Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

The room where we held the dinners and these brilliant club concerts was only separated by a wall from David Garrick’s dining-room. He made the mistake of living in the wrong house.

The theory why we dined at 6.30, was that popular actors and singers could dine with us, and give us a turn before they went to their theatre. In practice, they very seldom came, unless they were having a holiday, voluntary or otherwise. But there were always enough of them “resting” to give us a brilliant evening.

For some little time after dinner the Club did not settle down sufficiently to make its favourite performers willing to give their turns. It made too much noise over diluting whisky with soda, and manœuvring to get the waiter’s attention. This gave the new aspirant his chance. If he was timid and low-voiced, he did not always get the attention of the room, but it was not difficult to get the chairman to call on him. I know by experience how difficult it was to get any old “hand” to sing first. I called upon the bores first, when I was in the chair. There were several of them, whom the Club had grown into the habit of tolerating every Saturday night, so they had earned a right to be called on. They all said that they had colds, and afterwards, when the performance was at its height, sent round notes that they felt better, and would try to give a turn if I called upon them now. But I ignored the notes so long as I had any one else to call on. They were mostly reciters; almost any kind of song will go in a club which takes up a chorus.

Some of the humorous reciters were very good. The club was never tired of hearing Robert Ganthony give a scene in a Metropolitan Police Magistrate’s Court; or that youthful octogenarian, Fitzgerald, the artist, mimicking a rehearsal at Astley’s in the old days; or Odell, the idol of the Savage, going through his wonderful repertoire. Early in the evening, Walter Hedgcock, the Crystal Palace organist, would give us the song he never could publish, because he was blocked by an earlier setting—Kipling’s “Mandalay.” It was delightful music, and was eventually published as the “Mousmee,” with words which I wrote for him in the metre of “Mandalay.” Hedgcock did not mind coming on early, because he could always pick up the audience with the first bars of “Mandalay.”

Townley, who was Registrar of Births and Deaths at St. Pancras, I think—except on Saturday nights and Sundays—was our funniest singer; he was a natural comedian. The Club always insisted on its favourites singing the same songs. He had to sing a song called “Hoop-la,” or something of the kind. Willie Nichol had to sing “Loch Lomond”; Cheesewright had to sing “The Three Jolly Sailor-Boys”; Denny, who was afterwards our honorary secretary, did generally give us something recent from the music-halls. But the old “hands” eyed him half resentfully while he did it.

I soon came to regard Odell as an oasis, because, though the Club made him sing and recite the same things Saturday after Saturday, he had a blessed gift of gag. In the midst of his ballad about the Fleet, the one Warham St. Leger wrote for Punch, he stopped one night to tell us how he lost his last engagement. It was in a piece based on the wreck of the Princess Alice, the Thames steamer in which so many lives were lost. Odell played the part of captain of the steamer, and all went well till one night, as he expressed it, just at the fatal moment, when the people in the stalls were taking off their coats because they were so perspiring with excitement, he could stand the tension no longer, so he took out his watch and said, “It’s just five o’clock. I wish I had gone back by the penny ’bus.” The audience rose in their places, and stoned him with whatever came handy, and he pretended that after that he never could get an engagement.

As I don’t drink after dinner, and don’t smoke at all, I began to find these concerts very tiring as soon as I knew all the performances by heart. But there was no other place of meeting except the bar. We badly needed a smoking-room, adjoining the dining-room and the bar, where those who had brought interesting people with them could introduce them to interesting Savages, without losing touch with the evening, as they did if they went up to that melancholy library, which has probably been given over to some legitimate purpose, like Bridge, long ago.

I frequently agitated for this smoking-room, and I believe that they got it eventually. The bar did too good a business; you did not see people getting intoxicated; its habitués carried their liquor too well. But I have seen one man drink as many as thirty-three whiskys-and-sodas in a single evening, and I saw him the other day—twenty years afterwards—looking as fit as possible.

Gradually I came to the conclusion that as there were so many other interesting things happening on Saturdays, it was not wise to give my Saturday evenings up to the Savage, and there was “nothing else to” the club in those days. It had not then become the favourite lunching-place of the great editors, an important venue for authors.

So I retired from the Savage, as I retired from the Devonshire a few years afterwards. When one of the committee of the Devonshire asked me why I retired from it, I said that I only used it for funerals, and that I was retiring because they had made that an extra. This was a fact. The windows of the Devonshire Club are one of the best places for seeing a royal funeral—or, of course, any other royal procession. The committee discovered this, and put on a charge of ten pounds a seat, to pay for the decorations of the Club. So many people wanted these seats that they had to be balloted for. The action of the committee was justified. But, as I had not used the Club since the funeral of Queen Victoria, when I found that I could not see the funeral of King Edward from its windows without balloting for the privilege of paying ten pounds for it, I sent in my resignation, and paid a guinea for a seat from which I could see the funeral for the whole length of Oxford and Cambridge Terrace. I went with Norma Lorimer and Markino, who painted a wonderful picture of it. The people on whose roof we hired the seats from the contractor, asked us to lunch, and became quite intimate friends. They proved to be Mr. Sanderson Stuart and his daughter—the youthful genius of sculpture.