CHAPTER VII.
MISCELLANEOUS SIGNS, DATES, AND INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.
‘Many things of worthy memory.’
Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew.
I SHALL close my account with a few miscellaneous signs and inscriptions which I could not appropriately fit in elsewhere. Several eminent banking firms carefully preserve the signs which were used by them before their houses were numbered; but they have been so ably described by Mr. Hilton Price and others, that little more need be said. The Marygold is in the front shop of Messrs. Child and Co.’s premises, Fleet Street; it is of oak, the ground stained green, with a sun and a gilt border: the motto underneath is, ‘Ainsi mon âme.’ The Three Squirrels of Messrs. Gosling are worked in iron and attached to the bars which protect their central window, and the original sign of copper is preserved in the front office. From Mr. Price I learn that as early as the year 1684, and perhaps earlier, James Chambers kept a goldsmith’s shop at the Three Squirrels over against St. Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street; and it is a curious fact that one family of Chambers bears the three squirrels in its arms. Hoare’s Golden Bottle hangs over the doorway of their banking-house. Sir Richard Colt Hoare thought it was a barrel sign adopted by James Hore, of Cheapside, because his father, Ralph, was a member of the Coopers’ Company. More likely, however, it was a sign of the same description as the Black Jack and the Leathern Bottle, of which a genuine specimen from the corner of Charles Street, Leather Lane, has lately found its way into the Guildhall Museum. Unfortunately, the Grasshopper—the old sign of Messrs. Martin and Co., in Lombard Street—has not been preserved. It was the crest of Sir Thomas Gresham, who is believed to have here carried on his business. A most interesting history of the house has lately been written by Mr. J. B. Martin, one of the partners. A quaint and charming sign is the little carved figure of a naval officer taking an observation—the Wooden Midshipman of Dombey and Son. He may still be seen in the Minories, having migrated from Leadenhall Street some years ago. Not long since the owners sent him for change of air to the Naval Exhibition. The figure and its associations form the subject of a capital paper by Mr. J. Ashby-Sterry in All the Year Round for October 29, 1881.
At the corner of Charlotte Street and the Blackfriars Road there is a figure of a dog overturning a three-legged iron pot, in its eagerness to get at the contents; this is the sign of a wholesale ironmonger’s establishment said to date from 1783. The Dog’s Head in the Pot, as it is called, seems, of late years at any rate, to have been usually adopted by members of this trade, because the vessel represented is of iron. The sign is said to indicate a dirty, slovenly housewife. Larwood and Hotten mention a coarse woodcut of the beginning of last century (to judge from the costumes, copied from an older original) which represents two old women in a disorderly room or kitchen. One of them wipes a plate with the bushy tail of a large dog whose head is buried in a pot. Under it are the lines:
‘All sluts behold, take view of me,
Your own good husbandry to see.’
A Dutch saying, to anyone late for dinner, is that he will find the dog in the pot; in other words, that the remains of the dinner have been handed over to the dog to finish.
The Dog’s Head in the Pot is a very old London sign, being mentioned in a tract from the press of Wynkyn de Worde called ‘Cocke Lorell’s Bote.’ The person who dwelt at this sign was therein described as ‘Annys Angry with the croked buttock—by her crafte a breche maker.’ A later notice occurs in the will (dated September 3, 1563) of Thomas Johnson, citizen and haberdasher, of London, who gave £13 4s. annually to the highways between Barkway and Dog’s Head in the Pot, otherwise called ‘Horemayd,’ probably a house of entertainment in the parish of Great or Little Hormead, in Hertfordshire, by the side of the road from Barkway to London. At a house in Westgate Street, Gloucester, some beautifully carved Tudor panels have lately come to light. One of them has on it a dog or leopard eating out of a three-legged pot. A seventeenth-century trade-token, issued from Red Cross Street, and another from Old Street, St. Luke’s, have the device of the Dog’s Head in the Pot.
A medallion in plaster or terra-cotta, which looked as if it might have been copied from a classical coin, was till lately to be seen on the gable of a little fishmonger’s shop in Cheyne Walk. This, though a humble specimen of its class, belonged to a style of decoration once common. I have before me a view, dated 1792, of a house on Tower Hill with similar medallions. Sometimes the heads of Roman Emperors were thus placed, sometimes the cardinal virtues or other emblematic figures. In the third edition of Stow, by Anthony Munday, occurs the following passage, descriptive of Aldgate: ‘The old ruinous Gate being taken downe, and order provided for a new foundation, divers very ancient peeces of Romane coyne were found among the stones and rubbish, which, as Mr. Martin Bond (a Worshipful Citizen, and one of the Surveyors of the worke) told me, two of them (according to their true forme and figure) he caused to be carved on stone, and fixed on eyther side of the Gates Arch without, eastward.’ These coins were of the Emperors Trajan and Diocletian. Martin Bond laid the foundation-stone of the new gate in 1607. The little house in Cheyne Walk was formerly a freehold with the right of pasturage on Chelsea Common; it was pulled down in October, 1892. I have drawn it for the frontispiece of this volume; the lower part appears in a delightful etching by Whistler, called ‘The Fish-shop.’
One of the most interesting signs in existence belongs to my friend Mr. F. Manley Sims. It does not, however, strictly belong to London, having been brought from Poole some years ago; its earlier history has yet to be discovered. This is a doctor’s signboard, excellently carved, with figures in high relief. It is divided into compartments: in the centre—more important than the rest—is the doctor himself, in Jacobean costume, his potions ranged on shelves behind him; around, in seven compartments, are represented various operations of surgery; and below, in relief, appear the words from Ecclesiasticus, ‘Altissimus creavit de terra medicynam et vir prudens non abhorebit illam.’ Anno Domini 1623. There are traces of paint and gilding; the whole is enclosed within an ornamental border, and has a highly decorative effect.
Somewhat akin to the sculptured street signs are the tablets on which are inscribed the names of the streets, and often the dates of their building or completion. They have historical value where, as is not unfrequently the case, they record a name now in danger of being forgotten, and some of them are designed with a good deal of taste. So many of these tablets remain that I shall not attempt a list, but shall only mention a few good examples. One of the oldest is in Great Chapel Street, Westminster, and is inscribed: ‘This is Chappeil Street, 1656.’
The following are instances of the inscriptions, which may help us to make out the history of the streets. On a corner house at the east side of Dering Street (late Union Street), Oxford Street, is a stone inscribed, ‘Sheffield Street, 1721.’ Curiously enough, in Horwood’s Map of 1799, and in another issued in 1800, the name is given as Shepherd Street, so that here we have four changes in 170 years. On a modern house at the south-east corner of Danvers Street, Cheyne Walk, much of which is now cleared away, there is a stone, supported by brackets, with a pediment which tells us that ‘This is Danvers Street, begun in ye year 1696 by Benjamin Stallwood.’ Danvers House, hard by, was not pulled down till 1716. May’s Buildings, on the east side of St. Martin’s Lane, have the name, and date 1739. Mr. J. T. Smith, in ‘Nollekens and his Times,’ tells us that they were built by Mr. May, who ornamented the front of No. 43, St. Martin’s Lane, a few doors off, where he resided. His house is still there; it has pretty cut brick pilasters, and a cornice, and is now used as a restaurant. The archway which leads into Sardinia Street, under one of the old houses on the west side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is inscribed above the keystone on each side, ‘Duke Streete, 1648.’ This street was renamed in 1878, after the chapel there, once belonging to the Sardinian minister, which was demolished in the riots of June 2, 1780, but shortly afterwards rebuilt, and is now known as the chapel of SS. Anselm and Cecilia. Here Fanny Burney was married, in 1793, to General D’Arblay. A stone tablet, which has on it ‘Nassau Street in Whettens Buildings, 1734,’ is still to be seen at the south-west corner of Nassau Street. In Strype’s Map of 1720 the ground here, facing Gerrard Street, is occupied by a large mansion with a garden at the back, Nassau Street not being yet made.
Some of these tablets are well designed; a very nice example, though not an early one, is placed above the first-floor of No. 16, Great James Street, Bedford Row. It is an irregular convex shield, surrounded by elaborate scroll-work of a style not uncommon about the time of its erection, namely, in 1721. As a typical specimen it has been drawn for this work. James Street, Haymarket, is also marked by a stone with ornamental border, above a first-floor window of what is left of the old Tennis Court, which is said to have been connected with the noted Gaming House and Shaver’s Hall.
The date on it—namely, 1673, indicates, I suppose, the year in which the street was built or finished; Shaver’s Hall existed some time previously. The Tennis Court ceased to be used in 1866, to the regret of many. In the year 1887 the upper part was rebuilt; but from the tablet downwards the original walls, though stuccoed over, remain. Mr. Julian Marshall says that in this court Charles and the Duke of York used frequently to play their favourite game, and that the house, No. 17, at the south-western corner of James’s Street and the Haymarket, is said to have been that through which the royal brothers used to pass, on their way to the Tennis Court.[77] It does not, however, appear that there was any contemporary evidence connecting them with it.
In the region called Mount Pleasant, Gray’s Inn Lane, not far from the new thoroughfare Rosebery Avenue, there are two or three tablets of a different kind. Near the west end, between Nos. 55 and 56, is a plain square stone, with ‘dorrington street 1720’ incised in Roman capitals. This stone is in a brick frame, with moulded hood, and projects from the frame about an inch and a half. Further east, on No. 41, nearly opposite the site of the prison, are two more tablets; one, similar to that just described, has ‘baynes street, 1737.’ Over this is a far more elaborate example of cut or moulded brick, with a pediment. It has the inscription ‘in god is all our trust,’ and below some marks or signs in relief (one of which appears to be a T-square), with the date 1737. The motto is similar to that of the Brewers’ Company, and of the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company; with the latter I should think that the builder or first possessor may have had some connection.
This last, being a house and not a street tablet, reminds me that there are scattered about here and there on the fronts of houses, initials and dates which by judicious treatment are made quite decorative. One of the prettiest was a little cut brick tablet on an old house—No. 164, Union Street, Southwark—lately destroyed, which had on it beneath a pediment the initials w. h. in monogram, and the date 1701. Again, in Walbrook, on the west side, is a tablet merely dated 1668, with well-designed brackets and cornice. On a modern house—No. 4, Tothill Street, Westminster—called in 1885 the Cock, now the Aquarium Tavern, there is a stone on which are cut the date 1671, a heart-shaped mark, and the initials e. t. a.
In 1850, when Peter Cunningham wrote his handbook, the old house was yet standing; in it Thomas Southerne, the poet, had lodged, as pointed out by Mr. Hutton in his ‘Literary Landmarks of London.’ The heart has puzzled me; a similar mark was formerly on a house in Peter Street, Westminster. Can it have been a parish mark? An undoubted device of this kind appears on a house at the corner of West Street and Upper St. Martin’s Lane, and consists of two ragged staves crossed, with the date 1691, and the initials s. g. f., which indicate the parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields. A mark of the parish of St. Bride’s, dated 1670, is in Robin Hood Court, Shoe Lane. At the corner of Artillery Street, Bishopsgate Without, and Sandys Row, soon to be improved away, there is a flat stone having fastened on it a piece of iron, shaped like a broad arrow, and below the date 1682. Is this a parish mark, or can it have been connected in any way with the old artillery ground—the Tassel Close of an earlier time, when crossbow-makers used here to shoot at the popinjay? In Strype’s time ‘divers worthy citizens’ still frequented it for martial exercise. Of greater historic interest are the monogram of Henry VIII., the Tudor portcullis, and other devices carved on the spandrels of the arches which are under the gatehouse of St. James’s Palace.
A general description of the painted signboards of London has formed no part of the scheme of this book, because much has already been written on the subject, and it would be too extensive to treat satisfactorily in the limited space at my command. It may, however, be useful to note a few signs of this kind still in situ. The Running Footman, of which there are two specimens in Hays Mews, Charles Street, Berkeley Square, is particularly interesting on account of the costume, and because it is a record of the days when carriages moved at little more than a foot’s pace,[78] and there were no police to regulate the traffic. It is supposed to date from about 1770. Such a servant as this would be singularly out of place in modern London; but in the East, retainers of the same kind, who run in front and clear the way, still naturally form part of a great man’s equipage. The Goat in Boots is to be seen in the Fulham Road in front of a public-house lately rebuilt. To Le Blond—a Flemish painter, who lived at Chelsea—was attributed the original design, which seems to have been painted or repainted by Morland. Since then, however, it has been daubed over again and again. Some ingenious person has conjectured that the sign originated from a corruption of the Dutch words: ‘der Goden Bode’ (the messenger of the Gods), said to have been applied to Mercury, and to have been formerly used on houses in Holland, to denote that post-horses were to be obtained; but this seems improbable, as the house in old deeds is called the Goat. At the Ben Jonson tavern in Shoe Lane a curious old wooden panel is preserved, which bears on its two sides what are supposed to be portraits of ‘rare Ben’; as it is nailed against the wall, one side only is now visible. The person portrayed is a lean hungry-looking man, the very reverse of the poet; it seems likely, nevertheless, that this was the old signboard. A more ambitious effort is the full-length portrait of the Duke of Cumberland—the hero of Culloden—which is on a public-house at the corner of Bryanston Street and Great Cumberland Place, built about 1774. It is affixed to the wall in accordance with the law passed a short time previously. One is reminded of a letter by Horace Walpole to Conway, dated April 16, 1747, in which he thus moralizes: ‘I observed how the Duke of Cumberland’s head had succeeded, almost universally, to Admiral Vernon’s, as his head had left few traces of the Duke of Ormonde’s. I pondered these things in my heart, and said unto myself all glory is but a sign.’ Now that Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly has passed away, it is worth while to record that over the bar of the Restaurant on this site (rebuilt 1886) was to be seen the old painted signboard of a white horse with flowing mane and tail, and the inscription, ‘The New White Horse Cellars, Abraham Hatchett.’ Last year, owing to further alterations, this was removed.
The signs I have referred to are comparatively well known, but that of the Coach and Horses—No. 49, St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell—has, I think, hitherto escaped observation. This is a large picture representing a lioness attacking one of the leaders of a mail-coach; a yokel with a pitchfork, and a dog, advance intrepidly to the rescue. In the background is a wayside inn, in front a pond. The event depicted actually took place on October 20, 1816, and is described in ‘Cassell’s Popular Natural History,’ vol. ii., p. 119. It seems that the Exeter mail-coach was on its way to London, and the driver had pulled up at Winter’s-Low-Hut, seven miles from Salisbury, to deliver the bags, when one of his leaders was suddenly attacked by a ferocious animal, which proved to be a lioness. A large mastiff came to the rescue, but when she charged him he fled, and was pursued and killed about forty yards from where the coach was standing. It turned out that the lioness had escaped from a menagerie which was on its way to Salisbury Fair. She was eventually driven into a granary, carrying the dead mastiff in her teeth, and there secured by her keepers. A picture of this strange attack was long exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly; of this picture I imagine the sign to be a copy, it seems too well done to have been painted expressly for the public-house to which it belongs. In the course of 1889 a curious sign, the Whistling Oyster, disappeared from No. 13, Vinegar Yard, on the south side of Drury Lane Theatre. Here were formerly oyster and refreshment rooms, and it seems that about 1840 Mr. Pearkes, the then proprietor, discovered among his stock an eccentric bivalve, which actually did produce a sort of whistling sound; much custom for a time and many jokes resulting therefrom. In an early volume of Punch there is a fancy portrait of the whistling oyster.
In the course of this work I have several times alluded to the Guildhall Museum, beneath the Guildhall Library, which is not known as it deserves. It contains not only sculptured signs, but a very valuable collection of objects of artistic and antiquarian interest, most of them from various parts of the city. The only drawbacks are that the crypt or room in which they are placed, being half underground, is very imperfectly lighted, and that the collection has not hitherto been catalogued. This latter defect will, however, I understand, be shortly remedied. Before descending let us glance at the statues which flank the entrance to the Guildhall Library and Museum from King Street. They are from the old College of Physicians in Warwick Lane—one of Wren’s buildings—some remains of which still exist, incorporated in the premises at the back of No. 1, Newgate Street. These statues represent King Charles II. and Sir John Cutler, a rich merchant whose avarice, handed down by Pope[79] and others, has become immortal. It seems that in 1675 Sir John—a near relation of Dr. Whistler, the president—expressed a wish to subscribe towards the rebuilding of the College of Physicians, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire, having previously stood at Amen Corner. When a deputation attended to thank him, he renewed his promise, and specified the part of the building for which he intended to pay. The theatre accordingly bore on its front towards Warwick Lane the inscription, ‘Theatrum Cutlerianum.’ In the year 1680 statues in honour of the king and the knight were voted by members of the college. A certain amount of money must have been furnished, and some years afterwards Cutler advanced them more; but after his death his executors, in 1699, claimed the whole with interest, the money pretended to be given, and that actually given, being alike set down as a loan in Cutler’s books. The demand was compromised for £2,000. The statue remained, but the college wisely obliterated the inscription which, in the warmth of its gratitude, it had placed beneath the figure: ‘Omnis Cutleri cedat labor amphitheatro.’ Pennant[80] is responsible for the above account, perhaps overcoloured, which he gave on the authority of Dr. Richard Warren. Strype speaks of Sir John as a great benefactor to the college; he had no doubt given largely to the Grocers’ Company, of which he was warden, and a portrait of him is in their possession.
I will now ask my readers to come with me to the Museum, which well repays a visit. I understand that the nucleus of it was formed in 1829, when various antiquities, discovered in digging the foundations of the then new Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the new London Bridge, and in the destruction of the Guildhall Chapel, were brought together; but it has only of late years become important. I have already described the sculptured signs which here find a home; let me now briefly call attention to other objects which seem to me especially interesting. There is an article on them in the City Press for September 5, 1891, to which I am indebted for several useful hints. The accumulation of earth and débris in the City is so great, that the present town is raised many feet above Roman London. Now that excavations for new buildings are carried down much deeper than formerly, valuable objects are not unfrequently brought to light. The Roman antiquities in the Museum are many and important; of these perhaps the most striking is a large piece of tessellated pavement from Bucklersbury, in almost perfect condition. It was found no less than 19 feet below the level of the roadway, on which account it is thought to be an early relic of the Roman occupation. One of the good deeds of the much-abused Metropolitan Board of Works was the gift of this piece of pavement to the Corporation. In the course of excavations in the City no less than three bastions of the original wall have been discovered. The foundations of these were formed by masses of statuary, inscriptions, and other débris of earlier Roman buildings. A fine specimen is the statue of a Roman soldier, found at the bastion in Camomile Street a few years since. Then there is a sculptured lion fiercely attacking another animal, and many similar remains of equal or greater interest; to describe them all in the briefest way would fill a chapter. About one other relic of the Roman occupation I shall say a few words, because it appears to be an almost unique instance of a joke, written by a Roman with his own hand. This is a tile found in the Roman wall during the excavations for Cutler’s Hall in Warwick Square. On it are the following words, evidently incised when it was still soft: ‘Austalis, Dibusu vagatur sib cotidem,’ which was thus translated by the late Mr. Charles Roach Smith: ‘Austalis wanders off (from his work) by himself to the Gods every day.’ The sentence is thought to apply to a workman who was in the habit of absenting himself at odd intervals, for purposes of prayer maybe—or more likely of refreshment, and to have been written by a fellow workman.
Of later objects, the various specimens of mediæval skates are worth mentioning. Each one is fashioned out of the tibia of a horse. They have been found from time to time in the neighbourhood of Moorfields, and well exemplify the description written by Fitzstephen in the twelfth century, wherein he tells us that ‘when the fen or moor which watereth the walls of the City on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice—some tie bones to their feet, and shoving themselves by a little picked staff, do slide as quickly as a bird flieth through the air, or an arrow out of a crossbow.’ Interesting also are the flat caps of burgesses, considered to be of the time of Henry VII., which were found in Finsbury, May, 1887, and exhibited to the members of the British Archæological Association by Mr. J. W. Bailey. They resemble the flatter kind of Scotch caps, or the Basque caps, and have a peculiar little flap behind. Gold coins were discovered in the double rims of these caps, kept there for safety, no doubt; one of them an angel, of the time of Richard II. Then there is a fine collection of Elizabethan graybeard jugs or bellarmines, the grotesque heads on them being caricatured from the cardinal of that name, who so strongly opposed the reformed religion. Among larger objects, a splendid fireplace from the old mansion in Lime Street which belonged to the Fishmongers’ Company, and on which Messrs. G. H. Birch and R. Phené Spiers drew up such a valuable monograph at the time of its destruction. An old stone conduit from South Molton Street is worth a glance. It has on it the City arms and the date 1627, and was found six feet below the pavement. There is interest of a kind, too, in the inscription from Pudding Lane, affixed in 1681 by overzealous Protestants to the house of Farryner, the King’s baker, where the Great Fire of London first began. This inscription was taken down in the reign of James II., replaced in that of William III., and finally removed about the middle of last century. It was found in the cellar and brought here when the house (latterly numbered 25) was pulled down in 1876.
A few signs not sculptured are, I think, worth alluding to. One of the quaintest is composed of blue and yellow Dutch tiles, and was doubtless once fixed near the entrance of a coffee-house, but unfortunately no record of it has been preserved. It is about twenty inches high, and represents a boy with long hair, in seventeenth-century costume, somewhat like that of the modern Bluecoat boys. He is standing, and pouring out coffee; by his side is a table, with appliances for drinking, and tobacco pipes, and above, on a scroll, the words ‘dish of coffee boy.’ A sign of this kind in remarkable preservation, and finely executed, is the Cock and Bottle—three to four feet high, and worked in blue and white Dutch tiles with an ornamental border—which came from Cannon Street. The date of this sign is said to be about 1700; the house to which it belonged formerly stood on the south side, and was pulled down in 1853, at the time of the Cannon Street alterations. A public-house (Nos. 94 and 96), still called the Cock and Bottle, occupies the site. A sign of a Dolphin which belongs to the earlier part of the eighteenth century was in 1890 presented by Messrs. Burrup, so long pleasantly connected with the Surrey Cricket Club. It is painted on copper, and comes from a shop on the south side of the old Royal Exchange, where an ancestor of the Burrup family was first established in 1730. A unique relic is the little plate of metal, inscribed as follows:
‘Abraham Bartlett, who makes ye boulting mills and cloathes, dwells at the sign of the boulting mill at Thames Street, near Queenhith, London, 1678.’
It is surmounted by a grotesque head, and fixed on a thin piece of wood with a ring for hanging it up. The boulting-mill was used for sifting meal by shaking it backwards and forwards, boulting-cloth being a material of loose texture for the meal to pass through. Of doubtful origin is a classically designed figure of a boy in low relief, with foliated border, and the date 1633; the material of this is cast iron. Another curious relic is a wooden statuette of Time, with scythe and hour-glass, which formerly belonged to the clock in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. The inscription tells us that it was presented by the churchwardens, who in my opinion ought never to have removed it from the church for which it had been carved, where it was far more appropriately placed than it can possibly be here; though of course one is glad that it is preserved.
Last, not least, a very interesting stone bas-relief of doubtful origin, which purports to represent Whittington and his cat, was bequeathed by the Rev. Canon Lysons. The figure in question is doubtless that of a boy carrying a little quadruped in his arms. The tablet to which it belongs seems to have been broken off on the side to the spectator’s left, and therefore probably formed part of a larger piece of sculpture. This relic, which at a first glance seems to resemble a sculptured house-sign, was exhibited some years ago at a meeting of the Archæological Institute. Mr. Lysons stated on that occasion that it was dug up in Westgate Street, Gloucester. From a rent-roll of 1460, he had learned that in the said year Richard ‘Whitynton,’ lord of the manor of Staunton, possessed a house or houses, called ‘Rotten Row, or Asschowellys-place’; and from a lease it appeared that the house, in the foundations of which the stone was found, stands exactly on the site of Asschowellys (in modern orthography Ashwell’s) Place. The Richard Whittington here alluded to was great-nephew of the renowned Lord Mayor of London, living contemporaneously with his famous namesake, the rent-roll above named having been made within thirty-seven years of Sir Richard’s death. This is certainly a very singular coincidence, and if it could be proved that the tablet in question represented Whittington and his cat, we might consider that the tradition about him, which has delighted the childhood of so many thousands, was really founded on fact. Mr. Lysons was strongly of that opinion; he stated, however, that the house in Westgate Street, under which the tablet was found, besides being on the site of Ashwell’s Place, is also on the site of a Roman temple—and perhaps most impartial observers will be inclined to think that the costume of the figure, and the general style of the tablet in question, point rather to indifferent Roman than to fifteenth-century work.
CHAPTER VIII.
A FEW SUBURBAN SPAS.
‘Of either sex whole droves together
To see and to be seen flock thither,
To drink and not to drink the water,
And here promiscuously to chatter.’
Islington Wells or the Threepenny Academy, 1691.
IN connection with sculptured signs, and again when alluding to the arms of the Fowler family, and to Canonbury, I have had occasion to describe houses in Islington. I shall now take up the thread of my discourse, from the White Lion on the west side of the High Street, and ask the kind reader to explore with me the sites of some of the old places of entertainment nearer London. A short distance further south is the Angel, rebuilt in 1819. This was one of the picturesque old galleried inns which have now become almost extinct. Close at hand, on the opposite side of the way, is the old Red Lion tavern, very much rejuvenated; it puts forward a bold claim to date from the year 1415. On the gables are shields, apparently modern, with lions in relief. Seventy or eighty years ago this house stood almost alone on the high-road. Here Tom Paine was said to have written his ‘Rights of Man,’ and the tradition is that Goldsmith, Thomson, nay even the great Dr. Johnson, visited it. In the middle distance of Hogarth’s picture of ‘Evening,’ there is a house, supposed to be the old Red Lion, which shows how rural were its then surroundings. The scene is laid in front of the Myddleton’s Head—also at that time apparently a country wayside inn, which, says Pinks, had been built in 1614. A portrait of the worthy founder of the New River Company projects by way of sign from the gable. This house stood on the south side of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, from which it was separated by the New River. Malcolm has recorded that in 1803 it was still picturesque. He says: ‘A few paces northwards (from Islington Spa) conduct the passenger under a portrait of Sir Hugh Myddleton (tolerably well painted), who faces his river adorned with tall poplars, graceful willows, sloping banks, and flowers.’ How changed is now the scene! The trees have long since perished as utterly as the anglers,[81] ‘the noble swans’ and water-fowl, of an earlier time; and Sir Hugh would no longer face his once pleasant stream, which in its old age has disappeared from sight, and taken refuge under ground. In 1831 the Sir Hugh Myddleton tavern replaced the former house of entertainment. This, in its turn, has now ceased to exist, having been pulled down, with other houses in Myddleton Place, to make room for the new thoroughfare[82] from the Angel, Islington, to Holborn Town Hall, opened July 9, 1892, under the name of Rosebery Avenue.
One of the leading characteristics of London citizens of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was their taste for frequenting public gardens and houses of amusement in the suburbs. Many of these were originally health-resorts—‘spas’ or ‘wells,’ they were called, from the springs of mineral water which had formed the chief attraction. In such places the northern suburbs abounded, and the parish of Clerkenwell[83] might be considered their headquarters. At a time when travelling was toilsome and costly, sometimes even dangerous, it was useful to have a little Buxton or Harrogate close at hand. To supply the demand, some enterprising person discovered a spring with rare healing powers; some doctor wrote it up, and the place became, for a time at least, fashionable. Such a spa in St. George’s Fields I have already described. Let me say a few words about others equally interesting, in the neighbourhood in which we now find ourselves.
Not far from the site of the Myddleton’s Head, on the north side of the New River, no longer visible, and close to the New River Head, stands Sadler’s Wells Theatre, built on the site of one of these places of health-resort. It seems that some time before 1683, a certain Mr. Sadler, said to have been a surveyor of highways, had put up a wooden building hereabouts, which was known as Sadler’s Music-house. In that year his servants, when digging in the garden for gravel, were reported to have discovered a mineral spring, and in 1684 a pamphlet was published by a doctor named Thomas Guidot, puffing the curative powers of the water. He speaks of five or six hundred patients being there every morning, and assures us that the spring had merely been rediscovered: ‘The priests belonging to the Priory of Clarkenwell, using to attend there, making the people believe that the virtues of the waters proceeded from the efficacy of their prayers.’ ‘These superstitions,’ he adds, ‘were the occasion of its being arched over and concealed at the time of the Reformation.’
In spite of this fine puff, the waters, apparently, soon ceased to attract, though they continued to be sold in Sadler’s name for some time, as shown by an advertisement of June, 1697.[84] In 1699 the building was advertised as Miles’s Musick-house. The place had then become known as a resort for very disorderly characters. Miles was succeeded by Francis Forcer, whose father, a musician, seems to have lived on the spot.
The son, said to have been an Oxford man, introduced the diversions of tumbling, and rope-dancing with the pranks of Harlequin and Scaramouch. He died in 1743, and in the following year the establishment was being carried on by one John Warren, when it was presented by a Middlesex Grand Jury as a place of ‘great extravagance, luxury, idleness, and ill-fame.’ Soon afterwards it got into the hands of Mr. Rosoman,[85] who in 1765 pulled down Sadler’s wooden erection, and built a regular theatre on the site.
Towards the end of last century Sadler’s Wells was still some distance from London, and the roads were by no means safe. George Daniel, in his ‘Merrie England,’ says: ‘It is curious to read at the bottom of the old bills and advertisements the following alarming announcements, “A horse patrol will be sent in the New Road that night, for the protection of the nobility and gentry who go from the squares and that end of the town; the road also towards the city will be properly guarded.” Again, “June, 1783.—Patroles of horse and foot are stationed from Sadler’s Wells gate along the New Road to Tottenham Court Turnpike; likewise from the City Road to Moorfields; also to St. John Street, and across the Spa fields to Rosoman Row, from the hours of eight to eleven.”’ On Easter Monday, April 2, 1804, a new sort of entertainment called ‘Naumachia’ was produced at Sadler’s Wells. An immense tank had been constructed under the stage and beyond it, which could be filled by water from the New River, and emptied at pleasure. On this aquatic stage, the boards being removed, was given a mimic representation of the Siege of Gibraltar, in which real vessels of considerable size bombarded the fortress, but were subdued by the garrison and to all appearance burnt.[86] After a time the success of the novelty was prodigious, and many pieces of the same kind were afterwards produced. This theatre was distinguished a generation ago as the home of Shakespearean drama, under the management of that sterling actor Samuel Phelps. It was rebuilt in 1879. The actual site of the old well has long been lost; Malcolm asserted that it had been discovered some time before he wrote ‘in the space between the New River and the stage-door’ of the theatre, and that it was said to have been encircled with stone, with a descent of several steps. Cromwell, however, writing a few years later, tells us that ‘persons who have an intimate acquaintance with the theatre for the last half-century have no recollection of the discovery; and as it is known that springs yet exist under the orchestra and stage, it seems probable that the ancient healing fountain might be traced to that situation.’
For a few years, during the first half of the seventeenth century, there was a rival to Sadler’s Wells in a popular place of amusement called ‘The New Wells near the London Spa.’ There were gardens here, and a theatre, in which took place what we should now call variety entertainments. Mrs. Charlotte Charke—the eccentric daughter of Colley Cibber, was one of the performers. Ceasing to attract, it was closed in 1747, the theatre being afterwards used as a chapel under the auspices of John Wesley, and, according to Pinks, the houses Nos. 5 to 8, Rosoman Street now occupy the site.
Lysons, Halliwell Phillipps, and others, have confused the mineral spring discovered by Sadler with a mineral spring of greater celebrity called the New Tunbridge Wells; but, though near each other, they were quite distinct. In 1699 a narrative poem was published under the title of ‘A Walk to Islington, with a Description of New Tunbridge Wells and Sadler’s Musick House,’ in which the fame of the wells is ascribed to its medicinal water, and that of the music-house to such good cheer as cheesecakes, custards, bottled ale and cider, and the diversions of singing and dancing. An article in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December, 1813, puts the matter beyond a doubt; and their relative positions are clearly marked in Horwood’s map of 1799. New Tunbridge Wells, or the Islington Spa (really, of course, in the parish of Clerkenwell), was a spring of chalybeate water in a garden, the entrance to which until 1810 was opposite the New River Head on the south side; No. 6, Eliza Place marked the site. This street, a continuation west of Myddleton Place, has, like it, been absorbed by Rosebery Avenue. The spa was open to the public before 1685, as is proved by a curious advertisement in the London Gazette of September 24 in that year: ‘Whereas Mr. John Langley, of London, Merchant, who bought the Rhinoceros and Islington Wells, has been represented by divers of his malicious adversaries to be a person of no estate or reputation, nor able to discharge his debts; which evil practices have been on purpose to ruin and destroy his reputation,’ etc. The character of the company soon after this may be judged from a burlesque poem, published in 1691; it contains the lines which head this chapter. In 1700 there was ‘music for dancing all day long, every Monday and Thursday during the summer season. No mask to be admitted.’ A few years later the spa became fashionable, being patronized by ladies of such position as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It was at its zenith in 1733, when the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, daughters of George II., came daily in the summer and drank the waters. At this time, as we learn from the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘Such was the concourse of nobility and others that the proprietor took above £30 in a morning. On the birthday of the Princesses, as they passed through the Spa Field (which was generally filled with carriages), they were saluted with a discharge of 21 guns, a compliment which was always paid them on their arrival; and in the evening there was a great bonfire, and the guns were discharged several times.’ Islington Spa continued with, on the whole, declining fortune throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Soon afterwards it was found necessary to curtail the garden, and a great part of the old coffee-room was pulled down. About the year 1810, the old entrance being closed, a new one was made in Lloyd’s Row; and finally, in 1840, what remained of the garden was altogether done away with, and two rows of houses, called Spa Cottages, were built on the site. Even now there is a house at the corner of Lloyd’s Row and Spa Cottages, the residence of the last proprietor, which recalls the vanished glory of other days by the inscription in capital letters, ‘islington spa, or new tunbridge wells.’ At the back, in the cellar of No. 6, Spa Cottages, I have seen grotto-work with stone pilasters; on each side are steps descending. Here, I believe, was the original chalybeate spring; for many years it has ceased to flow.
Horwood’s map of 1799 shows some of these suburban spas and places of amusement very distinctly. Islington Spa is marked just south of the New River Head, and over a hundred yards south-west of Sadler’s Wells. The garden is of considerable size, running east, apparently to St. John Street Road. A short distance to the west, and also near the New River Head, is Merlin’s Cave—a rural tavern and holiday-resort of Londoners—named, it is said, after an artificial cave, dug out in 1835 in the royal gardens at Richmond, by order of Queen Caroline, and of which there was here, perhaps, a humble imitation.
Again, some distance to the south of the New River Head, at the corner of Rosoman Street and Exmouth Street, one sees the words ‘London Spa,’ on a public-house with that sign erected in 1835 to replace a former building. This is on or near the site of another mineral spring once, as we have seen, sufficiently famous to be named in a description of the New Wells,[87] a neighbouring establishment. In ‘Poor Robin’s Almanack’ for 1733, occurs the following doggerel, which refers to the month of July:
‘Now sweethearts with their sweethearts go
To Islington or London Spaw;
Some go but just to drink the water,
Some for the ale which they like better.’
In point of fact, the spa ale sold here seems before the middle of the century to have become famous, when the mineral water was no longer heard of. Spa Fields, which adjoined, were an open waste, a Sunday resort of Londoners of the lower class addicted to rough sports. I have already referred to these fields at page 69, when speaking of the Ducking-pond public-house and its successors, the Pantheon, and Spa Fields Chapel, the first of ‘the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.’ She died in the house adjoining it on June 17, 1791.
At the end of last century one might have had an almost rural walk from the London Spa west to Bagnigge Wells, a more famous place of entertainment. The way would have been along Exmouth Street, then built on the south side only, and called Braynes Row; a relic of its early days remains in the form of a tablet between Nos. 32 and 34, which has inscribed on it ‘Braynes Buildings 1765.’ At the end of this street was a turnpike, and at right angles to it was the Bagnigge Wells Road, the lower portion of which had the suggestive name of Coppice Row. North-west from the turnpike, it ran between fields as far as a little group of houses called Brook Place, and then a few more steps would have taken one to Bagnigge Wells,[88] within the borders of St. Pancras. There was a tradition, unsupported, I believe, by any evidence, that Nell Gwynne had here a place of summer abode, ‘pleasantly situated amid the Fields, and on the banks of the Fleet,’ then a clear stream flowing rapidly and somewhat subject to floods. This was Bagnigge House, a gabled building, some trace of which still remained as late as the year 1844. Inside, it had originally some curious decorative features; over a chimney-piece in one of the rooms were the Royal arms and other heraldic bearings, and between them ‘the bust of a woman in Roman dress, let deep into a circular cavity of the wall, bordered with festoons of delf earth in the natural colours and glazed.’ These were afterwards removed from this position, and set up in a long room built for assemblies and balls, which, formed the eastern boundary of the garden. An aquatint print of the interior of this room was published by J. R. Smith in 1772, after a painting by Saunders. The place seems to have been opened for purposes of amusement early in the eighteenth century; for in Beckham’s[89] curious work, the ‘Musical Entertainer’ (circa 1738), is an engraving of Tom Hippersly there, mounted in the ‘singing rostrum,’ regaling the company with a song. The inevitable healing springs, which always, no doubt, made their appearance when wanted, were, it would seem, a comparatively late discovery, first introduced to the public by Dr. John Bevis, who in 1760 wrote ‘An Experimental Enquiry concerning the Contents, Quality and Medicinal Value of two Mineral Waters lately discovered at Bagnigge Wells near London.’ One was supposed to be purging, and the other chalybeate; he gives an elaborate account of each. About the year 1775 the place[90] was ‘The Sunday Ramble’ as ‘by no means barren of amusement, and visited in the morning by hundreds of persons to drink the water, and on summer afternoons by numerous tea-drinking parties.’ The writer tells of ‘beautiful walks ornamented with a great variety of curious shrubs and flowers all in the utmost perfection,’ and ‘a small round fish-pond, in the centre of which is a curious fountain representing Cupid bestriding a swan, which spouts the water to a great height.’ The Fleet,[91] or, as it was sometimes there called, the Bagnigge River, now a sewer, but at that time still comparatively undefiled, flowed through part of the garden; it was crossed by a bridge, and the banks were rich with vegetation, insomuch that, as Archer tells us, Luke Clennell, the artist, often came here and made foreground studies for his pictures. But tastes change: the mineral waters ceased to attract; people of fashion came no more. As early as 1779 Bagnigge Wells is described as a place
‘Where ‘prenticed youth enjoy the Sunday feast,
And City matrons boast their Sabbath rest,
Where unfledged Templars first as fops parade,
And new-made ensigns sport their first cockade.’
Later it became a mere cockney tea-garden, and gradually declined, till in Lewis’s ‘History of Islington,’ 1842, it is described as almost a ruin. Shortly afterwards it was closed and dismantled, and now all trace of it has disappeared, save the name, which has been appropriated by a modern tavern at the corner of King’s Cross Road (formerly Bagnigge Wells Road) and Pakenham Street, and a curious stone tablet surmounted by a grotesque head, of which I here give an illustration.
This is now to be seen built into the wall between two modern houses—Nos. 61 and 63, King’s Cross Road—probably near the north-western limit of the garden. It is mentioned by Dr. Bevis in 1760 as having been ‘over an old Gothic portal taken down about three years ago, and now replaced over the door from the high-road to the house.’ At that time, I believe, the grotesque head was added. About thirty years ago, as may be learned from a letter in the Builder, January, 1863, the doorway was pulled down and the stone fixed where one may still see it, in front of the houses built on the site. I was glad to find this stone still in existence; it is worth rescuing from oblivion. The inscription runs as follows: ‘This is Bagnigge House neare the Pinder a Wakefielde 1680.’
The latter place, thus referred to, was an old country tavern in the Gray’s Inn Road. Mr. Wheatley says it was on the west side, and that the small houses between Harrison Street and Cromer Street, till recently called Pindar Place, occupied the site; and, confirming his statement, it is shown in Strype’s map on the west side of ‘the road to Hamstead.’ The modern public-house with this sign is on the east side. Tom Brown, in his ‘Comical View of London and Westminster,’ published in 1705, gives us a pleasant glimpse of the then surroundings—of a stile near Lamb’s Conduit, and ‘a milkmaid crossing the fields to Pinder of Wakefield.’ There is mention of it immediately after the Great Fire, by Aubrey. When the inscription was first put up, Bagnigge House and the Pinder of Wakefield were probably next-door neighbours, though their sites are now separated by a dreary wilderness of bricks and mortar. Palmer, in his ‘History of St. Pancras,’ records that in 1724 the Pinder of Wakefield was destroyed in a hurricane, the landlord’s two daughters being buried in the ruins. The word Pinder, equivalent to pinner or penner, was applied to the keeper of the public pen or pound for the confinement of stray cattle. George a-Green, or the Pinder of the town of Wakefield, is the subject of a prose romance supposed to be as old as the time of Queen Elizabeth. He (so runs the legend), with his back to a thorn and his foot to a stone, thrashed no less a foe than Robin Hood.
Before quitting this branch of my subject, I will say a few words about a former health-resort within a stone’s throw of the old Pinder of Wakefield. On the east side of Gray’s Inn Road, near the upper end, by the King’s Cross Station on the Metropolitan Railway, is a shabby-looking passage called St. Chad’s Row, which, turning to the north, runs into King’s Cross Road, and here is the site of the well named after St. Chad or St. Ceadda, who founded the bishopric of Lichfield, and died in 672. In Laurie and Whittle’s map of 1800, the extension of Gray’s Inn Road northwards is called St. Chad’s Road. The well, however, as far as I can ascertain, was not particularly ancient—or, if so, the early records are lost. Hone describes it in his ‘Everyday Book’ in the following prophetic words: ‘St. Chad’s Well is near Battle Bridge. The miraculous water is aperient, and was some years ago quaffed by the bilious and other invalids, who flocked thither in crowds.... A few years and it will be with its waters as with the water of St. Pancras’ Well, which is enclosed in the garden of a private house near old St. Pancras Churchyard.’
The garden attached to St. Chad’s Well seems in the last century to have been famous for its tulips; at least, if one may believe an advertisement in my possession, which has the date 1779. It speaks of ‘The largest and richest collection of early Dutch tulips ever yet seen in Great Britain, now in bloom, with many fine double hyacinths of various colours raised by Van Hawsen, to be had of Richard Morris at St. Chad’s Wells, Battle Bridge, near London; the lowest prices marked in the catalogue, which may be had as above, and the flowers seen gratis. No person admitted with a dog. Seedsmen and gardeners will be furnished wholesale with Duke Vantol, Claremond, and many other sorts of early tulips at the Dutch prices, and with the usual discount: the grand present Auricula at 1s. per pot: Gold and Silver Fish cheap.’ Mr. Pinks gives the particulars of the sale by auction of St. Chad’s Well on September 14, 1837. It seems that there was then a brick house facing Gray’s Inn Lane, having a pump-room and a large garden at the back. The water appears to have been still sold three years afterwards, when a pamphlet was issued setting forth ‘the characteristic virtues of the Saint Chad’s Wells aperient and alterative springs.’