Mr. Punch (supported by shades of two of his most famous henchmen, John Leech and Charles Keene): "Good-bye, old friend. You've been very useful to me, but your day is done."

Cabs v. Taxis

London underwent many notable changes, structural and otherwise, between 1892 and 1914, but perhaps the most remarkable were brought about by the engineer rather than by the architect. Macadam had yielded to asphalt, and now asphalt largely gave place to the wood pavement. Electric lighting became general, and with the "electrification" of the old Underground a favourite source of well-founded complaint was finally removed. But the conspicuous and outstanding feature of London traffic in this period was the coming of the Tubes, while above ground it was revolutionized by the motor, and the passing to a great extent of horse-drawn vehicles. As early as 1902 Mr. Briton Rivière uttered a lament over the disappearance of the horse from London traffic. His point of view was quite intelligible, but it was purely artistic. Punch was a great lover of the "noble animal," but it was precisely for that reason that he welcomed its release from the drudgery and suffering, the maltreatment and overloading inseparable from the old order. The speeding-up of street traffic brought with it new perils and noises, but it freed us from many discomforts and nuisances – for example, the "cab-runner," rampant in the middle 'nineties, who plagued unprotected females by his extortions and insolence until the coming of the taxi ran him off his legs. At the time of the South African War, when Punch noted the commandeering of 'bus horses for service at the front, he declared that there had been hardly any improvement in the public vehicles of London since the days of Shillibeer – the coach-builder who introduced omnibuses to London in 1829. It is true that the drivers were famous for their conversational powers, which motor-bus drivers are unable to exercise owing to their isolation, but only mediævalists can lament the passing of the old lumbering, stuffy 'bus, dimly lit by oil lamps, and in wet weather redolent of damp straw. As for the "growler," Punch was decidedly premature when in 1905, the centenary of the year in which public conveyances first plied for hire in London, he assumed that its reign was over. In 1907 he paid the "growler" the homage of a cartoon in which Punch, attended by the shades of John Leech and Charles Keene, admitted that the "Cabby" had been "very useful to him" – as a target for generally hostile criticism. In spite of Punch's repeated valedictions, the "growler" continued to emerge during strikes in later years, and I am not certain whether it can be pronounced to be dead even yet. In 1907, again, there is a curious reference to the now largely disused practice of whistling for cabs. An irritated hansom-cabby observes to a gentleman who has been whistling for a "taximeter cab" for ten minutes – in series of three whistles – "Try four whistles, guv'nor, and p'r'aps you'll get an airship." The whistling code had first of all to be revised so as to establish the precedence of the "taxi," and then was simplified by the disappearance of the "growler" and the hansom. In this context may be quoted the epitaph based on the fact that a French traveller had taken "Job Masters" to be a personal name, and published in 1909: —

His horses were old and his carriages were older,
But they were all we could get and we had to put up with them.
His watchwords were Livery and Bait, and he will be sadly missed.
His end was Petrol.

The Fairy Electra (to Steam Locomotive Underground Demon): "Now they've seen me, I fancy your days are numbered."

(Central London Electric Railway opened by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales – Wednesday, June 27, 1900.)

The L.C.C. Trams

On the vexed question of the extension of the tramway system to central London Punch did not maintain an inflexible consistency. In 1905 he supported the L.C.C. in their effort to carry the tram system across Westminster Bridge and along the Embankment, and when their Bill, passed in the Commons, was thrown out by the Lords, he showed Lord Halsbury, the leader of the Opposition on this occasion, as an out-of-date Horatius, Punch informing him that "this isn't ancient Rome. This is modern London, and you've just got to move on." Yet in 1907 the congestion of empty trams between Blackfriars and Westminster Bridge moved him to ridicule the L.C.C.'s "Spectacular Vacuum Embankment Trams," and to paint a fancy portrait of a grocer's assistant who had actually succeeded in riding in one of them. Later on, again, on the eve of the War, Punch made it clear that he had no sympathy with the L.C.C. in their obstinate preference for trams as opposed to motor-buses. The L.C.C. tram was "beaten on points" by its more flexible rival. "Hard lines on me," says the tram. "Yes," retorts the motor-bus, "it's always hard lines with you, my boy. That's what's the matter; you can't side-step."

But the coming of the new order in London locomotion dates appropriately from the year 1900. Early in that year Mr. Punch describes his experiences on a trip from the Monument to Stockwell in what he calls the "Sardine-box railway," dwelling on the scrimmages of passengers and the rocking of the trains, and endorsing the company's advertisement that it was the "warmest line in London." Criticism gives place to eulogy in the summer, when the fairy "Electra" gives the Steam Locomotive Underground Demon notice to quit, and Punch adopts the phrase, "The Twopenny Tube," from his lively but short-lived contemporary the Londoner. "Horace in London" indites a "Carmen Tubulare" in honour of the new Underground, and a burlesque article is based on the notion that the ozone generated in the Tubes would lead to a monstrous growth of appetite. The new and highly irregular verb, "Tu be," is conjugated in all tenses and moods, beginning: "I tube, thou payest tuppence; he Yerkes⁶; we get a hustle on; ye block the gangways; they palm off 'bus tickets." Complaints of over-crowding testified to the popularity of the new method of transit, and the voice of the "strap-hanger" was soon loud in the land. The congestion on the suburban railways had moved one of Punch's bards to poetic remonstrance as early as 1901: —

We wage no far-off conflict with Afridi or with Boer,
A present peril we must face, our foes are at the door;
Brave must he be of heart, and as a flint must set his face,
Who in the train at Finsbury Park would struggle for a place.

French Tourist (to Father Thames): "Dis, donc, mon vieux, when does the next boat start on your beautiful river?"

Father Thames: "It doesn't start. I ain't allowed to have any boats."

Six years later Punch describes "rack-hanging" on the suburban lines of the Great Eastern as one stage worse than "strap-hanging" on the Underground. Another and more formidable outcome of the subterranean extension of London traffic was noted in 1913 à propos of the cracks in St. Paul's. Punch's Londoner exults complacently over the impending downfall, so long as he is swiftly transported from his home to his office: —

I thunder down to work each morn,
And some historic shrine
Must have its matchless fabric torn
To get me there at nine;

And when I gather up my traps,
As sundown sets me free
A nation's monuments collapse,
To take me home to tea.

To parody Lord John Manners's couplet: —

Let fanes and monuments in ruins lie,
But give us still our new Mobility.

While there was this feverish activity in developing surface and subterranean communications on land, the apathy of the authorities in failing to develop an efficient service of steamboats roused Punch to repeated protests – notably in the cartoon where Father Thames explains to a French visitor: "I ain't allowed to have any boats." In more complacent mood, however, Father Thames ejaculates, "Well, I'm blowed! This quite gets over me," as he surveys the opening in 1894 of the great Tower Bridge, or "the Giant Causeway," as Punch calls it. In 1896 Punch was concerned with the intention of the L.C.C. to do away with Chelsea Reach, and did not disguise his satisfaction when the scheme was "turned down" by a Select Committee. On the other hand, the unkempt and squalid condition of what he sarcastically calls the "Surrey Riviera" suggested a cartoon in January, 1913, exhibiting Father Thames in his filthiest guise saying plaintively, "I know a bank where the foul slime flows."

London's New Cathedral

The most notable of the structural changes in London in this period was the opening of the new thoroughfare from Holborn to the Strand and the clearing away of the old rookeries at the southern end. Kingsway and Aldwych were the names coined by Sir Laurence Gomme for the thoroughfare and crescent, and could not have been improved on; but Punch exercised his ingenuity in offering a variety of suggestions purporting to be made by famous and notorious personages of the hour: e.g. "Via Marie," "John Lane," etc. Among single buildings the most notable addition was the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster, consecrated in 1903. Bentley's masterpiece was the largest and most impressive church erected in London since St. Paul's, which Punch, in his irreverent "Lightning Guide" described as "London's largest temple and the biggest Wren's nest ever known." The new internal decoration executed in the early years of this century by the late Sir W. B. Richmond prompted the remark that "the Christian law is upheld in the nave, but the inside of the dome is strictly Mosaic." Mr. Hammerstein's Opera House in Kingsway after a brief allegiance to the serious lyric Muse went the way of other similar ventures. In the autumn of 1912 Punch saw in the vacant theatre a chance for English opera, but his cartoon, "Now or Never," was not exactly optimistic, and the claims of Variety once more triumphed.

When improvements on a large scale are planned and executed it has generally been found impossible to reconcile the demands of High Art with the aims of municipal politics. The appeal of leading artists and architects was powerless to prevent the spoiling of the eastward vista along the chord of the Aldwych arc. So with the scheme of the Victoria Memorial, involving the new road from Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace. In the "Finishing Touch" Punch represented the County Councillor blandly correcting London's remonstrance with him for blocking the view. Not a bit of it; he was only improving things: "ars est celare artem, you know" – in reference to the action of the "Improvements" Committee of the L.C.C. in allowing the prospect of the Admiralty Arch to be obstructed by a building at the eastern end.

The French have a saying that administrative art is always arid; Punch went further and roundly accused the L.C.C. of Vandalism. In their schemes for widening Piccadilly in 1901 he scented a sinister design of converting it into a tramway route, just as he had foreshadowed the conversion of Rotten Row into a bicycle track in 1895 – this, by the way, at a time when bicycling in the Park was only allowed from 10 A.M. till 12 noon. As a faithful champion of the equestrian interest, Punch renewed in 1894 the appeals he had made in earlier years for making more rides in Hyde Park. He was much concerned with the general dirt and disorder which reigned there – the frowsy and immoral loungers, "socialist scamps and somnolent tramps, scoundrels who swear and zealots who groan," and welcomed the new rules in 1896 in the belief that they would exclude tub-thumpers, Salvationists and atheists, "sot and satyr, crank and vandal." Punch, in his zeal for maintaining the decencies and amenities of our parks, laid himself open to the charge of an anti-democratic bias. He was, however, sincerely proud of the glories of London, while always ready to denounce the blots on her scutcheon. Sir W. B. Richmond's anti-smoke crusade met with his approval in 1898. Writers who dilated on the fine atmospheric effects of London fog jarred on his robust common sense, but the beauties of Richmond Park in all seasons inspired him to genuine enthusiasm. A lyrical "note" new to his columns is sounded in the charming lines which he printed in 1910: —

Have you been to royal Richmond when the year is growing mellow,
And October, mild and fruitful, on its woodland sets her mark,
When the footpath – of her bounty – has a carpet red and yellow,
And the great harts roar a challenge as the twilight meets the dark,
And at half-past five or so,
There are lights that flash and glow,
Thrilling upward in the quiet out of Kingston down below?

London Smoke (tyrant and murderer): "Methinks there are two Richmonds in the field."

(A Mr. Richmond writes to The Times in support of the Anti-Smoke campaign of Sir William B. Richmond, K.C.B., R.A. Mr. Punch says, heartily, "Let 'em all come, and more power to their elbows!")

The End of the Westminster Aquarium

I do not find that Punch in his record of "disappearances" notes the disuse of hatchments, but he duly chronicles at the close of 1895 the termination of the last of the old turnpike trusts on November 1. "Vanishing London" generally moved him to elegy. Over the Lowther Arcade, which was closed in 1898 by the sale of the Crown lease, he did not waste many tears, and the end of the Westminster Aquarium in January, 1903, did not excite any passionate regret. Still, Punch had seen many strange shows and celebrities within its walls – Blondin, Zazel and Zaeo, Slavin and Sullivan, Pongo the Ape, Sandow the strong man, John Roberts the master of the cue; and a certain mitigated melancholy broods over Punch as we watch him

Muse over a pipe of the days that are dead,
Dream that once more I am able to scan
Closely the bird with the duplicate head,
Live once again with the Petrified Man.

It was another matter altogether when Punch heard that Clifford's Inn was to be pulled down in April of the same year. In his indignation he suggests that the Temple Gardens, Middle Temple Hall and Temple Church should forthwith be sacrificed to the craze for improvements, and continues in the same strain of exaggerated irony: —

If you turn the Charterhouse into a railway station, the Tower into warehouses and Westminster Hall into an Inebriates' Home, something will have been done towards making London a happier and a better place.

Another sign of the times which frequently exercised Punch's mind and stimulated his satire was the multiplication of huge new hotels. In 1902, when it was announced that St. James's Hall was about to be pulled down to make room for another of these monsters, Punch pictured Macaulay's New Zealander coming to visit London and finding it entirely composed of hotels and residential flats. The luxury à l'Américaine of these mammoth establishments excited Punch's strictures in 1907; simultaneously he inveighs against the poky and insanitary arrangements of the modern flat.

In earlier years Punch had been prodigal of suggestions for the "improvement" of London; in this period he is more critical than constructive, though I note that in 1904 he reverts to his old suggestion of a great open-air café. This, he now proposed, should occupy the ground floor of the Ritz, with a terrasse overlooking Piccadilly and the Green Park. But Punch did not scorn the cheap restaurants, and in one of his "Lays of a Londoner" pays homage to the charms of Soho – a tribute culminating in this admirable stanza: —

Borne on the cosmopolitan breezes
Divinely blended odours trickle,
The louder forms of foreign cheeses
Contend against the home-made pickle.

Cromwell and Carlyle

It is hoped that Chelsea, with its Artists' Quarter, will take advantage of the magnificent opportunity offered by the four chimneys of the generating station. Why not an equestrian statue of Carlyle, reading his own works?

On the subject of statues and memorials Punch had always held strong views; views that by no means ministered to national self-satisfaction. When the question of a statue to Cromwell came up once more in 1894, Punch practically repeated his old cut, with a slight variation of treatment, in "Room for a Big One," Cromwell addressing his Royal rivals, "Now then, your Majesties, I hope I don't intrude." In May, 1895, Punch returned to the charge in his most truculent anti-monarchical vein: —

ON THE NEW STATUE

("Her Majesty's Government are about to entrust to one of our first sculptors a great historical statue, which has too long been wanting to the series of those who have governed England." – Lord Rosebery at the Royal Academy Banquet.)

Our "Uncrowned King" at last to stand
'Midst the legitimate Lord's anointed?
How will they shrink, that sacred band,
Dismayed, disgusted, disappointed!
The parvenu Protector thrust
Amidst the true Porphyrogeniti?
How will it stir right royal dust!
The mutton-eating King's amenity
Were hardly proof against this slur.
William the thief, Rufus the bully,
The traitor John, and James the cur —
Their royal purple how 'twill sully
To rub against the brewer's buff!
Harry, old Mother Church's glory,
Meet this Conventicler? – Enough!
The Butcher dimmed not England's story,
But rather brightened her renown
In camp and court, it must be said,
And if he did not win a crown,
At least he never lost his head!

Punch's acid remark made many years before, that we were incapable of producing a fine statue or memorial, is virtually repeated in his suggestion, made in 1896, for the formation of a "Metropolitan Statues Supply Association" for the purpose of supplying public statues and monuments on the hire system. There was certainly good excuse for the burlesque, for, as Punch reminds us, "Mr. Akers-Douglas, replying to Mr. Labouchere as to whether his attention had been called to a statue 'purporting to be of the late Mr. John Bright in the Central Lobby,' and whether it is to remain there, said that it was erected under arrangements made with his predecessors. He admitted that there were very varied views as to its artistic merits."

National Heroes and their Memorials

In 1902 the fall of the Campanile of St. Mark's at Venice prompts a Trafalgar Square Lion to remark: "I only wish some of our London monuments would come down as easily." In an earlier volume I have mentioned Punch's reiterated complaints of the time taken in completing the Nelson Memorial in Trafalgar Square. In 1903, after fifty years had elapsed, the monument to the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul's was still unfinished. Punch dealt faithfully with this discreditable delay in a caustic perversion of Tennyson's ode, "Bury the Great Duke," and a cartoon in which, under the heading "Ars (Britannica) Longa," Napoleon, hearing from his victor that his monument is approaching completion, sarcastically comments, "Déjà?"

On the question of burials in Westminster Abbey, it may here be added, Punch was clearly not satisfied with the arrangement which left the Dean as the chief arbiter, when he wrote in the summer of 1909: —

For whom shall England's high memorial fane
Offer a resting-place of hallowed stone
When they have nobly lived their destined span?
The nation speaks her choice, but speaks in vain;
The final verdict lies with one alone —
A Mr. Robinson, a clergyman.

The "Mr. Robinson," thus disparagingly referred to, was that learned divine, Dean of Westminster from 1902 to 1911, and since then Dean of Wells. It should therefore be remembered that he was Dean of Westminster when Irving was buried in the Abbey.

Driver (approaching Hyde Park Corner and pointing out the sights to country visitors): "On the left's the statute erected to the memory of the great Dook o' Wellington, and that 'ere on the right's a statute erected to the memory of the pore ole 'oss-'buses wot's bin run orf the street by them stinkin' motors."

"Our Robert"

Mention has already been made of the widening of the Mall as part of the Queen Victoria Memorial. Brock's statue and monumental group were pronounced by Punch in 1911 "worthy of a great Queen and a great City," an acknowledgment truly remarkable in one so chary of approval. Captain Adrian Jones's Peace "Quadriga" on Constitution Hill prompted a burlesque alternative design in 1908, with "four typical pedestrians rampant and a motor-car urgent." In 1912 an old lady is seen asking a policeman, "Is that what they call the Quadruped, officer?" and the obliging Robert replies, "Yes, Mum; all except the lady." Towards "Robert," by the way, Punch was in the main sympathetic and appreciative throughout this period, and in one of the "Lays of a Londoner" pays a generous tribute to the benevolent autocrat of the highway: —

In vain the dray-horse paws the air,
The flow of low abuse grows brisker;
He never turns an injured hair,
Or lifts a deprecating whisker,
For he knows well enough that they
May gibe, but dare not disobey!

Whether in dark, secluded walks
He flouts the schemes that bad men work us;
Or maiden ladies, screaming "Lawks!"
Hang on his neck in Oxford Circus;
His mien displays an abstract calm
That soothes the fractured nerves like balm.

Who spoors the burglar's nimble feet,
And spots the three-card man's devices?
Who hales before the judgment seat
The vendor of unwholesome ices?
Who's apt at any time to have his
Complexion spoiled by hob-nailed navvies?

It is indeed our Robert, or,
As some prefer to say, our "Bobby";
The civil servant, paid to floor
The wiles of those who'd kill or rob 'ee;
Who keeps our premises secure,
Our butter and our morals pure.

And when we hear of fresh alarms,
Of bombs and mutiny and massacre,
Of citizens dispersed by arms,
In countries where such things, alas! occur,
Well may we urge our Robert's claim
Alike to gratitude and fame.

This is a fairly comprehensive summary of the multifarious activities of one who is, or, at any rate, was up to the end of 1918, more of an institution than a man.

Though he lived in or just off Fleet Street, Punch kept an eye on the growth of the charms of Greater London. In 1907 he printed his "Song of Six Suburbs (after Mr. Rudyard Kipling)": —

BRIXTON

Though far outside the radius you roam,
Where shall a fairer prospect meet the eyes?
Brand-new, like Aphrodite from the foam,
The homes of Brixton Rise.

TOOTING

Supreme am I, Suburbia's guiding star,
And when I speak let lesser tongues be dumb;
The prefix "Upper" shows the class we are;
Where Tooting beckons, Come!

HAMPSTEAD

Upon your North-West Passage scale my heights,
And mark the joyous crowds that sport beneath;
Men call me "Happy": O the strange delights,
The dalliance on my Heath!

PECKHAM

A peaceful calm envelops every street,
And like an old-world idyll life drifts by;
Where else such courtly couples shall you meet
A-comin' thro' the Rye?

CLAPHAM

Unto my yoke my stalwarts meekly bend:
Daily, between the hours of 8 and 9,
To dare worse horrors than the Pit I send
Sons of the Chatham line!

EALING

"Last, loveliest, exquisite," I give to those
Civilian warriors from India rest;
What suburb boasts the dignified repose
That clings to Ealing, W.?

Later on the garden suburb is a frequent theme of genial comment and satire based on first-hand observation, for the late Mr. F. H. Townsend was a resident in Golder's Green, and his ingenious pencil found ample scope in the amenities and humours of the new Rus in Urbe. Another "garden" that had provoked Punch to less favourable comment in earlier years – Covent Garden – was still a source of dissatisfaction as late as 1904. When John Hollingshead died in the autumn of that year, Punch, in his obituary notice of the manager of the Gaiety Theatre, revealed the fact that "his was the dauntless hand that, under Mr. Punch's banner, attacked 'Mud Salad Market' many years ago." If the present condition of Covent Garden market is not exactly ideal, at any rate it does not justify the censures passed on it seventeen years ago as still blocking traffic with congested muck.

London (in her new Museum at Kensington Palace): "Bless my soul, what a life I've led!"

In 1912 the London Museum was opened at Kensington Palace, and Punch, in a commemorative cartoon, showed London as an old lady examining the cases of the Roman, Saxon and Norman periods. "Bless my soul," she says, "what a life I've led!" And Punch was often more interested in the life she had led than in that she was leading or was about to lead. Her future, as outlined by Sir Aston Webb in January, 1914, seemed to him a charming but somewhat visionary prospect: —

Meanwhile this London is my place;
Sad though her dirt, as I admit is,
I love the dear unconscious grace
That shines beneath her sooty face
Better than all your well-groomed cities.

6. Charles Tyson Yerkes, the American financier who, after a chequered early life, became a railway magnate and took a leading part in organizing and financing the London electrical railways.