An astute former hanger-on at Faultless’s cock-pit in Endell Street surprised me considerably on one occasion as he stood at the door of a dilapidated beer-house in Covent Garden by informing me that he had bought it for a trifle, and six months later I was literally staggered by again meeting the rascal shovelling out potatoes at a little greengrocery shop where now stands the London and Westminster Bank opposite the Law Courts.
He explained that he had a brother in a humble but trusted position at Spring Gardens, and that his old beer-house had ceased to exist, and he expected his “present property” would “come down” before long.
Green Street, leading from Leicester Square, was another channel for the acquisition of large profits, and when every house was a bug-walk, and demolition a matter of a few months, the news was actually “offered” to a man I knew well able to find the requisite purchase money, but rejected from misplaced prudential motives.
The present London Pavilion was another glaring instance of jobbery, and years before it was necessary to hustle the ex-Scott’s waiter from the cosy nest-egg he so diligently nursed, the Board of Works descended on him like an avalanche with a peremptory notice to quit.
At this stage one Villiers comes upon the scene, but whether he was a scion of the noble house of Jersey or Clarendon is not clear. Suffice that tradition credited him with having once been a considerable actor who had made a great hit in a minor part in the Overland Route at the Haymarket during the fifties. Later, he appears to have become lessee of the transpontine Canterbury Hall, where he was a dismal failure, and spent the latter portion of his tenancy in bed—a victim of gout and the importunities of irrepressible bill-stickers.
It was in these darkest hours that the Board of Works entered into his life, and in an incredibly short space of time he had enlisted the co-operation of a sporting furrier, had hustled the unhappy Loibel out, and was in undisputed possession of the London Pavilion. How the £103,000 was found to pay the out-going man is of no particular importance, suffice that so indecent was the haste that an auction was deemed superfluous; the entire contents were turned over at a valuation, and as Loibel toddled out Villiers toddled in, and—undisturbed by parochial or other demands—he gradually rose to affluence, periodically visited Continental watering-places, was a person to be reckoned with in a mushroom political club, and died recently worth a considerable personalty.
The juggle over the Pavilion never attracted much interest, and the gladiators being respectively a German and a Jew the transaction was forgotten almost at its inception.
Passing through the Opera Colonnade I tried not long ago to locate the exact shop—once a cigar merchant’s—in which the Raleigh, originally known as the “Old Havana Cigar Club,” may be said to have had its being, for it was whilst sitting on tubs one afternoon in the fifties that three or four Mohawks of the first order persuaded Tod Heatly—the ground landlord—to provide some sort of superior night-house which, by opening its doors at 10 p.m. and not closing them till the last roysterer had reeled home, would “meet a want long felt,” as modern advertisements occasionally describe their worthless wares.
It was later—in the early seventies—that the proprietorship changed hands, and was worked on more commercial lines by the Brothers Ewen (triplets), who, believing in quantity rather than quality, periodically sat as a committee under the chairmanship of an amiable old gentleman (Lord Monson) and elected everything and everybody capable of producing the increased subscription.
It was in the solitary long room of the Tod Heatly era that details were arranged for the duel (which never came off) in regard to an accusation of foul play that was made in a Pall Mall club, when an old gentleman, who was in Court dress, was considerably astonished at receiving a flip on his calf from an erratic trump. And in this room, too, enough Justerini’s brandy was consumed of a night to float the motors which now lumber that once-sacred chamber. For whisky and other emanations of the potato were then practically unknown and only heard of by the privileged few who had seen an illicit Boucicault still on the stage.