London Signs and Inscriptions

by Philip Norman

A general description of the painted signboards of London has formed no part of the scheme of this book, because much has already been written on the subject, and it would be too extensive to treat satisfactorily in the limited space at my command. It may, however, be useful to note a few signs of this kind still in situ. The Running Footman, of which there are two specimens in Hays Mews, Charles Street, Berkeley Square, is particularly interesting on account of the costume, and because it is a record of the days when carriages moved at little more than a foot’s pace,[78] and there were no police to regulate the traffic. It is supposed to date from about 1770. Such a servant as this would be singularly out of place in modern London; but in the East, retainers of the same kind, who run in front and clear the way, still naturally form part of a great man’s equipage. The Goat in Boots is to be seen in the Fulham Road in front of a public-house lately rebuilt. To Le Blond—a Flemish painter, who lived at Chelsea—was attributed the original design, which seems to have been painted or repainted by Morland. Since then, however, it has been daubed over again and again. Some ingenious person has conjectured that the sign originated from a corruption of the Dutch words: ‘der Goden Bode’ (the messenger of the Gods), said to have been applied to Mercury, and to have been formerly used on houses in Holland, to denote that post-horses were to be obtained; but this seems improbable, as the house in old deeds is called the Goat. At the Ben Jonson tavern in Shoe Lane a curious old wooden panel is preserved, which bears on its two sides what are supposed to be portraits of ‘rare Ben’; as it is nailed against the wall, one side only is now visible. The person portrayed is a lean hungry-looking man, the very reverse of the poet; it seems likely, nevertheless, that this was the old signboard. A more ambitious effort is the full-length portrait of the Duke of Cumberland—the hero of Culloden—which is on a public-house at the corner of Bryanston Street and Great Cumberland Place, built about 1774. It is affixed to the wall in accordance with the law passed a short time previously. One is reminded of a letter by Horace Walpole to Conway, dated April 16, 1747, in which he thus moralizes: ‘I observed how the Duke of Cumberland’s head had succeeded, almost universally, to Admiral Vernon’s, as his head had left few traces of the Duke of Ormonde’s. I pondered these things in my heart, and said unto myself all glory is but a sign.’ Now that Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly has passed away, it is worth while to record that over the bar of the Restaurant on this site (rebuilt 1886) was to be seen the old painted signboard of a white horse with flowing mane and tail, and the inscription, ‘The New White Horse Cellars, Abraham Hatchett.’ Last year, owing to further alterations, this was removed.

The signs I have referred to are comparatively well known, but that of the Coach and Horses—No. 49, St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell—has, I think, hitherto escaped observation. This is a large picture representing a lioness attacking one of the leaders of a mail-coach; a yokel with a pitchfork, and a dog, advance intrepidly to the rescue. In the background is a wayside inn, in front a pond. The event depicted actually took place on October 20, 1816, and is described in ‘Cassell’s Popular Natural History,’ vol. ii., p. 119. It seems that the Exeter mail-coach was on its way to London, and the driver had pulled up at Winter’s-Low-Hut, seven miles from Salisbury, to deliver the bags, when one of his leaders was suddenly attacked by a ferocious animal, which proved to be a lioness. A large mastiff came to the rescue, but when she charged him he fled, and was pursued and killed about forty yards from where the coach was standing. It turned out that the lioness had escaped from a menagerie which was on its way to Salisbury Fair. She was eventually driven into a granary, carrying the dead mastiff in her teeth, and there secured by her keepers. A picture of this strange attack was long exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly; of this picture I imagine the sign to be a copy, it seems too well done to have been painted expressly for the public-house to which it belongs. In the course of 1889 a curious sign, the Whistling Oyster, disappeared from No. 13, Vinegar Yard, on the south side of Drury Lane Theatre. Here were formerly oyster and refreshment rooms, and it seems that about 1840 Mr. Pearkes, the then proprietor, discovered among his stock an eccentric bivalve, which actually did produce a sort of whistling sound; much custom for a time and many jokes resulting therefrom. In an early volume of Punch there is a fancy portrait of the whistling oyster.

In the course of this work I have several times alluded to the Guildhall Museum, beneath the Guildhall Library, which is not known as it deserves. It contains not only sculptured signs, but a very valuable collection of objects of artistic and antiquarian interest, most of them from various parts of the city. The only drawbacks are that the crypt or room in which they are placed, being half underground, is very imperfectly lighted, and that the collection has not hitherto been catalogued. This latter defect will, however, I understand, be shortly remedied. Before descending let us glance at the statues which flank the entrance to the Guildhall Library and Museum from King Street. They are from the old College of Physicians in Warwick Lane—one of Wren’s buildings—some remains of which still exist, incorporated in the premises at the back of No. 1, Newgate Street. These statues represent King Charles II. and Sir John Cutler, a rich merchant whose avarice, handed down by Pope[79] and others, has become immortal. It seems that in 1675 Sir John—a near relation of Dr. Whistler, the president—expressed a wish to subscribe towards the rebuilding of the College of Physicians, which had been destroyed in the Great Fire, having previously stood at Amen Corner. When a deputation attended to thank him, he renewed his promise, and specified the part of the building for which he intended to pay. The theatre accordingly bore on its front towards Warwick Lane the inscription, ‘Theatrum Cutlerianum.’ In the year 1680 statues in honour of the king and the knight were voted by members of the college. A certain amount of money must have been furnished, and some years afterwards Cutler advanced them more; but after his death his executors, in 1699, claimed the whole with interest, the money pretended to be given, and that actually given, being alike set down as a loan in Cutler’s books. The demand was compromised for £2,000. The statue remained, but the college wisely obliterated the inscription which, in the warmth of its gratitude, it had placed beneath the figure: ‘Omnis Cutleri cedat labor amphitheatro.’ Pennant[80] is responsible for the above account, perhaps overcoloured, which he gave on the authority of Dr. Richard Warren. Strype speaks of Sir John as a great benefactor to the college; he had no doubt given largely to the Grocers’ Company, of which he was warden, and a portrait of him is in their possession.

I will now ask my readers to come with me to the Museum, which well repays a visit. I understand that the nucleus of it was formed in 1829, when various antiquities, discovered in digging the foundations of the then new Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, the new London Bridge, and in the destruction of the Guildhall Chapel, were brought together; but it has only of late years become important. I have already described the sculptured signs which here find a home; let me now briefly call attention to other objects which seem to me especially interesting. There is an article on them in the City Press for September 5, 1891, to which I am indebted for several useful hints. The accumulation of earth and débris in the City is so great, that the present town is raised many feet above Roman London. Now that excavations for new buildings are carried down much deeper than formerly, valuable objects are not unfrequently brought to light. The Roman antiquities in the Museum are many and important; of these perhaps the most striking is a large piece of tessellated pavement from Bucklersbury, in almost perfect condition. It was found no less than 19 feet below the level of the roadway, on which account it is thought to be an early relic of the Roman occupation. One of the good deeds of the much-abused Metropolitan Board of Works was the gift of this piece of pavement to the Corporation. In the course of excavations in the City no less than three bastions of the original wall have been discovered. The foundations of these were formed by masses of statuary, inscriptions, and other débris of earlier Roman buildings. A fine specimen is the statue of a Roman soldier, found at the bastion in Camomile Street a few years since. Then there is a sculptured lion fiercely attacking another animal, and many similar remains of equal or greater interest; to describe them all in the briefest way would fill a chapter. About one other relic of the Roman occupation I shall say a few words, because it appears to be an almost unique instance of a joke, written by a Roman with his own hand. This is a tile found in the Roman wall during the excavations for Cutler’s Hall in Warwick Square. On it are the following words, evidently incised when it was still soft: ‘Austalis, Dibusu vagatur sib cotidem,’ which was thus translated by the late Mr. Charles Roach Smith: ‘Austalis wanders off (from his work) by himself to the Gods every day.’ The sentence is thought to apply to a workman who was in the habit of absenting himself at odd intervals, for purposes of prayer maybe—or more likely of refreshment, and to have been written by a fellow workman.

Of later objects, the various specimens of mediæval skates are worth mentioning. Each one is fashioned out of the tibia of a horse. They have been found from time to time in the neighbourhood of Moorfields, and well exemplify the description written by Fitzstephen in the twelfth century, wherein he tells us that ‘when the fen or moor which watereth the walls of the City on the north side, is frozen, many young men play upon the ice—some tie bones to their feet, and shoving themselves by a little picked staff, do slide as quickly as a bird flieth through the air, or an arrow out of a crossbow.’ Interesting also are the flat caps of burgesses, considered to be of the time of Henry VII., which were found in Finsbury, May, 1887, and exhibited to the members of the British Archæological Association by Mr. J. W. Bailey. They resemble the flatter kind of Scotch caps, or the Basque caps, and have a peculiar little flap behind. Gold coins were discovered in the double rims of these caps, kept there for safety, no doubt; one of them an angel, of the time of Richard II. Then there is a fine collection of Elizabethan graybeard jugs or bellarmines, the grotesque heads on them being caricatured from the cardinal of that name, who so strongly opposed the reformed religion. Among larger objects, a splendid fireplace from the old mansion in Lime Street which belonged to the Fishmongers’ Company, and on which Messrs. G. H. Birch and R. Phené Spiers drew up such a valuable monograph at the time of its destruction. An old stone conduit from South Molton Street is worth a glance. It has on it the City arms and the date 1627, and was found six feet below the pavement. There is interest of a kind, too, in the inscription from Pudding Lane, affixed in 1681 by overzealous Protestants to the house of Farryner, the King’s baker, where the Great Fire of London first began. This inscription was taken down in the reign of James II., replaced in that of William III., and finally removed about the middle of last century. It was found in the cellar and brought here when the house (latterly numbered 25) was pulled down in 1876.

A few signs not sculptured are, I think, worth alluding to. One of the quaintest is composed of blue and yellow Dutch tiles, and was doubtless once fixed near the entrance of a coffee-house, but unfortunately no record of it has been preserved. It is about twenty inches high, and represents a boy with long hair, in seventeenth-century costume, somewhat like that of the modern Bluecoat boys. He is standing, and pouring out coffee; by his side is a table, with appliances for drinking, and tobacco pipes, and above, on a scroll, the words ‘dish of coffee boy.’ A sign of this kind in remarkable preservation, and finely executed, is the Cock and Bottle—three to four feet high, and worked in blue and white Dutch tiles with an ornamental border—which came from Cannon Street. The date of this sign is said to be about 1700; the house to which it belonged formerly stood on the south side, and was pulled down in 1853, at the time of the Cannon Street alterations. A public-house (Nos. 94 and 96), still called the Cock and Bottle, occupies the site. A sign of a Dolphin which belongs to the earlier part of the eighteenth century was in 1890 presented by Messrs. Burrup, so long pleasantly connected with the Surrey Cricket Club. It is painted on copper, and comes from a shop on the south side of the old Royal Exchange, where an ancestor of the Burrup family was first established in 1730. A unique relic is the little plate of metal, inscribed as follows:

‘Abraham Bartlett, who makes ye boulting mills and cloathes, dwells at the sign of the boulting mill at Thames Street, near Queenhith, London, 1678.’

It is surmounted by a grotesque head, and fixed on a thin piece of wood with a ring for hanging it up. The boulting-mill was used for sifting meal by shaking it backwards and forwards, boulting-cloth being a material of loose texture for the meal to pass through. Of doubtful origin is a classically designed figure of a boy in low relief, with foliated border, and the date 1633; the material of this is cast iron. Another curious relic is a wooden statuette of Time, with scythe and hour-glass, which formerly belonged to the clock in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. The inscription tells us that it was presented by the churchwardens, who in my opinion ought never to have removed it from the church for which it had been carved, where it was far more appropriately placed than it can possibly be here; though of course one is glad that it is preserved.

Last, not least, a very interesting stone bas-relief of doubtful origin, which purports to represent Whittington and his cat, was bequeathed by the Rev. Canon Lysons. The figure in question is doubtless that of a boy carrying a little quadruped in his arms. The tablet to which it belongs seems to have been broken off on the side to the spectator’s left, and therefore probably formed part of a larger piece of sculpture. This relic, which at a first glance seems to resemble a sculptured house-sign, was exhibited some years ago at a meeting of the Archæological Institute. Mr. Lysons stated on that occasion that it was dug up in Westgate Street, Gloucester. From a rent-roll of 1460, he had learned that in the said year Richard ‘Whitynton,’ lord of the manor of Staunton, possessed a house or houses, called ‘Rotten Row, or Asschowellys-place’; and from a lease it appeared that the house, in the foundations of which the stone was found, stands exactly on the site of Asschowellys (in modern orthography Ashwell’s) Place. The Richard Whittington here alluded to was great-nephew of the renowned Lord Mayor of London, living contemporaneously with his famous namesake, the rent-roll above named having been made within thirty-seven years of Sir Richard’s death. This is certainly a very singular coincidence, and if it could be proved that the tablet in question represented Whittington and his cat, we might consider that the tradition about him, which has delighted the childhood of so many thousands, was really founded on fact. Mr. Lysons was strongly of that opinion; he stated, however, that the house in Westgate Street, under which the tablet was found, besides being on the site of Ashwell’s Place, is also on the site of a Roman temple—and perhaps most impartial observers will be inclined to think that the costume of the figure, and the general style of the tablet in question, point rather to indifferent Roman than to fifteenth-century work.