Jack Peyton, who commanded the 7th Dragoon Guards, was another patron of Long’s. Shortly after his second marriage with a wealthy widow, his boon companion, Tom Phillips, of the 18th, asked him, “Is she good-looking, Jack?” “No, by —, Tom,” was the reply, “d— near as ugly as yourself.”
The fashion of dining at restaurants had not taken root in those days, and the feeding resorts were few and good and very far between.
Their numbers, indeed, were to be counted on one’s fingers, and were resorted to either for lunch or supper, and seldom, as now, for the more serious ceremony of dinner.
People dined at their hotels, for the plate-glass abominations that now cumber the ground at every point of vantage had not suggested themselves to undesirable aliens and our own home-grown Israelites.
When the (present) Berkeley Hotel first started the new idea under the auspices of the renowned Soyer, the separate-table system was a nine days’ wonder, and people were impressed when it was currently reported that Lady Blantyre and her most unimaginative of husbands might be seen nightly at the next table to Skittle’s enjoying the creations of that most marvellous of chefs.
It was here that that distinguished siren once rebuked a waiter who had clumsily splashed her with some viand, by: “You infernal lout, if I wasn’t a lady I’d smack your ugly face!” and it was at St. James’s (as it was then called) she was nightly entertained by her numerous worshippers.
A noble marquis—eventually a duke, and lately deceased—was for years supposed to be her lawful husband, but the devotion of a life-time and subsequent events have since given the lie to this evident canard.
“The Guildhall Tavern,” “The Albion,” and Simpson’s long reigned supreme as places where saddles and sirloins, marrow-bones and welsh rabbits were to be obtained in perfection; but all have now disappeared, except in name, nor will the expenditure of fortunes in their resurrection ever bring back the indescribable air of solid comfort that characterised these hostelries of the Sixties.
It was in the last-named house, even then on the wane, that my solitary (active) interest in the drama afforded me numerous occasions of delight.
Off the entrance hall was an unpretentious room, and here every day for weeks a divine being from the Gaiety partook of a hurried lunch in the company of my enraptured self.