This elegant and well-appointed theatre, near the corner of Wellington Street, was built in 1868, from the designs of Mr. C. J. Phillips. It occupies the site of the Strand Music Hall, a large building which had been erected in the place of an arcade which the late Lord Exeter had built here in order to resuscitate the glories of old Exeter ’Change. Both the arcade and music hall proved disastrous failures, whilst the Gaiety Theatre, on the other hand, has turned out immensely successful, under the management of Mr. John Hollingshead.
The Strand (North Side).—[p. 147.]
Sir John Denham, the poet, when a student at Lincoln’s Inn, in 1638, in a drunken frolic blotted out with ink all the Strand signs from Temple Bar to Charing Cross.
In a house in Butcher Row, Winter, Catesby, Wright, and Guy Fawkes met and took the sacrament together. Raleigh’s widow lived in Boswell Court, and also Lord Chief Justice Lyttelton and Sir Richard and Lady Fanshawe; and in Clement’s Lane resided Sir John Trevor, cousin to Judge Jeffries and Speaker to the House of Commons. Dr. Johnson’s pew at St. Clement’s is No. 18 in the north gallery; Dr. Croly put up a tablet to his memory. The Tatler, 1710, announces a stage-coach from the One Bell in the Strand (No. 313) to Dorchester.
No. 317 was the forge kept by the Duchess of Albemarle’s father, and it faced the Maypole; Aubrey describes it as the corner shop, the first turning to the right as you come out of the Strand into Drury Lane. Dr. King died at No. 332, once the Morning Chronicle office. The New Exeter Change—the site of which is now covered by the Gaiety Theatre and Restaurant—was designed by Sydney Smirke, with Jacobean frontage. East of Exeter Change stood the Canary House, mentioned by Dryden as famous for its sack with the “abricot” flavour. Pepys mentions Cary House, probably the same place. At No. 352 was born, in 1798, Henry Neale the poet, son of the map and heraldic engraver. In Exeter Change No. 1 of the Literary Gazette was published, January 25, 1817. Old Parr lodged at No. 405, the Queen’s Head public-house. No. 429, built for an insurance office by Mr. Cockerell, has a fine façade. At No. 448 is the Electric Telegraph Office; the time signal-ball, liberated by a galvanic current sent from Greenwich, falls exactly at one, and drops ten feet. The old Golden Cross Hotel stood farther west than the present. The Lowther Arcade, designed by Witherden Young, is 245 feet long and 20 feet broad. Here the electric eel and Perkin’s steam-gun were exhibited about 1838. In 1832 a Society for the Exhibition of Models had been formed here. In 1831 the skeleton of a whale was exhibited in a tent in Trafalgar Square; it was 98 feet long, and Cuvier had estimated it to be nearly a thousand years old.
It should be added that for most of the facts in this note the author is indebted to that treasure-house of topographical anecdote, Curiosities of London, by J. Timbs, Esq., F.S.A., a book displaying an almost boundless industry.
The Crown and Anchor Tavern.—[p. 152.]
The Crown and Anchor Tavern, at the corner of Arundel Street, was for some years the Whittington Club. Before the alterations it had an entrance from the Strand, which is now closed, its door being now in Arundel Street. Douglas Jerrold was one of the earliest promoters of this club, which was much used by young men of business. In 1873, after having been closed for some time, it was re-opened as the Temple Club. The King of Clubs was started about 1801 by Mr. Robert (Bobus) Smith, brother of Sydney, a friend of Canning’s, and Advocate-General of Calcutta. It sat every Saturday at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, at that time famous for its dinners and wine, and a great resort for clubs. Politics were excluded. One of the chief members was Mr. Richard Sharpe, a partner in a West India house, and a Parliamentary speaker during Addington’s and Perceval’s administrations. Mackintosh, Scarlett, Rogers the poetical banker, John Allen, and M. Dumont, an emigré and friend of the Abbé de Lisle, were also members. Erskine, too, often dropped in to spend an hour stolen from his immense and overflowing business. He there told his story of Lord Loughborough trying to persuade him not to take Tom Paine’s brief. He once met Curran there. A member of the club describes the ape’s face of the Irish orator, with the sunken and diminutive eyes that flashed lightning as he compared poor wronged Ireland to “Niobe palsied with sorrow and despair over her freedom, and her prosperity struck dead before her.”[773]
Wych Street.—[p. 164.]
“In a horrible little court, branching northward from Wych Street,” writes Mr. Sala, in an essay written in America, “good old George Cruikshank once showed me the house where Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker, served his apprenticeship to Mr. Wood, the carpenter; and on a beam in the loft of this house Jack is said to have carved his name. * * * Theodore Hook used to say that “he never passed through Wych Street in a hackney-coach without being blocked up by a hearse and a coal waggon in the van, and a mud-cart and the Lord Mayor’s carriage in the rear.”