Part 1

Transcribed from the 1907 Elliot Stock edition by David Price, email [email protected]. Many thanks to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Libraries for allowing their copy to be consulted in making this transcription.

[Picture: Book cover]

CREMORNE AND THE LATER LONDON GARDENS

* * * * *

BY WARWICK WROTH ASSISTANT-KEEPER OF COINS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM;

AUTHOR OF ‘THE LONDON PLEASURE-GARDENS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’

* * * * *

WITH TWENTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS

* * * * *

LONDON ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. 1907

[Picture: Waterside entrace, Cremorne. From an etching by W. Greaves, 1871]

PREFACE

THE open-air resorts described in this volume lack the romantic associations of the classic pleasure-gardens of the eighteenth century, and it is impossible to impart to Cremorne or the Surrey ‘Zoo’ the historic dignity of a Vauxhall or a Ranelagh. Yet, if these places are undeserving of the detailed treatment that has been accorded to their prototypes, they may claim at least a brief and modest chronicle, which may seem the more necessary because it has mainly to be constructed, not from books, but from stray handbills and forgotten newspapers. Already, indeed, we are growing accustomed to speak of the nineteenth century as the ‘last,’ and to recognize that the London of Dickens, and Thackeray—the London of the thirties, the forties, and even of the sixties—had a physiognomy of its own.

Such places of resort, for the most part, enjoyed no kind of fashionable vogue; they were frequented (if invidious distinctions must be made) by the lower middle classes and the ‘lower orders.’ Yet they offer some curious glimpses of manners and modes of recreation which may be worth considering. I have endeavoured to describe some twenty of these places, selecting those which seem, in various ways, to be typical. To the general reader this selection will be enough—though, I trust, not more than enough—but the London topographer who turns to the appendix and the notes will find a quite formidable list of tea-gardens and tavern-gardens, which, if my aim had been to omit nothing, I could have described in greater detail.

I have taken some pains in compiling these lists, partly from topographical curiosity, partly from the conviction that their enumeration almost rises to the dignity of pointing a moral. The main contrast is between the tavern and public-house of former days and the gin-palace, with whose aspect—externally, if not (in any sense of the word) internally—we are only too familiar. A description that I have found in a London guide-book of 1846 of the tea and tavern gardens of that date has already an old-world air: ‘The amusements are innocent, the indulgence temperate; and a suitable mixture of female society renders it [our guide means _them_] both gay and pleasing.’ The public-house was then, as now, no inconspicuous feature of the Metropolis; yet in the earlier half of the nineteenth century it had, if not exactly gaiety and innocence, some characteristics which tended in that direction—its little gardens in summer, its tavern concerts in winter-time. In the fifties, or earlier, many of these garden spaces—often, it is true, of Lilliputian dimensions—were marked out as building-ground, which was either sold to alien contractors or utilized by the proprietor of the tavern when he thought fit to erect thereon a roomier and more imposing edifice. At the same period, or some years later, the increase of music-halls, of local theatres, and places of entertainment, rendered the tavern concert, with its unambitious glee-parties and comic singing, a superfluity. The disappearance of the tavern concert may not be a matter of keen regret, but the abolition of the garden has altered—and for the worse—the whole character of the public-house.

In the garden a man might sit with a friend or chance acquaintance as long as his pleasure and a treacherous climate permitted. In the gin-palace he practically cannot sit at all, but is huddled, sometimes with his wife and children, into a kind of pen, from which custom and a sort of shy politeness bid him depart at the earliest moment to make room for new-comers. The London public-house has thus become a mere counter for the hurried consumption of drink; it has lost any convenience or merit it may once have had as an improvised club and a cheerful resort.

The proprietors of the larger houses seem, indeed, to have had a suspicion of this, for they sometimes offer, for the behoof of their wealthier customers, a comfortable lounge or smoking-saloon. But this does not benefit the humbler classes, and it has often seemed to me that a good way of discouraging intemperance in a great city is not to attempt the heroic, unpopular, and impossible task of abolishing the traffic in drink, but to compel the owners of licensed houses to dispense their stock-in-trade under more rational and recreative conditions—_to give us_ ‘_clubs_’ _for_ ‘_pubs_,’ or, at any rate, cafés and café-restaurants.

We have our obvious models on the Continent in the large café, the beer-garden, and even in the small café. The poor man would not be ‘robbed of his beer,’ nor would the change be quite ‘un-English,’ as the record of our little tavern gardens will show. Even in London at this moment there is an (almost solitary) instance of a café-restaurant of this kind, in Leicester Square.

The one feature common to all these Continental places is the custom of sitting down at a table; there is no standing at a bar, or the rapid displacement of one customer by another. The coffee, the liqueur, or the lager, is not only drained—shall I say, to its dregs?—but is spun out and husbanded to the utmost, and for an hour or so there is at least the semblance of the comfort and convenience of a club.

It is too late now to restore the little summer gardens, but it should be possible to convert our public-houses, not into coffee-palaces, which do not meet the general need, but into cafés, by which I mean places where varied drinks, strong or otherwise, would be obtainable, though under less absurd and demoralizing conditions than at present. Every one should be made to sit down, should be waited on—by a waitress if we like—and the great bar itself should be dissolved, except as a counter for the attendants. There could be cafés both large and small—places that the London Baedeker would describe as (relatively) ‘expensive,’ and others to suit the pence of the people. The café might even be musical, though perhaps a line would be drawn at the _café chantant_. Probably many small places would not be able to conform to these conditions, and would have to be closed; but, in view of the diminished competition, the larger houses could be called upon without hardship to undertake the necessary reconstruction.

But I am converting this preface into a temperance pamphlet, and, before is it too late, I break off to ask a kindly consideration for a little volume which recalls, I think, some interesting and not uninstructive features of old London life. In reading the proof-sheets I have had the kind help of my brother, Mr. A. E. Wroth.

WARWICK WROTH.

1907.

CONTENTS

PAGE PREFACE v CREMORNE GARDENS 1 MANOR-HOUSE BATHS AND GARDENS, CHELSEA 25 BATTY’S HIPPODROME AND SOYER’S SYMPOSIUM, KENSINGTON 30 THE HIPPODROME, NOTTING HILL 34 THE ROYAL OAK, BAYSWATER 37 CHALK FARM 39 EEL-PIE (OR SLUICE) HOUSE, HIGHBURY 42 WESTON’S RETREAT, KENTISH TOWN 44 THE MERMAID, HACKNEY 46 THE ROSEMARY BRANCH, HOXTON 48 SIR HUGH MYDDELTON’S HEAD, ISLINGTON 52 THE PANARMONION GARDENS, KING’S CROSS 54 THE EAGLE AND GRECIAN SALOON 57 ALBERT SALOON AND ROYAL STANDARD PLEASURE-GARDENS 68 NEW GLOBE PLEASURE-GROUNDS, MILE END ROAD 70 THE RED HOUSE, BATTERSEA 72 BRUNSWICK GARDENS (OR VAUXHALL PLEASURE-GARDENS), VAUXHALL 77 FLORA GARDENS, CAMBERWELL 79 MONTPELIER TEA-GARDENS, WALWORTH 81 SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 83 LIST OF MINOR LONDON GARDENS, NINETEENTH CENTURY 93 INDEX 98

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE WATERSIDE ENTRANCE, CREMORNE _Frontispiece_

From an etching by W. Greaves, 1871. THE STADIUM, CHELSEA 3

From a lithograph, published in 1831. ‘BARON’ NICHOLSON AT A ‘JUDGE AND JURY’ TRIAL 3

From _Life in London Illustrated_, _circa_ 1855. PLAN OF CREMORNE, _circa_ 1870–1877 6 THE DANCING-PLATFORM, CREMORNE, 1847 9

From the _Pictorial Times_, June, 1847. CREMORNE GARDENS IN THE HEIGHT OF THE SEASON 11

By M’Connell, 1858. THE FIREWORK GALLERY, CREMORNE 17

From an etching by W. Greaves, 1870. THE DANCING-PLATFORM, CREMORNE 23

From an etching by W. Greaves, 1871. MANOR-HOUSE GARDEN, CHELSEA, _circa_ 1809 25 ADMISSION TICKETS, NEW RANELAGH, PIMLICO, 1809, ETC. 28 THE HIPPODROME, BAYSWATER (NOTTING HILL), _circa_ 35 1838 PLAN OF THE HIPPODROME, NOTTING HILL, 1841 36 THE TEA-GARDENS, ROSEMARY BRANCH, 1846 49 ADMISSION TICKET, ROSEMARY BRANCH, 1853 50 SUSPENSION RAILWAY, PANARMONION GARDENS 55

From an engraving, _circa_ 1830. A TAVERN-CONCERT SINGER, MISS FRAZER (OR FRASER) 59 JAMES, _circa_ 1838 PLEASURE-GARDENS, EAGLE TAVERN, _circa_ 1838 67 NEW GLOBE TAVERN PLEASURE-GROUNDS 71

From a lithograph after H. M. Whichelo, _circa_ 1846. THE RED HOUSE, BATTERSEA 73

From a view published by J. Rorke, _circa_ 1845. BARRY, THE CLOWN, ON THE THAMES 74

(Cp. Red House, Battersea.) A SOUTH-EAST VIEW IN THE SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 83

After a lithograph published by Havell, 1832. STIRRING UP THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON (SURREY ZOO) 87

After George Cruikshank, 1844. ‘OLD LONDON’ AT THE SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS 89

After a lithograph published by Webb, 1844.

CREMORNE GARDENS

THE old house by the river had often changed hands, but the new possessor, who was reputed to be a Baron, somewhat puzzled the quiet inhabitants of Chelsea. Great oaks and elms surrounded the grounds, but through the fine iron gates, which were left half open, it was not difficult—as on this summer morning of 1830—to catch a glimpse of the owner, engaged, apparently, in the survey and measurement of his estate. He was a man of over sixty, dressed in a faded military uniform of no known pattern, but which seemed to have done service in some company of sharpshooters in the days of Napoleon. In the middle of the lawn was a table, on which a rifle reposed amid a litter of plans and papers. But if the Baron had a gun it was not to shoot _you_, but one of the targets at the far end of the garden, and his successive bull’s-eyes certainly proclaimed the hand of a master. A little intrusion he did not seem to mind, and as you advanced he only offered you a prospectus: ‘THE STADIUM, Cremorne House, Chelsea, established for the tuition and practice of skilful and manly exercises generally.’ {1}

The estate of Cremorne House (or Farm), which was afterwards to be developed into the notorious Cremorne Gardens, had once belonged to the pious Lady Huntingdon, and George Whitfield had prayed and discoursed within the house. Later on, it passed to the Earl of Cremorne, then to his widow, a descendant of William Penn. The last owner was Granville Penn. {2a} The purchaser of 1830, in whom we are interested, was Charles Random de Berenger, who styled himself Baron de Beaufain, or, more often, the Baron de Berenger. His name seemed French, but he boasted of ancient Prussian lineage, and long before this date had settled in London. He was a skilful draughtsman, an inventor of peculiar guns {2b} and explosives, and believed to be the owner of innumerable patents, which had only brought him to a debtors’ prison. In the summer of 1815 he had emerged from a term of imprisonment in the King’s Bench, for it was he who with consummate skill and audacity had carried through the great Stock Exchange hoax of 1814, in which Lord Cochrane and his friends were so painfully involved. {2c} In fifteen years these things were nearly forgotten, and the Baron, who was a sportsman and a dead shot, found himself well supported when he opened his Cremorne Stadium in 1832.

[Picture: The Stadium, Chelsea. From a lithograph, published in 1831]

The subscription was two or three guineas, and the members, under the Baron’s tuition, could shoot, box and fence, and practise ‘manly exercises generally’ in his beautiful grounds. He also established, so to speak, a ‘Ladies’ Links,’ with its clubroom, ‘which Gentlemen cannot enter,’ unless (such is his quaint proviso) ‘by consent of the Ladies occupying such.’ In 1834 George Cruikshank made a design for a ‘Chelsea Stadium Shield,’ which was quite Homeric in its form, and showed every conceivable kind of sport and exercise, including pole-jumping and golf. {2d}

The Stadium flourished, or, rather, lingered on, till 1843, but only with the adventitious aid of occasional galas and balloon displays that already foreshadowed Cremorne. {3}

[Picture: ‘Baron’ Nicholson at a ‘Judge and Jury’ Trial. From Life in London Illustrated, circa 1855]

The transformation of this failing arena of British sport into the full-blooded pleasure-garden of Cremorne was effected by another Baron, though he was such only by the courtesy of Bow Street and Maiden Lane. Renton Nicholson (for that was his name), like most of the managers of Cremorne, was a man who knew a thing or two. He was born early in the century, and his boyhood was spent in the quiet village of Islington, where his two sisters kept a young ladies’ seminary. His tastes early led him to the distractions of Sadler’s Wells, and at sixteen, {4a} when he became a pawnbroker’s assistant in Shadwell, he began to acquire his remarkable knowledge of the ‘flash’ life of London in all its grades. About 1830 he opened a jeweller’s shop in the West End, which supplied the ‘swells’ of the day and their female friends, and by this time his London acquaintanceships were extensive and peculiar, consisting, as we are told, of shady journalists, players, tavern vocalists, and rooks of all shades from the welsher to the skittle sharp. He knew the taste of his public, and in 1837 began to issue the scurrilous journal called _The Town_, for which Dr. Maginn and other lively contributors used to write. After a minor experience of gambling-houses and doubtful premises of various kinds, he became (in 1841) proprietor of the Garrick’s Head in Bow Street, and here, in a room holding about 300 people, and fitted up like a law-court, he presided—as Lord Chief Baron Nicholson—over the judge and jury trials that were so attractive to the Londoner of the forties and fifties. The causes that came before this tribunal were chiefly matrimonial—the _crim. con._ cases of the time—and were such that their obscenity and heartlessness (mitigated, it is true, by flashes of wit) often made the most hardened sinner shudder. Nicholson presided over similar trials at those famous haunts, the Coal Hole and the Cyder Cellars, till his death in 1861. He was impudent in manner, obese and sensual in appearance, yet a man of real talent and geniality, gone hopelessly upon the wrong track. His apologists describe him as a sort of nineteenth-century Robin Hood, who plucked the aristocratic pigeon, but was ‘the soul of good nature’ to the poor Bohemian. {4b}

His connexion with Cremorne was brief, and his capital inadequate. In 1843 he replaced the timid prospectus of De Berenger by flaming bills announcing a ‘Thousand Guineas Fête,’ which during three days (July 31, August 1 and 2), at one shilling admission, provided, among other diversions, a mock tournament, a pony-race, a performance by Tom Matthews the clown, and a _pas de deux_ by T. Ireland and Fanny Matthews.

In 1845 De Berenger died, and this year Littlejohn (the refreshment caterer to the gardens) and Tom Matthews managed the place between them. Charles Green, the balloonist, was called in, and began that long series of Cremorne ascents which a spice of eccentricity and danger always rendered popular. For example, in September, Green went up with a lady and a leopard—the latter a magnificent animal, so perfectly subdued in the presence of his mistress or her ‘livery servant,’ as to lay (according to the bill) at her feet or crouch in her lap at command. In August the balloon party consisted of Green, Lord George Beresford, and Tom Matthews, who preluded the ascent by singing his ‘Hot Codlings.’ The balloon went up at seven, and, after visiting the General Post Office and passing over Stamford Hill in perilous proximity to the New River Reservoir, landed its occupants, after a voyage of two hours, cold and shivering, on a marsh at Tottenham.

In 1846 (or more probably a few years later) Cremorne was purchased by Thomas Bartlett Simpson, who guided its destinies till the beginning of the sixties. {5} Simpson had been head-waiter at the Albion, a well-known theatrical tavern that stood opposite Drury Lane Theatre in Russell Street, and was afterwards its lessee. He was a shrewd man of business, and, according to George Augustus Sala, ‘a kindly and generous gentleman.’ Sala, who knew the gardens well from about 1850, tells us that, unlike the Vauxhall of the time, Cremorne was a real pleasaunce surrounded by magnificent trees, with well-kept lawns and lovely flowers, and melodious singing-birds. Nothing was pleasanter in the summer-time than to saunter in at midday or in the early afternoon (for the gardens were not properly open till three or five), and find Mr. Simpson’s daughters there with their work-baskets—to say nothing of the pretty barmaids employed by the kindly and generous gentleman, who were busy, in their cotton frocks, arranging the bars, and paying, it is implied, no ordinary attention to Mr. G. A. Sala.

[Picture: Plan of Cremorne, circa 1870–1877]

Five thousand pounds was spent in preparing for the opening of 1846, and a banqueting-hall and theatre were constructed, as well as some ‘delightful lavender bowers’ for the accommodation of the 1,500 persons who were likely to need a bowery seclusion. The gardens were rapidly getting into shape, and we can now survey them almost as they appeared till their close in 1877.

They were about twelve acres, to which must be added, from 1850, the grounds of Ashburnham House on the west, in which flower-shows and other exhibitions were held. Cremorne lay between the river and the King’s Road, Chelsea. The grand entrance was in the King’s Road, where a big star illuminated the pay-box. On a summer evening, if you did not mind the slow progress of the threepenny steamer from the City to Cremorne Pier, you entered by the river gate at the south-east corner of the gardens. The grounds were well lit, but on entering there was not that sudden blaze of light that was the visitor’s great sensation when he came through the dark pay-entrance into the garden of Vauxhall. The most conspicuous feature was the orchestra to the south-west of the gardens—a ‘monster pagoda,’ brilliantly lighted with hundreds of coloured lamps, and surrounded by a circular platform, prepared, it is said, to accommodate 4,000 dancers. Here the dancing took place from 8.30 till 11 or later. There was always a dignified master of the ceremonies (in 1846 Flexmore the pantomimist), but little introduction was required in that easygoing place. There was a good band of fifty, for some years under Laurent, of the Adelaide Gallery Casino in the Strand. {7} In the early part of the evening—at any rate, in the seventies—the dancing was left to the shop-girls and their friends: the gilded youth and the ‘smart’ female set of Cremorne began their waltzing later on, after the fireworks.

The gardens had a tendency to become congested with side-shows, flaring stalls and shooting-galleries, too much suggesting a fair; but, unlike Earl’s Court and the later Vauxhall, Cremorne remained a garden. There was still the encircling fringe of ancient trees, and an avenue on the west stretching from north to south; on the east side was the broad lawn from which the balloon ascents took place.

Cremorne had the usual pleasure-garden equipment of fountains and statuary; refreshment-bars, boxes, and tables were placed at every coign of vantage, though the right place to go was the Cremorne House (or Hotel) dining-room, or the upper and lower tiers of supper-boxes in the south and south-western corner. Here there was a half-crown supper, and, if you aspired no higher, the Cremorne sherry, that fine old wine, ‘free from acidity, and highly recommended to invalids.’ In the centre of the grounds was an American bowling-saloon, which made its appearance, together with American drinks, in ’48 or ’49.

On the west side was the circus; the theatre was in the south of the garden. A smaller theatre, north of the lawn, was appropriated to a troupe of marionettes, introduced by Simpson in 1852. They were great favourites of the public and of the proprietor, who liked ‘the little beggars who never came to the treasury on Saturday.’ Besides this, there was a maze and (as Vauxhall had its hermit) a gipsy’s tent and a ‘double-sighted youth.’ The admission to the gardens was one shilling, and the season tickets cost one guinea or two guineas.

Simpson’s management (_i.e._, till 1861) provided some special diversions, of which the most curious, perhaps, was an Aquatic Tournament or Naval Fête (1851). About eleven at night a fortress (either St. Jean d’Acre or Gibraltar) on the river esplanade was vigorously attacked by a squadron consisting of fourteen steamers of the Citizen Company (whose ‘entire fleet’ was embarked in the enterprise), seconded by the hull of a retired Citizen steamer, which was laden with combustibles. To this attack the land battery—its necessary smoke, fire, and noise supplied by Mortram and Duffell, the Cremorne fireworkers—made a suitable reply, and eventually the old hull was blown to pieces amid the cheers of the spectators.

The Italian Salamander, ‘Cristoforo Buono Core,’ was, later on, in 1858, another attraction of a fiery kind. Like Chabert, the more famous Salamander of 1826, {8a} this man entered a burning furnace with apparent unconcern, and (as he informed an inquisitive spectator) ‘titt as fell as he cott,’ though the performance made him very ‘dursty.’