CHAPTER XVI.
THE WELL WALK—THE SECOND PERIOD.
Although it could not be said that the Wells were ever actually closed till subsequent to 1809, the visits of the head-borough and a posse of constables at unexpected hours had so disarranged the system of play in Well Walk that before 1725 the gaming-tables, and with them the raffling-shops, had disappeared.
Defoe, in an early edition of his ‘Tour of Great Britain,’ tells us, in describing the Hampstead Wells, that besides the Long Room, where the gentry meet to amuse themselves and play at cards publicly, on Monday evenings, there is an Assembly-room for dancing 60 feet long and 30 feet wide, elegantly decorated. Every gentleman who subscribes a guinea has a ticket for himself and two ladies; to non-subscribers the fee for admission is two and sixpence. Another authority adds that most of the resident gentlemen are subscribers.[246]
In these days of incandescent gas and electric light, one shudders at the thought of this handsome sixty-feet-long assembly-room illuminated by chandeliers filled with pyramids of candles, with others in plated or pewter sconces at set distances on the walls.
At Almack’s, long afterwards, where only the best wax-lights were tolerated, complaints of the destruction to the ladies’ dresses, and gentlemen’s also, from the dropping of the melted wax upon them, were frequent. I have no doubt the same lamentation was heard at Hampstead, where the method of lighting could scarcely have been as perfect. But if the illumination inside be thought inadequate, what is to be said as to the state of things outside? It was a happy circumstance when a full moon fell due upon an assembly night, and was accordingly set forth in the advertisement. Otherwise a row of lanterns, suspended from tree to tree above the Well Walk, lighted the visitors to the rooms, though these, towards the end of the century, were superseded by ill-smelling and uncertain oil-lamps.
Under these circumstances, leaving the rooms was perilous. Groups of flambeaux in the hands of waiting serving-men and link-boys threw a lurid glow through the foul-smelling smoke that clouded them, and under cover of which cut-purses and pickpockets, amongst them, perhaps, the notorious Jenny Diver herself,[247] were enabled to mix with the company leaving the doors, and relieve them of laced handkerchiefs, fans, purses, snuff-boxes, and jewellery, without detection. Not unfrequently the throng was swelled by a mob of roughs (as we now call them), who, getting up a quarrel for the express purpose of creating confusion, could so cover the retreat of the thieves.
This state of things was often recurring in Well Walk, and continued down to quite the end of the eighteenth century. Cradock, quoted by Lord Campbell in his ‘Lives of the Lord Chancellors,’ tells his readers that one evening the Misses Thurlow (there were three of them),[248] being at the Hampstead Assembly, were on returning in some danger from a riot at the door, from which they were rescued by a young officer who happened to be present, and who handed them in safety to their coach. The incident reads like the opening of a Della Cruscan romance; but, alas! the Lord High Chancellor Thurlow had outlived romance, though he made a point of calling the next morning on the young gentleman, whom he found at breakfast, and satisfied his sense of obligation to him by offering to partake of it, which he did.