Donald Shaw

“ Lord Glasgow was not a lovable man; bluff to a degree, and sensitive as lyddite, the brine that he imbibed in his youth never appears to have left him, for his lordship was in the Navy when keel hauling was in vogue, and the sixties found him as foul-mouthed, irritable, and cross-grained as any British tar ought to be.
Suffice that in those hard-drinking, hard-swearing days, no head was harder, no répertoire more complete than that of this belted Earl (why belted?) ”

“ 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. ”

“ Two-pound points to £10 on the rubber were the staple stakes of even the sober old Whist, and then one was looked upon as depriving a better man of the seat unless prepared to bet an extra hundred. Old fogies, who had never previously risked a shilling, would cautiously creep to the table, and nervously tender half-crowns, till frightened out of their lives by Tony Fawcett, of the 9th Lancers, shouting, “D— it, sir, this isn’t a silver hell!” and then, not to be beaten, they would club together and make up the requisite sovereign. ”

“ But for the old woman, and an occasional apparition in a startling check costume that flashed in and out between the coffee-house and the pot-house, one might have imagined the entire place was uninhabited, so subdued and reposeful was everything.
Tall and angular by nature, with skin-tight overalls and a coat the colour of a Camden Town ’bus, Jerry Fry was the undisputed landlord of the unpretentious coffee-house, and recognised director of a gang of sharpers who made human nature their study, and scoured the highways and byways nightly in search of profitable quarry. ”

“ Sir Henry De Hoghton, a wealthy baronet who was above the horizon in the Sixties, though possessed of a fine estate and a palatial residence, preferred the hand-to-mouth existence of an hotel, and lived at Meurigy’s, now the supper-house yclept the Chatham. Never visible to the naked eye by day, he wandered into the Raleigh about midnight, and casting furtive glances in various directions, would settle down without a word. ”

“ London in the sixties was so different from the London of to-day that, looking back through the long vista of years, one is astonished at the gradual changes—unnoticed as they proceed. Streets have been annihilated and transformed into boulevards; churches have been removed and flats substituted; night houses and comfortable taverns demolished and transformed into plate-glass abominations run by foreigners and Jews, whilst hulking louts in uniform, electro-plate and the shabby-genteel masher have taken the place of solid silver spoons and a higher type of humanity. ”

“ Every man-of-war calling at Ascension is compelled to ship a dozen, which lie for weeks on deck, their heads resting on a swab, and the hose playing on them of a morning, while a stench more insidious than the vapours of a fried-fish shop attaches itself to everything; one’s hair-brush reeks like a turtle fin, and whether one eats, drinks, or smokes, it’s toujours tortue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Men seldom returned but in parties of twos or threes, and so it was that the Major’s “lady” found herself constrained to hug the walls of the grim old fortress during the early hours of that memorable night in the long-ago sixties.
It was the night after the big race, when Caractacus was responsible for much that followed, that the crowd at the Raleigh was phenomenal, and champagne was being consumed in tumblers from the entrance hall to the card room. ”

“ It was in the narrowest part of Bond Street that the goddess pitched her tent, and to say that the traffic was impeded would convey but a poor idea of the congestion that retarded locomotion in that worst-built of thoroughfares. Old men desirous of enamelling their bald old pates, ponderous females with scratch wigs and asthma, and girls, pretty and ugly, with defects capable of improvement, hustled and tussled to pay the fee of the wonderful enchantress who guaranteed to restore youth to old age and make one and all “beautiful for ever.” ”

“ Turning into Oxford Street there was the Queen’s Bazaar, afterward converted into the Princess’s Theatre, still with us, with its dismal, dingy frontage and limited shelter for ladies with guttural voices; whilst almost opposite was the Pantheon, with perhaps the most chequered career of all, having been, in turn, the National Opera House, the accepted Masquerade house, a theatre, and a bazaar till 1867, when it attained its present proud position as the main tap for the supply of Gilbey’s multifarious vintages. ”

“ Often did the rafters of Connaught Place rattle during these festive gatherings, and sheaves of shares changed hands till no one was sent empty away, and so by the aid of nitrate, “the Colonel” was wafted amid the highest pinnacles of Society. Occasionally a false note was struck when some over-eager recipient put his shares on the market—but even these faux pas were soon forgotten, for “the Colonel,” if not “Plantagenet blood,” had the instincts of a gentleman. ”

“ First came old Freer, as, casting a sheep’s eye at the Marquis, he contemplated the orchestra; next, producing a watch, he shouted, “time, gentlemen,” and half a dozen seedy instrumentalists ascended the stairs. The pianist, it was evident, was in his cups, but no notice was taken of this—it being admitted that he played better when drunk than when sober, and had even been known to supply impromptu variations and improvements to the “Mabel Valse” and “Blue Danube” when under the exhilarating influence of Freer’s brut champagne. ”

“ Five o’clock was striking as we drove past Covent Garden, and having suggested that excellent eggs and bacon were to be obtained at Hart’s Coffee House, all alighted and all ate as only diplomatists and night birds can.
As we drove still further West the strings of market carts wafted the odours of country life and green things into our debauched nostrils, and we slunk away to our respective homes more or less delighted with our adventures. ”

“ Luncheon on the Derby and Oaks days in the long-forgotten sixties was an institution that dwarfs the most ambitious displays of hampers and cold pies consumed on the tops of drags. Conceive a huge marquee with tables the entire length groaning under every delicacy, from plovers’ eggs at a shilling a-piece to patés and blanc-manges of the Gunter school of creation. Imagine vats six feet high around the entire walls distilling the best champagne into goblets filled by the most expert of footmen. ”

“ What became of the second wife I never heard, what became of the Alhambra lass and the dusky tadpoles that drove about the King’s Road at Brighton history does not tell, for “Love is a queer thing, it comes and it goes,” and all that remains to the present generation is the nebulous tale of a misguided man who kicked down wealth, position, and a happy old age in the reckless pursuit of a silly ambition. ”

“ It was in the 11th that the fire-eating Colonel shot a captain of his regiment dead in a duel, and only saved his commission by his overwhelming interest. It was a regiment in which every private was dressed and redressed at his Captain’s expense as if his uniform had been made by Poole, and where the overalls and sleeves were so tight that one marvelled how officers or men ever got in or out of them.
What a beautiful regiment it was in the old sixties. And one felt it was a national crime to send such troops to India. But all that, alas! is long since changed ”

“ This latter place, although palpably suffering from old age and the ravages of time, and propped up by beams innumerable, p. 49was the nightly rendezvous of oyster-eaters, where, sandwiched in between “loose boxes” upstairs and down, champagne and other drinks were consumed to excess.
Often amid these sounds of revelry, ominous cracks and groans warned the revellers that all was not right, till on one never-to-be-forgotten night a sound that vibrated like the crack of doom caused a stampede, and leaving wine, oysters, hats, unpaid bills, every one rushed helter-skelter into the street. ”

“ Not to have known Jinks was not in itself a reproach, but not to have known Jonas Hunt in the long-ago sixties was to have admitted that one was without the pale of Society, or certainly that section of it which gambled, raced, and drank all day and all night, if circumstances permitted. A fine horseman of iron nerve and unbounded assurance, he had ridden in the Balaclava charge before he was out of his teens, and on retiring from the service a few years later, developed into one of the best gentleman riders ever seen in England or France. ”

“ Does any one ever give it a thought that Charing Cross was not so very long ago a resort of footpads, and that even so late as the Sixties the sweet waters of the somewhat putrid Thames oozed and bubbled where the District railway station now stands? And how few are aware that, when Drummond’s Bank was in course of construction, fossils of mammoth, cave lions, rhinoceros, and Irish deer were found ”

“ How different is the entire neighbourhood to-day! The very name Ratcliff Highway has disappeared, and been replaced by that of Saint George’s Street East; where constables once patrolled on the qui vive in twos and threes a solitary embodiment of the law may now be seen, strolling along in a manner that once would not have been worth an hour’s purchase; where drunken sailors in sea-boots and knives at every girdle lurched against inoffensive pedestrians, unwashed women may now be seen at corners knitting stockings, whilst unsavoury tadpoles are constructing mud-pies in the gutter ”

“ By those who knew him intimately he will be remembered as a weak, amiable, and generous youngster, terribly handicapped by a colossal rent roll, a splendid pedigree, a generous, impulsive disposition, and an entire ignorance of the value of money. To the present generation, who have only heard of his escapades, he will appear as a reckless, unprincipled reprobate, preferring low company to that of his equals, incapable of restraining his passions in pursuit of the object of the moment, and sacrificing anything and anybody for their attainment. ”

“ In Soho Square, on the western side, where to-day—and all day—men with pronounced features, forbidding countenances, and of usurious tendencies may be seen in a first floor window exchanging views on the iniquitous restrictions associated with stamped paper, a bazaar existed in the long-ago sixties where dogs that squeaked and elephants that wagged their tails might have been bought by children of tender years who, for aught we know, may have since been plucked of their last feather by the vultures that now hover over those happy hunting grounds. ”

“ It would be absurd and nauseous to repeat the beautiful phrases one poured into the ear of a being who, if alive now—which is doubtful—has probably not a tooth in her head; suffice to say she was a superb écarté player, and initiated me into the rudiments of the game. It seemed marvellous to me that such a goddess should strive so laboriously to overcome in me the violation of every canon of the game, but in those long-ago days I was fair of hair and of a ruddy countenance, and the coincidence may not have been so extraordinary after all. ”

“ Conceive a long oblong table; in the centre sits the banker, whilst before him are two or three packs of new cards from which he tears the wrappers, shuffles them, and, placing them on the table, invites a player to cut. What fairer than this? What possibility of sharp practice when every eye is riveted on him, who, dealing one card to the right and one to the left, finally deals to himself? ”

“ Everybody consulted Madame Rachel. If a youth got a black eye at young Reed’s sparring rooms (at the “Rising Sun” in Whitehall) it was in Bond Street he was made presentable for any fashionable function in the evening, and in every conceivable walk of life one met evidence of the universal sway of enamel; whilst nightly at the Opera, Rachel and her daughter occupied a box on the grand tier and surveyed the battalions of old men and old women, youths and maidens, who had passed through their hands. ”

“ The drill field adjoining the barracks was converted into a paddock for brood mares and yearlings; the entire stabling and any superfluous out-houses became roomy loose boxes; hens cackled, cocks crowed, and pigs grunted from every point of the compass, and any youngster prepared to purchase a promising hunter—“a bit rough, but likely to shape well”—from the Colonel need perform no more arduous duties than eating his dinner in uniform and chewing a straw all day. ”