THE ALBERT SALOON AND ROYAL STANDARD PLEASURE-GARDENS
In his own Shepherdess Walk—a little to the north of the Eagle—the enterprising Thomas Rouse had a not unsuccessful imitator in the person of one Henry Bradley, the proprietor of the Royal Standard tavern and pleasure-gardens. Some entertainments and concerts were given here in the early thirties, but the fame of the place, such as it was, belongs to the forties.
At the end of 1838 Bradley began to adorn his gardens somewhat in the manner of the Eagle, surrounding them with boxes, alcoves, and panoramic views, and building the new saloon for concerts and plays which became well known as the Albert Saloon. He opened the gardens on Easter Monday, 1839, announcing that they would accommodate 10,000 persons, of whom 4,000 were sure of shelter from the rain. Concerts, vaudevilles, and melodramas were for several years the staple of attraction, and the admission was usually not more than sixpence. Tom Jones, a mimic and comic singer, was the manager, and something was done in the way of fireworks, ballooning, and weekly dances.
At the gardens of this period the mild attraction of a balloon ascent was often heightened by suspending from the car some living object—a pony, a donkey, or a man. The balloonist Gypson, who ascended from the Standard gardens in 1839, varied this device by attaching to his night-balloon ‘a model of the late Royal Exchange.’ Unfortunately, as the balloon was rising, the ‘late Royal Exchange’ caught fire and was burnt to ashes in the grounds, though the aeronaut cut the rope and soared on high in safety.
As a minor theatre, the Albert Saloon never attained the well-deserved fame of its Grecian rival. But it is fair to say that in one week of 1846 it presented the tragedy of Venice Preserved, the tragedy of Othello, and Cato—not, indeed, Addison’s, but ‘Cato; or, The Slave’s Revenge, a romantic drama.’ To relieve the tension of this trying time, the drama of the Jail Bird was enacted, and Jack Sheppard and Rookwood were at one time or another found to be the taste of the Albert audiences.
The Albert Saloon had also its pantomimes, and for several years the noted clown, Paul Herring, was in its company. Herring had begun life, like other famous artists, by performing daily—and innumerable times daily—in Richardson’s show at Bartholomew Fair. He came to the Albert Saloon in 1839, and was afterwards clown at the Victoria and other theatres. In his later days he subsided into the lean and slippered pantaloon, a part that he played in the Drury Lane pantomime of 1877, the year before his death.
The glory of the Albert appears to have waned at the end of the forties, and the place was closed about 1857, and the Royal Standard, a public-house numbered 106, Shepherdess Walk is now its only representative. [69]
[The newspapers, and bills and posters of the Albert Saloon (W.); Colburn’s Kalendar, 1840, pp. 14, 163.]
NEW GLOBE PLEASURE-GROUNDS, MILE END ROAD
The New Globe tavern, No. 359, Mile End Road, was and is (though somewhat altered)—a substantial building, with a fine golden globe still keeping its balance on the roof. From the twenties or thirties [70a] till the sixties it had some spacious grounds in the rear, entered from an archway beside the tavern. These grounds contained fine trees, and were prettily laid out with many fountains, statues, and rustic boxes. On the west of the grounds was the Regent’s Canal, and the whistling and puffing of the Eastern Counties Railway in the background were, for a time, looked on as amusing novelties. Houses in Whitman Road and Longfellow Road (at the back of the tavern) now cover the site of these grounds.