gathered to the great majority, having in the meanwhile, it may be
supposed, done pretty well for themselves, since we find their son to
have been an attorney. The cottage was deserted, and the royal gift of the
land partly forgotten, so that the Lord Chancellor of that period was
granted a lease of the ground and began to build a mansion on it. Allen's
son had to the full that shrewdness which has made the name of "attorney"
so generally detested that those "gentlemen by Act of Parliament" prefer
nowadays to call themselves "solicitors." He waited until my Lord
Chancellor had nearly completed his house, and then put forward his claim,
finally obtaining L450 per annum as ground rent. He subsequently sold the
land outright, and so Lord Chancellor Henry Bathurst, Baron Apsley, and
Earl Bathurst, became the freeholder, and named his residence "Apsley
House." The mansion was purchased by the nation for the great Duke of
Wellington in 1820. It was, from its situation, long known as "No. 1,
London."
VII
[Sidenote: _MUD BULWARKS_]
Let us see what kind of entrance to London this was in olden times. In
Queen Mary's day the idea of a road leading so far as Bath seems to have
been considered too fantastic for common use, and this was accordingly
known as the "waye to Reading." In that reign, which was so reactionary
that many were discontented with it, and roused up armed rebellions, the
rebel Sir Thomas Wyatt brought his men thus far, having crossed the Thames
at Kingston and struggled through the awful sloughs between that place
and Knightsbridge. It seems quite likely that, but for the mud of those
miscalled "roads," the rebellion would have been successful, and the
course of history changed. But Wyatt's soldiers were utterly exhausted
with the march; and when the Londoners saw them, plastered with mud from
head to foot, they forgot their own discontent, and laughed at their
would-be deliverers, calling them "draggle-tails." So, dispirited and
contemned, they were easily disposed of by the Queen's troops, who, secure
behind their girdle of muck, had only to wait and slay them at leisure.
[Illustration: HYDE PARK CORNER, 1792.]
The lesson seems not to have been lost upon the authorities, and
accordingly we find this defence of dirt in existence up to the year 1842.
For nearly three hundred years this "splendid isolation" set an almost
impassable gulf between those who wished to get out of London and those
who wanted to come in; for in the year just mentioned we learn that
Knightsbridge was in so deplorable a state of neglect that it was
perfectly impassable for persons possessing a common regard for
cleanliness or comfort. Ankle-deep in mud and water, the pavement was
rendered additionally dangerous by two steps, forming a sudden descent, so
that those who were rash enough to attempt to pass that way in the dark
generally bruised themselves severely at the best of it; or, at the worst,
broke a leg or an arm.
But this was nothing compared with a former age, when Lord Hervey, writing
from Kensington, said the road was so infamously bad that he lived there
in a solitude like that of a sailor cast away upon a lonely rock in
mid-ocean. The only people who enjoyed this condition of affairs appear to
have been the footpads and the highwaymen, who had the very best of times,
until they were caught. Indeed, in the days when the stage-coaches
performed the then marvellous feats of travelling at anything from three
to five miles an hour, under favourable circumstances, the road could not
be considered safe after Hyde Park Corner was left behind; and records
tell of highway robberies, with the romantic accessories of blunderbusses
and horse-pistols, at Knightsbridge so late as 1799.
[Sidenote: _THE "HALFWAY HOUSE"_]
[Illustration: HYDE PARK CORNER, 1797.]
There was at that time, and until 1848, an old inn standing by the way,
near where are now Knightsbridge Barracks. This inn, the "Halfway House,"
occupied the exact site where Prince of Wales's Gate now gives access to
Hyde Park. Hereabouts lurked all manner of bad characters, who had
infested the neighbourhood from time immemorial, safe from the clutches
of the law both in their numbers and in the isolation created by the
almost bottomless sloughs of mud which then decorated what was, by
courtesy or force of habit, called the "road."
[Illustration: THE "HALFWAY HOUSE." 1848.]
At this spot, in April, 1740, the Bristol mail was robbed by a footpad,
who overpowered the post-boy and got off with both the Bath and Bristol
bags; while in 1774, three men were hanged for highway robbery here. But
the most thrilling and circumstantial story of highwaymen at this spot is
that which relates the capture of William Belchier, in 1750. There had
been numerous highway robberies in the neighbourhood of the "Halfway
House," and at last one William Norton, a "thief-catcher," was sent to
apprehend the man, if possible. He took the Devizes chaise at half-past
one in the morning of June 3, and when they had come to the place, sure
enough the robber was there, waiting for them, and on foot. He bade the
driver stop, and, holding a pistol in at the window, demanded the
passengers' money. "Don't frighten us," replied Norton. "I have but a
trifle; you shall have it." He also advised the three other passengers to
give up their coin; and, holding a pistol concealed in one hand and some
silver in the other, let the robber take the money. When he had taken it
the thief-taker raised his pistol and pulled the trigger. It missed fire;
but the robber was too frightened to notice that. He staggered back,
holding up both hands, exclaiming, "O Lord, O Lord!" Norton then jumped
out after him, pursued him six or seven hundred yards, and then caught
him. He begged for mercy on his knees, but Norton took his neck-cloth off,
tied his hands, and brought him into London, where he was tried, found
guilty, and hanged. The prisoner asked his captor in court what trade he
followed. "I keep a shop in Wych Street," replied Norton; adding, with
grim significance, "and sometimes I take a thief."
In Kensington Gore (which might have obtained its sanguinary name from
these encounters--but didn't) a certain Mr. Jackson, of the Court of
Requests at Westminster, was requested to "stand and deliver" on the night
of December 27, in the same year, by four desperadoes. And so the tale
goes on, with such curious side-lights on the state of society as are
afforded by the stories of how pedestrians, desirous of journeying from
London to Knightsbridge and Kensington, were used in those "good old
times" to wait in Piccadilly until there were gathered a sufficient number
of them to render the perilous journey safer. Even then they did not rely
only on their numbers, but went well armed with swords, pistols, and
cudgels.
[Sidenote: _TURNPIKE GATES_]
It is scarcely to be supposed that the turnpike-gates earned much money in
those times, when ways were foul and dangerous, and when the cut-throats
who lurked about that delectable "Halfway House" were in their prime.
Printed here will be found several views of the first gate, showing its
development from 1786 to 1797. It will be seen that a high brick wall then
bounded the Park. This was continued all the way, except where the houses,
low inns, and cottages on the north side of the road stood, and where
their successors stand to-day, to the eastward and westward of the present
"Albert Gate." That imposing entrance to the Park was made in 1846, and
the immense houses on either side--the "two Gibraltars," as they were
called--built. They were so called because it was thought they would never
be taken; but the one on the east side, now the French Embassy, was soon
let to Hudson, the Railway King. As mentioned just now, the "Halfway
House" stood where the Prince of Wales's Gate opens into the Park. It
stood there until 1848, when the ground was purchased for L3000, and the
house pulled down. If the owners had kept the land, their descendants
to-day could have sold it for a sum that would represent a handsome
fortune, as evidenced by the fact that a plot of ground of the same size,
on which Thorney House stood, in Kensington Gore was sold in 1898 for
L100,000. Thus does the value of land increase in the neighbourhood of
London.
In 1827, London and its neighbourhood began to be relieved of the incubus
of the turnpike-gates. In that year twenty-seven toll-gates were removed
by Parliament; eighty-one were disestablished July 1, 1864; and sixty-one,
October 31, 1865. Many others were swept away on the Essex and Middlesex
roads on October 31, 1866, while the remainder ceased July 1, 1872. The
first toll-gate which gave the traveller pause from 1856 to July 1, 1864,
on the Bath and Exeter roads stood in Kensington Gore, and barred the
roadway just where Victoria Road branches off. Many yet living can recall
the "Halfpenny Hatch," as it was familiarly known. At the time of the
Great Exhibition of 1851 the road was distinctly rural. It was that
greatest of all exhibitions which gave an impetus to building in this
neighbourhood. Up to that time London had not "discovered" Kensington, and
the highway was not a mere street, but looked as though the country were
round the corner, which, indeed, was very nearly the case. You could then,
in fact, well imagine yourself to be on the highway to somewhere or
another--a thing demanding more imagination to-day than most people are
capable of calling up.
VIII
[Sidenote: _OLD KENSINGTON_]
It may be as well to put on record in this place the Kensington of my own
recollection. My reminiscences of Kensington by no means go so far back as
the time when Leigh Hunt wrote his "Old Court Suburb," a book which
described what was then a village "near London;" but when I first knew
that now bustling place it was, if not exactly to be described as rural,
certainly by no stretch of imagination to be called urban. In those days
the great shops, which are no longer called shops, but "emporia," or
"stores," or "magazines," did not flaunt with plate-glass windows opposite
St. Mary Abbot's Church, nor, indeed, did the present building of St. Mary
exist. In its place was a hideous structure, erected probably at some
early period of the eighteenth century. It had windows that purported to
be Gothic, and a bell-turret that belonged to no known order of
architecture. It, and the now demolished old church of St. Paul,
Hammersmith, bore a singular likeness to one another. The present
generation can only discover what these unlovely buildings were like by
referring to old prints, because there are none other now existing in
London to which they can be likened; and a very good thing too. I can
recollect old St. Mary's very well indeed, and the days when the old
Vestry Hall was still a place for the transaction of vestry business are
quite vivid to me. In fact, at that time the Vestry Hall was somewhat new,
and where the imposing Town Hall now stands beside it there was a tall
building of very grimy brick, with quaint little figures of a boy and a
girl perched high up on brackets above, and on either side of, the door.
These little figures were represented as clad in a peculiar Dutch-like
uniform; the boy, I think, blue, and the girl a quite painful orange,
whenever they repainted her, which was seldom. This was, in fact, some
sort of charity school, and it was as dismal a place as all charitable
institutions were apt to be in our grandfathers' time, when it was
criminal to be poor, and eleemosynary establishments, in consequence, were
designed as much like prisons as might well be.
[Illustration: KENSINGTON HIGH STREET, SUMMER SUNSET.]
At the time of which I speak it was quite necessary to go to London to do
any save the most ordinary shopping, and if one had told the "oldest
inhabitant" that a time was presently coming when it would be possible not
only to order, but to purchase and take away on the instant, from
Kensington shops the rarest and most costly things that the heart of man
(or woman either, for that matter) could desire, that ancient individual
would have thought he was being told fairy tales.
[Illustration: "OLDEST INHABITANT."]
I knew that oldest inhabitant, who has been long since gathered to his
fathers. His was a quaint figure, and he was stored with many
reminiscences. He could "mind the time" when Gore House was occupied by
the Countess of Blessington, and when Louis Napoleon, then a young man
about town, was a frequent visitor to that somewhat Bohemian
establishment. Also he remembered the first 'bus to make its appearance in
Kensington. For myself, I certainly remember the time here when omnibuses
were few and far between. Now there are generally half a dozen waiting at
any time you like to mention by St. Mary Abbot's, which has become, in
omnibus slang, "Kensington Church," while the pavements are thronged by
fashionable crowds all day long and every day. Not least remarkable is the
long row of bicycles drawn up against the kerb opposite the aforesaid
emporia, in charge of a diminutive boy in buttons, the patrons of these
great shops being inveterate "bikists."
[Sidenote: _THE NEW KENSINGTONS_]
Now that towering hotels and flats have been built in Kensington High
Street, the old-time distinction of the "Old Court Suburb" is fast
becoming obliterated, and there are more Kensingtons than were ever
dreamed of years ago. North Kensington, and South and West
Kensington--which, shorn of these would-be aristocratic aliases, are just
Notting Hill, Brompton, and Hammersmith--were just so many orchards and
market-gardens not so many years ago; and I declare that it is not so long
since there was an orchard in Allen Street, off the High Street, where
red-brick flats now stand, while, in that chosen realm of flatland, Earl's
Court, the cabbages and lettuces grew amazingly. Cromwell Road was not
built at the time to which my memory harks back, and where the ornate
Natural History Museum now stands there was a huge gravel-pit, in which
were many ponds and swamps, where wild grasses grew and slimy newts
increased and multiplied greatly. Gore House, which had been Lady
Blessington's, was still standing in the early years of my recollection,
and the Albert Hall, which now occupies the site of it, was, consequently,
undreamt of. The last use to which it had been put was to be converted,
by Alexis Soyer, into a huge restaurant for the millions who frequented
the Great Exhibition of 1851, which I do _not_ recollect, thank goodness!
[Sidenote: _KENSINGTON HOUSE_]
There were other landmarks in the Kensington of my youth which have long
since been swept away. For instance, where Victoria Road joins the Gore
there was a tall archway leading to a hippodrome, or horse repository.
Where it stood there is now an extremely "elegant"--as they used to say
when I was younger--hotel. Even greater changes have taken place where the
Gore joins the High Street. Where that collection of palatial houses
called Kensington Court now stands, there stood years ago a huge old brick
mansion which in its last days experienced some strange vicissitudes of
fortune, among which its last two changes--into a school for young ladies,
and finally into a lunatic asylum--were not the least remarkable. There
was in those days a most dreadful slum at the back of this mansion, known
locally as the "Rookery." Londoners should know the history of Kensington
Court and its site, and how Baron Albert Grant, in the heyday of his
financial success, pulled down the old mansion, and built himself on its
ruins a lordly (and vulgar) pleasure-palace, which he called "Kensington
House." The memory of it springs fresh to this day, and it requires little
effort to recall the place as it stood, in all its pristine
pretentiousness, until 1880, or thereabouts. It was built by the
redoubtable Baron to shame Kensington Palace, which it exactly faced, and
if gilt railings, fresh white stone, and big plate-glass windows may be
said to have put the old Palace out of countenance, then Kensington Palace
was shamed indeed, but only with that very questionable kind of shame
which overtakes the poor patrician confronted by a swaggering, pursy
millionaire. At any rate, Kensington Palace is avenged, for not one stone
now remains of that pretentious house. It lay back some little distance
from the road, from which it was screened by a tall iron railing, with
gilded spikes and globular gas-lamps at intervals, of a type closely
resembling those in use on the Metropolitan and District Railways. It is
not a lovely type, but it is one still greatly favoured in the suburbs of
Clapham and Blackheath.
This ornate palisade of cast-iron, which pretended to be wrought, once
passed, a gravel drive led up to the house. Ah, that house! It possessed
all the flamboyant glories of Grosvenor Gardens and more, and was of a
style called variously by the building journals of that day, French or
Italian Renaissance. "Renaissance" is a term which, like charity, covers a
multitude of sins, and if you want to cloak a collection of architectural
enormities, why, you term it Renaissance, and, by implication, insult the
great French and Italian masters of the New Birth. It needs not to trouble
about the details of that house, save to say that polished granite pillars
were well to the fore, and that portentous Mansard roofs in fish-scale
lead coverings, with spikes, finished off its sky-line. For long years
Kensington House remained unlet, because of the immense sums its up-keep
would have entailed. Millionaires, South African and other varieties,
were not so plentiful years ago as they are now. So, after some years of
forlorn waiting for the occupier who never came, Kensington House, never
once inhabited, was at last demolished, and its materials sold. It is said
that the grand marble staircase went to grace the gilded salons of Madame
Tussaud's waxen court, and certainly the spiky railings, with their
gas-lamps, were sold to furnish an imposing entrance to Sandown Park
Racecourse, where they may be seen to this day by the cyclist who wheels
through Esher, down the Portsmouth Road.
[Illustration: THACKERAY'S HOUSE, YOUNG STREET.]
[Sidenote: _JOHN LEECH_]
There still stands, off High Street, the grimy double-bayed house, now
numbered 16, Young Street, but formerly No. 13, in which Thackeray wrote
"Vanity Fair;" but most others of the old literary and artistic haunts of
the "Old Court Suburb" have been demolished. "The Terrace"--that long row
of old-fashioned houses extending from Wright's Lane westward--was pulled
down but six years ago. Those houses were not beautiful, but they were at
least pleasingly old-fashioned, and in No. 6 lived and died John Leech, an
early victim of that peculiarly modern malady, "nerves." Some amazingly
up-to-date shops now occupy the spot.
[Illustration: THE "WHITE HORSE." TRADITIONAL RETREAT OF ADDISON.]
Long ago, the other old-fashioned houses on this side of the road lost
their forecourt gardens, over which other shops were built; and beyond the
memory of any one now living there stood a little country inn at the
corner of what is now the Earl's Court Road; a rural retreat called the
"White Horse," to which Addison withdrew from the cold splendours of
Holland House opposite. He had contracted an unhappy marriage with the
Countess of Warwick, the mistress of that splendid mansion, which happily
yet remains; but stole away to this more congenial haunt, and drank his
intellect away.
Beyond this, all was country road, in the coaching days, until Hammersmith
was reached. The first outpost of that now unsavoury place was a rural inn
called the "Red Cow," opposite Brook Green.
IX
[Sidenote: _THE "RED COW"_]
The "Red Cow," pulled down December, 1897, rejoiced once upon a time in
the reputation of being a house of call for the peculiar gentry who
infested the suburban reaches of the great western highways out of London.
It was not by any means the resort of the aristocracy of the profession of
highway robbery; but a place where the cly-fakers, the footpads, and the
lower strata of thievery foregathered to learn the movements of travellers
and retail them to the fine gentlemen who, mounted on the best of horses,
and clad in gorgeous raiment, occupied the higher walks of the art at a
safer distance down the road. The house was built in the sixteenth
century, and was a quaint, though unpretending roadside tavern with a
high-pitched, red-tiled roof. It possessed vast stables, for it was
situated, in early coaching days, at the end of the first stage out of
London. It may well be imagined, then, that the stable-yard was a scene of
constant excitement in the good old days, for here were kept a goodly
supply of strong roadsters for the coaches running to Bath, Bristol,
Wells, Bridgewater, and Exeter, and here the elegant samples of horseflesh
which had brought the coaches at a spanking pace from the "Belle Sauvage,"
on Ludgate Hill, were changed for animals who could do the rough work of
the country roads. They were not particularly fine to look at--especially
those used on the night coaches--and it was often a matter of surprise
that they were able to keep up the pace required, and that the greasy old
harness stood the strain. It has been said that in one of the
old-fashioned rooms of the "Red Cow" E. L. Blanchard wrote his "Memoirs
of a Malacca Cane." In the last thirty years or so of its existence the
"Red Cow" was a favourite pull-up for the waggoners from the market
gardens, who in the small hours of the morning rumbled past with piled-up
loads of fruit, vegetables, and flowers for Covent Garden, and halted on
their return for a refresher of bread and cheese and beer. Then, too, the
hay-carts used to halt here, and the sight of them, with the horses
drinking from the old wooden water-trough beside the kerb-stone,
underneath the swinging sign, was like a picture of Morland's come to
life, and agreeably leavened that general air of fried-fish, drink, and
dissipation which lingers in the memory as the most characteristic
features of modern Hammersmith.
[Illustration: THE "RED COW," HAMMERSMITH. DEMOLISHED 1897.]
The travellers who were whirled through this place in the Augustan age of
coaching were soon in the country again, on the way to Turnham Green,
along the Chiswick High Road. That fine broad thoroughfare is now bordered
by an almost continuous row of modern shops, erected, many of them, where
barns and ricks stood less than ten years ago. Such was the appearance of
"Young's Corner," indeed, until quite recently. That corner, let it be
said for the information of those not well acquainted with the topography
of the western suburbs, is the spot where the road from Shepherd's Bush
joins the highway. Let it further be placed on record, before "historic
doubts" have had time to gather about the origin of the name, that it
derives from a little grocer's shop kept at the north-east angle of that
junction of the roads within the recollection of the present writer, by
one Young, who has probably been long since gathered to his fathers, for
his Corner knows him no more, and a house-agent's shop, a brand-new
building (like all its neighbours), stands where the now historic Young
sold tea and sugar, and (let us hope) waxed prosperous in days gone by.
[Sidenote: _TURNHAM GREEN_]