"London is a world by itself . . . among the Londoners are so many nations differing in manners, customs, and religions, that the inhabitants themselves don't know a quarter of them." TOM BROWN wrote in 1690:
If that was true in his time,
then how much more today with the population of the County
of London four times as great, and Greater London adding four
million more to the unwieldy total. Almost all of these millions
have heard of Covent Garden, yet only a handful have seen with
their own eyes the scene so readily imagined, and an even smaller
number know anything of its early history ... its origin ... its
chequered story throughout the centuries.
The man who refuses to walk the deserted streets of London
at five o'clock in the morning in order to see the market for
himself allows imagination to paint the scene. And probably the
scene he visualizes is not entirely false, though it is certain to be
daubed in softer colours than reality. Covent Garden is an
allegorical resurrection. In the half-light of day, carts, wagons and
lorries rumble over the London bridges towards these three acres
of profusion. They bring with them the mud of farms and dialects
of country lanes as I write, now yellow with hazel catkins. The
side-streets are jammed tight. Cloth-capped porters hurry to and
fro like courtiers of Nature. The richness of heaped produce
looks like a vivid canvas of Van Gogh. Here is an anthology of
the seasons . . . the vegetable world in all its glory . . . oranges,
tangerines in silver jackets, Canadian apples, festoons of grapes,
carrots, grapefruit from Cuba, shades of green in watercress,
parsley, shallots, and the familiar fronds of the cabbage, onions
with shining faces, beetroot, swedes, parsnips with long sensitive
roots. To this mass add the colours of glorious masses of flowers.
It is a gay scene. The fruits of the earth piled in a London street
market.
The association is not uneasy. Centuries ago vegetables and
flowers were grown where this market now stands. It was then
the Convent Garden of St. Peter's. What was grown went to
the table of the Abbot of Westminster. London had been pastoral
for many years. William Fitzstephen, secretary to Thomas a
Becket, confirms the rusticity of London's population of roughly
40,000 in the biography of his master replate. . . . "The Thames
abounds with fish. On the north side are fields for pasture and a
delightful plain of flat meadow land, interspersed with flowing
streams, on which stand mills whose clack is very pleasing to the
ear. Close by lies an immense forest (Enfield Chase) in which are
densely wooded thickets, the coverts of game, stags, fallow deer,
boars and wild bulls."
The subsequent history of Covent Garden falls into four
divisions. The Convent was disestablished and disendowed.
Weeds ran riot, until the Earl of Bedford, in conjunction with
Inigo Jones, the father of the English Renaissance, built around it
the quadrangle and the Piazza. On two sides enormous colonnades
were raised, and soon the Garden became the recognized parad-
ing-ground of gentlemen of fashion and their mistresses. The
surrounding area became a fashionable suburb patronized in the
Restoration by Charles and his frivolous Court for their gambling
and insatiable amours. This era of popular dissipation was inter-
rupted by two catastrophes that altered the face of London.
Pepys in his diary records on 6th June, 1665 : "The hottest day I
ever felt in my life. This day, much against my will, I did in
Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon
the doors, and c Lord have mercy upon us!' writ there; which was
a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that, to my remem-
brance, I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and
my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell
and chew, which took away the apprehension." That sign must
have been common in Covent Garden. At night the rumble of the
carts, precursors of those that now come at dawn, blended their
noise with the dirge-like cry "Bring out your dead." Three
months later Pepys wrote to Lady Carteret: "I have stayed in the
City till above 7,400 died in one week and of them about 6,000
of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but the tolling
of the bells." The final total was one hundred thousand deaths. To
these horrors was added the Great Fire in which acres of
dwellings were destroyed. In a few months the shape and size of
London had changed. The second chapter in the history of
Covent Garden had opened.
The fashionable world gradually moved westwards and houses
of distinction were turned into tenements. This area deteriorated
rapidly and became one of the most infamous quarters of London.
Sir John Fielding summarized the condition in 1766 : "One of the
principal causes of the number of bawdy-houses being collected
together in or near Covent Garden, is there having been several
estates in the courts and contiguous streets where the leases of
the houses were so near expiring that it was not worth while to
repair them till they were out, by which means they were let for
almost nothing to the lowest of wretches, who hired three or four
of them, and filled them with common prostitutes. This made
Exeter Street, Change Court, Eagle Court and Little Catherine
Street so infamous that it was dangerous for persons to pass and
repass." The law which allowed such places to obtain a wine
licence from the Stamp Office as a substitute for a magisterial
licence added to the confusion. It was an evil time for Covent
Garden, and "Tomkyn's" and the "Rose" carried on a roaring
trade for "gentlemen to whom beds are unknown".
The third stage was inaugurated as early as 1680 when the
vegetable market was established, but almost a century had to
pass before it was finally settled. A feature at the beginning of the
nineteenth century was the seasonal migration to Covent Garden
of Shropshire and Welsh girls. They came on foot in droves and
were employed moving loads of fruit to the market. It was
common for these young women to carry a heavy load from
Baling to Covent Garden roughly nine miles sometimes
making the double journey twice a day, for a weekly wage of five
or seven shillings. These country wenches must have brought a
breath of fresh air into a murky atmosphere.
The last chapter came in 1732 when Covent Garden Theatre
was built by the harlequin, John Rich. That first building was very
small, the stage measuring 20 ft. by 47 ft., but it had this advantage
the granting of Letters Patent by King Charles II to one
William Davenant, "his heirs and assigns", which allowed
"tragedies, comedies, plays, operas, musick, scenes, and all other
entertainment of the stage whatsoever". From this foundation
the theatre began with Congreve's Way of the World,, but soon
turned to opera, the first being Thomas Arne's Artaxerxes. In
1736 Handel's Atalarita was performed by Royal Command, the
composer in this performance insisting that a solo be given to his
chef, Gustavus Waltz. On i6th May, 1767, there is a record of
Charles Dibdin accompanying the singer Miss Brickler on the
piano, the first time that instrument is mentioned in English
music. Rich's theatre was destroyed by fire in 1808. The then
Prince of Wales laid the foundation stone for the new theatre
later that same year, in fact in the vaults of the present building
can be seen this three-ton block of masonry bearing the in-
scription: "Long live George, Prince of Wales." The rebuilt
theatre was the largest in Europe, but it had a similar fate, being
burned down in 1856.
The present structure by Barrie was opened in 1858. Here is
the only Covent Garden known to many people. The earthy
smell of vegetables and soil never reaches that sweeping amphi-
theatre of scarlet and gold with its tiers and boxes and glittering
lights. Here every great singer from Caruso to Gigli, Tetrazzini
to Flagstad, has appeared, no international reputation being
complete without an appearance in London's leading opera house;
here Sadler's Wells Ballet with the brilliant prima ballerina,
Margot Fonteyn, the talented choreographer, Frederick Ashton,
and the inspired direction of Dame Ninette de Valois has become
the greatest ballet company in the world outside the Soviet Union.
On great occasions the entire theatre is a moving mass of animated
humanity reflecting and radiating every shade of brilliance and
colour, such as that Spring night in 1946 when, before an
audience that included the late King, and Queen, the two Prin-
cesses and the ambassadors from every embassy and legation in
London, the Royal Opera House re-opened with a rich new
production of The Sleeping Beauty, perhaps the most famous of
the Russian classical ballets ... an unforgettable night of
pageantry . . . everything being dwarfed by those massive curtains
of crimson.
Two worlds exist side by side. One has links with Westminster
Abbey. The other, a tradition that goes back to the first produc-
tion of The Messiah in 1741 with Handel as conductor ... a
tradition that today is murmured in the same breath as the Scala in
Milan, and the Metropolitan Opera House in New York ... a
jewel of brilliance in the Season. A bell summons us. The scarlet
stalls and boxes are filling. Every tier of the sweeping amphi-
theatre is filling. The lights fade like dying glow-worms. The
curve of a woman's shoulder looks momentarily like ivory. The
orchestra snatches at a few stray notes. Applause greets the
conductor. He bows . . . taps the stand with his baton. The
theatre wells to the music of Tchaikovsky . . . familiar chords . . .
then slowly the huge curtains part . . . and delicate wraiths of
grace float across the stage. It is a visual interpretation of a musical
emotion. Music and ballet become fused in an inarticulate, un-
fathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the infinite and
allows us for moments to gaize into that. Ballet becomes the
ectoplasm of music. We follow the romance of Odette and
Siegfried until the final voyage through the waters of the lake to
the world of eternal happiness.
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LONDON SEASON
LOUIS T. STANLEY
With illustrations by ALAN CRISP
PREFACE BY ALFRED NOYES
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY BOSTON
The Riverside Press Cambridge 1956
Printed in Great Britain
http://www.archive.org/
catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/141427
[As Written]
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