Removal of the Exhibition to the present building--Sleeping
“figures”--History of the Portman Rooms--The Cato Street
Conspiracy--Baron Grant’s staircase.
After fifty prosperous years at the old Baker Street Rooms--now known as
the Portman Rooms--it became necessary that Madame Tussaud’s should find
more commodious premises to meet the growing popularity of the Exhibition.
The removal to the present well-known red building was made in July,
1884, and the change took about a week, during which the staff put in
very long hours. So strenuous a time was it that some of them could
hardly keep their eyes open towards the end of this transition period.
There were considerably more than four hundred figures, not to mention
countless other things, to transfer; and the models were cloaked for
conveyance, as the idea could not be entertained of portraits of
royalties, celebrities, and notorieties being carried uncovered and
exposed to the vulgar gaze.
The wrapping of the images in sheets led to an amusing incident after
they had been removed. Before they could be properly arranged and a
fitting place assigned to each, the exhibits were placed in their
coverings on the floor. This fact, it appeared, suggested to tired
members of the staff a way by which they might be able to snatch a little
rest.
Missing some of the men, my suspicions were directed to the prostrate
exhibits, and I proceeded to prod the sheeted figures, with the result
that here and there my attentions called forth manifestations of life.
The weary helpers had laid themselves down to sleep among the models,
hoping not to be disturbed. Although time was pressing, they were
permitted to continue a few hours’ well-earned rest with their pack-sheet
cloaks around them.
Few of our visitors on the closing night were aware of the forthcoming
change-over, and it was only when the band, after playing the last bar
of the National Anthem, struck up “Auld Lang Syne” that the visitors
realised what it all signified. There was a touch of pathos in the
farewell scenes, and for the next week Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition was
not included among the sights of London.
When the old rooms in Baker Street were taken over for hospital uses in
the war, my mind reverted to an historic coincidence of considerable
military interest.
More than a hundred years ago what is now the Baker Street Carriage
Bazaar formed the barracks and stabling of the Royal Life Guards. The
place was then known as the King Street Barracks. Old inhabitants of the
neighbourhood used to tell me that a regiment of the Guards marched from
these quarters on their way to the field of Waterloo.
A little way off was the Portman Street Barracks, from which Captain
Fitzclarence set out to arrest Arthur Thistlewood and his confederates in
connection with the Cato Street Conspiracy--one of the most desperate and
foolhardy episodes in modern English history.
Thistlewood and other members of the Spencean Society--which might almost
be described as the prototype of latter-day Bolshevism--conceived the
mad idea that they could capture, among other strongholds, the Bank of
England, the Mansion House, the Tower of London, and Coutts’s Bank;
but they found that the public sympathy on which they counted did not
exist. Thistlewood was thrown into gaol for treasonable utterances, and
instead of imprisonment bringing him to his right senses, he became more
fanatical than ever.
The crowning act of infamy on the part of this nineteenth-century “Guy
Fawkes” and his followers was to hatch a plot for the assassination of
Ministers at a Cabinet dinner in Lord Harrowby’s house, Grosvenor Square.
The conspirators took a loft over a stable in Cato Street, Marylebone,
where they accumulated arms, bombs, and hand-grenades, vainly imagining
that the police knew nothing of their movements, whereas the authorities
were only waiting the right moment for action.
Thistlewood and his gang of desperadoes were arrested in the act of
arming themselves for the wholesale assassination of the heads of the
Government. In the scuffle Thistlewood killed a police-officer with his
sword. The ringleader and four others, named Brunt, Davidson, Ings, and
Tidd, were executed on the evidence of one of their own associates, who
told the court that it was intended, in the first instance, to set fire
to the King Street Barracks and either take the Life Guardsmen prisoners
or kill them as they sat in their mess-room. This mess-room, fifteen
years later, was occupied by Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition.
* * * * *
Few, if any, of the thousands of persons who mount and descend the marble
staircase which adorns the entrance-hall of Madame Tussaud’s are aware
that it originally formed part of a lordly pleasure house which was
erected by the late Baron Grant on the site of what was one of the vilest
slums (then known as “The Rookery”) in Kensington.
Who was Baron Grant?
The late Baron was born in Dublin in 1830. His real name, it appears, was
Gottheimer. His parents were poor, and he had a hard upbringing. By dint,
however, of industry, the sharpness of his wits and his great aptitude
for business, he acquired wealth and a reputation in the City of London.
At the age of thirty-five he was elected M.P. for Kidderminster, standing
as a Liberal-Conservative and defeating Lord Annaly, who was at that time
a Lord of the Treasury. In 1868 he was appointed a Deputy-Lieutenant of
the Tower Hamlets, and in the same year the King of Italy conferred upon
him the hereditary dignity of Baron and appointed him a Commander of the
Order of St. Maurice and Lazare.
These distinctions were well deserved by the then Mr. Grant for the
services he had rendered in connection with the completion of the famous
Victor Emmanuel Gallery in Milan, though in one of the burlesques of the
period the decoration was scathingly referred to in the following couplet:
Kings can titles give, but honour can’t,
So title without honour’s but a _barren Grant_.
At the height of his prosperity Baron Grant built his princely mansion
at Kensington Gore. It was never occupied, except for one night, when
the “bachelors of London”--in other words, the smart young men of London
Society--hired the house from the Baron’s creditors and gave a ball of
exceptional splendour.
The Baron was unable to pay the contractor, and the mansion, known as
“Grant’s Folly,” was pulled down because no one could afford to buy or
rent it. The magnificent marble staircase, which cost £11,000, was bought
by Madame Tussaud’s for £1,000, and placed in our Exhibition.
The beautiful iron railings and gates of the “Folly” were purchased for
the Sandown Park Club, where, I understand, they may still be seen.
Baron Grant was a keen collector of works of art, and once obtained the
honour of being voted the thanks of the House of Commons for presenting a
picture to the National Gallery.
It came about in this way:
On the 18th of May, 1874, a very valuable portrait of Sir Walter Scott
was put up to auction at Christie’s, and was eventually secured by Baron
Grant for 800 guineas. The same evening Sir Stafford Northcote, the
Leader of the House, was asked by a private member why the Government
had not purchased so fine a work of art for the nation. He replied that
the Treasury had no funds available for the outlay. Thereupon the Baron
rose and stated that he had already written offering the picture to the
Trustees of the National Gallery.
Sir Stafford immediately proposed a vote of thanks, and this was carried
with much enthusiasm.
Eight hundred guineas, however, was far from being the largest sum which
the Baron spent on a single picture. He gave £10,000 for Landseer’s
“Otter Hunt,” and the value of his collection may be judged from the fact
that it realised £106,000 when the inevitable crash came and his art
treasures passed under the hammer to pay his creditors.
The great benefaction for which Baron Grant will always be remembered
is the gift of Leicester Square to the Metropolis at a cost to him of
upwards of £30,000. For years this Square had been dilapidated and a
disgrace to London, with a huge hoarding round it. Baron Grant secured,
by purchase, all the rights of the owners. He then planted the gardens,
and erected in the centre the statue of Shakespeare by Signor Fontana.
This was, at the time, the only statue of the world’s greatest dramatist
existing out of doors in his own country. The liberal donor also placed
in the Square busts of celebrated men who had lived in the neighbourhood.
These included Sir Isaac Newton, John Hunter, William Hogarth, and Sir
Joshua Reynolds.
This act of munificence did not bring the Baron the popularity he so
much desired, for after the princely gift was presented by him to the
Metropolitan Board of Works on the 2nd of July, 1874, the following
verses were freely sold at the opening ceremony:
Of course, you’ve heard the news that Baron Grant,
To gain what most he wants--a good repute,
Has promised to reclaim
Wild Leicester Square, so long the West End’s shame,
And turn that waste ground, nigh Alhambra’s towers,
Into a smiling garden full of flowers.
But will the world forget these flowers of Grant’s
Are but the product of his City “plants”?
And who, for shady walks, will give him praise
For wealth thus spent, _when gained in shady ways_?
In short, what can he hope from this affair?
Save to connect his name with one thing Square!
It was this same public-spirited though erratic “plunger” in stocks
and shares who, in February, 1875, widened, at his own cost, the road
leading to Kensington House, so as to avoid the curve which was dangerous
to carriages when driving in. It was an approach that Queen Victoria
frequently used.