Richard Harding Davis
Harper’s Monthly/July, 1893
THE Derby, whatever it may have been to the English people in the past, seems to be chiefly patronized to-day by coster-mongers and Americans. I saw at the last Derby about forty thousand coster-mongers and gypsies, and some twenty thousand Americans, equally divided between well-known actors and the people you meet on the steamer. Of course there were other classes there, the idle rich and royalties, but they were not on the scene at all. They had as little to do with it as the Roman senators painted on the backdrop in Julius Caesar who remain stiff and dignified whatever befalls, have to do with the super senators who run up the stage crying “Kill, burn, destroy!” They formed a cluster of black hats in a corner of a grandstand that rose as high as the Equitable Building—a wall of human beings with faces for bricks. The real Derby crowd was that which stretched about this sheer wall upon Epsom Downs over miles and miles of dusty turf.
To approach the Derby in a proper frame of mind, and to get its full values, it is necessary to start sixteen miles away from it, and to draw near to it slowly and by degrees, and with humility of spirit. The spirit in which you return depends on different things, generally on a particular horse.
The Derby does not affect London town itself. I should like to be present at the public function which could. It does not overthrow it, and color it with blue and orange and black, as the football match does New York on Thanksgiving day. It sprinkles it with a number of young men with field-glasses about their persons, and a few more coaches than usual, but that is all. You reach the Surrey side and Clapham Road before you note the difference. And from there on for sixteen miles you are not allowed to forget that you are going to the Derby. You go on a coach if you wish to see it properly. By it I mean the scene and the people, and not the races, which are a very small part of it, and which are like all other races in that the wrong horse comes in first. Clapham Road begins at the other end of Vauxhall Bridge, and as your coach swings into it on a trot you take your place in a procession, and only trot thereafter by accident. This procession is made up of coster-monger carts; coaches with ringing horns and clanking harness; omnibuses, gay with enamelled advertisements; open trucks, carrying kitchen chairs for seats; hansoms, with hampers on top and mosquito nettings in front; and drays and vans and every make of wagon known to the London streets, from the Mile End Road of Whitechapel to the Mile of Hyde Park. To watch this procession on its way, thousands of men and women line the two sidewalks, and fill the windows of houses, the family, on the first floor, dressed for the occasion, and the nurse-maids and house-servants hanging out of the windows above them. These latter are amused or envious, as the case may be, and express themselves accordingly.
In the procession the coster-monger predominates. There is generally not less than six of him in one cart, with the poor little “moke,” as they for some unknown reason call their donkey, almost invisible, save for his ears and his little legs, that go pluckily twinkling in and out from beneath the legs of his owner, which are stretched along the shaft and encircle his neck.
“Six men and only one donkey?” some one exclaimed to a coster after the races.
“And why not?” said the man. “We all on us ’ad whips.”
The London coster is quite as typical in his way as the London policeman. He wears a white and blue dotted kerchief as the badge of all his race, and a high-cut waistcoat and a full long-tailed coat, both strung with pearl buttons as closely as they can be sewed together. If he is very smart he has his trousers slashed like a Mexican vaquero’s, with a triangle of black velvet and more pearl buttons. This is his unofficial uniform. Many of the gypsies wear it too, and it is all the more picturesque because it is unofficial. He pays more than he can afford for one of these suits, and they are handed down from father to son, and so in their time see many Derbys, and Sunday outings at the Welsh Harp, and bank holidays. He leaves Farringdon Road or Spitalfields or Whitechapel at four in the morning of Derby day, and so reaches it about one in the afternoon, after many halts. If he is a good coster, one who jumps upon his mother but seldom and only beats his wife when drunk, he takes the “missus” and the “nipper” and two or three pals with him. If he is not married, he gives the seat of honor to his sweetheart, or his “doner,” as he calls her. Her badge of office is a broad silver chain with a large silver locket attached, and a bonnet. She can also be told by the way she bangs her hair. The silver chain is inevitable; the bonnet is wonderful. The coster girls pay for these latter a sixpence a week on the instalment plan, and some of these bonnets from Petticoat Lane cost as much as the milliners on Bond Street ask for theirs. But the coster girl gets much more for her money. Her bonnet is as broad as a sombrero, slanting down in front over her eyes and hair, and towering at the back above her head, covered with colored feathers and ribbons and velvet. This bonnet is as characteristic and local to the coster girls of the east of London as are the gold head-dresses to the women of Scheveningen.
It is necessary to give the coster-monger so much space because the Derby really belongs to him, although he does not grudge you the spectacle. He rather enjoys your being there. He considers catching your eye a sufficient introduction, and bids you with solicitude to be careful of your health, and asks, “Wot cheer, Govenor?” or exclaims ecstatically: “My! Wot nice ladies you ‘ave got along o’ you; hain’t you? ‘Er with the straw’at in particular. I’m plaiying you to win, your ladyship, and the laiy next you for a plaice;”or he will stop suddenly in the middle of his song (for every wagon-load sings, so that as you go along you are steadily passing out of the burden of one melody into the rhythm of another), and standing up, cry, warningly: “Don’t you listen to ‘im, laidy. ‘Es adeceiven of you. It’s just ‘is gammon. Ahh! you sees, I knows you.”
There is a great deal of this sort of thing. It is extremely funny, or rough and vulgar, if you like, but that is really no reason why English women of the better class should not see it, as none of them apparently have done. That, however, touches on a national characteristic which would take very long to explain, even were it not to me, at least, still unintelligible.
After two hours you draw away from the solid rows of suburban villas, with immortal names painted on their very little door-posts, and drive by parks, and into villages and past public-houses, in front of which hundreds of wagon-loads have been emptied, and where the occupants, having been refreshed and enlivened, are taking the stiffness out of their limbs by dancing on the very dusty village green, the “doners” in their young men’s Derby hats, and the young men in the marvelous bonnets aforesaid. It is the noisiest and the best-natured of crowds, and the thirstiest, for the public houses apparently are not frequent enough, and many wagons carry their own kegs of ale on temporary tables running down the centre, upon which the occupants sprawl, lean, and pound with their pewter mugs.
The commons and parks give way to broad fields and bunches of trees and hedges, and the procession breaks into a trot and breathes the fresh air thankfully; or we pass between the high stone walls of some great estate, and can see the tennis-court from the top of the coach, and the owner and his friends, even at this early hour, taking tea, which in England is like a motion to adjourn. Even this far from town small boys, very red of countenance and covered with dust, accompany us on our way, turning cartwheels or somersaults, and landing heavily on their backs, only to scramble up again and run after us to call, “Throw us your mouldy coppers, sir,” or “’Ope you’ll pick the winner, sir.” At one place hundreds of orphans, in the uniform of the asylum to which they belong, are ranged behind a hedge under the care of sweet-looking teachers, and cheer wildly and continually, like a mob in a play, apparently at the prospect that someone at least, if not themselves, is going to enjoy himself. And men throw coppers, for which they scramble. It struck me that all the dear little girls in mob-caps, and the sweet little boys in regimentals playing so bravely in the asylum band, were learning a very curious lesson along that dusty highway, and that making beggars of them, and objects of careless pity from such a mob, would be hardly worth in years to come the few pennies which the day brought in.
To many of the crowd the day was an old story, and to wear away the time they played cards on the tables placed in their vans, or danced up and down the confined limits of the wagon, while the others beat time on their knees. The good-nature is the most marked feature of the day, and quite well worth remarking when one considers that thousands of drivers are handling from four horses to one donkey each, and that each is trying to get ahead of the one immediately in front, and that each thinks his particular animal is best entitled to take and to hold the right of way. Nothing. I think, speaks more highly of the Englishman’s inborn knowledge of driving, whether he be a butcher boy or Arthur Fownes, than this procession, three deep and sixteen miles long, on Derby day, with not a wheel gone nor a broken shaft to mark the course.
It is one o’clock before you leave the cultivated lands behind, and toil slowly up the steep hill to the downs, where the white dust rises suddenly like a mist and shuts out the rest of the world, leaving you in a white cloud, which blinds and suffocates you. It makes you understand the mosquito nets in front of the hansoms and the blue and green veils around the men’s hats.
It is a dust which conceals everything from view except the rear of the coach just in front and the flashes of light where the sun strikes on a piece of brass mounting. It is like moving through a fog at sea. One hears the crack of the whips and the creaking of wheels and leather all around, and the half-hearted protest of some guard on his horn, but one can only imagine what the dust hides, and comes out of it on the top of the downs as out of a Turkish bath, gasping and tearful, and wondering if those other people know how white and bedraggled and haggard they look. The top of the downs is one vast encampment—an encampment without apparent order or government, with every dust-covered hedge in sight lined with picketed horses and donkeys, and with hundreds more grazing along lines of rope which early risers have stretched for your convenience and their possible profit. You must pass through a mile of this impromptu stabling before you reach the race-track proper, and between rows and rows of carts resting upon their shafts, and hansom-cabs with the driver’s seat pointing skywards, and omnibuses abandoned for the time to gypsies and hostlers. It is a bivouac as great as that of an army corps. In the centre of these open-air stables rises the grandstand, with its back towards London. It is the highest grand stand in the world, and the people on the top of it cannot be recognized from the ground even with an opera-glass. It faces one end of a horseshoe track—a turf track, with stout rails on either side of it. In the centre of this horseshoe track is a valley; and this valley, and the track, and the downs beyond the horseshoe track, are covered for miles with what looks like a succession of great and little circuses and their accompanying side-shows. There is not a row of booths here and a bunch of tents there, but long irregular avenues and streets built of booths and flag-covered tents, with canvas pictures for walls, stretching on beyond one another for a mile, like a fighting line of old battleships with all their canvas set and all their signals flying; and in amongst these are thousands of people pushing and shoving and moving in black blocks and streams and currents, with a soldier’s scarlet coat or a gypsy’s yellow shawl showing for an instant, and then disappearing again in the ocean of black heads and white faces.
The Derby is quite free; at least unless you mount the monster grand stand, or go inside the enclosure between it and the track; but the rest is as free as a Lord Mayor’s show, and on the day that I was there sixty thousand people availed themselves of this freedom. In a country given to spectacular exhibitions—Wimbledon’s, jubilee processions, boat-races, naval reviews—the Derby strikes one as quite the most remarkable thing of this sort that the English do and they do them all particularly well. In no other country, I believe, do sixty thousand people travel sixteen miles to camp out around a race-track, and then break up camp and march back again the same night.
As a matter of fact, they do not all march back the same night. The gypsies and the fakirs, and hundreds of others around the training-stables (for the racing at Epsom Downs lasts a week), remain overnight, and this encampment, with the fires burning in the open air and the lights showing from under the canvas, makes as weird and wonderful a scene as that of the Derby day itself. But in the morning this sleeping bivouac rouses itself, and the tents go up as easily as umbrellas, and an army of people crowd the track and the grounds, as thickly as the City Hall Square is crowded on the night of a Presidential election. The coaches face the grandstand from the opposite side of the track. They are packed as closely together as the omnibuses in front of the Bank of England, so that one could walk for half a mile from one to the other of them without once touching the ground. The first which come of these take the best places, and the last are crowded in on them by the servants and the unemployed, who take out the leaders and shove with the wheelers until they have locked wheels with two other coaches, and have apparently entangled themselves forever. These coaches form a barrier three rows deep along the course, and the dresses of the women on top of them, and the luncheons, before their pyramids are demolished, make the place look like a succession of picnics in mid-air.
Back of these, down the valley between the curves of the horseshoe, are tents and the rings where wooden horses circle and prance, and railroad cars which mock the laws of gravity, dashing up and down wooden hills, and where there are shooting-galleries and boxing-booths and swings, and rows after rows of gypsy wagons (little green and red houses on wheels, with a pair of steps at the back like a bathing-machine), and solid phalanxes of shouting book-makers. These last stand in couples, dressed ridiculously alike, as a guarantee that they do not intend to lose themselves in the crowd, and with banners behind them to tell who they may be, from whence they come, and what a very old and trustworthy firm theirs is.
“Good old Ted Marks,” and “Splasher Getters of Manchester’”; “Diamond Jack of Birmingham”—”Fair play, quick pay, and civility to all” is his motto—and “Ikey Kennedy, the Music Hall pet,” in a gilded four-wheel wagon, with his portrait in oils on the sides. There are dozens of such wagons and hundreds of bookmakers. Some in white flannel caps, clothes, and shoes, others all in red silk with red silk opera hats and evening dress, others with broad sashes spangled with bright new shillings like shirts of chain armor, and others in velvet or Scotch plaids. They are grotesque, loud-voiced, red-faced, and each couple identical in appearance, even to the flower in the button-hole and the scarf-pin. They will take anything from a shilling to a five-pound note, and they take a great many of both.
But if you would get something for your money other than a ticket with “Lucky Tom Tatters of London” printed upon it, you can throw wooden balls at cocoanuts in front of a screen, or a wooden heads, or at walking-sticks, and perhaps get one of the cocoanuts, or a very bad cigar. You can also purchase a purse in which you have seen a gentleman in a velveteen coat put a sovereign, which is not there when you open the purse, or bet on which one of three cups the little round ball is under, or buy wooden doll babies with numerous joints to stick in your hatband, or colored paper flowers and feathers to twine around it, these latter being traditional. People always put doll babies in their hats after the Derby—you can see them in Frith’s picture: “It has always been done,” they will tell you, if you ask, and that is all the reason you can obtain, or that you desire if you are a good Englishman. There are also numerous venders of tin tubes and dried peas, with which joyous winners on their way home pepper the legs of the helpless footmen on the back of the coach in front, and of pewter squirts filled with water with which they re-freshen the dust-covered “bobbies”; or, if you are a sportsman, you can watch a prize-fight which is always just about to begin, or shoot at clay pipes with a rifle, or try your strength by pounding a peg into the ground.
These are all very moderately priced pleasures, but there is much you can get for nothing at all. You do not have to pay to see the clown on stilts walking above the heads of the crowd, and frightening Eliza by putting one leg over her shoulder and trusting that she will not jump the wrong way; or to see the man who allows anyone in the crowd to break with a sledge-hammer the rocks which he holds on his breast, and who jumps up unharmed and dashes after the dissolving audience with his tattered hat.
You see so much to entertain you on the grounds that you forget about the races, although the sight from the coach is, in its broader view, quite as amusing and impressive as the one you obtain by pushing through the crowd. Instead of moving about to see other people, the other people come to call on you, chiefly musicians of several nationalities, who sing sentimental songs sentimentally to the young women on the next drag, who try to pretend they do not know that they are being made to look ridiculous; and little yellow-haired girls on stilts, who seat themselves on the box, and draw their stilts up out of the way, and sing, “I’m er blushin’ bud of innercence; papa says I’m a great expense”; and troops of burnt-cork comedians who pretend they know the people on the coaches, and who flatter the weak in spirit by crying: “Ahh! glad to see your lordship ‘ere todoiy. I ain’t forgot the ’arf-crown your lordship give me when your lordship won that pot of money off King Remus, Kenton Park Way. Your lordship allus wos a good one at pickin’ a winner. Now, wot can we sing at your lordship’s command ter-day?” At which his lordship, being a real-estate agent from Chicago, is extremely pleased, and commands his favorite melody.
There are a great many Americans at the Derby. It is something of which they have all heard, and in consequence want to see. An Englishman has also heard about it, but that does not necessarily make him want to see it.
There are some things there which no one cares to see—men fighting in the dirt for the chicken bones some groom has scraped off a plate and thrown between the wheels, and men who, when someone on the coach, seeing this, hands them decent food in a decent way, tremble all over as a dog does when you hold up a stick, and choke the food into their mouths with one hand while the other (wasted one) is stretched out for more, and men and boys sleeping heavily under the very feet of the crowd, worn out with the endless noise and excitement and the sixteen-mile walk and drink, and the young bank clerk who came overdressed, and was suddenly beset on all sides, and who now stands stunned and silly with empty pockets and a hole in his scarf to show where his pin had been. Or one sees a quick congestion of the crowd in one spot, and policemen making through it like men through water, arm over arm, until they meet around and rescue some poor wretch of a book-maker who has tried to sneak away from his debts, and upon whom one of his creditors, knowing that the law of England will not recognize a gambling debt, has called down the unwritten law of the race-track, and has hurled the cry of “Welsher.” An awful word, that means nothing to us, but which sometimes on an English racecourse means death from man-handling. And the fellow is run out into the track trembling with terror and clinging to the officers about him, with his tawdry suit of velvet torn from his back, and his face and naked shoulders covered with sweat and dust, and the blood that shines brilliantly in the sunlight, all his blatant noisy swagger gone, and with nothing left but au awful terror of his fellow-men. When Englishmen used to deprecate the sad prevalence of lynch-law in some parts of my own country, I used to ask them if they had ever heard a man cry “’Welsher” in England, and they would fall back on the evils of our protective tariff and of our use of ice-water at dinner.
The races at the Derby are very beautiful examples of how grand a spectacle a horse-race can be. I can only speak of them as a spectacle, and not knowingly in sporting phraseology, because a compositor once made me say that the odds on a horse were 60 to 0, and a great many clever sporting editors, whose experience was limited to Gutenberg, pointed out by this how little I know. Since that I have avoided writing of horse-races, except as a picturesque and pretty institution.
What first puzzles one at the Derby is to see where the horses are going to And room to run, for the track is blocked with the mob, which stands doubtfully fingering the sixpences in its pockets, and listening to the young men who are selling tips on the race to follow, and beseeching the crowd about them to remember what they foretold at the Manchester races a year ago.
“Did I say Orleander would win? Did I? I arsk you now, as man to man, did I, or did I not? I did. Right, sir, I did. And the gents wot patronized me got a quid for every bob they ’ad up. I don’t spend moi toime ’ang-ing- round pubs, I don’t, I’m hup every mornin’ on these ’ere downs a-watchin’ these ’ere ’orses run, and I knows wot’s wot, and it’s all writ down ’ere in these ’ere pieces of paiper which I’m givin’ away for a tanner.” Mixed with these young men are evangelists with an organ on wheels, to the accompaniment of which they sing hymns. They are not the Salvationists, though one sees the rod jerseys of these also, but soberly clothed, earnest-looking men, perfectly impassive to the incongruity of their surroundings, and fervent in their hope of accomplishing some good. They have as large a circle about them as has the tipster, and they are too familiar a sight wherever many people are gathered together in England to be either scoffed at or encouraged. But when the bell rings, all of these—tipster, evangelist, and colored comedian—fly before the important business of the moment, and there is a rush to the rails, which men clutch desperately like wrecked mariners to a mast-head, and a sudden overflow among the carriages as the mounted police ride slowly along the length of the track, leaving a clear broad green road behind them.
And then the horses canter up the course, and come back again with a rush of colors and straining necks amidst what is almost, for so large a multitude, complete silence. Englishmen do not make themselves heard as does a racing crowd in America. The most interesting effect in the race to one who is looking up the track, and who is not interested in the finish, is what seems to be a second place, as the crowd breaks in after the last of the horses and sweeps down the track, making it appear shortened behind as the horses move forward.
When it is all over there is the desperate hurry of departure, the harnessing up of frightened horses, and the collecting of the stray members of the different coaching parties, and a great blowing of horns and cracking of whips, and much inelegant language, and long and tiresome waits of a quarter of an hour each, while the great mob that arrived at different hours tries to get out and depart at the same moment. But as soon as the downs are cleared, and Clapham Road is reached, the procession of the morning is re-formed; the crowds, only greater in number, line the way on either side, and there is much more singing and much more blowing of horns and playing of accordions and airy persiflage. The coster does not object to making- himself look ridiculous. He rejoices intensely in a false nose and a high paper cap. He would not feel that he had enjoyed the day or done it proper honor if someone in his party did not sing or play the accordion, and if all of them did not wear plumes in their top hats. We have nothing which exactly corresponds with this at home; the people of the east and west sides, when they go off for a day’s holiday, do not make themselves ridiculous on purpose. If one of their party wore a false nose, or a red and yellow hat two feet high, or stuck doll babies all over his person, he would be frowned upon as being too “fresh.” The day is not complete to the east side tough here unless he helps to throw someone off the barge, or thrashes the gentleman who wants to “spiel” with his girl. And the Englishman of the lowest class is much more musically inclined than his American brother. From the downs to High Street, Whitechapel, there is one continual burst of song—the songs, as a rule, it is interesting to note, being those which a man of an entirely different class had written for audiences of as wholly different class, but which were hailed and adopted unanimously by the people of the class about which they were written. I refer to Albert Chevalier and his coster-monger ditties. One sees the same thing in the way the British soldiers in India sing Mr. Kipling’s barrack-room ballads, and the inhabitants of Cherry Street have adopted Mr. Braham’s “Maggie Murphy’s Home.”
Many of these vocalists fall by the wayside, under a hedge or against the walls of a public-house, and the waits at these places become more general and more frequent, and so it is quite dark before you reach the asphalt again, and find the streets ablaze with light and rimmed with black lines of spectators and beggars, who hope you have had a lucky day, and who entreat, with a desperation which recognizes this to be the last chance for another year, that you will throw them what remains of your “ mouldy coppers.”
One finds the Cup day of Royal Ascot a somewhat tame affair after the rowdy good nature and vast extent of the Derby. It is neither the one thing nor the other. There is rather too much dust and too frequent intrusions of horses upon the scene to make it a successful garden party, and there are too many women to make it a thoroughly sporting race meeting. There seem to be at least four women—generally twins, to judge by their gowns—to every man. The crowd that makes the Derby what it is, is only present at Ascot on sufferance. The smart people, to whom Ascot primarily and solely belongs, have all the best places and the best time; but even the best time does not seem to be a very good time. They all appear to be afraid of mussing their frocks, which, when they have so many, seems rather mean-spirited. There is a track at Ascot over which horses run at great speed at irregular intervals, but nobody takes them seriously. One is either back in the royal enclosure taking tea, or behind the grand stand on the lawn, quite out of sight of the track, or lunching on the long line of coaches facing it, or in the club and regimental tents back of these, where, for all one can see of it, the race might be coming off in Piccadilly, Every well-known regiment has its own luncheon tent, with its soldier-servants in front, the native Indians in white and red turbans and the sailors being the most successful, and many of the London clubs have their tents also, and the pretty women, and the big, narrow-waisted young men, all of whom look and walk and dress alike—even to the yellow leather field glass over the right shoulder, which never comes out of its case—pass from tent to tent, and from coach to coach, and from the Enclosure to the grand stand throughout the whole of the day, seeking acquaintances and luncheon, and tasting horrible claret-cup and warm champagne. The Ascot races were under the especial charge last year of the Earl of Coventry, who, as master of the Queen’s buckhounds, had, among other duties, that of refusing the applications of five thousand people for a place in the Enclosure. This in itself must be something of a responsibility, although it is likely that after one has refused three thousand, the other two thousand would not weigh on one’s mind. It is also his duty and pleasure, when the court is not in mourning, to ride at the head of a group of richly attired gentlemen leading the royalties in their carriages.
This is a very pretty sight. The horses are very fine, and the coats very pink, and Lord Coventry is, as he should be, the ideal of an English gentleman M. F. H. He only clears the track once; after that the ordinary mounted police perform this service, which is a somewhat superfluous duty, as the crowd go on with their own pursuits whether the track is clear or not. The Ascot gowns are probably the most striking effect of the day; a woman would recall one or two of them, but to a man they appear as a dazzling whole; they are the first and the last thing he sees; they force themselves upon him before anything else, as the multitude of hansom-cabs on a London street press on the eye before you recognize which street it is.
To the American there must always be something delightful in the idea of the Enclosure; but the reality is a trifle disappointing. He has, of course, outgrown the idea that royalties look differently from other people, but such an aggregation of social celebrities penned up, as it were, and on view to such an immense mob, seems to promise something less conventional. But it is interesting to hear the present bearer of a very great name fuss and fret because there are two and not three lumps in his tea, and to find that the very much made up lady is the professional beauty, and not the young and very beautiful one who is laughing so heartily at a song of a colored comedian on the other side of the rail, and that she in turn was once a clergyman’s daughter and is now a Personage indeed, and “walks in” before all the other great ladies and professional beauties and the young girl friends of her own age with whom she once used to play tennis and do parish work. It is also curious to consider that “only a brandy bottle” stands between a shy little man and a title which is written up in bronze from Hyde Park corner to Westminster Bridge, and that the “black man,” who is not at all black, in the ill-fitting gray frock-coat, is a prince of half of India, and that the very much bored young man who is sitting down while three women are standing and talking to him is a manufacturer’s son who is worth a million pounds sterling. It is also interesting to hear the policemen tell the crowd outside the fence that they must not even “touch the railing.” It makes you think you are at a circus, and listening to the keeper warning the group in front of the lion’s cage. I really could not see what harm it would have done had they happened to touch the railing itself, especially when it was the fault of those behind who were so keen to see. And it is only fair to say that the lions behaved admirably, and were quite unconscious of the presence of so many awe-stricken spectators. That is all that saved it from being ridiculous on both sides of the barrier.
I do not think that royalty looks well in the garb of every day, and in the sunlight to which we can all lay claim. Its members should be reserved for functions and dress parades and levees. They look much better then. Their appearance in high hats and in jewels worn with cloth walking dresses is artistically and politically wrong. It is much better not to have royalty at all than to have a democratic royalty which stops to laugh at Punch and Judy shows, as did George III, or goes to smoking concerts, as do some of his descendants. Such conduct may endear royalty to the hearts of the people, but it is extremely annoying to the visiting American. Royalty is either royal or it is nothing; and when it steps off the red plush and walks over to Tattersall’s to back Orvieto, it loses its only excuse and its only interest.
What impresses you most about Henley is the way in which everyone contributes to make it what it is. It is not divided into those who are looked at and those who look on. Every one helps, from the young man in the blue coat and the red ribbon of the Leander Club, who lounges on the house-boat, to the perspiring waterman, with his brass shield and red coat, who ferries you from one bank to the other. The chance spectator gives just as much to the scene as does the winner of the Diamond Sculls. Everyone and every boat-load is part of a great panorama of color and movement, some giving more than others. Letty Lind, of the Gaiety Theatre, for instance, under her lace parasol in the Gaiety enclosure, is more pleasing to look at than the stout gentleman who is bumping everything within reach of his punt, and who is kept busy begging pardons from one end of the course to the other; but even he makes you smile lazily, and so contributes to the whole.
You are impressed, as you are at so many of the big English out-of-door meetings, with the system and the order of the thing, and with the rules which govern your pleasure, and the fact that the rules which control the Henley week are as strictly in force as those which govern the Bank of England, and are quite as excellent. There is no scrambling for places, nor mixture of the good with the bad, and the speculator, who does all he can to spoil every successful meeting in America, from the football matches and the Horse Show to a Paderewski recital, is unknown. A governing committee, or board of trustees, or some such important body, sit in conclave long before Henley week, and receive applications from clubs for places along the bank, and from families for portions of the lawns, and from the owners of house-boats for positions on the course. And the board of trustees decide who shall go where and which shall have what, and the lordly houseboat and the humble fakir who asks room on the opposite bank for his cocoanut stand are treated with equal consideration. And so when you come down from town in your flannels, prepared to be pleased and to enjoy yourself, you find the scene set, and the ushers in their places, and your seat reserved for you. That is the great thing about England—its law and order, which keeps the hired carriages out of the Row, which arrests you for throwing an envelope out of a hansom cab, and which controls the position of your canoe at Henley. In America it is everyone for himself. In England it is everyone for everyone else, and though the individual may occasionally suffer, the majority rejoice. It may annoy you to find that you must not anchor your launch to a house-boat, and leave it there while you walk about on the turf; but if it is left there it annoys hundreds of others who need the room it takes, and so when you return you will find that the river police have removed it, and tied it up at some place where lost articles are classified and cared for. This hurts your feelings, but it is good for the public.
The racing is a very small part of Henley. It must necessarily be so when two boats only can row at the same time, and when the advantage of position means an advantage of two lengths to the crew which pull under the shelter of the house-boats. An arrangement so absurd as that cannot be considered as coming under the head of serious sport. Henley is a great water picnic, not a sporting event; it is the out-of-door life, the sight of the thousands of boats and thousands of people in white and colors, all on pleasure bent, and the green trees, and beautiful flowers of the houseboats, and the colored lanterns at night and the fireworks, which make Henley an institution. It strikes one at first as being very small, as it really is, much smaller than the name and fame of the race and place lead one to expect.
You enter into the spirit of Henley when you get your ticket in town, and find hundreds of young men and maidens crowding the platform, and dressed as no one would dare to dress in New York city—in the most barbarous blazers and brilliant boating suits—the sort of garments men or girls might have worn a few years ago at the Pier or at Bar Harbor, but which they would certainly not expose to the stares of Broadway, or to the criticisms of the idlers around a railroad station. America is a fine free country in many ways, but England is much more free in one, and allows her subjects or the strangers within her gates to dress as they please, and where they please. Hundreds more of such holiday-looking beings met the special trains at Henley station, and from that on you see no more round hats, or black coats, or varnished boots. The whole boating fraternity of the Thames seems to have been turned into the queer quaint town, with its crooked streets and more crooked red roofs, and everyone is sunburnt and comfortable-looking and happy.
From the big stone bridge to a point a mile below, the house-boats stretch along one bank, and green grass and high trees line the other, and on the river between are processions and processions of boats, so close that the owners touch with their hands; they move along in blocks, or pull out of the crush by stealing a tow from the boat just ahead. A skillful and agile athlete could cross the river dry-shod at places by stepping from one boat to another. The boats and their crews disappear and reappear like a shuttle in a loom, moving slowly in and out, or shooting ahead if they are small enough, and you catch a glimpse of a pretty face or a more than striking costume only to lose it again as another boat slips in the way like the slide in a stereopticon. Whether you look down upon it from a house-boat or are in the midst of it in a canoe, the effect is more brilliant and the changes more bewildering than are the advancing and retreating lines of any great ballet you have ever seen. And at night, even when you try to sleep, you still see the colors and the shining sunlight flashing on the polished wood-work, and the boats as they move in and out and swallow each other up.
The setting of the scene is very good. Nature has been the landscape-gardener of one bank with trees and gradually rising hills, and man has made the other brilliant with the long row of house-boats. A house-boat can be a very modest and barnlike affair, or it can suggest a bower of fresh flowers and a floating Chinese pagoda combined. Those at Henley are of this latter kind. Some of them were pink and white, with rows of pink carnations, or white and gold, with hanging vines of green, or brilliantly blue, with solid banks of red geraniums. Some of them were hidden entirely by long wooden boxes of growing flowers, which overflowed and hung down in masses of color to the water’s edge, and all had gorgeously striped awnings and Chinese umbrellas and soft Persian rugs everywhere, and silk flags of the owners’ own design flapping overhead. It is only a step along the gang-plank to the lawn, and so on down the line to the next open space, where some club has a bit of lawn reserved for it, and has erected a marquee, and brilliant standards proclaiming its name, and guiding the thirsty and hungry member to its luncheon table.
There are possibly more profitable ways of employing one’s time and more intellectual amusements, but you are very near to content when you fall back in a wicker chair on the top of one of these waterhouses, and feel the breeze lifting the awning overhead, and hear the trees scraping it with their leaves; and were it not for the necessity of getting up to watch two crews of young men pulling violently past at an unusual speed, the race week at Henley would be quite ideal.
The Archive 