The recent death of the once-popular Chief of the Fire Brigade, Eyre Shaw, recalls many stirring scenes that lit up the West End in the long-ago sixties, when theatres bore a considerable share of the conflagrations that partially or entirely destroyed some of our most notable playhouses.
It was in ’65 that the old Surrey was in flames, to be replaced later on by the present structure, more familiar to the present generation as associated with the début of such popular artistes as Lardy Wilson, Nelly Moon, Val Reece (Lady Meux of the 20th century), Rose Mandeville, and others under the management of Bill Holland, and the distinguished patronage of names too sacred to mention save with bated breath and in reverential tones.
Three years later the Oxford Music Hall was burned down, but those caves of harmony were less pretentious in those days, and so the conflagration, except as a sight, did not provoke much interest. But a blaze that occurred in December, ’67, roused all London, and as a “spectacle” surpassed anything that had ever been depicted on its stage, and put in the shade the Guy Fawkes celebrations of the previous month.
In that memorable year Her Majesty’s Theatre, without any apparent rhyme or reason, burst into flame, and despite herculean efforts was soon a heap of cinders. For the construction, as may be supposed, was wood and old, and those chiefly interested were probably gainers by the drastic accident, except perhaps Mapleson, who was said to have lost £12,000, and Madame Tietjens, £2,000. But Tod Heatly, the ground landlord, could hardly have regretted it, for it opened up possibilities of improving the site which, after many years, culminated in the present establishment, with its profitable addenda of an hotel with its “lardy-da” luncheon and supper rooms.
In those remote days the Metropolitan Board of Works was the controlling authority, and bone counters which emanated from them passed the holders within the cordon on any of these interesting occasions.
Eyre Shaw, too, about this time was appointed chief officer, and being an enthusiastic patron of the Gaiety (then only a precocious infant with every promise of its present development) little wonder that the bone counters were in considerable evidence amongst the present-day old ladies who then represented the Connies and Dollies and Lizzies of burlesque.
Contemplating the still-smouldering ruins, how complete appeared the obliteration of many notable incidents. Here Mario—approaching seventy—was acclaimed to the echo by a gushing house, after having been hissed off the stage in Paris for mumbling what he once used to sing; here Giulini thrilled the world with the purest tenor ever heard, and died in the madhouse in the zenith of his fame; here later, Moody and Sankey bellowed in solo and in duet, and stopped the traffic by the eager crowds that sought admission (free) to bellow in the chorus; here, too, sweet little Chiomi essayed to make her début in Lucia and failed; and here Lord Dudley, Carpenter, Vandeleur-Lee, Goodenough, and a host long since swept into the universal dust-bin, beamed nightly on Tietjens and Fanchelli with expressions supposed to denote familiarity with the text; here under its dismal porticoes sights of distress and starvation—forgotten in slumber—were nightly to be met with, as painful as anything that ever appealed to De Quincey outside the Oxford Street Pantheon, and here old Leader, prince of Bohemians and managing director of the Alhambra in the zenith of its pranky days, had a box office till he dropped from old age; here on one occasion on the son of one of the celebrated Irish Army agents being presented to him, the Royal George patronisingly greeted him with, “Oh, indeed, a son of ‘Borough and Armit,’” and received the explanatory reply: “No, sir, only of Armit;” and on the ghosts of all these departed memories not one stone now stands upon another to bridge, as it were, the present with the glorious past.
In these latter days, a conflagration such as this would, of course, be impossible, as witness the blaze not long since in Holborn. But then that was a fire proof construction.
CHAPTER XV.
MOSTLY “OTHERWISE” (continued).
In the long-ago sixties the Artillery Ball at Woolwich was the most select and the most sought after function that the dancing community yearned for, and about the same time Major Goodenough, a popular officer of this distinguished regiment—although close upon eighteen stone—fell desperately in love with Tietjens, herself of large pattern. Rumour, indeed, asserted that the ponderous couple were engaged, and so it came to pass that poor old Goody was nonplussed almost to distraction when his application for a ticket for his fiancée was politely but firmly refused.