Cavanagh was an Irishman by birth, and a house-painter by profession. He had once laid aside his working-dress, and walked up, in his smartest clothes, to the Rosemary Branch to have an afternoon’s pleasure. A person accosted him, and asked him if he would have a game. So they agreed to play for half-a-crown a game, and a bottle of cider. The first game began—it was seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, all. Cavanagh won it. The next was the same. They played on and each game was hardly contested. “There,” said the unconscious fives-player, “there was a stroke that Cavanagh could not take: I never played better in my life, and yet I can’t win a game. I don’t know how it is.” However, they played on, Cavanagh winning every game, and the bye-standers drinking the cider and laughing all the time. In the twelfth game, when Cavanagh was only four, and the stranger thirteen, a person came in, and said, “What are you here, Cavanagh!” The words were no sooner pronounced than the astonished player let the ball drop from his hand, and saying, “What! have I been breaking my heart all this time to beat Cavanagh?” refused to make another effort. “And yet, I give you my word,” said Cavanagh, telling the story with some triumph, “I played all the while with my clenched fist.”
He used frequently to play matches at Copenhagen-house for wagers and dinners. The wall against which they play is the same that supports the kitchen-chimney, and when the wall resounded louder than usual, the cooks exclaimed, “Those are the Irishman’s balls,” and the joints trembled on the spit!
Goldsmith consoled himself that there were places where he too was admired: and Cavanagh was the admiration of all the fives-courts where he ever played. Mr. Powell, when he played matches in the court in St. Martin’s-street, used to fill his gallery at half-a-crown a head, with amateurs and admirers of talent in whatever department it is shown. He could not have shown himself in any ground in England, but he would have been immediately surrounded with inquisitive gazers, trying to find out in what part of his frame his unrivalled skill lay.
He was a young fellow of sense, humour, and courage. He once had a quarrel with a waterman at Hungerford-stairs, and they say, “served him out” in great style. In a word, there are hundreds at this day, who cannot mention his name without admiration, as the best fives-player that perhaps ever lived (the greatest excellence of which they have any notion)—and the noisy shout of the ring happily stood him instead of the unheard voice of posterity.
The only person who seems to have excelled as much in another way as Cavanagh did in his, was the late John Davies, the racket-player. It was remarked of him that he did not seem to follow the ball, but the ball seemed to follow him. Give him a foot of wall, and he was sure to make the ball. The four best racket-players of that day were Jack Spines, Jem Harding, Armitage, and Church. Davies could give any one of these two hands a time, that is, half the game, and each of these at their best, could give the best player now in London the same odds. Such are the gradations in all exertions of human skill and art. He once played four capital players together, and beat them. He was also a first-rate tennis-player, and an excellent fives-player. In the Fleet or King’s Bench, he would have stood against Powell, who was reckoned the best open-ground player of his time. This last-mentioned player is at present the keeper of the Fives-court, and we might recommend to him for a motto over his door,—“Who enters here, forgets himself, his country, and his friends.” And the best of it is, that by the calculation of the odds, none of the three are worth remembering!
Cavanagh died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, which prevented him from playing for the last two or three years. This, he was often heard to say, he thought hard upon him. He was fast recovering, however, when he was suddenly carried off to the regret of all who knew him.
Jack Cavanagh was a zealous Catholic, and could not be persuaded to eat meat on a Friday, the day on which he died. We have paid this willing tribute to his memory.
“Let no rude hand deface it,
And his forlorn ‘Hic Jacet.’”
Fives-play from the year 1780 was a chief diversion at Copenhagen-house, particularly while Mrs. Harrington remained the landlady. She was careless of all customers, except they came in shoals to drink tea in the gardens and long room up stairs, or to play at fives, skittles, and Dutch pins, and swill and smoke. The house was afterwards kept by a person named Orchard, during whose time the London Corresponding Society, in 1795, held meetings in the adjacent fields.[198] In 1812, it was proposed by a company of projectors to bring sea-water through iron pipes “from the coast of Essex to Copenhagen fields,” and construct baths, which, according to the proposals, would yield twelve and a half per cent. on a capital of 200,000l.; but the subscription was not filled up, though the names of several eminent physicians sanctioned the undertaking, and the project failed.[199]
After Orchard’s tenancy, Copenhagen-house was kept by one Tooth, who encouraged brutal sports for the sake of the liquors he sold. On a Sunday morning the fives-ground was filled by bull-dogs and ruffians, who lounged and drank to intoxication; so many as fifty or sixty bull-dogs have been seen tied up to the benches at once, while their masters boozed and made match after match, and went out and fought their dogs before the house, amid the uproar of idlers attracted to the “bad eminence” by its infamy. This scene lasted throughout every Sunday forenoon, and then the mob dispersed, and the vicinity was annoyed by the yells of the dogs and their drunken masters on their return home. There was also a common field, east of the house, wherein bulls were baited; this was called the bull-field. These excesses, although committed at a distance from other habitations, occasioned so much disturbance, that the magistrates, after repeated warnings to Tooth, refused him a license in 1816, and granted it to Mr. Bath, the present landlord, who abated the nuisance by refusing to draw beer or afford refreshment to any one who had a bull-dog at his heels. The bull-field has since been possessed and occupied by a great cow-keeping landlord in the neighbourhood, though by what title he holds it is not known, certainly not by admission to it as waste of the manor. This field is close to the mud cottage hereafter mentioned in Hagbush-lane, an ancient way to Highgate-hill.