At a concert in 1798 (June) Incledon and Madame Mara sang. In 1799 a January masquerade was diversified by a drawing for fifty twelfth cakes as prizes for the masks.
The Directors now began to offer prizes for regattas and volunteer shooting-matches, and a few splendid entertainments mark the closing years of Ranelagh.
On 2 June, 1802, Boodle’s Club gave an elegant dance at which the ladies “wore white and silver, ornamented with laurel”—and diamonds, and amused themselves by drawing prizes of trinkets in a Lottery Booth. On the 28 June (1802) the Picnic Society gave an “afternoon breakfast,” and at five o’clock Garnerin, the French aeronaut, and Captain Sowden ascended in a balloon from the gardens.[239]
On 23 September (1802) Mr. Thomas Todd descended into a reservoir of water twenty-five feet deep, prepared for him in the gardens. His awkward diving-tub, and his dress of leather and metal excited the laughter of spectators born too early to know the diver of the Polytechnic. Nor is this praiseworthy experiment to be counted among the splendid entertainments of Ranelagh, for Mr. Todd was “misfitted by his coppersmith,” forgot to take down his lamp, and did not remain under water more than five minutes.[240]
On 1 June, 1803, a ball in commemoration of the Installation of the Knights of the Bath took place and proved one of the finest of the entertainments. Yet these were only ‘struggles for happiness,’ and attempts to galvanise a nearly lifeless Ranelagh. The unending promenade, with its sentimental songs and elegant regale of tea and coffee, had ceased to attract, and the lamp-hung trees, the Chinese House and the music on the Canal had lost their ancient charm. On 8 July, 1803, the Rotunda of Ranelagh was opened for the last time as a place of amusement.
On 30 September, 1805, the proprietors gave directions for the demolition of Ranelagh House and the Rotunda; the furniture was sold by auction shortly afterwards, and the buildings were removed. The organ was bought for Tetbury Church, Gloucestershire, where it remained till 1863, when it was purchased by a builder.
The Ranelagh grounds had extended from the old Burial Ground (east of Chelsea Hospital) to the rivermarshes on the south, and the Chelsea Bridge Road now crosses their eastern boundary. When the buildings were removed the grounds were, by degrees, purchased of the shareholders by General Richard R. Wilford to add to his property adjoining. A poet of the Gentleman’s Magazine in June 1807 laments the Fall of Ranelagh, and the site already overgrown with weeds. The foundation walls of the Rotunda and the arches of some of the cellars could, however, be traced as late as 1813, and part of the site was a favourite playground for Chelsea children. By 1826, the Ranelagh grounds had become by purchase the property of Chelsea Hospital and were parcelled out into allotments. The ground is, at the present time, once more a ‘Ranelagh Garden,’ in which the public are admitted, as the old advertisements would say, “to walk gratis.”
All traces of Ranelagh have been thus obliterated, and a London historian (Jesse, London, iii, 420) on visiting the site in 1871, could find as its memorial only a single avenue of trees with one or two of the old lamp-irons—the ‘firetrees’ of the early advertisements—still attached.
[From the numerous authorities, the following may be selected:—Gent. Mag. 1742, 418, ff.; Ranelagh House: a Satire in prose, London, 1747 (W. Coll.); Dodsley’s London, 1761; Sir John Fielding’s Brief Description of London, 1776; Burney’s Hist. of Music, iv. 668, ff.; Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide (1793?); Lysons’s Environs, Supplement, p. 120; Faulkner’s Chelsea, ii. 299, ff.; Blanchard in The Era Almanack, 1870; Grove’s Dict. of Music, art. “Ranelagh House,” by W. H. Husk; L’Estrange’s Village of Palaces, ii. 296; Walford, v. 76, ff.; Austin Dobson’s Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 2nd ser. p. 263, ff.; collections relating to Ranelagh in British Museum and Guildhall libraries, and a large series of cuttings from newspapers, magazines, &c., W. Coll.]