by two other windows. At the farthest end of the room from the door
is a mantelpiece of grey and white marble. The walls are painted a
comfortable green colour, and there are warm crimson curtains to the
windows. There are many pictures upon the walls; and a large sofa,
leather-covered arm-chairs, and a writing-table in the bow of the
window give an air of comfort to the room. A great screen, which, in
its way, is a work of art, being covered with cuttings of all periods,
from Rowlandson's caricatures to the modern style of military prints,
is drawn out from the wall so as to divide the room into two portions.
On the door side of the screen stands in one corner the regimental
colour of the battalion finding the guard, and here, too, are the
bearskin head-dresses of the officers.
On the fireplace side of the screen is a table ready set for dinner,
the clear glass decanters at the corners being filled with champagne,
a silver-gilt vase forming the centre-piece, and candles in silver
candelabra giving the necessary light. By the fireplace the officers of
the guard, in scarlet and gold and black, are waiting to receive their
guests.
In addition to the officers of St James's guard, the adjutant and
colonel of the battalion that finds the guard, the two officers of the
Household Cavalry on guard at the Horse Guards and some of the military
officials of the Court have a right to dine. But it is rarely that all
entitled to this privilege avail themselves of it, and the captain and
officers of the guard generally are able to ask some guests to fill the
vacant chairs.
As, on the stroke of eight, on the evening I am writing of, we sat down
to dinner my host told me that he had ordered a typical meal for me.
This was the menu:
Potage croûte-au-pot.
Eperlans à l'Anglaise.
Bouchées à la moëlle.
Côtelettes de mouton. Purée de marrons.
Poularde à la Turque.
Hure truffée. Sauce Cumberland.
Pluviers dorés.
Pommes de terre Anna.
Champignons grillés.
Omelette soufflée.
Huîtres à la Diable.
The spatchcocked smelts, the boar's head, with its sharp-tasting sauce,
and the _soufflée_, I recognised as being favourite dishes on the
King's Guard.
On this evening the wearers of the black coats, as well as the red,
had served his Majesty, at one time or another, in various parts
of the world, and our talk drifted to the subject of the various
officers' guards all over the British world. In hospitality the castle
guard at Dublin probably comes next to the guard at St James's, for
the officers of the guard fare excellently there at the Viceregal
expense. The Bank guards, both in the City of London and at College
Green, have compensating advantages, and the officers' guard at Fort
William, Calcutta, has helped many an impoverished subaltern to buy a
polo pony. The story goes that some rich native falling ill close to
the gate of Fort William, the subaltern on guard took him up to the
guardroom and treated him kindly, and in consequence, in his will, the
native left provision for a daily sum of rupees to be given to the
subaltern on guard. These rupees are paid to the officer minus one,
retained by the _babus_ as a charge for "stationery," and though all
the little tin gods both at Calcutta and Simla have exerted themselves
to recover for the subaltern that rupee, the power of the _babu_ has
been too strong and the imaginary stationery still represents the
missing rupee. We chatted of the Malta guard, with its collection of
pictures on the wall; of dreary hours at Gibraltar, with nothing to do
except to construct sugar-covered fougasses to blow up flies; and of
exciting moments at Peshawar, when the chance of being shot by one's
own sentries made going the rounds a real affair of outposts.
Then I asked questions about the gilt centre-piece, which is in the
shape of an Egyptian vase with sphinxes on the base, and was told that
the holding capacities of it were beyond the guessing of anyone who
had not seen the experiment tried. Some of the other plate which is
put upon the table at the close of dinner is of great interest. There
is a cigar-lighter in the shape of a grenade given by his late Majesty
King Edward, a silver cigar-cutter, a memento of an inter-regimental
friendship made at manœuvres, and a snuff-box made from one of the
hoofs of Napoleon's charger Marengo. Which hoof it was is not stated on
the box, but the collective wisdom of the table decided that it must
have been the near hind one. Excepting on days when the Scots Guards
are on guard, the Sovereign's health is not, I believe, drunk after
dinner--though I fancy that King Edward, when Prince of Wales, dining
on guard, broke through this custom. The regiment from across the
Border was at one time suspected of a leaning towards Jacobitism, and
while the officers were ordered to drink his Majesty's health they were
not allowed to use finger-glasses after dinner, lest they should drink
to the King over the water.
Dinner over, the big sofa is pulled round in front of the fire and
a bridge-table claims its devotees. I asked my host to be allowed
to inspect the pictures which pretty well cover the walls. The most
important is an excellent portrait of Queen Victoria in the early part
of her reign. It is the work of "Lieut.-Col. Cadogan," and was begun
on the wall of a guardroom--at Windsor, I fancy. The surface of the
wall was cut off, the picture finished, and it now hangs, a fine work
of art but a tremendous weight, in the place of honour. There is an
admirable oil-colour of the old Duke of Wellington, showing a kindly
old face looking down, a pleasant difference from the alert aquiline
profile which most of his portraits show. There are prints of other
celebrated generals, mostly Guardsmen, and an amusing caricature of
three kings dining on guard. It is a very unfurnished guardroom, with
a bare floor, in which their Majesties are being entertained, but the
enthusiasm with which the officers are drinking their health makes up
for the surroundings. A key to the print hangs hard by, but the names
attached to the various figures are said to have been written in joke.
Many of the pictures are sporting prints and hunting caricatures; but
the original of _Vanity Fair's_ sketch of Dan Godfrey is in one corner;
and a strange old picture of a battle, painted on a tea-tray, hangs
over the door.
On either side of the looking-glass, above the mantelpiece, are the
list of officers on duties and the orders for the guard, the latter
with a glass over them, which is supposed to have been cracked in
Marlborough's time. Some very admirably arranged caricatures, with
explanatory notes, are bound into a series of red volumes and kept in a
glazed set of shelves, and these, with a number of blue-bound volumes
of _The Pall Mall Magazine_, form the greater portion of the library
available for the officers on guard.
As the hands of the clock near eleven, the butler, who has been handing
round "pegs" in long tumblers, takes up his position by the door.
Military discipline is inexorable, and we (the guests) know that we
must be out of the precincts of the guard by eleven o'clock. We say
good-night to our hosts, and as we go downstairs we hear the clank of
swords being buckled on.
Outside in the courtyard a sergeant and a drummer and a man with a
lantern are waiting for the officer to go the rounds.
XXXI
THE OLD BULL AND BUSH
There is no side of London life that has died out more completely, so
far as the upper classes are concerned, than the visits to the old
tea-gardens which used to be the resort of the well-to-do classes from
the days of King Charles II. up to the beginning of the last century.
Bagginnage Wells, to which Nell Gwynne first brought the bucks, is only
a name now, but Coleman, in his comedy, _Bon-ton_, defined good tone as
to
"Drink tea on summer afternoons
At Bagginnage Wells with china and gilt spoons."
Sadler's Wells was a tea-garden with a music-room before Rosoman
pulled down the building to put up a theatre. White Conduit House used
to take fifty pounds on a Sunday afternoon for sixpenny tea tickets,
and its white bread was considered a great luxury. The bowling alleys
of Marylebone Gardens were famous; and there were tea-gardens and a
bowling-green at the Yorkshire Stingo, opposite Lisson Grove. Kilburn
Wells advertised that its gardens and great room were adapted to the
use of "the politest companies," and at Jenny's Whim there was a great
garden, in different parts of which were recesses, and in a large piece
of water facing the tea alcoves big fish and mermaids showed themselves
above the surface. The Apollo Gardens in the Westminster Road, and
Cuper's Gardens opposite Somerset House, were amongst these old places
of amusement, most of which are now only names. There is, however, at
the present time a tavern with tea-gardens of the old-fashioned kind
quite close to London, which, besides its picturesqueness, has other
recommendations which give it a right to inclusion in a "Gourmet's
Guide."
The Bull and Bush at North End, Hampstead, which is the tavern to
which I refer, has no very long history behind it. It was a farmhouse
when Jack Straw's Castle and the Spaniards were inns with tea-gardens
attached, the gardens of the latter house being laid out in the formal
Dutch style, which became fashionable after the Revolution. Tradition
has it that the Bull and Bush was at one time Hogarth's house, and Mr
Austin Dobson, who garnered information from all quarters into his book
on Hogarth, admits the claim of the house to this distinction, but
thinks that it was a house to which Hogarth went for "a visit." There
are long periods in Hogarth's life, before his father-in-law, Sir John
Thornhill, forgave him for his elopement with his daughter and took
the young pair to live with him in the family house in Covent Garden,
of which no record has been kept, and I should like to imagine that
the blue-eyed, bold young artist carried away the girl he loved to the
farmhouse on the breezy common to spend their honeymoon there, and that
he and she together planted the ring of fir-trees in the garden which
are still called "Hogarth's firs." The house ceased to be a farm, and
became a place of refreshment in later days, and W. H. Pyne (Ephraim
Hardcastle), in his collection of essays, "Wine and Walnuts," tells
of an imaginary excursion made to the Bull and Bush by a party which
included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Sterne and Garrick, and
puts in Gainsborough's mouth praise of the creamy milk and the fine
Dutch damask to be found at the little inn.
And the great Victorian painters and writers followed the example of
their predecessors in going on jaunts to the Bull and Bush, for when
Harry Humphries, a great favourite with all men of the pen and brush,
was the host of the house, Dickens used to frequent it, and George
Augustus Sala, Clement Scott and E. L. Blanchard, and those two great
_Punch_ artists, George du Maurier and Charles Keene, and many more of
a like kidney.
There is no difficulty in finding the old inn to-day, for at the
flagstaff and the pond which mark the western end of the long, bare
backbone of the common (from which London can be seen below to the
south in its veil of smoke, and on clear days the Surrey hills beyond,
while to the north are the hills and fields of the great landscape that
stretches from Harrow round to Hainault) the North End road plunges
down, with common land, furze and undergrowth and big trees and grassy
knolls to one side, and on the other old oaken park palings and big
trees.
Just where the road first dips a blind fiddler stands, and all day
long he plays one air, and that air is Kate Carney's song, "Down
by the old Bull and Bush." The inn itself is almost in the shadow
of a big mansion, Pitt House it is called, to which the great Lord
Chatham retired when he suffered from his nerve storms, refused to
see any of his fellow-ministers and could not even bear the presence
of a servant, his food being passed in to him through a panel in the
door. In the road to one side of the inn a peripatetic photographer
generally establishes his studio. The Bull and Bush is a white-faced
building with a slated roof, standing a little back from the highway,
and behind it and on both sides of it are many trees. It is an old
house with a big window to its large room on the first floor and nice
old-fashioned bow-windows with small panes to the two bar-rooms on
the ground floor. One of these bar-rooms is a real snuggery adorned
with sketches by some of the artists who have made themselves at home
in the inn. Various large boards set forth that lunches, dinners and
teas are obtainable; that the name of the host is Mr Fred Vinall; that
there are private dining-rooms, a coffee-room and billiards; and that a
two-shilling ordinary is ready every Sunday from two to three o'clock.
This "ordinary," which I believe is a very noble feast for the money
charged, is held in the big room upstairs.
The gardens are at the back of the inn, and though summer is the real
time to enjoy the attractions of the arbours at the Bull and Bush, it
is quite pleasant when the new leaves are covering, in the spring, the
trees with the lightest green, or on a still, autumn day when the tints
around the lawn are all russet and copper, to drink tea on the little
terrace behind the house in the centre of which is a great stone vase
for flowers and at which little tables with red and white and yellow
and white covers are set for the tea-drinkers. The tea is excellent,
and though the slices of bread and butter are thick they are of fine
bread and the freshest of butter. When spring merges into summer the
green bowling lawn, with turf as thick and level as a carpet, also has
its quota of cane chairs and little tables, and the rustic arbours all
around it, on the roofs of which are boxes of flowers, are also all
occupied. The waiters are kept busy carrying cakes and bread and butter
and tea and stronger beverages all through a summer day to the little
family parties who take their ease in the garden of their inn.
As a neighbour to the bowling-green is the platform which serves as
an out-of-door dancing floor when Cinderellas are held on summer
evenings, and as the flooring on which the chairs are put when a
concert is given on a little stage which is to one side of this planked
space. In the middle of this dancing and theatre floor is the circle
of firs which bears Hogarth's name. There are electric lights on the
terrace and amidst the trees and round the lawn and dancing floor.
Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays are the days on which the concerts
or the dances are generally held in summer.
Mr Fred Vinall, short in stature, genial in manner, with close-clipped
grey beard and moustache, has just as distinguished friends amongst
players and artists and men of the pen as any of his predecessors. He
has revived the old pleasures of the tea-gardens of a hundred years
ago, and to see the gardens of the Bull and Bush on a warm summer
evening is to learn that Londoners can take their evening pleasures out
of doors with cheerful mirth and with sobriety as well.
And now at last I come to the reason why the Bull and Bush should be
recommended to gourmets not only as a place where Londoners can be
seen amusing themselves sanely, but as a place of excellent eating.
Mrs Vinall, wife of the host of the old inn, Belgian by birth, has all
the talent of a Cordon Bleu, and if warning is telegraphed or written
to the inn of the coming of a party of gourmets, a lunch or a dinner,
admirably cooked under Mrs Vinall's supervision, will be ready for
the gastronomers, the table set in the open air, and they will, I am
sure, eating in the invigorating air of Hampstead Heath food admirably
cooked, thank me for having told them of a lunching and dining place
clear of the London smoke.
XXXII
THE BERKELEY
The pleasant, white-faced hotel, with its restaurant on the ground
floor, which faces the Ritz across Piccadilly, stands on classic
ground, for it was at the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street that
Francatelli, the great cook and _maître d'hôtel_, pupil of the even
greater Carême, was in command of the St James's Restaurant and the
hotel of that name which in the middle of the last century stood first,
with no _proxime accessit_, amongst the restaurants of the capital.
Nowadays we take our great French cooks in London for granted; they
are part of the life of London. But in the fifties Clubland was still
a little astonished and flattered that the great chefs were willing to
desert their own country to dwell amidst the fogs and rain of England,
and restaurants were comparatively rare, and few of them were of a
very high class. Hayward, who first published his "Art of Dining" in
1852, gives in his book little biographies of Ude and Francatelli,
and alludes rather slightingly to Soyer, who was the third of the
trio of very great cooks. Disraeli, who had enough of the artistic
temperament in him to assign to gastronomy its proper place amongst
the pleasures of life, recorded the dismissal of Ude from Crockford's
in the following words:--"There has been a row at Crockford's, and Ude
dismissed. He told the committee he was worth £4000 a year. Their new
man is quite a failure, so I think the great artist may yet return
from Elba." The "new man" was Francatelli, and he was so far from
being a failure that when it was thought that Buckingham Palace should
possess the greatest cook in England the position of chief cook and
_maître d'hôtel_ to the Queen was offered to him. He did not find the
position a comfortable one, and resigned at the end of two years. For
a time he lived in retirement, but in the sixties he once more placed
himself on the active list, and took charge of the St James's.
In doing so he was following the example of Soyer, who, in the fifties,
established a restaurant in Gore House, which had been the residence
of Lady Blessington. Soyer expected that the Great Exhibition would
send a crowd of rich people to his restaurant, and many great people
patronised it, but in the end he lost £7000 by his venture. Hayward
says concerning him that "he is more likely to earn immortality by his
soup kitchen than by his soup," alluding to the soup kitchens that
Soyer as a Government Commissioner established at the Royal Barracks in
Dublin during the great famine in Ireland.
In 1868, when "The Epicure's Year Book," an attempt to copy Grimod de
la Reynière's "Almanach des Gourmands," was published by Bradbury and
Evans, Francatelli was at the zenith of his fame at the St James's, and
the anonymous author, in that book, who wrote the chapter on "London
Dinners," after paying a compliment to British fare, saying that Wilton
and Rule are not afraid of comparison with any oyster dealers in the
world, and extolling the flounders and steaks of the Blue Posts in Cork
Street, declares that cookery "such as Ude once served at Crockford's
and his successor Francatelli is now serving at the St James's Hotel,
Piccadilly, is not reached by any other hotel or tavern in London." As
it may interest my readers with a taste for antiquarian lore to know
which were the restaurants recommended in the sixties for good plain
food, I continue the quotation. "At the Ship and Turtle in Leadenhall
Street, or at Birch's (Ring and Brymer), on Cornhill, the turtle is
cooked with perfect art; and the punch would satisfy the author of
'Le veritable art de faire le Punch.' The fish, at the fish dinner at
Simpson's in Cheapside, is admirable. Nay, you may have a chop broiled
under your nose, at Joe's, behind the Royal Exchange, that shall defy
criticism. At Simpson's in the Strand; at the Albion, by Drury Lane
Theatre; at Blanchard's (ask for his Cotherstone cheese), in Beak
Street, Regent Street, the Earl Dudley's neck of venison, duckling with
green peas, or chicken with asparagus--the main elements of his dinner
'fit for an emperor,' are to be bought excellently well cooked. The
Rainbow, in Fleet Street, is a well-known, good, plain house; and a
grill well cooked and served, where Messrs Spiers and Pond have put up
their silver gridiron, at Ludgate Hill, is a new illustration of London
plain cookery. The London, in Fleet Street, is an admirable house;
cheap, and yet where there are--a rare thing in the City--well-kept
tables. This house publishes its menus in the evening papers. Our
oyster shops have no rivals in the boastful capital of gastronomy.
Take Pim's, for example, in the Poultry, where there are perfect
oysters, and the luncheon delicacies of our modern day. But when the
ambitious diner glances along the line of entrées, even in the best
of the houses I have cited, he is in danger. In the City, the Albion
is the best kitchen for elaborate dishes, and the dinners given here
are smaller than the crowds which meet over huddled, flat, and chilled
dishes at our great public dinners. Yet nobody would for one moment
think of comparing the most carefully prepared dinner for sixty with
such a menu as Francatelli prepares for half-a-dozen in Piccadilly."
From this general damnation, however, the author exempts Willis's, in
King Street, St James's, where, he says, the mutton pies of the Old
Thatched House Tavern may still be eaten; Epitaux', in Pall Mall; the
Burlington, in Regent Street; Verrey's and Kühn's, in which places
"very respectable French cookery is to be had."
"The Epicure's Year Book" gives amongst its menus of remarkable dinners
of 1867 one of the "Epicure" dinner served at the St James's. The
_dîner à la Russe_ was in those days ousting the dinner in the French
style, in which the dishes were placed in three services or relays
upon the table and carved by host and guests, and such an epicure as
Captain Hans Busk, who was the gourmet _par excellence_ of the sixties,
gave his guests at the United University Club very much such a dinner
as men eat to-day, though his dinners were of too many courses. But at
the Mansion House the first and second and third services were still
adhered to. Francatelli, though conforming to the new style, made
concessions to the old school, as this menu shows. His French was a
little shaky, for he did not know when "_à la_" should be used and when
it should not be used:
Les Huîtres.
_Potages_.--La purée de gibier à la chasseur; à la Julienne.
_Poisson_.--Les epigrammes de rougets à la Bordelaise; le saumon à la
Tartare.
_Entrées_.--Les mauviettes à la Troienza; les côtelettes à la
Duchesse; les medaillons de perdreaux à la St James; le selle de
mouton rôtie.
_Legumes ... Salade._
_Second Service_.--Le faisan truffé à la Périgueux; la mayonnaise de
crevettes; les chouxfleurs au parmesan; la charlotte de pommes; le
gâteau à la Cérito.
The St James's was not by any means the first hostelry at the corner
of Berkeley Street, for in the stage-coach days a coffee-house--the
Gloucester, I think--occupied the site, and some of the coaches for the
west used to start from it; but I have already given you a fill of the
history of the forerunners of the Berkeley, and will come at once to
recent years and the modern building.