In the evening there was a grand illumination of the government buildings, the clubs and the prominent business houses. The streets were thronged with people—men, women, and children—all elbowing their way along, eager to see all that was to be seen, and willing to give no one an opportunity they themselves could not enjoy. It was a motley crowd, composed of all classes. The well-dressed shopman was jostled by the ragpicker; and ragged, homeless girls, arm in arm, shoved aside the elderly matron, who had come out with her children to see the illuminations. There were all classes and conditions of people, and they raved and tore about more like escaped lunatics than the staid, sober Britons they pride themselves upon being.
A walk down Pall Mall was almost worth one’s life. On this thoroughfare are located the principal clubs of London, and as they were rather brilliantly lighted with gas jets arranged in fanciful designs, the crowd flocked there to see them. The street was actually packed from curb to curb, so that locomotion was difficult. The illuminations were not on a scale grand enough to merit all this outpouring of people, this great hubbub, this drunkenness and gin-incited hilarity. For the most part the designs were simply the English coat of arms, with the letters “V. R.” on each side, the whole being done in plain gas jets. Occasionally some thriving shop-keeper, who had made a little something from the Royal family, would branch out a little more extensively, and use tiny glass shades of different colors, over his gas. But it was dreary beyond measure. The streets were dark and gloomy, the air was close, and the so-called illuminations were so very, very meager that they made the general effect only more dismal.
Yet the people surged up and down the streets, hurrahing and shouting for the Queen, for the Prince of Wales, for the Royal family, for themselves, for anybody they could think of. The public houses were open long after other places of business were closed, and there was a constant stream of thirsty people gliding from behind the half-closed doors out upon the street to yell until another dram became necessary. The customers were not limited to the sterner sex by any manner of means. There were crowds of young girls ranging from fourteen to twenty, poor working girls, who had saved all of their scant earnings they could in anticipation of this holiday, who boldly pushed their way with a coarse laugh, through the crowd of men and, standing at the bar, would call for and drink their bitter beer, or ale, or stout, or gin, even, with all the effrontery of an old toper. And old women there were too, who would quietly glide into the compartments marked “private bar,” and there drink their brandy or Irish whisky. Throughout it all there seemed to be a dogged determination to become intoxicated, just as though there could be no pleasure, the Queen’s birthday could not be celebrated properly, unless every one filled himself up with ardent spirits.
As it grew later, the crowds increased both in size and disorder. Notwithstanding the fact that most of the illuminations had been extinguished, the masses had had a taste, and they wanted more. They became momentarily ruder and more boisterous. As the time approached for the closing of the publics, the crowd received fresh installments of the worse class of women, and then drunken women tried to do worse than the drunken men, and they succeeded. A woman thoroughly under the influence of liquor is something simply terrible to see, and here we saw it. On that night the air rang with their ribald jokes and coarse songs, as they jostled each other in their unsteady walk.
A HOLIDAY IN PARIS.
This, it must be remembered, is not a scene that occurred down in Cheapside, or in the Seven Dials, or the streets down near the river. No, indeed. Pall Mall, one of the most aristocratic streets in London, Regent street, the Broadway of London, Piccadilly, the Haymarket, these were the scenes of this frightful display, and evidently nothing was thought of it. The police made no arrests, and did not seem to know that there was anything occurring that was not perfectly allowable and justifiable. So the wild debauch went on all night, and it was not until the gray light made its appearance in the east that the city quieted down and the streets no longer echoed with the maudlin cries of the host of people who celebrated in their own peculiar style the anniversary of their Queen’s birthday.
