While the Keep-the-Line loved fun, others loved athletics. The Mary-le-bone Cricket Club of the olden days did not at all resemble what it afterwards became when known as Lord’s. In its early age, there was as much difficulty in passing a ballot successfully, as in the most exclusive clubs of the present day. The members included players from every degree in the peerage, members of the House of Commons, and gentlemen of large landed property. The costume of the club was skyblue! and their chief object—even before cricketing—was the performance of practical jokes. One of the latter was played by the bacchanalian Duke of Richmond on Fred Reynolds the dramatist. The Duke put Reynolds on horseback, and rode with him to a match on Moulsey Hurst. The steed ridden by Reynolds was from Astley’s, and the Duke led the way to where a body of soldiers were exercising with gun, drum, and trumpet. The circus war-horse immediately became dramatic, going through a course of unparalleled performances, which he concluded by flinging his sky-blue rider. But there were, besides the practical jokers, serious and accomplished cricketers. For bowling, David Harris; for batting, Tom Walker; and for wicket-keeping, sharp-eyed Hammond, had no equal except in Lord Frederick Beauclerc, who excelled, each in his speciality, and could beat everybody at all three.
In those days, the Mary-le-bone Club had no particular ground. From May to September they moved from place to place, encamping here and bivouacking there by day, and taking their ease in their inn by night. Hospitality varied this course very pleasantly. Sir Horace Mann, the King of Cricket, kept open house for the club at his seat near Maidstone, or at his marine residence at Margate. This hospitality did not cause him to be respected by the practical jokers. Some of the jokes lacked decency; and we do not see much fun in the emptying a man’s box of its snuff and filling it with hellebore, to make him sneeze a hundred times for one! It was a rule that no offence was to be taken at the roughest of these jokes, but it was not always in the power of a man to seem delighted at them. We quite sympathise with Miles Peter Andrews, who, being asked why he looked serious when everybody was laughing loudly at a jest perpetrated by the most convivial of the members, answered—‘My dear sir, I can see no fun in a man who owes me three guineas!’
The hospitality of Mann to the club was, if possible, exceeded by that of Richard Leigh, whose welcomes to the members at Wilmington were feudal in their sumptuousness. His good taste and liberality were manifested in many ways. His musical gatherings were exquisite treats. His love for athletic sports was shown in his zeal at getting up cricket matches. The eccentric Duchess of Gordon, who had married two dukes and a marquis to her three daughters, once said aloud to Richard Leigh: ‘I am the first, but you are the second, match-maker in England, Mr. Leigh.’
One of the droller incidents of the club-matches was long remembered. Reynolds, who was but an amateur, was one day called upon to go in for a member who was too ill to play. He went to the wicket with a feeling of fright, as if he stood in front of a loaded pistol levelled at him, when he saw that the formidable Harris was about to bowl. In his own words, he says: ‘My terrors were so much increased, by the mock pity and sympathy of Hammond, Beldam, and others round the wicket, that when this mighty bowler—the Jupiter Tonans—hurled his bolt at me, I shut my eyes in the intensity of my panic, and mechanically gave a random desperate blow, which, to my utter astonishment, was followed by a loud cry all over the ring of “Run! run!” I did run, and with all my force; and getting three notches, the Duke of Richmond, John Tufton, Leigh, Anguish, and other arch-wags, advanced and formally presented to me twenty-five sixpences in a hat, collected from the bystanders as “the reward of merit.” Even Lord Winchilsea and Sir Horace Mann contributed to this, and then all playfully commenced promoting a new subscription, which only stopped because I could not stop the next ball. To my great joy, up went my stumps and out I walked—certainly with some little éclat, being the first member of the club who had been considered a regular player—i.e., paid for his services.’
We have now to say a few words of some other clubs and their purposes. In the last century, Benjamin Franklin was in the chair at a private club which used to meet weekly at ‘The Prince of Wales’ in Conduit Street. A proposal was made to do something for starving authors. The members murmured over their pipes, stared at the punch-bowl, and thought authors were vulgar people, who were not worth being thought about. The matter, however, was not allowed to drop. Year after year some kind soul or another brought it hot upon the anvil, hammered at it till he was weary, and then passed the hammer to another and another, and he to another, till at last the something was beaten into shape, and shape into substance, till there was fashioned that excellent and praiseworthy institution, the Literary Fund. In its first year only a few shillings could be spared for one hungry author, but now it sends forth welcome relief by hundreds of pounds.
This Literary Fund brings to our mind a literary club which we must not pass over—namely, ‘The Syncretics.’ The worthy gentleman who invented the name has never been discovered; but, dignified as the title looked, it sorely troubled some of the members, particularly those who had looked into a dictionary for the interpretation, yet who, on being asked for the meaning of ‘Syncretic,’ had forgotten the dictionary definition. The object of this united body was the encouragement of the dramatic element among the members. They were to write plays, which managers were to put on the stage for them; and as each play was acted, the Syncretics were bound, or were supposed to be bound, to support the drama of their brother-member by enthusiastic demonstrations of applause. Their motto seemed to be: ‘Hors nous et nos amis nul n’aura de l’esprit.’
When the amiable society had furnished nearly as many new dramas as there were members, the difficulty arose as to which play should have the precedence. It was a delicate matter. Each writer saw peculiar claims and merits in his own play, and those members whose pieces were as yet only on the stocks thought that the club should not be in too great a hurry, lest, by failing in their first venture, they should discourage the possible or probable new Shakespeares who as yet lacked time to bring about their dramatic dénouements. At length a decision was arrived at, and a play called ‘Martinuzzi’ had the good or evil fortune to be selected for representation. The public expectation had been stimulated to a high degree, but disappointment followed. ‘Martinuzzi’ was a lugubrious failure; but an ill-natured world would have it that it was most violently hissed by the author’s fellow-clubbists, the Syncretics. What will not a censorious world assert? The scandal-mongers affirmed that it was a Syncretic rule for each member, except the author, to hiss the play in course of representation, as each sibilant member hoped, by damning his brother’s play, to obtain a better chance of bringing his own forward earlier.
Is there anyone surviving whose pantomimic memories can flash vividly back half a generation? If so, how joyous yet sad must be his remembrance of another literary club—‘The Fielding’—and the pantomime of ‘Harlequin Guy Fawkes,’ acted by the members, at Covent Garden, in 1855! If the set purpose of that society at its formation was to found a school of mimes, the success was undoubted. It was a strange ambition, thought Smelfungus, for professional men and clerks in public offices to attempt to rival—nay, excel—the clowns, harlequins, lovers, and pantaloons who were imbued with the traditions of the times of Grimaldi and Bologna, Barnes and Parsloe. The amateurs were quite up to the regular business. Who that was there will forget the marvellous delivery of the patter song which Albert Smith rattled out as ‘Catesby’? Was ever stage-fight at the old Coburg (where Messrs. Blanchard and Bradley used to slay and be slain nightly with broad-swords, that hacked and hewed to orchestral accompaniments) equal to the terrific combat which was maintained between the awfully savage Catesby and the resolute assassin Guy Fawkes, who had Mr. Holmes under his mask? The latter seemed like a boneless unvertebrated acrobat who could throw his limbs anywhere he pleased out of his own way, or very much in the way of his adversary. The murderous earnestness of his fighting was in strong contrast with the hilarious humour of his burlesque-singing; and Mr. Holmes’s solemn humour was equally well illustrated in the part he took, with three other amateurs, in the performance of acrobatic feats in the scene of the Epsom Racecourse. They executed the easiest of feats with an admirable air of having achieved the impossible. The laughing spectators were almost deceived by the mock seriousness of the pseudo-acrobats; and, when the latter bowed to the applause, with an air of being exhausted by their seemingly laborious efforts, the applause grew louder, and the laughter shook the very house.
There were other members of the club who took part in this celebrated pantomime, and who were quite as effective as their fellows. Spectators calculated in vain the number of government-office windows Mr. Bidwell, the inimitable harlequin, must have leapt through, the government tables he must have vaulted over, and the government chairs he must have waltzed with for supposititious columbines, before he arrived at the perfection which he then displayed. One could not but wonder whether he went down to his office in Whitehall in his spangles covered by a greatcoat, from which he suddenly emerged to stir the often-manifested delight of the porter. Did he go to his desk by a hop, step, and a jump? Did he ever awe a reproving ‘Head of Department’ by shaking his ruler above him, as on the stage he shook his wand and paralysed the clown? Then there was Arthur Smith, who slipped about in Pantaloon as if he had never known boots, and heels to them, since he was born. Nor let us pass over Joe Robins, that airy medical student, who, we suppose, made the dissecting-room funny by his skeleton songs, if he chaunted the scraps of minstrelsy as farcically as he sang ‘Hot Codlins’ in the character of Clown. Horace Walpole said of some amateur actors at whose playing he was present, that they played so well it was a pity they had not sense enough not to play at all. He would not have been epigrammatic in that style had he witnessed the burlesquers and pantomimists of the Fielding Club. It was because of their sense and intelligence that they were so efficient. In their strength and buoyant spirits and exuberant health, they looked immortal. Alas! some of them have passed from the stage-manager to the sexton. One or two, having the alternative put before them, quitted motley and pantomime for ever, and took permanently to their office duties. Two or three went in an opposite direction; they stuck to the stage, and more or less adorn it now, under their proper or under stage-names. An odd fellow or so ‘got up a tree,’ as if that feat belonged to the harlequinade of life; but it is believed that their creditors saw less fun in the reality than in the pantomimic effect. In short, to quote Hood’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham College’—