 200 horse-power, and could be let out, so as to soar ‘in an
aerial voyage over London,’ 2,000 feet. The charge for an ascent was ten
shillings, but a free admission was granted to a female inmate of the
Fulham Workhouse, who chose to celebrate her hundredth birthday by a trip
in the balloon, attended by the matron. It was fortunately not on this
occasion that the captive balloon, after the manner of its kind, escaped!
{16c}
John Baum, who became lessee in 1870, had not the character of his
predecessors, nor a hand strong enough to restrain the vagaries of his
more troublesome clients. But he was by no means incapable as an
entertainment manager and when the gardens were opened they were found to
be much improved, and a new theatre was built. He developed the stage
amusements, and produced some good ballets, such as _Giselle_, in 1870.
In 1875 there was a comic ballet by the Lauri family, and Offenbach’s
_Rose of Auvergne_, with a ballet of 100, was given. Auber’s _Fra
Diavolo_ was presented before a Bank Holiday audience in 1877. {17} The
orchestra was a capable one under Jules Riviere. In 1872 the licence for
dancing, the great attraction of Cremorne, was refused, but in 1874 the
waltzing or, the ‘crystal platform’ was again as lively as ever.
[Picture: The Firework Gallery, Cremorne. From an etching by W. Greaves,
1870]
The one great, but melancholy, sensation of Baum’s management was the
episode of ‘Monsieur de Groof, the flying man.’ Vincent de Groof was a
Belgian who had constructed a flying machine on which he made some
ascents with doubtful success in his native land. He came to England in
1874, and with some difficulty persuaded Baum to let him go through his
dangerous performance at Cremorne. Certainly the flying man made a good
advertisement, and on the evening of June 29, 1874, there was a great
concourse in the gardens. The machine was suspended by a rope, 30 feet
long, from the car of Simmons’s ‘Czar’ balloon, and while the tedious
process of inflation was going on the spectators had time to inspect a
flying apparatus strange and wonderful. It was constructed of cane and
waterproof silk, and was made ‘in imitation of the bat’s wing and
peacock’s tail.’ Evidently De Groof, like his inventive predecessor in
_Rasselas_, had considered the structure of all volant animals, and found
‘the folding continuity of the bat’s wing most easily accommodated to the
human form.’ His wings were 37 feet long from tip to tip, and his tail
18 feet long. In the centre was fixed an upright wooden stand about 12
feet high, in which De Groof placed himself, working the wings and tail
by means of three levers. He ascended from Cremorne about eight, and as
the balloon rose seemed like a big bird perched in his net framework. He
was meant to descend in the gardens, but the wind carried the balloon
away to Brandon in Essex, where he made a perilous descent from the
balloon, almost unseen, but apparently without injury. The Cremorne
habitué felt that he was cheated of a sight, and on July 9 the experiment
had to be repeated. At about half-past seven the machine was once more
taken up by Simmons’s balloon, and this time there was no changing of the
venue. The balloon soared to a great height, but for fully half an hour
continued to hover over the gardens. Then the wind bore it rapidly away
in the direction of St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, till the machine was
perilously near the church tower. No one quite knew what happened at
this moment. Simmons seems to have called out, ‘I must cut you loose,’
and De Groof to have responded ‘Yes, and I can fall in the churchyard.’
Suddenly the rope was severed, the machine, without resistance to the
air, was seen to collapse, and wind round and round in its descent, till
it fell with a heavy thud near the kerbstone in Robert Street. {18} A
great crowd had collected, and De Groof was picked up in a terrible
state, and taken into the Chelsea Infirmary to die. The fate of the
balloon was an anti-climax: it was carried away to Springfield in Essex,
where it came down on the Great Eastern railway-line after a narrow
escape from a passing train. The whole affair caused great excitement in
London, and the details were copied into papers like the _Indian Mirror_.
A sheet-ballad sold in the Chelsea streets drew the obvious morals, and
appealed to the tender-hearted passer-by:
‘You feeling hearts, list to my story,
It is a most heartrending tale;
And when the facts are laid before you
To drop a tear you cannot fail.’ {19}
But we are nearing the last days of Cremorne. At no period could the
gardens be described as a place of quiet family resort, and under Smith
in the sixties we begin to hear of rows and cases in the police courts.
In 1863, for instance, there was a ‘riot’ on the night of the Oaks day,
and a number of men, apparently of decent position, stormed and wrecked
one of the bars. Six of them were caught, and fined from £20 to £50
apiece. A scene of this kind was partly the fault of the manager, who
had advertised his gardens as just the pleasure resort for a gentleman
returning from the races. One (undated) story of a Cremorne fracas, told
by G. A. Sala, is rather amusing, and worth repeating nearly in his
words. ‘A gallant Captain and M.P.,’ who was engaged to a young lady of
good position, began to repent of his promise. To get out of it
honourably he could devise no better plan than to disgrace himself at
Cremorne. One night, accordingly, he repaired to the gardens ‘with a few
chosen boon companions,’ who, like himself, imbibed freely of the rare
vintages in the supper-rooms. The moment came when he was in a mood ‘to
break things,’ and his first onslaught was on the glasses and decanters
of a refreshment counter. Then he charged the dancing platform,
frightened the dancers, and scattered the musicians ‘like blossoms before
a March blast.’ They tried to stop him, but he put the waiters _hors de
combat_, and for some time made short work of the police. The next
morning the gallant Captain and M.P. found himself, at the police court,
Westminster, provided with a sentence of fourteen days. From his
dungeon-cell in Holloway he wrote an abject letter to his impending
father-in-law, deploring the degradation he had brought on himself and
his friends, and relinquishing for ever all claims on the beloved
daughter. Next day the governor of the prison handed him a letter from
the same father-in-law, which ran as follows: ‘DEAR JIM,—Sorry to hear
you have got yourself into such a scrape. Never mind; boys will be boys!
Katie and I will call for you in an open carriage on Monday week, and the
marriage will take place on the following morning at St. James’s,
Piccadilly.’
These things were relatively trifles, and it was really not till the
seventies—under Baum—that Cremorne became an impossible place. The
Westminster Police Court was now hardly ever without its drunk or
disorderly case from the gardens. Even the normal evenings at Cremorne
were fairly fertile in incident, but a big crop followed the abnormal
evenings—the night of some great event, the Derby, the Oaks, the return
of the Prince from India, or—a new institution—the Bank Holiday. At such
times extra late hours were always granted, and they were those occasions
when champagne is said to ‘flow like water.’ It was half-past ten,
half-past eleven, twelve, and still the theatres and music-halls were
sending down fresh visitors, and the cabs came rattling down the King’s
high road. The bars and boxes were so many hives of drinking mortals—men
who had lost and men who had won, and the drinking quickly led to an
almost indiscriminate pugnacity. The wretched waiters, even, were
assaulted, though the pugilist thought he amply atoned by a money payment
‘on the spot.’
The efforts of the half-hearted Chelsea Vestry of 1857 were renewed with
more vigour (and with more justification) from 1870 onwards, and they had
a valuable ally in Canon Cromwell, the principal of St. Mark’s Training
College, which stood almost opposite the entrance of Cremorne. One of
the many unedifying illustrated papers of the seventies, the _Day’s
Doings_, portrays the Canon in cap and gown ejecting two flashily dressed
females from the gardens, and he and his docile students for the next six
years are said to have given Mr. Baum a very rough time. This opposition
was not popular, and on one 5th of November the worthy Canon was paraded
on a coster’s barrow in front of Cremorne as a guy. The comic papers
sneered at the petitions ‘signed by all the babies and children under
ten,’ and issued a revised set of Cremorne Regulations. All ladies were
henceforward to have certificates of respectability from the Board of
Guardians, though members of the London School Board were to be admitted
free. No fireworks, dancing, smoking, laughing, or flirting were
allowed, but by an order from the Vestry you could obtain a coffee cobler
or a cocoa cocktail. Ridicule is sometimes a legitimate weapon against
the Puritan, but in this case Canon Cromwell and the Vestry were hardly
in the wrong.
The end came rather suddenly and in a curious way. Towards the close of
1876 there was distributed in Chelsea a pamphlet in verse, entitled _The
Trial of John Fox_, _or Fox John_, _or the Horrors of Cremorne_. It was
signed ‘A. B. Chelsea,’ but the author was soon discovered to be a Mr.
Alfred Brandon, a worthy and evidently courageous man, who had long been
known as minister of the Chelsea Baptist Chapel. By trade Mr. Brandon
was a tailor, and no doubt his coats were better than his poetry, which
is, indeed, sad doggerel. This pamphlet was an indictment of Cremorne as
the ‘nursery of every kind of vice,’ and of its callous money-grubbing
manager John Fox. The jury decide _against_ John Fox:
‘Our verdict this: the Fox has had his day.
Destroy his covert—let him run away.’
Mr. Baum is said to have been ‘stung by these cutting remarks’—‘remarks’
which, whether they stung or cut, constituted, from the legal point of
view, a highly defamatory libel. He doubtless went unwillingly into
court, but in May, 1877, the libel action of Baum _v._ Brandon was heard
in the Queen’s Bench before Sir Henry Hawkins. Brandon pleaded, in the
familiar way, first, that he had intended no allusion to Baum, and,
secondly, that he _had_ alluded to Baum, but that what he said was true,
and, moreover, not malicious. In court it was averred by Baum that
Cremorne was most respectably conducted, and that the houses in the
neighbourhood were most respectable. Brandon, to justify the libel,
called various witnesses, among whom were a Cremorne waiter and a woman
from a reformatory, who both traced their downfall to the gardens. The
jury found for Baum, but awarded him a farthing damages, and each side
had to pay its own costs.