“NUMBER TEN”

Evening Star, Issue 20980, 19 December 1931, Page 22

“NUMBER TEN”

MOST FAMOUS OF HOUSES When the Prime Minister flew hack to, Downing street the morning after his victorious poll at Seabam Harbour, no doubt he found on his table, hot from the printing press, the new volume of the London Survey Committee. It will have interested him, as surely it will interest others, for the large, fat book, with some 150 plates, devotes nearly one-half of its hulk to the little hy-way of three old houses which is Downing street —the buildings that tower above them are modern Government offices (says a writer in an Englnh paper). Downing street is famous only because. for two centuries past, it has had the Prime Minister’s official residence. The house he occupies of itself makes small claims to notice. It was in 1731 that No. 10 first became linked with the fortunes of successive Governments. A Crown property, it was offered by King George II to Sir Robert Walpole, who would only accept it for his office of First Lord of the Treasury. In that way it became annexed to the post for ever. Sir George Downing, who was knighted after King Charles’s Restoration, and later became baronet, laid out the short street, which ended abruptly at the park wall. _ Many a foreigner has wondered why, if we house the Sovereign’s chief adviser at all, we should do it so meanly. Ic is historical association, rather than any pretentiousness in the building itself, that constitutes the attraction. Look back over the list of those who have dwelt there; Walpole himself, and Pelham and Grenville; Lord North, whose fame is much besmirched by the loss of the American colonies; William Pitt, on three separate occasions ; the old Duke of Wellington, who liked officialdom, and found it useful as a residence when Apsley House was in the builders’ care for decoration and enlargement; Canning and Grey,'and a host besides. • Not alll these were First Lords of the Treasury; till a century and a-half ago the occupant of No. 10 Downing street more often was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, now housed next door. No. 11, the Chancellor’s residence, really consists of two houses, which at one time were separate._ It has one distinction of a kind which I doubt the neighbour house can boast; from No. 11 came, on January 7, 1854, the announcement of the birth there to Mr and Mrs W. E. Gladstone of a son, Herbert —the son who became Viscount Gladstone, Governor of South AfriCcit Next them is No. 12, the office of the Government Whips. Downing’s name, by reason of the little street in Westminster, is known to all the world. Better for him had it been forgotten. No man spoke well of him. He stands as an exemplar of treachery, avarice, and servility. A servant of Cromwell, and a member of both his Parliaments, when there were jobs to be had—he was foremost in pressing Oliver to accept the Crown—he managed to make his peace with the complaisant King Charles 11., thereby gaining new profits. . , , , Perhaps the man is best judged by the opinions that he left behind him in his different fields of New England it became proverbial to say of a false man who betrayed his trust that he was “an arrant George Downing.” At home Pepys says of him that “ all the world takes notice of him for a most ungrateful villain. When in Holland on a mission for Charles 11., the ex-Cromwelhan, by false assurances, secured the arrest of three fugitive regicides, who suffered hanging; and he became so unpopular that he fled before the fury of the Dutch mob. Later, when again he was proposed for the same employment, one of the Council gave warning: Ine rabble will tear him in pieces! “Well, I will venture him!’ said Charles, smiling.