Warwick William Wroth

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 p. viiof drink; it has lost any convenience or merit it may once have had as an improvised club and a cheerful resort. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ It will be remembered that this picture represents a portly dame, accompanied by an evidently ill-used husband and two crying children, passing by the tavern, wherein a merry drinking-party is seen through the open window. Perhaps the mantling vine is not a natural feature of the place, but bitter Hogarthian symbolism—‘Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house.’ On the other hand, Clerkenwell has still its Vine Yard Walk, and twenty years ago in one or two of the gardens in a square near Sadler’s Wells, there might be found a vine which produced a passable grape. ”

“ In the early part of 1851 he took Gore House, the famous home of Lady Blessington at Kensington, and fantastic skill and showy decoration soon made the old-fashioned stucco-fronted building the wonder of a London as yet unfamiliar with palatial restaurants. The newspapers and a prospectus printed on satin paper with green-tinted edges announced the advent of ‘Soyer’s Universal Symposium,’ a single ticket for which was to cost a guinea, and a family ticket—your family might consist of five—three guineas. ”

“ Some of the spectators considered that, at any rate, the balloon could be punished, and ‘a well-directed volley of stones’ soon left the monster prostrate on the lake. An attempt was made to drag it on shore and tear it in pieces, but at this moment the cord broke. Some of the rowdier spirits now sought out the proprietor, hoping to duck him in one of his own ponds. And when this failed, they attacked the glass panes of the lion’s conservatory. But suddenly the police appeared and Vesuvius burst forth in all its fury, and when the fireworks were over the visitors quietly dispersed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The gardens were by no means solely frequented by South Londoners, though they were far from the luxurious west, and on the wrong side of the Thames. Fireworks, promenade concerts and ballooning were a bait for the shillings of the sightseer, but for more than twenty years at least these attractions never quite sophisticated the simple recreation afforded by the Zoological Garden. ”

“ In March, 1878, the theatre was hired for a single performance, a boxing match between Rooke and Harrington. A rough company of 800 people were got together, and the prize, a splendid silver vase valued at £100, was ostentatiously displayed to the audience. An old ‘Surrey’ waiter who was present is said to have recognized in this noble trophy a capacious leaden vessel which had stood on one of the refreshment counters in the water-drinking days of the Zoological Gardens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In September, 1899, the newspapers announced that the Eagle premises were in the hands of the house-breakers. A few old frequenters hastened to revisit the place, and some others, no doubt, who had only heard of the Eagle as a somewhat low resort associated with that enigmatic song of their childhood, ‘Pop goes the Weasel,’ must have been surprised to find the buildings—rather handsome in their way—still in existence. ”

“ The Great Exhibition of 1851 was indirectly responsible for the existence in Kensington of two short-lived institutions—a circus and a restaurant. They are rather outside our subject, but, as having something of an open-air character, may be briefly described.
In the autumn of 1850 William Batty, a famous circus proprietor, acquired some land within five minutes’ walk of the new world-wonder, the ‘Crystal Palace,’ and erected thereon an elliptical-roofed pavilion which accommodated many thousands of spectators, and had a large arena open to the sky. ”

“ Crowds poured in from Greenwich, Deptford, and Woolwich, and the road became so blocked that even ‘families of distinction could not approach within a mile of the tavern.’ Some fortunate parishioners ascended the tower of the church, and a jolly tar got astride of the Mermaid sign. In front of the house an abnormal assemblage of fat men and still fatter women jostled and pushed and tumbled one over another in a way that delighted the coarse caricaturists of the period. Sadler’s companion was a naval officer, Lieutenant (or Captain) Paget, who paid a hundred guineas for his seat in the car. ”

“ Smith proposed to supply the want by erecting on the site of the house, or near it, a capacious building. His baths were opened in 1838, and the popular orchard was utilized as a garden promenade, which he provided with an orchestra and a room for concerts and dancing. In imitation of the panoramas of the Surrey Zoological Gardens, the ‘Taking of Fort Bhurtpore’ was reproduced in the grounds, and the fireworks and crackers of Professor Tumour rendered the capture of the fortress by the English a lifelike spectacle. ”

“ In 1846 an Act of Parliament empowered the Commissioners of Woods and Forests to form a park in the Fields, and in 1850 the Red House and its shooting-ground were purchased by them for £10,000. But the landlord (James Ireland) and the fair people had still two years to run. Mr. Ireland, on his part, considerably forced the pace, and made his garden into a minor Vauxhall, where we hear of balloons and fireworks, a ballet, a circus, a dancing-platform, and a tight rope. All this must have been on a humble scale, for sixpence and threepence were the highest charges. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Eagle reopened in the spring of 1832 with many of the attractions that long continued to characterize it. In the garden was an orchestra of Oriental type, variously described as Moorish or Chinese, and the Pandean Band from Vauxhall Gardens was engaged to perform. Dancing took place, generally once a week, in the ‘Grecian tent’ or in the assembly-room, and the gardens were adorned with Chinese lanterns, cosmoramas, fountains, and dripping rocks. In the Saloon there were concerts and ‘vaudevilles’ every evening, with sacred music (in Lent) from Handel and Mozart. ”

“ One drawback to the selectness of the Hippodrome (and the proprietor’s profits) was a path across the enclosure through which the public had a right-of-way. The footpath people seem, as a rule, to have been orderly enough, p. 35but gipsies, ‘prigs,’ and hawkers did not neglect the opportunity of mingling with the nobility and gentry. In March, 1838, an attempt was made in Parliament to block this footpath by a measure entitled the Notting Hill Enclosure Bill; but this harmless title was speedily perceived to conceal an attempt to legalize horse-racing in London. ”

“ Scott was badly wounded, and was carried on a shutter to the tavern, where he died in a p. 40fortnight. This was practically the last of the Chalk Farm duels, [40a] and, curiously enough, it is the London Magazine [40b] that about a year later furnishes a long and most philosophical account of the tea-drinking at this very garden. What the writer notices is the seriousness of the ordinary frequenter of the garden, who drinks and smokes with no approach to the least flexibility of limb or feature. There are three plain citizens sitting stolidly in one alcove without uttering a word. ”

“ The Eagle tavern and Grecian theatre which stood till lately at the corner of the dreary City Road and Shepherdess Walk were developed out of a quiet eighteenth-century pleasure-garden known as the Shepherd and Shepherdess, which had its arbours, skittle-ground, and small assembly-room. [57a] About 1822 a rather remarkable man, named Thomas Rouse (born in 1784) , came into possession of the premises. [57b] He is said to have begun life as a bricklayer; at any rate, he had a turn for building, and in later days indulged himself in saloons, pavilions, and Cockney gardening. ”

“ Balloon ascents, which had such a strange fascination for the frequenters of Vauxhall in the thirties and forties, and which were always an attraction at Cremorne, do not seem to have been a feature of the Surrey Gardens. An ascent by Henry Coxwell, on September 7, 1854, was of some importance, as the balloonist for the first time gave a public exhibition of his methods of balloon-signalling in war. His apparatus was attached to the car, and the signals were supposed to be addressed to the beleaguered fortress of Sebastopol. ”