Holborn, where the “Old Bell” stood, was, until quite recent years, a pleasant threshold to the City. There stood Furnival’s Inn, that quiet quadrangle of chambers, with the staid and respectable Wood’s Hotel. Next door was Ridler’s Hotel, with pleasant bay-window looking upon the street, and across the way, in Fetter Lane, remained the “White Horse” coaching inn; very much down on its luck in its last years, but interesting to prowling strangers enamoured of the antique and out-of-date.
The vanished interest of other corners in London might be enlarged upon, but it is too melancholy a picture. Let us to the Borough High Street, and, resolutely refusing to think for the moment of the many queer old galleried inns that not so long since remained there, come to that sole survivor, the “George.”
You would never by mere chance find the “George,” for it has no frontage to the street, and lies along one side of a yard not at first sight very prepossessing, and, in fact, used in these days for the unsentimental purposes of a railway goods-receiving depot. This, however, is the old yard once entirely in use for the business of the inn.
The “George,” as it now stands, is the successor of a pre-Reformation inn that, formerly the “St. George,” became secularised in the time of Henry the Eighth, when saints, even patron saints, were under a cloud. It is an exceedingly long range of buildings, dating from the seventeenth century, and in two distinct and different styles: a timbered, wooden-balustraded gallery in two storeys, and a white-washed brick continuation. The long ground-floor range of windows to the kitchen, the bar, and the coffee-room, is, as seen in the illustration, protected from any accidents in the manœuvring of the railway waggons by a continuous bulkhead of sleepers driven into the ground. It is pleasing to be able to bear witness to the thriving trade that continues to be done in this sole ancient survivor of the old Southwark galleried inns, and to note that, however harshly fate, as personified by rapacious landlords, has dealt with its kind, the old-world savour of the inn is thoroughly appreciated by those not generally thought sentimental persons, the commercial men who dine and lunch, and the commercial travellers who sleep, here.
But, however pleasing the old survivals in brick and stone, in timber and plaster, may be to the present generation, we seem, by the evidence left us in the literature and printed matter of an earlier age, to have travelled far from gross to comparatively ideal manners.
THE LAST OF THE OLD GALLERIED INNS OF LONDON: THE “GEORGE,” SOUTHWARK.
Photo by T. W. Tyrrell.
The manners common to all classes in old times would scarce commend themselves to modern folk. We get a curious glimpse of them in one of a number of Manuals of Foreign Conversation for the use of travellers, published towards the close of the sixteenth century in Flanders, then a country of great trading importance, sending forth commercial travellers and others to many foreign lands. One of these handy books, styled, rather formidably, Colloquia et dictionariolum septem linguarum, including, as its title indicates, conversation in seven languages, was so highly successful that seven editions of it, dating from 1589, are known. The traveller in England, coming to his inn, is found talking on the subject of trade and civil wars, and at length desires to retire to rest. The conversation itself is sufficiently strange, and is made additionally startling by the capital W’s that appear in unconventional places. “Sir,” says the traveller, “by your leave, I am sum What euell at ease.” To which the innkeeper replies: “Sir, if you be ill at ease, go and take your rest, your chambre is readie. Jone, make a good fier in his chambre, and let him lacke nothing.”
Then we have a dialogue with “Jone,” the chambermaid, in this wise:
Traveller: My shee frinde, is my bed made? is it good?