CHAPTER VI.

EVANS’S AND THE DIALS.

BEFORE the Embankment came into existence, Salisbury Street and Cecil Street—where the hotel now stands—consisted for the most part of lodging houses. Overlooking the river, stairs led to shanties to which wherries were moored, whilst a verandah, running the entire length of the house in which I once had rooms, enabled shade and muddy breezes to be indulged in during the hot summer evenings. At the side could be seen the arches known as Fox Hill, which, still visible from the (now) Tivoli Music Hall, were in those days capable of being traversed for a considerable distance.

In ancient days the haunt of smugglers and desperadoes, it had not lost its popularity with the lawless classes even in the more modern long-ago sixties, and weird stories of murders that had never been discovered, and crimes of every description, were currently reported as of almost daily occurrence in the impenetrable “dark arches of the Adelphi.” No sane person would have ventured to explore them unless accompanied by an armed escort, and even Wych Street, Newcastle Street, and Holywell Street were “out of bounds” after nightfall.

The dead body of a female having one morning been discovered, it was currently reported that the assassin was in concealment in the “dark arches;” the police—from information received—were convinced of it, and the authorities, having a mind to probe the mystery, organised search parties, which scattered amongst the labyrinths, and eventually emerged no nearer an elucidation than before.

Passages, it was asserted, led to various exits on the river bank, and extended in an easterly direction to Whitefriars, all of which in later years have been gradually filled up till now nothing more pernicious than a peaceful beer-store a few yards from the entrance and an occasional board-man who ought to be traversing the street, give signs of vitality to what was once a sink of iniquity.

It is refreshing after this weird retrospect to turn to the modern Adelphi Terrace, where years ago I participated in many enjoyable reunions. Here each Sunday night such lively company as the late Kate Vaughan and her husband, Freddy Wellesley, Billy Hill, Marius, Florence St. John, Sweet Nell Hazel, and other vestals congregated; whilst the “Savages” have made it their headquarters, and can lean over the balcony without risking typhoid, and eventually cross the Strand at no greater risk than an invitation to air their French.

And the changes in the Adelphi suggest the changes that have taken place in other historical resorts, than which nothing has been more marked than in the Burlington Arcade. Here every afternoon, between six and seven, throngs composed of all that made up the pomp and vanity of this wicked world disported themselves. Here Baby Jordan and “Shoes”—since become the mother of a present-day baronet—Nelly Fowler, and Nelly Clifton held court with their attendant squires and lords of every degree. Here at seven the entire mass surged towards the Blue Posts in Cork street and indulged in champagne and caviare toast. Here about the same time Hastings, Fred Granville, and roysterers of a more pronounced type looked in for a breakfast of “fixed bayonets” by way of appetite for the dinner at Limmer’s that most of them would barely touch. Here (in Cork Street) a little head might be seen cautiously peeping over the blinds at No. 17 in the hope that some eligible client might seek pecuniary relief before entering on the night’s enjoyment. Here in later years the same head, but transformed into the appearance of a Fitzroy storm signal, might be seen more shiny, more haughtily posed, dictating terms to Lairds of Aboyne and owners of Derby favourites. After which the rich man died, and the shekels made by usury have gone (as was only right) to bolster up impecunious subalterns and Christian hospitals.

In the palmy days of Paddy Green, Evans’s provided perhaps the only tavern where a weary sojourner might sit in peace and realise that he was surrounded by comfort and tone. Hovering near the door was the genial old proprietor, with white hair and rubicund face, a smile for every one, and capable of passing anywhere for a chairman of directors at least. Around the walls were the priceless oil paintings belonging to the Garrick, deposited temporarily after the fire that made havoc with that historical building; whilst covering the entire floor were tables where the best (and the best only) of chops, steaks, mealy potatoes, and welsh rabbits, with wines of heaven knows what age, beer, and spirits were procurable.

Nor must the old establishment be confounded with the modern fungus that continued its name under the pilotage of an enterprising Jew, and eventually got closed by the police for developing into an ordinary night house.

To see a genuine old English waiter crumble a huge potato with a spotless napkin creates a pang when one thinks of his German and Italian prototype asking “’Ow many breads you have?” and on being told “one,” looking as if he could swear you had had two.

And no accounts were discharged at the time—sit, as one might, from 10 to 2 a.m., and eat and drink variously, and as often as one pleased—all the reckoning was one’s own as one imparted it on leaving to the most courteous of butlers at the door.

And then the stage, what comparison is possible between the healthy singing of glees and solos one then heard and the elephantine wit of the modern serio-comic? And poor old Van Joel, who, as the programme explained, was retained on account of past services, retailing cigars in the hall and obtaining fancy prices for “Auld Lang Syne”—how a lump comes even now into one’s knotty, hoary old throat at the recollections of these long-agos!

Monotonous as all this may sound to the modern up-to-date sightseer, there was a homeliness and an indescribable delight associated with Evans’s that surely the recording angel will not fail to remember when he sums up the sins of the sixties.

Across the market, again, was a hostelry, long since disappeared except in name, “The Hummums,” and who shall find to-day such rare old English fare, served on silver by the most typical of English waiters?

The rooms may have been dingy, the smoking-room a little stuffy, but the spirit of Bob Garnham must surely hover over the modern imitation that has arisen on its ashes and assumed everything but its indescribable comfort.

The approaches to Evans’s after dark were by no means free of danger in the long-ago sixties. The market porters, who for the most part were cut-purses and pugilists, were apt to waylay solitary foot passengers whilst awaiting the arrival of the vegetable vans, and I recollect an Uxbridge farmer named Hillyard entering the hotel one night with a broken wrist after being waylaid and robbed in Russell Street.

The old Olympic, hard by, was another nasty place to leave after the performance, except in a cab. Within fifty yards the alleys bristled with footpads, and any foolhardy pedestrian traversing the dimly-lighted Drury Lane or Newcastle Street was pretty sure not to reach civilisation without a very rough experience from the denizens of Vinegar Yard and Betterton Street.

The Forty Thieves were an organised bevy of sirens, whose headquarters were the Seven Dials, and whose mission it was to entice, decoy, and cajole any fool who had the temerity to listen to their cooing.

The Clock House on the Dials, now an apparently well-conducted pot-house, was in those days a hotbed of villainy. The king of pickpockets there held his nightly levée, and the half-dozen constables within view would no more have thought of entering it than they would the cage of a cobra.

If a man lost a dog the reward was offered there; if one’s watch disappeared it was there that immediate application was desirable; and if the emissary was not “saucy” he might with luck save it from the melting-pot that simmered all day and all night within fifty feet of Aldridge’s horse repository.

The walk through the Dials after dark was an act none but a lunatic would have attempted, and the betting that he ever emerged with his shirt was 1,000 to 60. A swaggering ass named Corrigan, whose personal bravery was not assessed as highly by the public, once undertook for a wager to walk the entire length of Great Andrew Street at midnight, and if molested to annihilate his assailants.

The half-dozen doubters who awaited his advent in the Broadway were surprised about 1 a.m. to see him running as fast as he could put legs to the ground, with only the remnant of a shirt on him; after recovering his breath and his courage he proceeded to describe the terrific slaughter he had inflicted on an innumerable number of assailants. A scurrilous print that flourished about this time in its next issue narrated the incident in verse by: “Oh, pray for the souls that Corrigan kilt,” etc. Corrigan, it may be added, was an Irishman, and not a particularly veracious one.

Any list of queer fish would be incomplete without introducing the name of Bill Holland, who, although he struggled on till the eighties, was in his zenith in the sixties. Rosherville being too far, and Vauxhall having disappeared, the North Woolwich Gardens came into favour with those who sought recreation of a less boisterous kind than that at Cremorne.

Bill Holland had all his life been a showman; amusing and full of exaggerated anecdote, he had catered for the public from time immemorial; every monstrosity had at some period passed through his hands; every woman over seven feet, and every man under four, had appeared under his auspices: the tattooed nobleman, the dog-faced man, the whiskered lady—all recognised him as master at one period or another. He had “directed” the Alhambra, the Surrey, the Blackpool Gardens, and, in later years, the Battersea Palace, and signally failed with each; but, sphinx-like, he invariably reappeared irreproachably groomed and waxed, with some confiding creature ready to finance him. His constant companion was Joe Pope, an abnormally fat little man, and a brother of the Q.C. who not long ago died. It was the brains of this obese little man, in conjunction with Bill Holland’s assurance, that kept the wheels going for over thirty years.

Across the river at Greenwich were the historical Trafalgar and Ship Taverns, where the famous fish dinners, served in the very best style, were procurable. Only fish, but prepared and served in irreproachable form; beginning with boiled flounder, one progressed by seven stages of salmon in various forms, filleted sole, fried eel, each with its special sauce, till whitebait plain and whitebait devilled found the wayfarer well-nigh exhausted.

It was only then that the folly of ordering dinner on a hungry stomach became manifest, and when the duckling that the smiling waiter had suggested made its appearance it was almost with tears that one turned away from its pleading savour and reluctantly confessed one’s inability to do it justice. And then the coffee on the lawn, and the scrambling for coppers amongst the water arabs in the surging mud below, were adjuncts that never failed in the completing of enjoyable evenings now for ever gone.

Why the resort went out of fashion seems an enigma. Forty, thirty, aye, twenty years ago both taverns were the almost daily resorts, during the summer and autumn, of the highest in the land. In one private room would be heard Her Majesty’s judges, cracking jokes as if they were incapable of judicial sternness; in another legislators by the score, who had travelled down by special steamer to eat and drink as if no such things as fiscal questions existed; whilst in the public room cosy couples dined, and roysterers smoked and joked, and yet all has passed like a pleasant dream. The Trafalgar has long since been pulled down, the Ship, if not closed, is very much changed for the worse, and Londoners swelter annually with the patience of Job, and are apparently indifferent to the delightful resorts they have lost.

It was during a May meeting, when rural deans and other provincial Church luminaries were staying at Haxell’s and the Golden Cross Hotels, that Satan prompted certain roysterers to raid these establishments when the reverend lodgers might be supposed to have retired to their respective closets. It was Nassau Clarke—a subaltern in the Life Guards—who conceived the brilliant idea, and collecting Jacob Burt, Charlie Buller, Lennon, and a few other well-known roysterers, we proceeded towards the Strand. The joke, if such it may be called, was to change every pair of boots reposing peacefully outside the various doors, and the development—which none of us was likely to witness—was the scare that would ensue at 8 a.m., when sober ecclesiastics might be expected to swear at the prospect of being late for their platform prayer at 9. Charlie Buller in those days was reputedly the handsomest man in the Household Brigade; an excellent bruiser, and not slow of wrath, he was, moreover, a desirable companion when altercations were likely to occur.

Lennon, on the other hand, was not a cockney, and only up on leave, but willing to assist in anything original or exciting. Not many months previously he had been awarded a brevet-majority and the Victoria Cross for a conspicuous act of bravery at the Taku Forts. I lost sight of him for years, and when I again met him he had left the Army and fallen apparently on bad times. In consideration of his past services, he was nominated years later for a Knight of Windsor; but the poor old fellow was “not himself” when he went down to be installed, and the appointment was cancelled. He was an excellent actor in comic parts, and has a son, I believe, on the London stage.

The winter of ’61 was an unusually severe one, and the river that washed the walls of the grim old Tower was covered with a thick coating of ice, which in its turn afforded a convenient asylum for the dead cats and other refuse that drifted upon it from the neighbourhood of the adjoining wharves. Locomotion in those pre-Embankment and underground railway days was not so convenient as now, and as cabs had practically ceased running by reason of the mountains of snow intervening between the Tower and the Monument, I had, together with a few boon companions, decided that the time had come for a migration, and went in for “first leave.”

And the choice we had made was by no means an unhappy one, for the weather that had made existence in London well nigh intolerable had driven the woodcocks into the coverts, and we all declared that a week of such surroundings would compensate for all the vicissitudes we had undergone from Kangaroos, Tower, and five o’clock bacon and eggs in London. The “route,” too, had come, and we reasoned, not unwisely, that the journey to Ireland was at best an unpleasant one, and that if we delayed, 1000 to 60 were by no means extravagant odds that we might get no leave at all.

It was about a fortnight after this that, having returned to grimy old Lane’s, I received a characteristic letter from my old chum, George Hay. “Most of my time” (he wrote) “is spent in accompanying the old squire on his various peregrinations over the estate, and by pointing out various agricultural developments that were absolutely necessary, or structural alterations that would improve the holdings. He leads me to understand that my place was on the spot I would one day inherit, and the fitting moment would arrive after I got my company. ‘D— it, sir,’ he would continue, ‘in my time no eldest son remained longer than a year in the army unless he was prepared to pay £10,000 over regulation for the regiment as Cardigan did.’

“‘But in the infantry, sir,’ I suggested, ‘things are different. Promotion is slower, and I can’t help thinking that the bonds that unite officers to the regiment are stronger than is usually the case in the cavalry. But I see no prospect of my company till we are under orders for foreign service, and we shan’t be at the top of the roster for another two years at least.’

“‘I have nothing to say against the line, sir,’ he would reply, ‘except that your officers can rarely ride to hounds.’

“‘But surely, sir,’ I answered, ‘there are other virtues you will not deny to the linesman; in garrison towns they at all events appreciate hospitality, and don’t insult worthy folks by accepting their invitations only to turn them into ridicule. You may remember the story of a young puppy who replied to a kindly hostess by “The King’s never dance, and the King’s never sing,” and this in a regiment, forsooth, where every man-jack of them was a shopkeeper’s son, and which was known as the “Trades Union.”’”

Great excitement meanwhile prevailed at the Tower; the route had come, the mess was closed, and everybody was packing in preparation for an early departure for Ireland. Transports in those long-ago days were not the floating palaces inaugurated years later by the Indian troopers. Cranky steamers—whose principal industry was the transporting of pigs and cattle—were hurriedly chartered by the War Office, and with the men packed like herrings, and the junior officers billeted amongst the band instruments, regiments proceeded at five knots an hour from London to the Irish ports.

The Colonel, during these preparations, lost no opportunity of describing his experiences when last stationed in Dublin; how he and certain boon companions were within an ace of being tried for their lives for throwing into the Liffey an old watchman deposited in a sentry-box; how they started the “Pig and Whistle” in Sackville Street, run on lines that would shock you, virtuous reader; their nightly visits to the “Quane’s” Theatre, where Mikey Duff performed _Hamlet_, and declined to accede to the demands of the gallery for “Pat Molloy and the roising step” with the indignant retort: “D— yer oise, what do you expect for toppence;” the orgies of “Red bank” oysters at Burten Binden’s, and the dinners at the Bank of Ireland, when the regiment furnished the guard; how old Bill, after a drinking bout, would stamp through every corner of the guard-rooms, cursing at everything, and winding up by the consumption of half-a-dozen brandies and sodas, and “very different to what it was in the Peninsula!”

“Payther” Madden, too, was holding forth on what he would show them in Cark, if “plase the Lard the rigimint was quarthered in the ould station,” and went on to describe how Barny Magee “wad come on and sing at the Hole in the Wall with a gaythaar in his fist, looking for all the world like a hamstrung moke,” and how the gallery would shout, “For the love of dacency, Barny, dhrop yer concertina and pull up yer stockin’,” and how Mrs. Rooney, bless her soul, would pass yer the toime of day with that grace—so genteel loike, so obsarvent—as ye paid toll to go in, with: “God bless you, Carporal, it’s you that has the lip,” or ilse: “Go an wid ye, Carporal, for a flirrt that ye are.”

“A sort of bloomin’ sing-song,” suggested a cockney comrade, “but give me London, with ’er bloomin’ orange peel and hashfelt, with ’er boats down to North Woolwich, with yer gal on yer knee and a new clay in yer face; a pint of shrimps maybe, and a pint of ale down yer neck, and no bloomin’ guards.”

Amid these conflicting sentiments the regiment quitted the Tower.

And what a delightful station the Dublin of the sixties was; here Lord Carlisle as Lord-Lieutenant reigned supreme, and though compelled by usage to keep up the mock court, with its mock “Master of the Horse” and “Gentlemen at Large,” diffused hospitality like the fine old English gentleman he was.

Nightly the captain and subaltern of the Castle Guard were invited to the Viceregal table, during which the kind old man clinked glasses and invited his every guest to take wine with him. How His Excellency could retain his head after all these courtesies was once a marvel till it transpired that the huge decanter before him was the weakest brandy and water diluted to the exact colour of Amontillado. And then the whist that followed at sixpenny points, when His Excellency rigorously prevented his partner—and his partner only—from seeing every card in his hand. How refreshing it all was!

No contortions short of dislocating their necks could prevent his adversaries from taking advantage of the dishonest opportunity, for the old gentleman cracked jokes throughout the entire rubber, and claimed and paid his sixpences with the scrupulousness of a confirmed gambler.

Among the Viceregal staff were some inflated specimens of vice-flunkeydom. Foster, Master of Horse, whose death occurred lately, was reputed as not knowing one end of a horse from another, and never ventured on a purchase for the Viceregal stables, at Farrell’s or Sewell’s, unless fortified by the close proximity of Andy Ryan or some other horse-coper. Burke, a Gentleman at Large and an ex-colonel of militia, was another warrior of the offensive type, and I shall never forget the scene when a youngster of the 16th Lancers at one of the levées gave him a peremptory order when he was officially glued to the staircase, under pretence that he mistook him for a flunkey. But the matter was not to end there, and before the réveille had ceased blowing at Island Bridge he was waited upon by a fiery buckeen to demand satisfaction on behalf of Kornel Burke.

Captain Stackpool (everybody had a military title) was another Dublin curiosity. Member of Parliament for Ennis, he affected Dublin and the delights of the Unoited Service from one year’s end to the other. Dublin, he assured me, was the most “car-driving, tea-drinking, money-spending city in the world,” and he was not far wrong.

Lord Louth, who weighed eighteen stone, and stood five foot seven in his stockings, had served some years in a kilted regiment; but he, too, has long since been gathered to his fathers.

About this time an amusing incident occurred to Lord Louth. The very best of fellows, his vanity was insatiable, and only London-built clothes were good enough to set off his graceful figure.

In the 14th Hussars was a diminutive cornet who also patronised the same tailor as Louth, and both these dandies—as appeared later—had telegraphed on the same day for a pair of the most bewitching trousers in preparation for some social event to which they had both been invited. Conceive the consternation of the two recipients when at the last moment a pair of diminutive pants revealed themselves to the enraged peer, and a garment sufficiently voluminous to engulf three Deal boatmen reached the expectant cornet. This latter was known as the “Shunter” from the extraordinary talents he developed later as a gentleman rider, and still later as a hanger-on of Abingdon Baird.

One of the most brilliant surgeons that Ireland or any other country has ever produced was just coming into prominence in those long-ago days. Dr. Butcher, who in appearance resembled the portraits of Disraeli in his younger days, was known professionally to nearly every man in the garrison; of the most enthusiastic type, he thought nothing of producing two or three stones from his waistcoat pocket and exultantly explaining that he had that morning taken them from certain patients’ interiors, and nothing gave him greater offence than refusing to attend one of his private séances. But the most marvellous operation he ever performed was on Billy Deane, of the 4th Dragoon Guards, who, having consulted every specialist in Europe, appealed to Butcher to save his arm and enable him to remain in the service.

A fall whilst hunting had resulted in the disease of the elbow-bone of the left arm.

“Nothing but taking your arm off will save your life,” was the universal fiat.

“D— nonsense!” was Butcher’s retort, and he cut a square clean out of the elbow.

Within six months Billy’s bridle arm was stronger than the other.