Haymarket

“ Every Londoner knows the Pall Mall by sight, the restaurant one door above the Haymarket Theatre, and is familiar with the lace-curtained window of its buffet, its entrance and the line of five French windows with flowers before them on its first floor, and there are few playgoers who have not, before spending an evening at the Haymarket or His Majesty's over the way, dined at one time or another at the Pall Mall Restaurant. ”

“ This street is wide, beginning at Coventry street and running down for a distance of about 1,400 feet to the "bottom," ending at the line where Pall Mall begins. They always say the "bottom" or "top" of a street in London, never "east" or "west." If there be a place in London that is deserving of notice, it is the Haymarket. Hundreds of years ago, the washerwomen of the village of Charing, just below us, and now one of the great business centres of London, used to bring their dirty linen here [Pg 480] to cleanse it, and then dry it on the green fields in the Haymarket. ”

“ As he enters this new line of route, he will perceive that the buildings assume a more important aspect. They are for the most part stucco-fronted, and being frequently re-painted, they have a light and cheerful appearance. In the Haymarket are Her Majesty’s Theatre and the Haymarket Theatre; and near at hand are many club-houses and Exhibition-rooms. Pall Mall displays a range of stone-fronted club-houses of great magnificence. At the foot of Regent Street is the short broad thoroughfare of Waterloo Place, lined with noble houses, and leading southwards to St. James’s Park. ”

“ The Haymarket manager continues to wade knee-deep in tragedy, in spite of the state of the weather. The fare is, however, too good for any change in the carte. “Werner” forms a substantial standing dish. The “Boarding School” makes a most palpable entrée; while “Bob Short,” and “My Friend the Captain,” serve as excellent after-courses. The promises recorded in the Haymarket bills are, a new tragedy by a new author, and an old comedy called “Riches;” ”

“ Fleet-street, Ludgate-hill, Cheapside, Newgate-street, the “off” parts of St. Paul’s Church-yard, Cornhill, Leadenhall-street, Bishopsgate-street, the free bridges, with many other places where locomotion never ceases, are, in proportion to their width, as productive of street mud as the Haymarket.
Were the Haymarket a mile in length, it would supply, at its present rate of traffic, to the scavenger 6 loads of street mud daily, or 36 loads for the scavenger’s working week. In this yield, however, I am assured by practical men, the Haymarket is six times in excess of the average streets ”

“ Petersburg are thronged with a tumultuous crowd. To-day meat may still be eaten, to-morrow the great fast begins; every butcher's shop will be shut; for seven whole weeks oil is in the ascendant. Every one is in haste to make a good meal to-day.
The great Haymarket, the "Szenaja Plostadt," is the attraction to the hungry throng. There, in long rows before the butchers' booths, stand on their four feet frozen oxen, bucks, and wild boars, with heads outstretched, the butcher either sawing or chopping off the desired joint for his customers ”

“ S. D. Page and Sons have built a large warehouse in the Haymarket, where they employ upwards of 100 hands in the manufacture of brushes for wholesale trade. They are also extensively engaged in the paper trade and in the manufacture of paper bags by very interesting and curious machinery worked by steam power, and by which each bag is pasted, folded, cut, and completed in the machine with astonishing rapidity. Three such machines, and several hands, are employed. ”

“ About the same time the whole Haymarket company, under Buckstone’s management, began to make frequent rounds of the country theatres; and other “touring combinations” were soon organized. It is manifest that the “combination” system and the stock company system cannot long coexist, for a manager cannot afford to keep a stock company idle while a London combination is occupying his theatre. The stock companies, therefore, soon dwindled away, and were probably quite extinct before the end 535 of the ’seventies. ”

“ Mr Barnett has often pointed out to me the little room in the Albany where he began his long and difficult struggle with fortune. He spent little, he lived laboriously; within ten years he had accumulated a sufficient capital to devise and launch the Haymarket Bank. The scheme of this speculation, risked by a comparatively poor man, yet in the early thirties, should be enough to stamp the genius of its creator. The Bank depended upon a principle which, had it but proved successful, would have revolutionised the financial world. ”

“ Rich's power was annihilated, an independent and powerful company was formed, and the Haymarket opened under the management of Wilks, Dogget, Mrs. Oldfield, and Cibber. Mrs. Oldfield soon retired upon a special allowance, and Cibber, by playing off his intractable coadjutors the one against the other, and making himself the referee upon all occasions of dispute, obtained the great object of his ambition, the entire and actual management.
Rich had hired Drury Lane, on the condition that he should pay £3 a-night while the house was open. ”

“ In 1836 he went to America, where he remained at the Park theatre, New York, for seventeen years. His début in Lond was nominally made at the Haymarket on 28 March 1853 as Sir Anthony Absolute. He had, however, some twenty years earlier played at the Victoria the Lord Mayor in 'Richard III' as a substitute for his father. At the Haymarket he took the lead in courtly comedy. ”

“ For twenty-nine years he played at this house, the Haymarket, or Drury Lane, acting at first young lovers in comedy, and afterwards characters in dramas, but seldom apparently in his long career being troubled with a part of primary importance. ”

“ In July 1763, at the Haymarket, he achieved the greatest success hitherto attained in the part of Jerry Sneak, a henpecked husband, written expressly for him by Foote, in the latter's ‘Mayor of Garratt.’ Back at Drury Lane, he played Foresight in ‘Love for Love,’ Abel Drugger in the ‘Alchemist,’ Maiden in ‘Tunbridge Walks,’ Nicodemus Somebody in the ‘Stage Coach,’ and Sharp in the ‘Lying Valet.’ At the Haymarket in 1764 he was the first Rust, an antiquary, in Foote's ‘Patron.’ During the two following years his name is not found in London bills. ”

“ Nesbitt (Lady Gay Spanker) , and Madame Vestris (Grace Harkaway) , was a triumph, remains to this day one of the best of acting plays of its period, and is a remarkable work for so young a man. In February 1842 he gave to the same theatre, under his own name, 'The Irish Heiress,' and on 19 Sept. to the Haymarket 'Alma Mater, or a Cure for Coquettes.' 'Woman' followed at Covent Garden, 2 Oct. ”

“ To facilitate them in their undertaking, however, there was established, at a house on the eastern side of the Haymarket, what may be called a dépôt of voituriers, where a man was almost always to be found or heard of, ready, for a specified sum, to carry any lady, gentleman, or child, who might be locomotively disposed, from one part of Europe to another. ”

“ Harriet, her sister, afterwards Mrs. Humphrey Bland, played at the Haymarket in 1828, presumably on 30 Sept., Letitia Hardy in 'The Belle's Stratagem' to the Hardy of Farren, and was on the stage until her death on 5 Nov. ”

“ And near the butchers naturally were the cooks, who flourished in Cooks' Row, along Thames Street. Candlewick Street took its name from the chandlers. Cornhill marks the site of the ancient corn market. Haymarket, where the theatre is so well known, was the site of a market for hay, but that is comparatively{214} modern. The citizens did not go so far out of the city to buy and sell hay. Stow says: "Then higher in Grasse Street is that parish church of St. ”

“ White in the farce of that name, and at Cardiff as Pauline in the ' Lady of Lyons.' After playing in various Yorkshire towns she was engaged by Knowles for three seasons at Manchester, where she became a favourite. Her first appearance in London was made on 5 Oct. 1857 as Pauline in the 'Lady of Lyons' at the Haymarket, where on the 13th she played Constance in the 'Love Chase.' On 7 Nov. ”

“ It is but a step from the Markets of Quebec to the markets of Ontario in a matter of miles, but in atmosphere you step from Old France to Old England.
Here in Kingston or Brantford is the old Market Hall that might be in Nottingham or Newark or any other English market-town. And here the market-men are of the English type—Old-Country fellows or United Empire Loyalists. Here is the canvas-covered farm-wagon looking like the spiritual ancestress of the prairie schooner. There is a change from women to men as salesmen. There is not the customary tumultuous chatter of the French. ”

“ Built to hold a thousand people, here it squats, an emptiness; the only sounds those in the long sombre belt of firs, whose branches sway with a sound of the sea in the airs that sweep the breezy Heath.
Newmarket is first mentioned in 1227, when it seems to have been established in consequence of an epidemic raging at the mother-parish of Exning, about two miles away. This “old market” of Exning, now a village, owes its name, say some, to the Iceni, but it is much more likely to have derived from the Celtic word “Exe,” for water, for the springs there are a feature of the place. ”

“ Hayes on horseback made a tour of the Ouleout country and the upper Susquehanna, announcing to all the inhabitants that a new store had been opened. Solomon Martin, who had a rival store, predicted disaster for the new firm. But Mr. Hayes’s tour brought a crowd of customers at once and a large trade was soon secured.
In the following year the firm was able to send a [32] large quantity of local produce to Catskill and Baltimore. Pearl and pot ashes, pork, bacon, wheat, cattle, dried apples and eventually whiskey became staple articles of export. ”

“ Exchange, and the crier proclaims the fair from the charter, at the prompting of the town-clerk. The fair is proclaimed, and is already in existence. There is the market-place, an area of six acres, jammed full of stalls, shows, bazaars, and people. From the earliest hour of the morning, wagons loaded with cheese have been arriving, which are now seen on one side of the market-place, pitched down in piles, and in quantities enough, one would think, to serve all England for a twelvemonth. ”

“ All the affairs of the Hays were so satisfactorily settled now that the young couple were only waiting for the departure of Will Walling to leave Haymore for London, where they might live in retirement in that great city until they should have fitted themselves to mingle with the more critical of their Yorkshire neighbors.
Early in the new year pleasant letters came from America. They were from Cleve and Palma Stuart, and brought news of the change of fortune that would take them to the mountain farm of West Virginia. ”

“ Long before “the unfolding star wakes up the shepherd” are the London cows milked; and the great wholesale vendors of the commodity, who have it consigned to them daily from more distant parts to the various railway stations in the metropolis, bear it in carts to every part of the town, and distribute it to the hundreds of shopkeepers and itinerants, who are anxiously waiting to receive it for re-distribution amongst their own customers. It is evident that a perishable commodity which everyone requires at a given hour, must be so distributed. ”

“ And of course that first market of Notre Dame des Victoires was herself but a daughter of the old markets everywhere in vogue in France transplanted to Quebec. So that if “blood counts” the “’scutcheon” of the markets now scattered throughout Canada, many of them in the great out-of-doors literally under the banner of the Maple Leaf, is certainly that of an “Honourable Company”.
To Quebec then, belongs the title of “Mother of the Canadian Market”. It was on her foot that the Province children of the Dominion learned to ride:
“To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. ”

“ The hunter arose and followed Ran upstairs and into the library, where they sat down at a table on which stood pen, ink and paper.
“Longman,” said Ran, “would it suit you to be gamekeeper of Haymore?”
“Why, Mr. Hay, it would make me the happiest man on earth! But I really would not wish you to give me the place at another man’s expense.”
“Never fear; it will be at no man’s expense in the sense you mean. There has been no gamekeeper at Haymore for a year past. The last one left to seek his fortune in Australia, and no successor has yet been appointed. The place is yours if you will have it. ”

“ The majority of the banks are members of the Clearing House, Post Office Court, where a daily exchange of drafts representing millions of pounds sterling is effected. The Royal Mint is on Tower Hill. The Stock Exchange is in Capel Court, and numbers of brokers have their offices in the vicinity of the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England.
Manufactures and Retail Trade.—No part of London can be pointed out as essentially a manufacturing quarter, and there is a strong tendency for manufacturing firms to establish their factories outside the metropolis. ”

“ We appear to be holding our own everywhere as regards piece goods and iron, whilst five-sixths of the imports of the United States consist of flour, salt pork, and other provisions. The Haytians are French in their tastes, but the cheapness of our Manchester goods enables our importers to hold their own. The great export, coffee, appears in great part ultimately to reach French ports, as it is not appreciated in other countries, whereas its cheapness and good quality recommend it strongly to the French Government for the use of the army. ”

“ The Bon Ton Store—Haydock & Simons'—the largest shop in town. The first-story front of clear glass, the plates cleverly bound at the edges with brass. The second story of pleasant tapestry brick. One window of excellent clothes for men, interspersed with collars of floral piqué which showed mauve daisies on a saffron ground. Newness and an obvious notion of neatness and service. Haydock & Simons. Haydock. She had met a Haydock at the station; Harry Haydock; an active person of thirty-five. He seemed great to her, now, and very like a saint. His shop was clean! ”