White
Conduit House, too, has an interest of its own for most Englishmen,
for did not Mr. Bartholomew the proprietor, in 1754, provide
bats and balls for his customers, and encourage the game of
cricket in the adjoining meadow, and so lay the foundations
of the Vast organisation of the modern game? There is no doubt
about it at all. The place continued the headquarters of cricket
in London for twenty years; men of condition played their matches
there, and in 1784 the club which met in that meadow included
the Duke of Dorset, Lord Winchilsea, Lord Talbot, Colonel Tarleton,
and no less a light of the cricket world than Thomas Lord, the
founder of the Marylebone Club.
The
history of these and a score of other entertainments in the
open air is recorded in the fugitive literature of their times,
admirably collected and arranged in works like that of Mr. Warwick
Wroth of the British Museum, with its orderly references and
authorities which make it a model of what such a work should
be. In such records you may learn how the "Three Hats"
at Islington was perhaps the home of the modern equestrian entertainment,
afterwards brought to perfection by Philip Astley, where "Johnson
the Irish Tartar rode a single horse standing on his head;"
how citizens with a taste for the placid old game of bowls went
to Dobney's in the Pentonville Road, to the Belvidere Tea Gardens
hard by, to the Black Queen Coffee House and Tea Gardens, Shacklewell
Green, or to Cuper's Gardens over the river. Dobney, we find
by the way, had another curious attraction about 1772, when
Mr. Daniel Wildman, the Bee Master, gave a fearsome exhibition
on horseback, "standing upright, one foot on the saddle
and the other on the horse's neck, with a curious mask of bees
on his face; he also rides, standing upright on the saddle,
with the bridle in his mouth, and by firing a pistol makes one
part of the bees march over a table and the other swarm in the
air and return to their places again."
Each
one of all these humble places had some special attraction of
its own. There was Copenhagen House, on the site of the Clock
Tower of the Cattle Market at Islington, famous for its fives,
where John Cavanagh, the prince of fives players, whose fine
play is commemorated in an essay of Hazlitt's, was wont to astonish
spectators with his skill at the game, eschewing the volley,
"but seldom missing a return off the ground, though it
rose no more than an inch."
There
is a human story of the origin of fives at Copenhagen House,
telling how the maid of the tavern, hailing from Shropshire,
meeting an acquaintance from the same county, and talking over
the game, which was one of the diversions of their native place,
improvised a fives ball, made an appointment for a day later,
and played a game against the end of the house, which delighted
the onlooking topers and so started the tradition of fives at
Copenhagen House. The very gable where the maid and her friend
played their historic game remained the theatre of the famous
contests which followed, and the cooks in the kitchen were said
to recognise the severe returns of Cavanagh on the wall, and,
"as the meat trembled on the spits," to remark, "There's
the Irishman again."
All
the roads, indeed, that led out of London to the north and west,
were avenues which led pleasureseekers to open air entertainments
of one sort or another. Belsize House was a country mansion
on the west side of Haverstock Hill, opened in 1720 by a Welshman
"with an uncommon solemnity of music and dancing,"
with a park wilderness and garden a mile in circumference "filled
with a variety of birds which compose a most melodious and touching
harmony," as we are assured. Cakes and ale were much in
evidence at Belsize House, and foot and galloway races"
six times round the course."
In
1726 they "hunted a fat doe to death with small beagles,"
when sportsmen were invited "to bring their own dogs if
not too large." Farther north still was Hampstead with
its famous wells and gardens, and a local clergyman and chapel
for those amorous couples who could not afford the journey to
Gretna Green. Its later Assembly Room with its fugitive fashion
is embalmed in much of the fiction of the last part of the century,
and there Mr. Samuel Rogers "danced minuets in his youth
and met a great deal of good company."
Visits
to Hampstead in those days were in the nature of an expedition
which called for the services of the daily stage coach. Perhaps
the most northerly point of attraction for pleasure-loving Londoners
was the Spaniards Tavern, unless Kilburn Wells or New Gorgia
in Turner's Wood, or Hornsey Wood House, could claim that distinction.
The Spaniards had its pebble walks laid out by the ingenious
Mr. Staples with curious devices of the Signs of the Zodiac,
the Tower of London, Adam and Eve, and the Great Pyramids and
its "prospect of Hanslope Steeple within eight miles of
Northampton and Langdon Hill in Essex, full sixty miles east,"
unless the imagination of its advertisers betrayed them.
Between
these outposts and the Thames, Bayswater Gardens in the Bayswater
Road on the west, and Spring Garden in the Mile End Road on
the east, there were a dozen or it may be a score of similar
places which claim and receive attention in a history of the
town, but must be passed over here with such mention.
We
have been concerned so far with the places of entertainment
which flourished on the al fresco tastes of the Londoner at
various periods, but nearly all lying on the north side of a
line continued east and west of what is now approximately Oxford
Street. It was on this side of London that the al fresco tradition
of the tea garden attained its greatest splendour, mainly, as
we believe, from the natural love of a town dweller for rising
ground and brisk air, partly from the variety which two little
rivers gave to that country, and also by reason of the attractions
of the semi-fashionable crowds who at times gathered round one
or other of its numerous spas.
Carry
on to page ten
