Instead of the promenade from which strollers are now hustled off the pavement by a zealous police, the strip between Windmill Street and the Raleigh Club was the favoured lounge, and the Haymarket literally blazed with light (till daylight) from such temples as the “Blue Posts,” Barnes’s, The Burmese, and Barron’s Oyster Rooms. This latter place, although palpably suffering from old age and the ravages of time, and propped up by beams innumerable, was the nightly rendezvous of oyster-eaters, where, sandwiched in between “loose boxes” upstairs and down, champagne and other drinks were consumed to excess.
Often amid these sounds of revelry, ominous cracks and groans warned the revellers that all was not right, till on one never-to-be-forgotten night a sound that vibrated like the crack of doom caused a stampede, and leaving wine, oysters, hats, unpaid bills, every one rushed helter-skelter into the street. Old Barron, staring disconsolately from the pavement at his fast-collapsing house, suddenly appeared to remember that his cash-box was in the doomed building, and rushing frantically in, was seen hurrying out with the prized treasure. And then a crash that might have quailed the stoutest heart rang through the night, and Barron, cash-box, and lights, all disappeared in a cloud of dust that ascended up to heaven. Days after the old man was found firmly clutching his treasure. Let us hope its possession compensated him in his passage across the Styx.
The decorous Panton Street of to-day was another very sink of iniquity. Night houses abounded, and Rose Burton’s and Jack Percival’s were sandwiched between hot baths of questionable respectability and abominations of every kind. Stone’s Coffee House was the only redeeming feature, and, as it existed in those days, was a very spring of water in a dry land.
But it must not be assumed that, although Percival’s was a “night house,” it was to be classed with its next door neighbours. Here the sporting fraternity radiated after all important events; here Heenan lodged after his fight with Tom King; and one can see him—as if it were yesterday—receiving his friends and backers on the following Sunday with his handsome features incrusted in plaster of Paris and smiling as if he had been awarded the victory he was undoubtedly choused out of.
But perhaps no spot has undergone more structural and social change than Arundel Place, an unpretentious court that leads out of Coventry Street. At one corner now stands a tobacconist’s shop, and at the other an eating bar, where hunks of provender are devoured at the counter, and cocoa retailed at a penny a bucket; whilst the court itself is practically absorbed by the Civil Service Stores, through whose windows “gentlemen” may be seen weighing out coffee, and “bald-headed noblemen” tying up parcels.
In the sixties, however, the place had considerably more vitality—after nightfall. On the eastern side stood a public-house of unenviable repute, owned by an ex-prizefighter, to which the fraternity congregated in considerable numbers; whilst at the end furthest from Coventry Street was a coffee-house, whose open portals discovered nothing more dangerous than an oil-clothed floor, chairs and tables over its surface, and an unassuming counter for the supply of moderate refreshments. During the day a spirit of repose pervaded the entire area; the public-house appeared to be doing little or no trade, whilst the coffee-house was chiefly remarkable for the persistent scrubbing and emptying of buckets that went on, as a mechanical charwoman, in the inevitable bonnet, oscillated to and fro between the door and the pavement. But for the old woman, and an occasional apparition in a startling check costume that flashed in and out between the coffee-house and the pot-house, one might have imagined the entire place was uninhabited, so subdued and reposeful was everything.
Tall and angular by nature, with skin-tight overalls and a coat the colour of a Camden Town ’bus, Jerry Fry was the undisputed landlord of the unpretentious coffee-house, and recognised director of a gang of sharpers who made human nature their study, and scoured the highways and byways nightly in search of profitable quarry. Not that the above costume was the sole one in Jerry’s extensive wardrobe, which boasted amongst others the huge cape and whip associated with rustic drivers, a clerical outfit, evening clothes, and a white tie the size of a poultice. Jerry as a strategist was without a rival, and it requires but little effort of imagination to assume that he has turned in his grave times innumerable in the contemplation of the sorry sharpers of the present era who have usurped his functions in the despoiling of their species. Any promising subject that appeared on the horizon immediately became the object of Jerry’s personal solicitude, and once the victim’s besetting sin was accurately diagnosed, no time was lost in placing a specialist on his unsuspecting track. It was not long after the arrival of the “Line” garrison in London that George Hay was focussed as an inveterate gambler, and as the “Landed Gentry” vouched for his being the eldest son of a county magnate, no time was lost in laying lines in every direction in the hope of catching him. Not that play—in which he was by no means an expert—was his only delight; on the contrary, he excelled in every kind of manly sport, and could hold his own with the gloves with many a man who had the advantage of him in height and weight.
When in the country cards never entered his mind; in London, however, with the fascination ever before him, the temptation was irresistible, and the three fly-blown cards of a racecourse manipulator or chemin de fer at the Arlington held him like a vice whilst the fever was upon him.
It was a sultry evening in September when everybody (except four millions) was out of town that George and Bobby elected to stroll to the West End after an uneventful dinner at mess. Threading their way through the slums that abutted on the Tower, nothing worthy of record occurred till, casually stopping to light a cigar, they were accosted on the threshold of Leicester Square by a courteous individual who asked for a light.
George was nothing if he was not a gentleman, and without waiting to consider why the person should seek a light from him when gas jets were blazing outside every shop, he considerately acceded.