Bohemian Days in Fleet Street

by William Mackay

One of the most characteristic of these foreign eating-houses on English soil was the Café l’Étoile, in one of the streets—Rupert Street, I think it was—which run off Coventry Street, parallel to Wardour Street. This place was one half restaurant, and one half cabaret. A door and a passage led from the one to the other. In the restaurant the usual eighteen-penny dinner of many courses was served, and the usual bottle of vinegary wine was “thrown in.” The company, if not select, was at least sedate. Your Frenchman in London is by no means as gay a creature as on his boulevards at home. And the few English who joined him at his frugal meal in the Café l’Étoile as a rule maintained their insular mauvais honte.

But in the adjoining cabaret things were very different. Here the bearded exiles were enveloped in such an impenetrable cloud of smoke that they had forgotten all about their milieu. They had created here their own atmosphere, so to say. And a particularly villainous atmosphere it was—sulphurous and pestiferous. The chatter was incessant and strident. The clatter of the dominoes on the tables, the noise of the impact of the mugs and glasses—these mingled indistinguishably with the universal din. In this stifling atmosphere might be encountered some of the off-scourings of Continental cities. The political refugee, finding security in a country that could afford to treat him with absolute contempt, talked treason only when in his cups. Here was the practical politician also—the dynamitard, the artificer of bombs, the professor of the stiletto and the revolver. Scotland Yard had the dossier of every frequenter of the Café l’Étoile duly consigned by the police authorities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. It was the most noisy, the most stuffy, the hottest, the dirtiest, the most polyglot, little hell in all London. I do not know, but I strongly suspect that a too constant solicitude on the part of Scotland Yard led to its disappearance. Its site is occupied by a restaurant called the West End Hotel, the reputable successor of an unsavoury progenitor.

To William Gorman Wills I owe my introduction to most of the Soho restaurants. Wills liked the company he found in these places, and he liked the prices; for he was seldom well off. Money flowed from him in all directions, so that he never had much for his own use. It was lent or given in lumps as soon as it was received, a good deal of it finding its way into the pockets of impostors. For Wills was a man of genius—one of the few I have ever met—and inherited that financial incapacity which is the birthright of men of genius. He was an artist first of all, and had a studio in the Brompton Road, in a crescent which stood where the Consumptive Hospital now stands. He was a musician of distinction. He wrote a novel which would have made the reputation of any man who paid attention to the social arts which expedite the arrival of Fame. He will, perhaps, be still remembered by the public for his many contributions to the stage. His “Charles I.,” produced at the Lyceum for Irving, was one of the most poetical acting plays of the last century—Byron, and Lytton, and Sheridan Knowles, to the contrary, notwithstanding. In his search after French cookery he was instant. And I remember the delight with which he took me to Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where a new café had been opened. The dining-saloon consisted of the two ground-floor rooms of an ordinary house thrown into one. Wills waved his arm as if to indicate to me fine spaces—like those of the Louvre for instance.

“All the artists of the neighbourhood will dine here,” be declared with conviction. “If we could only get old Madox Brown to come here once, he would never go to the trouble of having dinners cooked at home!”

Madox Brown lived in Fitzroy Square, so that the convenience of the arrangement seemed indisputable. And Charlotte Street, as well as some other streets with long first-floor windows, was still a thoroughfare in which artists set up their studios. The Bohemia of “The Newcomes” was still existing north of Oxford Street when I first knew London, and when I have visited Madox Brown in Fitzroy Square it has given me pleasure to think that his might be the very building which was tenanted for a time by Colonel Newcome. But if a tithe of the artists then working in that part of the town were to demand a meal at the restaurant newly discovered by Wills, the majority of them must have had their dinner served to them in the street. An invasion even of the members of the Madox Brown family would have strained the resources of the tiny place to the utmost.

At the time when Wills was making daily discoveries among the little French eating-houses of Soho and Bloomsbury, he had few imitators in that field of gastronomies. The Englishman still pooh-poohed the French cuisine. He never hesitated to express his contempt for what he called “kickshaws.” Give him a basin of mock turtle soup, a bit of boiled turbot, a cut off the joint, and two vegetables, with apple pudding and Stilton cheese to end up with, and he wouldn’t thank you for the finest repast conceived by the first chef, and prepared by the most expert assistants in Europe! There are still fine old English gentlemen who hold this heresy; but they all held it then. The consequence is that half the population, over fifty years of age, suffer from indigestion. But while this most barbarous standard of dining obtained, it was faithfully catered for by the fine old English gentleman’s staunch admirer—the fine old English landlord. And to this day there persist a few establishments which make it their business to supply the fine old English dinner for the fine old English gormandizer.

In the early seventies all the hotels, and almost all the restaurants, supplied nightly the heavy meals that then represented the national taste. In an earlier chapter I have alluded to the Rainbow in Fleet Street, and to the Albion in Russell Street, Covent Garden. These were typical. Simpson’s in the Strand was run on the same lines. This was a very famous house of its kind. I have not visited the place since it was rebuilt during the alterations at the Savoy. But it carries on the old tradition, I understand; that is to say, a customer can still have his slabs of fish and his thick cuts from the joint, but he is granted an option. He may have his food served in daintier guise. The smoking-room at Simpson’s was a great rendezvous for men who knew good whisky and were judges of a cigar. For the cigar divan next door to the restaurant was really part of the concern. It was in that little smoking-room that I first met Charles Kelly, the actor. He became the second husband of Ellen Terry, and was one of the most charming men I have ever known. His real name was Wardell, and he had thrown up his commission in a crack cavalry regiment to “go on the stage.”

Simpson’s was celebrated for something beside its typical old English fare, its excellent whisky, and its incomparable cigars. In a certain upper chamber at Simpson’s there were accustomed to meet all the most eminent chess-players of the day. Steinmitz and Blackmore could be found there on most afternoons. And, although it was known in the outside world that they could be seen without any let or hindrance on the part of the proprietor, their privacy was never invaded. Only amateurs of the game entered the chess-room. Your true Londoner differs in this from the citizens of other towns: he never intrudes where he is not wanted. As to the restaurant below, the dinner there was served in a square saloon at the back of the building. The joints were trundled up to the customers on “dumbwaiters” running on castors. The meal was of the usual heavy, stodgy description. The older diners ate heartily, and, as a rule, suffered horribly from dyspepsia. The waiters breathed hard, exhibited signs of a bibulous habit, and possessed the largest feet of any men I have seen either before or since.

In Covent Garden, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and the Bedford—each of them hotels—served the same class of dinner. At these comfortable resorts the meal was generally followed by a bottle of port, thus insuring the achievement of that indigestion which the stodgy comestibles may have failed to set up. The ordinary English restaurant was supplemented by the chop-house. In the City, where quick lunching is a desideratum, these establishments flourished exceedingly. In the West End the most noted of them was Stone’s, in Panton Street, at that period a thoroughfare with a bad name, but at the present time purged of its earlier reputation. It has a theatre, some elegant restaurants, and exhibits few signs of its squalid past. Panton Street has forsworn sack, and lives cleanly.

But this chapter is not designed as a mere catalogue of the catering houses, but as the rough sketch of an evolution illustrated by examples, and illuminated here and there, I hope, by anecdotes, relevant and irrelevant. I have sufficiently shown that the Englishman of the early seventies, dining from home, liked to have served to him the same sort of meal which was provided for him on Sundays in the bosom of his family. The Café Royal catered mainly for foreigners. It and the Café Verrey were—so far as Londoners were concerned—but two voices crying in the wilderness. While as for the minor French restaurants in Soho, only artists, poets, and other degenerate Englishmen, affected those cheery little outposts of a great army which was presently to take possession of the town. To-day the conquest of London by the foreigner is complete. The French cuisine has been adopted in all the principal hotels and restaurants, and the old fish-joint-sweets-and-Stilton menu has been relegated to the howling wilderness.