IN OLD SOHO

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 45, 16 November 1929, Page 33

IN OLD SOHO

AN EXCURSION TO LONDON’S FOREIGN SUBURB

Soho is coming dawn. Her ghosts are awake and her shadows are disturbed. London is losing its own peculiar Bohemia# the village within a city that has sheltered genius in its garrets, dukes in its great houses, a microcosm of the nations in its alleys, and the world’s queerest foods in its restraurants, writes J. Wentworth Day, in the “Sunday Express.” Onq hundred and twelve of Soho's houses have either fallen since the year began or are falling now. Values have trebled since the war. The old order must go. The housebreaker’s hammer is heard where Hazlitt died, and mortar dust aims the streets where De Quincey walked ■with his Anne under the London moon. William Blake saw visions of angels where giant cranes now swing against the sky. and Mozart played in streets where concrete now takes the place of concertos. Monmouth's ghost is unhappy in the sqiiare that knew his earthly home, and the street where Canaletto dreamed of the Italian lakes is a place of yawning chasins.

Soon there will be no Soho —no trace of the village within a city that was London's own peculiar Bo’ ernia. Old Soho, the blend of Montparnasse and Montmartre, will give way to the new Soho, a desert of concrete cliff dwellings, of gaudy cinemas, and towering office blocks. Do you wonder that the ghosts are awake? Their tombs are crumbling about them, their dreams are .become nightmares of reality. The Soho we knew, the place of dear, dirty streets and old, green squares; of flowers and the smell of new.bread; of odd wines and strange dishes; the home of greasy little men with blue chins and archducal manners; of girls, swarthy, dark-eyed, and eternally working—this old Soho of the halfcrown six-course lunch and the threepenny tip—is doomed. Genius will search for its garrets elsewhere, and tie poor but clever will starve. Its end is inevitable, as the end of its frogs’ legs and snails, its creamed chestnut and Chianti, it spaghetti and salami. It will go, and London will have lost one of the flavours that make her the most catholic city in the world. I shall regret it. Who will not? After all, the old Soho was genuine. Its Italians were real Italians. Its Frenchmen sold authentic frogs, its Spaniards smell of indubitable garlic. It was a place where all men might eat and drink, but only certain sorts of men chose to live— mostly the queer foreign fish who are washed up on the London shore and herd together for companionship sake. It is a more authentic Bohemia than Chelsea, that self-conscious segregation of pose and paint. Soho does not hug the convention that to be unconventional you must defy the world and so vindicate your own mediocrity. Soho works and stinks, eats and drinks, throws its garbage out of doors if nd one is looking, and harbours within its doors any one and every one, from the peer and the peri within its restaurants most intime to the razor gang in its nigger-dives.. Soho is catholic. Soho is original. Soho is more or less sincere. And Soho got its name because James, Duke of Monmouth, who ran away with my great-aunt, sixteenth removed, Henrietta Baroness Wentworth, lived in Monmouth Square, which today is called Soho Square. When after Sedgemoor they caught James in a field ditch with half a dozen peas in his pocket and cut off his head the King ordered that Monmouth Square should be called King’s Square. But the Monmouthians secretly called it Soho—because "Soho,” the medieval "view halloa,” was the war-cry that Duke James shouted under the stars at Sedgemoor. So a Stuart 1 unting cry became a London place name. That is the best story—but the true one is that Soho was “So-hoe” long before James met Henrietta at Toddington in Bedfordshire. It was "Soboe” in a Royal Proclamation in 1671. Soho was a fashionable district. The Venetian Ambassador lived in Frith Street, a few doors from the house where Mozart dwelt vhen he was a boy of eight. So prodigious a prodigy was this precocious brat that his father challenged all the neighbourhood to produce a piece of music which the boy could not play at sight. ‘ At the corner of Greek Street is the demurely lovely House of Charity, where dwelt Lord Mayor Beckford, who was a friend of Chatterton,, the boy poet who starved in his Holborn garret. Beckford had courage enough to tell the King what he thought of him. ■ Such of those old houses as still stand are beautiful within, panelled and galleried, rich with carved walnut and mahogany, instinct still with the grandeur ”f the old lost days. Carlisle House, Soho Square, was the most interesting of them all. Once the town house of the Earl of Carlisle, it was taken by La Cornelys, the famous international adventuress- and courtesan. . She turned it into a place of subscription balls and masques, to Which, as Casanova says, came every artisocrat and every member of the Royal Family except the King and Queen. Some of her balls were magnificent but deadly dull. Others were Rabelaisan masquerades, at which every rake and roue, male and female, in the town turned up, some dressed as Van Dycks and Cromwells, some as Vestal Virgins, Bacchantes and Nymphs, and others as caricatures of the great political figures of the day. Tile banqueting room held 500 diners, and the ballrooms, hung with blue

satin and decorated with Oriental magnificence, were on a like scale. Gradually, however,' debts grew, her popularity waned, bankruptcy came. La Grande Cornelys, mistress of dukes and princes as of Casanova himself, became an old hag selling asses' milk at Hyde Park Corner. Finally she vanished into the grim fortress of the Fleet Prison, and there died, a pauper, on August 19, 1797. So much for the old lurid glories of Soho Square, where the night rang with revelry and linkmen’s cries, when money flew and morals were loose. Another Carlisle House, also in Soho Square, became the home of that re markable man, Domenico Angelo Malevolti Tremamando, the great Angelo, the most graceful and accomplished swordsman and horseman London has ever known.

Angelo, who was brought to London from Paris by Peg Woffington, became the fencing master and friend of the Prince of Wales. His house in Soho Square and his riding school were a hub of fashion and sport, : All sorts met and dined at I’s table. Next door to him lived Karl Friedrich Abel, whose playing of the voil-de gamba was an enchantment, and he and Sebastian Bach, the composer, Gainsborough, Sheridan, Wilkes, the Marquis of Granby, and the Chevalier D’Eon, met, dined and talked at Angelo’s table. Angelo was a mask of fashion and a mould of morals and manners. He died on July 11, 1802, in his eightyseventh year, reduced in wealth, but not in pride, as fencing master at Eton. Soho Square had many other famous inhabitants of the fine houses which looked upon its formal garden and the statue of the King. •George 11. lived there as Prince of Wales, and Sir Roger de Coverley, Evelyn, Sir Joseph Banks, Bishop Burnet, .the Earl of Stamford, and Lord Bateman all had houses —that Bateman whom Charles 11. made an Irish peer in order to, escape giving him the Bath, "for I can make him a lord, but I can never make him a gentleman.” The principle still survives. The Linnten Society had its first home there, and the body of that gallant Norfolk admiral, Sir Cloudesley Shovel, lay in state in one of its houses. At the corner of the square where now stands the factory of Crosse and Blackwell stood the notorious White House, the centre of the most depraved dissipation o" the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.' It was 'a large house, magnificently decorated —a very temple of vice, in which many a pretty young girl wan ruined and many a fortune lost. I “Old Q.,” the Marquis of Hertford, and George Prince of Wales were a trinity of the rakes who kept it goln/. Of those famous Soho ghosts—De Quincey and his Anne, the beautiful woman who found him starving on ’ a doorstep and became the love of his life, only to be lost in the filth and crime of the Soho . streets; Hazlitt, writing his immortal prose and dying in poverty, with,. as his last words: “I have had a happy life,” and Blake, poet, mystic, and artist, who was born i Broad Street. Golden Square, above his father’s shop, and saw apgels growing on trees— they have been written about so often that even in Soho they are not without honour and knowledge. The last tragic figure still haunts her streets, forgotten by all but the erudite delvers into the macabre of Londons history—Theodore, King of Corsica. He lies in St. Anne's churchyard today, the king who pawned his kingdom, died in a garret, and was buried b- the good will of a Soho tradesman. Theodore began his life as Baron of Neuhof, in Prussia, fought in Charles of Sweden’s armies, gained ome military renown, and was'offered the crown of Corsica, then no more than an island of banditti, barbarians, maquis and mouflon. . He coined his own money, raised an army of 15,000, and for a time made the island independent of Genoa. Debts came, the coinage gave out, and the King of Corsica fled to England. For a time he was treated as an ex-monarch, and Walpole became his fHend. , .. More debts, however, soon drove him into the King's Bench Prison Walpole raised a subscription list of fifty pounds, and he vas bought out, and went that day in a sedan chair to call on the Portuguese Minister to plead his case. The Minister was not at home, and Theodore had not even sixpence to pay the chairman, so he directed him to a little tailor’s shop in Soho, where the tailor paid the bill and found the king a garret to sleep in. He fell ill next day, and died three days later, having pawned his kingdom at the Old Bailey to,pay his creditors! A pauper’s funeral iyas averted by the whlin of one John Wright, an oilman, of Compton Street, who said, “For once I will pay the funeral expenses of a king.” You may see his memorial tablet on the church wall,to this day. Within the church vaults lies another noble skeleton, that of the eccentric second Lord Camelford, who fell in a duel with Captain Best at Kensington in 1804. . t He fought the duel well knowing that he would be killed, and commanded that his body should be buried on a lonely Island in a Swiss lake. But the European wars prevented his wish being carried out, and to-day Lord Camelford still lies beneath the stones of St. Anne’s, in a gorgeous coffin, with his coronet upon the lid, alone with the rats and the darkness. , It is all a piece with the dead pomp and past nobility of the haunted streets thiit are now falling into their final dust.