Volume I Part 23 (2/2)
All these rooms are panelled in the most gorgeous manner, s.p.a.ces being left to be filled up with mirrors, silk or gold enrichments; the ceilings being as superb as the walls. A billiard-room on the upper floor completes the number of apartments professedly dedicated to the use of the members. Whenever any secret manoeuvre is to be carried on, there are smaller and more retired places, both under this roof and the next, whose walls will tell no tales.
The _cuisine_ at Crockford's was of the highest cla.s.s, and the members were occasionally very _exigeant_, and trying to the patience of M.
Ude. At one period of his presidency, a ground of complaint, formally addressed to the Committee, was that there was an admixture of onion in the _soubise_. Colonel Damer, happening to enter Crockford's one evening to dine early, found Ude walking up and down in a towering pa.s.sion, and naturally inquired what was the matter. ”No matter, Monsieur le Colonel! Did you see that man who has just gone out? Well, he ordered a red mullet for his dinner. I made him a delicious little sauce with my own hands. The price of the mullet marked on the _carte_ was 2_s._; I asked 6_d._ for the sauce. He refuses to pay the 6_d._ That _imbecille_ apparently believes that the red mullets come out of the sea with my sauce in their pockets!” The _imbecille_ might have retorted that they do come out of the sea with their appropriate sauce in their pockets; but this forms no excuse for damaging the consummate genius of a Ude.
The appet.i.tes of some Club members appear to ent.i.tle them to be called _gourmands_ rather than _gourmets_. Of such a member of Crockford's the following traits are related in the _Quarterly Review_, No.
110:--”The Lord-lieutenant of one of the western counties eats a covey of partridges for breakfast every day during the season; and there is a popular M.P. at present [1836] about town who would eat a covey of partridges, as the Scotchman ate a dozen of becaficos, for a whet, and feel himself astonished if his appet.i.te was not accelerated by the circ.u.mstance. Most people must have seen or heard of a caricature representing a gentleman at dinner upon a round of beef, with the landlord looking on. 'Capital beef, landlord!' says the gentleman; 'a man may cut and come again here.' 'You may cut, Sir,' responds Boniface; 'but I'm blow'd if you shall come again.' The person represented is the M.P. in question; and the sketch is founded upon fact. He had occasion to stay late in the City, and walked into the celebrated Old Bailey beef-shop on his return, where, according to the landlord's computation, he demolished about seven pounds and a half of solid meat, with a proportionate allowance of greens. His exploits at Crockford's have been such, that the founder of that singular inst.i.tution has more than once had serious thoughts of giving him a guinea to sup elsewhere; and has only been prevented by the fear of meeting with a rebuff similar to that mentioned in _Roderick Random_ as received by the master of an ordinary, who, on proposing to buy off an ugly customer, was informed by him that he had already been bought off by all the other ordinaries in town, and was consequently under the absolute necessity of continuing to patronize the establishment.”
Theodore Hook was a frequent visitor at Crockford's, where play did not begin till late. Mr. Barham describes him, after going the round of the Clubs, proposing, with some gay companion, to finish with half an hour at Crockford's: ”The half-hour is quadrupled, and the excitement of the preceding evening was nothing to that which now ensued.” He had a receipt of his own to prevent being exposed to the night air. ”I was very ill,” he once said, ”some months ago, and my doctor gave me particular orders not to expose myself to it; so I come up [from Fulham] every day to Crockford's, or some other place to dinner, and I make it a rule on no account to go home again till about four or five o'clock in the morning.”
After Crockford's death, the Club-house was sold by his executors for 2,900_l._; held on lease, of which thirty-two years were unexpired, subject to a yearly rent of 1,400_l._ It is said that the decorations alone cost 94,000_l._ The interior was re-decorated in 1849, and opened for the Military, Naval, and County Service Club, but was closed again in 1851. It has been, for several years, a dining-house--”the Wellington.”
Crockford's old bulk-shop, west of Temple-bar, was taken down in 1846.
It is engraved in Archer's _Vestiges of London_, part i. A view in 1795, in the Crowle Pennant, presents one tall gable to the street; but the pitch of the roof had been diminished by adding two imperfect side gables. The heavy pents originally traversed over each of the three courses of windows; it was a mere timber frame filled up with lath and plaster, the beams being of deal with short oak joints: it presented a capital example of the old London bulk-shop (sixteenth century), with a heavy canopy projecting over the pathway, and turned up at the rim to carry off the rain endwise. This shop had long been held by a succession of fishmongers; and Crockford would not permit the house-front to be altered in his lifetime. He was known in gaming circles by the sobriquet of ”the Fishmonger.”
FOOTNOTES:
[29] Edinburgh Review.
”KING ALLEN,” ”THE GOLDEN BALL,” AND SCROPE DAVIES.
In the old days when gaming was in fas.h.i.+on, at Watier's Club, princes and n.o.bles lost or gained fortunes between themselves. It was the same at Brookes's, one member of which, Lord Robert Spencer, was wise enough to apply what he had won to the purchase of the estate of Woolbidding, Suffolk. Then came Crockford's h.e.l.l, the proprietor of which, a man who had begun life with a fish-basket, won the whole of the ready money of the then existing generation of aristocratic simpletons. Among the men who most suffered by play was Viscount Allen, or 'King Allen,' as he was called. This effeminate dandy had fought like a young lion in Spain; for the dandies, foolish as they looked, never wanted pluck. The 'King' then lounged about town, grew fat, lost his all, and withdrew to Dublin, where, in Merrion-square, he slept behind a large bra.s.s plate with 'Viscount Allen' upon it, which was as good to him as board wages, for it brought endless invitations from people eager to feed a viscount at any hour of the day or night, although King Allen had more ready ability in uttering disagreeable than witty things.
Very rarely indeed did any of the ruined gamesters ever get on their legs again. The Golden Ball, however, was an exception. Ball Hughes fell from the very top of the gay paG.o.da into the mud, but even there, as life was nothing to him without the old excitement, he played pitch and toss for halfpence, and he won and lost small ventures at battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k, which innocent exercise he turned into a gambling speculation. After he withdrew, in very reduced circ.u.mstances, to France, his once mad purchase of Oatlands suddenly a.s.sumed a profitable aspect. The estate was touched by a railway and admired by building speculators, and between the two the Ball, in its last days, had a very cheerful and glittering aspect indeed.
Far less lucky than Hughes was Scrope Davies, whose name was once so familiar to every man and boy about town. There was good stuff about this dandy. He one night won the whole fortune of an aspiring fast lad who had come of age the week before, and who was so prostrated by his loss that kindly-hearted Scrope gave back the fortune the other had lost, on his giving his word of honour never to play again. Davies stuck to the green baize till his own fortune had gone among a score of less compa.s.sionate gentlemen. His distressed condition was made known to the young fellow to whom he had formerly acted with so much generosity, and that grateful heir refused to lend him even a guinea.
Scrope was not of the gentlemen-ruffians of the day who were addicted to cruelly a.s.saulting men weaker than themselves. He was well-bred and a scholar; and he bore his reverses with a rare philosophy. His home was on a bench in the Tuileries, where he received old acquaintances who visited him in exile; but he admitted only very tried friends to the little room where he read and slept. He was famed for his readiness in quoting the cla.s.sical poets, and for his admiration of Moore, in whose favour those quotations were frequently made. They were often most happy. For example, he translated 'Ubi _plura_ nitent non ego _paucis_ offendar maculis,' by '_Moore s.h.i.+nes so brightly that I cannot find fault with Little's vagaries_!' He also rendered 'Ne _plus_ ultra,' '_Nothing is better than Moore!_'[30]
THE FOUR-IN-HAND CLUB.
Gentleman-coaching has scarcely been known in England seventy years.
The Anglo-Erichthonius, the Hon. Charles Finch, brother to the Earl of Aylesford, used to drive his own coach-and-four, disguised in a livery great-coat. Soon after his _debut_, however, the celebrated ”Tommy Onslow,” Sir John Lacy, and others, mounted the box in their own characters. Sir John was esteemed a renowned judge of coach-horses and carriages, and a coachman of the old school; but everything connected with the coach-box has undergone such a change, that the Nestors of the art are no longer to be quoted. Among the celebrities may be mentioned the ”B. C. D.,” or Benson Driving Club, which held its rendezvous at the ”Black Dog,” Bedfont, as one of the numerous driving a.s.sociations, whose processions used, some five-and-thirty years ago, to be among the most imposing, as well as peculiar, spectacles in and about the metropolis.
On the stage, the gentlemen drivers, of whom the members of the Four-in-Hand Club were the exclusive _elite_, were ill.u.s.trated rather than caricatured in _Goldfinch_, in Holcroft's comedy _The Road to Ruin_. Some of them who had not ”drags” of their own, ”tipped” a weekly allowance to stage coachmen, to allow them to ”finger the ribbons,” and ”tool the team.” Of course, they frequently ”spilt” the pa.s.sengers. The closeness with which the professional coachmen were imitated by the ”bucks,” is shown in the case of wealthy young Ackers, who had one of his front teeth taken out, in order that he might acquire the true coachman-like way of ”spitting.” There were men of brains, nevertheless, in the Four-in-Hand, who knew how to ridicule such fellow-members as Lord Onslow, whom they thus immortalized in an epigram of that day:--
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