Pall Mall Gazette

“ VOLUME VII. JANUARY--JUNE, 1890.
"Murray's Magazine stands out head and shoulders above its competitors."--Glasgow Herald.
"Murray's Magazine has fairly won its way to the very front rank."--Nonconformist.
"Murray's Magazine improves every month. More convenient in form and cheaper, it seems to contain all that we expect to get in the big monthlies."--Land and Water.
"Not one of the shilling monthlies has better maintained its early promise than Murray's Magazine."--Scotsman.
"Perhaps the most readable of all the shilling monthlies."--Pall Mall Gazette. ”

“ If great people have left their mark on the street, some curious individualities have also been connected with it. Think of four women racing down Pall Mall for a prize, to wit, “a holland smock, a cap, checked stockings, and laced shoes!” ”

“ Sir Douglas Straight remained editor till the end of 1908, when he was succeeded by Mr Higginbottom.
Founded in 1880 by Mr H. Hucks Gibbs (afterwards Lord Aldenham) , for Mr Frederick Greenwood to edit when he had left the Pall Mall, the St James's Gazette represented the more intellectual and literary side of Tory journalism in St James's Gazette. opposition to the new Liberalism of Mr Greenwood's former organ; it was in fact meant to carry on the idea of the original Pall Mall as Mr Greenwood had conceived it, and was (like it) more of a daily review than a chronicle of news. ”

“ When he stealthily went downstairs, and opened the door and passed into the street, behold! the new day was shining abroad—and how cold, and still, and silent it was after the hot glare and whirl of that bewildering night! No living thing was visible. A fresh, sweet air stirred the leaves of the trees and bushes in St. James's Square. There was a pale lemon-yellow glow in the sky, and the long, empty thoroughfare of Pall Mall seemed coldly white. ”

“ Then the road goes beside the graveyard and again through corn to the general store of John Marion Rains, which with five houses in sight—and one of these the York home—marks the western confine of Pall Mall.
One can be in the center of Pall Mall and not know it, for the residents live in farm houses that dot the valley and in cabins on the mountainsides. The little church, which sits by the road with no homes near it, is the geographical as well as the religious center of the community—it is the heart of Pall Mall. ”

“ On the right-hand side as you go from Pall Mall there are most respectable shops, but the wonder to me is how they manage to attract custom sufficient to enable them to pay what must be their very heavy rents. ”

“ Somewhere, behind Pall Mall, unheeded the sun has set: the sky is powdered with crimson dust; one by one the shops gleam out, blazing their windows of burnished glass; the twilight throbs with a ceaseless shuffle of hurrying feet ”

“ On every side of the route down Ludgate Hill, Fleet Street, and the Strand, and more westward still, through Pall Mall, St. James’s, and Mayfair, iridescent stars and crowned monograms glowed like titanic jewels from a thousand buildings.220 Fleet Street and the Strand were garlanded across with festoons of many-coloured globes, and the streets of this part of the town resembled nothing so much as an unending triumphal arch of rainbow-hued fire. Observed from Waterloo Place, Pall Mall seemed literally ablaze with general conflagration, so lavishly were the Clubs illuminated. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A second great fire, on December 6th, 1867, again destroyed the building, which was subsequently re-erected with its principal frontage in Pall Mall, at a great cost; this in its turn we have seen disappear, and the new “His Majesty’s Theatre” rise on its site, with its chief entrance in the Haymarket, and a long frontage to Charles Street. Luckily, the old arcade is embodied in the new building, and here are still to be seen those dear little shops that look so clean and prosperous and yet so diminutive—like a sort of Tom Thumbs among business establishments! ”

“ It is referred to so far back as the middle of the fifteenth century, and it was in high favour as the headquarters of the October Club in the reign of Queen Anne.
During the eighteenth century many fashionable resorts were located in Pall Mall and neighbouring streets. In Pall Mall itself was the famous Star and Garter, and close by was St. Alban's Tavern, celebrated for its political gatherings and public dinners. Horace Walpole has several allusions to the house and tells an anecdote which illustrates the wastefulness of young men about town. ”

“ But the Junior Carlton Club, facing Pall Mall, has removed this stigma; it is a fine specimen of architecture. Demolition, previous to reconstruction, has already begun next to it. After this as far as John Street is a row of comparatively insignificant narrow houses of various heights and [Pg 54] styles. Some of the houses on the north side of Pall Mall were built before the completion of the square, so that there was no room for large mansions here. At the corner of John Street and Pall Mall is what is called "Ye Olde Bull Tavern," a square box-like stuccoed house. ”

“ The Pall Mall has an exceedingly comme il faut clientele, and any man who did not wear evening clothes or a dinner jacket in the restaurant would feel himself rather a fish out of water there at dinner-time, and would probably take cover in the gallery. I see at the Pall Mall very much the same people whom I see at the Savoy and the Carlton, and the lady who dines at the smaller restaurant before going to a theatre to-day, probably to-morrow, when a dinner constitutes the entertainment for the evening, is taken to dine at one of the larger restaurants. ”

“ Pall Mall is as much Pall Mall to him as it was when he trod it in considerably tighter boots, never mind how many years ago. At his club the same waiter (waiters never die) will bring him the paper, and stir the fire for him, just as he used to do when the Reform Bill was a thing unheard of, and he can contemplate his bald head in the very same mirror that once reflected locks of Hyacinthine cluster. ”

“ The lapidary has from the first felt himself at home with Nature, and has found room for many of her devices and eccentricities, which he could not now bear to turn out of doors. Neither are we inclined to quarrel with him about his arrangements, though his shop exhibits nothing which will remind us of a frontage in Pall Mall or Bond Street. Moreover, when we look a little closer, he is not such a mere dreamer after all. Commerce has not been forgotten, nor is a certain kind of elegance lacking. ”

“ In the court-yard are the state-carriages of the nobility; and the streets around the park are thronged with crowds of anxious spectators.
These are the moments when that gloomy building is lighted up with the splendour of modern royalty; at all other times, night and day, red grenadiers pace to and fro in front of the dark walls. The court-yards are given up to the gambols of birds, cats, and children; but every morning, a military band of music plays in the colour court.
Pall Mall is one of the most splendid streets in London; its splendour is chiefly owing to the club houses. ”

“ THE TURNPIKE AT HYDE PARK CORNER, 1706.
[Pg 29]
CHAPTER II. ST. JAMES’S STREET AND PALL MALL.
“O bear me to the paths of fair Pall Mall,
Safe are thy pavements, grateful is thy smell.”
—Gay’s “Trivia.”
Can we do better, after the surfeit of bricks and mortar which we have just undergone, than relax our jaded senses and relieve our wearied eyes by loitering for a few moments in the Green Park? See! it is just across the way, and a convenient entrance helps to tempt our steps. ”

“ The pavements of Pall Mall were full of gentlemen in black coats and top hats, with here and there a white waistcoat and a button-hole to light up the throng; the sentry in scarlet and bearskin outside the War Office stood presenting arms to the passage of a field officer ”

“ Where the palace once stood, a hundred little children are paddling up and down the steps to St. James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the Athenæum Club; as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the United Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London now—the mart of news, of politics, of scandal, of rumour—the English forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last despatch from the Crimea, the last speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. ”

“ Pall Mall is overlaid, as in a palimpsest, with imaginary clubs; and the narrow, silent streets behind the Abbey are roused to life by the hoot or jingle of phantom cabs on their way to a political dinner.
It is a world complete in all its generations, all its social grades. They are born and educated, these dream-children; they love and quarrel, marry and separate, make money and lose it, live and die. Another generation presses upward to take their place ”

“ Waterloo Road and Blackfriars Road, "over the water," as they trend southwards pass through strange and often unsavoury purlieus. Every district has its special idiosyncrasies. Piccadilly and St. James's are always aristocratic. Pall Mall has a severe and solid dignity; while the Strand and its continuation, the narrow and tortuous Fleet Street, are instinct with ancient honour and literary association. Yet, even here, if the visitor have not the "seeing eye" that discerns the past through the present, he may "walk from Dan to Beersheba and find all barren." ”

“ So that on Saturday evening there was a crowd in Pall Mall and in the neighboring streets. It might have been supposed that there was an immense crowd of brokers permanently established around the Reform Club. ”

“ Vanhomrigh's, then walk up the Pall mall, through the park, out at Buckingham house, and so to Chelsea a little beyond the church: I set out about sunset, and get here in something less than an hour: it is two good miles and just five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight steps; so there is four miiles a day walking, without reckoning what I walk while I stay in town. When I pass the mall in the evening it is prodigious to see the number of ladies walking there, and I always cry shame at the ladies of Ireland, who never walk at all, as if their legs were of no use, but to be laid aside. ”

“ The club houses in Pall Mall, St. James's Street, and elsewhere, were elegantly and most appropriately illuminated, with one solitary exception—the Reform club house in Pall Mall, in front of which was exhibited the word "Victoria" in variegated lamps. Some wags doubted the propriety of this display, and, looking at the Parliamentary events of the preceding night, were sceptical as to the fitness of the word at such a moment. ”

“ The Pall Mall, until then a sedate chronicle and review of the day's events, suddenly became the initiator of all kinds of new programmes and movements, political and social, besides astonishing people by its dash and unconventionality. In January 1884 General Gordon, who had been on the point of resigning from the army, was dispatched on his fateful mission o Khartoum, as the direct result of an ‘interview’ with him published in the Pall Mall and reinforced by a leading article in which Stead urged this step upon the government. ”

“ Origin of name of, 73 Jordan, Mrs. (Actress) , 103 Johnson, Dr., 1, 43, 71, 118, 119, 121, 127 John Street, Pall Mall, 47, 128 Jones, Sir Thomas, 13 Kauffmann, Angelica, 109 Kean, Edmund, 21 Keith, Rev. ”

“ Oh, give me the sweet shady side of Pall-mall! ”

“ And so long as each must keep her separate establishment, it will not be found possible to reduce living much below the present figures. But London has more wisely met the pressure of the times in those magnificent clubhouses, which have made Pall Mall almost a solid square of palaces hardly inferior to the homes of the nobility themselves. Each of these houses has its hundreds of members, who really fare sumptuously, having all the luxuries of wealth on the prices that one pays here for poverty. The food is furnished by the best purveyors, and charged to the consumers at cost ”

“ With their homes back in the mountains nearly fifty miles from the railway, with a journey before them over rocky roads and up mountainsides to the other communities of Fentress county, the people of Pall Mall live in the communion and democracy of one great family. Children call old men by their Christian names. ”

“ Phileas Fogg, having shut the door of his house at half-past eleven, and having put his right foot before his left five hundred and seventy-five times, and his left foot before his right five hundred and seventy-six times, reached the Reform Club, an imposing edifice in Pall Mall, which could not have cost less than three millions. ”

“ In Bold Street is the Palatine, a miniature copy of the Clubs of Pall Mall: at the doors and windows may be seen, in the intervals of business, a number of young gentlemen trying very hard to look as if they had nothing to do but dress fine and amuse themselves. ”

“ Fyffe, an old and highly-esteemed member of the Times staff, who had joined Mr. Frederick Greenwood in the editorial direction of the new development of the Pall Mall. What Walter said to Fyffe I never learned in detail, but subsequently had reason to guess he told him he had in the cab downstairs a young fellow who was (or would be) one of the wonders of the journalistic world, and that the morning edition of the Pall Mall would have no chance unless it secured his services. ”