LV The White Horse Cellars
A little glass canopy with a clock above it juts out into Piccadilly, and a tall commissionaire stands at an entrance where some stairs dive down, apparently into the bowels of the earth. Where the stairs make their first plunge there is above them on the wall the device of a white horse—a fine prancing animal, somewhat resembling the White Horse of Kent.
The stairs, with oak panelling on either side of them, give a twist before they reach the bottom, where is the modern restaurant that occupies the site of what were originally known as the New White Horse Cellars, but which are now called the Old White Horse Cellars, probably on the lucus a non lucendo principle, for they have been modernised out of all recognition since the days when Charles Dickens recorded the departure of Mr Pickwick from these Cellars on his coach journey down to Bath.
The Old White Horse Cellars were originally on the Green Park side of Piccadilly, and their number was 156, as some way-bills to be seen at the present White Horse Cellars testify. This ground is now occupied by the Ritz Hotel. Strype mentions the original cellar as being in existence in 1720.
On the staircase walls of the New White Horse Cellars is a little collection of prints and way-bills, caricatures, etchings, old bills of Hatchett’s Hotel, posters and advertisements from The Times and other papers of the hours at which the coaches for the west started. In this curious little gallery of odds and ends are some documents relating to the old cellar on the other side of the road. But the White Horse Cellars were under Hatchett’s in the great coaching days, from the year of the battle of Waterloo to 1840. It was from Hatchett’s that Jerry, in Pierce Egan’s book, took his departure when going back to Hawthorn Hall, and said farewell to Tom and Logic, and it was in the travellers’ room of the White Horse Cellars, a title that was used alternatively with “Hatchett’s,” that Mr Pickwick and his friends sheltered from the rain, waiting for the Bath coach.
Hatchett’s in Dickens’s time was not the comfortable house that I knew in the eighties, when the revival of stage-coaching was at its height. Indeed, there could not be a picture of greater discomfort than Dickens sketched in a few words when he wrote: “The travellers’ room at ‘The White Horse Cellar’ is, of course, uncomfortable; it would be no travellers’ room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter, which latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment.” Dickens’s word picture of the scene at the start of the coach at half-past seven on a damp, muggy and drizzly day is a fine pen-and-ink sketch, and Cruikshank, in one of his caricatures, “The Piccadilly Nuisance,” shows very much the scene as Dickens described it, with the orange-women and the sellers of all kinds of useless trifles on the kerb; the coaches jostling each other, passengers falling off from them, and the pavement an absolute hustle of humanity.
Cruikshank’s various drawings and caricatures preserve the appearance of Hatchett’s of the old days in the memory better than any word pictures could do. The bow-windows of the old hotel with many panes of glass in them; the stiff pillared portico, with on it the name “Hatchett’s,” and a little lamp before it, and above it the board with the inscription, “The New White Horse Cellar. Coaches and waggons to all parts of the kingdom.” Above this board again was a painting of an old white horse. I fancy that the title of the Cellars, when they were on the other side of the way, must have been taken from some celebrated old horse—though Williams, who was the first landlord of the original cellars, is said to have given them their name as a compliment to the House of Hanover, and that it was the white horse, not the cellar, that was old.
There are various other legends with respect to the horse that gave Hatchett’s its title, one of them being that Abraham Hatchett, a proprietor of the tavern, had an old white horse with a turn of speed which had won him many a wager against more showy animals.
The entrance to the Cellars below Hatchett’s, in the old days, was down some very steep stairs just in front of one of the bow-windows, and an oval notice, hanging from a little arch of iron, directed people down into the depths to the booking-office.
My reminiscences of Hatchett’s are of the later revivals of road coaches; the days of old “Jim” Selby, the famous coachman who, though everybody called him “old,” died a comparatively young man. His grey hair and his jolly, fat, rosy face gave him an appearance of being older than he really was. Those were the days when the late Lord Londesborough and Captain Hargreaves, Mr Walter Shoolbred, Captain Beckett, Baron Oppenheim and Mr Edwin Fownes were well-known whips, and when “Hughie” Drummond, and the host of other good fellows and lively customers in whose veins the red blood flowed in a lively current, who drank old port and despised early hours, were the men about town. “Hughie” Drummond taking old “Jim” Selby out to dinner after the arrival of the “Old Times” from Brighton and changing hats with him, which generally took place early in the evening, is one of my remembrances of Hatchett’s. And many a time have I split a pint with “Dickie-the-Driver,” the oldest in standing amongst my friends, then not the least lively of the young fellows, before climbing up on to the coach at Hatchett’s to go down to the Derby. For many years eight of us, always the same men, went down by coach from Hatchett’s on Derby Day, always with “Dickie” driving out of London and the last stage on to the downs, and our gallop down and up the hill on the course was a really breakneck performance.
It was from Hatchett’s that “Jim” Selby started on his celebrated drive with the Brighton coach, “Old Times,” to Brighton and back, for a wager of a thousand pounds to five hundred against his accomplishing the journey in eight hours. On the coach were: Selby himself, driving; Captain Beckett, whom we all called “Partner”; Mr Carleton Blyth, who still sends yearly from Bude his greeting of “Cheero” to his old friends; Mr “Swish” Broadwood, Mr “Bob” Cosier, Mr A. F. M’Adam, and the guard. Harrington Bird’s picture of the coach during the galloping stage, with the horses going at racing pace, gives an idea of how Selby drove on that day when he had a clear road. The coach reached the “Old Sip” at Brighton, having done the first half of the journey in just under four hours; stayed there only long enough to turn the coach round and to read a telegram from the old Duke of Beaufort, who was most keenly interested in the revival of coaching, and who was a very good man himself on the box seat—and then started again for London, reaching the White Horse Cellars ten minutes under the stipulated time and forty minutes within the record. I was one of the men amongst the crowd that gathered to see the return of the coach and to cheer old “Jim” Selby, who brought his last team in no more distressed than they would have been doing their journey under ordinary circumstances. How highly respected Selby was by all coaching men was shown by the long string of stage-coaches, every coach on the road having suspended its usual journey, which followed his body to the grave.
In those days the bill of fare at Hatchett’s was roast beef or boiled mutton and trimmings; duck and green peas, or fowl and bath-chap. There was an inner sanctuary then called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which was the bar parlour, into which only the most favoured patrons of the house were admitted, and Miss Wills, the manageress, used to keep any unruly spirits very much in order.
When Hatchett’s was rebuilt and changed its name it changed hands very frequently, though the White Horse Cellars always remained a restaurant. The Cercle de Luxe, a dining club, at one time occupied the upper floors of the building, and then it became the Avondale Hotel, with M. Garin as manager and M. Dutruz as chef. Since then the rooms have been put to many uses, and are now, I see, once again in the market.
It is the memory of what Hatchett’s and the White Horse Cellars have been in their old days—memories that haunt me like the sound of a horn afar off on one of the great roads—that makes me disinclined nowadays to eat a French dinner in what was a home of good English fare; and whenever I lunch or dine in the White Horse Cellars to-day I always, for the sake of old times, order a plate of soup, a mixed grill and a scoop from the cheese. The three-and-sixpenny dinner of to-day is, I have no doubt, a good one, and Mr Stump, the present manager, is most courteous and anxious to oblige. I look at the menu when I am in the restaurant, but for the old sake’s sake I keep as close to the meals of old days as the resources of the establishment allow me to do.
The White Horse Cellars of to-day is a modern, up-to-date restaurant, below the level of the ground, though the ventilation is so excellent and the lighting arrangements so good that one never has the sensation of being in a cellar. Half-way down the staircase, just where the little picture gallery commences, a door leads into a buffet. One’s great-coat and hat are taken at the bottom of the stairs, and then one enters quite a lofty room with a groined roof, and with cosy nooks and various extensions of the bigger room, which, I fancy, have been thrown out under the side-walk above. The walls of the restaurant are of cream colour; the ornamentation is in the style of Adams, and there is deep rose colour in the arches of the roof. Many mirrors reflect the vistas and give the rooms the appearance of being more extensive than they really are: a string band is perched up in a little gallery; there are palms here and there, and a bronze galloping horse in a recess does something to recall the old horsy days of Hatchett’s.
There are many little tables, each with its pink-shaded lamp, in this restaurant, and it has a chic clientele, the “Nuts” of to-day appearing to patronise it just as much as the bucks and the bloods, the swells, and the “whips” of the last two generations used to. I see pretty actresses sometimes dining at Hatchett’s, and it is a very cheerful restaurant in which to take a meal. It is, I believe, always crowded at supper-time, and the Glorias, the two excellent dancers who appear earlier in the evening on the Empire stage, dance the Tango, at midnight, in and out of the little tables.
But to me the charm of the White Horse Cellars is that I can live again in memory, when lunching or dining there, those joyous days of youth and fresh air, when a jolly coach-load used to start from before its door for a day of delight in sitting behind good horses driven by a good whip, listening to the music of the shod hooves and the guard’s horn, receiving a greeting from everyone along the road, and feeling that no king on a throne is happier than a man riding behind a picked team on a good coach. Motor cars have their uses and their pleasures, but they seem to have killed the fuller-blooded joys that came with coaching.