the accession of Her Majesty and the opening of the great Victorian Era,
in which everything except human nature (which is still pretty much what
it used to be) has been turned inside out, altered, and ‘improved.’
If, in the year 1837, we wished to reach Brentford and could not afford
to hire a trap or carriage, practically the only way, other than walking
the seven miles, would have been to take the stage; and as these stages,
starting from the City or the Strand, were comparatively few, it was
always advisable to go down to the starting-places and secure a seat,
rather than to chance finding one vacant at Hyde Park Corner.
‘How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line in
Piccadilly, after the mails are gone,’ says Hazlitt, writing of the
romance of the Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten mile
journeys afforded no hold for the imagination, compared with the dashing
‘Quicksilver’ and the lightning ‘Telegraph’ to Exeter; but what on
earth the Londoner of modest means who desired to travel to Putney or to
Brentford would in those pre-omnibus times have done without those
stages it is impossible to conceive. We, in these days, might just as
well find romance in the majesty of the beautiful Great Western Express
locomotives that speed between Paddington and Penzance, and then turn to
the omnibuses that run to Hammersmith, and say, ‘How we hate the
’buses!’
All these suburban stages started from public-houses. There were quite a
number which went to Brentford and on to Hounslow, and they set out from
such forgotten houses as the ‘New Inn,’ Old Bailey; the ‘Goose and
Gridiron,’ St. Paul’s Churchyard; the ‘Old Bell,’ Holborn; the
‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly; the ‘White Hart,’ ‘Red Lion,’ and
‘Spotted Dog,’ Strand; and the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street. It is to be
feared that those stages were not ‘Swiftsures,’ ‘Hirondelles,’ or
‘Lightnings.’ Nor, indeed, were ‘popular prices’ known in those days.
Concessions had been made in this direction, it is true, some seven
years before, when the man with the extraordinary name--Mr.
Shillibeer--introduced the first omnibus, which ran between the
‘Yorkshire Stingo,’ in the New Road, Marylebone, and the City; and the
very name ‘omnibus’ was originally intended as a kind of finger-post to
point out the intended popularity of the new conveyance, but as the fare
to the City was one shilling, it may readily be supposed that Bill
Mortarmixer, Tom Tenon, and the whole of
[Sidenote: _THE ‘GOOSE AND GRIDIRON’_]
[Illustration: THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE GLOUCESTER
COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]
their artisan brethren, who did not in those times aspire to
one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk. For the same reason, they
were only the comparatively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny
fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the ‘stage.’
Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate company, and, paying
our one-and-sixpence, set out from the ‘Goose and Gridiron.’
That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly back from the roadway
on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished
in 1894, after a good deal more than two centuries’ record for good
cheer. It was originally the ‘Swan and Harp,’ but some irreverent wag,
probably as far back as the building of the house in Wren’s time, found
the other name for it, and the effigies of the goose and the gridiron
remained even to our own time.
This year of our imaginary journey affords a strange contrast with the
appearance the streets will possess some sixty years later. Ludgate
Hill, in 1837 an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, paved with rough
granite setts, will in the last decade of the century present a very
different aspect. Instead of the dingy brick warehouses there will be
handsome premises of some architectural pretensions, and the Hill will
be considerably widened. The setts will have disappeared, to be replaced
by wood pavement, and the traffic will have increased tenfold; until, in
fact, it has become a continuous stream. There will be strange vehicles,
too, unknown in 1837,--omnibuses, hansom-cabs, and motor cars, and
where Ludgate Hill joins Fleet Street there will be a Circus and an
obstructive railway-bridge.
[Illustration: ‘AN OLD GENTLEMAN, A COBBETT-LIKE PERSON.’]
We proceed in leisurely fashion down Ludgate Hill, and halt for
passengers and parcels at the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street, which is now
a railway receiving office. Thence by slow degrees, calling at the ‘Red
Lion,’ ‘Spotted Dog,’ and the ‘White Hart,’ we eventually reach the
‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly, re-built many years ago, and now
the ‘Berkeley Hotel.’ Beyond this point, progress is fortunately
speedier, and we reach Hyde Park Corner in, comparatively speaking, the
twinkling of an eye. Hyde Park Corner in 1837, this year of the Queen’s
accession, has begun to feel the great changes that are presently to
alter London so marvellously. We have among our fellow-travellers by the
stage an old gentleman, a Cobbett-like person, who wears a rustic,
semi-farmer kind of appearance, and recollects many improvements here;
who can ‘mind the time, look you,’ when the turnpike-gate (which was
removed in 1825) stood at the corner; when St. George’s Hospital was a
private mansion, the residence of Lord Lanesborough; and when the road
leading past it to Pimlico was quite wild country, as in the picture on
page 43, where sportsmen shot snipe in those marshes that were in future
years
[Illustration: THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S STATUE.]
to become the site of Belgrave Square and other aristocratic quarters.
At this spot Mr. Decimus Burton had already built the great Triumphal
Arch forming the entrance to Constitution Hill, together with the
Classic Screen at Hyde Park Corner. The Screen was built in 1828, and
the Arch, which is a copy of the Arch of Titus at Rome, in 1832.
Already, in 1820, Apsley House had become the residence of the Iron
Duke, but it was not until 1846 that what Thackeray justly names ‘the
hideous equestrian monster’ was placed on the summit of that Arch,
opposite the Duke’s windows. Here is an illustration of it, before it
was hoisted up to that height. Beside it you see the Duke himself, in
his characteristic white trousers, in company with several weirdly
dressed persons. Again, over page, may be seen the Arch, with the statue
on it, and the neighbourhood vastly changed from the appearance it wears
in the picture of the ‘North-East Prospect of St. George’s Hospital.’
Instead of the great hooded waggons starting for the West Country, the
road is occupied with very crowded traffic, and among the vehicles may
be noticed two omnibuses, one going to Chelsea, the other (for this is
the year 1851) to the Exhibition,--the first exhibition that ever was.
If, ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to look at those
omnibuses, you will see that they have neither knifeboards nor seats on
the roof, and that passengers are squatting up there in the most
supremely uncomfortable, not to say dangerous, positions. Also, in those
dark ages of London locomotion, the ascent to that uncomfortable roof
was of itself perilous, for no
[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER, 1851.]
[Illustration: ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL, AND THE ROAD TO PIMLICO, 1780.]
one had as yet dreamed of the staircase. Other curious points will be
noticed by the observant, and among them the fact that ’buses then had
doors. The present historian vividly recollects a door being part of the
equipment of every ’bus, and of the full-flavoured odour of what Mr. W.
S. Gilbert calls ‘damp straw and squalid hay’ which assailed the
nostrils of the ‘insides’ when that door was shut; but in what
particular year did the door vanish altogether? Alas! the straw, with
the door, is gone for evermore, and passengers no longer lose their
small change in it to the great gain of the conductor, who, by the way,
used to be called ‘the cad,’ even although he commonly wore a ‘top hat’
and a frock coat, as per the picture. The word ‘cad’ has since then
acquired a much more offensive meaning, and if you addressed a conductor
by that name nowadays, he would probably express a desire to punch your
head.
The hideous statue of the Duke and his charger ‘Copenhagen,’ which the
French said ‘avenged Waterloo,’ was removed to Aldershot in 1884, when
the alterations were made at Hyde Park Corner.
VII
And now we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in
1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until
1854.
There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been
swept away. Toll-gates,
[Sidenote: _THE PIKEMEN_]
[Illustration: KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.]
for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago
was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself,
or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to
pay toll then, and a favourite amusement of the young bloods was
fighting the pikeman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as
the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young
sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of
the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and
battery. In fact, they were such sporting times that, whether the
pikeman or the Corinthian youth won, the latter would probably chuck his
antagonist a substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman would
say that ‘his honour was a gemman,’ and exeunt severally to purchase
beef-steaks for the reduction of black eyes.
[Illustration: THE PIKEMAN.]
The present generation has, of course, never seen a pikeman. He wore a
tall black glazed hat and corduroy breaches, with white stockings. But
the most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen apron. No
one knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it
must now needs be lost in the mists of history, because the last
pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades,
where he probably is still going through a series of shadowy encounters
beside the shores of the Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of
long ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his ferry across
the stream.
But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 as quiet a spot as you
could find round London, with scattered cottages of the rustic,
rose-embowered kind. Knightsbridge Green _was_ a green in those days,
and not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and for many years
afterwards, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks would walk with
the nursemaids in the country lanes, and take tea in the tea-gardens
which stood away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton.
Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the
road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer
threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens
and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those
soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing,
a curious, and an instructive thing to take them, tottering in their old
age, by the hand and say: ‘Here, my gallant warrior of eighty years or
so,’ and ‘Here, my pretty maiden of four-score, is Knightsbridge, the
self-same Knightsbridge you knew, but with some new, and somewhat
larger, buildings.’ They would be as strangers in a strange land, and,
dazed by the din of the thronging traffic amid the sky-scraping
buildings, beg to be taken
[Sidenote: _THE ‘NEW POLICE’_]
[Illustration: KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.]
away. But to bring back the policeman of that era, if that were
possible, and set him to control this traffic, would be more instructive
still. When the last years of the coaching age along this road were
still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’
as he was variously named, had an easy time of it here. Not so his
successors, who have to deal with an almost continual block, all day
long and every day.
[Illustration: THE ‘NEW POLICE.’]
The ‘New Police’ were a novel body of men in the early years of the
reign, having been introduced in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel. Hence the
brilliant appropriateness of those nicknames. There still, however,
lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution,
the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours
in a curious sing-song voice with remarks upon the state of the weather
added. Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant: ‘Twelve
o’clock, and a stormy night!’ and found comfort in the companionship of
that voice.
The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living can have seen one of
those many-caped, tottering old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us.
That is because we have read so much about them in the exploits of Tom
and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of the glorious days of George the
Fourth, when the most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching,
bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A ‘Charley’ was, of course,
a watchman. The thrashing of a ‘Charley’ was not an heroic pursuit, but
(or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular. They were generally
old men, and not capable of very serious reprisals upon the gangs of
muscular youths who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them
unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those
poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released
them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’
who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows.
Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to,
although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the
supposition that the continental system of a semi-military _gendarmerie_
was intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the
police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was, of course,
necessary, one as nearly as possible like civilian dress was chosen. The
present uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if they had
then worn a helmet, would have been howled out of existence by the
violent Radicals and Chartists who troubled the early years of the
Queen’s reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all, but a tall
glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A swallow-tailed coat, tightly
buttoned up, with a belt round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin,
and trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a very respectable and
citizen-like aspect. It has been left to later years to alter this
uniform.
VIII
[Sidenote: _KENSINGTON_]
But we must not forget that we are travelling to Brentford sixty-two
years ago. Let us, therefore, whip up the horses, and, passing the first
milestone at the corner of the lane which a future generation to that of
1837 is to know by the name of the Exhibition Road, hurry on to
Kensington.
[Illustration: TOMMY ATKINS, 1838.]
Kensington in this year of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria
is having an unusual amount of attention paid to it. Every one is
bursting with loyalty towards the girl of eighteen suddenly called upon
to rule over the nation, and crowds throng the old-fashioned High Street
of Kensington at the end by Palace Green, eager to see Her Majesty drive
forth from Kensington Palace. They are kept at a respectful distance by
a sentry in a dress which succeeding generations will think absurd.
White trousers, coatee, stiff stock, rigid cross-belts, and a shako like
the upper part of the funnel of a penny steamer were whimsical things to
go a-soldiering in, but the Tommy Atkins of that time had no other or
easier kind of uniform, and it will be left for the Crimean War,
seventeen years later, to prove the folly of it.
The palace is well guarded, for the Government, for their part, have not
yet learned to trust the people; nor, indeed, are the people at this
time altogether to be trusted. The long era of the Georges did not breed
loyalty, and for William the Fourth, just dead, the people had an amused
contempt. They called him ‘Silly Billy.’ At this time, also, aristocracy
drew its skirts daintily from any possible contact with the lower herd.
Alas! poor lower herd, and still more, alas! for aristocracy.
[Illustration: OLD KENSINGTON CHURCH.]
[Sidenote: _REMINISCENCES_]
Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has a friend with him, and,
as we jolt from Kensington Gore into the High Street, points out the
palace, and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary lived and died
there, amid William’s stolid Hollanders. He tells a story which he heard
from his grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look at the
King’s dropsical ankles, said, when asked what he thought of them, ‘Why,
truly, I would not have your Majesty’s two legs for your three
kingdoms.’ He tells the friend that the King procured a more courtly and
less blunt medical adviser; and we can well believe it. More stories
beguile the way: how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark ended here
in the fulness of time; how their successor, George the First, furious
with Sir Robert Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and anything
and everything, used to tear off his wig and jump on it, in transports
of rage. How he would gaze up at the vane on the clock-tower entrance to
the palace (which we can just glimpse as we pass), anxious for favouring
winds to waft his ships to England with despatches from his beloved
Hanover, and how he died suddenly at breakfast one morning after being
disappointed in those breezes.
These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however, has reminiscences of his
own, and can recollect the Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the
Prince Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810 and 1814--‘a
red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled hair, all spangles and scarlet
cloak, like a play-actress, making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the
people, and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood for houses
to let.’ The old gentleman who says this is a Radical, and, like all of
that political creed, likes to see Royalty ‘behaving as sich, and not
like common people such as you an’ me.’ Whereupon another passenger in
the stage, on whom the speaker’s eye has fallen, audibly objects to
being called, or thought, or included among common persons; so that
relations among the ‘insides’ are strained, and so continue, past
Kensington Church, a very decrepit and nondescript kind of building;
past the Charity School, the Vestry Hall, where a gorgeous beadle in
plush breeches, white stockings, scarlet cloak trimmed with gold
bullion, a wonderful hat, and a wand of office, is standing, and so into
the country. Presently we come to the village of Hammersmith, innocent
as yet of whelk-stalls and fried-fish shops, and so at last, past
Turnham Green, to Brentford.
[Illustration: THE BEADLE.]
IX
Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the BATH
ROAD, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex.
Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for
what says Gay?--
Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.
[Illustration: BRENTFORD.]
[Sidenote: ‘_BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN_’]
Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is
unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant,
inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with
Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas,
each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or
the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will
have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt,
and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The
bargees and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing picturesquely
at one another all day, while the gasmen, the hands at the waterworks,
and the railwaymen join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity so
cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not often, because when a
bargee addresses his dearest friend by a string of epithets that might
make a typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken as a token
of friendship. These are the shibboleths of the place.
When, however, Gay alludes to the ‘white-legged chickens,’ for which, he
says, Brentford was known, we are at a loss to identify the breed. That
kind of chicken must long since have given up the attempt to be
white-legged, and have changed, by process of evolution, into some less
easily soiled variety. For the dirt of Brentford is always there. It
only varies in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious in
clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals and clinkers; and when
a day of rain has laid this plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the
shape of seas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might have written
yesterday--
E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;
while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for when a contemporary, a
native of Glasgow, was praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his
eloquence with the query: ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’
Here was sarcasm indeed! Happily, however, the Glaswegian had _not_ seen
Brentford, and so was not in a position to appreciate the retort. But
Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course present, knew, and told the
Doctor this was shocking. ‘Why, then, sir,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘_you_
have never seen Brentford!’
Then, when we have all this delightful testimony as to Brentford’s dirt,
comes Shenstone, the melancholy poet who ‘found his warmest welcome at
an inn,’ to testify as to the character of its inhabitants. ‘No
persons,’ says he, ‘more solicitous about the preservation of rank than
those who have no rank at all. Observe the humours of a country
christening; and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as
“the quality” of Brentford.’
[Sidenote: _ODD STREET-NAMES_]
Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that Brentford is a
town of high interest. Its filthy gasworks, its waterworks, its docks
have not sufficed to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the
place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other such truly
picturesque town as Brentford exists near London. This will not long
remain true of it, for, even now, new buildings are here and there
taking the place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a quite
remarkable number of old inns, and the great stableyards and courtyards
of other old coaching hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This
was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London in the coaching
era, and the beginning of the last stage in; and in consequence, as
befitted a town on the great highway to the West, had ample
accommodation, both for man and beast. One of these old yards,
indeed,--Red Lion Inn Yard--is historic, for it is traditionally the
spot where Edmund Ironside, the king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016,
after he had defeated them here. The most famous, however, of all the
Brentford inns, the _Three Pigeons_, was brutally demolished many years
ago, although it had associations with Shakespeare and ‘rare’ Ben
Jonson. The ‘Tumbledown Dick,’ another vanished hostelry, whose sign was
a satire on the nerveless rule and swift overthrow of the Protector’s
son, Richard Cromwell, was a well-known house; while the names of some
of the old yards--Green Dragon Yard and Catherine Wheel Yard--are
reminiscent of once-popular signs.
Then Brentford has the queerest of street names. What think you of ‘Half
Acre’ for the style and title of a thoroughfare? or ‘Town Meadow,’ which
is less a meadow than a slum? Then there are ‘The Butts,’ with some
fine, dignified Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a
quiet spot behind the High Street; and ‘The Hollows,’ a thoroughfare
hollow no longer, if ever it was.