Bohemian Days in Fleet Street

by William Mackay

And talking of artists, I may mention here that the only person of distinction whose acquaintance I ever made through my host was Frost, the accomplished follower of Etty as a painter of the nude. I had the mild, man-in-the-street sort of admiration of Frost’s work, which I had seen on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held, not at Burlington House, but in Trafalgar Square. And from his pictures I expected—such are the perverse preconceptions of youth—to meet a young, tall, flamboyant man with flowing locks and the airs of a Grand Seignior. We were walking one morning—my host and I—down the main avenue of the Regent’s Park. It was spring-time. The flower-beds were ablaze with bulb plants. But few people were about at the moment. Presently we came upon a small and sombre man feeding the sparrows, which followed him in flocks, hovering about his head, and now and then lighting on his hand to snatch a crumb. The small, sombre man was dressed in rusty broadcloth. He wore a wig, had a most melancholy expression, and might have been put down as a superannuated tax-collector, a solicitor run to seed, a Dissenting preacher out of work; but not one man in a thousand would have identified him as a painter of nude subjects, which had been severely reprobated by the unco’ guid. Yet the amiable provider of food for the sparrows was none other than the celebrated Mr. Frost. Frost was a bachelor, and his house was kept for him by a couple of old maiden sisters, who had little sympathy with the direction in art which their brother’s genius had taken. But the sparrows in Regent’s Park altogether approved of their eccentric benefactor. And in this particular form of charity he was the forerunner of the amiable M. Pol (that is the Frenchman’s name, I think) whom I have watched feeding the birds in the gardens of the Tuileries. On this occasion Frost was not to be tempted into any discussion on art. He was intent on arguing the question of drains with my friend, and spoke on the sewer question with the dry particularity of a sanitary engineer. Altogether a disappointing experience of the painter of “Actea: the Nymph of the Shore,” a work which had stimulated all my youthful enthusiasm.

The first movement in the drifting stage of my career was the result of my presence at the first performance of “School” at the old Prince of Wales Theatre in Tottenham Street. The hatchment painter and I had long before agreed that we would be present on that memorable occasion. The night came at last. We were early—or what in those days would have been considered early—and obtained seats at the back of the pit. At that time the suburbs still remained sane. There was no queue of demented women posted outside pit and gallery doors at eight o’clock in the morning so as to be in good time for a performance commencing at eight at night. But the seating capacity of Miss Wilton’s theatre was limited, the pittites being restricted to a very small area, and, having passed the check-taker, we felt that we might consider ourselves lucky in having gained admittance at all. Ah, to recall the sensations of that playgoing! The sigh of relief as I settle myself in my seat! The roseate air of pleasurable anticipation on the faces of those about me; the empty rows of the booked stalls stretching from the front row of the pit to the orchestra; the eager scanning of the features of the stalls as they file in; the curious feeling of cheery elation, of high expectation—these are sensations which grow very stale with use; they are the prerogatives of youth. Enjoy them, my boys, while you are in your heyday. They are moods for which the old and the blasé would give a ransom to experience once again.

Indirectly and ultimately this visit to the pit meant much to me. Immediately it meant my first appearance in print in a London publication; eventually it meant my first acquaintance with a dramatic author. Ultimately, perhaps, it meant the determination to a calling quite apart from that to which I had been devoted by my friends. My chirpy companion, as he kept pointing out to me the various distinguished stall-holders as they filed into their places, little dreamed—as, indeed, how should he?—that he was conversing with a dramatic critic in embryo, and that in the course of a few short years I, too, would have a stall set apart for me in that select parterre.

With the production of “School” the Bancroft management and the Robertson comedies reached high-water mark, and all the town was soon rushing to the Royal Dustbin in its grimy and shabby little street off the Tottenham Court Road. A return to the natural in comedy has always spelled success. Farquhar’s was such a return. Goldsmith’s return to nature was hailed by a community sick of stilted heroics and artificial sentiment. Sheridan later on recalled the playgoer to the fact that to give a humorous presentation of society as it is means the highest pleasure to the patron and the highest profit to the playwright. At this present time of writing a return to nature has a meaning very different indeed to that which it bore at other periods. Nowadays the meaning of a return to nature seems to be a return to obscenity. Natural is a term connoting lubricity. And to this confusion in the minds of some modern dramatists as to the true significance of words I attribute much of the irritation caused by supervision and most of the agitation fomented with a view of disestablishing the censorship. But in the old Tottenham Street days we had not as yet accepted the quaint perversion of ideas at present offered us by an anæmic, exotic, futile section of playwrights, whose goods are exhibited at unlicensed matinées, because—luckily—the managers see “no money” in them. The word “nature” was not understood in this foul fashion by T. W. Robertson. The men and women of Robertson’s comedies were the men and women of his own day. The incidents were amusing without being preposterous, or pathetic without being maudlin. The construction of the Robertson series was close, intelligible, sequent. His dialogue rippled rather than sparkled; the story was invariably simple, wholesome, attractive; and over each production was the incommunicable Robertson atmosphere.

And the management that presented these dainty works exercised a care, a taste, and a scrupulous devotion to the details of representation which came as a revelation to those acquainted with the stage methods of the period; and marked, indeed, a revolution in stage management. It is not overstating the case to say that, had it not been for the lead given in this direction by the Bancrofts in the ’sixties and early ’seventies, and subsequently followed up with still greater éclat by the same artists at the Haymarket, one would scarcely have witnessed the elaborate sets and costly casts to which Irving accustomed us in the ’eighties and ’nineties, or on which, in our own time, Sir Herbert Tree spends so much money and so much intelligent enterprise. In the history of stage reform, however, the Bancrofts must always figure as pioneers; nor is anyone who is old enough to remember the London stage as it was accepted before their management of the Prince of Wales Theatre, at all likely to controvert the statement. Happily for the public, the lead was quickly and largely followed. The old-fashioned stage-manager became a thing of the past. What was once the exception is now the rule.

“Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.”

Slender as was my experience of London theatres and immature as was my judgment, I was intelligently impressed by the idyllic delicacy of the work represented, and by the exquisite rendering accorded by a company so wonderfully fitted with their parts. I confess to having felt an enthusiasm then which now I should have some difficulty in explaining. That emotion was soon to find an opportunity for expression. When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.

Our acquaintanceship—never an intimate one—began with a correspondence, friendly and genial on his side, ebullient and unctuous, I fear, on mine, for I was very young. Some time elapsed before I met him in the flesh. The introduction was effected at the Albion Tavern in Russell Street, Covent Garden. That famous hostelry has gone by the board this many a day. When first I knew it the Albion was a London institution for which one might have prophesied a permanence as secure as that of St. Paul’s. It faced the north side wall of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, some distance west of the stage-door. It was the favourite supper resort of theatrical people, and famous for its tripe and onions and for its marrow-bones. An excellent dinner of fish, joint, and cheese was served earlier in the evening at half a crown a head—the carver, in white smock and apron and white cook’s cap, wheeling the joint round from table to table on an ambulatory dumb-waiter, and carving in front of the customer, and according to the customer’s desire. The place was run by two brothers, named Cooper, who owned a similar house in Fleet Street. This was called the Rainbow. It was a great luncheon-resort of lawyers, and three-fourths of the present occupants of the judicial bench must have taken their midday meal there from time to time. The Rainbow, alas! where once law officers chopped and learned leaders absorbed the midday refresher, is now mainly a wine-bar—the daily resort of the Guppys, the Joblings, and the Smallweeds of the profession.

The brothers Cooper were not very much in evidence at either house. They presented none of the characteristics of the typical licensed victualler. Indeed, they were the most highly respectable looking men to be seen in any walk of life—rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered, of solemnly benign expression, and dressed with an amount of elderly foppishness which, in a drab mid-Victorian age, was quite delightful to behold. Up the Thames—somewhere in the Hampton Court direction, if I remember aright—where their home was, the neighbours who were “not in the know” supposed them to be stockbrokers of a sporting turn of mind. But if the Coopers took no ostensibly active part in the management of the Albion, they were most effectively represented by their head-waiter—the incomparable Paunceford. Even now, across the years, one can see his beaming face, his head held a little to one side—a propitiatory pose—his twinkling eye, his mellifluous and insinuating tone as he proceeds from box to box, half an hour, or even an hour, after closing-time, with the half-plaintive, half-humorous admonition of “Time, gentlemen, if you please!” Paunceford and the Albion should both have been made immortal. For when the Albion closed its doors, another race of waiters had arisen, and Paunceford’s occupation was gone. The last time I passed through Russell Street, Covent Garden, a merchant from the neighbouring market was running the premises as a store for fruit and vegetables. I wonder whether the ghosts of those departed who once made merry within ever appear to the eminent salesman, flitting behind his mountains of green-stuff, or playing phantom hide-and-seek among his boxes of oranges and bananas.