Yes, a few hundred years ago, on that very triangle of green grass you see to-day outside Mr. Tattersall’s big gateway, diagonally facing the Knightsbridge Tube station, men and maidens danced round the maypole on the Knightsbridge village green.
I have a special weakness for that three-cornered grass plot. People pass it every day and look scornfully at it—if they look at all. No one knows that it is all that is left of a piece of Merrie England. Little by little it has been pared away. The last maypole was taken down at the end of the eighteenth century, and the watchhouse and pound that Addison mentions in the Spectator disappeared about a quarter of a century later. The little bit of green has watched the evolution of the tiny chapel of the Elizabethan lazar-house that once existed near by into the stately and uninteresting Holy Trinity Church, and the gradual rise of the immense departmental shops to take the place of the village silk mercers of yesterday.
There is a tradition that part of the green was once used as a burial ground in the time of the Great Plague, but since there is no record of this gruesome fact, I refuse to believe it.
Tattersall’s
“Satirists may say what they please about the rural
enjoyments of a London citizen on Sunday.”
Washington Irving.
One was brought up to believe in the country Sunday after-dinner inspection of property, where unlucky week-end visitors are paraded to admire their host’s corn and cattle, but I have often wondered what the English nation did with itself when in town of a Sunday afternoon. I know now. They go to Tattersall’s and look at the horses to be sold next day. Tattersall’s on a fine Sunday afternoon in the season is like a big reception by a not too exclusive hostess. Pretty young girls in charming frocks make the tour of the stables with their menfolk, and very horsey-looking people try to persuade their neighbours that they know as much about horses as the more unobtrusive individuals at whose nod grooms fly to strip their charges for inspection.
Since Richard Tattersall, the last Duke of Kingston’s training-groom, opened his auction mart when his patron died in 1773, and founded his fortunes by buying Highflier for £2500, Tattersall’s has grown into a national institution with a world-wide reputation. It still belongs to the same family, but they moved in 1865 from Grosvenor Place to the present buildings, where every Monday all the year round the auctions take place, and every Sunday in the season dukes and jockeys, horse dealers and country squires, society ladies and trainers’ wives, stroll up and down admiring the horses.
Ely House
“Queen Bess was Harry’s daughter.”
Rudyard Kipling.
As you come out of the Tube station, the view of Dover Street with its irregular skyline is a very modern one. It looks a rather dull, uninteresting place, given over to commerce and clubs, but like most of the Piccadilly and Pall Mall quarter, it is very reminiscent of the Stuart period. The history goes back to the respectable date of 1642, when the Clarendon estate was cut up into Dover, Albemarle, Bond and Stafford streets.