London's
Tea Gardens
Visit
page one, two,
three, four,
five, six, seven,
eight, nine,
ten, eleven
There
came of course the usual hangers-on of respectability, the ladies
of doubtful reputation, the" bloods of humour," copper
captains, and even on occasion famous highwaymen, like the eminent
John Rann, or Sixteen-stringed Jack, who was wont to display
his hectoring graces in the gardens. Such incidents, however,
gave a pleasant adventurous interest to a visit to Bagnigge;
a highwayman, so long as he escaped the justices, was a not
unpopular character, and the ordinary citizen lost no caste
in taking a glass with one of these heroes at a tea garden or
a tavern. It is recorded, however, that this particular hero
gave such offence at Bagnigge on a certain Sabbath afternoon
in July of 1774, that he was incontinently pitched out of the
windows of the Long Room by the outraged citizens, a fall which
preceded his final overthrow by Jack Ketch at Tyburn by just
four months.
It
is not surprising to find the artists busy with a place which
attracted so much of the life of the time. There was the excellent
publisher, Carrington Bowles, who preserved so much for us of
the social life of the century, who has left two or three excellent
mezzotints among his series. One, the Bread and Butter Manufactory,
shows the fashionable Sunday parade in the long room; another,
the typical citizen Mr. Deputy Dumpling and his family enjoying
an afternoon in the gardens. The place is figured in the frontispieces
and illustrations of many parish histories and London guide-books
of a past day. Men like Sanders painted it, and engravers like
I. R. Smith transferred its beauties to the copper.
Finally
its amenities provided subjects for many able amateurs whose
sketches and drawings enrich great collections like those of
Mr. Crace and the Guildhall Museum. On the extensive piece of
ground which is to-day enclosed more or less roughly by Marylebone
Road, High Street, Marylebone, Weymouth Street, and Harley Street,
was the other notable public garden of the northern district
of London, famous for half a century as Marylebone Gardens.
We make no apology for reminding the modern Londoner that Marylebone
remained a rural village until well on in the reign of George
the Third, a village separated by fields from the Oxford Road,
and receiving much benefit from the attractions of these gardens,
which came to be much appreciated by the well-to-do and respectable
people who began to build and occupy the good houses of Portman
and Cavendish Squares. As in the case of the great majority
of the London alfresco establishments, the later prosperity
of the garden was reared upon the small beginnings of a tavern
or public-house.
The
Rose of Normandy was a small place of this sort on the eastern
side of the High Street, famous since Stuart times for its bowling-greens.
Those same bowling-greens were acquired from the gardens of
the Marylebone Manor House, which stood till 1791 on the site
of the present Devonshire Mews. People of condition played bowls
at the Rose until well on in the eighteenth century, and left
their substance at its gaming-tables. Mr. Pepys found the Rose
"a pretty place" in 1668, and Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham,
as Mr. Pope reminds us, spent much of his time on its pleasant
lawns, dined there once a year with his friends, and was accustomed
to wind up the annual proceedings with the genial toast, "Mayas
many of us as remain unhanged meet here again next spring."
There
were occasional illuminations too at the Rose, and concerts
of music on the king's birthday, acrobatic exhibitions, and
flying men, all of which foreshadowed features of the management
of the later gardens of which the Rose was the forerunner. It
was only, however, in the summer of 1738 that the proprietor
of the tavern, Mr. Daniel Gough, realising its capabilities,
threw the place open to the public as an al fresco entertainment,
and first made a regular charge of admission to what he called
his "Marybone Gardens," much increased then and later
by additions from the grounds of the Manor House.
The
venture seems to have been quite successful from the first.
The evening entertainment of good music, which continued the
tradition of the place, was apparently much appreciated, for
in the three following years there is record of the building
of a substantial garden orchestra, an organ by Bridge, and the
"House or Great Room" for balls and suppers. The place
attained almost immediately the dignity of the silver token
or season ticket, admitting two people for the whole summer,
and there is evidence of the increasing prosperity of the establishment
in the progressive prices, from twelve shillings to a couple
of guineas, charged for these relics, which are still to be
seen at the British Museum and in other collections.
There
is a very pleasant flavour of sober reasonable enjoyment by
worthy and respectable people suggested by the numerous records
of these old gardens - of their early years at least; of simple
rational amusement in pleasant surroundings widely different
from the fiercer joys of some other establishments we shall
notice in the course of our inquiry.
The
peace-loving public who gave the place its vogue disported themselves
among the ancient trees and parterres in the old garden of the
Manor House; shady elms and planes, some of which still give
dignity to the houses south of the Marylebone Road, made a pleasant
retreat where they could eat their syllabubs and cake, and listen
to the music of Handel and Arne. On the west they looked right
on to pretty Harrow-on-the-Hill; northward their view was bounded
by the wooded heights of Hampstead and Highgate, and on the
east there was nothing but green fields and open country between
the gardens and the rising moon.
There
were surely worse conditions in which to hear "Where the
Bee Sucks," or "Blow, Blow thou Winter Wind,"
for the first time, than surrounded by pretty faces in Marylebone
Gardens in the early days of George the Third; and London has
gained little, one imagines, by the exchange of these simple
pleasures for some of its amusements to-day. Music, as we have
said, was one of the great traditions of the place.
Continue
on to page seven
