Unnoticed London

Few people think of connecting the name of Knightsbridge with anything less modern than the big departmental shops, the Barracks or the cosy houses on the fringe of Mayfair and Belgravia.

Yet there was a town of Knightsbrigg in the fourteenth century, in Edward the Third’s day, when the Black Prince and his knights must often have crossed the Westbourne stream by the bridge built just where the Albert Gate now stands. Mr. Davis in his History of Knightsbridge gives as the origin of the name the story that “in ancient time certain knights had occasion to go from London to wage war for some holy purpose. Light in heart if heavy in arms, they passed through this district on their way to receive the blessing awarded to the faithful by the Bishop of London at Fulham. For some cause or other, however, a quarrel ensued between two of the band, and a combat was determined upon to decide the dispute. They fought on the bridge which spanned the stream of the Westbourne, while from its banks the struggle was watched by their partisans. Both fell, if the legend may be trusted; and the place was ever after called Knightsbridge in remembrance of their fatal feud.”

Walking down the Brompton Road from the Knightsbridge Tube station it is difficult to realise that not a hundred and fifty years ago “the stream ran open, the streets were unpaved and unlighted, and a Maypole was still on the village green.”

Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass you see to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing the Knightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole on the Knightsbridge village green.

I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. People pass it every day and look scornfully at it—if they look at all. No one knows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Little by little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at the end of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addison mentions in the Spectator disappeared about a quarter of a century later. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tiny chapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into the stately and uninteresting Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise of the immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silk mercers of yesterday.

There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burial ground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record of this gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.

Tattersall’s

One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinner inspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded to admire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what the English nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. I know now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold next day. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a big reception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charming frocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and very horsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know as much about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nod grooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.

Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom, opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded his fortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into a national institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs to the same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to the present buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctions take place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horse dealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, stroll up and down admiring the horses.

Ely House

As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with its irregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull, uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most of the Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of the Stuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642, when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond and Stafford streets.

Out of Peckham, that haunt of the prosperous City man of those times, had come Sir Thomas Bond, the forerunner of the Messrs. Cubitt of 1921, with his syndicate, dealing death to historical associations and possessing none of the delicacy of feeling that made John Evelyn turn his head the other way when he drove by with Lord Clarendon the late owner.

Evelyn himself lived here, close to the house of Lord Dover, whose name was given to the street. Pope’s friend, Dr. Arbuthnot, and Lady Byron, both lodged in Dover Street, but by far the most interesting house is No. 37, a brick building of unobtrusive, classic simplicity, that has a story connecting it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

You might pass up and down Dover Street many times without noticing the significant bishop’s mitre, carved in stone halfway up the middle of the façade. This was once the distinguishing mark of the town house of the bishops of Ely that they bought in 1772 from the Government in exchange for all claim on their Hatton Garden property in Ely Place. Nowadays one thinks of diamond merchants in connection with Hatton Garden, but in Elizabeth’s day it was the Naboth’s vineyard that she coveted on behalf of her handsome Chancellor, Sir Christopher Hatton. The bishops were forced to grant him a lease for the rent of a red rose, ten loads of hay, and ten pounds, the right to walk in their rival’s gardens whenever they chose, and to gather twenty baskets of roses every year.

The bone of contention brought no luck to anyone. Hatton was imprudent enough to borrow the money for improvements from his queen. She insisted on the bishops conveying the property to her till the sum should be repaid, and when one of them jibbed at carrying out the terms of this settlement, the Queen wrote him an Elizabethan epistle:

Sir Christopher Hatton was never able to repay his mistress’s loan. It broke his heart, says an old chronicler, and though the queen relented at the end, and came to visit him, “there is no pulley can draw up a heart once cast down, though a Queen herself should set her hand thereunto.” He died disconsolate, in his coveted palace of Ely, in 1591.

After all these vicissitudes, the diocese got back its property at the Restoration, but in 1772 they gave up all claim to it in exchange for the mansion in Dover Street.

The latter is a stately house, with a long marble hall and staircase, and the bishops of Elizabeth’s day would doubtless be mildly surprised if they knew that it is now used by the men and women belonging to the Albemarle Club.

London Museum

Quite near Dover Street, if you only knew it, is the one place where you may read the story of London spread out before you page by page better than anywhere else. But very few people can even tell you how to find it.

I once saw Lancaster House called the Cinderella of London museums—perhaps because it is so charming and so neglected. It is near no bus route nor railway station, yet this London Carnavalet is not so very far from the Dover Street Tube station and either of the two routes by which it is reached from that point are delightful walks. You may enter Green Park and stroll along the Queen’s Walk till you come to a passage-way to the left—not the first little narrow one where two people have to walk Indian file into St. James’s Place, but the second, that leads through a wider gateway, closed at 10 p.m., into Stable Yard.

Or else you can go down St. James’s Street, past the passage leading into the quaint little eighteenth-century courtyard of Pickering Place, towards St. James’s Palace with its beautiful old sixteenth-century brick gateway in Cleveland Row. Skirt the Palace to the right and you will come to Stable Yard, and in Stable Yard is Lancaster House.

It is a stately place. Queen Victoria once said to the Duchess of Sutherland: “I come from my house to your palace,” but shorn of the groups of chairs and tables and the stately company moving up and down the magnificent staircase, the yellow and red marble walls seem cheerless and repellant.

Now and then a little white notice is pasted on the door with the announcement that the museum, which is usually open on summer Fridays and Sundays from 2 to 6, and all other days from 10 to 6 and till 4 o’clock in winter, will be closed to the public for an afternoon or evening. The Government are entertaining distinguished strangers in the spacious salons, and then Lancaster House lives again for a few hours the brilliant existence it had in the nineteenth century, when it was called Stafford House and the Duke of Sutherland dispensed splendid hospitality there.

Amusing tales of these political parties, and of the guests, and of many other things, are told in Mr. Arthur Dasent’s delightful Story of Stafford House, that is sold for a modest sum just inside the door.

In 1913 Lord Leverhulme bought the remainder of the lease that expires in 1940, from the Duke of Sutherland, and handed it over to the trustees of the London Museum to house the collection of London antiquities then exhibited in Kensington Palace.

The name of Stafford House was changed to Lancaster House as a compliment to the King, who is Duke of Lancaster, and in memory of the generosity of a Lancashire man.

It is an entrancing place, where you can trace this great city’s history from the time men used flints to the war that is too near for its souvenirs to be anything but harrowing.

One may walk through the ages, from the Prehistoric room, through Roman, Saxon and Mediæval rooms, on the ground floor, and, then, going up the grand staircase, see how men lived in London in Tudor, seventeenth-century, Cromwellian and Charles II.’s days, and so on, through the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century rooms, to the costume and Royal rooms, where you pause dumbfounded before the going-away dress of stiff white silk poplin embroidered with gold that Queen Mary wore the day of her wedding, 6th July, 1893.

Down on the ground floor, past the Temple Crusader with the Mestrovic countenance, in the west corridor, is the Gold and Silver Room, with the beautiful jewellery that some bygone Jacobean jeweller buried in Wood Street, perhaps when the menace of the Great Fire was upon him.

Of what happened to him there is no trace, and the lovely chains and rings lay buried for two and a half centuries. They may for all we know have been stolen and buried by thieves who met their end on Tyburn Tree before they could enjoy their booty. Admirers of Lalique’s work in the Place Vendôme will see how this unknown Englishman solved the same problems of the great French artist 250 years ago. The delicate enamel chains and lovely cameos and carved chalcedony and glass and onyx are prettier than many a jeweller’s stock to-day, and they must look disdainfully across at the case of heavy Victorian atrocities which our grandmothers wore so complacently.

St. James’s Church

I do not remember ever seeing anyone cross the paved courtyard of St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, on a week-day, for though it was one of Wren’s favourites among the churches he built, and inside there is a font carved by Grinling Gibbons, it has an air of sanctimonious respectability that is not very alluring, but the font with its carving of the Fall of Man, etc., is well worth seeing.

The Haymarket Shoppe

I have asked many people if they know where to find a perfect example of an eighteenth-century shop, bow windows little flight of steps and all, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus—and they look at me in blank astonishment.

Yet there it stands, at 34 Haymarket, two doors down from Coventry Street on the left-hand side, its pot-bellied windows filled with quaint jars and bottles and more modern packages of the upstart cigarette, that has ousted the honest snuff which was sold there for two hundred years.

It belongs to another day and generation, and through the old doorway the 20th-century passer-by can see the oaken shelves with their rows of old wooden boxes and snuff jars that used to contain the “King’s Morning Mixture,” as supplied to His Majesty King George IV.

The old shop has had many royal customers, and going through the beautiful Adam screen into the back room, one may be shown, if the courteous proprietor is not too busy, the accounts of Queen Charlotte, who bought her snuff here for nineteen years of the Dukes of Cumberland and Sussex and the Princesses Charlotte and Elizabeth, who also indulged in the best rappee.

Most of the great names of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century England may be found in these old ledgers. David Garrick and Inigo Jones were customers, and so were my Lord Halifax, Lady Shrewsbury and the Duchess of Grafton. Beau Brummell’s accounts lie, cheek by jowl as he would have them, with those of the Earl of Dorchester and the Duke of Bedford, and the long array of famous names of men and women to be found in the yellowing papers might well have served as a list of guests present at any brilliant political function of the time.

The snuff-taking of those days has passed with the lace jabots and the silk knee-breeches, but the fashion died hard, and so recent a figure as Lord Russell of Killowen was one of the last of the famous snuff-takers. The twentieth century turns up its nose at what it calls a disgusting habit, yet it had its graces and was responsible for the creation of the beautiful boxes and bottles now treasured as heirlooms.

The actual owners of this fascinating shop have carried on the business in their family

since 1780, when the founder, M. Fribourg, retired. One of the present partners, Mr. George Evans, has written a delightful monograph on the Old Snuff House of Fribourg and Treyer, “At the Rasp and Crown, at the upper End of the Haymarket, London.” It is a charming book, filled with illustrations and reminiscences of the leisurely days before the arrival of the departmental store, when an old-established firm had time to have intimate courtly relations with its customers.

What Lord Petersham could now change his mind and return 216 pounds of anything and be urbanely credited with £75 12s.; and do grateful customers now make presents of gold-lined amboyna snuff boxes to mark their satisfaction?

If they do, I am as ignorant of the fact as the ordinary pedestrian of the historical interest of the unnoticed shop he passes daily on his way to Piccadilly Circus.

A King in Soho

Few Londoners can tell you where a king lies buried in Soho. Shelley may have been thinking of him when he gave his mad invitation to the old lady in the Highgate bus, to “sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,” but if so his knowledge is not shared by many people.

If I have made you curious, walk along Coventry Street from Piccadilly Circus, leaving Leicester Square, that “pouting-place of princes,” on your right, and turn up Wardour Street past Lisle Street and Gerrard Street that was fashionable in Charles II.’s day and where Dryden and Burke and Lord Mohun lived and where Johnson and Reynolds founded the Literary Club that still exists in another meeting-place. Then, crossing Shaftesbury Avenue, you will come to the old graveyard at the back of the church of St. Anne, which is now a playground and only open till four in the winter months and during the hours of service on Sundays. On the wall you will find a tablet to the memory of the unlucky Theodore, King of Corsica, who fled from France, a bankrupt, only to be seized on his arrival in London and flung into the Fleet prison. “Near this place,” runs the inscription, “is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this neighbourhood Dec. 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King’s Bench Prison by the Benefit of the Act of Insolvency. In consequence of which he registered his Kingdom of Corsica for the use of his Creditors.” To which Horace Walpole has appended the following stanza:

The kindly soul who bailed out fallen Majesty a fortnight before his death and then gave him decent burial, was, according to the verger of St. Anne, an Italian candle merchant from Old Compton Street, on the site of whose shop is now that excellent non-profiteering restaurant known as Le Dîner Français. But I prefer, with the Blue Book, to think that the Samaritan was a tailor, grown rich, perhaps, snipping the embroidered waistcoats of H.R.H. Frederick, Prince of Wales, when the latter squabbled with his royal parents and removed in a pettish mood to Leicester House hard by.

The only other interesting things I could find in this old church were the tomb of Hazlitt, immediately below King Theodore’s memorial stone,—the old wooden drain pipes, lately disinterred, that lie on the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the church, and the tablet within, to the memory of “The Beloved Mother-in-Law.”

St. Anne’s was built in 1685, a significant year in the annals of this neighbourhood. It was the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which sent the Huguenots flocking to London, to take up their residence here, and of the Battle of Sedgemoor, when the Duke of Monmouth, who had a mansion in the Square, used as his watchword the cry “So Ho!” and unconsciously christened the whole district.

CHAPTER III

TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET

One of the most enthralling and endearing things about London is the way the memory of the great people, whose names are so familiar that you feel you would know their bearers if you met them, pervades the city and crops up in such very unexpected places. If business ever took you through that evil-smelling fishy Lower Thames Street, you would discover that Chaucer lived there for six years when he was Comptroller of the Petty Customs in the Port of London. You stroll through the little Cloisters in Westminster Abbey, of all places in the world, and some one tells you that Lady Hamilton once lived in the Littlington Tower, when she was servant to Mr. Hare and had no thought that she would ever inspire a hero to great victories. You think that when you have seen Sir Thomas More’s tomb in Chelsea Old Church, and Crosby Hall near by, you have exhausted the souvenirs of his life, but you find him again in Westminster Hall, where he was condemned to death—in the Deanery where he spent two months in charge of the Abbot of Westminster,—in Lincoln’s Inn—in Milk Street in the City, where he was born, “the brightest star that ever shone in that Via Lactea”—in the church of St. Lawrence Jewry where he lectured, and in the Tower where he died.

Dr. Johnson, of course, was ubiquitous. He went everywhere and usually said something noteworthy about everything. One of the great difficulties in writing this book has been to refrain from quoting him too frequently, and Pepys is even worse. The kindly official in the Clothworkers’ Hall (where I lunched once on a special occasion) said to me: “Samuel Pepys, Ma’am, Pepys the great Diarist—you may have heard of him,” and I felt like replying: “My good man, I have been with your Pepys through Chelsea—and in St. Margaret’s, Westminster, where he was married—I have seen his portrait at the Royal Society Rooms in Burlington House and his house in Buckingham Street—the church of St. Bride, where his birth was registered—St. Lawrence Jewry, where he was disappointed with Wilkins’ sermon—All Hallows, Barking, that, as he wrote on the 5th September, 1666, only just escaped the Great Fire—his parish church of St. Olave’s, where he worshipped, and Hyde Park, where he used to go driving with his wife.”

The Strand

Of all delightful places to meet memories of famous bygone people, the most intriguing is the Strand. A superficial glance at this modern bustling street shows little of the past still clinging about it. But a little further on you will discover, if you look for them, a bit of Roman London, a Renaissance chapel, a statue with a history, a lovely group of eighteenth-century houses, the water gate of a former fine mansion on the riverside, and a church that links us to the time of the Danish invasion.

The Londoner would probably tell you that Piccadilly Circus is the centre of his city; the historian, St. Paul’s; but to the foreigner, the visitor from overseas, or to the Anglo-Indian back from the East, the centre will always be Charing Cross.

It has been a starting-point for the traveller from the days when the little old village of Charing was used as a halting-place on the way to the City or to the Royal Palace of Westminster. Probably that is the true derivation of the name; “La Charrynge” meant the Turning, the great bend where the two roads met, but a prettier tradition derives its name from Edward I.’s dear queen (“chère Reine”). Another cross to her memory once stood here, the most beautiful of all those set up by the sorrowing king wherever her bier rested on its journey from Grantham to Westminster Abbey. Cromwell’s Parliament, with its passion for destruction, pulled it down in 1647, and the column which now stands in the courtyard in front of the station is only a memorial modelled as far as possible on the original design. It was set up by Barry about sixty years ago, but it is already so weather-beaten that many people are under the amiable delusion that it is the very cross erected in 1291.

The exact position of the old cross is now covered by King Charles I. on horseback, facing the scene of his death in Whitehall, and this statue has had an even more adventurous history.

It was cast originally in 1633 and after the king’s execution it became so unpopular that Parliament sold it to a brazier to be melted down. With an eye to the possibilities of the future that a diplomat might envy, this man cannily buried the statue and did a roaring trade with the Royalists in relics supposed to have been made from the fragments. After the Restoration the statue quietly came to light again, and was set up in its present position in 1674 with popular rejoicings. Its tribulations were not yet over. The day of the burning of Her Majesty’s Theatre, the sword, a real one of the period, that hung at the side, was broken off, and it has never been replaced.

Another curious thing about this statue lies in the absence of girths to the saddle or trappings on the horse, and it is said that when this oversight was pointed out to the sculptor Le Sueur, he was so overcome with mortification that he committed suicide on the spot.

In the days when London was no bigger than one of our second-rate provincial towns, Charing Cross was its market square. Here stood the pillory, even as late as the beginning of the last century; here were read the Royal proclamations, and here were the booths of the showmen who dealt in giants and fat ladies,—it was here, too, that Punch made his first appearance in England in 1666. Where the railway station now stands was Hungerford Market, and Trafalgar Square occupies the yard of what were once the Royal Mews, where the king’s falcons were kept till they were replaced by the king’s horses. It is rather odd that the word “mews” is now always associated with stables, for it once meant the pens or coops in which moulting falcons were kept (from the French muer—to moult). Geoffrey Chaucer, who lodged at Westminster, was in his time Clerk of the King’s Works and of the Royal Mews.

Water Gates

People seem to think that a great deal of time and energy must be spent if they wish to see anything of historic London, and they pass by, unnoticed, many of the most interesting reminders of bygone periods, just because they may see them every day.

Buckingham Street, leading out of the Strand, is only a stone’s throw from Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross and it is full of historic memories. What stories the beautiful old water gate at its foot could tell of the days when the silver Thames washed up and down its grey stone steps, and of the famous people who used to take boat there!

It was built by my Lord Duke of Buckingham, that hated favourite of James and Charles the First, who cuts such a sorry figure in English history books and such a romantic one in the pages of Dumas. He was the father of the extravagant, erratic George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whom Scott describes in Peveril of the Peak, and Pope more pungently:

Lely painted a wonderful portrait of the son. It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, but even more interesting is the Vandyck picture of him with his brother Francis, painted when they were boys, and lately bought for the National Gallery.

With his father murdered, and his property confiscated by the Commonwealth and given to General Fairfax, the duke solved his problem by marrying the General’s daughter and heiress, a solution for which Cromwell made him pay by a sojourn in the Tower, where he was an intermittent resident. But in spite of his wife’s fortune the man who, “was everything by turns and nothing long” was obliged to sell the magnificent mansion that his father had re-built in 1625 on the site of the old York House.

The earlier mansion had been the home of the Bishop of Norwich in Henry VIII.’s time, of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, of the Archbishop of York, who gave the house its name, and of Sir Francis Bacon who loved the place and only left it for the Tower.

In 1672 the second York House was sold for £30,000, with the stipulation that the streets built on the site were to be given the Duke’s names. They are quite easy to trace: there is George Court, with the George Tavern, where you may eat your chop to the sound of an orchestra of singing birds; hard by are Villiers and Duke Streets; “Of” Lane has been rechristened York Place,—and now we are back in Buckingham Street.

The new quarter soon had famous tenants. John Evelyn lived for a year in Villiers Street, and forty years later Sir Richard Steele had a house there. No. 14, Buckingham Street, has been much remodelled since Samuel Pepys lived there and walked down the steps of the water gate on his way to visit his friend Mr. Cole in Brentford. There is a tablet on the house to tell the passer-by that the Earl of Oxford, William Etty and Clarkson Stanfield, the marine painter, also lived here.

The house opposite looks far more modern, but within the very new outer walls of the offices of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses are preserved much of the exquisite carving, ceiling paintings, and elaborate stucco work that belong to the time when Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias, came over to England in 1698 and lodged in these very rooms. David Hume, Rousseau, Fielding and Black all lived at No. 15, now incorporated in No. 16, but the Dickens lover will ignore these famous names and only remember that the rooms at the top of the house are the very ones taken by Miss Betsy Trotwood for David Copperfield.

With the exception perhaps of that Shah of Persia who spent a happy holiday in England in the reign of the late Queen Victoria, I suppose we never had a more eccentric royal visitor than Peter the Great. No doubt that is the reason why the memories of his brief stay here still seem to cling about so many parts of London. This strange being, half-barbarian, half-genius, had great ambitions and achieved them. As Voltaire says: “He gave a polish to his people and was himself a savage; he taught them the art of war, of which he was himself ignorant; inspired by the sight of a small boat on the river Moskwa, he erected a powerful fleet and made himself an expert and active shipwright, pilot, sailor and commander; he changed the manners, customs and laws of the Russians, and lives in their memory as the father of his country.”

Ships and shipbuilding were his passion. He went to Holland and worked in the yards there as a mechanic, calling himself Pieter Timmermann, until he had mastered the manual part of his craft. Then he came to England to study the theory of shipbuilding. King William III. placed the house in Buckingham Street, so conveniently close to the river, at his disposal, and invited him to Court when he felt inclined. But Pieter hated crowds and ceremonies and preferred to spend his days in hard work and his evenings drinking and smoking with boon companions.

At the end of a month, finding himself too far from the dockyards, he moved to Deptford, and put up at Sayes Court, kindly lent to him by John Evelyn. He was a dreadful tenant. We all know how Evelyn loved his garden,—but the Czar and his rough crowd trampled the flower-beds and spoilt the grass-plots, and trundled wheelbarrows through the diarist’s pet holly-hedge for exercise. “There is a house full of people right nasty!” wrote Evelyn’s indignant servant to his master. They ate and drank enormously,—eight bottles of sack after dinner were nothing to Pieter, and listen to this for a breakfast menu for twenty-one persons: half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, three quarts of brandy, six quarts of mulled wine, seven dozen of eggs, with salad in proportion.

Much of his time, when he was not gathering

the vast store of information that he afterwards used to such excellent advantage, the Czar spent sailing on the river, and in the evening he would repair with favoured members of his suite to a public-house in Great Tower Street. The old tavern has been rebuilt, but the name “The Czar of Muscovy,” and later “The Czar’s Head,” that it adopted as a compliment to its imperial visitor, is there to this day, and you may see it close to the city merchant’s house at No. 34 that is noticed in another chapter.

The “right nasty” people did not stay long, luckily for Evelyn’s peace of mind, but returned to London for another month or two. Then saying good-bye to King William, who had certainly treated him very well, the Czar pressed into his hand a little twist of brown paper, in which was found a ruby valued at £10,000, and sailed away home for Russia, taking with him no fewer than 500 English captains, scientists, pilots, gunners, surgeons, sail-makers, anchor-smiths, coppersmiths and the like, all ready for adventure in the unknown, according to the tradition of their race.

To come back to the Strand. It is fairly certain that the rather heavy and unattractive stone archway and steps at the bottom of Essex Street (at the other end of the Strand) formed the water gate of old Essex House, once occupied by the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.

It compares very badly with the water gate in Buckingham Street, which was designed by Inigo Jones in 1625, and built by Nicholas Stone the master mason, who carved one of the lions on its frontage. The London climate has blurred the outline of the arms of the Villiers family on the south side, and the motto “Fidei Coticula Crux” on the north, and the raising of the Embankment now prevents the waters of the Thames from swirling round the old stone steps. No monarch had passed through the water gate since the days of Charles II. until Queen Alexandra came to open the new building in Buckingham Street in 1908. Its glory has departed, but there it stands, useless, unnoticed and forgotten, yet how beautiful!

The Adelphi

Retracing your steps up Buckingham Street, turn to the right along Duke Street and John Street, and you will find yourself in the Adelphi, that oasis of calm quiet so near the roar of the bustling Strand, where famous authors of the present day like to pitch their luxurious tents. Note the steep hill up which you climb. This is the roof of the arches which the brothers Adam built over the site of old Durham House in order that they might erect their elegant houses on a level with the Strand. You can still wander in these vaults, if you are lucky enough to find an open gate; they are curious, and were once a fine rendezvous for evil characters.

The Duke of Buckingham’s names are not the only ones to be perpetuated here. The architects, Robert, John, James and William Adam, all had streets named after them, and they called the whole quarter the Adelphi because they were brothers.

William Street has lately been rechristened Durham House Street, to remind us that the Adelphi was built on the site of Durham House, where Lady Jane Grey was born.

Probably the Adelphi will have to go some day, when a proper bridge for Charing Cross is built across the river here, but lovers of this little bit of unspoiled Georgian London will miss its old-world charm and dignity.

St. Clement Danes

Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the two churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolated in the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on either side. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, though half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses, with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the “Straits of St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, one hundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for the merrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed the Puritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, but old customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlier pole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went on around it for many a long day.

The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Some say that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danish invaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built, after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, having married English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that they did not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle of Thorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate.

Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditions of childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along the Strand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of the nursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of the dried fruit trade.

The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff in Henry IV. Those chimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is as famous for its music.

One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time when Turketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century, presented his abbey with the great bell Guthlac, and added six others with the rhythmic names of Pega, Bega, Bettelin, Barthomew, Tatwin and Turketul, to make a peal.

In the early monkish days they looked upon bells as the voices of good angels: they were blessed and dedicated: the passing bell was tolled to keep off evil spirits from the dead. Henry VIII., that ruthless iconoclast, cared little for superstition, and in the general destruction of the religious houses hundreds of old bells were sold or melted down. But the pious people of those days would point out how the Bishop of Bangor, who sold his Cathedral bells, was shortly afterwards stricken with blindness, and that Sir Miles Partridge won the Jesus Bells of St. Paul’s from King Henry at play and, proceeding to remove them and have them melted down, was hanged soon after on Tower Hill.

The bells of St. Clement’s were added after the church had been rebuilt in 1692, under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren, who gave his services for nothing in his usual generous-hearted way.

St. Clement’s is dear to all true Londoners as Dr. Johnson’s church. You may see the very pew where he sat, and there is something about the solid, handsome structure that seems to fit the thought of the ponderous great man who worshipped there Sunday by Sunday, striving “to purify and fortify his soul and hold real communion with the Highest.” It is a fine and a prosperous church, and so richly endowed that at one time all the paupers of the neighbourhood used to flock there for the sake of what they could get. That they were well looked after, the carefully kept parish registers bear witness as far back as 1558. There are other interesting entries in the old registers. You may read of the baptism of Master Robert Cicill, the sonne of ye L. highe Threasurer of England, and of the marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor with Mary Davies, the child heiress of Ebury Manor, who brought to her husband all those lands of Pimlico and Belgravia from whose rents the Dukes of Westminster draw the bulk of their colossal fortune. Her life story has been published recently by Mr. Charles T. Gatty in his two-volumed Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury.

Chapel Royal of the Savoy