Out and About London

by Thomas Burke

After some search, we found a quiet corner in a bar where the perverted stuff was not being talked, and there we gave ourselves to recalling the little joyous jags that marked the progress of other years. I was dipping the other night into a favourite bedside book of mine—here I'd like to put in a dozen pages on bedside books—a Social Calendar for 1909; a rich reliquary for the future historian; and was shocked on noting the number of simple festivals which are now ruled out of our monotonous year. Do you remember them? Chestnut Sunday at Bushey Park—City and Suburban—Derby and Oaks—Ascot Sunday at Maidenhead—Cup Tie at the Crystal Palace—Spring week-ends by the sea—evening taxi jaunts to Richmond and Staines—gay nights at the Empire and the adjoining bars—supper after the theatre—moonlight trips in the summer season down river to the Nore—polo at Ranelagh—cricket at Lord's and the Oval—the Boat Race—Henley week—Earl's Court and White City Exhibitions, where one could finish the evening on the wiggle-woggle, as a final flicker. And now they have just delivered the most brutal blow of all. Having robbed us of our motors and our cheap railways, they have stolen away from the working-man his (and my) chiefest delight—the beanfeast wagonette. (How I would have loved to take Henry James on one of these jags.) The disappearance of this delight of the summer season is, at the moment, so acute and so personal a grief, that I cannot trust myself to speak of it. I must withdraw, and leave F. W. Thomas (of The Star) to deliver the valedictory address:—

This spells the death of yet another old English institution. One cannot go beanfeasting in traps and pony carts. There would be no room for the cornet man, and without his distended cheeks and dreadful harmony the picture would be incomplete.

That was a great day when we met at the works in the morning, all in our best clothes and squeaky boots, all sporting large buttonholes and cigars of the rifle-range brand.

With the yellow stone jars safely stowed under the seat and the cornet man perched at the driver's left hand, we started off. Usually the route lay through Shoreditch and Hackney to Clapton, and so to the green fields of the Lea Bridge Road.

For the first hour of the journey we were quiet, early-morningish, and a little reminiscent, recalling the glories of past beanfeasts. The cornet man tootled half-heartedly, with many rests and much licking of dry lips. Not until the "Greyhound" was passed did he get well under way, and then there was no stopping him. His face got redder and redder as he blasted his way through his repertoire; a feast of music covering the years between "Champagne Charlie" and Marie Lloyd.

At the end of the drive the horses were put up and baited, and the merry beanfeasters spread themselves and their melody through the glades of Loughton or High Beech, with cold roast beef and pickles at Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge or the "Robin Hood."

And who does not remember that joyful homeward journey, with the cornet man, now ruddier than the cherry, blaring "Little Brown Jug" from well-oiled lungs, while behind him the revellers sang "As your hair grows whiter," and an accordion in the back seats bleated "The Miner's Dream."

As Herbert Campbell used to sing in the old days:—

Then up I came with my little lot,

And the air went blue for miles;

The trees all shook and the copper took his hook,

And down came all the tiles.

That was the real tit-bit of the beanfeast, the rollicking homeward drive, with the brake embowered in branches of trees raped from the Forest, and lit by swaying Chinese lanterns and great bunches of dahlias bought from the cottagers of Loughton, and Chingford.

One always took home a bunch of flowers from a beanfeast, and maybe a pint of shrimps for the missus, and some acorns for the youngsters, or a gilded mug.

The defunct brake had other uses than this. Sometimes it took parties of solemn old ladies in beads and black to an orgy of tea and cake in the grounds of the "Leg of Mutton" at Chadwell Heath. These were prim affairs. Mothers' Meeting from the little red church round the corner. They had no cornet, and the smiling parson rode in the seat assigned to Orpheus.

The youngsters, too, had their days—riotous days shrill with song and gay with coloured streamers, air-balloons and trumpets. How merrily they would bellow that they were "all a-going to Rye House, so 'Ip-ip-ip-ooray!'" though their destination was Burnham Beeches or Brickett Wood.

Rubber-neck parties of American tourists occasionally saw the sights of London from brakes and wagonettes; solemn people, who for all the signs of holiday they displayed might have been driving to Tyburn Tree.

But the real reason for the brake was the beanfeast with its attendant cornet man and its rubicund driver with his white topper and the little boys running behind and stealing rides on the back step. Until the war is over Epping will know them no more, and the nightingales of Fairlop Plain will sing to the moon undisturbed.

We lunched at the "Trocadero," where a friend on the staff put us in the right place and put before us the right food and the right wine. The rooms looked like a Service mess-room. Every guest looked like every other guest. Men and women alike had fallen victims to that devastating plague of uniforms, and all charm, all significance, had been obliterated by this murrain of khaki and blue serge. The suave curves of feminine dress had been ironed out by the harsh hand of the standardizer, and in their place we saw only the sullen lines of the Land Girls' rig making juts and points with the rigidities of the Women's Army Corps and Women's Police garb. The Vorticists ought to be thankful for the war. It accomplished in one stroke what, in 1914, they were feverishly attempting: it turned life into a wilderness of angles.

"Clothes," said Carlyle, "gave us individuality, distinction, social polity." He ought to see us now. Standard Bread, Standard Suits, Standard This, and Standard That.... The very word "standard" must now be so universally loathed by men who have managed to conceal from the controllers some remnants of character, that I wonder the Evening Standard manages to retain its popularity without a change of title. If standardizing really helped matters, nobody could complain; but can Dogberry aver that it does? Does it not, in practice, rather hinder than help? In railway carriages the bottlefed citizen girds against all this aimless interference with his daily life; but his protests are no more considerable than that of the victim in the melodrama: "Have a care, Sir Aubrey, have a care. You have ruined me sister. You have murdered me wife. You have cast me aged father into prison. You have seduced me son. You have sold up me home. But beware, Sir Aubrey, beware. I am a man of quick temper. Don't go too far."

When we looked round the Trocadero, and we remembered the bright company it once held, and then noted the tart aspect of the place under organization, we felt a little unwell, and dared to wonder why efficiency cannot walk with beauty and the zeal for victory go with grace and gladness. Had the marriage, we wondered, been tried by the authorities, and the parties proved to be so palpably incompatible? Or was it that they had been for ever sundered by some one who mistakes dullness for earnestness and ugliness for strength?

However, the rich scents of well-cooked offal, mingled with those of wine and Oriental tobacco, soothed us a little, and we achieved a brief loosening of the prevailing restraint, and allowed our thoughts to run without the chain. Our friend had dug from the depths of the cellar a fragrant Southern wine, true liquid sunshine, tinct with the odour of green seas; a rare bottle to which I made a chant-royal on the back of the menu, and, luckily for you, mislaid the thing, or it would be printed here. We talked freely; not brilliantly, but with just that touch of piquancy that stimulants and narcotics, rightly used, bestow upon the brain.

We lounged over coffee and liqueurs, and then strolled up the Avenue and called at the establishment of "Mr. Francis Downman," that most discriminating and charming of wine-merchants—discriminating because he has given his life to the study of wines; charming because, away from his wine-cellars and in his true name, he is a novelist whose books, so lit with sparkle and espièglerie, have carried fair breezes into many a dusty heart. If you have ever visited that old Queen Anne House in Dean Street and glanced at "Mr. Downman's" Bulletins, you will realize at once that here is no ordinary vendor of wines. Wine to "Mr. Downman" is a serious matter. Opening a bottle is an exquisite ceremony; drinking is a sacrament. I once lunched with "Mr. Downman" in his cool Dutch kitchen "over the shop," and each course was lovingly cooked and served by his own hands, with suitable wines and liqueurs. It was a lesson in simple and courtly living. How pleasant the homes of England might be if our housewives would pay a little attention to correct kitchen and table amenities. "Mr. Downman" would be a public benefactor if he would open a School of Kitchen Wisdom where the little suburban wife might sit at his feet and learn of him. Yes, I know that there are many schools of cookery and housewifery, but these places are managed by people who only know how to cook. "Mr. Downman" would bring to the task all those little elegancies which make a dinner not merely satisfactory, but a refinement of joy. Feeding, like all functions of the human body, is a vulgar business anyway, but here is a man who can raise it to the dignity of a rite.

Further, he has shown us, in those "Bulletins," how to turn advertising into one of the minor arts. Perhaps of all the enormities which the nineteenth century perpetrated in its efforts to make life unbearable, the greatest was the debasing of trade. In the eighteenth century trade was a serene occupation, as you may see by glancing at the files of the old Gentleman's Magazine, Mirror, Spectator, where announcements of goods and merchandise were made in fine flowing English. Advertisement was then a matter of grace, of flourish and address; for people had leisure in which to receive gradual impressions. The merchants of that day did not scream at you; they sat with you over the fire, and held you in pleasant converse, sometimes, in their talk, throwing off some persiflage or apothegm that has become immortal. There was a Mr. George Farr, a grocer, circa 1750, who issued some excellent trade tickets from the "Beehive and Three Sugar Loaves"; little cards, embellished with dainty woodcuts that bring to mind an Elzevir bookplate; the pictures a sheer joy to look upon, the prose a delicate pomp of words that delights the ear. Then there were the trade cards of the Goldsmiths' and Silversmiths' Company of the eighteenth century, each one the production of a true artist (Hogarth did several), as well as the tobacco advertisements of the same period. In the latter case, not only were the cards works of art, but poetry was wooed and won for the cause. Near the old Surrey Theatre lived one John Mackey, who sang the praise of his wares in rhyme and issued playbills purporting to announce new tragedies under such titles as My Snuff-Box, The Indian Weed, The True Friend, or Arrivals from Havannah, The Last Pinch, and so on. The cabinet-makers of the eighteenth century also found time to indite delicious morsels of prose and prepare quaint and harmonious pictures for the delight of their patrons. Mr. Chippendale and Mr. Heppelwhite were most industrious in this direction, and the Society of Upholsterers and Cabinet Makers issued, in 1765, a work now very much sought after: The Cabinet and Chair Makers' Real Friend and Companion.

But then, snorting and hustling like a provincial alderman, in came the nineteenth century, with its gospel of Speed-up; and the result was that fair fields and stately streets scream harshly in your ears at every turn:—

Drink Bingo.
It is the Best.