It was here that poor old Jim Stewart—seldom sober, and long since dead—gave a baccarat party to some twenty plungers, where it was agreed that no deal should commence after 6 a.m., at which hour he was the winner of £1,500, and where, yielding to the earnest request of a heavy loser, he consented to extend the time to 6.30, and rose a loser of £5,000; it was here that the fastest and best men in London lounged in and out of the coffee room from breakfast time till well on in the afternoon, and smoked, drank champagne, talked horsy, and swore loudly.
Not that Long’s was not a highly-respectable hotel; on the contrary, the entire upper part was conducted on strictly correct lines, and patronised by the best county people of the day, and the latitude granted to the ground floor must be set down rather as a desire of the management to please all parties, and bow before the inevitable there was no resisting.
An amusing story may here be introduced of Colonel Oakes, of the 12th Lancers, the most irascible of cavalry officers, with a command of language that few, if any, could excel, and who invariably put up at Long’s.
Stationed at Aldershot, the Colonel about this time got married, and, anxious to avoid publicity, he decided to bring his bride up to London and, to make matters still less noticeable, to bring his soldier-servant with him.
Things went happily till the faithful attendant, who was an Irishman, knowing the Colonel’s impatient nature, and considering the luggage was a long time coming up, put his head over the banisters and shouted: “Will you be plased to bring up the Colonel’s and Miss Black’s boxes?”
The tableau half an hour later in the Colonel’s apartments may reasonably be left to the reader’s imagination: the politest of landlords expressing his astonishment, the most irritable of Dragoons cursing his impudence, and the innocent cause of this comedy of errors trembling for the consequences.
Colonel Oakes was admittedly a good soldier, and second only to Valentine Baker as a cavalry leader; popular with both officers and men, he was one of the last of the old swaggering school, a man of likes and dislikes, who, although free and easy and very plain-spoken, was a martinet in other ways.
“R—,” he once said to one of his officers (who certainly was not the accepted ideal of a sabreur), after an inspection, “the General asked me if you had come from the infantry,” and when the remark failed to elicit the reply he desired, he continued: “D— it, sir, you spoil the look of my regiment. I wish to — you’d exchange!” and when the culprit lost his temper and said he considered he was insulted, and that he was the son of a baronet, the irresponsible Colonel shouted: “D— it, sir, I’m the son of a shoemaker, and I wish to — you’d leave my regiment!”
On another occasion, strolling into the stables, he overheard two recruits discussing him: “I say, Bill,” remarked one of the warriors, “the Colonel’s a d— rum old buffer.” To which the other acquiescing, the Colonel advanced, and standing before the trembling culprits, began: “Yes, I heard what you said—that I was a d— rum old buffer—and I tell you what it is; if you had drunk as much as I have in the last thirty years you’d be a d— rum old buffer.”
Despite all these circumstances, no smarter regiment existed than the 12th in the long-ago sixties, although it was commanded by a “d— rum old buffer.”