From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  This part of London is thick with clubs. Brooks’s Club is just across St James’s Street and was frequented by Phineas Finn in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels, as was the Reform Club round the corner in Pall Mall.

  No. 33a St James’s Street has a curious connection with Conan Doyle. The author, an active sportsman, had become friendly with a well-known strongman and music-hall performer called Eugen Sandow and attended Sandow’s Institute of Physical Culture at that address. In 1904 the author was involved in an accident which resulted in his being trapped underneath his car and he attributed his survival to the muscular development he had achieved under Sandow’s direction.

  No. 28 Northumberland Avenue was the Constitutional Club where Conan Doyle sometimes lunched with his fellow member P.G. Wodehouse. In 1959 it moved to Pall Mall and closed in 1979. It appears in a number of Wodehouse novels as ‘the Senior Conservative Club’ and was, according to Psmith in the City, noted for the ‘Curiously Gorganzolaesque marble of its main staircase’.

  Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was a member of Boodle’s Club in St James’s Street and used it as a model for Blades Club, of which ‘M’ was a member, Bond being taken there by him as a guest. Fleming borrowed the name of a fellow member for one of his arch-villains: Blofeld. There is a reference to the club in Oscar Wilde’s play of 1895, An Ideal Husband, when it is said of a bachelor peer ‘Lord Goring is the result of Boodle’s Club’. In Bleak House Dickens, in a reference to the incestuous way in which political power and influence is passed to and fro between small clubbish groups, writes of Lords Boodle and Coodle, Sir Thomas Doodle and the Duke of Foodle.

  Perhaps the oddest fictional club was that of Sherlock Holmes’s cleverer brother Mycroft. He belonged to the Diogenes Club, Pall Mall, where ‘no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one’.

  Further down St James’s Street, at No. 87, was the St James’s Coffee House where Joseph Addison wrote many of the early editions of The Spectator, founded as a daily publication in 1711 with the declared desire ‘to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality … to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses’.

  Nearby is ‘Marchmain House’, St James’s Street, London home of the Flyte family in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited which, converted into flats, becomes the headquarters of Hazardous Offensive Operations, one of the many units to which Guy Crouchback is seconded during his motley military career in Waugh’s great wartime trilogy Sword of Honour. Marchmain House does not exist but may be identified with any of the grand aristocratic houses which border Green Park and the Mall. The exterior of Bridgewater House in Cleveland Row which, like Marchmain House, backs on to Green Park, was used as Marchmain House for the 1981 Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited.

  BRIGHT YOUNG PEOPLE

  Across Piccadilly from Green Park, leading from Park Lane towards Berkeley Square, is Curzon Street, once the home of the adventuress Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and later the home of the Duc de Richleau in Dennis Wheatley’s bizarre 1934 novel of black magic and the occult, The Devil Rides Out. Later made into a ‘Hammer’ film starring Christopher Lee as the Duke and Charles Gray as Mocata, the evil practitioner of the black arts, it also featured Medina Place, St John’s Wood as the home of Simon Arum where the Satanists meet. This has been identified as a cul-de-sac close to Lord’s cricket ground, Melina Place, which was once the home of the novelist Anthony Powell, a friend of Wheatley. Simon Arum is rescued from the cult by Richleau, with the assistance of occult knowledge gained from artefacts in the British Museum.

  Curzon Street is still the site of Heywood Hill’s bookshop, formerly the workplace of the novelist Nancy Mitford. During the time that she worked there, and particularly during the Second World War, the shop became a gathering place for Nancy’s well-connected friends and it was while working there that Nancy, unhappily married, met the love of her life in Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle’s right-hand man. In her novel The Pursuit of Love her heroine Linda works in a bookshop in a ‘slummy little street’, a less than adequate description of one of Mayfair’s most elegant thoroughfares, but clearly a reference to Nancy’s own experience. Linda marries the rather grim banker Tony, but while working in the bookshop she meets her Gaston, Fabrice de Sauveterre, whereupon ‘she knew that this was love … she knew that never before, not even in dreams, and she was a great dreamer of love, had she felt anything remotely like this’. Linda eventually leaves her husband for the Communist sympathiser Christian to live in the then less fashionable Cheyne Walk. The book has many autobiographical elements and reflects the need for Nancy and her friends, who became known as the Bright Young People, to be endlessly amused: ‘The worst of being a Communist is that the parties you may go to are, well, awfully funny and touching but not very gay’ as Linda tells her sister.

  Many of the same characters appear in Vile Bodies, the second novel of Nancy’s lifelong friend Evelyn Waugh. The Bright Young People are based on a group of wealthy, rootless and directionless individuals with whom Waugh (and Nancy Mitford) were loosely and sometimes uncomfortably associated. In a foreword to the novel on its publication Waugh wrote: ‘Bright Young People and others kindly note that all characters are entirely imaginary (and you get far too much publicity already, whoever you are).’ This is disingenuous since it is not hard to put names to many of the principal characters in the book, notably the ‘heroine’ Agatha Runcible who was amongst those who ‘all got into taxicabs and drove across Berkeley Square’ in the heart of Mayfair, heading for the home of Miss Brown, who fervently wishes to be adopted by the Bright Young People as one of their number. The Bright Young People have attended a Hawaiian party and are dressed accordingly. Miss Brown takes them to her home, feeds them and is overcome with excitement when Agatha Runcible, clad in the Hawaiian costume which was de rigeur, asks to stay the night. The following morning Agatha, having burst in upon ‘a sweet old boy sitting at a desk’ (the Prime Minister) finally realises where she is, at 10 Downing Street, and, ‘trailing garlands of equatorial flowers, fled out of the room and out of the house to the huge delight and profit of the crowd of reporters and press photographers who were already massed round the historic front door’. In due course ‘Midnight orgies at No.10’ are reported and the government falls.

  Cruttwell makes a further appearance, though this time he has fallen in rank and, as Captain Cruttwell MP, receives a petition from the Ladies’ Conservative Association of Chesham Bois, calling upon him to withdraw his support for the prime minister. Agatha Runcible is regarded by many as a fanciful representation of Elizabeth Ponsonby, the daughter of a cabinet minister and granddaughter of the composer Sir Hubert Parry. After a dissipated life she died, still a young woman, of alcoholic poisoning.

  Hyde Park Corner was the site of another of the Bright Young People’s escapades where, after attending a ‘Mozart Party’ in eighteenth-century costume, the revellers joined a group of workmen repairing gas mains there, a photograph of the incongruous event duly appearing in the press. The Downing Street episode in Vile Bodies also owes something to an event in the life of the Lygon family, who are identified with the Flytes in Brideshead Revisited. Lady Mary and Lady Sibell Lygon returned to the home of their father, Halkin House (the site now occupied by the Halkin Hotel in Halkin Street, Belgravia), to find themselves locked out and walked instead to Downing Street, the home of their friends the Baldwins, to request a bed for the night.

  The atmosphere of parties in Belgravia like the one which ended with bewildered employees of the gas company at Hyde Park Gate is well conveyed in Vile Bodies as the Bright Young People arrive at a party to welcome an American Evangelist, Mrs Melrose Ape, a character based upon an American evangelist called Aimee Semple Macpherson:

  The Bright Young People came popping all together, out of someone’s electric brougham like a litter of pigs, and ran squealing up the steps. Some
gate-crashers who had made the mistake of coming in Victorian fancy-dress were detected and repulsed. They hurried home to change for a second assault. No-one wanted to miss Mrs Ape’s debut.

  P.G. Wodehouse’s Mayfair was also, of course, the haunt of Bertram (‘Bertie’) Wilberforce Wooster and those of his friends who frequented the Drones Club, conveniently close to Bertie’s flat in Berkeley Street, a refuge for young men with plenty of money and not too much in the way of brains to trouble them. Wodehouse himself briefly occupied a flat at No. 15 Berkeley Street in 1922, which appears in ‘Sir Roderick Comes to Lunch’ as the flat in which is entertained Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the Blackshorts, a thinly disguised portrait of Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts. Here Bertie would meet such chums as Rupert Psmith, Hildebrand (‘Tuppy’) Glossop, Oofie Prosser, Bingo Little, Gussie Fink-Nottle and Fergy Fungie-Phipps, Bertie informing his numerous ferocious aunts that he is attending a meeting of the club’s Fine Arts Committee. Since women were in no circumstances admitted to the Drones, except as waitresses or cleaners, there was no danger of Bertie’s subterfuges being exposed even though the dreaded Aunt Dahlia had a flat nearby.

  Evelyn Waugh, a dedicated clubman himself and a great admirer of P.G. Wodehouse, claimed that the Drones Club resembled no club that had ever existed or could possibly exist, but other commentators have traced its origins to three Mayfair clubs which flourished from about the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. The first was the Bachelors’ Club at 106 Piccadilly which, as its name implies, was for men determined to avoid the pitfalls of marriage, as Bertie Wooster certainly was. Field Marshal Kitchener was amongst the more eminent members of the Bachelors’ Club before it was replaced by Buck’s Club, which took its name from its founder Herbert Buckmaster, first husband of the actress Gladys Cooper. Buckmaster and a group of fellow officers who had fought in the First World War founded the club specifically for younger people whose spirits needed to be raised after their ordeals in the trenches, so it could be said to have foreshadowed the activities of the Bright Young People whom Evelyn Waugh satirised and who abandoned themselves to light-hearted pleasure. Wodehouse never became a member of Buck’s Club, but frequently lunched there as a guest and he makes several references to Buck’s Club in his works. He gave the name McGarry to the barman of the fictional Drones Club, this being the name of the real barman of Buck’s Club who in 1921 created Bucks Fizz, a mixture of Champagne and orange juice, which often brought relief to Bertie Wooster and other Drones after a heavy night out. Winston Churchill was a member of Buck’s Club. At the beginning of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets Wodehouse’s description of the Drones Club clearly has in mind the real home of Buck’s Club as it exists today at its original home at No. 18 Clifford Street, Mayfair:

  In the heart of London’s clubland there stands a tall and grimly forbidding edifice known to taxi drivers and the elegant young men who frequent its precincts as the Drones Club. Yet its somewhat austere exterior belies the atmosphere of cheerful optimism and bonhomie that lies within.

  At the end of Clifford Street are Grafton Street and Bond Street, the site of the famous jewellers Asprey’s which appears as Aspinalls in many Wodehouse works. A third influence on the Drones was the Bath Club which, like the Drones, had a swimming pool in which members were occasionally immersed. It was based at 34 Dover Street from its foundation in 1894 until 1941, when it was destroyed in the Blitz, following which it found temporary homes before closing in 1981. This was the original of the club into whose pool Tuppy Glossop propelled Bertie Wooster ‘in the full soup and fish’ (i.e. full evening dress).

  And let us not forget Reginald Jeeves, himself a member of the Junior Ganymede Club for ‘Gentlemen’s Gentlemen’, located in a public house on the corner of Hay’s Mews and Charles Street and going by the improbable name ‘The Only Running Footman’, a reference to the eighteenth-century practice of having a footman running ahead of a gentleman’s carriage. In the Junior Ganymede Club the gentlemen’s gentlemen recorded their observations on their employers, eleven pages of the book, according to Jeeves, being devoted to the activities of Bertie Wooster. The pub was built in 1749 and rebuilt in the 1930s.

  Nearby to the south, at 110a Piccadilly, was the home of Lord Peter Wimsey, the fictional detective created by Dorothy L. Sayers, the site now occupied by the Park Lane Hotel. The addition of the ‘a’ to the address is thought by some to be a slightly cheeky reference to the ‘b’ added to 221 by Conan Doyle for his equally fictitious address for the more famous Sherlock Holmes.

  Nearby is The Albany, one of London’s most exclusive addresses, which was the home of Raffles, the gentleman thief created by E.W. Hornung, brother-in-law of Conan Doyle. Raffles’s prowess at cricket earn him invitations to country houses from which he steals to earn a living.

  The Only Running Footman in Mayfair is believed to have been the inspiration for the Junior Ganymede Club in P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories. (Mark Beynon)

  CIRCUMLOCUTION IN MAYFAIR

  Dickens also places some of his characters in the heart of Mayfair. Mr Tite Barnacle of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, who, in Dickens’s words, ‘had only one idea in his head and that was a wrong one’, bolsters his self-esteem by living in an airless house ‘not absolutely in Grosvenor Square itself but it was very near it’. When he has come into his fortune Mr Dorrit, released from the Marshalsea, moves into a hotel in Brook Street.

  At the time that Dickens was writing Little Dorrit, Mr and Mrs Claridge had just opened their hotel in Brook Street after buying an adjoining property. It is certainly the hotel used by Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms, in an unsuccessful and ultimately humiliating attempt to seduce his former wife, Virginia, though he eventually, and gallantly, remarries her when, destitute, she becomes pregnant by another man. Perhaps Dickens had in mind this hotel, which would become London’s grandest, for Old Dorrit.

  In Brook Street Dorrit is visited by the crooked financier Merdle, a resident of Harley Street on the slightly less fashionable north side of Oxford Street. Merdle later commits suicide after his bank collapses, taking with it Dorrit’s fortune. Merdle’s fate owed much to the example of the fraudster John Sadlier of the Tipperary Bank who, in 1856, committed suicide on Hampstead Heath by swallowing prussic acid. Little Dorrit was completed the following year.

  ‘A GREAT DEBAUCHEE’

  The St James’s district, across Piccadilly, was not for Bertie Wooster since the gentlemen’s clubs frequented by Evelyn Waugh like White’s (Brown’s in Uneasy Money) were too staid for young men who, when they wanted attention from a club servant would ‘heave a bit of bread at him’. Nor did Wooster consider becoming a candidate for the Athenaeum, a haunt of intellectuals and prelates which appears in Something Fishy and Money in the Bank as Lord Uffenham’s club The Mausoleum.

  Nearby, in what is perhaps the grandest street in this, the grandest part of London, is Carlton House Terrace, which overlooks the Mall and is the London home of the old Duke of Omnium, a prominent character in the Palliser novels, though Trollope’s verdict on him is most clearly expressed in his novel Dr Thorne:

  He rarely went near the presence of majesty, and when he did so, he did it merely as a disagreeable duty incident to his position … the Queen might be queen so long as he was the Duke of Omnium. Their revenues were about the same, with the exception that the duke’s were his own … In person he was a plain, thin man, tall, but undistinguished in appearance, except that there was a gleam of pride in his eye which seemed every moment to be saying ‘I am the Duke of Omnium.’ He was unmarried, and, if report said true, a great debauchee.

  To the north of Carlton House Terrace is Suffolk Street which was once the location of Anthony Trollope’s favourite London hotel, Garlant’s. He chose it for Eleanor, the daughter of the Revd Septimus Harding, as a convenient place to stay in London after she had married the innocuous clergyman the Revd Francis Arabin in Barchester Towers, and Trollope himself lived there for t
he last year of his life, suffering a stroke in November 1882 and dying the following month.

  POST OFFICES AND PRINCES

  Anthony Trollope was long employed by the Post Office and is credited with the invention of the pillar box. One of his places of work was the headquarters of the Post Office at St Martin’s le Grand, off Newgate Street. Until 1697 criminals could seek sanctuary in the grounds of the monastery, and later college, of St Martin’s le Grand. Sir Thomas More, in a work of 1513, claimed that Miles Forrest, one of those accused of murdering the Princes in the Tower, ‘rotted away piecemeal’ in the sanctuary.

  Anthony Trollope, more often associated with the cloisters of Barchester, showed a familiarity with London’s social gradations in many of his novels. Madame Max Goesler, the wealthy widow who befriends, rescues from conviction and finally marries Phineas Finn, the principal character in two of the Palliser novels, has a house in Park Lane, while Trollope places the crooked financier Melmotte, in The Way We Live Now, in a house in Grosvenor Square, the heart of Mayfair, though his downfall and suicide follow. Grosvenor Place, nearby, is the London home of Lady Laura Standish in Phineas Finn following her marriage to the immensely wealthy but obsessive and jealous Mr Kennedy. Convinced that Phineas Finn is the cause of his wife’s discontent, Kennedy tries to shoot Finn in a hotel in Judd Street, which runs south of the Euston Road opposite St Pancras station. Kennedy then sinks into madness and dies. In The Prime Minister the barely reputable Lady Eustace lived in ‘a very small house bordering upon Mayfair but the street, though very small, and having disagreeable relation with a mews, still had an air of fashion about it’. Trollope shows a more subtle touch in The Small House at Allington when Lady Alexandrina de Courcy nearly makes the ‘fatal error’ of moving to Pimlico, the more modest neighbour of the grander Belgravia. She raises her sights accordingly towards Eaton Square in the heart of Belgravia: ‘if indeed they could have achieved Eaton Square … her geographical knowledge of Pimlico had not been perfect and she had very nearly fallen into a fatal error.’