In the summer there was the grass-boat, owned by an old man and his wife and a grown-up
daughter. It had been an old ship’s jolly-boat, and had a roughly-built half deck cabin about the size of a four-wheeled cab. The three of them lived in it, and came twice a week to the draw-dock with bundles of coarse rush grass cut in the marshes on the river’s bank, to sell to the local tradesmen to feed their horses, at three half-pence a bundle; and all they had left was taken by the cowkeepers at a penny a bundle. When there was no grass they would go sand-dredging, getting the sand by a pole with a leather bag on an iron frame at the end, with a rope to a block rigged up and attached to a windlass. The old man would let down gradually the pole, and the wife and daughter would wind it up. They were a terribly drunken lot; but the temptation to drink in those days in Chelsea was very much greater than at present, for since I can recollect, in that one road not much over a mile, from Battersea Bridge to Ebury Bridge on the canal, there have been eighteen public houses closed, and only one new license granted, and that is to the “Chelsea Pensioner.” The names of the thirteen houses that I alluded to were the “Green Man” at the bottom of Beaufort Street, at the back of Luke Flood’s house, the “Adam and Eve,” the “Cricketers,” the “Magpie and Stump,” the “Don Saltero,” the “Yorkshire Grey,” the “King’s Head,” the “Old
Swan,” the “Fox and Hounds,” the “Snow Shoes,” the “General Elliott,” the “Duke of York” (that was the house in Wilkie’s picture of the reading of the news of the Battle of Waterloo), the “Rose and Crown,” the “Cheshire Cheese,” the “Nell Gwynn,” the “Marquess of Granby,” and the “Waterworks,” and several beerhouses. All of these houses have been closed or pulled down.
At the corner of Smith Street was the house where Tommy Faulkner, who wrote the history of Chelsea, carried on his business of bookseller, library keeper, stationer and printer. There were some rich people at that end of Paradise Row, several of them Quaker families, keeping two or three servants. Near the corner of the alley leading into Durham Mews, lived a doctor, a celebrated anatomist, and at the bottom of his garden in the Mews stood a building with no window that could be seen. That had the reputation of being the dissecting room. None of us boys would pass it after dark, as it was reported that the body snatchers who robbed the grave yards, would bring the bodies in a sack to sell to the doctor.
The present Children’s Hospital was Miss Pemberton’s ladies’ school, Gough House, with a lozenge-shaped grass plot and a carriage drive; an avenue of elm trees led on each side to the house
from the iron entrance gates, by the side of which stood the coachhouse and stables.
A trip to Clapham was quite an undertaking, as there were no means of getting there but by walking. Once a year I used to go with the mother to pay the ground rent. We had to start after an early dinner and walk over Battersea Bridge along the road, with fields on each side to the top of Surrey Lane, pass Weller’s Farm, and strike off to the left by a pathway through cornfields to Long Hedge Farm—where the Chatham and Dover works now stand—and pass through some water meadows with bridges of planks across the dikes and penstocks, and up the hill by the side of some old cottages that brought you out in the Wandsworth Road; across a narrow footpath, a steep hill with steps cut in the gravel, called Matrimony Hill, and through the old churchyard. A few doors to the left was a ladies’ school,—our destination. The lady we were to see was a Miss Hart, a parlour boarder there. We were regaled with biscuits and a glass of currant wine, which we quite appreciated, to help us on our way home.
CHAPTER 2.—Schoolboy Escapades.
In Smith Street, at the corner of Durham Mews, stood Durham House School, a large, square, rambling old building, without any pretence to architectural design, apparently built at different times. It contained over forty rooms and dormitories, with a large playground at the back extending the whole length of the mews. It was strictly a boarding school, and must have had nearly one hundred boys training for Eton and Harrow and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, mostly the sons of the aristocracy and the leading families. Some of our most eminent men were trained there. Some of the younger boys on the fourth form were allowed out with the usher on the Wednesday afternoons in the summer time, from two till six, to wander in the fields and lanes to gather wild flowers and to receive instruction in botany. I became acquainted with them at the tuck shop in Queen Street, kept by an old crippled shoemaker, where we used to gamble for sweets by an apparatus called a “doley.” You dropped a marble down a spiral column on to a tray at the bottom with a lot of indents for the marble
to lodge in, all numbered, and the highest number took the prize.