Balls of various colours were invariably the signs of quacks and fortune-tellers in the eighteenth century; the Bagford Bills are full of Red, Blue, Black, White, and Green Balls, all signs of those gentry who profess to cure all the evils flesh is heir to. How they came to choose this sign is hard to say, for we can scarcely imagine that they were intended to represent magnified pills. Moorfields[680] was the head-quarters of this trade:—
“If in Moorfields a Lady stroles
Among the Globes and Golden Balls,
[483] Where ere they hang she may be certain
Of knowing what shall be her fortune.
Her husband too, I dare to say,
But that she better knows than they.”
Compleat Vintner, London, 1720, p. 38.
The Golden Ball was the sign of J. Osborne, bookseller in Paternoster Row, circa 1740, who printed one of the earliest “London Directories;” also of Doctor Forman in Lambeth Marsh, who was deeply implicated in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. The Two Golden Balls at the upper end of Bow Street, Covent Garden, was a place famous for concerts, balls, and other amusements, in the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Prince Eugene once attended a concert at this house. The Two White Balls, in Marylebone Street, was the sign of a school in 1712, where Latin, French, mathematics, &c., were taught; in the same house there also lived a clergyman who taught “to write well in three days.”[681]
The balls of the silk mercers and the quacks, suspended from an iron above the door, were generally added (in name at least) to the painted sign, when the house possessed one; as, for instance, the Ball and Cap, Hatton Garden, 1668; the Ball And Raven, Spitalfields, in the seventeenth century, (both on trades tokens;) the Red Ball and Acorn, Queen Street, Cheapside, “a [quack] gentlewoman, daughter of an eminent physician in 1722;”[682] the Plough and Ball, at Nuneaton; the Salmon and Ball, several in London; the Bible and Ball, a bookseller’s in Ave Maria Lane, 1761; the Heart and Ball, a silk-mercer’s in Little Britain, 1710; the Green Man and Ball, on a trades token of Charter House Lane, where the man is represented throwing a ball; and thus innumerable other combinations with the Ball might be mentioned.
The Three Blue Balls, generally a pawnbroker’s sign, was also in old times used for taverns and other houses, while pawnbrokers used at pleasure such signs as the Blackamoor’s Head, the Black Dog and Still, &c.[683] On 26th March 1668, Pepys tells us that, coming from the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he and his party went to the Blue Balls tavern in the same locality, where they met some of their friends, including Mrs Knipp;
“And after much difficulty in getting of musick, we to dancing and then to a supper of French dishes, which yet did not please me, and then to dance and sing, and mighty merry we were till about eleven or twelve at night, with mighty great content in all my company, and I did, as I love to do, enjoy myself. My wife extraordinary fine to-day, in her flower tabby suit, bought a year and more ago, before my mother’s death put her into mourning, and so not worn till this day, and everybody in love with it, and, indeed, she is very fine and handsome in it. I having paid the reckoning, which came to almost £4, we parted.”
What a delightful flow of animal spirits that old Secretary of the Admiralty enjoyed! Alas, for the awful dignity of his modern successors!
There is still a public-house sign of the Blue Balls, at Newport, I.W.
The Ring and Ball, Fenchurch Street, 1700, seems suggested by the game of pall mall, recently revived under the name of croquet, in which a ball was struck by a mallet through an iron ring. This sign is mentioned in an advertisement of some valuable trinkets which had been lost:—