Among the minor entertainments of Smith’s management was the exhibition, in 1867, of Natator, the man-frog. This human frog was a young man of twenty, who was to be seen through the plate-glass front of a huge tank filled with 6 feet of water. He imitated the motions of fish, stood on his head, ate a sponge-cake, or smoked a pipe. A more rational exhibition was the appearance of the Beckwith family in 1869. [16b]
In his last year (1869) Smith exhibited the French ‘captive balloon’ in the Ashburnham grounds. This balloon was made of linen and indiarubber, and held thirty people. It was attached by a strong rope worked by an engine of 200 horse-power, and could be let out, so as to soar ‘in an aerial voyage over London,’ 2,000 feet. The charge for an ascent was ten shillings, but a free admission was granted to a female inmate of the Fulham Workhouse, who chose to celebrate her hundredth birthday by a trip in the balloon, attended by the matron. It was fortunately not on this occasion that the captive balloon, after the manner of its kind, escaped! [16c]
John Baum, who became lessee in 1870, had not the character of his predecessors, nor a hand strong enough to restrain the vagaries of his more troublesome clients. But he was by no means incapable as an entertainment manager and when the gardens were opened they were found to be much improved, and a new theatre was built. He developed the stage amusements, and produced some good ballets, such as Giselle, in 1870. In 1875 there was a comic ballet by the Lauri family, and Offenbach’s Rose of Auvergne, with a ballet of 100, was given. Auber’s Fra Diavolo was presented before a Bank Holiday audience in 1877. [17] The orchestra was a capable one under Jules Riviere. In 1872 the licence for dancing, the great attraction of Cremorne, was refused, but in 1874 the waltzing or, the ‘crystal platform’ was again as lively as ever.
The one great, but melancholy, sensation of Baum’s management was the episode of ‘Monsieur de Groof, the flying man.’ Vincent de Groof was a Belgian who had constructed a flying machine on which he made some ascents with doubtful success in his native land. He came to England in 1874, and with some difficulty persuaded Baum to let him go through his dangerous performance at Cremorne. Certainly the flying man made a good advertisement, and on the evening of June 29, 1874, there was a great concourse in the gardens. The machine was suspended by a rope, 30 feet long, from the car of Simmons’s ‘Czar’ balloon, and while the tedious process of inflation was going on the spectators had time to inspect a flying apparatus strange and wonderful. It was constructed of cane and waterproof silk, and was made ‘in imitation of the bat’s wing and peacock’s tail.’ Evidently De Groof, like his inventive predecessor in Rasselas, had considered the structure of all volant animals, and found ‘the folding continuity of the bat’s wing most easily accommodated to the human form.’ His wings were 37 feet long from tip to tip, and his tail 18 feet long. In the centre was fixed an upright wooden stand about 12 feet high, in which De Groof placed himself, working the wings and tail by means of three levers. He ascended from Cremorne about eight, and as the balloon rose seemed like a big bird perched in his net framework. He was meant to descend in the gardens, but the wind carried the balloon away to Brandon in Essex, where he made a perilous descent from the balloon, almost unseen, but apparently without injury. The Cremorne habitué felt that he was cheated of a sight, and on July 9 the experiment had to be repeated. At about half-past seven the machine was once more taken up by Simmons’s balloon, and this time there was no changing of the venue. The balloon soared to a great height, but for fully half an hour continued to hover over the gardens. Then the wind bore it rapidly away in the direction of St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, till the machine was perilously near the church tower. No one quite knew what happened at this moment. Simmons seems to have called out, ‘I must cut you loose,’ and De Groof to have responded ‘Yes, and I can fall in the churchyard.’ Suddenly the rope was severed, the machine, without resistance to the air, was seen to collapse, and wind round and round in its descent, till it fell with a heavy thud near the kerbstone in Robert Street. [18] A great crowd had collected, and De Groof was picked up in a terrible state, and taken into the Chelsea Infirmary to die. The fate of the balloon was an anti-climax: it was carried away to Springfield in Essex, where it came down on the Great Eastern railway-line after a narrow escape from a passing train. The whole affair caused great excitement in London, and the details were copied into papers like the Indian Mirror. A sheet-ballad sold in the Chelsea streets drew the obvious morals, and appealed to the tender-hearted passer-by:
‘You feeling hearts, list to my story,
It is a most heartrending tale;
And when the facts are laid before you
To drop a tear you cannot fail.’ [19]
But we are nearing the last days of Cremorne. At no period could the gardens be described as a place of quiet family resort, and under Smith in the sixties we begin to hear of rows and cases in the police courts. In 1863, for instance, there was a ‘riot’ on the night of the Oaks day, and a number of men, apparently of decent position, stormed and wrecked one of the bars. Six of them were caught, and fined from £20 to £50 apiece. A scene of this kind was partly the fault of the manager, who had advertised his gardens as just the pleasure resort for a gentleman returning from the races. One (undated) story of a Cremorne fracas, told by G. A. Sala, is rather amusing, and worth repeating nearly in his words. ‘A gallant Captain and M.P.,’ who was engaged to a young lady of good position, began to repent of his promise. To get out of it honourably he could devise no better plan than to disgrace himself at Cremorne. One night, accordingly, he repaired to the gardens ‘with a few chosen boon companions,’ who, like himself, imbibed freely of the rare vintages in the supper-rooms. The moment came when he was in a mood ‘to break things,’ and his first onslaught was on the glasses and decanters of a refreshment counter. Then he charged the dancing platform, frightened the dancers, and scattered the musicians ‘like blossoms before a March blast.’ They tried to stop him, but he put the waiters hors de combat, and for some time made short work of the police. The next morning the gallant Captain and M.P. found himself, at the police court, Westminster, provided with a sentence of fourteen days. From his dungeon-cell in Holloway he wrote an abject letter to his impending father-in-law, deploring the degradation he had brought on himself and his friends, and relinquishing for ever all claims on the beloved daughter. Next day the governor of the prison handed him a letter from the same father-in-law, which ran as follows: ‘Dear Jim,—Sorry to hear you have got yourself into such a scrape. Never mind; boys will be boys! Katie and I will call for you in an open carriage on Monday week, and the marriage will take place on the following morning at St. James’s, Piccadilly.’
These things were relatively trifles, and it was really not till the seventies—under Baum—that Cremorne became an impossible place. The Westminster Police Court was now hardly ever without its drunk or disorderly case from the gardens. Even the normal evenings at Cremorne were fairly fertile in incident, but a big crop followed the abnormal evenings—the night of some great event, the Derby, the Oaks, the return of the Prince from India, or—a new institution—the Bank Holiday. At such times extra late hours were always granted, and they were those occasions when champagne is said to ‘flow like water.’ It was half-past ten, half-past eleven, twelve, and still the theatres and music-halls were sending down fresh visitors, and the cabs came rattling down the King’s high road. The bars and boxes were so many hives of drinking mortals—men who had lost and men who had won, and the drinking quickly led to an almost indiscriminate pugnacity. The wretched waiters, even, were assaulted, though the pugilist thought he amply atoned by a money payment ‘on the spot.’
The efforts of the half-hearted Chelsea Vestry of 1857 were renewed with more vigour (and with more justification) from 1870 onwards, and they had a valuable ally in Canon Cromwell, the principal of St. Mark’s Training College, which stood almost opposite the entrance of Cremorne. One of the many unedifying illustrated papers of the seventies, the Day’s Doings, portrays the Canon in cap and gown ejecting two flashily dressed females from the gardens, and he and his docile students for the next six years are said to have given Mr. Baum a very rough time. This opposition was not popular, and on one 5th of November the worthy Canon was paraded on a coster’s barrow in front of Cremorne as a guy. The comic papers sneered at the petitions ‘signed by all the babies and children under ten,’ and issued a revised set of Cremorne Regulations. All ladies were henceforward to have certificates of respectability from the Board of Guardians, though members of the London School Board were to be admitted free. No fireworks, dancing, smoking, laughing, or flirting were allowed, but by an order from the Vestry you could obtain a coffee cobler or a cocoa cocktail. Ridicule is sometimes a legitimate weapon against the Puritan, but in this case Canon Cromwell and the Vestry were hardly in the wrong.
The end came rather suddenly and in a curious way. Towards the close of 1876 there was distributed in Chelsea a pamphlet in verse, entitled The Trial of John Fox, or Fox John, or the Horrors of Cremorne. It was signed ‘A. B. Chelsea,’ but the author was soon discovered to be a Mr. Alfred Brandon, a worthy and evidently courageous man, who had long been known as minister of the Chelsea Baptist Chapel. By trade Mr. Brandon was a tailor, and no doubt his coats were better than his poetry, which is, indeed, sad doggerel. This pamphlet was an indictment of Cremorne as the ‘nursery of every kind of vice,’ and of its callous money-grubbing manager John Fox. The jury decide against John Fox: