Part 2

In contrast to these popular shows, the manager on Friday, July 9, 1858, gave an ‘Aristocratic Fête,’ arranged by a committee of gentlemen assisted by lady patronesses, who are said to have been very chary of issuing tickets to other ladies whom the gentlemen proposed to invite. But the invitations mattered little, for the 9th turned out to be one of the wettest days of an English July, and the aristocratic ambitions of Cremorne were damped down for ever. {8b}

In the balloon ascents of Cremorne (as already remarked) there was often a dangerous element, usually a parachute descent. Without dwelling on the ascents of balloonists like Lieutenant Gale and the celebrated Charles Green, who made his three hundredth and sixty-fifth voyage (of course including his ascents at Vauxhall and many other places) on August 2, 1847, we can notice only the Bouthellier, Poitevin, and Latour performances.

In August, 1852, {9a} a French aeronaut named Bouthellier ascended on a trapeze attached to the car of a balloon, and when the balloon was at a respectable height began to twist himself round ‘almost in a knot,’ then to untie himself, and finally to suspend his body as he hung, first by his neck, then by his heels. The reporter tells us that this was done ‘to the evident mingled alarm and pleasure of the spectators,’ and the whole thing was considered to ‘redound greatly to the credit’ of Mr. Simpson.

[Picture: The Dancing-Platform, Cremorne, 1847. From the Pictorial Times, June, 1847]

In September of the same year (1852), Madame Poitevin, ‘in the character of Europa,’ ascended from Cremorne on the back of a heifer which was attached to her balloon. This was nothing new to _her_ or to the sight-seers of Paris, where she and her husband had made hundreds of ascents on the backs of horses, and even ‘a great many ascents with a bull.’ A pony ascent had been made by Green at Vauxhall in 1850, {9b} but the English magistrates drew the line at a heifer, and Simpson and his Europa were fined at the Ilford Sessions on September 7, 1852, for cruelty to animals.

This wretched exhibition was not, of course, repeated, but risky parachute feats were by no means to be abandoned. On June 27, 1854, at about seven o’clock, Henri Latour, a balloonist of the age of fifty, went up lashed to a parachute which was formed like a horse, and suspended from W. H. Adams’s balloon. As the balloon was rising an attempt was made (by means of a trigger-iron) to release the parachute, but it somehow got twisted, and its two guiding ‘wings’ did not expand. The descent of the balloon continued, and in the Tottenham marshes, which it had now rapidly reached, struck the earth, and the unhappy Latour was dragged over the ground and through the trees, and died a few days after of his injuries. {10a}

The programme of the theatre and the concert-room was less exciting. The Cremorne theatricals never aimed much higher than the farce and the vaudeville, but there were some good ballets, in which (_circa_ 1847–1851) the Deulins took part. Under Simpson some of the old favourite comic singers were engaged—Sam Cowell in 1846, Robert Glindon in 1847 and 1850. {10b} Herr Von Joel, who appeared in 1848, was ‘a peculiar old German’ {10c} who had made a sensation—which became a bore—at Vauxhall Gardens. His business was to appear at unexpected moments and in unsuspected parts of the gardens, to yodel. Swiss ditties, and to give imitations, on his walking-stick, of birds and feathered fowl. In his later days he was a familiar figure at Evans’s Supper-Rooms, where he used to retail dubious cigars, and dispose of tickets for benefits which never came off. J. W. Sharp (‘Jack Sharp’), who sang at Cremorne in 1850, was at one time the rage of the town, and his comic songs were in demand at Vauxhall and at such places as Evans’s and the Mogul in Drury Lane. But he took to dissipated ways, lost his engagements, and died in the Dover Workhouse at the age of thirty-eight. {10d}

Simpson’s varied enterprises resulted in a substantial profit, even if he did not make (as he told the impecunious Baron Nicholson) the sum of £100,000 during his first years at Cremorne. His patrons were people of all ranks, and of varying degrees of virtue. But Cremorne was never able to parade in the newspapers that array of fashionable and distinguished personages who ‘last night’ visited Vauxhall. It was not, for one thing, a place that ladies (in the strict sense of the word) were in the habit of visiting, unless, perhaps (as Mr. Sala puts it) ‘in disguise and on the sly,’ or, at any rate, under the safe conduct of a husband or brother. Ladies of some sort were, no doubt, considerably in evidence there, though we are not to think of Cremorne as so entirely given over to ‘drink, dancing, and devilry’ as its sterner critics declared. If it was a place for the man about town, it also attracted a number of worthy citizens and country cousins who went there for an evening’s pleasure with their wives and daughters, and were ‘not particular.’ A livelier element was imported by the medical students—a high-spirited race made responsible in those days for the sins of many non-medical youngsters—by Oxonians and Cantabs, by temporarily irresponsible clerks and shopmen, and ‘flash’ personages of various kinds.

[Picture: Cremorne Gardens in the Height of the Season. By M’Connell, 1858]

In 1857 the Chelsea Vestry had presented the first of many annual petitions against the renewal of the licence, setting forth the inconvenience of the late hours of Cremorne, the immoral character of its female frequenters, and its detrimental influence generally on the morals (and house property) of the neighbourhood. Such petitions, like the annual protests against old Bartholomew Fair, were a long time in taking effect, but, as Cremorne grew older, the rowdy and wanton element certainly increased, and finally, as we shall see, not undeservedly brought about its downfall. In spite of all this, we know of more than one respected paterfamilias who has still somewhere a Cremorne programme or two, the relic of some pleasant and doubtless romantic evening in the sixties or seventies, when he imagined himself to be seeing something—if not too much—of ‘real life’ in London. In the sixties some charming little folding programmes were issued, printed in colour, and presenting on every page a view of Cremorne. Portions of the programme were ingeniously cut out, so that on the front page there was a view up the long walk, flanked by its trees and lamp-bearing goddesses, right to the great fountain. Another page depicted the supper-table spread with its choice viands and ‘rarest vintages,’ and on another was a view of the circus, the supper-boxes, and the promenade enlivened by a peripatetic band—all for a shilling admission, and the patron, Her Majesty the Queen. {12a}

Time has cast a veil over the orgiastic features of Cremorne, and though this is just as well, some of its old frequenters may cherish the feeling that there are no ‘intrepid aeronauts’ now, no fireworks like Duffell’s, no gaily-lighted tiers of supper-boxes, and no waltzing on circular platforms with beauteous, if little known, damsels.

Simpson retired in 1861, {12b} and on July 30 there was a new manager, Edward Tyrrell Smith. {12c} He has been denied, somehow, a place in the great _Dictionary of National Biography_, but one cannot turn over a programme of London amusements in the fifties or sixties without encountering the name of E. T. Smith—an interesting man, of boundless energy and resource, and a lucky, if wayward, speculator, who was everything by turns and nothing long. He was the son of Admiral E. T. Smith, but his aspirations were not lofty, for he began life—he was born in 1804—as a Robin Redbreast, one of the old red-waistcoated Bow Street runners. When the new police force was established Smith was too young for superannuation, so he was made an inspector. But he soon tired of this, and after trying his hand as a sheriff’s bailiff or auctioneer, went into the wine trade. In 1850 we find him landlord of a tavern in Red Lion Street, Holborn, attracting custom by dressing his barmaids in bloomer costume. From about this date his speculative genius turned to the management of London theatres. He took the Marylebone, then Drury Lane, where he made quite a lengthy stay, and even plunged into opera at Her Majesty’s. One of his eccentricities was to present silver snuff-boxes and watches to his master-carpenters and property-men, each presentation taking place on the stage, accompanied by an appropriate speech. He was lessee of the Lyceum, of the Surrey, of Astley’s (when Ada Menken appeared as Mazeppa), and he took Highbury Barn for one season. He also founded the Alhambra in Leicester Square, making short work, for his purpose, of its instructive predecessor, the Panopticon.

He effected another transformation by turning Crockford’s gaming-house into the Wellington Restaurant, and opened a second restaurant—but this was a dismal failure—in the vaults of the Royal Exchange. He further made a handsome profit out of a French bonnet-shop which he established at Brighton, under the alluring name of Clémentine. He financed Baron Nicholson at the Coal Hole, became proprietor of the _Sunday Times_, and finally settled down in the metal trade. If Smith had little money of his own, he had a marvellous talent for extracting it from others, for, with some managerial humbug in his doings, he was a good-natured man, with plenty of friends who believed in his speculative _flair_. One of his early devices was ingenious. He hired from a money-lender at the rate of £1 a day a £1,000 banknote, which he always carried in his pocket—not to spend, but to deposit when he made a purchase, and to inspire confidence generally. He retired from Cremorne in 1869, and managed just to outlive the gardens, for he died in 1877, on November 26.

Smith began his enterprise with a startling novelty—a ‘female Blondin’ who undertook to cross the Thames. Late on an August afternoon of 1861 thousands of spectators thronged the river banks and the esplanade of Cremorne, or waited in small boats to see this new heroine of Niagara. A tight rope was stretched across the river at a height varying from 50 to 100 feet, and at last the female Blondin appeared. She was a delicate-looking little woman, who called herself Madame Genvieve. Her real name was Selina Young, and she was the granddaughter of James Bishop the showman. One has seen the male Blondin making a careful inspection of his guy-lines and supports before starting on his perilous course. His female imitator began her progress at once. When she had traversed about two-thirds of the distance, she paused to rest on the narrow timber ledge of one of the main supports of the rope. The rest was a long one, and it was soon felt that something was wrong when the attendants were seen tightening the remaining 600 or 700 feet of rope. At last, after this trying pause—she had started three-quarters of an hour earlier, and it was now growing dusk and chilly—she moved a few feet forward; then she halted, and then moved again. But the rope was now swaying like a garden swing, for the guy-lines had been cut—apparently by some scoundrel who wanted the leaden weights. Attempts were being made to throw cords over the rope, when suddenly she let go her balance-pole. It was a terrible moment, but with infinite pluck and presence of mind the female Blondin caught the rope with both hands, then a couple of weights suspended from it, and next the cords by which that part of the rope was steadied. Descending by the grasp of a three-quarter-inch cord, she reached a boat, and was saved. {14a} But the warning was disregarded, and the very next year the female Blondin was performing at Highbury Barn. Here she fell from a rope which was damp and slippery, and was made a cripple for life. {14b}

Another sensation, though void of peril, of Smith’s management was the Cremorne tournament, which began on Wednesday, July 8, 1863, {15} and lasted two or three days. It was suggested by the famous Eglinton tournament of August, 1839, which is said to have cost the Earl of Eglinton £80,000. The Cremorne imitation was held, not in the park or tilt-yard of a castle, but in the large pavilion of the Ashburnham grounds, which was gay with flags and garlands and the escutcheons of medieval heroes. The velvet and the gold lace may have been less costly, but the effect was equally impressive. At Eglinton Castle the Queen of Beauty was the lovely Lady Seymour; the Marquis of Waterford was one of the knights, and Prince Louis Napoleon one of the squires. The knights and squires of Cremorne came chiefly from the theatre and the circus, and the pages were ladies described by a journalist as ‘no strangers to the choreographic stage.’ The Queen of Beauty was Madame Caroline, a circus-rider well known at Vauxhall and elsewhere, who is believed to have resided in the New Cut.

The Scottish tournament was a fiasco, and was carried out under the cover of umbrellas and great-coats in the intervals of drenching rain which lasted for three days. The opening day at Cremorne was bright and sunny, and the procession of 300 made its entrance in imposing style: heralds in their gaudy tabards, yeomen in Lincoln green, men-at-arms in glittering armour—a whole _Ivanhoe_ in motion. The tournament King, the Queen of Beauty, and their suite, were escorted to a tapestried tribune, and their gorgeous array contrasted strangely with the tall-hatted and coal-scuttle-bonneted spectators who occupied the seats on every side. The heralds made the proclamation, and the jousting began. First, there were trials of skill between knights of different countries all in armour, and mounted on chargers with emblazoned housings. Some sports, like tilting at the ring and the quintain, followed, and then came the grand mêlée between the two companies of knights. Finally, one of the combatants was unhorsed—_pro forma_—and his antagonist received the prize of valour from the Queen of Beauty.

Bands of music and facetious clowns, or rather ‘jesters,’ enlivened the proceedings, which were at first exciting and a fine spectacle, though they tended to grow monotonous. {16a}

Among the minor entertainments of Smith’s management was the exhibition, in 1867, of Natator, the man-frog. This human frog was a young man of twenty, who was to be seen through the plate-glass front of a huge tank filled with 6 feet of water. He imitated the motions of fish, stood on his head, ate a sponge-cake, or smoked a pipe. A more rational exhibition was the appearance of the Beckwith family in 1869. {16b}

In his last year (1869) Smith exhibited the French ‘captive balloon’ in the Ashburnham grounds. This balloon was made of linen and indiarubber, and held thirty people. It was attached by a strong rope worked by an engine of 200 horse-power, and could be let out, so as to soar ‘in an aerial voyage over London,’ 2,000 feet. The charge for an ascent was ten shillings, but a free admission was granted to a female inmate of the Fulham Workhouse, who chose to celebrate her hundredth birthday by a trip in the balloon, attended by the matron. It was fortunately not on this occasion that the captive balloon, after the manner of its kind, escaped! {16c}

John Baum, who became lessee in 1870, had not the character of his predecessors, nor a hand strong enough to restrain the vagaries of his more troublesome clients. But he was by no means incapable as an entertainment manager and when the gardens were opened they were found to be much improved, and a new theatre was built. He developed the stage amusements, and produced some good ballets, such as _Giselle_, in 1870. In 1875 there was a comic ballet by the Lauri family, and Offenbach’s _Rose of Auvergne_, with a ballet of 100, was given. Auber’s _Fra Diavolo_ was presented before a Bank Holiday audience in 1877. {17} The orchestra was a capable one under Jules Riviere. In 1872 the licence for dancing, the great attraction of Cremorne, was refused, but in 1874 the waltzing or, the ‘crystal platform’ was again as lively as ever.

[Picture: The Firework Gallery, Cremorne. From an etching by W. Greaves, 1870]

The one great, but melancholy, sensation of Baum’s management was the episode of ‘Monsieur de Groof, the flying man.’ Vincent de Groof was a Belgian who had constructed a flying machine on which he made some ascents with doubtful success in his native land. He came to England in 1874, and with some difficulty persuaded Baum to let him go through his dangerous performance at Cremorne. Certainly the flying man made a good advertisement, and on the evening of June 29, 1874, there was a great concourse in the gardens. The machine was suspended by a rope, 30 feet long, from the car of Simmons’s ‘Czar’ balloon, and while the tedious process of inflation was going on the spectators had time to inspect a flying apparatus strange and wonderful. It was constructed of cane and waterproof silk, and was made ‘in imitation of the bat’s wing and peacock’s tail.’ Evidently De Groof, like his inventive predecessor in _Rasselas_, had considered the structure of all volant animals, and found ‘the folding continuity of the bat’s wing most easily accommodated to the human form.’ His wings were 37 feet long from tip to tip, and his tail 18 feet long. In the centre was fixed an upright wooden stand about 12 feet high, in which De Groof placed himself, working the wings and tail by means of three levers. He ascended from Cremorne about eight, and as the balloon rose seemed like a big bird perched in his net framework. He was meant to descend in the gardens, but the wind carried the balloon away to Brandon in Essex, where he made a perilous descent from the balloon, almost unseen, but apparently without injury. The Cremorne habitué felt that he was cheated of a sight, and on July 9 the experiment had to be repeated. At about half-past seven the machine was once more taken up by Simmons’s balloon, and this time there was no changing of the venue. The balloon soared to a great height, but for fully half an hour continued to hover over the gardens. Then the wind bore it rapidly away in the direction of St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, till the machine was perilously near the church tower. No one quite knew what happened at this moment. Simmons seems to have called out, ‘I must cut you loose,’ and De Groof to have responded ‘Yes, and I can fall in the churchyard.’ Suddenly the rope was severed, the machine, without resistance to the air, was seen to collapse, and wind round and round in its descent, till it fell with a heavy thud near the kerbstone in Robert Street. {18} A great crowd had collected, and De Groof was picked up in a terrible state, and taken into the Chelsea Infirmary to die. The fate of the balloon was an anti-climax: it was carried away to Springfield in Essex, where it came down on the Great Eastern railway-line after a narrow escape from a passing train. The whole affair caused great excitement in London, and the details were copied into papers like the _Indian Mirror_. A sheet-ballad sold in the Chelsea streets drew the obvious morals, and appealed to the tender-hearted passer-by:

‘You feeling hearts, list to my story, It is a most heartrending tale; And when the facts are laid before you To drop a tear you cannot fail.’ {19}

But we are nearing the last days of Cremorne. At no period could the gardens be described as a place of quiet family resort, and under Smith in the sixties we begin to hear of rows and cases in the police courts. In 1863, for instance, there was a ‘riot’ on the night of the Oaks day, and a number of men, apparently of decent position, stormed and wrecked one of the bars. Six of them were caught, and fined from £20 to £50 apiece. A scene of this kind was partly the fault of the manager, who had advertised his gardens as just the pleasure resort for a gentleman returning from the races. One (undated) story of a Cremorne fracas, told by G. A. Sala, is rather amusing, and worth repeating nearly in his words. ‘A gallant Captain and M.P.,’ who was engaged to a young lady of good position, began to repent of his promise. To get out of it honourably he could devise no better plan than to disgrace himself at Cremorne. One night, accordingly, he repaired to the gardens ‘with a few chosen boon companions,’ who, like himself, imbibed freely of the rare vintages in the supper-rooms. The moment came when he was in a mood ‘to break things,’ and his first onslaught was on the glasses and decanters of a refreshment counter. Then he charged the dancing platform, frightened the dancers, and scattered the musicians ‘like blossoms before a March blast.’ They tried to stop him, but he put the waiters _hors de combat_, and for some time made short work of the police. The next morning the gallant Captain and M.P. found himself, at the police court, Westminster, provided with a sentence of fourteen days. From his dungeon-cell in Holloway he wrote an abject letter to his impending father-in-law, deploring the degradation he had brought on himself and his friends, and relinquishing for ever all claims on the beloved daughter. Next day the governor of the prison handed him a letter from the same father-in-law, which ran as follows: ‘DEAR JIM,—Sorry to hear you have got yourself into such a scrape. Never mind; boys will be boys! Katie and I will call for you in an open carriage on Monday week, and the marriage will take place on the following morning at St. James’s, Piccadilly.’

These things were relatively trifles, and it was really not till the seventies—under Baum—that Cremorne became an impossible place. The Westminster Police Court was now hardly ever without its drunk or disorderly case from the gardens. Even the normal evenings at Cremorne were fairly fertile in incident, but a big crop followed the abnormal evenings—the night of some great event, the Derby, the Oaks, the return of the Prince from India, or—a new institution—the Bank Holiday. At such times extra late hours were always granted, and they were those occasions when champagne is said to ‘flow like water.’ It was half-past ten, half-past eleven, twelve, and still the theatres and music-halls were sending down fresh visitors, and the cabs came rattling down the King’s high road. The bars and boxes were so many hives of drinking mortals—men who had lost and men who had won, and the drinking quickly led to an almost indiscriminate pugnacity. The wretched waiters, even, were assaulted, though the pugilist thought he amply atoned by a money payment ‘on the spot.’