Before Baum’s management of the Alhambra it was conducted for a time by a man called Strange. This gentleman had been previously a waiter at the St. James’s Restaurant—the “Jimmy’s” of later days—and he was running the show, I think, in 1870. During that lurid year the Alhambra made a lot of money, for the war feeling ran high, and the management astutely gave prominence in its programme to rival national airs. Partisanship was evoked. The house was nightly crowded by patriots on both sides, and scuffles and encounters were among the ordinary diversions of the evening. It is wonderful to see how doughty and valorous your fighting man who stays at home can be! Strange was supposed by the supporters of the house to be consumed by a hopeless passion for the première danseuse, who spurned his addresses. I never asked him about it, for, although he always made an effort to be civil to persons of my calling, he was a churlish fellow, and he wore flowing side-whiskers, which was in itself an offence. Both he and the object of his middle-aged affection have been dead this many a day.
My memory of the Alhambra stage is as a dream of fair women. Whether as ballet-girls, as singers, or as actresses in opera-bouffe, the women engaged were always lovely. They become visualized for me now in a procession of pretty faces and divine forms. There is Kate Santley, fair-haired and vivacious, and fresh from the music-halls and her success with “The Bells go ringing for Sarah!” There passes now Cornélie D’Anka, the golden-haired Hungarian, with the Amazonian figure and the exquisite voice; and behind her, as I look, looms, indistinct but recognizable, the figure of an Oriental potentate visiting our shores—that, indeed, of the Shah of Persia. Scasi, with her well-trained voice, passes from the Alhambra to the Surrey Gardens. Scasi, as will be seen, is Isaacs spelled backwards, and with the superfluous “a” deleted. She was the daughter of a furniture-dealer in Great Queen Street. The old Surrey Gardens, for which she abandoned the Alhambra, was the scene of the last appearance in public of the beautiful Valérie Reece—the late Lady Meux. Strange to think that the delightfully irresponsible little Bohémienne of the jocund days should have evolved into the owner of a Derby winner—Volodyvoski, which she leased to the American, Mr. Whitney—and the organizer and provider of equipment to a battery of artillery for service in South Africa. The name of Julia Seaman calls up to me that lady’s appearance in “The Black Crook,” in which fine production she played with extraordinary effect the part of the malignant fairy. A more inspiring performance than that in which I subsequently saw her at Paravicini’s theatre in Camden Town. She then essayed—not very convincingly—the rôle of Hamlet.
Pitteri was première danseuse for more years than it would be quite gallant to recall. Although assuming the chief place in ballet, this famous dancer possessed none of those sylph-like characteristics which are usually associated with the chief of the ballerine. She was a lady of opulent charms and large figure. In those days there was always engaged in the Alhambra production that epicene excrescence, the male ballet-dancer. At the Alhambra it was the duty of this individual to support the figure of Pitteri as she made a semicircle in the air, and to hold her when she assumed those poses which alternated her spells of purely terpsichorean exercise. The man ballet-dancer supporting Pitteri earned his wages whatever they may have been. Sara—known as Wiry Sal—was another favourite of the Alhambra ballet. This lady belonged to the high-kicking, athletic order of Corybantes. She was accompanied by two other high-kickers, and the three became known about town as “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”
After the reign of John Baum, the directors of the Alhambra were for ever changing their manager. All sorts and conditions of managers—from William Holland and Joseph Cave up to John Hollingshead—had a try at it. But not one of them seemed able to get along with the Nagles, the Suttons, and the Winders, of the board of directors. One by one these reactionaries died off, and under a reconstructed board and an enterprising and settled management the establishment at present flourishes like a green bay-tree.
One of the last occasions on which I visited the Alhambra in my capacity as a member of the Press was on the occasion of Sandow’s appearance at that establishment. He challenged and defeated a “strong man” who was then drawing the town. After the performance we were invited to a supper given in the champion’s honour in a café—the name of which I forget; it stood between the Alhambra and the Cavour—for even in those early days Sandow had a keen appreciation of the value of a réclame. Sir Reginald Hanson took the chair on the occasion, and the police paid us a domiciliary visit at one o’clock in the morning. Our names and addresses were solemnly taken down—a ceremony which occupied much time; but we never heard any more of the matter. Sandow has gone far since that frugal entertainment of the London Press.
The café at which we were invited to sup with Sandow must have occupied the site, or have been very close to it, once devoted to the squalid orgies of “The Judge and Jury.” Elsewhere in these rambling reminiscences I have alluded to ineffaceable memories which one would willingly expunge. Through life one looks back on experiences which one would gladly forget, but cannot. They cling like burrs, and pursue like an evil odour. My recollection of “The Judge and Jury” furnishes such an experience. I visited the place once. Nothing on earth could induce me to pay it a second visit. The entertainment was in two parts. The first consisted of a mock trial presided over by “Baron Nicholson.” Before this libidinous old president, “barristers,” duly arrayed in wig and gown, called witnesses, male and female of their kind, and proceeded to examine and cross-examine with an amount of licence and obscenity that set up in the hearer a sort of moral nausea. The “Baron’s” charge to the jury was a tissue of ribaldry and bawdry which to me seemed simply awful, but which appealed to the habitués of the squalid hall.
The trial at an end, Nicholson’s bench was removed, and behind it was seen to be a stage-curtain. To the strains of a piano this was drawn up, and on a revolving platform were discovered the figures of some women representing groups from the classics. The goddesses of Olympus were more sadly aspersed by this exhibition of shameless flesh than had been the Bench and Bar of England by Nicholson’s travesty. As the platform revolved, the women, with nothing on save their pink fleshings, smirked and leered at the audience in front. Needless to say, the figures in this exhibition of posé plastique were neither young nor beautiful. The pink fleshings could scarcely keep in place the sagging charms of a mature Venus, the lank limbs and scraggy neck of Diana. . . . Faugh! London knows better now.
CHAPTER XVI
MINE EASE AT MINE INN
People have short memories—particularly in the matter of benefits received. To-day, for instance, it is the usual and the correct thing to credit the London County Council with all that has been accomplished for the beautification of London during recent years. Yet the two greatest improvements carried out in my time were not done by the Council at all. The two municipal achievements to which I allude are the Holborn Viaduct, and that magnificent boulevard, the Thames Embankment. Now, these two enduring monuments of municipal enterprise and foresight we owe to the old—and much-maligned—Board of Works. When I gaze dismayed on the hideous structure at Spring Gardens, which now admits the public through its bowels to St. James’s Park; and when, entering and traversing the Park, I see the grim bastion that has been erected at the end of the duck-pond, with the object, apparently, of dwarfing Buckingham Palace into the likeness of a row of aristocratic almshouses, I wonder whether we were not safer, when all is said and done, in the hands of the reprobated “Board of Shirks,” as it was called by the comic papers of its day.
Give a man beautiful surroundings, and he will begin to live up to his environment. With the wonderful improvement effected on the face of London by the operations of the Board, there became heard the still, small voice of a demand for more beautiful living. The two main elements in living, I take it, are eating and drinking. And, rightly or wrongly, I have always synchronized the completion of the Viaduct and the Embankment with the first noticeable advance in catering. Before that point of departure there were in London but two restaurants of the first class at which one could obtain a French dinner. One of these was the Café Royal; the other was Verrey’s. Both were—and still, happily, are—situated in Regent Street. To-day we have restaurants which quite easily surpass in elegance and amplitude of interior the two houses I have named, but the Café Royal still holds its own both in the matter of cellar and of cuisine.