CHAPTER XIII.

THE HOSTELRIES OF THE SIXTIES.

LONG’S Hotel, in Bond Street, as it appeared in the sixties, was a species of adjunct to half the clubs in London. Men playing till three or four in the morning in clubs that aspired to being considered “correct” usually adjourned to Long’s, and one man having engaged a bedroom, the rest trooped in after him. To such an extent, indeed, was this recognised, that a commodious bedroom on the ground floor was especially set apart for these nocturnal emergencies, and within five minutes of entering the most methodical of night porters produced cards, candles, and the inevitable brandy and sodas. Here play of a very high order frequently took place, and here also drunken rows and card disputes often ensued, unrestrained by the unwritten sanctity of a high-class club. It was here that a well-known baronet—long since dead—had a barging match with a peer still above the horizon, but rarely visible to the naked eye, where, after strong language, blows were exchanged, and a meeting arranged across the Channel, which happily never came off, the belligerents agreeing, after calm reflection, that dirty linen was best washed at home, as their respective laundry baskets were considerably overfreighted as it was and needed no further handicapping in the way of publicity; it was here that a young ass—still living—paid £4,000 for a broken-down ex-Derby horse that would have been dear at £100.

It was here that poor old Jim Stewart—seldom sober, and long since dead—gave a baccarat party to some twenty plungers, where it was agreed that no deal should commence after 6 a.m., at which hour he was the winner of £1,500, and where, yielding to the earnest request of a heavy loser, he consented to extend the time to 6.30, and rose a loser of £5,000; it was here that the fastest and best men in London lounged in and out of the coffee room from breakfast time till well on in the afternoon, and smoked, drank champagne, talked horsy, and swore loudly.

Not that Long’s was not a highly-respectable hotel; on the contrary, the entire upper part was conducted on strictly correct lines, and patronised by the best county people of the day, and the latitude granted to the ground floor must be set down rather as a desire of the management to please all parties, and bow before the inevitable there was no resisting.

An amusing story may here be introduced of Colonel Oakes, of the 12th Lancers, the most irascible of cavalry officers, with a command of language that few, if any, could excel, and who invariably put up at Long’s.

Stationed at Aldershot, the Colonel about this time got married, and, anxious to avoid publicity, he decided to bring his bride up to London and, to make matters still less noticeable, to bring his soldier-servant with him.

Things went happily till the faithful attendant, who was an Irishman, knowing the Colonel’s impatient nature, and considering the luggage was a long time coming up, put his head over the banisters and shouted: “Will you be plased to bring up the Colonel’s and Miss Black’s boxes?”

The tableau half an hour later in the Colonel’s apartments may reasonably be left to the reader’s imagination: the politest of landlords expressing his astonishment, the most irritable of Dragoons cursing his impudence, and the innocent cause of this comedy of errors trembling for the consequences.

Colonel Oakes was admittedly a good soldier, and second only to Valentine Baker as a cavalry leader; popular with both officers and men, he was one of the last of the old swaggering school, a man of likes and dislikes, who, although free and easy and very plain-spoken, was a martinet in other ways.

“R—,” he once said to one of his officers (who certainly was not the accepted ideal of a sabreur), after an inspection, “the General asked me if you had come from the infantry,” and when the remark failed to elicit the reply he desired, he continued: “D— it, sir, you spoil the look of my regiment. I wish to — you’d exchange!” and when the culprit lost his temper and said he considered he was insulted, and that he was the son of a baronet, the irresponsible Colonel shouted: “D— it, sir, I’m the son of a shoemaker, and I wish to — you’d leave my regiment!”

On another occasion, strolling into the stables, he overheard two recruits discussing him: “I say, Bill,” remarked one of the warriors, “the Colonel’s a d— rum old buffer.” To which the other acquiescing, the Colonel advanced, and standing before the trembling culprits, began: “Yes, I heard what you said—that I was a d— rum old buffer—and I tell you what it is; if you had drunk as much as I have in the last thirty years you’d be a d— rum old buffer.”

Despite all these circumstances, no smarter regiment existed than the 12th in the long-ago sixties, although it was commanded by a “d— rum old buffer.”

Jack Peyton, who commanded the 7th Dragoon Guards, was another patron of Long’s. Shortly after his second marriage with a wealthy widow, his boon companion, Tom Phillips, of the 18th, asked him, “Is she good-looking, Jack?” “No, by —, Tom,” was the reply, “d— near as ugly as yourself.”

The fashion of dining at restaurants had not taken root in those days, and the feeding resorts were few and good and very far between.

Their numbers, indeed, were to be counted on one’s fingers, and were resorted to either for lunch or supper, and seldom, as now, for the more serious ceremony of dinner.

People dined at their hotels, for the plate-glass abominations that now cumber the ground at every point of vantage had not suggested themselves to undesirable aliens and our own home-grown Israelites.

When the (present) Berkeley Hotel first started the new idea under the auspices of the renowned Soyer, the separate-table system was a nine days’ wonder, and people were impressed when it was currently reported that Lady Blantyre and her most unimaginative of husbands might be seen nightly at the next table to Skittle’s enjoying the creations of that most marvellous of chefs.

It was here that that distinguished siren once rebuked a waiter who had clumsily splashed her with some viand, by: “You infernal lout, if I wasn’t a lady I’d smack your ugly face!” and it was at St. James’s (as it was then called) she was nightly entertained by her numerous worshippers.

A noble marquis—eventually a duke, and lately deceased—was for years supposed to be her lawful husband, but the devotion of a life-time and subsequent events have since given the lie to this evident _canard_.

“The Guildhall Tavern,” “The Albion,” and Simpson’s long reigned supreme as places where saddles and sirloins, marrow-bones and welsh rabbits were to be obtained in perfection; but all have now disappeared, except in name, nor will the expenditure of fortunes in their resurrection ever bring back the indescribable air of solid comfort that characterised these hostelries of the Sixties.

It was in the last-named house, even then on the wane, that my solitary (active) interest in the drama afforded me numerous occasions of delight.

Off the entrance hall was an unpretentious room, and here every day for weeks a divine being from the Gaiety partook of a hurried lunch in the company of my enraptured self.

Nothing could have been more decorous than the tone that pervaded our frugal meal; nothing so incapable of giving offence to Exeter Hall opposite; the door of our retreat was intentionally kept ajar, yet despite these precautions I was one day informed that the manager declined to let the room for two, but that three would always be welcome.

“The School Board is on the warpath,” was my inward comment, and I never entered the place again. The “correct” old hypocrite is long since dead; the scene of these innocent repasts has long since been demolished, and the sweet lady who honoured me with her company has long since had a prefix to her name and become the proud mother of a subaltern in the Guards.

The inauguration of the Civil Service Stores, and the subsequent appearance of the Army and Navy Stores, gave the first fillip to that union between the Army and trade which the abolition of purchase and the changes in public opinion have since developed to such an extent.

Captain MacRae, late director-general in Victoria Street, who in the sixties was a plodding captain of foot, set the fashion by turning his sword into a tape-measure, and having taken the plunge lost no time in converting a general officer (some say his parent) into a laundry-man. Then followed the rush that saw bonnet shops and costumiers springing up in every fashionable street, and as Kitties and Reillys and Madges looked favourably on the military, the crop of Mantalinis increased and multiplied, and penniless officers became well-to-do men-milliners and accepted authorities on things military amid their new clientèle. And so the last nail was driven into that class distinction that was one of the chief characteristics of the long-ago Sixties.

Whilst on the subject of hostelries, a reference to Lane’s will not be amiss. This unique establishment was in St. Alban’s Place, and was affected by the rowdier class of youngsters, with a sprinkling of permanent residents in various stages of delirium tremens. Dirty and apparently never swept, the rooms might best be described as cosy. The beds, however, were scrupulously clean, and as the majority of the lodgers spent a considerable portion of their existence between the sheets, apple-pie order reigned in this department, ready for any emergency by night or day.

The ruling spirit was old John, an octogenarian in shiny snuff-coloured tail suit and slippers, who apparently never slumbered nor slept, and whom no human eye had ever seen otherwise attired. Assisted by two youngsters of fifty—Charles and Robert—this extraordinary trio knew the habits and tastes of every one; not that eating was extensively indulged in; and beyond the best of joints for dinner, and bacon and eggs for breakfast, the staple consumption for all day and all night might briefly be described as brandy and soda, rum and milk, whilst the more sedate confined themselves to sherry and bitters before breakfast, and a glass of brandy in their tea. How human nature stood such persistent floodings of the system seems beyond comprehension, yet nothing seemed to occur beyond revellers being periodically chaperoned to bed, and now and then an ominous long box being smuggled upstairs, and one hearing a day or so after that “the Captain” had had his last drink, and had been duly gathered to his fathers.

Even in those long-ago days the brevet rank was frequently assumed by ex-militia ensigns, but not to the same extent nor by such sorry specimens as twirl their moustaches in these more enlightened times and stand on the doorstep of the Criterion.

Whisky at this period was literally an unknown beverage in London—possibly because the supply could never have equalled the demand, or more probably because science had not yet evolved the diabolical concoctions that now do duty for the wine of bonnie Scotland. And so it came to pass that the staple drink at Lane’s was brandy and soda. Come in when one chose, there stood battalions of soda with brandy in reserve, and rarely did a wayfarer return at the small hours without calling for a libation from old Peter. Occasionally, after an unusual run, the supply might become exhausted, but no temptation could induce the old janitor to retail what had been reserved on “special order.” “What, give you that one? Why, it’s the Captain’s; every morning at five I takes it to his bedside, and if he’s asleep in the smoking-room I gives him a sniff of it, and he follows me to his room like a dog.”

Visiting the “Cheshire Cheese” not long since, I was struck by the marvellous change that the advance of civilisation (!!) had effected in that most cosy and unconventional of rooms. The steaks and puddings are still as good as ever, but the rollicking Bohemians, bristling with wit, with churchwardens and brown ale that one met at every table, have long since been replaced by their modern prototypes who sip their beer out of a glass, call for a _serviette_ in evidence of a trip to Boulogne, and bolt after depositing a penny on the table. And where are the jolly old waiters in rusty tail-coats, shambling along in their carpet slippers, who never inquired how many “breads” you had had nor what had won the 3.40 race? And the Americans who now invade the place are not an unalloyed blessing, as males and females appear to consider it a _sine quâ non_ to flop on to the seat where Doctor Johnson is once supposed to have sat, in order to be able to tell poppa and momma in the old Kentucky home how, if they could not rub shoulders with the mighty living, they had at least rubbed something with the mighty dead. This aspiration is indeed almost a disease with these Transatlantic trotters, and one rich and pronounced snob, despite his wealth, who lives amongst us, is known to pay for reliable information of the movements of European heirs-apparent in order to meet them by accident (!) and perhaps secure some fragment of recognition. The sequel is usually to be found in an inspired paragraph (4d. a word) hinting at possible alliance between the two families, which in its turn is flatly contradicted!

“Blood,” some genius discovered, “is thicker than water”—and the most unobservant must admit that some of it is very thick indeed.

And apropos of Doctor Johnson, what evidence is there that the great lexicographer’s rhinoceros laugh ever vibrated through the “Cheshire Cheese”? Boswell makes no reference to it, and surely such an omission would be impossible in the chronicles of that irrepressible toady—but when all’s said and done, what importance attaches to it so long as the fare maintains its pristine excellence and the American bumpings are restrained within reasonable limits?

When Piccadilly did not consist almost entirely of clubs, public billiard-rooms were patronised by many who would not enter a modern one. Many of these were run on the very best lines, and a regular clientele met every afternoon for sixpenny and half-crown pools.

The best was Phillips’s, at 99, Regent Street, where Edmund Tattersall, Lord St. Vincent, Colonel Dawes, Attenborough, the king of pawnbrokers, and a few members of 14, St. James’s Square Club never missed resorting—wind and weather permitting—from three to seven of an afternoon.

No goat from an alien flock dared hope to browse on that jealously-guarded pasture, and if, as occasionally, one wandered in, he speedily wandered out under the withering glances of old Phillips and his son.

Almost opposite were Smith’s rooms, where pool of a high class (in execution) was indulged in, and any amateur with a local reputation who took a ball soon disabused his mind of any exalted idea of his play.

Dolby’s, near the Marble Arch, had also its regular patrons, and even in the select region of Portman Square such correct old gentlemen as Sir James Hamilton, Mr. Burgoyne, and other residents in the neighbourhood met daily at an unpretentious tobacconist’s in King Street and played pool in a dingy room behind the shop.

But in the clubs of those long-ago days the most cold-blooded inhospitality obtained. If you called upon a friend you had to wait on the door-mat, and the offering of a glass of sherry was attended by the risk of expulsion. Smoking-rooms—if tolerated—were placed in the attics, and a “strangers’ room” was an innovation that only came into existence years after.

For long many clubs held out against the recognition of “strangers,” and only within the last few years have the “Senior” and the more exclusive establishments over-ruled the snarling objections of the few old fossils who use a club from morning to night without adding one cent to its revenue.

It was the privilege of the Army and Navy Club to make the first drastic move in the right direction, and to Louis Napoleon’s frequent visits for luncheon and its attendant cigarette and coffee may be traced the present accepted theory that “clubs were made for man, and not man for clubs.”

The best tobacconists also supplied the need now provided by the ubiquitous club, and Harris’s, Hoare’s, Benson’s, Hudson’s, Carlin’s in Oxford Street and Regent Street, each had their following, where every afternoon such men as Lord William Lennox, Lord Huntingtower, Mr. George Payne, the Marquis of Drogheda, Lord Henry Loftus, and Colonel Fitzgerald might be seen seated on tobacco tubs and cigar chests, smoking big cigars and drinking sherry which flowed from casks around the shop.

This last-named individual was a morose, fire-eating Irishman, whose life had been soured by the seduction of his wife by his own colonel, and later by the ravages of small-pox that had seared his once-handsome face.

The son of a famous duellist of the days of the Regency, it was told how on one occasion on entering the Cocoa Tree a comparative stranger exclaimed: “I smell an Irishman!” To which “Fighting Fitz” replied: “You shall never smell another!” and sliced off his nose on the spot.