Cremorne and the later London gardens

by Warwick William Wroth

On the west side was the circus; the theatre was in the south of the garden. A smaller theatre, north of the lawn, was appropriated to a troupe of marionettes, introduced by Simpson in 1852. They were great favourites of the public and of the proprietor, who liked ‘the little beggars who never came to the treasury on Saturday.’ Besides this, there was a maze and (as Vauxhall had its hermit) a gipsy’s tent and a ‘double-sighted youth.’ The admission to the gardens was one shilling, and the season tickets cost one guinea or two guineas.

Simpson’s management (i.e., till 1861) provided some special diversions, of which the most curious, perhaps, was an Aquatic Tournament or Naval Fête (1851). About eleven at night a fortress (either St. Jean d’Acre or Gibraltar) on the river esplanade was vigorously attacked by a squadron consisting of fourteen steamers of the Citizen Company (whose ‘entire fleet’ was embarked in the enterprise), seconded by the hull of a retired Citizen steamer, which was laden with combustibles. To this attack the land battery—its necessary smoke, fire, and noise supplied by Mortram and Duffell, the Cremorne fireworkers—made a suitable reply, and eventually the old hull was blown to pieces amid the cheers of the spectators.

The Italian Salamander, ‘Cristoforo Buono Core,’ was, later on, in 1858, another attraction of a fiery kind. Like Chabert, the more famous Salamander of 1826, [8a] this man entered a burning furnace with apparent unconcern, and (as he informed an inquisitive spectator) ‘titt as fell as he cott,’ though the performance made him very ‘dursty.’

In contrast to these popular shows, the manager on Friday, July 9, 1858, gave an ‘Aristocratic Fête,’ arranged by a committee of gentlemen assisted by lady patronesses, who are said to have been very chary of issuing tickets to other ladies whom the gentlemen proposed to invite. But the invitations mattered little, for the 9th turned out to be one of the wettest days of an English July, and the aristocratic ambitions of Cremorne were damped down for ever. [8b]

In the balloon ascents of Cremorne (as already remarked) there was often a dangerous element, usually a parachute descent. Without dwelling on the ascents of balloonists like Lieutenant Gale and the celebrated Charles Green, who made his three hundredth and sixty-fifth voyage (of course including his ascents at Vauxhall and many other places) on August 2, 1847, we can notice only the Bouthellier, Poitevin, and Latour performances.

In August, 1852, [9a] a French aeronaut named Bouthellier ascended on a trapeze attached to the car of a balloon, and when the balloon was at a respectable height began to twist himself round ‘almost in a knot,’ then to untie himself, and finally to suspend his body as he hung, first by his neck, then by his heels. The reporter tells us that this was done ‘to the evident mingled alarm and pleasure of the spectators,’ and the whole thing was considered to ‘redound greatly to the credit’ of Mr. Simpson.

In September of the same year (1852), Madame Poitevin, ‘in the character of Europa,’ ascended from Cremorne on the back of a heifer which was attached to her balloon. This was nothing new to her or to the sight-seers of Paris, where she and her husband had made hundreds of ascents on the backs of horses, and even ‘a great many ascents with a bull.’ A pony ascent had been made by Green at Vauxhall in 1850, [9b] but the English magistrates drew the line at a heifer, and Simpson and his Europa were fined at the Ilford Sessions on September 7, 1852, for cruelty to animals.

This wretched exhibition was not, of course, repeated, but risky parachute feats were by no means to be abandoned. On June 27, 1854, at about seven o’clock, Henri Latour, a balloonist of the age of fifty, went up lashed to a parachute which was formed like a horse, and suspended from W. H. Adams’s balloon. As the balloon was rising an attempt was made (by means of a trigger-iron) to release the parachute, but it somehow got twisted, and its two guiding ‘wings’ did not expand. The descent of the balloon continued, and in the Tottenham marshes, which it had now rapidly reached, struck the earth, and the unhappy Latour was dragged over the ground and through the trees, and died a few days after of his injuries. [10a]

The programme of the theatre and the concert-room was less exciting. The Cremorne theatricals never aimed much higher than the farce and the vaudeville, but there were some good ballets, in which (circa 1847–1851) the Deulins took part. Under Simpson some of the old favourite comic singers were engaged—Sam Cowell in 1846, Robert Glindon in 1847 and 1850. [10b] Herr Von Joel, who appeared in 1848, was ‘a peculiar old German’ [10c] who had made a sensation—which became a bore—at Vauxhall Gardens. His business was to appear at unexpected moments and in unsuspected parts of the gardens, to yodel. Swiss ditties, and to give imitations, on his walking-stick, of birds and feathered fowl. In his later days he was a familiar figure at Evans’s Supper-Rooms, where he used to retail dubious cigars, and dispose of tickets for benefits which never came off. J. W. Sharp (‘Jack Sharp’), who sang at Cremorne in 1850, was at one time the rage of the town, and his comic songs were in demand at Vauxhall and at such places as Evans’s and the Mogul in Drury Lane. But he took to dissipated ways, lost his engagements, and died in the Dover Workhouse at the age of thirty-eight. [10d]