KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO
KNIGHTSBRIDGE
“Go where we may--rest where we will,
Eternal London haunts us still.”
MOORE.
Few people think of connecting the name of Knightsbridge with anything
less modern than the big departmental shops, the Barracks or the cosy
houses on the fringe of Mayfair and Belgravia.
Yet there was a town of Knightsbrigg in the fourteenth century, in
Edward the Third’s day, when the Black Prince and his knights must often
have crossed the Westbourne stream by the bridge built just where the
Albert Gate now stands. Mr. Davis in his _History of Knightsbridge_
gives as the origin of the name the story that “in ancient time certain
knights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holy
purpose. Light in heart if heavy in arms, they passed through this
district on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful by
the Bishop of London at Fulham. For some cause or other, however, a
quarrel ensued between two of the band, and a combat was determined
upon to decide the dispute. They fought on the bridge which spanned the
stream of the Westbourne, while from its banks the struggle was watched
by their partisans. Both fell, if the legend may be trusted; and the
place was ever after called Knightsbridge in remembrance of their fatal
feud.”
Walking down the Brompton Road from the Knightsbridge Tube station it is
difficult to realise that not a hundred and fifty years ago “the stream
ran open, the streets were unpaved and unlighted, and a Maypole was
still on the village green.”
Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass you
see to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing the
Knightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole on
the Knightsbridge village green.
I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. People
pass it every day and look scornfully at it--if they look at all. No one
knows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Little
by little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at the
end of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addison
mentions in the _Spectator_ disappeared about a quarter of a century
later. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tiny
chapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into the
stately and uninteresting Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise of
the immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silk
mercers of yesterday.
There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burial
ground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record of
this gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.
TATTERSALL’S
“Satirists may say what they please about the rural
enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”
WASHINGTON IRVING.
One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinner
inspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded to
admire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what the
English nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. I
know now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold next
day. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a big
reception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charming
frocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and very
horsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know as
much about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nod
grooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.
Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom,
opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded his
fortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into a
national institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs to
the same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to the
present buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctions
take place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horse
dealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, stroll
up and down admiring the horses.
ELY HOUSE
“Queen Bess was Harry’s daughter.”
RUDYARD KIPLING.
As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with its
irregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull,
uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most of
the Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of the
Stuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642,
when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond and
Stafford streets.
Out of Peckham, that haunt of the prosperous City man of those times,
had come Sir Thomas Bond, the forerunner of the Messrs. Cubitt of 1921,
with his syndicate, dealing death to historical associations and
possessing none of the delicacy of feeling that made John Evelyn turn
his head the other way when he drove by with Lord Clarendon the late
owner.
Evelyn himself lived here, close to the house of Lord Dover, whose name
was given to the street. Pope’s friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Byron,
both lodged in Dover Street, but by far the most interesting house is
No. 37, a brick building of unobtrusive, classic simplicity, that has a
story connecting it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
You might pass up and down Dover Street many times without noticing the
significant bishop’s mitre, carved in stone halfway up the middle of the
façade. This was once the distinguishing mark of the town house of the
bishops of Ely that they bought in 1772 from the Government in exchange
for all claim on their Hatton Garden property in Ely Place. Nowadays one
thinks of diamond merchants in connection with Hatton Garden, but in
Elizabeth’s day it was the Naboth’s vineyard that she coveted on behalf
of her handsome Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. The bishops were
forced to grant him a lease for the rent of a red rose, ten loads of
hay, and ten pounds, the right to walk in their rival’s gardens whenever
they chose, and to gather twenty baskets of roses every year.
The bone of contention brought no luck to anyone. Hatton was imprudent
enough to borrow the money for improvements from his queen. She insisted
on the bishops conveying the property to her till the sum should be
repaid, and when one of them jibbed at carrying out the terms of this
settlement, the Queen wrote him an Elizabethan epistle:
Proud prelate! I understand you are backward in complying with your
agreement: but I would have you understand that I, who made you
what you are, can unmake you; and if you do not forthwith fulfil
your engagement, by God, I will immediately unfrock you, Elizabeth.
Sir Christopher Hatton was never able to repay his mistress’s loan. It
broke his heart, says an old chronicler, and though the queen relented
at the end, and came to visit him, “there is no pulley can draw up a
heart once cast down, though a Queen herself should set her hand
thereunto.” He died disconsolate, in his coveted palace of Ely, in 1591.
After all these vicissitudes, the diocese got back its property at the
Restoration, but in 1772 they gave up all claim to it in exchange for
the mansion in Dover Street.
The latter is a stately house, with a long marble hall and staircase,
and the bishops of Elizabeth’s day would doubtless be mildly surprised
if they knew that it is now used by the men and women belonging to the
Albemarle Club.
LONDON MUSEUM
“I turned me from that place in humble wise.”
JOHN DRINKWATER.
Quite near Dover Street, if you only knew it, is the one place where you
may read the story of London spread out before you page by page better
than anywhere else. But very few people can even tell you how to find
it.
I once saw Lancaster House called the Cinderella of London
museums--perhaps because it is so charming and so neglected. It is near
no bus route nor railway station, yet this London Carnavalet is not so
very far from the Dover Street Tube station and either of the two routes
by which it is reached from that point are delightful walks. You may
enter Green Park and stroll along the Queen’s Walk till you come to a
passage-way to the left--not the first little narrow one where two
people have to walk Indian file into St. James’s Place, but the second,
that leads through a wider gateway, closed at 10 p.m., into Stable Yard.
Or else you can go down St. James’s Street, past the passage leading
into the quaint little eighteenth-century courtyard of Pickering Place,
towards St. James’s Palace with its beautiful old sixteenth-century
brick gateway in Cleveland Row. Skirt the Palace to the right and you
will come to Stable Yard, and in Stable Yard is Lancaster House.
It is a stately place. Queen Victoria once said to the Duchess of
Sutherland: “I come from my house to your palace,” but shorn of the
groups of chairs and tables and the stately company moving up and down
the magnificent staircase, the yellow and red marble walls seem
cheerless and repellant.
Now and then a little white notice is pasted on the door with the
announcement that the museum, which is usually open on summer Fridays
and Sundays from 2 to 6, and all other days from 10 to 6 and till 4
o’clock in winter, will be closed to the public for an afternoon or
evening. The Government are entertaining distinguished strangers in the
spacious salons, and then Lancaster House lives again for a few hours
the brilliant existence it had in the nineteenth century, when it was
called Stafford House and the Duke of Sutherland dispensed splendid
hospitality there.
Amusing tales of these political parties, and of the guests, and of many
other things, are told in Mr. Arthur Dasent’s delightful _Story of
Stafford House_, that is sold for a modest sum just inside the door.
In 1913 Lord Leverhulme bought the remainder of the lease that expires
in 1940, from the Duke of Sutherland, and handed it over to the trustees
of the London Museum to house the collection of London antiquities then
exhibited in Kensington Palace.
The name of Stafford House was changed to Lancaster House as a
compliment to the King, who is Duke of Lancaster, and in memory of the
generosity of a Lancashire man.
It is an entrancing place, where you can trace this great city’s history
from the time men used flints to the war that is too near for its
souvenirs to be anything but harrowing.
One may walk through the ages, from the Prehistoric room, through
Roman, Saxon and Mediæval rooms, on the ground floor, and, then,
going up the grand staircase, see how men lived in London in Tudor,
seventeenth-century, Cromwellian and Charles II.’s days, and so on,
through the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rooms, to the costume and
Royal rooms, where you pause dumbfounded before the going-away dress of
stiff white silk poplin embroidered with gold that Queen Mary wore the
day of her wedding, 6th July, 1893.
Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestrovic
countenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with the
beautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in Wood
Street, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.
Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains and
rings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we know
have been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Tree
before they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in the
Place Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the same
problems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamel
chains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx are
prettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must look
disdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which our
grandmothers wore so complacently.
ST. JAMES’S CHURCH
I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St.
James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one of
Wren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is a
font carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimonious
respectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carving
of the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.
THE HAYMARKET SHOPPE
“Only far memories stray
Of a past once lovely, ...”
WALTER DE LA MARE.
I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example of
an eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all,
a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus--and they look at me in blank
astonishment.
Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from Coventry
Street on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaint
jars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, that
has ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.
It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorway
the 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows of
old wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s Morning
Mixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.
The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through the
beautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if the
courteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte,
who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberland
and Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulged
in the best rappee.
Most of the great names of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England may
be found in these old ledgers. David Garrick and Inigo Jones were
customers, and so were my Lord Halifax, Lady Shrewsbury and the Duchess
of Grafton. Beau Brummell’s accounts lie, cheek by jowl as he would have
them, with those of the Earl of Dorchester and the Duke of Bedford, and
the long array of famous names of men and women to be found in the
yellowing papers might well have served as a list of guests present at
any brilliant political function of the time.
The snuff-taking of those days has passed with the lace jabots and the
silk knee-breeches, but the fashion died hard, and so recent a figure as
Lord Russell of Killowen was one of the last of the famous snuff-takers.
The twentieth century turns up its nose at what it calls a disgusting
habit, yet it had its graces and was responsible for the creation of the
beautiful boxes and bottles now treasured as heirlooms.
The actual owners of this fascinating shop have carried on the business
in their family
[Illustration: THE OLD SNUFF HOUSE, 34 ST. JAMES’ HAYMARKET]
since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the present
partners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on the
Old Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, “At the Rasp and Crown, at the
upper End of the Haymarket, London.” It is a charming book, filled with
illustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrival
of the departmental store, when an old-established firm had time to have
intimate courtly relations with its customers.
What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds of
anything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do grateful
customers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to mark
their satisfaction?
If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian of
the historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his way
to Piccadilly Circus.
A KING IN SOHO
“Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.”
GEORGE HERBERT.
Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley may
have been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the old
lady in the Highgate bus, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories
of the deaths of kings,” but if so his knowledge is not shared by many
people.
If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from Piccadilly
Circus, leaving Leicester Square, that “pouting-place of princes,” on
your right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and Gerrard
Street that was fashionable in Charles II.’s day and where Dryden and
Burke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded the
Literary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossing
Shaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back of
the church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open till
four in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. On
the wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore,
King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized on
his arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. “Near this
place,” runs the inscription, “is interred Theodore, King of Corsica,
who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving
the King’s Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. In
consequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use of
his Creditors.” To which Horace Walpole has appended the following
stanza:
The grave, great Teacher, to a level brings
Heroes and beggars, galley-slaves and kings.
But Theodore this moral learned ere dead;
Fate poured its lessons on his living head.
Bestowed a kingdom, but denied him bread.
The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty a fortnight before his
death and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger of
St. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on the
site of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurant
known as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to think
that the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping the
embroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when the
latter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood to
Leicester House hard by.
The only other interesting things I could find in this old church were
the tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore’s memorial
stone,--the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on the
Shaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to the
memory of “The Beloved Mother-in-Law.”
St. Anne’s was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of this
neighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residence
here, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had
a mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry “So Ho!” and
unconsciously christened the whole district.