To frowsy bowers they reel through midnight damps,
With Fauns half drunk, and Dryads breaking lamps.[308]
In about ten years the Dog and Duck had become a place of assignation and the haunt of “the riff-raff and scum of the town.” One of its frequenters, Charlotte Shaftoe, is said to have betrayed seven of her intimates to the gallows. At last, on September 11, 1787, the Surrey magistrates refused to renew the license. Hedger, like the Music Hall managers of our own time, was not easily beaten. He appealed to the City of London, and two City justices claiming to act as justices in Southwark, renewed the license seven days after its refusal by the County magistrates. The legality of the civic jurisdiction in Surrey was tried in 1792 before Lord Kenyon and other judges, who decided against it. The license of the Dog and Duck was then made conditional on its being entirely closed on Sundays.[309]
In 1795 the bath and the bowling-green were advertised as attractions and the water might be drunk on the usual terms of threepence each person. About 1796 the place was again open on Sundays, but the license was lost. This difficulty the proprietor surmounted by engaging a Freeman of the Vintners Company, who required no license, to draw the wine that was sold on the premises. The “Sunday Rambler” who visited the place (circ. 1796) one evening about ten o’clock found a dubious company assembled. He recognised a bankrupt banker and his mistress; a notorious lady named Nan Sheldon; and another lady attired in extreme fashion and known as “Tippy Molly,” though once she had been a modest Mary Johnson. De Castro (Memoirs), with a certain touch of pathos, describes the votaries of the Dog and Duck in its later days as “the children of poverty, irregularity and distress.”[310] It would, indeed, be easy to moralise on the circumstance that the place was soon to become the inheritance of the blind and the lunatic. In or before 1799 the Dog and Duck was suppressed, and the premises, after having been used as a public soup-kitchen, became in that year the establishment of the School for the Indigent Blind, an institution which remained there till 1811.
“LABOUR IN VAIN” (ST. GEORGE’S SPA IN BACKGROUND, 1782.)
Meanwhile, the enterprising Hedger, had made a good use of his profits by renting (from about the year 1789) a large tract of land in St. George’s Fields at low rates from the managers of the Bridge House Estate. The fine for building was £500, but Hedger immediately paid this penalty, and while sub-letting a portion of the ground, ran up on the rest a number of wretched houses which hardly stood the term of his twenty-one years’ lease. From this source he is said to have derived £7,000 a year. He died in the early part of the present century,[311] having obtained the title of The King of the Fields, and the reputation of a “worthy private character.” He left his riches to his eldest son, whom the people called the Squire.
The Dog and Duck was pulled down in 1811 for the building of the present Bethlehem Hospital, the first stone of which was laid on 18 April, 1812. The old stone sign of the tavern, dated 1716, and representing a spaniel holding a duck in its mouth, and the Arms of the Bridge House Estate, was built into the brick garden-wall of the Hospital where it may still be seen close to the actual site of the once notorious Dog and Duck.
[Trusler’s London Adviser (1786), pp. 124, 164; Fores’s New Guide (1789), preface, p. vi; Allen’s London, iv. 470, 482, 485; A Modern Sabbath, 1797, chap. viii.; Wheatley’s London P. and P. s.v. “St. George’s Fields” and “Dog and Duck”; Humphreys’s Memoirs of De Castro (1824), 126, ff.; Manning and Bray, Surrey, iii. 468, 554, 632, 701; Allen’s Lambeth, p. 7, 347; Gent. Mag. 1813, pt. 2, 556; Rendle and Norman, Inns of Old Southwark, p. 368, ff.; Walford, vi. 343, 344, 350–352, 364; Larwood and Hotten, Signboards, 196, 197; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. iv. 37; newspaper cuttings in W. Coll.]