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.
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