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THE first time I saw London
was when I was sent on
newspaper business to the opening of the Exhibition
of 1862. As London was to be invaded by myriads
of visitors from all countries of the world as well as
from all parts of the United Kingdom, lodgings had
been in good time secured for me in Aldersgate,
which were very comfortable, and where my fellow
lodgers were exhibitors from Manchester and Yorkshire. One day, however, when I continued my
work in the Exhibition buildings so late that on
coming out I saw the last of the conveyances driving
off before I could reach it, I had to walk back on
foot, and was saved from losing myself on the way
by a strong sense of locality which made it pretty
easy, either by night or by day, to find out places I
had once seen without looking to street names or
asking policemen.
As I represented two
newspapers, I had two
tickets of admission for the opening day, besides a
season pass. One of the two tickets I gave to my
landlord, who was so pleased with the little gift that
he put himself in place of a guide, and went with
me to see the Tower, the Guildhall, Covent Garden,
the Docks, St Paul's, and various other places. My
fellow lodgers and I, and our landlord got into the
Exhibition buildings among the first, all in a batch,
and had, therefore, a free choice of places. We
stationed ourselves in what I may call a park of
artillery, Armstrong guns, Krupp guns, and so on,
near the platform. I perched myself on a field gun
with our two exhibitors, and we had some trouble
all day in so balancing ourselves as to keeput from
playing tricks by swaying up and down. Its height
gave us a wide view of the immense building, and
we watched with interest how it filled up with people x
as time went on. Our landlord sat below us on
a big Krupp gun, which was solid and ugly enough
for anything.
After a while came the
splendid procession, and passed close to us to the platform, which also was
very near at hand. Foreign Ambassadors, Ministers and ex-Ministers of
State, men eminent in arts and sciences and literature, the Lord Mayor of
London, and other chiefs of municipalities, in their robes and decorations,
made that day a splendid muster. Then all eyes were concentrated on the
royal personages who were to take the chief part in the formal opening ceremony. Owing to the recent death of Prince
Albert neither the Queen nor any of her children
could take part in the opening ceremony. The
Duke of Cambridge was deputed to officiate, and he
was supported right and left on the platform by the
Prince of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor Frederick
of Germany, the Queen's son-in-law, and by Prince
Oscar of Sweden, who afterwards succeeded his elder
brother and reigned long as Oscar II., but had the
misfortune before his death to see, through no fault
of his, Norway separated from Sweden.
Broad, burly, and of more
than medium height
as the Duke of Cambridge was, he was that day
overtopped by the Prussian Crown Prince, a blonde
giant and one of the handsomest of the sons of
men, and by the dark and slimmer Prince Oscar of
Sweden, who had inherited the French type of the
Bernadottes. I gazed at him with peculiar interest
on account of his name. His father, Oscar I. of
Sweden and Norway, was the godson of Napoleon,
who gave him the name of the finest hero of the
Ossianic cycle of Gaelic poetry. But of all the
Royal personages at the opening ceremony, the
best known and best liked and most vigorously
cheered by the huge crowd was the Princess Mary
of Cambridge, who soon afterwards married the
Duke of Teck.
I sat up all night writing my
account of the
opening ceremony, and when I went to bed at last
in broad daylight the headache of exhaustion and
excitement kept me for an hour or so awake. As
the procession passed within a few yards of me, and
afterwards when its members arranged themselves
on the platform close at hand, I was astonished
to find how easily I could identify many of the
celebrities of the day, whom I had never seen
before, by their pictorial representations, particularly
"Punch" caricatures of them. The musical part of
the ceremony was grand, and I was glad to observe
that a place had been found for Highland bagpipe
music also, which in such a vast building sounded
as if coming down a glen in a May morning,
raising stirring memories of a thousand years, and
harmonising itself with the voices of the mountain
streams, and of breezes which made heather slopes
bend and curl like waves of the sea.
For the first few days I had
long hours of constant
work in the Exhibition. I dined in the well-ordered
French refreshment place, and after losing the
vehicles once, took care to be out in time to catch
them ever afterwards. The well-guarded stand on
which the Koh-i-noor diamond was exhibited had
always a little crowd about it. With its glow of
light within itself, it is no doubt a wonderful stone,
but to me it had little more attractiveness than if
it had been a piece of glass of the same size and
humpy form. I admire emeralds and pearls, and
some of the other gems in a moderate degree, but
I have a curious dislike to diamonds, as if in a
previous existence I had come to connect them with
guile and crime. I have never been a fanciful
person, and this unexplainable antipathy remains
a puzzle to me to this day.
Sunday brought a welcome
cessation from newspaper work, but I was too anxious to see as much
as possible of London to rest in my comfortable
lodgings. I went to the morning service in St
Paul's. Dean Milman, whose writings I much
admired, officiated. He was then a bent old man,
but had such a clear voice that every word he spoke
was distinctly heard by all the huge congregation.
Several of us, with Exhibition tickets, banded
together for going to Westminster in the afternoon.
A. river steamer landed us on the terrace of the
Palace of Westminster, and we had drinks of beer
in the crypt by gaslight before going to the Abbey.
Mr Forster, our Bradford M.P., had sent me a ticket
for the Speaker's Gallery for the sitting of the
House of Commons on the Monday, but the business
happened to be of a humdrum kind on that evening.
I gazed with unbounded admiration at the splendid
exterior of St Paul's, by which London appeared to
be wholly dominated and to be largely redeemed
from architectural commonplace, but was disappointed with the interior, which was then in a
far from finished state than it is now. At West-
minister my sensations were quite different. The
Palace of Westminster or Houses of Parliament
outwardly dwarfed the Abbey, but the inside of
the Abbey is without comparison.
There was a remarkable
contrast between the
quietness of London on Sunday and the crowded
state of the streets and roaring traffic on week-days.
In 1862 all the movements of the people and all the
carrying of goods were above ground. Underground
railways and tubes had yet to come. So had
tramways, motor cars, and London County Council
improvements. Temple Bar still stood in its old
place, bearing on its tops the spikes on which the
heads of traitors had been placed of old, and
strangulating traffic in a main artery. It was not
so ornamental a relic of the past as I had imagined
it to be; but it was ornamental enough to be
entitled to be kept in possession of the Corporation,
and placed in some appropriate public place for
perpetual preservation. Considering its connection
with the history of the past, it should not have
been sold as rubbish to a private buyer, but kept
as an interesting ancient monument. Subsequent
visits corrected some of my first impressions of
London, but my first impression of its vastness only
got magnified and, so to speak, more oppressive as
my knowledge of the apoplectic head of the United
Kingdom enlarged itself. In 1862 I neither saw a
London mob disturbance nor inhaled an oily fog so
thick that it might be cut with a knife. Whatever
might be the tragedies of life in many of its homes,
whatever the brutal vices and crimes in its festering
slums, or the gilded profligacies and immoralities in
its aristocratic quarters, to the happily lodged casual
visitor the London of more than forty years ago,
although in respect to population a nation within a
nation, appeared to be a most orderly city, full of
attractions of all sorts, and rich in beautiful as well
as in historical places, and with far from a bad
climate notwithstanding superabundant fog and
rain at times, and the want of a romantic situation,
like Edinburgh for instance. Since that time
London sanitation has been vastly improved, and so
have the London streets and their architecture. |
