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Title: The book of The Cheese : Being traits and stories of "Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese"
Author: William Hussey Graham, - To be updated
Language: English
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THE
Book of the Cheese
BEING TRAITS AND STORIES OF
“Y^E OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE”
WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET
LONDON, E.C.
COMPILED BY THE LATE T. W. REID
THIRD EDITION REVISED BY WILLIAM HUSSEY GRAHAM
FOURTH EDITION EDITED BY R. R. D. ADAMS, M.A.
FIFTH EDITION
REVISED AND ABRIDGED BY FRANK BANFIELD, M.A. (OXON.)
_ILLUSTRATED BY MESSRS.
SEYMOUR LUCAS, R.A., HERBERT RAILTON, JOSEPH PENNELL,
WALTER ALLEN & GEORGE CRUICKSHANK_
“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?”—SHAKESPEARE
London:
“Y_{E} OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE”
145, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1908
PREFACE
TO
THE FIFTH EDITION
_TO OUR FRIENDS AND CUSTOMERS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD_
In the present edition, while most of the matter which has appeared
in previous editions of our little book has been retained, we have
deleted portions that we considered could be dispensed with, and
added some fresh incidents and reminiscences that we think may add to
its interest. We have enlarged the work by the addition of a chapter
descriptive of the pictures and objects of interest to be seen within
the precincts of this historic House. We desire to record our thanks
to Messrs. W. Marchant & Co., of the Goupil Gallery, 5, Regent
Street, for assistance given in relation to the pictures, and to many
old customers of the House for facts relating to its past history.
Yours obediently,
THE DIRECTORS.
O. C. C., LD.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE 1
II. JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH AT THE “CHEESE” 9
III. RELICS AND ART TREASURES OF THE “CHEESE” 15
IV. MR. JOSEPH PENNELL AND LADY COLIN CAMPBELL ON THE “CHEESE” 26
V. ABOUT THE PUDDING 33
VI. THE BAR 37
VII. CLUB LIFE AT THE “CHEESE” 42
VIII. DR. JOHNSON’S HOMES AND HAUNTS 55
IX. THE “CHEESE” AND ITS FARE—A GREAT FALL IN PUDDING 57
X. MR. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA AND OTHERS ON THE “CHEESE” 61
XI. THE PRESS AND THE “CHEESE” 65
XII. WHAT THE WORLD SAYS OF THE “CHEESE” 72
XIII. THE “CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN LITERATURE 85
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_PLATES_
“TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE,” _by
W. Dendy Sadler_ _Frontispiece_
“THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE _to face p._ 13
THE JOHNSONIAN CORNER ” 18
DR. JOHNSON’S CHAIR ” 22
AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE ” 23
“THE WAY IN” ” 27
THE BAR ” 37
“THE WAY OUT” ” 38
DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE ” 55
_IN TEXT_
PAGE
ENTRANCE TO THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE IN
WINE OFFICE COURT 5
STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” 8
CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE 25
FRONTISPIECE OF BILL OF FARE 78
PRINTED BY
EDEN FISHER & CO., LTD., 95-97, FENCHURCH ST.,
LONDON, E.C.
[Illustration: “TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE.” _By W. Dendy Sadler._
_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, owner of the Copyright._]
[Illustration: A _Storied_ TAVERN.]
CHAPTER I
EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE
Time consecrates;
And what is grey with age becomes religion.—SCHILLER.
Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by
one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our
ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid
remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they
have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however,
survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of
the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that
is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before
the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his
more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated
in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London’s living
memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have
altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his
contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full
swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable
reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying
curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the
mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith,
is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a
shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of
the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the “Cheshire
Cheese” which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically
curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the
Doctor’s time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.
“When I was a young fellow,” he says, “I wanted to write the life
of Dryden, and in order to get materials I applied to the only two
persons then alive who had seen him; these were old Swinney and old
Cibber. Swinney’s information was no more than this, ‘That at Will’s
Coffee-house, Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was
set by the fire in winter and then called his winter chair, and that
it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and then called
his summer chair.’ I went and sat in it.”
Thanks, therefore, to the fact that we have one specimen of the
Johnsonian tavern remaining practically the same as it was in the
Johnsonian days, we can still depict for ourselves, with but the
slightest effort of the imagination, what must have been the scene
at the Cheshire Cheese in the Doctor’s time. Johnson is there in his
favourite seat, mouthing and talking as who should say: “I am Sir
Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.” One or other of his
friends is never wanting to keep him company—Burke, or Goldsmith, or
it may be Langton or Beauclerk. But the inn is with us, though the
men of the eighteenth century are gone.
Even then the tavern as a club was beginning to fall into comparative
decay. Fashion was voting for the club proper, proprietary or
otherwise, and the habit of ceasing to live in the City carried away
the old frequenters of the Fleet Street taverns into the suburbs or
the more distant environs of London. Washington Irving gives us in
his “Sketch Book” a charming account of one of the city of London
hostelries, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The opening of the description would serve for the Cheshire Cheese
of to-day. “This has been a temple of Mirth and Wine from time
immemorial. It has always been in the family, so that its history
is tolerably well preserved by the present landlord. It was much
frequented by the gallants and cavalieros of the reign of Elizabeth,
and was looked into now and then by the wits of Charles the Second.
The members of the club which now holds its weekly sessions there
abound in old catches, glees, and choice stories that are traditional
in the place. The life of the club, and indeed the prime wit of the
neighbourhood, is mine host himself. At the opening of every club
night he is called in to sing his ‘Confession of Faith,’ which is the
famous old drinking troll from Gammer Gurton’s ‘Needle.’” Washington
Irving gives the words of the four verses of the song with chorus,
the first of which, as a specimen of an old-time City tavern song,
may suffice to be produced here:
I cannot eate but little meat,
My stomack is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am acold.
I stuff my skin so full within
With jolly good ale and old.
_Chorus_: Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foote and hand go cold;
But belly! God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
But from the time of Dr. Johnson down to the present day unbroken
links of tradition connect the Cheshire Cheese of the twentieth
century with the Cheshire Cheese of the eighteenth, and through
that with all the taverns in story, which begin with the Tabard and
pass on, through the Mermaid and the rest, to the old house in Wine
Office Court. This venerable survivor of a vanished race has a double
interest: to the lover of antiquity in general it appeals as the type
of the place our forefathers loved; to the lover of the Johnsonian
cycle, as enabling him to picture to himself what that race of giants
did, where they ate and drank, and where they talked. That they had
reason for their choice of an inn, and could give a reason for that
choice too, is plain from a well-known passage in Boswell, which runs
as follows:—
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN WINE OFFICE
COURT.
_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]
“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so
well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of
good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so
much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it
cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The
master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests
are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man but a very impudent
dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as
if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom
from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you
make, the more trouble you give” (we should remember that this was
said in the rougher world of the last century), “the more good things
you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you
with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect
of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there
is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much
happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
Although the origin of the Old Cheshire Cheese (formerly spelt “Ye
Olde Cheshire Chese”) is not altogether involved in obscurity, there
is a decided want of complete, or even semi-complete, details as to
its very early history; but it is much more affluent in literary
anecdote.
It was in the Old Cheshire Cheese that the dispute arose about who
would most quickly make the best couplet. One said:—
I, Sylvester,
Kiss’d your sister.
The other’s retort was:
I, Ben Jonson,
Kiss’d your wife.
“But that’s not rhyme,” said Sylvester. “No,” said Jonson; “but it’s
true.”
A later poet, Lord Tennyson, was himself a frequenter of the “Cheese”
in his young days, while it was there that Isaac Bickerstaff made the
epigram:
When late I attempted your pity to move,
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But—why did you kick me down stairs?
In fact, the “Cheese” was famous for epigrammatists. Who would not
like to have seen the face of the old glutton and scandalmonger when,
in the “Cheese,” the following lines were solemnly presented to him?—
You say your teeth are dropping out—
A serious cause of sorrow,
Not likely to be cured, I doubt,
To-day, or yet to-morrow.
But good may come of this distress,
While under it you labour,
If, losing teeth you guzzle less,
And don’t backbite your neighbour.
That Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other distinguished men
were in the habit of frequenting the Old Cheshire Cheese, there can
be no manner of doubt, and they knew what they were about in choosing
their place of rendezvous, for I find in a _brochure_ entitled “Round
London” (1725), that the house is described as “Ye Olde Cheshire
Cheese Tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating-house for goodly fare.”
Wine Office Court, where the Cheshire Cheese is situated, took its
name from the fact that wine licences were granted in a building
close by. The present “wine office” of the Old Cheshire Cheese is
exactly at the junction of the Court and Fleet Street.
“In this court,” says Mr. Noble, “once flourished a fig tree, planted
a century ago by the vicar of St. Bride’s, who resided at No. 12. It
was a slip from another exile of a tree formerly flourishing in a
sooty kind of grandeur at the sign of the Fig Tree in Fleet Street.”
[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.”
_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]
CHAPTER II
JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH AT THE “CHEESE”
There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so
much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.—JOHNSON.
Not the least delightful characteristic of the “Cheese” is the
persistency of its old customers. Those who once have been admitted
to its charmed circle soon become wedded to its ways. It is not
merely to the goodly cheer provided there that this loyalty is due,
although, no doubt, to the viands and the wines a share of it is to
be attributed. An anecdote of the late Mr. George Augustus Sala,
the well-known writer, _Daily Telegraph_ special correspondent, and
genial _bon vivant_ and gastronomist, is delightfully illustrative
of the attractions of the place from the side of the creature
comforts. The story is told by the London correspondent of the
_Liverpool Courier_ (December 10, 1895) in recording Mr. Sala’s
death. He writes: “Some years ago Mr. Sala went to Paris on behalf
of the _Daily Telegraph_, to write on the subject of French cooking
and French restaurants. Such praise of Parisian kickshaws was never
lavished before, and the extollation, to the complete discomfiture of
English cooks, lasted for fully six weeks. Everything in the cooking
line in Paris was grand, everything in England in the same line was
horrible. At the end of the six weeks Mr. Sala returned to London,
went immediately to the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street and said
to the head waiter—‘William, bring me a beefsteak, some potatoes in
their jackets, and a pint of ale. I’ve had nothing to eat for six
weeks.’”
The sentimental attractions are equally strong, and their influence
is felt even by the most occasional of guests whose situation in
life, or whose distance from London, unfortunately precludes their
being regular attendants at the hostelry. A fine acrostic sent to
the landlord by the Rev. William Kerr-Smith, Vicar of Whiteby,
Newcastle-on-Tyne, embodies some of the thoughts that naturally arise
in the mind of the cultivated visitant:
C hanged are the times and changed, alas, the guests!
H ow changed from those who erst with gossip stored
E ach day saw grouped about thy cheerful board!
S till are their voices now, whose noisy jests
H ave filled these rooms with laughter. Gathered here
I n rare confusion Beau, and Wit and Sage,
R ich, Poor and Spendthrift, Youth and fuller age
E njoyed whilst yet they might thy festive cheer.
C areless of censure each one told his tale,
H eard the last scandal as he quaffed his ale.
E ager to praise, they scrupled not to school,
E njoyed the folly, but condemned the fool.
S o lived they far removed from dulness dire,
E schewed the commonplace and tuned the lyre.
Among the bygone guests with whose memory the Cheshire Cheese is
fragrant, not the least notable was the immortal author of “The
Deserted Village” and “The Vicar of Wakefield.” Indeed he was its
very near neighbour, for Goldsmith’s lodging was at No. 6 Wine
Office Court, nearly opposite the “Cheese,” and here he wrote “The
Vicar of Wakefield.” It was on Johnson’s first visit to supper here
with Goldsmith that Percy called for him on his way, and found him
dressed in a new suit of clothes and well-powdered wig. Noticing
Johnson’s unusual smartness, he heard from him the reason of it.
“Sir, Goldsmith is a great sloven, and justifies his disregard of
propriety by my practice. To-night I desire to show him a better
example.” Johnson’s house, where the Dictionary was compiled, was
within a minute’s walk, in Gough Square. Boswell does not record
any visits to the “Cheese,” but Boswell’s acquaintance with Johnson
began when Johnson was an old man, when he had given up the house in
Gough Square, and Goldsmith had long departed from Wine Office Court.
At the best, Boswell only knew Johnson’s life in widely separated
sections. Boswell was in Edinburgh while Johnson was in Bolt Court,
and it is certain Johnson wrote no diary for the benefit of his
biographer. Witnesses who were on the spot supply the deficiency.
Some of them Mr. Cyrus Jay, in a little book entitled, “The Law—What
I have Seen, Heard and Known,” published in 1868, states that he had
met. The book contains this inscription:
TO THE
LAWYERS AND GENTLEMEN
WITH WHOM I HAVE DINED FOR MORE THAN
HALF A CENTURY
AT
THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE TAVERN
WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET
THIS WORK
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
BY THEIR OBEDIENT SERVANT
CYRUS JAY
In his preface Mr. Jay says: “During the fifty-five years that I
have frequented the Cheshire Cheese Tavern ... there have been only
three landlords. When I first visited the house I used to meet
several very old gentlemen, who remembered Dr. Johnson, nightly at
the Cheshire Cheese; and they have told me, what is not generally
known, that the Doctor, whilst living in the Temple, always went to
the Mitre or the Essex Head; but when he removed to Gough Square and
Bolt Court he was a constant visitor at the Cheshire Cheese, because
nothing but a hurricane would have induced him to cross Fleet Street.”
Mr. Jay’s fifty-five years, from 1868, take us back to 1813, or
little more than a quarter of a century after the death of Johnson.
But who then was Mr. Jay, and what are his claims to credibility?
“I have heard,” says Dr. Birkbeck Hill, that indefatigable inquirer
into Johnsonian facts and dates, “a member of our (the Johnson)
club relate that, when he was a student of law, there used to be
pointed out to him in the Cheshire Cheese an old gentleman who,
day after day, was always to be found there, prolonging his dinner
by an unbroken succession of glasses of gin and water. It was as a
kind of awful warning of the depths to which a lawyer might sink,
that this toper was shown, and it was added in a whisper that he
was the son of Jay, of Bath. Jay, of Bath, is well-nigh forgotten
now, but during the first half of the present century his fame as a
preacher stood exceedingly high. It was Cyrus Jay, his son, who for
fifty-three years frequenting this ancient tavern, preserved and
handed down this curious tradition of Johnson. The landlord has told
me how, in his childhood, he used to hear in the distance the gruff
voice of the old gentleman as he came along Fleet Street, and how
sometimes he was sent to see Mr. Jay safe home to his chambers at 15
Serjeants’ Inn hard by. For most of his long life, port, that medium
liquor, neither like claret for boys nor brandy for heroes, but the
drink for men, had been his favourite beverage. A failing income
brought him down at last to gin and water. He used to comfort
himself by the reflection that he could get twice as drunk for half
the money. He dined in the tavern to the very end. One evening he
was led home to his lodgings, and within four-and-twenty hours he
was dead. He was the last frequenter of the Old Cheshire Cheese who
knew the men who had known Johnson. Mine host remembers a still older
guest, Dr. Pooley by name, a barrister, who died about 1856, at the
age of eighty. Night after night for many a long year he had dined
at half-past seven to the minute on a ‘follower,’ the end chop of
the loin. He, too, used to tell of the men of his younger days, who
boasted that they had often spent an evening there with Dr. Samuel
Johnson.”
[Illustration: “THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.]
Another writer, Mr. Cyrus Redding, who went to live in Gough Square
in 1806, in his “Fifty Years’ Recollections, Literary and Personal,”
published in 1858, takes us a little further back. He says:
“I often dined at the Cheshire Cheese. Johnson and his friends,
I was informed, used to do the same, and I was told I should see
individuals who had met them there. This I found to be correct. The
company was more select than in later times. Johnson had been dead
about twenty years, but there were Fleet Street tradesmen who well
remembered both Johnson and Goldsmith in this place of entertainment.”
Mr. Cyrus Jay, deploring the loss of the Mitre, the Cock, and other
old taverns, remarks, “There still remains the Old Cheshire Cheese,
in Wine Office Court, which will afford the present generation, it
is hoped, for some years to come, an opportunity of witnessing the
kind of tavern in which our forefathers delighted to assemble for
refreshment.
“There was a Mr. Tyers, a silk merchant on Ludgate Hill, and Colonel
Laurence, who carried the colours of the 20th regiment at the battle
of Minden, ever fond of repeating that his regimental comrades bore
the brunt on that memorable day. The evening was the time we thus
met. There was also a sprinkling of lawyers, old demisoldes and men
of science; among the latter was a Mr. Adams, an optician, of Fleet
St.
“Colonel Laurence showed me Goldsmith’s tomb in the Temple
Churchyard; he was never tired of talking of his acquaintance with
the poet, whom he knew when Goldsmith, as well as Johnson, lived hard
by the Cheshire Cheese. I listened with eagerness to what these men
of other days told me. Tyers broke a leg, and was confined to his bed
for a long time, and the rubicund-cheeked Colonel passed the way of
all the earth in a year or two after I first became acquainted with
him. He used to speak of Goldsmith’s ordinary person, and told me the
poet never broke in upon the conversation when Johnson was talking.
“The left-hand room, entering the ‘Cheshire,’ and the table on the
extreme right upon entering that room, was the table occupied by
Johnson and his friends almost uniformly. This table and the room
are now as they were when I first saw them, having had the curiosity
to visit them recently. They were, and are still, as Johnson and his
friends left them in their time. Goldsmith sat at Johnson’s left
hand.” But the public room on the ground floor was not the only place
affected by Johnson and his friends. When they wished to retire from
the madding crowd a little room on another floor supplied all the
privacy they occasionally desired, and here to this day is carefully
preserved the chair from which the Doctor thundered.”
CHAPTER III
RELICS AND ART TREASURES OF “THE CHESHIRE CHEESE”
“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so
much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”—JOHNSON.
About half-way up Fleet Street, on the right or northern side if we
are coming from Ludgate Circus, the sign of “The Cheshire Cheese”
meets the eye of the wayfarer, and intimates to him the near presence
of the famous hostelry. There are two approaches, the western by Wine
Office Court, the other by the passage way leading to the annexe. We
will take the western, by Wine Office Court, because up it have often
strolled side by side Dr. Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, the latter
parting for a moment with his dictatorial friend at the portals of
“The Cheese” to go on to his lodgings a dozen yards further up the
court on the other side the way. The sign beneath which the Doctor
stands intimates to all and sundry that “The Cheshire Cheese” was
rebuilt in 1667, seven years after the glorious Restoration, on the
site of that older Cheshire Cheese, where Shakespeare, Ben Jonson
and many another Elizabethan wit were wont to quaff their sack amid
laughter and eager bandying of jest. We will leave the Doctor to
make for his favourite seat in the room on the left, while we enter
the bar. This is a delightful apartment in its tranquil reminder of
the past. Ranged round it are a number of valuable punch bowls, of
which we can imagine Mr. Pickwick if he were on a visit here took
elaborate and reverential note. They speak eloquently of countless
_noctes ambrosianæ_, when the wit and the liquor were alike of the
best. The bar of the Cheshire Cheese has seen them drained to the
last drop with effusive enthusiasm when the news of Blenheim, and
Oudenarde, and Ramilies arrived, or later for Dettingen and Minden.
We can imagine the punch was not without its tributory tears when
its patriotic customers suddenly learnt that Nelson had fallen in
the hour of victory, though there was nothing lachrymal to dilute
their jovial joy in the frequent triumphs of “The Iron Duke.” If the
old punch bowls could but speak! But the very air of the place is
redolent of the past, both storied and convivial, and eloquent for
him who but pauses to think and to recall.
One of the most touching things about “The Cheese” is the way in
which it treasures the memory of its old servants. “William” has
actually given his name to a room, and there over the fireplace of
the bar just opposite the door is his portrait, the portrait of
William Simpson, who commenced waiter at “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese”
Chop-house in 1829. “This picture,” says the inscription below, “was
subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the Coffee Room, and
presented to Mr. Dolamore (the Landlord) to be handed down as an
heirloom to all future Landlords of ‘Ye old Cheshire Cheese,’ Wine
Office Court Fleet Street.” The name of the artist is unknown. It is
worth noting that in this inscription the room in which we stand is
called a Coffee Room. Its modern designation of “the bar” therefore
is of comparatively recent origin.
The two small oil paintings on either side this heirloom were painted
in 1883 by William Allen. One of them depicts the interior of the
old bar, the other its exterior. To the right of the fireplace is
a striking and important painting. It is a portrait, but it is not
certainly known of whom. Tradition varies, and while according to
some it is a portrait of Dean Swift, others maintain that here we
have the counterfeit presentment of the first proprietor of the house
after the Great Fire, Theophilus B. Cruneble. There are other objects
of interest in the room, particularly worth notice being the old
china and glass. Nor must we omit to mention the young ladies behind
the bar, but it is for the visitor to appraise their grace and charm.
Beauty draws the human heart in every generation, and the men of
Johnson’s day were no less susceptible to its appeal than are we. The
picture upstairs, near the “Grandfather’s Clock,” would have fired
their imaginations as readily as it does ours.
But now, turning from the bar over which Hebes of our twentieth
century so efficiently preside, we pass to the room opposite, and
immediately on the left of the passage way as we enter. This room
has not changed its character or its furniture for centuries. If Dr.
Johnson were to come in now and go by us to his corner seat there to
the right of the fireplace, he would find things essentially much as
he left them. If his ghost wanders about Fleet Street, it must be a
great relief to it to get, when it can, back safe into its unchanging
old haunt, out of reach of the structural revolutions which elsewhere
time has wrought.
As in the bar, the important picture in this room is that of
a waiter. It is a portrait of Henry Todd, as the inscription
informs us, who commenced waiter at the Olde Cheshire Cheese the
27th February, 1812. It was painted by Wageman, July, 1827, and
“subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the Coffee Room, and
presented to Mr. Dolamore (the landlord) in trust to be handed down
as an heirloom to all future landlords of the Old Cheshire Cheese,
Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.”
Two oil paintings by Seymour Lucas, R.A., of the dining-room, with
portraits of customers, will repay inspection, while above Dr.
Johnson’s old seat is an oil painting of the Lexicographer himself,
a copy of the famous portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, now preserved
in the National Gallery. Underneath may be read the following
inscription:—“The Favourite Seat of Dr. Johnson. Born 18th Septr.,
1709. Died 13th Decr., 1784. In him a noble understanding and a
masterly intellect were united. With grand independence of character,
and unfailing goodness of heart, which won the admiration of his own
age and remain as recommendations to the reverence of posterity. ‘No,
Sir! there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so
much happiness has been produced as by a good tavern.—JOHNSON.’”
Hard by are two interesting old prints, one of Dr. Johnson rescuing
Oliver Goldsmith from his landlady, the other of a literary party at
the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Then there is an oil painting of
a family group in which the Doctor is easily to be recognised. More
modern, but still well worthy of inspection, is an artist’s proof,
signed by the artist himself, of the well-known picture—“Toddy at
the Cheese.” This is the painter, Mr. Dendy Sadler’s own gift to
the house, the interior of whose dining-room he has so genially
portrayed. Noticeable adjuncts of the apartments also are two old
water-bottles, one of leather, the other of stone, and of what is
known as Godstone ware.
[Illustration: THE JOHNSONIAN CORNER.]
The old staircase is well worth careful attention, having stood
marvellously the test of time. If we ascend it we arrive at
the first floor and William’s room, to which an announcement on
the wainscot at the foot of the stairs served as a guide. It is
immediately on our left when we reach the landing, perpetuating with
its name the memory of Mr. Dolamore’s faithful old henchman. Its most
interesting feature is a second copy in oils of the portrait of Dr.
Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds, to which I have just made allusion.
But it is much more than a mere replica of the copy downstairs in the
dining-room. It is a copy, indeed, but a very old copy, and dates
back to the Doctor’s own time. It was painted in order that it might
adorn the room at “The Mitre,” in Chancery Lane, where the club
founded by Dr. Johnson first held its meetings. Dr. Johnson’s “Mitre”
has long since been pulled down, but the club he founded exists, and
meets several times a year in William’s room. Two prints next claim
our attention—a coloured one of Dr. Johnson’s House in Gough Square,
the other a book print of Dr. Johnson, who is also shown to us in a
framed wax bas-relief model.
About the room also are a number of sepia drawings of the various
parts of the house—the work of that accomplished artist, F. Cox—while
there are several pictures on the wall which serve to show that
the tastes of the frequenters of the “Cheese” are not limited to
literature and journalism. For example, we have “Roach, Perch and
Dace,” and “Salmon Trout” and “Trout,” by C. Foster, a coloured
print of steeple-chasing, a portrait of Lord Palmerston, engraved by
F. Holl from the painting by F. Grant; a landscape of considerable
merit by an unknown artist, and a view of Fleet Street, showing the
entrance to Wine Office Court. Very interesting too is a print of
the meeting of Dr. Johnson and Flora Macdonald in the Isle of Skye
in the year 1773. This valuable work was recently exhibited at the
Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 at Shepherd’s Bush.
Issuing from this room, which embalms the memory of “William,” we
must pause at the foot of the flight of stairs leading to the next
floor to admire a handsome old grandfather’s clock, which even in
Dr. Johnson’s time was venerable by reason of its years, as it
was almost certainly part of the furniture of “The Cheese” when
the hostelry was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1667. It is not
impossible it was ticking off the flight of time when Hawkins and
other Elizabethan sea captains were harrying the warships of the
great Armada in its progress up the British Channel. Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson may have studied that ancient clock-face which would warn
them that it was desirable to cut short their pleasant revelry and
hasten to the theatre. We pass on with a lingering look, and the next
turn in the old staircase brings us to a private room, containing
one of the most valued treasures of the Cheshire Cheese, nothing
less than the original chair used by Dr. Johnson at the Mitre, the
old Chancery Lane tavern, patronised occasionally by the Doctor and
now pulled down. This chair was acquired by the proprietor of the
Cheshire Cheese, and sedulously protected from all accident and
injury. The better to ensure this end it is now enclosed in a glass
case. On the back of the chair is a medallion of Dr. Johnson with
the inscription—“Born Sept. 7th, 1709. Died Dec. 13th, 1784.” Copies
of the chair can be supplied to order in oak at £5 each, but the
medallion and inscriptions, which are perhaps modern, or at least
post-Johnsonian additions to the original chair, are not copied. A
notice card upon the seat of the chair announces to the visitor that
“This chair was in daily use by Dr. Samuel Johnson,” while below
follows the quotation:—“More regal in his state than many kings.”
Though he passed away when George Washington was in the zenith of his
renown after splendid epoch-making achievement in arms and diplomacy
and council, the memory of the great Doctor is as fresh and fragrant
as ever, as on the day when he last sat in the chair before us,
the oracle of a select company of wits and scholars. It is idle to
moralise further on this more than royal relic. Each intelligent
visitor, as he reverently contemplates it, will pursue his own line
of reflection.
Turning from the chair we find at the other end of the room a
glass-fronted cupboard, which contains many original samples of the
old willow pattern plate and also of the unique badge plate, which
has been in use in the house for many years. Here, too, are several
specimens of the old punch glasses, which have found favour with so
many generations of _convives_ of the Cheshire Cheese. The stranger
is not perhaps without a tremor of gastronomic emotion when the spoon
used for at least three generations, probably for a period of over
a century, in stirring _the_ pudding is pointed out to him. Hard by
on the walls of the room are seven old prints from Hogarth’s “Rake’s
Progress.”
The great artistic treasures of this room are, however, three
important paintings, which have recently been restored by Messrs.
William Marchant & Co., of the Goupil Gallery, 5 Regent Street.
The first, which looks down on the chair of Dr. Johnson in its
glass shrine, is an oil painting of a boy and dog. On the back of
the picture is written:—“David Boyle, aged 10.” “Ye 19th of July,
1691.” So that it was painted eighteen years before the birth of Dr.
Johnson. On the opposite wall is another oil painting, a still life
picture, attributed by competent critics to Peter Boel, who lived
from 1626 to 1680, and was a pupil of Snyders. The third of these
oil paintings is a figure picture, probably of “Diana,” by Charles
Le Brun, or the school (France, XVII. century).
In the smoking-room adjoining there is nothing of special interest
for visitors, since this apartment is mainly devoted to the smoking
of churchwarden pipes and to the consumption of “goes” of rack, cork,
and, above all, of Punch, for the right compounding of which Ye Old
Cheshire Cheese enjoys a reputation so deservedly high. Here take
place noteworthy arguments, conducted with much skill and logical
acumen by the regular customers, each in his own special chair, and
each with his own churchwarden pipe in his mouth, or held gracefully
poised to emphasise a rhetorical point. A case is provided in which
gentlemen may keep from harm the favourite pipes to which use and
wont have made them attached. In this room, too, the evening clubs
hold their meetings. The subject of “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Clubs”
is, however, dealt with elsewhere. Still attention may be drawn to
the fact that on the walls of the smoking-room are some interesting
pen and ink sketches and drawings relating to the clubs. It would
be unbecoming perhaps to omit mention of an engraving of “The Empty
Chair at Gadshill,” since it serves to remind us of the intimate
association of Charles Dickens with “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,” while
it suggests that other empty chair in the next room. Further, a pen
and ink drawing of the old bar downstairs, by Joseph Pennell, must
not be forgotten, any more than three Phil May sketches, the gift of
the Goupil Gallery.
[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON’S CHAIR.]
[Illustration: AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.
“An interesting episode in the family history of the House.”
_By F. Cox._
(William’s Room in the distance.)]
At the foot of the staircase leading up to the apartments sacred to
the fair Hebes of the House a sepia drawing by F. Cox claims our
notice. It is entitled “An interesting episode in the family history
of the House.” A stalwart favourite of the bar is snatching
a kiss, while two lovely colleagues of his beautiful victim are
tip-toeing down these very stairs to see the fun, and one pretty
forehead has just reached the corner of the wainscoting. And now as
the smiling beauties to the right of the picture bar our further
progress, let us descend to the kitchen, where the most interesting
objects are the original coal range and coal grill, which have been
in use for over a hundred years. Possibly nowhere in the wide world
is there a gastronomic temple of greater renown or more worthy of it,
for here have always been cooked in huge copper boilers the famous
pudding, the fire being fed and the pudding tended throughout the
whole night previous to the solemn and regular introduction of this
mammoth delicacy to the longing gaze of its patrons. That is the
hour when the analytical observer might make valuable studies of the
watering mouth.
Dinners, by the way, are now served in the Annexe. This room has been
formed by roofing with glass what was originally a court-yard. It
contains amongst the rest two famous original prints by H. Bunbury—“A
City Hunt” and “Hyde Park, 1780.” Other interesting prints are
“Destruction of the Bastile, July 14, 1789,” after a painting by H.
Singleton, and a line engraving by James Heath from a painting by F.
Wheatley of “The Riot in Broad Street on the 17th of June, 1773.”
Here also is a cabinet containing various articles which may be
purchased by visitors. The price list may be conveniently appended
here. It runs as follows:—
O.C.C. WARE, ETC. Each
_s._ _d._
Three-handle MUGS, silver mounted 50 0
Three-handle MUGS 10 0
Two-handle MUGS 7 6
One-handle MUGS 2 0
One-handle MUGS, silver mounted 21 0
Cream Jugs 1 0
Sugar Basins 1 0
Mustard Pots 1 0
Salt Cellars 1 0
Pepper Pots 1 0
Tea Pots —
Large. Small.
_s._ _d._ _s._ _d._
Badged Willow Pattern Plates 1 0 0 8
Badged Willow Pattern Dishes 1 0 0 8
POST CARDS.
No. 1 Series 6d. per packet.
No. 2 Series 6d. per packet.
Coloured Interior 1d. each.
Views of the House 6d. and 1s.
The above is a fairly complete inventory of the relics and art
treasures of the Cheshire Cheese, that ancient hostelry which
has become a place of pilgrimage for all in the wide realms of
Anglo-Saxondom who cherish the memory of a unique figure in the
literary history of the English-speaking peoples. Much has been said
and written of the great men of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries who have eaten good fare and waxed honestly
merry within the precincts of the Cheshire Cheese, but little of
the men of note of this generation and the preceding one who have
at one time or another been its guests. There are few distinguished
Englishmen who have not partaken of its hospitality, and few persons
of eminence, whether hailing from the far Antipodes or from the great
country over which floats the Stars and Stripes, who would deem a
visit to England complete if due homage to the memory of the great
Lexicographer in the Johnsonian shrine in Wine Office Court had not
been paid. There is nothing to compare with this worship of the
mighty literary monarch, unless it is to be found in that of which
Shakespeare is the centre, which has made of Stratford-on-Avon the
other Mecca of Anglo-Saxondom.
[Illustration: CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.”]
CHAPTER IV
MR. JOSEPH PENNELL AND LADY COLIN CAMPBELL ON “THE CHEESE”
Hard by there is the Cheshire Cheese,
A famous tap.—T. HOOD.
In the last chapter no mention was made of the fact that in 1887
a remarkable picture of the Cheshire Cheese by Mr. Seymour Lucas,
R.A., was exhibited at the Royal Academy, since it is not among the
art treasures of the house. It can, however, not be passed by, since
Mr. Seymour Lucas and the Cheshire Cheese are mutual friends. We
will therefore quote here the description given of the picture by
a well-known London evening paper. To Mr. Dendy Sadler’s picture,
“Toddy at the Cheshire Cheese,” allusion has already been made.
[Illustration: “THE WAY IN.”]
The _Pall Mall Gazette_ of March 29, 1887: “It represents a scene in
the Old Cheshire Cheese inn, and is entitled ‘The Latest Scandal.’
In one corner of the quaint old room, on the bench which is still
pointed out as the place where Dr. Johnson used to sit, we see a
typical group of the wits of the period. Some wear powder, while
others have the full dark wigs of an older fashion still. One of
the group, in the uniform of the Guards, is relating the latest
scandal to the rest, and pointing over his shoulder towards two
young beaux, who stand by the fireside. One of these wears his
right arm in a sling, and has evidently come to grief in a duel on
the previous night. He and his friend are mightily disconcerted to
discover that their escapade has become the talk of the town, and
that it is affording vast amusement to this group of scandal-mongers.”
What Mr. Seymour Lucas and Mr. Dendy Sadler have so admirably
portrayed for us with the brush, an American writer of distinction
has both described with his pen and illustrated with his pencil
in the pages of _Harper’s Weekly_. In a November number of that
periodical, in 1887, Mr. Joseph Pennell writes as follows:—
“On my first coming to London, I had fortified myself, not with a
course of English history, but by re-reading ‘Pickwick.’ My first
Sunday morning, about one o’clock, I found myself in Chancery
Lane outside the entrance to Lincoln’s Inn, in the company of the
proverbial solitary policeman and convivial cat. On my asking the
policeman where in the world I could get something to eat—as it is
well known one must starve in London on Sunday before one and after
three—he gave me the inevitable answer, ‘Down to the bottom, first
to your left, under the lamp, up the passage, and there you are!’
After he had repeated these mysterious directions two or three times,
and had found me hopelessly ignorant of his meaning, he did what
I have very seldom known a London policeman to do—a proof of his
loneliness; he walked to the end of Chancery Lane with me, and there
being no one in Fleet Street, pointed out the sign of the Cheshire
Cheese.... A push at the door, and I have passed into another world.
I was in a narrow hall, at the far end of which was a quaint bar,
where, framed in by small panes, were two very pretty, but I cannot
say fascinating barmaids—I never could be fascinated by the ordinary
English barmaid. Suddenly a waiter with a very short nose came out of
another room and screamed up the stairs: ‘Cotherum steak. Boatherum
foozlum mash. Fotherum coozlum, botherum steak!’ and then remarked to
me: ‘Lunch, sir? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. What can I get you, sir?
Steak, sir; chop, sir; kidney, sir; potatoes, sir, cooked in their
jackets, sir? Yes, sir; thank you, sir.’ Then up the stairs he added:
‘Underdone steak one!’ Then to me again: ‘Walk in, sir. Take a seat,
sir. Paper, sir? _Lloyd’s_, sir? _Reynolds’_, sir? Yes, sir.’...
“I had begun to look around me. I found I had stumbled on just
what I had determined to make a hunt for. I was in one of the
greenbaize-curtained boxes into which Mr. Pickwick was always
dropping under the guidance of Sam Weller, whose ‘knowledge of London
was extensive and peculiar.’ Unless you have a Sam Weller at your
elbow you will not very easily find the Cheshire Cheese, the last
of the London chop-houses, even though it is in Baedeker. In the
opposite corner was, not Mr. Pickwick, but one of those respectable
shabby old gentlemen you never see outside of London. The waiter
asked him in the same confidential tone, ‘if he would not have a
half-bitter! if he would not like to see yesterday’s _Times_? A most
interestin’ article in it, sir, Mr. Price, sir.’ Then Mr. Price’s
half-bitter came in a dented old pewter pot, and along with it an
exaggerated wine-glass; and Mr. Price held the pewter in the air, and
a softly murmuring stream flowed from the one into the other. Beyond
the box I was in I saw other hard straight-backed seats, and between
them other most beautifully clean, white cloth-covered tables, at all
of which were three or four rather quiet and sedate, but after their
manner sociable, Englishmen, everybody seeming to know everybody
else in the place. Everything seemed happy, even to the cat purring
on the hearth, and the brass kettle singing on the hob. Perhaps I
should except the restless waiter, who, when anyone came in, rushed
to the bottom of the stairs and gave his unearthly yell. Soon down
the same stairs came the translation of the yell in the shape of the
steak I had ordered, and with it the potatoes in their jackets, all
on old blue willow-ware plates.
“‘Your steak, sir. Yes, sir. Anything else, sir? Napkin, sir? Oh,
serviette! Yes, sir. All Americans like them, sir.’
“And so I found for the first time that napkins and bread, freely
bestowed in decent restaurants at home, are in England looked upon as
costly luxuries.[1]
... “I have returned again and again to the Cheshire Cheese, and
have, moreover, tried to induce others to go there with me. For if
the place is not haunted, as it is said to be, by the shades of
Ben Jonson and Herrick, of Samuel Johnson and Boswell, the waiter
is perfectly willing, for a consideration, to point out to you
the stains of their wigs on the wall. It is certain that Dickens,
Forster, Tom Hood, Wilkie Collins, and many other worthies did
frequent it, while Sala periodically puffs it, and a host of other
lights have written about it. In my own small way I have endeavoured
to lead some modern junior novelists and poets there, to show them
how near they could come to some of the great masters whom they
apparently worship so thoroughly. But on the only occasion when
I succeeded in placing one probably in the seat of Goldsmith or
Herrick, he sniffed at the chops and remarked that if Johnson had had
a napkin it would have been better for his personal appearance.
“I hardly know myself what is the attraction of the place, for
you can only[2] get chops and steaks, kidneys and sausages, or on
Saturdays a gigantic pudding, to eat your money’s worth of which
you must have the appetite of a Gargantua, or, on Shrove Tuesdays,
pancakes. If you should happen to want anything else, you would
probably get the answer which Mr. Sala says was given to a friend of
his who asked (at the Cock) for a hard boiled egg with his salad: ‘A
hegg! If Halbert Hedward ’imself wuz to cum ’ere he couldn’t ’ave
a hegg.’ Whoever really cares to see the last of the Old London
chop-houses, let him, when next in London, look up the sign of YE
OLDE CHESHYRE CHEESE.”
Not out of place, after the remarks of Mr. Pennell, will be found
a vivacious description of a dinner at the “Cheese,” given by Lady
Colin Campbell, writing under the pseudonym of “Ina” in the _World_
of August 31, 1892. Its “go” and high spirits render an apology for
quoting at length unnecessary. This clever lady writes as follows:—
“It is August, London is empty, and we are bored; yet dine we
must somewhere, and where to go is the difficulty. Everybody one
knows is either at Homburg or Cowes, so we cannot possibly go to
the Savoy or the Amphitryon. There is nothing more utterly stupid
than to visit the haunts of society after society has left, and to
find them peopled by the unknown—good creatures in their way, no
doubt, but not exactly _des nôtres_; not fashionably dressed enough
to admire, nor ridiculously dressed enough to be amusing, and the
affairs of whom we cannot discuss, for the simple reason that we
know nothing about them, good, bad, or indifferent. How strange
it is to think that only a short time ago no lady would ever have
dreamed of dining at a London restaurant! Then a few somewhat fast
people set the fashion of supping at some public place instead of
their own homes; and now there is probably no inhabitant of Mayfair
or Belgravia, with any pretensions to smartness, who has not at some
time or other either dined or supped at one of the many fashionable
cafés which have sprung up in various parts of the town, and have
become for a time the rage, only to be displaced by some newer,
more pretentious, and more expensive restaurant, to which people
flock, quite as much to see and discuss each other as they do to
discuss the delicacies provided for them by the latest celebrated
_chef_ imported direct from Paris. But, as I said before, dine we
must somewhere; and dining at a restaurant being depressing, and
dining at home dull, we are just turning over in our minds what we
had best do under the circumstances, when there comes a loud peal
at the front door bell. We all start up, and”—and, to abridge Lady
Colin’s narrative, three ladies and three gentlemen find themselves
in Fleet Street “in front of a little narrow alley, suggestive (to
me) of robbery and murder. Here we alight, and, with many apologies
for the shabbiness of the entrance, our host conducts us—by the
back way by mistake—into a dining place. A flare of unshaded gas
lights up a small, old-fashioned room, the floor of which is covered
with sawdust. The ceiling is white, with projecting cross-beams,
and at one side of the room is a long oak table, at which Johnson,
Goldsmith, and a few other choice spirits, were wont to sit and feed;
and here, it is said, originated the well-known riddle about the
number of beefsteaks it would take to reach the moon. All along one
side of the room are wooden partitions, exactly like old-fashioned
pews, with hard, cushionless sets. One of our party says, as she
sits down, that she feels as if she were in church; we devoutly
wished she would _behave_ a little more as though she were there,
long before the evening was over; but reaction having set in, we
are all, I fear, in a terribly frivolous humour, not by any means
in keeping with the solemn respectability of our surroundings, for
we are told that this chop-house has been in existence ever since
the year 1667, and is no ephemeral mushroom-house of the hour, to be
sought out one day and forgotten the next.... Our pew just holds six
comfortably, and we sit down three and three, opposite each other,
on either side of a very narrow table covered with a spotless white
cloth. We have willow-pattern plates, large and hot for the meat, and
small and cold, each with a pat of butter on it, for our potatoes.
First, we have thick slices of hot ham, the lean tender and pink and
the fat succulent, with an immense dish of the most delicious peas
I ever ate, and young potatoes served in their jackets. Anyone who
has tasted a fresh-run salmon which has been green-kippered, and has
compared it with the hard, salt fish that is cured for the London
market, will appreciate the difference between an ordinary ham and
one that is prepared for immediate consumption. These Yorkshire hams
were not intended for keeping, and, as the cook afterwards informed
us, were all eaten up in a day. I could easily have believed her
if she had said one was eaten up at every meal, judging by the
thickness of the slices to which we were helped, and the amount we
were supposed to eat of them. The next dish is a point steak, rosy
without being _saignant_, accompanied by fresh dishes of young peas
and potatoes.... Our somewhat eccentric dinner is brought to a close
by a bowl of rum punch, accompanied by six long churchwarden pipes
and a glass full of bird’s-eye tobacco.”
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Serviettes are now provided as a matter of course.
[2] A more extensive menu is now provided.
CHAPTER V
ABOUT THE PUDDING
Now, good digestion wait on appetite
And health on both.—SHAKESPEARE.
“How do you make it?” asked a fair American of the proprietor.
The answer is not recorded, for in the manner of making chiefly lies
the speciality of the Old Cheshire Cheese. The hand of the proprietor
himself compounds the ingredients in a secret room, secure from the
gaze of even his most inquisitive attendants.
Yet when we look on the immense bowl from which sixty or seventy
people are to be fed, one cannot wonder at the lady’s desire to know
how such a Brobdingnagian dish could be so exquisitely prepared.
The proportions of the bowl are emblematic of the profusion with
which its contents are dispensed, and even Gargantua would find
himself vanquished in presence of the “Cheese” hospitality.
Old “William,” for many years the head-waiter, could only be seen in
his real glory on Pudding Days. He used to consider it his duty to
go round the tables insisting that the guests should have second or
third, ay, and with wonder be it spoken, fourth helpings.
“Any gentleman say pudden?” was his constant query; and his habit was
not broken when a crusty customer growled:
“No _gentleman_ says pudden.”
William either never saw the point or disdained to make reply.
The narrow limits of this volume are all too small for a complete
collection of the prose and verse written in praise of the pudding. A
few examples must serve.
In “Ye Lay of Ye Lost Minstrel,” printed in the _West London
Observer_ (April, 1890), are a number of verses in praise of the
“Cheese,” by Mr. William Henderson. We give the following extract
from his poem:—
If you’d dine at your ease
Try “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.”
At this famous resort
In the Wine Office Court
Kickshaws, entrées or slops
You’ll not get, but the chops
Devil’d kidneys and steaks
He will say who partakes
Are all second to none—
To a turn they are done!
But the pudding!—oh my!
You look on with a sigh,
As it comes piping hot
From the cauldron or pot—
Oh the savour, the taste,
Of its lining, its paste!
How it wells! how it swells!
In its bosom there dwells
Food for gods, meat for men,
Who resort to Moore’s den.
A parody by the same author will appeal to the sentiment of those who
scorn a foreign yoke. It is inscribed to Beaufoy A. Moore, and was
published by Mr. J. H. Wadsworth, of Boston (U.S.A.):—
YE PUDDING’S REQUIEM
AIR: DEATH OF NELSON.
We sought “The Cheese,” with thirst and hunger prest,
And own we love the pudding day the best.
But no one quarrels with the chops cook’d here,
Or steaks, when wash’d down by Old English beer!
’Twas on Saint Andrew’s day,
Our way thro’ Fleet Street lay;
We sniff’d the pudding then!
We scorn’d all foreign fare,
True British food was there,
To “cut and come agen.”
Our landlord carved with manner grave,
Brave portions to each guest he gave,
Nor thought he of his booty,
Nor thought he of his booty.
Along the boards the signal ran,
“Charlie” expects that ev’ry man
Will pay and do his duty,
Will pay and do his duty.
And now the waiters pour
Prime “Burton” foaming o’er
“Old William” marks his prey!
No tips that waiter claimed,
Long be that waiter famed,
Who smiles and makes it pay!
Not dearly was that pudding bought,
For ev’ry hungry Briton sought
A “follow” from that beauty,
A “follow” from that beauty.
With plate on plate each waiter ran;
“Charlie” confessed that ev’ry man
That day had done his duty,
That day had done his duty.
At last the fatal sound,
Which spread dismay around,
The pudding’s off, the pudding’s off at last!
“The vict’ry’s on your side,
The day’s your own” Moore cried!
“I serve and have to fast!
However large that pudding be,
No scrap is ever left for me!
Content I do my duty!
Content I do my duty!
For to complain was ne’er my plan.”
Let all confess that Moore, good man,
Has ever done his duty,
Has ever done his duty!
1890. W.H.
The “Cheese” pudding has a far-extended sphere of influence. It
boasts a clientèle much more numerous than are the actual frequenters
of the ancient hostelry. Hundreds are sent out every year to
all parts of London, and, indeed, England. Some even have found
their way to the United States, imported direct from “The Cheese”
by enthusiastic Americans. The following extract from the _Court
Journal_ of April 4, 1891, describes the misadventures of one owing
to the operation of the McKinley Act: “The London lark pudding is
renowned in many lands. The travelled American speaks with rapture
of that lark pudding he partook of in Fleet Street. Mr. Burras, of
New York, requested that such a lark pudding should be sent out to
him from London, so that the stay-at-home ones might partake of
the British culinary luxury. The delicacy duly arrived; the guests
who were to aid Mr. Burras in eating it were duly invited—all was
ready, indeed, when an unexpected difficulty arose. The Customs House
authorities declined to give it up until the question as to what duty
‘lark pudding’ was liable to was settled. The McKinley Bill does not
mention lark pudding. It takes cognisance of canned goods and potted
meats, certainly; but larks in a pudding were unclassified, and
they said it did not come under the head of manufactured articles,
because it was food in a natural state. A week has elapsed while
the authorities have been debating the point, and in the meantime
the lark pudding is most probably turning sour, and Mr. Burras
and his friends dancing with indignation. More trouble will ensue
over this lark pudding, no doubt, than did upon the opening of the
four-and-twenty-blackbird pie of yore! It may cause the establishment
of Free Trade in the States.”
It is satisfactory to be able to state that the pudding eventually
passed the Customs House none the worse for its detention. The guests
were eloquent in its praise, and several of them have since visited
England merely to track the pudding to the place of its nativity.
[Illustration: THE BAR.]
CHAPTER VI
THE BAR
If on thy theme I rightly think,
There are five reasons why men drink:
Good wine, a friend, because I’m dry,
At least, I should be by-and-bye,
Or any other reason why.—H. ALDRICH.
The bar of the “Cheese” is unique amongst the bowers of Boniface
in the metropolis. It has no equal and no rival. “Here,” says the
_Sportsman_ of March 30, 1887, “gather poets, painters, lawyers,
barristers, preachers, journalists, stockbrokers, musicians, town
councillors, and vestrymen, with just a _soupçon_ of sporting
celebrities, and a decided dash of the impecunious ‘Have beens.’
The latter represent in the ‘Cheese’ colony the Irish division in
Parliament. Many of our most eminent journalists, legal luminaries,
and successful merchants have been patrons of the Old Cheshire Cheese
in the days when it was to them club, discussion forum, and even
home.”
The “Cheese” bar resembles no other in London. The customers are
unique, and the names of their drinks are peculiar. The simplest and
amplest is “whisky,” and that means Scotch whisky. No old customer of
the “Cheese” would ever think of asking for “Scotch.” If anyone dares
to say “Scotch,” he is marked down at once as one not yet inured
to the ways of the bar. On the other hand, neither must he whisper
“Irish”—certainly not! If he knows his “Cheese” he asks for “Cork,”
and if he says “Irish” he is an ignoramus. Then who would mention
“gin?” The word is absolutely vulgar, and should be confined to the
East End and Mrs. Harris. No, no! the cognoscente calls for “rack”—an
odd name, which may be meant to suggest the state of mind of the
drinker on the morrow, or it may be a mere contraction of arrack.
Punch, a mysterious and delectable compound, we had better not order
in the bar, its consumption is so much more pleasant upstairs; but
there is no reason why we should not admire the punch bowls, and
having considered them and studied the portrait of an erstwhile
waiter over the fireplace as much as they deserve, we probably turn
about, and, as the eyes become accustomed to the darkness, find
ourselves confronted with the way out. But don’t go for a while.
You would probably like to see somebody in the bar. Adequately to
people the bar would task the pencil of a Hogarth, the pen of a
Thackeray. That more genial Hogarth of our time, the late Phil May,
has indeed done it exceedingly well in his “Parson and the Painter.”
But the human constituents of the bar’s society vary with the hour
of the day. In the morning the journalistic element predominates.
But it is when night begins to fall that the life of the bar is at
its brightest. Then the blinds are drawn, the gas is lighted, and
the full orchestra tunes up. The Cheeseites are in their glory, and
what might be copy for a dozen comic papers elicits a little passing
laughter and then is forgotten. When the sparkle has fled from the
champagne, who can restore it? Here, however, are a few fragments of
typical conversation.
The bar is crowded, and floating in the ambient air one detects
the rich voice of a Scotch poet who is being taken to task for his
grammar.
[Illustration: “THE WAY OUT.”]
“It’s maybe not English at present, Mr. Bluggs; but wha maks your
English? It’s your Shakespeares, your Multons, an _Me_!”
From another part of the room comes the voice of an Englishman
somewhat at a disadvantage among Irish and Scotch intonations of rich
variety.
“Of course the Scotch say they speak better English than the English.
I remember I once had a short engagement on an Edinburgh paper. When
about to leave ‘Auld Reekie’ there was a little _deoch-an-dorus_,
and some fifteen of the fellows came to wish me God-speed. They were
from some fifteen different parts of Scotland, and after certain
formalities in the way of hot toddy my Scotch friends brought up
the eternal question of their immaculate English. ‘It may be as you
say,’ I interposed, ‘but why do you speak it with fifteen different
accents?’ Had them there, ha! ha!”
Irish Dramatist (discussing tours, etc.)—“Did I hear you say Stony
Stratford? I was once there, and no wonder they called it Stony
Stratford, for I was never so bitten with bugs in my life.”[3]
Genial Advertising Manager—“I hear that poor old Mac’s dead” (general
sorrow and display of handkerchiefs). (Enter poor old Mac—silence
falls on the company.)
Poor old Mac—“Good evening, Miss S——, I haven’t seen you for a long
time.”
Miss S.—“Was it very hot where you have come from?”
Funny Man—“Why, Jack, you seem to believe in a lot of things nobody
else believes in”—(then, as a clincher)—“I suppose you believe in the
transmigration of souls!”
Solemn Man—“I do—and so do you. You must feel you were an ass when
you lent me that half-sovereign six months ago.”
Socialistic Journalist (to admiring friends)—“Have you read my
articles in the _X Y Gazette_? No? Well, read them, and you will
see that I am the second, if not the first, among the teachers of
humanity. Nobody, for at least eighteen hundred years, has taught as
I have taught.”
Waiter, suddenly entering the bar—“Oh, I beg your pardon, but you did
not pay for that steak you had in the room.”
Socialistic Journalist—“Pay for it! Not likely! It was from the
beginning as much my steak as Charlie Moore’s. Now it is more mine
than his. Pay? Base is the slave that pays.”
Racing Journalist—“Jones is a good writer, but he will never set the
Thames on fire.”
Impecunious Reporter—“I wish he would, for it’s very cold, and I have
to sleep on the Embankment.”
The story goes that on one occasion there was some little
misunderstanding at the bar; but misunderstandings are of the rarest,
and this one has become legendary. The account which reached me ran
something after this manner:—
Great Sub-Editor (with back to fire)—“_You’re_ not a freemason.”
Great Reporter—“I am.”
G. S.-E.—“Why, I’ve been making masonic signs to you for the last
half-hour.”
G. R.—“Do you call me a——?”
G. S.-E.—“I do.”
G. R.—“Then——” (and they roll together on the floor).
Head waiter (rushing in)—“What’s this? What’s this about?”
Manageress—“Only two gentlemen making a few masonic signs under the
table.”
Of course, as a rule, harmony prevails in the “Cheese,” and “chaff”
abounds without physical threshing, for the _habitués_ love the
ancient hostelry and themselves too much to make the place a
bear-garden.
To quote again from the _Sportsman_:—
“There is a sense of comfort and veneration about the place which
constitutes an absolute charm. There is something homely and out of
the common in its sawdust-coated floors, with uneven boards and great
gaping ‘chinks.’ The fireplaces are huge and commodious, capable of
holding a hundredweight of coal at a time. These said fireplaces, by
the way, have much to answer for in legions of broken resolutions
to be home at six. On a cold winter’s day, when their genial warmth
penetrates every portion of the room, and the merry flames dance and
leap after each other up the capacious chimney space, a man listens
to the howling wind without, or hears the rain pattering on the paved
courts, and he says, says he, ‘The old woman may be cross, or the
mater may scold; but we don’t kill a sheep every day, and—just one
more, James, and I will catch the seven.’ Those wicked fireplaces,
the huge singing kettle, the cosy recesses, and the seductive perfume
of toddy have indeed much to answer for.”
FOOTNOTES:
[3] This _non sequitur_ has already appeared in print.
CHAPTER VII.
CLUB LIFE AT THE “CHEESE”
The feast of reason and the flow of soul.—POPE.
One of the most interesting features of the “Cheese” is its club
life. It is not the stately and withal solemn life of the modern
West-end club, but it is the social and intensely human life of the
club as Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, understood it. When the Doctor, Sir
Joshua, and some others established “The Club” in 1764, the members
were to meet once a month and take supper, passing their evening in
witty discourses.
At the “Old Cheshire Cheese” the Johnsonian tradition is naturally
strong; it pervades the whole place, and all the clubs which hold
their regular or occasional meetings there endeavour, as much as our
less heroic days will allow, to emulate the example of the giants of
the days gone by.
The following is a complete list of the clubs actually in existence
at the present time:—The Johnson Club, founded about 25 years;
Sawdust Club, founded 1906; Ye Punchbowlers; the Mitre Club, founded
November, 1903; “Ourselves,” founded 1897; St. Dunstan’s, founded
1790; Rump Steak Club; the Dickens Club.
The following further details regarding the Cheshire Cheese Clubs of
the past as well as the present may be found not without interest.
The place of honour is given to—
THE JOHNSON CLUB.
This club is composed of many men eminent in literature and art,
or distinguished in other ways. The club, which is literary and
social, and is restricted to thirty-one members, was founded about
twenty-five years ago. The members bind themselves to sup together
annually on or about December 13, the anniversary of the Doctor’s
death, but various other meetings are held throughout the year.
The constitution of the club is thus described by Dr. George
Birkbeck Hill, the well-known editor of the latest and best edition
of “Boswell.” “We are,” he says (in the _Atlantic Monthly_ of
January, 1896), “in strict accordance with the great Lexicographer’s
definition, ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain
conditions’; the conditions being that we shall do honour to the
immortal memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson by supping together four times
a year, and by swallowing as much beefsteak pudding, punch, and
tobacco smoke as the strength of each man’s constitution admits. A
few of the weaker brethren—among whom unhappily I am included—whose
bodily infirmity cannot respond to the cheerful Johnsonian cry,
‘Who’s for poonsh?’ do their best to play their part by occasionally
reading essays on Johnsonian subjects, and by seasoning their talk
with anecdotes and sayings of the great Doctor. We are tolerated
by the jovial crew, for they see that we mean well, and are as
‘clubbable’ as nature allows. OUR FAVOURITE HAUNT IS THE OLD
CHESHIRE CHEESE, THE ONLY TAVERN IN FLEET STREET LEFT UNCHANGED by
what Johnson called that ‘fury of innovation’ which, beginning with
Tyburn and its gallows-tree, has gradually transformed London. The
Mitre—‘where he loved to sit up late’; where he made Boswell’s head
ache, not with the port wine, but with the sense he put into it;
where, at their first supper, he called to him with warmth, ‘Give me
your hand, I have taken a liking to you’; where, nearly a century
later, Hawthorne, in memory of the two men, dined ‘in the low,
sombre coffee-room’—the Mitre has been rebuilt.
“The Cock, most ancient of taverns, has followed its ‘plump
head-waiter’ along the road of mortality, although, fortunately, its
fittings and furniture are still preserved with the house which,
under the same name, has risen on the other side of the street. THE
OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE STANDS AS IT STOOD IN THE DAYS WHEN GOLDSMITH
USED TO PASS ITS SIDE DOOR on his way up the dark entry to his
lodgings in Wine Office Court. The jolly host who owns the freehold
can show title-deeds going back almost to the time of the Great Fire
of London.
“There, on the ground floor, we meet our ‘Prior’ sitting on a bench,
above which is set in the wall a brass tablet bearing the following
inscription:—
“‘THE FAVOURITE SEAT OF
DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.
_Born September 18, 1709; Died December 13, 1784._
“‘In him a noble understanding and a masterly intellect were
united to great independence of character and unfailing goodness
of heart, which won the admiration of his own age, and remain as
recommendations to the reverence of posterity.
“‘No, sir! there is nothing which has yet been contrived by
man, by which so much happiness has been produced as by a good
tavern.—JOHNSON.’
“In this same room, with its floor as ‘nicely sanded’ as when
Goldsmith knew it, our club gathers from time to time; here,
undisturbed in our thoughts by a single modern innovation except the
gas, we sup on one of those beefsteak puddings for which the Cheshire
Cheese has been famous from time immemorial. So vast is it in all
its glorious rotundity that it has to be wheeled in on a table; it
disdains a successor in the same line, and itself alone satisfies
forty hungry guests. ‘A magnificent hot apple pie stuck with bay
leaves,’ our second course, recalls the supper with which Johnson
‘celebrated the birth of the first literary child of Mrs. Lennox,
the novelist, when at five in the morning his face still shone with
meridian splendour though his drink had been only lemonade.’[4] The
talk is of the liveliest; from time to time toasts are drunk and
responded to.”
The centenary of the death of Dr. Johnson was celebrated in December,
1884, and the _Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_ of the 20th of
that month thus refers to the Doctor’s connection with the ancient
hostelry:—“Whoever has heard of the grand old Doctor knows well that
the greater part of his life was passed between Ludgate Hill and
Temple Bar, and that the most interesting portion of it revolved
about Gough Square. There seems to be little doubt that while he
lived here, the Old Cheshire Cheese tavern was, as is claimed for it,
the haunt which he most favoured, and where much of that sledgehammer
wisdom was coaxed forth or teased forth, which Boswell has recorded
that, as Macaulay put it, the memory of Johnson might keep alive the
fame of his works.”
Many notable men have sat down at the Johnson centenary dinners in
the Cheshire Cheese. At that held on December 13, 1894, for example,
the chair was taken by Mr. Augustine Birrell, Q.C., M.P., then most
popularly known as the author of “Obiter Dicta,” but subsequently to
become President of the Board of Education and later Chief Secretary
for Ireland in a Liberal Government. From the _Sketch_ of December
19, which devoted to this particular festivity a page and half of
illustrated literary matter, is taken the following extract:—“The
most interesting figure of the evening was undoubtedly Mr. Dobson.
His health was proposed just in such a way as it must have been in
the days when men of letters indited odes to one another.” Then
followed the reading of gentle imitations of Mr. Dobson’s style, but
exigency of space precludes our quoting more than a couple of stanzas
from a delightful perversion of “The Ladies of St. James’s”:—
The Journalists of Fleet Street
Have precious little cash,
They put their all in papers
Which swiftly go to smash;
But Publishers, my Publishers,
Sit twirling of their thumbs
While sweated clerks with ledgers
Tot up colossal sums.
The Journalists of Fleet Street
While taking of their ease,
Invoke the frequent tankard
That haunts the Cheshire Cheese;
But Publishers, my Publishers,
As epicures enjoy
The wines of Mr. Nicols,
And soups of the Savoy.
THE RHYMERS’ CLUB.
Another club which affected the stern, uncushioned comforts of the
“Cheese” was known as the Rhymers’ Club, and we betray no secret
when we give the names of the members, for are they not written in
the book of their poetic deeds? In this book, published through
Elkin Mathews in 1892, the composition of the club is thus recorded:
Ernest Dowson, Edwin J. Ellis, G. A. Greene, Lionel Johnson, Richard
Le Gallienne, Victor Plarr, Ernest Radford, Ernest Rhys, T. W.
Rolleston, Arthur Symons, John Todhunter, W. B. Yeats.
When such sweet singers meet, it may well be believed that the night
was ambrosial, care and the world were banished, and the contests of
the “Cheese” and of the “Mermaid”—in miniature, it is no discourtesy
to say—live again, as Mr. Rhys sings:
As once Rare Ben and Herrick
Set older Fleet Street mad,
With wit not esoteric,
And laughter that was lyric,
And roystering rhymes and glad.
As they, we drink defiance
To-night to all but Rhyme,
And most of all to Science
And all such skins of lions
That hide the ass of time.
A very considerable poet and proseman, Mr. John Davidson, a
Scotchman, by the way, from the vicinity of Paisley, in his work,
“A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender,
which Lasted One Night and One Day, with a History of the Pursuit
of Earl Lavender and Lord Brumm, by Mrs. Scamler and Maud Emblem,”
brings two of his characters, Mr. Gurdon and Sir Harry Emblem, into
the “Cheese” in a condition which would spell ruin to the landlord
were it generally adopted. The two gentlemen had spent some £40 in
eight days, and now they are “on the rocks” in a Strand restaurant.
But foreigners have hard hearts, and so the delightful couple find
their way to the Cap and Bells, which every Fleet Streeter will
recognise as the Cheshire Cheese. They order supper, and, though
unprepared to pay, are prepared to justify their deeds. They were
quite unconventional in the matter of settlement of accounts; they
were financially naked, yet they were not ashamed. Fortunately for
the landlord, it happens that on this night the Guild of Prosemen
(oh, sarcastic Mr. Davidson!), otherwise the Rhymers’ Club, are
holding their meeting, and one of the members, acting more like
an impulsive poet than a mere proseman, settles their account and
introduces them to the club. There we must say farewell to Mr.
Davidson’s creations, but we cannot leave the Rhymers without
quoting, by the kindness of the author and publisher, the following
exquisite:—
BALLADE OF THE CHESHIRE CHEESE IN FLEET STREET.
I know a home of antique ease
Within the smoky city’s pale,
A spot wherein the spirit sees
Old London through a thinner veil.
The modern world so stiff and stale,
You leave behind you when you please,
For long clay pipes and great old ale
And beefsteaks in the “Cheshire Cheese.”
Beneath this board Burke’s, Goldsmith’s knees
Were often thrust—so runs the tale—
’Twas here the Doctor took his ease
And wielded speech that like a flail
Threshed out the golden truth. All hail,
Great Souls! that met on nights like these
Till morning made the candles pale,
And revellers left the “Cheshire Cheese.”
By kindly sense and old decrees
Of England’s use they set their sail;
_We_ press to never-furrowed seas,
For vision-worlds we breast the gale,
And still we seek and still we fail,
For still the “glorious phantom” flees.
Ah well! no phantom are the ale
And beefsteaks of the “Cheshire Cheese.”
ENVOI.
If doubts or debts thy soul assail,
If Fashion’s forms its current freeze,
Try a long pipe, a glass of ale,
And supper at the “Cheshire Cheese.”
“THE 49 CLUB.”
This is a more recent club which met at the “Cheese” to partake, as
their “Chronicle” has it, of “a curious mysterie
Yclept ye 49 pudding,
Also Grylled Bones,
Also Stewed Cheese,
together with such Olde Ales, Costlie Wines, and strong waters as may
suit ye taste, purse, or conscience of ye Members.”
The Chronicle of this club is very diverting, and begins with a motto
_not_ from Goethe,
Ein guter Trunk
Macht Alte junk
which is, after all, a very partial and temporary truth. For the
guidance of other social clubs I cannot refrain from quoting _in
extenso_ the article headed “Rules”:—
“The Rules of the Club being of the sort once heard are never
forgotten, there is no need to repeat them in this Chronicle.”
So much for the Forty-niners.
THE SOAKERS’ CLUB.
“We’ll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting days, and
moreo’er puddings and flapjacks; and thou shalt be welcome,” was
the Shakesperean motto of this frankly christened club. The pious
founder of the club, in a finely printed booklet, declared that “it
was deemed a requisite that your club should flourish under some
rollicking epithet such as had not previously been ‘empounded’ by
any other fraternity. The title should be terse; it should also be
outrageous. It should smack of the _caveau_, and have the scent of
the beeswing. Accordingly, many have been the creations that have in
turn possessed the mind of your promoters. Fuddling clubs, gorging
clubs, out Heroding Herod clubs—these comprised a whole hand of
clubs, in which was not a single trump. Then did your promoters
bethink themselves of that unctuous cognomen, ‘The Soakers.’ The
title is a nudity.... The name of ‘The Soakers’ Club’ is selected
only as conveying a sharp antithetical travestie upon our sober
habits as moderate men.” This last statement is consolatory, for
it would have been unpleasant if the club had come to the “Cheese”
merely to make manifest their loyalty to their name. They were good
fellows, and, though not quite antithetical to their designation
did not allow it to run riot with their moderate tendencies. They
dined at the “Cheese” regularly for years, but their numbers did not
increase, owing probably to the frank brutality of their title, and
the natural result was that they gradually dwindled away.
THE ST. DUNSTAN’S CLUB.
No wife, however shrewd, could object to her marital slave being a
member of the St. Dunstan’s, while even the most angelic of ladies
would scarcely like to see her lord flourishing as a leader among
“The Soakers.” Therefore has the St. Dunstan’s flourished like a
green bay tree for over a century. Its proud boast is that it has
contributed more Common Councilmen and Aldermen (and consequently
Lord Mayors) to the Corporation of the City of London than any other
club in the Metropolis.
The St. Dunstan’s is pre-eminently a social club, neither party
nor religion entering into its management. As may be expected, its
members (now limited to twenty-eight) are leading men in their
respective walks of life. The St Dunstan’s Club is called after the
courageous English saint who, according to tradition, once pulled
Satan by the nose with a pair of pincers. This episode in the life of
the holy friar is represented on the insignia of the club. The club
legend is that St. Dunstan shook the devil all round the boundaries
of the parish, and then dropped him in the Temple, hence the origin
of the name of the “Devil’s Own” applied to the legal profession,
hence also the name of the “Devil” tavern, nearly opposite St.
Dunstan’s Church, where the Apollo Club was presided over by Ben
Jonson. Fleet Streeters can no longer “go to the Devil,” in the
sense of going to any particular tavern, but anyone of respectability
may be introduced to Child’s Bank, No. 1 Fleet Street, which stands
on the Devil’s site. The bankers preserve in their parlour Jonson’s
Latin rules set down for the guidance of the club.
It appears by the Minute Book that the St. Dunstan’s Club was first
established at Anderton’s Coffee House on March 10, 1790, by the Rev.
Joseph Williamson, the then Vicar of St. Dunstan’s, Mr. Nicholls,
of St. Bride’s, Deputy of the South Side of the Ward of Farringdon
Without, and some fifteen others, inhabitants of Fleet Street and its
immediate vicinity. The club was limited to thirty members, whereof
twenty-six were to be inhabitants of the parish, and four gentlemen
resident in the ward. A chairman, treasurer, and secretary, were
annually elected at the first meeting of the club in the month of
October, and the toasts were fixed by resolution to be as follows:—
1st.—The King.
2nd.—The Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the rest of the Royal Family.
3rd.—Unanimity to this Parish.
4th.—Prosperity to the Ward.
5th.—The Absent Members.
At the first regular meeting of the club Mr. Brewer, of St.
Sepulchre’s, who was the Deputy for the North Side of the Ward, was
duly elected a member, and at a meeting held on October 17, 1792,
the celebrated John Wilkes, Alderman of the Ward, was unanimously
elected an honorary member. The subscription to the club was one
guinea per annum, and the principal source of income appears to have
been derived from wagers for bottles of wine amongst the members, the
annual elections for Common Councilmen in the Ward always producing
a good number of bets as to the position of the various members of
the club at the declaration of the poll. Wagers were laid about every
conceivable thing under the sun, as a few of the following examples
will show:—
January 25, 1792.—“Mr. Whipham laid Mr. P. North a gallon of claret
that 14 days from this date the 3 per Cent. Consols would be 95 per
cent.” Mr. Whipham lost.
January 16, 1793.—“Mr. P. North lays Mr. Hounsom a bottle of wine
that he (Mr. P. North) will be in bed before 2 o’clock the next
morning (January 17), and Mr. Hounsom lays Mr. P. North that he has
lost the above wager.”
June 12, 1793.—“Mr. P. North lays that Mr. Hounsom will not forget to
pay Mr. Thorne the 2d. to-morrow in the course of the day which he
(Mr. Thorne) had lent and advanced for him to pay the waiter 2d. for
a Welsh rarebit which Mr. Hounsom had for his supper.”
January 19, 1793.—“Mr. Thorne reported that Mr. Hounsom had paid him
the 2d. at half-past 9 o’clock in the morning.”
June 12, 1793.—“Mr. Lambe and Mr. Dep. Nicholls ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Lambe
lays that Mr. Dep. Nicholls knows Miss W——. _Upon explanation Mr.
Dep. Nicholls lost._ Mr. Jones and Mr. J. North ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Jones
lays that neither Mr. Lambe nor Mr. Dep. Nicholls knows Miss W——. Mr.
Jones lost. Mr. Dep. Nicholls requested that the club would permit
him to pay a bottle for having termed Miss W—— Mr. Hounsom’s _friend_
instead of _neighbour_. Ordered that it be granted. Mr. Lambe and Mr.
J. North ‘a bottle.’ Mr. Lambe lays that he (Mr. Lambe) never ran
away from a good thing. After some discussion it was decided that Mr.
Lambe had lost the bet.”
In 1795 a great number of bets were made about the wearing of hair
powder, and the wagering was so keen that counsel’s opinion was
taken as to who had won the respective bets; the original opinion
and decision of the counsel (Mr. George Bond, of Serjeants’ Inn) is
attached to the Minute Book.
It was also the custom of the club to wager on the “_first letter_”
of the King’s or Queen’s Speech after the words “_My Lords and
Gentlemen_.” This naturally afforded great scope for speculation,
which, it appears by the minutes, the members were accustomed to take
full advantage of. When the funds of the club were low the following
among other expedients was adopted:—
February 22, 1792.—“Resolved that any member of this club elected to
any office of honour or emolument shall pay for the benefit of the
club one bottle of port wine.”
April 8, 1795.—“Mr. Hounsom and Mr. Whipham ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Hounsom
lays that the Prince of Wales will not have issue within the space
of 12 months. Mr. Fisher and Mr. Williams ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Fisher
lays that the Prince of Wales will have issue within the space of 12
months. Mr. Thorne and Mr. George ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Thorne lays that
the Princess of Wales will be delivered of a son or daughter within
12 calendar months.”
April 22, 1795.—“Rev. Mr. Williamson and Mr. Ustonson ‘1 bottle.’
Mr. Williamson lays that the Princess of Wales is not delivered of a
son or daughter within 12 calendar months. Mr. Butterworth and Mr.
Piggott ‘1 bottle.’ Mr. Butterworth lays that the Prince of Wales
will not have issue within 12 months.”
THE LEGITIMIST CLUB.
Before leaving the subject of “Cheese” clubs one more of the many
which have enjoyed on occasion the hospitality of the “Cheese” may
be mentioned. Most people in this land, and presumably everybody in
America, would consider this club somewhat belated. It has an idea
that King Edward is a usurper, and that the rightful sovereign of
these isles and of the empire is some foreign potentate whom even his
own states disown. The following paragraph from the _Daily Telegraph_
of March 25, 1895, will show that whatever we may think of the views
of its members, the excellence of their taste in gastronomy cannot be
called in question:—
“A few gentlemen are still left in this hasteful, bustling, and
forgetful age who have time to remember that James I. ascended the
throne of England on March 24, 1603. It is hardly necessary to add
that they are members of the Thames Valley Legitimist Club, who
spend their leisure in moaning over the extinguished glories of
their country since the expulsion of James II. Taking advantage of
the fact that yesterday was not only the anniversary of the date
just given, but was also Mothering Sunday, when the rigidity of
the Lenten fast is temporarily suspended, they dined together last
evening in the Old Cheshire Cheese, and after doing justice to the
famous Johnsonian puddings and other viands, amused themselves after
their wont by inspecting a piece of the scaffold on which some
unfortunate followers of the House of Stuart were executed. The
health of the Queen was drunk, and it was incidentally mentioned as a
fact not generally known that, with two exceptions, every sovereign
in Europe was descended from the saintly mother of the monarch whose
anniversary they were that day celebrating. The health of Charles
VII. of Spain, whoever he may be, was duly honoured.”
[Illustration: Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square (_By permission of_ MESSRS. INGRAM BROTHERS,
_Proprietors of “The Sketch.”_)]
FOOTNOTES:
[4] “The supper was elegant. Johnson had directed that a magnificent
hot apple-pie should make part of it, and this he would have stuck
with bay leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox had written verses,
and, further, he had prepared for her a crown of bays with which,
but not till he had invoked the Muses by some ceremonies of his own
invention, he encircled her brows.”
The first literary child whose birth was here celebrated was a dreary
novel called _The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella_.
CHAPTER VIII
DR. JOHNSON’S HOMES AND HAUNTS
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.
SHENSTONE.
It is a common belief that Fleet Street is dotted with houses which
were Dr. Johnson’s homes in later years, and with the taverns in
which he sat drinking tea and talking philosophy till the small hours
of the morning. It is not so. The Doctor’s house at No. 1 Inner
Temple Lane has given way to “Johnson’s Buildings.”
In Johnson’s Court (named after Thomas Johnson, citizen and merchant
taylor, and one of the Common Council from 1598 till his death in
1625) the Doctor lived from 1765 to 1776, and during his “journey” in
Scotland humorously described himself as “Johnson of that Ilk.” The
house (No. 7) has, however, gone the way of all bricks and mortar. In
1776 he removed to No. 8 Bolt Court, where he passed the rest of his
life. The house was demolished soon after his death. In fact there
is only one house—No. 17 Gough Square—on which we can look and say,
“Here dwelt Dr. Johnson.”
Gough Square itself has undergone inevitable alteration, but
fortunately for the devotee, at the western end the Doctor’s house,
No. 17, still stands intact. Here his wife died in 1752, and here
he completed his Dictionary in 1755. In his note book for 1831,
Carlyle mentions having paid a visit to the house and interviewed
the occupant, who was apparently under the impression that his
illustrious predecessor in the tenancy had been a schoolmaster. So
he had been, and one of his pupils, a pupil of whom any master might
have been proud, was David Garrick. But the tenant knew not that
schoolmastering had long been abandoned when the Doctor was compiling
his Dictionary in that by no means majestic abode. On the right-hand
side of the doorway the Society of Arts has placed a plaque with the
following inscription:—
[Illustration: DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON
_Author_
LIVED HERE
B. 1709. D. 1784.]
CHAPTER IX
THE “CHEESE” AND ITS FARE—A GREAT FALL IN PUDDING
Resurgam.
_La découverte d’un mets nouveau fait plus pour le bonheur du genre
humain que la découverte d’une étoile._—BRILLAT-SAVARIN.
If, as Brillat-Savarin says, the discovery of a new dish does more
for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star, how much
more deserving of human gratitude is the discoverer of the “Cheese”
pudding than a Herschel or an Adams?
The _Sportsman_ of March 30, 1887, has a long and eulogistic article
on the “Cheese,” but exigencies of space preclude its being quoted
in its entirety. The writer says: “Happily the most famous of London
ancient taverns is left to us in the Old Cheshire Cheese, which
is yet nightly haunted by the shade of Dr. Johnson, whose modern
prototypes still enjoy their steaks and punch, and discuss politics,
polemics, and plays, though they wear short hair and masher collars
instead of full-bottomed wigs and ruffles.
“The ‘Old C.C.’ is a retiring, respectable, very conservative, and
hoary-headed aristocrat of the bygone school. Changes are made with
a very rebellious spirit, and the introduction of a patent American
machine for squeezing lemons savoured so much of modern progress
that its appearance nearly raised a riot amongst the patrons of the
sawdust-strewed bar. The ‘Cheese’ has no glaring front, nor does
it invite custom by acres of plate glass, glittering gasaliers, or
gorgeous frescoes. A modest representation of a cheese in dingy glass
does duty for a sign, so far as the street of Fleet is concerned.
The house has its school of customers, who look upon it as a species
of club, without the expense of entrance fee. How old the original
edifice was I am not prepared to say, but I notice by an ancient
sideboard that it was rebuilt in 1667.
“Inside, the hostelry has a curiously quaint, old-world appearance,
and this has been jealously preserved to good purpose by successive
proprietors. Rebuilt, decorated in the prevailing style of
public-house architecture, the ‘Old C.C.’ would have nothing to
recommend it over scores—nay, hundreds—of its fellows.
“The dining-room is fitted with rows of wooden benches and wooden
tables without the slightest pretence of show. But the cloths are
white and clean, and the cutlery bright, while the china service is
of that ancient and undemonstrative blue design which delighted our
forefathers, and is known as the willow pattern.... On the walls hang
three prominent objects, a barometer, a print of Dr. Johnson, and an
old oil painting by Wageman, representing the interior of the room,
with a gentleman trying his steak with his knife; a waiter holding up
a port wine cork in the well-known attitude ‘two with you’; and a cat
rubbing her oleaginous hide in anxious expectation against the leg
of the settle. This picture, like one in the bar, is an heirloom, or
rather a fixture, which cannot be sold—‘for ever and ever, amen!’—but
must pass from landlord to landlord.
“Upstairs there are extensive ranges of kitchens where burnt
sacrifices are being perpetually offered up in the shape of mutton
and beef; a dining-room and a smoke-room, dark-panelled and cosy,
where a man may forget the world and be lost to it during a much
coveted mid-day rest. Of other rooms on other floors no man knoweth,
save that in rumours it is alleged there have been private parties
over marrow-bones and puddings, a theory which is well borne out by
echoes of peals of laughter, and the popping of champagne corks.
Whatever the place may be above, however, it has no comparison
with the glories that lie below the paving. The privileged few who
are allowed to go into the wondrous cellars—redolent of sawdust,
cobweb-coated, and covered with dust—wander amidst avenues of
wine-bins with wonder and astonishment at the space occupied
underground as compared with the upper regions. The entrance to the
cellars is in the dingy office in the street of Fleet, which is
devoted to the wholesale department, and here a record is kept of the
rich old ports and generous clarets sleeping below, with the merry
devils of laughter bottled up in quarts and magnums in overcoats of
pink and foil. No man could remember them, be his experience as a
cellar-man what it may.
“The ‘Old C.C.’ is a fine record of the passing seasons. When
genial spring has brought forward vegetation, the waiter’s cheerful
intimation that ‘Asparagus is on, sir,’ recalls the fact forcibly to
your notice. When, later, ‘’Am and peas’ can be secured, the vision
of early summer is perfect, and is not even disturbed by boiled beans
and bacon. In the hot, sultry days, cool salads are appropriate, and
when these disappear there is a closing in of daylight and a general
warning that the year is past its prime. Then does the ‘Cheese’ draw
its blinds and light its gas, stoke up its fires, and announce its
great puddings. Yet further ahead, when raw November days come upon
us, the savoury smell of Irish stew—that fine winter lining for
the hungry—pervades the place and so the season goes round. Of all
the changes brought about by the rolling year, however, none is so
popular as the advent of
THE PUDDING,
though it means frost, and damp, and cold winds. _The_ pudding
(italics for ‘the,’ please,) has no rival in size or quality. Its
glories have been sung in every country. The pudding ranges from
fifty to sixty, seventy, and eighty pounds’ weight, and gossip has
it that in the dim past the rare dish was constructed to proportions
of a hundredweight. It is composed of a fine light crust in a huge
basin, and there are entombed therein beefsteaks, kidneys, oysters,
larks, mushrooms, and wondrous spices and gravies, the secret of
which is known only to the compounder. The boiling process takes about
SIXTEEN TO TWENTY HOURS,
and the smell on a windy day has been known to reach as far as the
Stock Exchange. The process of carving the pudding on Wednesdays and
Saturdays is a solemn ceremony. The late proprietor, Mr. Beaufoy A.
Moore, could be with difficulty restrained from rising from his bed,
when stricken down with illness, to drive to the ‘Cheese’ and serve
out the pudding. No one, he believed, could do it with such judicious
care and judgment as he did.
“Once, and once only was that pudding dropped. Alas, the sad day!
In the room sat an expectant hungry army of fifty men. The waiter,
bearing in triumph the pudding, appeared smiling on the scene. His
foot slipped, he tripped, the pudding wavered, and then bowled along
the floor, breaking up and gathering sawdust as it went. There was a
breathless silence. The proprietor dropped the upraised carver, stood
speechless for a moment, and then went out and wept bitterly. The
occasion was too much for him. One after another the awed and hungry
crowd put their hats on and departed, with sorrowful faces and watering
mouths.”
CHAPTER X
MR. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA AND OTHERS ON THE “CHEESE”
For he’s a jolly good fellow.—_Old Song._
The late Mr. George Augustus Sala, in an article entitled “Brain
Street,” which is to be found in “Old and New London” (Cassell,
Petter & Galpin), thus describes Wine Office Court and the Cheshire
Cheese:—
“The vast establishments of Messrs. Pewter and Antimony,
type-founders (Alderman Antimony was Lord Mayor in the year ’46);
of Messrs. Quoin, Case, and Chappell, printers to the Board of
Blue Cloth; of Messrs. Cutedge and Treecalf, bookbinders; with the
smaller industries of Scawper and Tinttool, wood-engravers; and
Treacle, Gluepot, and Lampblack, printing-roller makers, are packed
together in the upper part of the court as closely as herrings in
a cask. The ‘Cheese’ is at the Brain Street end. It is a little
lop-sided, wedged-up house, that always reminds you, structurally, of
a high-shouldered man with his hands in his pockets. It is full of
holes and corners and cupboards and sharp turnings; and in ascending
the stairs to the tiny smoking-room you must tread cautiously, if
you would not wish to be tripped up by plates and dishes momentarily
deposited there by furious waiters. The waiters at the ‘Cheese’
are always furious. Old customers abound in the comfortable old
tavern, in whose sanded-floored eating-rooms a new face is a rarity;
and the guests and the waiter are the oldest of familiars. Yet the
waiter seldom fails to bite your nose off as a preliminary measure
when you proceed to pay him. How should it be otherwise when on that
waiter’s soul there lies heavy a perpetual sense of injury caused
by the savoury odour of steaks and ‘muts’ to follow; of cheese
bubbling in tiny tins—the original ‘speciality’ of the house; of
floury potatoes and fragrant green peas; of cool salads, and cooler
tankards of bitter beer; of extra-creaming stout and ‘goes’ of Cork
and ‘rack,’ by which is meant gin; and, in the winter-time, of Irish
stew and rump-steak pudding, glorious and grateful to every sense?
To be compelled to run to and fro with these succulent viands from
noon to late at night, without being able to spare time to consume
them in comfort—where do waiters dine, and when, and how?—to be
continually taking other people’s money only for the purpose of
handing it to other people—are not these grievances sufficient to
cross-grain the temper of the mildest-mannered waiter? Somebody
is always in a passion at the ‘Cheese’: either a customer because
there is not fat enough on his ‘point’ steak, or because there is
too much bone in his mutton-chop; or else the waiter is wroth with
the cook; or the landlord with the waiter, or the barmaid with all.
Yes, there is a barmaid at the ‘Cheese,’ mewed up in a box not much
bigger than a bird-cage, surrounded by groves of lemons, ‘ones’ of
cheese, punch-bowls, and cruets of mushroom-catsup. I should not care
to dispute with her, lest she should quoit me over the head with a
punch-ladle, having a William-the-Third guinea soldered in the bowl.”
“Old and New London,” ch. 10, part iii., p. 123, contains this
paragraph:—
“Mr. William Sawyer[5] has also written a very admirable sketch of
the ‘Cheese’ and its old-fashioned conservative ways, which we cannot
resist quoting:—
“‘We are a close, conservative, inflexible body—we, the regular
frequenters of the “Cheshire,”’ says Mr. Sawyer. ‘No new-fangled
notions, new usages, new customs, or new customers for us. We have
our history, our traditions, and our observations, all sacred and
inviolable. Look around! There is nothing new, gaudy, flippant, or
effeminately luxurious here. A small room, with heavily timbered
windows, a low-planked ceiling. A huge projecting fireplace, with a
great copper boiler always on the simmer, the sight of which might
have roused even old John Willett, of the “Maypole,” to admiration.
High, stiff-backed, inflexible “settees,” hard and grainy in texture,
box off the guests half a dozen each to a table. Sawdust covers the
floor, giving forth that peculiar faint odour which the French avoid
by the use of the vine sawdust with its pleasant aroma. A chief
ornament in which we indulge is a picture over the mantel-piece,
a full-length of a now departed waiter, whom, in the long past,
we caused to be painted, by subscription of the whole room, to
commemorate his virtues, and our esteem. We sit bolt upright round
our tables, waiting, but not impatient. A time-honoured solemnity
is about to be observed, and we, the old stagers, is it for us to
precipitate it? There are men in the room who have dined here every
day for a quarter of a century—aye, the whisper goes round that one
man did it on his wedding day! In all that time the more staid and
well-regulated among us have observed a steady regularity of feeding.
Five days in the week we have “Rotherham steak”—that mystery of
mysteries—or our “chop and chop to follow,” with the indispensable
wedge of Cheshire—unless it is preferred stewed or toasted—and
on Saturday decorous variety is afforded in a plate of the
world-renowned “Cheshire” pudding. It is of this latter luxury that
we are now assembled to partake, and that with all fitting ceremony
and observance.’”
FOOTNOTES:
[5] The late Mr. Sawyer was for many years the brilliant editor of
_Funny Folks_. His articles signed “Rupert,” in the _Budget_ have
often been reprinted.
CHAPTER XI.
THE PRESS AND THE “CHEESE”
Crown high the goblets with a cheerful draught;
Enjoy the present hour; adjourn the future thought.
DRYDEN’S _Virgil_.
Among the earlier notices of the “Cheese” which have appeared in
newspapers is the following, taken from _Common Sense, or, the
Englishman’s Journal_,[6] of Saturday, April 23, 1737:—
“On Sunday, April 17, one Harper, who formerly lived with Mr.
Holyoake at the sign of the ‘Old Cheshire Cheese,’ in Wine Office
Court, Fleet Street, for eight years, found Means to conceal himself
in the House, and early on Monday Morning got into the Room where
the Daughter lay, and where Mr. Holyoake (as he well knew) kept his
Money; and accordingly he took away a small Box wherein was £200
and Notes to the Value of £600 more. The Child, hearing a Noise,
happily awaked, and cry’d out, ‘Mammy, Mammy, a Man has carried away
the Box;’ which alarm’d her Father and Mother, who lay near, and
immediately they got up; which oblig’d the Fellow to hide himself in
the Chimney, where he was discover’d, with the Box carefully ty’d up
in a Handkerchief, and being secur’d, was afterwards carried before
the Lord Mayor, who committed him to Newgate.”
In the _Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser_ of Monday, August 9,
1784, we read an account of an attempted murder at the “Cheese.”
It appears that a porter in the Temple named John Gromont induced
a woman who had cohabited with, and then deserted him, to accept a
drink at a public-house in Wine Office Court, “where, starting up in
a fit of frenzy, he cut the woman’s throat.”
“Before the transaction he had made several attempts to destroy
himself at Mr. Bosher’s, the Rainbow, opposite the end of Chancery
Lane, in Fleet Street, and other public-houses in the neighbourhood.”
Coming to a more recent period, we find the press notices of the
“Cheese” increase in frequency. _Punch_, for April 14, 1864,
describes a famous evening at the “Cheese.” Mr. John Cordy
Jeaffreson, no mean authority, in his “A Book about the Table,”
mentions the “Cheese” as one of the three houses in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Inns of Court worthy of comparison with those
near St. Paul’s, and so the references go on ever spreading till they
cross the Atlantic and even return from the Antipodes.
Considerations of space will only permit a few further quotations
from the vast mass of journalistic literature dealing with the
subject.
The _Kent Examiner and Ashford Chronicle_ of June 20, 1885,
referring to the “Cheese,” says:—“It is very generally believed that
Shakespeare was one of its numerous frequenters, but undoubtedly
one famous man was, namely—François Marie Arouet, otherwise
Voltaire—while often enough were present Bolingbroke, Pope, and
Congreve, and it is well known that Rare Ben Jonson was one of its
most jolly frequenters. Coming down to more modern times, among the
many customers of the house have been Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon,
Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, Tom Hood, and last, but not least,
Thackeray and Dickens.”
In “A Walk up Fleet Street,” which appeared in the _Sunday Times_,
the following passage occurs:—“The Cheshire Cheese is not imposing
in appearance, nor is it even to be seen from the street. Two
little courts lead to its somewhat dingy portals; portals much
frequented by the London correspondents of provincial journals and
gallery reporters. More or less throughout every day of the week
barristers and journalists—even members of Parliament are not always
missing—come to this house for their dinner, and sit contentedly
round the sides of two good old-fashioned rooms. But it is on
Saturday that the Cheshire Cheese is seen at its best. Then it is
that ‘rump-steak pudding’ makes its appearance; announced all the
week, anxiously expected, come at last!”
The _Reporter_, of October 28, 1874, says of the “Cheese”:—
“We have occasionally used this old-fashioned house for over a
quarter of a century, and can conscientiously assert that for its
chops and steaks, cold beef and salad, and marvellous rump-steak
pudding, and for the alacrity with which these edibles are supplied
the establishment is unmatchable in the metropolis. Besides, the malt
liquors are of the strongest and the best brew, and the whiskies are
mellow and old; whilst the ancient punch, which is served exactly as
compounded in the days of Dr. Johnson, is simply nectar worthy of
elevating even the gods.”
Under the heading “Some Gossip about Famous Taverns,” a writer in the
_Licensed Victuallers’ Gazette_ says:—
“What man who has ever been called into Fleet Street, either on
business or pleasure, does not know the sawdusted floor and old-time
appointments of the Cheshire Cheese? Who would dare to confess
ignorance of the Brobdingnagian chops, the world-famous point steaks,
the stewed cheese, which constitute its main attractions all the
year round? Who has not here devoted himself during the hot summer
months, in the cool dining-room which seems ever impervious to the
sun’s rays, to the manufacture of an elaborate salad to enjoy with
his cold beef? And who, again, has never yet been so fortunate as to
witness that appetising procession to be seen every Saturday during
the winter months, when Mr. Moore, the master of the house, in dress
coat clad, and armed with a mighty carver, precedes into the room
that mighty steak and oyster pudding, the secret of whose manufacture
has never been allowed to penetrate beyond the mazes of Wine Office
Court.”
And again the same writer observes:—“The secret of the success of the
Cheshire Cheese is that everything sold within its doors is good. For
this we prefer its sanded floors to marble halls, for this we listen
curiously to the weird cry of the waiter up the crooked staircase
of ‘Rudderhumbake,’ which, by old experience, we know heralds
the approach of a choice cut from the mighty rump of a succulent
shorthorn or an Aberdeen steer.”
The _Philadelphia Times_ of October, 1884, thus refers to the
“Cheese”:—
“A famous man who haunted the ‘Cheese’ was Voltaire, side by side
with Bolingbroke, Pope, and Congreve, and there is to-day an old play
in manuscript in Scotland, written in Rare Ben Jonson’s day, in which
these lines occur:—
“Heaven bless ‘The Cheese’ and all its goodly fare—
I wish to Jove I could go daily there.
Then fill a bumper up, my good friend, please—
May fortune ever bless the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’”
A reviewer in the _City Press_ (October 30, 1875) says:—“Ben Jonson
loved the ‘Cheese’; and at one time you had only to walk into a Fleet
Street coffee-house to become familiar with all the choice spirits of
the age. Dean Swift, Addison, and Steele affected the tavern; so did
Sheridan, and so did Lord Eldon, and so, indeed, did all men of mark
down to our own time.”
An article headed:—
“YE RUMPE STEAKE PUDDINGE”
in the _Fort Worth (Texas) Daily Gazette_ opens as follows:—
“While I am on the subject of ‘food’ I must be permitted to mention
that I enjoyed the privilege of partaking of ‘ye rumpe steake
puddinge’ a few days since at no less celebrated board than ‘The
Cheese,’ Wine Office Court, Fleet Street. ‘The Cheese,’ or, to
give it its full title, ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese,’ is now the most
historical tavern of all the old taverns in London. Nearly all the
other taverns have had to make way for the more modern restaurant or
public-house. Little is known, it seems, of the very early history
of the place. A _brochure_ entitled ‘Round London,’ published in
1725, describes the house as ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese tavern, near
ye Flete Prison, an eating house for goodly fare.’ And now in 1883,
or very near the beginning of the year 1884, I can bear cheerful
witness to the fact that it still deserves to be classed with the
very few public places in London where one can secure ‘goodly fare.’
The rump-steak pudding, which is the special feature of the place,
is certainly toothsome, and is not apt to be speedily forgotten by
the epicure. It has been served promptly at one o’clock p.m. every
Saturday ‘since when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary,’
and the particular one that I assisted to dissect was enjoyed by
quite a hundred persons. Though nominally a ‘steak pudding,’ there
are very many other ingredients in the dish than rump steak. It is
said that for more than 200 years the old tavern has changed hands
but twice, and that it is now in the hands of the third family that
has helped to keep up its ancient reputation. It is also said that
the recipe by which the pudding is builded is a secret that belongs
to the place, and is as sacred an heirloom as the old oil painting
of Henry Todd, who, according to the inscription on the portrait,
commenced waiter at the ‘Old Cheshire Cheese’ February 17, 1812.
This picture was, according to the inscription again, ‘painted by
Wageman, July, 1827, subscribed for by the gentlemen frequenting the
coffee-room, and presented to Mr. Dolamore (the landlord) in trust,
to be handed down as a heirloom to all future landlords of the Old
Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.’”
“Henry Todd, ‘Old’ Harry as he was familiarly called by the visitors,
had made a considerable sum of money while in his situation,” writes
the compiler of the great work on which the British Museum so prides
itself, “Signs of Taverns,” “but I am informed that a spendthrift son
reduced his circumstances much. To a stranger he appears a morose,
cynical kind of man, apparently not by any means adapted for the
waitership of a tavern, although he is always attentive to the wants
of his customers. Perhaps he was a different being when younger, and
to those who were old customers of the house and who knew him well,
he used more freedom probably.
“The portrait, I am informed, is the first attempt in oil by
that exceedingly talented artist Wageman, and was painted at the
instigation of a visitor to the house, a Mr. Thomas Morell, a
well-known pen and quill dealer who resided in the Broadway, Ludgate
Hill (a brother of the Morell also pen and ink dealer in Fleet
Street), and who was well known to the public for his eccentricity by
the name of Peculiar Tom Morell, from the singularity of his puffs
and advertisements.”
“Old Harry” retired soon after the portrait-painting from age and
infirmity, but was alive at Christmas, 1838.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Printed and sold by J. Purser in White Fryars, and G. Hawkins at
Milton’s Head, between the Two Temple Gates, Fleet St. MDCCXXXVII.
CHAPTER XII
WHAT THE WORLD SAYS OF THE “CHEESE”
That all-softening, overpowering knell,
The tocsin of the soul—the dinner-bell.—BYRON.
The “Diner Out,” in the _Evening Standard_ of January 10, 1867,
writes:—
“In each of the apartments on the ground floor is a full-length
portrait, in oil, of a departed waiter—subscribed for upon his
retirement by the gentlemen ‘using’ the house. The one which most
strikes my memory at the moment is the representation of a portly,
respectable—scrupulously respectable—middle-aged man, clad in a
costume worn early in the century—that is to say, the coat is of
blue, the buttons are gilt, the cravat is a cheerful roll surmounting
a frilled shirt, and the legs know no trousers but the breeches and
stockings of departed days, when well-made men ‘stood upon their
legs’ in something more than the merely literal sense of the term.
The background of the picture is a faithful representation of a
section of the room in which it is hung. The box before which the
waiter is standing, opening a bottle of port (I say port, because
a man would never open a bottle of sherry with the same grave, but
complacent, air of responsibility), is a speaking likeness, and so is
evidently the representation of the guest for whom the order is being
executed—a person even more respectable than the waiter, if possible,
with a very high coat collar, his hair all brushed up to the top of
his head, and a cute knowledge of wine depicted in every lineament
of his countenance. You may be sure that no inferior quality is being
opened for him. Indeed, the waiter is as incapable of deceiving as
the guest of being deceived. The wine is evidently of that degree
of excellence which impels people to talk about it while they drink
it—a wine which is its own aim and end—not a mere stimulating drink,
setting men on to be enthusiastic upon general subjects. The diner is
plainly the model diner of the Cheshire Cheese, as the waiter is the
model waiter.
“The Cheshire Cheese is famous for steak-pudding, agreeably tempered
by kidneys, larks, and oysters. This dish, which is often ordered
for private parties, and even for private houses, is frequently
made the occasion of social gatherings of an extensive character—so
much so, indeed, that Madame Roland might have extended her
celebrated apostrophe to Liberty by saying—‘O Steak Pudding, how
much conviviality is committed in thy name!’ Whatever you get at the
‘Cheshire’ is sure to be good and capitally cooked.”
From an article entitled “At the Cheshire Cheese,” which appeared
in the _Commercial Travellers’ Review_, the following is taken:—“At
one o’clock—the time at which the ‘Cheese’ is most frequented—we
accompanied our friends up Fleet Street, and then by devious ways and
turnings, more than enough to upset our geography, until we finally
arrived at that part of Wine Office Court where the ‘Cheshire’
stands. We were ushered into what seemed most like the after cabin
of a steamer, with comfortably arranged and well appointed miniature
tables on either side, attended by trim obliging waiters, and
everything else equally inviting, and fully justifying our friend’s
previous good report. ‘Roast Lamb,’ ‘Roast Beef,’ ‘Boiled Beef,’
‘Beefsteak Pie,’ and——‘Thanks—plates for four of the first with
the various &c., and four tankards of stout.’ ‘Yes, sir’—and away
vanishes our excellent friend, the waiter, to the unknown regions
where cook holds sway and reigns supreme, only to return in less time
than it takes to record the fact, with all that was calculated to
make us content and comfortable.... We enjoyed one of the pleasantest
afternoons it has been our good fortune to participate in for many
a day. Pleasant dinner—pleasant company over a well-brewed bowl
of palatably flavoured sipping punch, that engendered pleasant
reflections on past assemblies and present associations—in the heart
of dear old London—surely no alloy was possible in our midst, and
nothing more was needed save the presence of some other far away
friends to overflow the cup of pleasure at the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’”
In the _World_ of December 24, 1884, there is an article on the “The
Old Chop Houses,” in which the writer, drawing on the recollections
of thirty years, says: “There was only one other house that excelled
the old Cheshire Cheese for a steak, and that was the Blue Posts in
Cork Street.... But as regards mutton, chops, the Cheshire Cheese
was unrivalled in London, or anywhere short of Barnsley, where a
mutton chop is about a third part of a loin, not reckoning the chump
end, and where this doubled or trebled chop is so taperly trimmed
and freed from its superfluous fat, that when cooked, by a process
which I take to be rather roasting than grilling, and served with
the fillet under, like a sirloin of beef, it might, by virtue of its
shapely plumpness, be taken for a roast partridge or grouse.”
Under the head of “Public Refreshment,” in Knight’s “London,” vol.
iv., p. 314, appears this passage:—
“There is a dingy house in a court in Fleet Street where the chops
and steaks are unrivalled. Who that has tasted there that impossible
thing of private cookery, a _hot_ mutton chop—a second brought
when the first is despatched—has not pleasant recollections of the
never-ending call to the cook of ‘two muttons to follow’?”
In Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities” (book ii., chap. 4),
after the trial at the Old Bailey, the text proceeds:
“‘I begin to think I _am_ faint.’
“‘Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.’
“Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill
to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern.[7] Here
they were shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon
recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine; while
Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate
bottle of port before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon
him.”
“Jeems Pipes, of Pipesville,” in a letter dated from Regent Street,
London, June 26, 1879, to the San Francisco _Daily Evening Post_,
thus refers to the Cheshire Cheese:—
“The Old Cheshire Cheese is, perhaps, at the present writing, one of
the most popular of the old hostelries, and when you consider that
for over two hundred years it has been in existence, and has been
patronised by celebrities of every degree, rank, and station, and
even royalty—for Charles II. ate a chop here with Nell Gwynne—and the
genial landlord will actually show you the seats used by Dr. Samuel
Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, even to the marks on the wainscotted
wall made by their greased wigs; the corner where the author of
‘Pendennis’ and ‘The Newcomes’ sat, or where Charles Dickens, Mark
Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Douglas Jerrold, John Leech, and a host of
others enjoyed their ’arf-and-’arf and toasted cheese. The tavern is
situated up a little narrow passage called
‘WINE OFFICE COURT.’
I don’t think it can be more than three feet wide. On the right hand
side of it is the entrance. Over the door is a glass lamp painted
red, with the words ‘Old Cheshire Cheese’ on it. But, oh! what chops,
what steaks, what cold lamb and salad, what beefsteak pudding you
do get here! It is indeed a revelation! And should you be permitted
to ascend to the upper part of the building you will find the walls
adorned with paintings, articles of vertu, and other evidences of
comfort and ease, where the proprietor dispenses his hospitality in
the most genial manner; and, when I inform you that Mr. Moore is
a vestryman and churchwarden of St. Bride’s, will shortly become
Councilman, and probably Alderman and Lord Mayor, you will see that
it is no common thing to be the landlord of the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’”
Mr. Moore did not live to attain the dignity of Lord Mayor which
“Jeems Pipes” presaged. He died in 1886, loved and respected in his
life, and deeply lamented at his death by the troops of friends who
knew him both in his private and business life.
The following are extracted from a London letter in the _New York
World_ of September 14, 1884, and are interesting:—
“London abounds in historic taverns, but of them all none are
more historic and interesting than the ‘Cheese.’ To eat a steak
here is not to masticate fried cork, while the tankards of bitter
ale, foaming and delicious, with which you wash down the steak
are worth a long journey to enjoy. The folk-lore of this famous
haunt is interesting, not alone to tavern-loving, but to general
posterity, although as to a complete and detailed account of its
very early history there is much of obscurity. While there are no
positive proofs, there are authentic legends that Shakespeare spent
many an idle hour at this place, because it was on his way to the
Blackfriars’ Theatre, in Playhouse Yard, Ludgate Hill, of which he
was so long a time absolute manager. In his time the play began at 1
p.m. and ended at 5 p.m., at which hour the wits of the town mustered
forces in Fleet Street haunts.
“In modern times, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and
now to-day that prince of diners and _bons vivants_, George Augustus
Sala, have frequented the Cheshire Cheese and waxed eloquent over
its comforts and subtle charms. Both Dickens and Thackeray knew how
to appreciate a good inn, and, after singing the praises of the bill
of fare, pay deserved compliments to the waiters. Men who serve
the frequenters of the Cheshire grow gray in the service, and each
boasts his own particular customers. Of the younger waiters all are
most civil, and the young women at the bar are not only polite, but
lady-like in manners and appearance.
“It is surprising how soon one gets used to the innovation of the
feminine bar-tender, and it is not to be questioned that it is a good
custom, productive of greater refinement among the male frequenters,
and, where the young women conduct themselves modestly, in no wise
degrading to their minds or morals.
[Illustration: FRONTISPIECE OF BILL OF FARE.
_By Cruickshank_]
“It matters little what hour you select to visit ‘Ye Olde Cheshire
Cheese,’ you will have plenty to amuse and instruct you, and always
find the pretty barmaids in the bar room attentive and clever.
The cutting of the rump-steak and kidney pie is a spearing process
performed by the proprietor, and often as many as three, even four
waiters are needed to lift the huge smoking hot pie to the centre
table, while often from thirty to sixty hungry men wait at the
various tables for a triangle of this toothsome viand. Take my word
for it, you will have a great desire for a second help, and even
though, like myself, you are a petticoat wearer, no one will annoy
you or even look surprised at your devoting an evening among the odd
masculine characters nightly frequenting ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.’”
In an article written by Mr. W. Outram Tristram, and illustrated
by Mr. Herbert Railton, the _English Illustrated Magazine_ of
December, 1889, gives, under the title of “A Storied Tavern,” a most
interesting account of this old house.
“Here,” says the writer, “is no home for kickshaws and cigarettes.
From this kitchen comes no sample of fashionable culinary art, that
‘art with poisonous honey stolen from France.’ Nothing of that kind
obtains at the Cheshire Cheese. Here the narrowed kingdom lies
of point steaks turned to a second and served hissing on plates
supernaturally hot, of chops gargantuan in size and inimitable in
tenderness and flavour, of cheese bubbling sympathetically in tiny
tins, of floury potatoes properly cooked, of tankards of bitter beer,
of extra creaming stout, of a rump-steak and oyster pudding served
on Saturdays only,[8] and so much the specialty of the house, that I
must deal with it hereafter. All smacks here of that England of solid
comfort and solid plenty.
“There is a collection of useful
IMPLEMENTS OF INEBRIETY
in the bar of the Cheshire Cheese, which brings the place’s past more
vividly, perhaps, before one than any view of its sanded floors,
low ceilings, or quaint staircase, disappearing suddenly from the
entrance passage in formal but inviting bend.
“Voltaire was certainly here; Bolingbroke, in this place cracked many
a bottle of Burgundy; and Congreve’s wit flashed wine-inspired, while
Pope, sickly and intolerant of tobacco-smoke, suffered under these
low roofs I doubt not many a headache. But it is of its distinguished
visitors of later days that the Cheshire Cheese as it now stands
reminds one most fully. Johnson, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Chatterton
were undoubted frequenters. Many a time the great Samuel, turning
heavily in his accustomed seat, and beset by some pert sailing
pinnace, brought, like a galleon manœuvring, his ponderous artillery
to bear. Goldsmith lived at No. 6 Wine Office Court, where he wrote
or partly wrote the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ his flagging inspiration
possibly gaining assistance from the tavern’s famed Madeira.
“His (Dr. Johnson’s) frequent, nay, nightly visits here are matters
of history, and have been vouched for on
AUTHORITY BEYOND DISPUTE.
The time is not so far distant when old frequenters to the house
were to be found who had drunk and eaten with men whom Johnson had
conversationally annihilated, and who recalled the circumstance with
an extreme clearness of recollection. A recollection this which
joined the record of two generations of the tavern’s great visitors.
And the second generation offered names not unworthy to compare with
the first, such notabilities as these figuring in the list: Dickens,
Thackeray, Douglas Jerrold, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor,
John Forster, Sir Alexander Cockburn, Professor Aytoun, Tom Hood,
Andrew Halliday, and Charles Mathews.”
Miss Sarah Morton, a special correspondent of the _Illustrated
Buffalo Express_ (N.Y.), gives in her paper, February 15, 1891, an
amusing report of her visit to the “Cheese.” “It was,” she says,
“with slow and lingering steps that I emerged from a visit to the
ghastly yet fascinating Tower of London, by the way of old St. Paul’s
Churchyard into Fleet Street, towards the ‘Cheshire Cheese.’ ’Twas
the night of the beefsteak pudding, a delicacy served only twice a
week, and in precisely the same way that it has been served in this
very place for 200 years.
* * * * *
“One feels just like sidling into an old-fashioned church pew, for
the three tables on the left, each accommodating six persons, are
provided with high-backed benches black with age.
“‘Will you wait for the pudding?’ asks the Imposing Personage.
“‘What time will it come on?’ I diffidently query.
“‘Six o’clock to the minute,’ was the answer.
“‘I will wait,’ I replied, and again I was left alone to continue my
observations.
“Over on the broad window seat is something under glass in a gilt
frame. It is a most glowing description of the glories of ‘Ye Olde
Cheshire Cheese,’ written by Jeems Pipes of Pipesville.
“Every seat is occupied.
“’Tis just six.
“The door swings slowly open. A huge, round white ball is borne
aloft, high above the head of The Personage, who enters with slow
and stately tread, followed in single file by six serious-faced
attendants. The salver is tenderly lowered, and rests upon the
table. Every eye is fixed upon it. The room is pervaded with perfect
hush.
“The Personage solemnly receives a big spoon and knife from his first
gentleman in waiting. The fateful moment has arrived. The pastry is
broken. The gravy gently oozes over it.
“The Personage gravely approaches me and apologises for not serving
me first, but ‘really the middle portion will be safer for you,’ he
explained.
“The plates of the others were heaped upon. My time has come. There
is my big dinner plate piled high with—what on earth! Birds! yes,
tiny bits of birds, skylarks, kidneys, strips of beef, just smothered
in pastry like sea-foam, and dark brown gravy, steaming with
fragrance, as seasoning.
“‘Half-and-half’—British bitter and stout in old-time pewter mugs was
brought; out of deference to my sex, I suppose, a glass tumbler was
placed before me, but I scorned to use it. Didn’t Thackeray say it
was worth a year’s absence in far-away countries to realise the joy
that filled one’s soul upon returning to old England and quaffing her
bitter from a pewter mug?
“Then came stewed cheese, on the thin shaving of crisp, golden toast
in hot silver saucers—so hot that the cheese was of the substance
of thick cream, the flavour of purple pansies and red raspberries
commingled.
“There were only 400 skylarks put into the pudding made for the
Prince of Wales at the banquet of the Forth Bridge opening in
Edinburgh. How many thousands of the ‘blithe spirits’ have been put
into the Cheshire Cheese pudding for 200 years?
“Shades of Shelley and Keats!”
In _Society_ a series of articles was devoted to the description
of famous restaurants and of the fare to be enjoyed within their
walls. The writer, long an intimate of the “Cheese,” devotes not the
least piquant of his descriptions to that immortal house. He writes:
“Christopher North chopped here, and has recorded his high opinion
of its kitchen and its cellar. I fancy, however, that it was about
the early _Punch_ period that its real connection with journalism
was ratified and the union consummated. Shirley Brooks has written
pleasantly about it, Albert Smith has chaffed it, Edmund Yates has
embalmed it in his ‘Reminiscences,’ and I have always had an idea
that the Fleet Street chop-house in which poor Sydney Carton is found
sitting in a semi-drunken condition is the Cheshire Cheese. Dickens,
at all events, knew this place well, nor was it likely to escape a
use of this sort. Mr. George Augustus Sala was a constant customer.”
The _Freemason’s Chronicle_ of June 5, 1886, in reviewing an earlier
edition of this little book, says:—“The praises of Ye Olde Cheshire
Cheese, one of the most antiquated, and yet the most favourite,
resorts in the city of London, have been sung by historians and
poets through the whole of the last century, and quaint stories have
been handed down to us of scenes and incidents that have from time
to time been enacted within the age-begrimed walls of this historic
‘chop-house.’ In these days of progress, when the links connecting
us with the bygone history of Old London are being snapped one by
one, and once familiar landmarks are being improved off the face
of the City by modern innovations, it is refreshing to be able to
sit down and con over the sayings and doings of eminent men who
have left ‘footprints on the sands of Time,’ and whose names are
immortalised in literature and song. This little volume brings us
_tête-à-tête_ with such sturdy intellects as those of Dr. Johnson,
Boswell, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Burke, and a host of other ‘men of the
time,’ who in their periods of leisure sought ease and refreshment at
the ‘Cheese,’ and set the tables often in a roar with their pungent
criticisms and flights of mirth and satire.
“You can have pointed out to you the seats used by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, even to the marks on the wainscoted
walls made by their greased wigs; the corner where the author of
‘Pendennis’ and the ‘Newcomes’ sat; or where Charles Dickens, Mark
Lemon, Shirley Brooks, Douglas Jerrold, John Leech, and a host
of others enjoyed their ’arf-and-’arf and toasted cheese. The
‘Cheese’ has still its _habitués_ and on Saturday there is the
famous rump-steak pudding, which draws a large attendance, for it is
considered that you may search the wide world round without matching
that succulent delicacy. Although we miss the genial form and face
of the late Moore, whose prerogative it was to preside over this
_chef-d’œuvre_ of the culinary art, yet his place is filled by a
worthy scion of the race, and the company, if not so garrulous or
so boisterous as of yore, is still permeated by a sense of deep and
affectionate loyalty to the ‘old shop.’”
The _Globe_ of September 23, 1887, says: “London itself bristles with
associations of the great dead. The toil and moil of Fleet Street
has tired you. Then turn up Wine Office Court and enter the Cheshire
Cheese, where you may sit in the same seat, perchance drink out of
the same glass, and if, like poor Oliver, you still ask for more, it
is possible to rest your head on the identical spot of grease that
Johnson’s wig provoked on the bare wall.”
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Indubitably the Cheshire Cheese.
[8] An error on the part of the writer. It is served on Mondays and
Wednesdays as well.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE “CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN LITERATURE
“THE FIELD OF ART” (“Scribner”), Feb. 1897:
“There is no date recorded of the building of the ‘Cheese,’ but
for over two hundred years it has been in existence, and has been
patronised by celebrities of every degree. Charles II. ate a chop
there with Nell Gwynne. A brass tablet in one corner informs you that
this was the favourite seat of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the panelling
immediately below is quite polished by the heads of generations of
the faithful who have held it an honour to occupy the seat....
“Along Fleet Street nineteenth century humanity rushes in throngs,
feverishly intent on the main chance. But now and again units from
the mass fall out and disappear into a little doorway, so unobtrusive
in its character as to be easily passed by strangers in search of
it. A small passageway, a bit of court, and one enters the Old
Cheshire Cheese, treading in the footsteps of generations of wits
and philosophers. A wit the visitor may not be, but he is certain to
be the other in one way or another, and his purpose in coming here
can have little in common with the hurly-burly he has but just left
out there in Fleet Street. The tide of affairs has left him stranded
on an oasis of peculiar charm—a low-ceilinged room, brown as an old
meerschaum, heavily raftered, and carrying to the sensitive nostril
the scent of ages, the indescribable aroma inseparable from these
haunts of geniality: the merry glow of the fire in the old grate,
flirting tiny flames upwards that caress the steaming, singing kettle
hanging just above. The old copper scuttle glints with the fitful
gleams upon its burnished pudgy sides; the floor spread abundantly
with sawdust softens the sounds of footfalls. The white tablecloths
make the note of tidiness relieving the prevailing low tone of the
room.... The silk hats and trousers of modern London almost seem out
of harmony with the cosy quaintness of their environment; but smalls
and buckles, and cocked hats pass away, and architecture survives the
fashions and persons of its creators.
“The waiter before one looks very different from the picture on the
wall of his one-time predecessor, but, what is important, the spirit
remains the same. In an atmosphere of good fellowship the frequenters
of to-day converse over their chop and pint, or perhaps before the
cheery fire nurse their knees in reflective mood, drawn together by
the same instincts that animated this delightful company of old.
“But who among these, if appealed to, could define the æsthetic
charm of the place? Is it the rich colouring of yellow, and old
gold, and silver, and brown, the traditions mellow as old wine that
sweeten the atmosphere, the satisfaction of the senses, the pure
contentment of soul, the pause by the way for the furbishing of one’s
mental apparel? It is all these and more that make the Old Cheshire
Cheese a delight, and, when one has gone, leaves of its high-backed
benches and polished tables, its general aspect of warm and cheery
hospitality, a glowing memory.”
* * * * *
“CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL,” Saturday, June 2, 1883, after speaking of
an imaginary journey from Temple Bar eastward, thus describes the
“Cheese”:
“There is another old City tavern where Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith
often sat together over a snug dinner, a tavern in Wine Office
Court called the Old Cheshire Cheese. Passing along Fleet Street
and glancing up this court, those magic words seem to take up all
the space in the distance as completely as though they were being
glanced at through a telescope, and if you follow the instincts of
your nature you will dive down the telescope towards the attractive
lamp above the door, and enter the tavern. The customary pint of
stout in an old pewter will be placed before you, if your taste
lies that way; and when you have finished your chop, or steak, or
pudding as the case may be, there will follow that speciality for
which the Cheshire Cheese is principally noted, a dish of bubbling
and blistering cheese, which comes up scorching in an apparatus
resembling a tin of Everton toffee in size and shape.
“It was the same when frequented by Johnson and Goldsmith, and their
favourite seats in the north-east corner of the window are still
pointed out. Nothing is changed—except the waiters, in course of
nature—in this conservative and cosy tavern. If Goldsmith did not
actually write parts of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ in that corner, he
must have thought out more chapters than one while seated there. He
lived in Wine Office Court, and here it is supposed the novel begun
at Canonbury Tower was finished.”
* * * * *
“PICTURESQUE LONDON” (Percy Fitzgerald):
“Fleet Street, interesting in so many ways, is remarkable for the
curious little courts and passages into which you make entry under
small archways. These are Johnson’s Court, Bolt Court, Racquet Court,
and the like. But in Fleet Street there is one that is specially
interesting. We can fancy the Doctor tramping up to his favourite
tavern, the Cheshire Cheese.
“Passing into the dark alley known as Wine Office Court, we come to
a narrow flagged passage, the house or wall on the other side quite
close and excluding the light. The ‘Cheese’ looks indeed a sort of
dark den, an inferior public-house, its grimed windows like those of
a shop, which we can look at from the passage. On entering, there
is the little bar facing us, and always the essence of snugness and
cosiness; to the right a small room, to the left a bigger one. This
is the favourite tavern, with its dingy walls and sawdusted floor,
a few benches put against the wall, and two or three plain tables
of the rudest kind. The grill is heard hissing in some back region
where the chop or small steak is being prepared; and it may be said
_en passant_ that the flavour and treatment of the chop and steak
are quite different from those ‘done’ on the more pretentious grills
which have lately sprung up. On the wall is the testimonial portrait
of a rather bloated waiter—Todd, I think, by name—quite suggestive
of the late Mr. Liston. He is holding up his corkscrew of office to
an expectant guest, either in a warning or exultant way, as if he had
extracted the cork in a masterly style. Underneath is an inscription
that it was painted in 1812, to be hung up as an heirloom and handed
down, having been executed under the reign of Dolamore, who then
owned the place. Strange to say, the waiter of the Cheshire Cheese
has been sung, like his brother at the Cock, but not by such a bard.
There is a certain irreverence, but the parody is a good one:
“Waiter at the Cheshire Cheese,
Uncertain, gruff, and hard to please,
When ‘tuppence’ smooths thy angry brow,
A ministering angel thou!
“It has its _habitués_, and on Saturday there is a famous rump-steak
pudding which draws a larger attendance, for it is considered that
you may search the wide world round without matching that succulent
delicacy. These great savoury meat puddings do not kindle the ardour
of many persons, being rather strong for the stomachs of babes.
“Well, then, hither it was that Dr. Johnson used to repair. True,
neither Boswell nor Hawkins, nor after them Mr. Croker, takes note
of the circumstances, but there were many things that escaped Mr.
Croker, diligent as he was. There is, however, excellent evidence
of the fact. A worthy solicitor named Jay—who is garrulous, but not
unentertaining in a book of anecdotes which he has written—frequented
the Cheshire Cheese for fifty years during which long tavern life
he says, ‘I have been interested in seeing young men when I first
went there who afterwards married; then in seeing their sons dining
there, and often their grandsons, and much gratified by observing
that most of them succeeded well in life. This applies particularly
to the barristers with whom I have so often dined when students, when
barristers, and some who were afterwards judges.’”
Mr. Fitzgerald then goes on to quote from Jay the extract given in an
earlier chapter, and concludes by saying, “Be that as it may, it is
an interesting locality and a pleasing sign—the Old Cheshire Cheese,
Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, which will afford the present
generation, it is hoped, for some time to come an opportunity of
witnessing the kind of tavern in which our forefathers delighted to
assemble for refreshment.”
* * * * *
G. A. S. (“Twice Round the Clock: Six P.M.”) (talking of the ancient
Roman repasts): “Better I take it, a mutton chop at the Cheshire
Cheese than those nasty ancient Roman repasts.”
* * * * *
THE “GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE,” April, 1895 (“A Six Days’ Tour in London
with a Pretty Cousin”):—
“We must take a glance at a tavern of the good old pattern close
by, which has a regular pedigree and has had books written about
it—the Cheshire Cheese to wit. We go up Wine Office Court and there
it stands with its blinking windows and somewhat shaky walls.... Not
so, Mr. Sylvanus Urban, the windows of the good old house may blink,
but there is nothing shaky about the walls, they at all events are
founded on a rock solid as the credit of the house. No wonder too,
for it carries its two hundred years or so bravely enough, and like
its extinct neighbour, the Cock, witnessed the Plague and Fire. It
is needless to say that the older Cheshire Cheese perished in the
Fire of London, which stopped about a hundred yards west of Wine
Office Court, just on the City side of St. Dunstan’s Church. Here the
floor is sanded—or rather sawdusted; here are boxes and rude tables;
the chop is done on a gridiron before you, and there is a beefsteak
pudding which delights epicures.”
* * * * *
WALTER THORNBURY (“Old and New London”):
“Goldsmith appears to have resided at No. 6 Wine Office Court from
1760 to 1762. They still point out Johnson and Goldsmith’s favourite
seats in the north-east corner of the window of that cosy though
utterly unpretentious tavern, the Cheshire Cheese in this court.
“It was while living in Wine Office Court that Goldsmith is
supposed to have partly written that delightful novel, the ‘Vicar
of Wakefield,’ which he had begun at Canonbury Tower. We like to
think that seated in the ‘Cheese’ he perhaps espied and listened
to the worthy but credulous vicar and his gosling son attending to
the profound theories of the learned and philosophic but shifty
Mr. Jenkinson. We think now, by the windows, with a cross light
upon his coarse Irish features and his round prominent brow, we
see the watchful poet sit eyeing his prey, secretly enjoying the
grandiloquence of the swindler and the admiration of the honest
country parson.”
* * * * *
MR. LEWIS HOUGH, in “Once a Week,” Oct. 26, 1867:
“The historical haunts of Fleet Street have a peculiar charm for
those who are open to the influences of association. The bench
may be hard, but Dr. Johnson has sat upon it; the oak panelling
is not luxurious to lean back against, but the periwigs of Steele
and Addison have pressed it; the little room may be dingy, but
the peach-coloured garments of Goldsmith once lent it a temporary
brilliancy.
“The Cock, immortalised by Tennyson, will live for ever in poetry,
but the architects, alas! have decided that it shall vanish from the
world of prose. But there is a favourite haunt of mine higher up in
Fleet Street. There you can feast upon marrow bones. On Saturdays
the _pièce de résistance_ is a wonderful pudding compounded of
steaks, oysters, kidneys, and other unknown delicacies; there is a
smoking-room upstairs, where punch is served in an old-fashioned
bowl, with glasses of the pattern in use in the last century.
THE CHEESE IN THE TIME OF JOHNSON
“‘As soon as I enter the door of a tavern’—and many were the taverns
whose doors the great Samuel entered—exclaimed Dr. Johnson from that
tavern chair which he regarded as the throne of human felicity, ‘I
experience an oblivion of care and a freedom from solitude; when I
am seated I find the master courteous’ (courtesy is thus hereditary
in the masters of the Cheshire Cheese) ‘and the servants obsequious
to my call, anxious to know and ready to supply my wants; wine then
exhilarates my spirits and prompts me to free conversation and an
interchange of discourse with those whom I most love: I dogmatise and
am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I
delight.’
“One can picture to oneself Johnson when he had entered and taken his
favourite seat at the Cheshire Cheese, the fire blazing then as it
blazes to-day, after a lapse of more than a century, in the mighty
grate, and casting its flashes, as it casts them to-day, over the
same oak-wainscotted walls, infusing a ruddier glow into the red
curtains drawn across the windows, and dropping a deeper-dyed ruby
into the drink that was meant for men.
“All the other tavern haunts which Johnson and his disciples
frequented have passed away or been improved out of all semblance to
the Johnson era; but the Cheese remains, within and without, the same
as it did when Goldsmith reeled up the steps to his lodgings opposite
the main entrance in Wine Office Court, or Johnson rolled his huge
bulk past it to the house in Gough Square, where his wife died in
1752 and the Dictionary was completed in 1755.”
MR. PHILIP NORMAN, in the “Illustrated London News” for December,
1890, remarks, in his “Inns and Taverns of Old London”:
“The faithful journey to the Cheshire Cheese firm in the belief that
when Goldsmith lived hard by in Wine Office Court the two friends
must have spent many an hour together in those panelled rooms and
have sat on the seat assigned to them by tradition. Now that the Cock
has quitted his original home, though under his former proprietor”
(it must be remembered this was written in 1890, and does not hold
at present—he crows gallantly over the way) “the Cheshire Cheese is
unquestionably the most perfect specimen of an old-fashioned tavern
in London.”
JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON (“A Book about the Table,” vol. ii. page 43):
“But ere we pass from beef to less majestic delicacies, let us render
homage to the steak pudding, than which no goodlier fare can be
found for a strong hungry man on a cold day. Rising from his pudding
at the Cheshire Cheese, such a feaster is at a loss to say whether
he should be most grateful for the tender steak, savoury oyster,
seductive kidney, fascinating lark, rich gravy, ardent pepper, or
delicate paste.”
* * * * *
“SCRIBNER” (“In London with Dickens”), March, 1881:
“These noisy and nasty eating-houses” (in and about Chancery Lane)
“are in striking contrast with the staid old-fashioned taverns in the
same neighbourhood, the Cheshire Cheese, etc.”
* * * * *
“The tavern,” says SIR WALTER BESANT (in “Fifty Years Ago”), “We can
hardly understand how large a place it filled in the lives of our
forefathers, who did not live scattered about in suburban villas,
but over their shops and offices. When business was over, all, of
every class, repaired to the tavern. Dr. Johnson spent the evenings
of his last years wholly at the tavern; the lawyer, the draper, the
grocer, even the clergyman, all spent their evenings at the tavern,
going home in time for supper with their families. The Cheshire
Cheese is a survival; the Cock, until recently, was another. And
when one contrasts the cold and silent coffee-room of the new great
club, where the men glare at each other, with the bright and cheerful
tavern where every man talked with his neighbour, and the song went
round, and the great kettle bubbled upon the hearth, one feels that
civilisation has its losses.”
* * * * *
MARK LEMON (“Punch”):
“LINES WRITTEN AT THE ‘CHEESE.’
“DEDICATED TO LOVELACE.
“Champagne will not a dinner make,
Nor caviare a meal.
Men gluttonous and rich may take
Those till they make them ill.
If I’ve potatoes to my chop,
And after chop have cheese,
Angels in Pond & Spiers’s shops
Know no such luxuries.”
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 24 Changed: Views of the Honse
to: Views of the House
pg 24 Changed: Mecca of Anglo-Saxondum
to: Mecca of Anglo-Saxondom
pg 50 Changed: anl the natural result
to: and the natural result
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The book of The Cheese : Being traits and stories of "Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese"" ***
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