[LV]
THE WHITE HORSE CELLARS
A little glass canopy with a clock above it juts out into Piccadilly, and a tall commissionaire stands at an entrance where some stairs dive down, apparently into the bowels of the earth. Where the stairs make their first plunge there is above them on the wall the device of a white horse—a fine prancing animal, somewhat resembling the White Horse of Kent.
The stairs, with oak panelling on either side of them, give a twist before they reach the bottom, where is the modern restaurant that occupies the site of what were originally known as the New White Horse Cellars, but which are now called the Old White Horse Cellars, probably on the lucus a non lucendo principle, for they have been modernised out of all recognition since the days when Charles Dickens recorded the departure of Mr Pickwick from these Cellars on his coach journey down to Bath.
The Old White Horse Cellars were originally on the Green Park side of Piccadilly, and their number was 156, as some way-bills to be seen at the present White Horse Cellars testify. This ground is now occupied by the Ritz Hotel. Strype mentions the original cellar as being in existence in 1720.
On the staircase walls of the New White Horse Cellars is a little collection of prints and way-bills, caricatures, etchings, old bills of Hatchett's Hotel, posters and advertisements from The Times and other papers of the hours at which the coaches for the west started. In this curious little gallery of odds and ends are some documents relating to the old cellar on the other side of the road. But the White Horse Cellars were under Hatchett's in the great coaching days, from the year of the battle of Waterloo to 1840. It was from Hatchett's that Jerry, in Pierce Egan's book, took his departure when going back to Hawthorn Hall, and said farewell to Tom and Logic, and it was in the travellers' room of the White Horse Cellars, a title that was used alternatively with "Hatchett's," that Mr Pickwick and his friends sheltered from the rain, waiting for the Bath coach.
Hatchett's in Dickens's time was not the comfortable house that I knew in the eighties, when the revival of stage-coaching was at its height. Indeed, there could not be a picture of greater discomfort than Dickens sketched in a few words when he wrote: "The travellers' room at 'The White Horse Cellar' is, of course, uncomfortable; it would be no travellers' room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter, which latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment." Dickens's word picture of the scene at the start of the coach at half-past seven on a damp, muggy and drizzly day is a fine pen-and-ink sketch, and Cruikshank, in one of his caricatures, "The Piccadilly Nuisance," shows very much the scene as Dickens described it, with the orange-women and the sellers of all kinds of useless trifles on the kerb; the coaches jostling each other, passengers falling off from them, and the pavement an absolute hustle of humanity.
Cruikshank's various drawings and caricatures preserve the appearance of Hatchett's of the old days in the memory better than any word pictures could do. The bow-windows of the old hotel with many panes of glass in them; the stiff pillared portico, with on it the name "Hatchett's," and a little lamp before it, and above it the board with the inscription, "The New White Horse Cellar. Coaches and waggons to all parts of the kingdom." Above this board again was a painting of an old white horse. I fancy that the title of the Cellars, when they were on the other side of the way, must have been taken from some celebrated old horse—though Williams, who was the first landlord of the original cellars, is said to have given them their name as a compliment to the House of Hanover, and that it was the white horse, not the cellar, that was old.
There are various other legends with respect to the horse that gave Hatchett's its title, one of them being that Abraham Hatchett, a proprietor of the tavern, had an old white horse with a turn of speed which had won him many a wager against more showy animals.
The entrance to the Cellars below Hatchett's, in the old days, was down some very steep stairs just in front of one of the bow-windows, and an oval notice, hanging from a little arch of iron, directed people down into the depths to the booking-office.