A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      London in my Time (1934)
Author:     Thomas Burke (1887-1945)
eBook No.:  0400651h.html
Edition:    1
Language:   English
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Date first posted:          August 2004
Date most recently updated: August 2004

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Diamond Jubilee. . . . Sixty Years a Queen. . . . The Longest Reign. . . . The roofs and windows of London are rippling with red-white-and-blue; even the poorest dwelling shows its three-hap'ny flag. Every street-organ is playing and every boy whistling, Leslie Stuart's Soldiers of the Queen. Schoolboys are wearing in the lapels of their coats enamel portrait-buttons of the Queen and the Royal Family. One is taken round the main streets at dusk to see the "illuminations"--just fairy-lamps of candle, oil or gas, but lighting the London of that time with the superlative of carnival blaze. London is celebrating the Record Reign and sixty years of what it thought was Progress, never guessing that more progress was to be packed into the next thirty years than the whole previous hundred years could show.

That is the London I saw and felt when I first became consciously aware of London. I had been running about it for some years before that, but it is from the Diamond Jubilee that I date remembered detail. It was a London that still held many of the fixtures and much of the atmosphere of what has come to be known as the Dickens' London. A London of horse-trams with halfpenny fares, and of hansom cabs; of crystalline bells and spattering hoofs. A London with winters of slush and fog of a richer sort than any known to-day, and summers of dust and clam; the slush and dust being its heritage from the horse-traffic. A London of silk hats, frock-coats, beards, curled moustaches, "choker" collars, leg-of-mutton sleeves, veils, bonnets, and, threading through these gigmanities, as herald of revolt, an execrated vixen in bloomers riding a bicycle. A London of solid homes, which regarded the introduction of flat-life as something Not Quite Nice; in fact, Fast. A London in which the head of the house still carved the joint at his Sunday table in the presence of his six or seven sons and daughters. A London of low buildings against which Queen Anne's Mansions was a sky-scraper. A London of lost corners; of queer nooks and rookeries; of curling lanes and derelict squares, unknown to the rest of London, and often, it seemed, forgotten by their local Councils. A London which, away from the larger streets, held pools of utter darkness, and terraces of crumbling caverns, and infinitudes of mist which called one as surely as the ranges to penetrate their fastness. A London whose roads were mainly granite setts, and therefore a London of turmoil and clatter. A London in which the more prosperous business men drove to their offices in their broughams. A London in which the first cars were appearing, to the puzzled scorn of the majority of the brougham-owners. "Never make a Do of those things. People never give up horses for those." A London in which particular trades and callings still wore particular clothes, and which still nourished public "characters" and eccentrics. A London in which strong language, of a strength that would blanch these outspoken times, was used by certain men of all social classes. A London where entertaining in restaurants was just beginning to displace the more pleasant but (for the hostess) more troublesome custom of entertaining at one's own table. A London in which paper money, save in the five-ten-twenty series, was unthought of. A London in which a golden sovereign would give you a quiet evening's entertainment of a kind which five pound-notes could not buy to-day. A London which, as befitted a great metropolis, had nine evening papers against to-day's meagre three. A London which was the centre of an Empire, and knew it. And a London which, in a few of its nerves, was beginning to be aware of the end of an epoch and of the New this and the New that.

Districts then were emphatically themselves; little islands washed by various alien waters which never penetrated inland. East was East and West was West. The foreign quarters were foreign. Soho was beginning to be anybody's country, but ordinary Londoners were seldom seen in the Italian streets of Back Hill, Eyre Street Hill or Warner Street; or in the recesses of the Ghetto, or in Limehouse or the Dutch streets of Spitalfields. Few of them knew the inner courts of Notting Dale and Hoxton, and artists and poets were never seen in the taverns of Bankside or Shadwell. All these places were then enclosed communities. So were many of the central districts. Chelsea was Chelsea and Streatham was Streatham. Cromwell Road knew nothing of Barnsbury, nor Stratford of Dulwich Village; and only a few cyclists had ever discovered the end of Finchley Road. Regent Street was then an "expensive" street, and even Oxford Street had not yet become the rendezvous of suburban housewives. Each district had its own perceptible key and maintained it. If a man lived in a mews he was a working-man, and if he lived in Mount Street he was a man of quality. If he lived in Bloomsbury he was hard-up, and if he lived in Prince's Gate he was wealthy. Kensington was notably Kensington and had little to do with the other side of the Park, the not-quite Bayswater; and a young man of Jermyn Street would not know of the existence of a place called Islington. The West End was still the West End. Change was being felt, and, in a small way, its seclusion was, by its own invitation, being invaded by people who could be "used." But commercial establishments had not disrupted the stateliness of its squares and streets. A suggestion that trams should run along the Embankment and buses along Park Lane; that one might open a theatre in Whitehall, cheap tea-shops in Bond Street, offices in Carlton House Terrace, entertainments of "animated photographs" in Curzon Street, and the world's chief wireless station in Portland Place, would have been too facetious to evoke even a smile.

It is a habit with the middle-aged--almost a symptom of middle-age--to hold that things in their youth were superior to things of the present; and it is true that in just a few matters the London of the early years of this century did have some points on the London of to-day. But only a few. Physically, it was dingy, and the general scene was by no means so fluent and coloured as it is to-day. It had far fewer pleasures and public amenities; most of the "gaiety" that one hears about took place within doors, and the public places caught only its aftermath in the form of reeling and uproarious young men. It was a city of extreme wealth, solid comfort, and extreme poverty; and these three estates agreed that things always had been like that and always would be. Often the third lived within a stone's-throw of the first, but in mutual indifference, never crossing each other's boundary. The Social Conscience, spurred by the Fabian Society, was then only beginning its first efforts at closing the cleft between them.

But the spirit of the people was more at ease. They had not then been crushed by blows at Imperial prestige and by forebodings of economic collapse, and if they had fewer pleasures they had fewer worries. You would not have guessed it by their faces. They were a stolid-looking, self-centred lot, and made no display of their content. They did not go about crying "Let's be gay. Let's make whoopee." Life was sufficiently agreeable without manufactured festivity. They were wedged in security, and had no need for war-cries or for songs urging them to keep their hearts up. Those "cheery" songs we are hearing to-day are a symptom of our condition. When a man asks in a loud voice: "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?" there is but one answer to the question. The fact that the question is asked supplies the answer, which is: "You are." In those days there was no big bad wolf on the horizon, and the wild party was not thought of, either as amusement or as despairing resource. There was no demand for a brighter London. They thought, the poor dears of those days, that their dingy London with its isolated cylinders of social life was already bright. George Edwardes was giving them the new light entertainment of "musical comedy"; the opera was an apparently immutable fixture of the London year; the Empire and Alhambra supplied them with traditional ballet-spectacle; the "halls" were in full flower; the park bands were playing Sousa's Marches; and Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus were key-notes of "frivolity"--a word of the period.

As for night-life, that was an indulgence for well-to-do young men and their seniors, and a few "daring" girls. There were decent nightclubs for those of ample means, and others of a wholly disreputable sort. There were none for the middle-classes, and if they had been started it is doubtful whether the middle-classes of that period would have patronised them. They might have felt them unnecessary, since licensing regulations were not what they are to-day. Most restaurants served after-theatre suppers, and were open till one in the morning, and in the days before taxis and cars that was late enough for the somewhat heavy folk who had offices to attend.

For the rest, the amusements of these folk of about the end of the century would seem to the present young of a simple order. They stood between the Yellow Book period and the postwar period. Their appetites were normal, and they did not cry "for madder music and for stronger wine." When they went out to dinner they did not ask the restaurateur to add to his duties those of music-hall manager, M.C., and clown. They asked him to supply an agreeable, well-served meal, and sound wines. Any other pleasures they supplied themselves. In those days people still talked. They used, not interjections and repetitions of Society's latest epithet, but conversation; and in most restaurants they could talk in a level voice and be heard. A few of the bars around Leicester Square--Provence, Café de l'Europe, Gambrinus, etc.--had orchestras, but they were not found in many restaurants. Even at the pioneer middle-class night-club, which arrived a few years before the War, when Austin Harrison and Mdme. Strindberg opened the Cave of the Golden Calf, even there, talk was mainly the thing. The term night-club had to wait a decade or more before it became synonymous with overcrowding and lack-lustre racket. Elderly people were complaining of the pace of London life, as elderly people have always been doing from the time of John Lydgate. Actually it was as it always is when regarded in relation to its period--just a little slower than it should have been.

The great spread in recent years of public pleasure and outdoor entertainment is an overdue development; but, coming so suddenly, it has had the effect of leaving people, when they cannot get this public pleasure, in mid-air and at a loss. They do not know how to amuse themselves. The modern provision of mass-amusement, and the mechanical inventions which bring it almost to their doors, have distracted them from the effort of providing their own. Six people making merry in a drawing-room or parlour, if they know how to do it, will always be individually merrier than any one of six hundred people sharing a common merriment in a restaurant or hall. But indoor, self-made amusement is now regarded as "too much bother."

In the past, people were more independent, ready to be themselves instead of seeking to be a matrix of everybody else. Sober as they were in their dress and their setting, their blood, I think, was richer and their nerves stouter. They were more ebullient than their children of to-day. Bread and circuses have made us tame; amenable to all sorts of direct and indirect propaganda. Our London is much younger and brisker in spirit than theirs, and wears a brighter countenance. But in relation to theirs it is as cocktails and sherry to Margaux and Chambertin.

Even when I began to be an active atom of London life--in the early nineteen-noughts--this Margaux and Chambertin tone prevailed, and I came to manhood in a London of stolid security and sanguine outlook. A century, in its social and spiritual significance, seldom begins at its calendar point; and the early years of the twentieth century were infused by a strong hang-over from the nineteenth. Just as the nineteenth century did not begin until 1840, and spent its childhood with the last vapours of the eighteenth, so the twentieth century took some time to adjust itself; though it took only half the time taken by the nineteenth. The early years were an interregnum between the rule of the old and the new. The death of Victoria brought a sudden release of bottled-up ideas and activities. Much of it led nowhere; it was a sort of out-of-school burst; a manifestation of "now we can do things." And through the Edward decade people did things. But those things were mainly a trying-out; we were not really in the twentieth century. Too many fashions, tastes and prejudices of the nineteenth remained with us to prevent our really going ahead into a new century and a new life. There was a fresher and freer tone in London life, but it did not carry any reconstruction or redistribution of values. It was merely an easing and brightening of the old. The austere schoolmistress was gone and had been replaced by a genial, easy-going master; but the school was much the same. Victoria's death was not the end of the nineteenth century, nor was Edward's. The true end of that century, and the beginning of the twentieth and of new-age growing-pains, was the end of the Great War. Not until 1920 did London enter upon its new era of structural and spiritual change.

Thus, in writing of London before the war one has a feeling of writing of the London of last century. And really one is. In talking to young people about London and London life before the war, and the things we did in that London, I find that they cannot regard them as part of twentieth-century life. They are twentieth century, and the London they know is the only twentieth-century London. We middle-aged folk, who started our boyhood ramblings about the London of 1904-5, they regard as stragglers from the Victorian age; which we are. Still, we had the privilege of witnessing the changeover, and it is something to have seen. As I began looking at London in 1897, and, save for holidays, have been constantly in attendance upon it, I have had London under observation through nearly four decades. Those years have been years of such radical and violent change in London life and the ways of the Londoner that no similar span of its long life can have known such a transformation. The differences between the London of the year of Diamond Jubilee and the London of 1934 are, I think, even more marked than the differences between the London of James II and the London of the Regency. Certainly they are of wider variety and scope than the memory of any Victorian centenarian could embrace.

The processes by which these differences have arrived have been so stealthy and so minute that to the constant Londoner, like myself, who has lived through them, they are often untraceable. A few of the larger junctions which register departure-points for change stand out, and among these I would set:

The Underground Railway.

The electric tram and motor-bus.

The making of Aldwych and Kingsway.

The spread of service flats.

The coming of popular cafés and popular hotels.

The opening of Selfridge's.

The new social amenities of streets and parks.

The use of tarmac and re-inforced concrete.

The brightening of Sunday.

But the sources of the change in social behaviour and outlook remain as obscure as the sources of the seasonal change in women's dress. Mode arrives among us, nobody knows whence. We find ourselves doing the same things and saying the same things, and no person or group of persons is responsible for this. It is an immigration from the invisible. Social history is a record of these immigrations, and not even the philosophers can decide for us the wherefore.

In the past forty years we of middle-age have witnessed many of these abrupt swerves from mode to mode, and because they are general and affect us all we do not notice their clean break from the recent mode. From the same cause we do not notice the abrupt changes in the London scene, and it is only when we look back that we realise how many changes have happened under our eyes. We have seen Society in its well-conducted, almost demure period; in its inane Bright-Young-Thing period; and within the last year or so we have seen it swerve again from the Mrs. Merrick note to the sensible and responsible. We have seen music-halls go, and movies arrive and develop to talkies. We have seen women's fashions pass from the bonnet and trailing skirt, through the hobble skirt and Merry Widow hat, the shirt-blouse, and bee-hive hat, the knee-length skirt of the twenties, the Eton crop and the shingle, to the bare legs and beret of the thirties. We have seen girls in the parks, at one time shrouded from neck to ankle, and at another in little but bathing-slips. We have seen the last days of Rosherville and the first days of the Lido. We have watched the blurred pageantry of the Votes for Women processions, and have seen women reach Parliament and all other departments of the nation's councils. We have seen London Pride, which went into decay for the greater part of the nineteenth century, reassert itself. We have seen streets of smoky brick become streets of glistening concrete. We have seen the outward thrust of business from the centre of town do as much in a few years towards slum-clearance as had been done in the previous fifty. We have seen commerce dress itself with dignity, and endow London with the Kubla Khan domes and towers of the P.L.A. building, the Shell-Mex building, the I.C.I. building, Transport House, and the new hotels of Park Lane. We have seen rural villages become suburbs. We have seen spots that, in our childhood, were "in the country," become part of the route of central London buses. We have seen our London, which had its limits at Barking, Shepherd's Bush, Croydon and Finchley, grow to a London which is London until you are beyond Romford, Uxbridge, Epsom or Watford.

Every Londoner, I think, will agree with me that it is as hard to say when or how the change happened as to say when a plant increased from six inches to seven inches. And will agree with me that the chief material agents, acting under our very noses, were undoubtedly petrol and electricity. The electric tram, the motor-bus, the extension of the Tube railways, the cheap private car--these widened man's radius and gave an acceleration to his natural desire for movement. From this power of swift and frequent change sprang all the developments in physical London and its tempo, and in the Londoner's home habits, outdoor habits, and amusements.

Some of these developments, as I say, the born Londoner hardly perceives. He accepts them as having always been, and is not aware, until he definitely considers them, that they are key-points of a new order. For a true appraisal of these developments one must look elsewhere. One must use the eye of a returned Londoner who went into the wilderness at the end of last century, and has had no news of London or of any other great city. First, one might puzzle him with a little examination-paper on London features. Something like this:

What is a Corner House?

Where is the Ritz?

What is Wardour Street noted for?

Define a subway, an escalator, a news-theatre, a Labour Exchange.

Where is the North Circular Road?

What is Croydon chiefly known for?

Where is the Garden Suburb?

What is the quickest way from Charing Cross to Edgware?

What is a flatlet?

From what point does the night coach leave London for Newcastle?

Where is the London Lido?

When he had given up most of these, as he would, one could set him wandering. What would first strike him? No doubt he would turn, as most homing exiles do, to Piccadilly Circus, and if he reached it at night he could be excused for thinking he had taken the wrong turning. But before he could reach it he would have taken a random eye-cast at the general face of London. If he arrived at Waterloo, and looked upon London from the other side, he would see a very different scape from that which he last saw. Some of the old points would reassure him--Big Ben and Victoria Tower; Cleopatra's Needle; Somerset House--but he would be as astonished by the staring brilliance of the new buildings of the Embankment as one of us would be if he were transported to Mr. Wells' City of the Future. Yet with all the difference he would know it for a London scape. It has set itself between river and sky with the air of having always belonged there. It is still London, but London rejuvenated. A more vigorous London; no longer solid and complacent, but challenging and thrusting. A London of firmer line and harder feature. A London no longer keeping its brightness to private display, but bringing whatever it has to the streets. A London that lives no longer in splendid mansions, but in flats; that follows personally the simple life and showers magnificence into the common stock. Formerly London's beautiful buildings were private homes, and for public buildings anything was held to be good enough. This custom is now reversed, and public and commercial affairs are transacted in halls of marble whose faces shine with civic dignity.

In a casual glance at this new London, one petty detail would perhaps give evidence of the passing of years more strongly than any major factor. There is one section of the London scene which affects us more than we know, though we see it only as we see the paving we walk on. As many people subconsciously remember a first tour of France, not by any star of the guidebook's constellation; not by some great château or bridge or cathedral, but by the face of that baby who, this quarter-century, has been haunting the French sky-line for the benefit of the soap of M. Cadum; so one of the mnemonic notes that call up London to the Londoner is its public advertisements. My first childish impression of London was not of a city of people, but of a city of lamps and the lit windows of shops. My second was of a city of advertisements. I am told that it was a habit of mine, as soon as I had learned to read, to spell out all the advertisements when riding in trains and buses and trams. So, when I recall the London of my childhood, almost the first entrants in the troupe of memories are--Nixey's Black Lead; Reckitt's Blue; Hinde's Curlers; Sapolio; Epps' Cocoa; Brooke's Soap Monkey Brand; Frame Food; and Whelpton's Purifying Pills.

Many of the commodities whose names, forty years ago, were truly household words, are still announcing themselves by the newest trans-Atlantic methods, but our homing exile would miss a number which were to him a fixed feature of the London scene, and would miss everywhere the restrained, almost bashful note of their advertising. The pictorial side of that advertising was commonly painful; the influence of James Pryde and William Nicholson and Steinlen was limited in its range, and it was long before commerce generally had followed the lead given by those who employed these artists. The letter-press was usually a blunt claim of superiority--"Drink Somebody's Cocoa. It Is The Best." Or "Somebody's Soap. Good For The Complexion." In its place he would find a deft thrust at his weaknesses. In the new stones and forms of London he would be able to perceive the solid city of his youth, but on its face--that part of it rented for advertising--which he had left demure, he would find grins, grimaces, pouts, leers and winks. Only the presence of Eros, the London Pavilion and the Criterion, would reassure him that he really had found Piccadilly Circus. In his day it was known as "the centre of the world." To-day it is known to a too-large and too-clamant section as the Premier Publicity Site. Such advertising as it carried in his day was no more than a gentle gesture of the hand indicating the excellence of this or that over other kinds of this or that. The whole Circus now is a series of ear-racking screams and eye-smiting gyrations against which the extreme contortions of the Jack Puddings of Bartholomew Fair would be almost modest. Yet it still manages to remain Piccadilly Circus, and for this generation of London boys it will be what it was for their fathers and grandfathers. The Strand, too, he would hardly know, for changes here have been more violent than in any other one street. Forty or fifty of the features which made the Strand of his youth are gone. Lowther Arcade and Exeter Hall, prominent features of his time, were in their last gasp when I began work in 1902; I just remember seeing them. Aldwych and Kingsway were in the pangs of birth as a heap of ruins, and the new Gaiety Theatre and Gaiety Hotel were only being thought of. Notable points that he would miss are Morley's Hotel, which was round the corner in Trafalgar Square; the Golden Cross; Haxell's little hotel in Exeter Street; Terry's Theatre; the old Strand Theatre; Wych Street; the old Tivoli; the Hotel Cecil; and perhaps Burgess' Fish Sauce Shop, the old tongue-twister. The Gaiety Hotel came and went before we had time to get used to it.

When I first knew the Strand the project of widening it was not even talked of. With that widening the whole structure of the street has changed within the recollection of those who are still in their teens. As I say, it has throughout its life been marked for constant change. As the High Street, reflecting always the contemporary taste of everyday London, it is never settled for long. The Strand of the nineties is now almost obliterated, and the Strand of even a later period has suffered so much pulling about that for the middle-aged it is a new street. Very little of that Strand of 1909, which the music-halls of that year were inviting us to go down, remains to-day, and the little that does appears in a new dress.

Yet, like Piccadilly Circus, it retains enough of that genius of personality which, in the past, carried its name in many songs round the English-speaking world. It is not now "the place for fun and noise; all among the girls and boys." It is hardly the pleasure-street it once was. That title, if by pleasure we mean theatres and restaurants, should belong to-day to Shaftesbury Avenue, which holds more theatres than any other street and borders that congerie of restaurants, Soho. But Shaftesbury Avenue has never fully been on the London map. It has all the qualifications, but somehow it lacks that corporate, close-facetted personality which, through all changes, distinguishes other streets and fixes them in public association. Just as one man with marked ability and an excellent direction of it yet fails to succeed, while his fellow, with a mere dab of ability, becomes a public figure, so Shaftesbury Avenue has missed that fame which has been granted rightly to the Strand and somewhat strangely to the void and spiritless Trafalgar Square. Maybe this fame, like the fame of so many London features, rests on tradition only; maybe the public honours certain streets, not for what they are, but for what they were fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years ago. Cheapside is much more spoken of than Queen Victoria Street; Pall Mall than St. James' Street; and Bond Street than Jermyn Street. Maybe, too, the name is a factor. "Shaftesbury Avenue" hardly lends itself to song as The Strand, Piccadilly and Leicester Square do. The Strand may change as often and as sharply as it pleases; it will still be London's High Street, an allusion-point in all London talk and a cog in the wheels of all London memories. In just one point it remains as it was when our exile last saw it. It is still a man's street. Almost anything a man wants can be got here. It never was a woman's street and to-day, as formerly, it has almost nothing for her. But as she has Oxford Street, Regent Street, St. Paul's Churchyard, and Kensington High Street almost wholly to herself she can hardly object to the segregation of this one street to the male.

Wherever our homing exile might go he would find, save in the isolated corners, radical change. He would find the City region not so compact as in his day; he would find it reaching to the east and north-east. He would find Leadenhall Street a street of white palaces, and would no doubt be as shocked at finding that the Bank of England has gone sur-realiste as if he had found the Sphinx going coy. He would find Fleet Street almost wholly rebuilt. In Soho he would find that the quiet curio shops he knew have been replaced by the flaunting windows of film companies. He would find the bookstalls loaded with papers he had not heard of, and would ask in vain for many old favourites. He would miss the most thrilling spectacle of his London--the splendid charge of the old greys which drew our fire-engines; but might find compensation in the dashing cars of the Flying Squad. He would miss the pastry-cook's, and would find in its place not merely tea-shops, which were beginning in his day, but Byzantine palaces where people may enjoy for sixpence such surroundings as were formerly reserved for the wealthy.

An early impression would be the absence of abject and paraded poverty. If he went to the Embankment and a few other places at midnight, he would soon learn that London has as much poverty as in his day; but he would remember that in his day one saw barefooted children in utter rags, and workless men, with knees showing through their torn trousers, eating refuse from dustbins. He would not see men in such expressive destitution now; there is food to-day for all who will ask for it; but poverty remains, hidden away in back rooms in back streets. Nor would he see any of the former display of wealth. London is still one of the richest cities of the world, if not the richest, but the rich and privileged, within the last twenty years, have learned something of good taste and have renounced ostentation. Everybody to-day, whatever his rank, tries to be a "reg'lar fellow."

He would miss Earl's Court, but in its place he would find mixed bathing in the Serpentine, an open-air theatre in Regent's Park, greyhound tracks, speedway tracks, hundreds of cinemas in every style of magnificence from Assyrian to Renaissance, a palace of dance in every suburb; and, in short, twenty times more public pleasure than his day had dreamed of. He would appreciate the increase of colour in the streets--not only in the people's clothes, but in shop-windows, house-fronts and doorways. He would remember the Squares he had left with their enclosures of dreary evergreens (or evergreys) and he would see Squares of green lawns and gay flower-beds. If he had come from Southern Europe he would find the London Sunday still a somewhat heavy affair, but he would not find it quite so Calvinistic as the Sunday of his youth. He would note a happier tone about the people in the parks, and a holiday spirit in the parties of youth setting out for country rambles.

If he talked to this youth at all he would note the absence of one symbol of the London of his time--the old Cockney slang. He would listen in vain for the crudely picturesque phrases which once were the language of the streets. In place of them he would hear a less picturesque but more piquant slang borrowed from American movies and American vaudeville turns. The Cockney's Yuss or Yerce is now Yeah. Things that used to be A Bit of All Right are now O.K. Where he used to ask if you Saw What He Meant, he now asks if you Get Him? Where heused to urge you to Buck Up, he now urges you to Snap Into It. Back-slang has gone, rhyming-slang has gone, and the "ag" language has gone. Brooklynese is the new Volapuk. With this change has come a change in the common London voice. Broadcasting and the talkies may have helped towards this change. The whining voice which was generally heard in our exile's day is now seldom heard. The tone may not be elegant, but it is crisper; more emphatic. The London face, too, would appear a little strange to him against his memories. Each social period has its special voice and face, and the face of the middle-aged Londoner today is markedly different from that of his fellow of thirty or forty years ago. One saw then beards and moustaches on plump faces, and easy, unquestioning eyes. To-day the face is thinner, the features more eager, the eyes keener. Partly this is due to the general spread of exercise and the outdoor week-end, partly to the accelerated pace of London life, and partly to economic anxiety.

Belgravia and South Kensington, which in his day were of high importance, he would find much changed both in appearance and significance; while he would find little in Bloomsbury to recall the drab and downcast district he had left. He would find that it has punned upon its name and preened its face and filled itself with blossom. The see-saw of London values has been working vigorously in the past few decades, and the obscure has become brilliant and the brilliant obscure. Many of the restaurants famous in his day are gone or are no longer in fashion. Those in fashion he would find of a new type. The qualities demanded by fashion thirty years ago are not now demanded. Cabaret, then almost unknown inEngland, is more important than cuisine, and the gourmet is a disappearing type. He needs leisure for his growth, and to-day people are not inclined to linger and savour their pleasures. They taste only. Dining must be worked in with other things--with dancing and a show; and sitting over the port when you might be dancing is regarded as a waste of that time which nobody seems to have. He would find that the leisured classes have lost the art of leisure. They must always be Doing Something. Wherever they may be they are always Going On somewhere else. Even in club-land he would find only a semblance of the old repose. He would perceive a brisker rhythm, a wider outlook. In the social clubs he would be shocked to find a profane intrusion of business talk.

Meals, in both restaurants and the average home, he would find shorter and better selected. Ceremony, save in a few circles, has been banished. Even etiquette has no exact definitions to-day, and Good Form has become a topic for the facetious columnists. Barley water is not only more favoured than the heavier wines of the early years, but is increasingly displacing, especially in summer, the cocktail or sherry of to-day. At lunch and supper the snack has supplanted the three- or four-course meal, and many of the young seem to live wholly on nibbles of hors d'œuvres.

These changes, in some degree, are welcome. They have made the whole tone of London life lighter and easier. The new century demanded an adjustment of social customs, and a physical tenuity, and the Londoner supplied them. To meet the new celerity those who were stout went to great daily pains to get thin. The slimming craze is not a beauty craze; its purpose is more rapid movement. The development of the car enabled us to travel at speed, and we have made speed the measure for all the little occasions of our day. We even talk more rapidly. And our talk is no longer confined to commonplaces and a few rigid topics. We now discuss Everything. There seems to be no taboo, not even in public places. There was already, in our exile's day, under the influence of the fin-de-siècle novelists, a tendency, among the daring, to a more liberal and honest outlook, but he would, I fancy, be surprised by the freedom of conversation among the very young, and the casual allusions to "certain" matters. The Victorians knew all about those matters, but saw no reason for making a song about them. To-day we are so anxious to make songs about them that we often make the song before we really know.

Some of the features that are gone our exile would regard as good riddances, but one almost-vanished feature he would, if he were any sort of fellow, regret. When he left London it had, around its centre, fourteen music-halls, and in the near suburbs thirty more. To-day, though variety entertainment is still to be had, and of a more slick and polished quality than formerly, it is not the natural living growth it was in the past. One feels that it is making a deliberate stand for recognition against cabaret and radio and the talkies, and that, though it is finding a public, the curve of favour is towards the others. Attempts have been made to revive it, but it belonged to an age, and though you may revive the features of an age you cannot revive its spirit. The young, of course, do not miss the music-hall; their particular phase of light entertainment is cabaret, and fifty years hence they will be talking wistfully of the good days of the nineteen-thirties when cabaret was spontaneous and rich. Meantime, they listen wearily to their elders talking of music-hall, and cannot understand why the old things should be so sentimental about that rough, raucous form of entertainment, or why they should prefer the simple songs of those dead halls--part of the native poetry of London--to the cute torch- songs and jazz-crooning imported from the States.

The first quarter of this century, indeed, may be known to history as London's American Phase, since the major part of the many and rapid changes it has suffered may be traced to America. Our tube railways we owe to America. The bulk of our entertainment is American in quality and largely in personnel. All our latest hotels derive from American models. Our snack-bars and all-night supper-stands are pirated from America. Our electric night-signs are an American idea. Our street songs are American. Our popular press models itself upon American journalism, and on our bookstalls English periodicals lie smothered and half-seen under piles of American magazines. Our newest buildings, where they are not German or Swedish, are American. Our one-way streets and automatic traffic controls are American. Where we knew little individual shops we now find giant Stores, run on the American plan; and the threepenny and sixpenny store is so much a feature of almost every large street, both in and out of London, that we almost forget its American origin. The new verve of our social occasions, and the mixing of all classes, are American traits. Even the country has not escaped, and on the main roads outside London, where we used to find English inns, we now find gaudy shacks working under the American title of "road-houses."

These importations, as I say, are not without value; they are responsible for that lighter and easier tone. London needed a certain quickening. It was getting set, and though the war shook it up a little, and shuffled its values, the tendency, after the war, was to relapse to the status quo ante. The American yeast, working constantly upon it these last twenty years, has done so much good that we now regard the zest and pungency of London life, which the States gave us, as our own growth. It has had many of these exotic phases, but it takes them only as a tonic for its self-expression. In the late seventeenth century it was pervaded by French styles. In the middle eighteenth everything Italian was correct. In the middle nineteenth it went all German. What it will be after its American Phase is hardly guessable: there seems very little choice in the way of new civilisations.

One group of features of the London scene our exile would find almost as he left them. While the rest of London takes doses of Fifth Avenue or Michigan Boulevard or Wilhelmstrasse, the nineteenth century remains with us in our dear, dim, smelly railway stations. Waterloo and Victoria have done a little towards bringing themselves into the modern scheme and edging towards Grand Central Terminal; and Marylebone always had light and space. But the others. . . . Think of London Bridge, on which John Davidson wrote a poem in praise of the perfect example "of what a railway station shouldn't be." Think of the external face of King's Cross--or try not to. Think of Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street, and see whether, from them, you can catch some glimmering of the inwardness of the Londoner. Think of the architectural grace of Charing Cross. When they will be reconstructed and made as agreeable to the eye, and as convenient for the stranger, as our Tube stations, I don't know. Since they have lasted so many years in their Victorian dress, I doubt if even my infant godson will live long enough to see an elegant King's Cross. Indeed, if they last much longer as they are I would resent any attempt to bring them into these times: I would prefer to see the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments take them over.

Looking around this cleaner, lighter, half-American London, our exile would no doubt be surprised by its new profiles. Not only in the Strand but in many another highway design has been at work. When as a boy I was trotting about London there were no uniform streets. The vista of even the great highways was broken and incongruous. There were no such lines as are offered to-day by Kingsway, Regent Street, the western half of Oxford Street, and the new Leadenhall Street. Demolition and rebuilding were then matters of private whim, and planning was only beginning to be considered. The Strand particularly was a jumble of low buildings and tall buildings, old shops and new shops; some bright, some dingy--the new shops often the dingier; some dignified and comely, some mere utilitarian erections; some jutting forward, some lying back. There were bits of the late eighteenth century, bits of the early nineteenth, much of the middle nineteenth, with the late nineteenth muscling in, and here and there some timid thrust of the "new" style which thought it was going to be twentieth century, until the real twentieth century knocked it out. We did not apologise to our visitors for this jumble; we exhibited it as typical London. We felt, as each generation has felt, that it was the real London at last, the complete expression of the city. But to-day we ride in taxis and buses through American streets and German streets and Scandinavian streets, and proudly show them to our visitors and say--"This is London." For so strong is its power of absorbing alien importations into its essence and making them peculiar to itself, that to-day, when on all sides we see New York avenues and Stockholm buildings, we can still claim that their space and light are the expression of ourselves. London has woven them into its mighty fabric, and for the young of to-day they will live as permanent symbols of London.

This power of absorption may best be realised by taking a distant view of the city. Go to some high point--Highgate Archway, Shooter's Hill, the top of St. Paul's, or the front of the Crystal Palace. From any of these points the silhouette to be seen is generally, though on a larger scale, the silhouette which was always seen. The changes in figure and feature which seem so comprehensive when one is in the streets are, from these heights, hardly perceptible. With all the new country ground taken in by its rapid growth, with all the destruction and reconstruction, it has the figure and the personality with which it began. It has grown as man grows, true to its early form and style; and in 1934 its shape is still that of the rough diamond shown on Norden's map of the late sixteenth century. After all the frenzy of change which has marked the last forty years, only here and there does some new tower or glittering commercial Pantheon corrupt the old silhouette; and then only trivially. There, point by point, are all the features which, in the last hundred years, have come to signify London throughout the world--Big Ben, the Victoria Tower, St. Paul's, the Monument, and around the last the spires of many churches which our greatest of grandfathers saw. There it lies, a huge and sprawling growth, but still in an unbroken line, from newt, as it were, to crocodile. As of all great beings, one may say that the more it changes the more it remains itself.

There was a time within recent memory when the London streets were, or seemed to be, full of "characters." Some of these were celebrated by the press and became known outside London. There was "Spring Onions," the Stepney poet. There was Craig, the cricket poet of the Oval. There was Humphreys, the Paternoster Row bookseller, of picturesque appearance, who decorated his shop with blue-pencilled exhortations from the Scriptures. There was the man who haunted the Strand and announced by a card in his hat that he was from Australia, seeking his lost daughter. There was the man who sold the Pall Mall Gazette at the bottom of Regent Street, dressed in the clothes given him by club-men--silk hat, frock coat, watered silk waistcoat, etc. And scores of others.

But of late years, under the general movement for uniforms and uniformity, they have been slowly passing from the London scene, and the only examples to be seen to-day are those who address the crowds from the rostrums of Hyde Park on Sunday afternoons. The war, which altered or obliterated so many factors and features of London life, obliterated the "characters." Old dodderers like myself miss them. They were a condiment to the every-dayness of the streets. They lived as they wished to live; behaved as they wished to behave; dressed as they wished to dress. Standardisation had not then set it, and the first ten years of this century marked perhaps the last phase of individualism. In those days variety was permitted and encouraged. To-day we must be homogeneous or perish.

Character was displayed not only by these quaint, obscure eccentrics of the streets. It was also displayed by the serious and famous. The outstanding figures in the various walks of life were not too shy to proclaim, by style and habit, their difference. Politicians, musicians, actors, lawyers, poets, bookmakers, comedians--each type announced its detachment from the common run, and lent the crowd a touch that made it a carnival crowd rather than a marching army. They recognised as keenly as anybody of to-day that all men are brothers. They saw no reason for trying to pass themselves off as a twin. Distinguished people then looked distinguished. To-day, at any gathering of the intellectually distinguished, half the company look like bankers and the other half like shop-assistants. One or two survivors of the old guard are with us, and in a world of sameness remain defiantly picturesque. One glance at Mr. Arthur Machen tells us that here is the romantic story-teller, and one glance at Mr. Augustus John discloses the painter. Thirty years ago most writers, painters, and musicians blazed themselves against the herd, and the Café Royal in those days was an assembly of strikingly personal costume, hair-dressing and deportment. Many of the figures, it must be admitted, looked far more distinguished than they really were, and it was perhaps this intrusion of the amateur, self-made Bohemian which led the artists and writers to react towards bourgeois formality.

The actor and comedian, too, presented themselves to the world in a sort of challenge costume, and made no attempt to be mistaken for young men about town. The actor's appearance announced the theatre, and the comedian's the music-hall--then two separate worlds which did not meet. The rank-and-file actors haunted the Strand, Bedford Street and Garrick Street. The music-hall people gathered around Waterloo Station and York Road, and on Sunday mornings at Brixton. Newspaper men also were recognisable from other folk, and from other kinds of literary men. The popular novelist was only beginning to break into Fleet Street with "special articles," and at that time one would not have mistaken him for a pressman, or vice versa. Fleet Street, throughout its history as newspaper-street, had its constant pageant of picturesque figures, but I think we saw the last of them in the nineteen-twenties. In this last group were Arthur Machen, T. W. H. Crosland, Randal Charlton and Hannen Swaffer. All of them were, and two still are, men of an "appearance" and panacherie too rare in these days when potential personalities masquerade as so many peas in a pod. Those who are old enough to compare the diversified group that used to gather in the defunct "Green Dragon" with the group that gathered until lately in Poet's Corner of Poppin's Court, will realise that what we have gained in conformity we have lost in piquancy. No man, whatever his talents, has the power to be both correct and interesting, and when the memoirs of the twenties and thirties come to be written they will make rather thin reading. They may be helped by the follies and stupidities of the immediate post-war period, but so far as personal "character" is concerned, the diarists will have as hard a job to give zest to their records as current cartoonists have to make pungent pictures out of commonplace figures and faces. (Though it is possible they may find a relish to their narratives in Sir Thomas Beecham.)

In those early years the mixing of classes and professions was only beginning. Clubs, taverns and restaurants still preserved a special and regular clientèle, and strollers from outside were strollers from outside. Bohemia was as watertight an enclosure as the inner circles of Society. You were in it or not, and neither Society nor Bohemia displayed any desire to enter the other's preserves. To-day, there are few preserves, and the social Bohemia and the arty Bohemia are constantly mingling. Few restaurants keep any special note; they are just restaurants, cheap or expensive. One could once be sure that of the company in a certain restaurant every man was connected with either the theatre or sport. In another restaurant, that every man was somewhere concerned with the literary world. In another, that every man was engaged in some capacity in the law. To-day everybody goes everywhere, and in any restaurant you may get if not the best at least a sample of all worlds. The arty Bohemia was then fixed in Chelsea, with a rather more wealthy and more formal offshoot at St. John's Wood. The Fitzroy and Charlotte Street Bohemia did not arise until after the war. Bohemia is an unsatisfactory word, since it conveys to most people something deliberate and cultivated, connected with drink and loose morals, whereas truly it is a state of mind rather than a way of living. But there is no other word immediately available to cover a mode which disregards herd-thought, herd-behaviour and herd-attitudes. Fleet Street had its own Bohemia, but by the time I knew The Street it was conventional and business-like. I am too young to have known the Rhymers' Club at the "Cheshire Cheese" where gathered Dowson, Lionel Johnson and other men of the nineties; too young to have known even the later group--The Songsters--and too young to have known that rather knockabout but very capable group which made the Sporting Times: John Corlett, Arthur Binstead, Edward Mott, Newnham-Davis, Arnold Goldberg, and others whose names escape me.

The literary world, at the time I began my wanderings, was beginning to move from Paternoster Row to Covent Garden, and very soon Covent Garden was a centre for publishers, literary agents and magazines. From 1907 to 1930 Henrietta Street was almost wholly literary, and to a young beginner in literature it was full of interest. Around mid-day, in the years before the war, one might see W. L. Courtney and Arthur Waugh coming from the offices of Chapman & Hall; H. W. Massingham dashing into the offices of The Nation; Edward Garnett carrying a bag of MSS. to the offices of Duckworth; Sir Home Gordon, cricketer and publisher, coming from Williams & Norgate; Austin Harrison and Norman Douglas outside the office of The English Review; and authors at every twenty yards. In one morning one might see Joseph Conrad, W. H. Hudson, John Masefield, Hall Caine, Israel Zangwill, H. G. Wells, and D. H. Lawrence. Zangwill and Hall Caine, callous to the suffering they might cause to the editor of The Tailor and Cutter, maintained the tradition of dress by which one could recognise an author on sight. The others affected the modern, self-obscuring style.

Henrietta Street and its neighbours have still, in the main, a literary atmosphere, but of late years publishers have shown a tendency to scatter. One finds them now in all parts of London. Paternoster Row, though now rather more drapery than literary, still houses some dozen. Others one finds in the Adelphi, in Bloomsbury; a few in Mayfair; a few in Soho; and one at least as far out as South Kensington.

If one's interest was in the theatre, Bedford Street, which adjoins Henrietta Street, afforded an amusing pageant. The Yorick Club was there and the Bodega was there. The Bodega, still there, made quite a figure in the theatrical and literary life of those days. It was there that Robert Sherard found Ernest Dowson at almost his last gasp. It was there that Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane had their first long talk. There you could meet three or four hundred old actors, each of whom, it seemed, had played Second Grave-digger to Irving. There, on Saturday noons, you could see most of the lions who were appearing at the Tivoli matinee. They made a group of their own, distinct from the actors; a Bohemia within a Bohemia. Few of these distinctive rendezvous remain to-day. Once upon a time those in a particular walk of life seemed to find delight in getting together. Now they seem anxious to get apart. They live as far from each other as possible, and if they join a club it is often not a club frequented by their profession. They no longer live in enclosed worlds of "shop." They scatter and penetrate to as many other worlds as possible. The old colonies have broken up, and scarcely any district of London now retains any fixed residential note. Where one does find a group with a regular meeting-place, it is composed usually of students or mere dilettanti of the arts. The chief cause for this is the car, which enables people to live some way out, and at week-ends to escape all town concerns and flee to the hills. Forty years ago escape was not so facile, and men tied to town over week-ends were driven to gather in confraternities.

Time and changing mode, besides carrying away the "character," have carried away many other once-common sights of the streets. Street entertainment, though it still exists in the form of Welsh miners singing choruses, ex-Service men playing jazz, and acrobats performing to theatre queues, is no longer so rich and varied as it was. You could once find some form of public amusement at every half-mile, and every suburban High Street on a Saturday night was a mixture of market and music-hall. At one point you would find a Highlander (probably from Camden Town) with bagpipes, and a lady partner doing the sword dance. A few yards away a man and woman doing a thought-reading act. Then a trained horse spelling "corn" and "hay" from lettered cards. Then a peep-show of a village street which sprang into activity if you put a penny in the slot. Then a preacher calling you to repentance. Then a one-man band--a man who carried and worked with mouth and with different limbs, a big drum, a triangle, Pan-pipes, cymbals, and concertina. Then a contortionist and escapist being roped and manacled. Then a weight-lifter; an Italian woman with a cage of fortune-telling budgerigars; a tattooed sailor advertising a tattooist--in short, a small Batholomew Fair every Saturday night, and a gusto to it which is, or seems to be, absent even from the Bank Holiday Fairs of to-day. The naphtha torches of the stalls, the incandescent lamps of the shops, and the candles used by the performers, gave the affair a carnival note which the modern stall, with its electric fittings, cannot equal. Electric light can give brilliance, and can make a brave display, but after the naphtha torch it seems austere and thin.

Casual carnival is no longer in fashion. We still have our carnivals, but they are organised: you buy tickets for them. We have lost the habit of breaking into spontaneous street-carnival, and perhaps in the interest of order it is well we have. Yet in such casual carnival as the return from Epsom on Derby Night I do not recall much disorder. This affair was a feature of the South London year. All the young of that part of South London on the road to the downs turned out for it, and from six o'clock to ten o'clock the road from Epsom through Ewell, Morden, Merton, Tooting, Balham, Clapham and Kennington to the bridges was a madly mixed procession. Four-in-hands, with amateur whips and liveried guards sounding the post-horns; victorias, landaus, traps, dog-carts, brakes, governess-carts, donkey-carts, milk-floats--anything that went on wheels. And the whole procession moving to that spirit of deliberate insanity which used to inspire the carnivals of Nice. It was, of course, a much heavier affair than any Latin carnival, being an English affair, but it caught something of that state of the human creature who is for once what he wants to be instead of the servant of his inhibitions. Every vehicle was decorated, if not with flowers, with paper streamers, flags, ribbons. The four-in-hands, the victorias and the landaus were sufficient show in themselves, but in the humbler vehicles eccentric head-dress, eccentric costume and eccentric decoration of the horses and donkeys prevailed. A typical example of the period's idea of fun was to dress the donkey's fore-legs in a pair of lady's knickers. The travellers saluted the crowd on the pavement, and the crowd saluted the travellers. The salutations were seldom in the best of taste. Indeed, the whole humour of the thing was of a kind which this age could not tolerate. It was that crowd-humour of London which Chaucer knew and Shakespeare knew, and which persisted until general education brought self-consciousness and better deportment. It took to its bed after Mafeking Night, and the general use of the car gave it its final despatch.

Another mortality is the street-cry. Of all the picturesque vendors, each with his peculiar chant, who gave colour to the streets, we have now only the lavender-woman and the muffin-man. But when I recall my childhood, and the blurred streets of those days, I hear the cry of the salt-man who, with donkey and barrow, hawked salt which he cut as required from one large block. I hear the last faltering accents of the penny pie-man. I hear the sweep's mournful herald of his presence, and the coal-man was heard "with cadence deep" in my day as in Dean Swift's day. The milk-woman, carrying her cans on a yoke, could be heard with her "Mee-yul-koo," and one of the terrors of my young life was an unseen creature which went through the October twilight, chanting to a down-scale tune: "Old Moore's Almanack, Old Moore's Almanack." I did not hear what he was chanting; I heard only the accent, which seemed charged with all the woe and mystery of London. He was one of the ravens of the night, of which the other was a fearful voice, not now permitted to scare wakeful children; the voice of the newsboy, with his "'Nother horrible mur-der by the Rip-per. . . . Pa-per." And there were the "Chairs to Mend" woman, the "Hot Rolls" boy, the Sarsaparilla hawker, the cats'-meat man, the rag-boddler-bone man (with balloons and flag) and the geranium merchant--"three pots a shilling." But unless you lived in a suburb you won't know anything about those mysteries. And you won't know, or care, why the baked-potato man has disappeared, or what has happened to the Italian with his pedestal organ and his monkey, or why the changing mode needed to have changed so violently as to rob you of hot rolls, and balloons and flags.

I spoke earlier of the disappearance of the Cockney slang and its replacement by American slang. Equally notable, at this day, is the disappearance of the Cockney himself. A fourth generation of the London-born is hard to find. The coster, of course, threw away his distinctive clothes and deportment as soon as Albert Chevalier brought him to public view on the music-hall stage. So, later, did the navvy, as you will discover if you have the hunt I had for corduroy trousers for the garden. And now the Cockney seems to have been exterminated, or to have hidden himself so successfully that there is no tracing him. I believe he must be about somewhere in the city, but the evidence is meagre. What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed among women, are not greater mysteries than the hiding-place of the Londoner in London.

I have met Londoners keeping seaside hotels, Londoners keeping lemonade stalls in the middle of Dartmoor, Londoners driving buses in Cumberland, Londoners in the Welsh hills, and Londoners working in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Cannes and Nice. But to find them in London . . . You may lunch at one of London's best-known grill-rooms. The scene is assumed by strangers to be typical of London and London life. Actually it is typical only of the provinces. It is filled with a company connected with London and commonly associated with London--famous actors, actresses, famous musicians, social leaders, authors--all part of the London scene and leading their lives in London; and not one of them a Londoner. The born Londoner can spot his fellow or the man from outside without seeing his face or hearing his voice. He need only see him walk across the room, or shake hands; he need only see the back of his neck or the set of his shoulders, and he knows him for Londoner or provincial. Over there is a man who has written many novels about London and is known as a London novelist. Every line of his body carries the marks of the shires. Next him is a Cockney comedian whose ears and neck proclaim his Midland origin. Elsewhere is a "well-known man about town," whose very walk announces him as Devonshire; a man to whom London means nothing but a "season" with its hub at Hyde Park, and who knows less about the intimate London than a Northumbrian who has a cousin living in Bloomsbury.

You may go to Fleet Street and look among the men who produce in London the daily record of London's life. You will see many Scots, numbers of Welshmen and Irishmen, and men from the northern shires. But if there is a Londoner at work among them he has closely disguised himself. You may go to cheap tea-shops at busy hours. A stranger, observing the customers, would think "Here, at any rate, is typical London." But let him talk to the people, and he will find that this one came from Hampshire last year, that one's home is in Nottingham, and another came from Shropshire two years ago, and the family of another moved in from Norfolk twelve years ago. You may go to Brixton Road, where, if anywhere, you should find true London. You talk to the shop-keepers. This one came from Southampton, the other from Cardiff, another from Colchester. Try Camden Town. Talk to the stall-keepers, who look as Cockney as any figure drawn by a comic artist to represent the Cockney. This one is a gipsy, the other from Suffolk, another from Berkshire. Wherever you go, you find that the "typical London crowd" is composed mainly of people who were born far from London. After ten or fifteen years they call themselves Londoners but on challenge they collapse to Birmingham or Liverpool or Leeds.

It is the same all over the seven hundred square miles. Scratch a self-styled Londoner and you find a provincial. London has a bad name for crime, while actually the Londoner is a good law-abiding fellow. I doubt if twenty per cent. of London crime can be traced to true Londoners; the bulk of it is the work of these expatriated provincials. They have taken London. They have taken our restaurants, our bars and our clubs. They have taken the best jobs. They have given themselves the leading rôles on the London stage. They have pushed the Londoner right off the main streets, and compelled him to retire to the back streets. I don't complain of the success of their drive; the Londoner has allowed it, and deserves his defeat by his quiescence. But if Government protects me from the cheap and good produce of men who live in foreign countries, why can't the L.C.C. protect me from the competition of people who belong to foreign counties and who invade my territory and seize the best things in it? If a musician who speaks Italian is barred from England because English musicians are out of work, why should a musician who speaks Yorkshire be allowed to work in London when London musicians are out of work. Or why should a Devonshire entertainer be allowed to practise in Surrey? Why can't we have London for the Londoners, and an immigration fee of say, a hundred guineas from all provincials who wish to become Londoners? Or plates of poisoned tripe at the northern railway termini and poisoned pasties at the southern?

In another sphere the Londoner has allowed himself to be pushed into the background by the provincial. Think of all the novels of London life which are accepted in the country as authoritative. How many of them were written by Londoners? Not one in fifty. The "regional" novel has been for the last century or so a notable feature of English fiction, but all the novels of this kind which survive have been the work of natives of those regions. No immigrant could have written the Wessex novels of Hardy or the Warwickshire novels of George Eliot; the Shropshire novels of Mary Webb or the East Anglian novels of R. H. Mottram. Yet the bulk of the "London" novels, which the provincials accept as we accept the rural, have been written by immigrants. The outstanding novelist of London life came from Portsea. Thackeray came from India, but came at so early an age that perhaps one may stretch a point and allow him as a Londoner. But one cannot make this allowance to the others who have been identified with the interpretation of London and London life: they did not settle in town until early manhood. We have Walter Besant, from Portsmouth; George Gissing, from Wakefield; Arnold Bennett, from the Potteries; Jerome K. Jerome, from Walsall; Pett Ridge, from Kent; Michael Arlen, from Lancashire; J. B. Priestley, from Yorkshire; Thomas Moult, from Derbyshire. All of them accepted as "London" novelists. To-day we have among us only one "London" novelist who is a Londoner. That is Mr. Frank Swinnerton.

How this has happened I do not know, for London is not without its great names in literature. But they have turned, oddly enough, not to the novel, but to poetry. And even in poetry they have used none of the swarming themes which London life affords. There seems to have been a mutual change-over. The country people rushed into London to write novels about London life; the London-born poets rushed into the country to write pastorals. They make a noble company--Chaucer, Spenser, Herrick, Crashaw, Dekker, Ben Jonson, Milton, Gray, Pope, Blake, Keats, Byron, Hood, Browning and Rossetti; yet, London-born as they were, not one of them wrote a "London" poem. All of them tuned their lyres to the country key; even Herrick, who loathed the country life of which he sang with such a golden note. No Londoner, as I say, could, after a few years in Yorkshire or Somerset, produce a Yorkshire or Somerset novel which would satisfy the natives of Yorkshire or Somerset that he knew what he was writing about and had got their inwardness in his bones. But these provincial immigrants can produce their "London" novels without challenge, despite their deplorable contortions when they present a London character talking what they think is Cockney. If a Londoner, writing a Potteries novel, made the characters begin their sentences with "Iss fay" and "Look you, indeed," he would be making no greater break than some of these authors make with their attempts at Cockney dialect. But they get away with it and are accepted, and perhaps the explanation is that London is not a "region" in the sense that the West Riding or East Anglia or Dorset is a "region." It has no permanent soil, no unchanging background, no rooted life that can be absorbed only through the bones and the blood. The Cockney will not "stay put" as rural families do, and consequently London is always fluid. It is a fusion of all elements of English life, and any man from any part of England can find his place in it. It will accept him and open to him. The country is more reticent. It gives itself only to its sons, and when the Cockney goes to make his home in it he has to wrestle with it. Perhaps that is where he has gone and why the country districts are in such a sad state. I don't know. I only know that he is not easily located in London these days.

I think the "character" whose disappearance from the London scene I most regret is that character which was so popular that at various times it was given affectionate nick-names. I mean the golden sovereign. For with the disappearance of that pleasing trifle came a complete change in the price of things. Apart from the fact that pieces of printed paper do not give you the feeling of being rich--however many you may carry with you--you can buy so little with them. The sovereign looked like riches and was. His potentialities were vast. His very gleam gave promise of good things and many of them. His weight reassured you. Often in hard times he was a widow's cruse. He might be the last you possessed, but while you could feel him in your pocket he lent you a confidence which your last five-pound note never lends. I have sometimes told young men what I have done in a London evening with one sovereign, and they look at me and look at each other, silently remarking that the old man's memory's going. But it isn't.

Often and often, in the years just before the war, a friend and myself have met at six o'clock, possessing a sovereign each. We have had aperitifs. We have dined in Soho at one of the places which soared beyond the general run of one-and-sixpence by serving a half-crown or three-shilling dinner--five courses, including game, and very good, though not Lucullan. We have had a bottle, often a bottle and a half, of reasonable claret, or flasks of Chianti, and have finished dinner with a liqueur. We have taken a cab to a theatre. We have bought seats in the dress-circle. We have taken a cab from the theatre to the station. At the station we have had a parting drink or so. And always, even if we had gone to a Caruso and Melba night at Covent Garden (gallery 2s. 6d.) we got home with some loose change. Indeed, we have often had amusing evenings when we had only five or six shillings each. On those hard-up occasions, the half-crown dinner was beyond us. We went instead to the Dieppe, the Franco-Suisse, or one of the many other places which did a four-course bourgeois dinner for one shilling. A bottle of ordinaire was a shilling; in some places tenpence. In these smaller places any of the usual liqueurs was sixpence. The ordinary brands of cigarette were threepence for ten, and good Turkish were sixpence for ten. One shilling would admit you to the Promenade Concerts or to the pit of a music-hall, which mostly had a bill of sixteen or eighteen turns, twelve of them "stars." After the show you could get a bottle of beer of one of the famous brands for threepence, or a proprietary whisky for fourpence. And even if you had two or three you still would not, at the end of the evening, have spent six shillings.

That is what poor young men could get in those days. The well-to-do must have had real trouble in spending their money, for even in the best restaurants five pounds went somewhat laggingly. The duty on wine was then much lower, and though the best restaurants put the best price on wines which were cheaper in the smaller places, they were still asking the sort of price now asked by second- and third-rate places. I have just looked at a wine-list of 1912. In it I find a Dow's port of 1884, at eighty-eight shillings a dozen; a Clos de Vougeot of 1894, at sixty-three shillings a dozen; a Château Lafite of 1890, at forty shillings a dozen; and of the Moselles, the princesses of the wine realm, a Berncastler Doktor of 1907 at fifty-eight shillings a dozen. Prices which one now pays for ordinary table wines.

Almost anything you wanted could be got then at a price which to-day purchases only the commonplace. To qualify as a spendthrift you must have had to think hard. One of "Pitcher's" stories about Phil May illustrates this. Phil May had attended the National Sporting Club, and had backed a lad who was not thought to have a chance. His lad won, and Phil May drew thirty pounds. Being Phil May, he saw no purpose in taking that thirty pounds home. It must be spent. It was then half-past eleven, but it must be spent. He invited all the people round about to come and have supper with him. He took them in cabs to a restaurant. He ordered a light but (as he thought) expensive supper, and kept the wine-waiter busy. Five or six friends had followed him as guests, but half-way through the meal he noted with some dismay that they were drinking very little, and that few bottles were being opened. This would not do: the thirty pounds must be spent. He called the waiter, and announced that he would like to finish the meal with a fresh fruit salad, and liqueur dressing. The waiter demurred and called the head-waiter. The head-waiter said that it could be done, but did Mr. May remember that it was January and that fresh strawberries, cherries, peaches, were likely to be--"Make the salad," said May. After some furious rushing around Covent Garden by the Kitchen Staff, the salad appeared; a magnificent bowl of out-of-season fruits. It was eaten and approved. The bill came. Phil May looked at it; then threw it down with a "Damn!" Even with the salad he hadn't spent his thirty pounds.

Phil May was a good specimen of the London "character," though he was really an immigrant from Leeds. Stories about him are innumerable. I can think of nobody to-day whose personality so constantly gives rise to anecdote and legend, and I can see none coming from the young. Nobody eagerly approaches you to tell you the "latest" about So-and-so, as I have heard they did with the "latest" about Phil May and Whistler and a few others of that period. We have our geniuses, but they do not claim their right to full being. There is no "latest" to be told. They seem, as I have said, only anxious to show that they are as sensible as merchants and as conventional as lawyers; as, at root, true genius always is. But genius has a licence to permit its little devils to play in public, while commercial men and lawyers dare not display their little devils outside the privacy of their own set. It is odd that modern genius ignores this licence. I recall from thirty years ago a music-hall song which petulantly inquired: "Must you have beef with your mustard?" We have the beef to-day in our geniuses. I wish they would bring with them a dash of mustard and give us a touch of the old fire of character.

Apart from individual characters, whole types of character have merged themselves in the common stock. Just as the London man has suffered from the craze for standardisation, so has the London girl. She is always, of course, under a fire of criticism concerning her behaviour and her dress and her masculine activity, but that comes mainly from prejudiced elders. We all, I suppose, fix our ideal of girlhood on the girls we knew in our teens. Men who were seventeen or eighteen in the forties of last century had nothing good to say of the hoyden of 1870, and those who were seventeen or eighteen in the sixties remembered girls of the "Alice" sort and looked askance at the fast miss of 1900; while those who were youths in 1900, though they have more tolerance than their fathers and grandfathers, and are prepared to approve the young thing of 1934, still see the ideal girl as a girl with flowing curls, and untroubled profile, and calm blue eyes. In most matters the modern London girl is an improvement on her elders, and notably in her absence of feminine humbug. She is direct, self-reliant, and honest in her attitudes. She knows more, and her mind is quicker. Forty years ago most girls were "dumb," and nobody thought of giving them that label. To-day that condition is the exception, and a word had to be found for it.

The only criticism I would make of her is that she is too much of a muchness. In my youth all girls were different. Prettiness was the standard then, where piquancy is the standard to-day. But it was a prettiness in variety. A dozen girls in a room were a dozen distinct girls. To-day, you may talk separately to a dozen girls in a room and all the time feel that you are talking to the same girl. Among the well-to-do classes particularly, the girl in face and figure is a stereo of all other girls: thin face, slim hips, slim fingers, and standardised expression. And in the street it is difficult to guess at a glance, save from the quality of her clothes, where she belongs. In the past you could immediately recognise the social girl, the middle-class girl, the City girl and the factory-girl. Each had its own tone, its own dress, and its own bearing. The factory-girl wore a black straw hat, ear-rings, a "Mizpah" brooch, and hair dressed in rolls over her ears. The City girl was neat and severe. The middle-class girl was also neat, but added a touch of the style and chic which in those days could only be had by money. The Society girl was consciously and demonstrably the Society girl. In these times, while the higher and the lower ranks are still distinguishable, the intermediate rank, and all the little ranks within it, have fused, and only fine and closely-observed shades mark the difference between the shop-assistant and the actress, or the young girl of Mayfair and the young girl of Hampstead.

The credit for this sameness, if it is a credit, must go to that bold and ardent portent of the nineties--the New Woman. It was she, in her Trilby hat and bloomers and tweed jacket and collar, who opened the world to the young girl of to-day. It was she who blazed the trail for Votes for Women, for entrance to all professions until then reserved to men, for mixed bathing, for sun-bathing, for tennis shorts, for bachelor flatlets and--for uniformity. She was the Woman Who Did, and she did well in all these things, save the last. When John Knox wrote of "this monstrous regiment of women," he can hardly have guessed how accurate the word regiment would be, centuries later. Women and girls have won their freedom, thanks to the New Woman, but, having won it, they seem unable to use it. After running about for a while, and tasting it, the next thing they did was to enter a new servitude and make themselves look as much like each other as possible. To-day there are neither pretty girls nor plain girls; everywhere you see the same keen features and alert eyes; the same scarlet lips and scarlet finger-nails; the same poise, the same rather arctic charm, and the same funny little hat. They are the progeny of the New Woman--a regiment of Good Sorts.

As the coster and the navvy have changed their costume and their deportment, so have less agreeable types. In my childhood there was much talk of a certain figure of the rougher quarters called the "hooligan." He was recognisable on sight. To-day he is not to be seen. He went out at the same time as the roaring, round-the-town boys of the West End. He was a lower example of their sort, a figure of an age, a smasher of things for the sake of smashing things. When life became more severe, and expenditure of energy had to have some purpose, he ceased to be, and his place was taken by neatly-tailored young men who do not break idly into disorder. They break with purpose and with method, and with fast cars. They are the smash-and-grab men and the hold-up men. You might sit with them in trains and buses and restaurants, and never know them from book-keepers and respectable householders. The hooligan had a contemporary, a more serious and business-like fellow, but equally recognisable. He, too--Burglar Bill--has ceased to dress his part and announce his calling to the world. He appears now as the cat-burglar, and often doubles the part by posing as a young man about town. He frequents West End bars and restaurants, and often is found to be mixing with reputable people. Just as many of the pleasures and conveniences once restricted to the rich can now be had by the people, so many of the activities once restricted to the poor have been taken over by the educated whose education has unfitted them for the new intellectual demands of the professions or the far-sighted enterprise of modern commerce.

Another type for which you will look in vain is that figure who, up to 1914, was so common that at various periods he had a stock name. At one time he was a Swell; then a Johnny; then a Masher; then a Blood; and his last manifestation was the K'nut. The nearest figure we now have to him is the gigolo, but there is a great gulf between the demeanour and operations of the two types. The Gay Old Boy, too, once a familiar figure of the West End, has gone, and his Lady Friend cannot easily be found. These types, I think, went out when the Empire Promenade went out and when Leicester Square suffered an overhaul, and lost those cosmopolitan bars which were the rendezvous of the Pretty Ladies. The Johnny, the Gay Old Boy, and the Lady Friend were part of the furniture of Leicester Square, as you may see from the pictures of the black-and-white artists of the period. With the passing of the Leicester Square legend they also passed. Outside London, however, the legend seems to survive. Young provincials, I notice, and visitors from the Dominions still want to see Leicester Square. This may be due to its being enshrined in old songs; but though these songs carried its legend into all sorts of remote villages, it was not, I think, the songs that set it on the map, nor anything that it possessed in itself. It owes most of its fame, I fancy, to Mrs. Ormiston Chant. Until she arrived, nobody, not even frequenters or casual visitors, realised what a depraved spot it was. It was from her that it had its best time. About ten years later, in the early nineteen-noughts, it began to flag. The music-halls, who had been its major celebrants, suddenly turned on their old favourite, and the late George Formby hastened the end of that particular phase of its life with his songs ridiculing the new kind of youth about town--"It's My Night Out," "I'm One of The Boys" and "We All Went to Leicester Square." The funeral hymn of its raffish phase was sung by the soldiers when they chose "Tipperary" for their marching song. In that song the author wrote better than he knew. "Good-bye, Piccadilly; farewell, Leicester Square." It was an adieu to an age. Piccadilly and Leicester Square survive, as bright as ever they were; but the self-conscious gaiety and that note which caused music-hall comedians to smirk when they mentioned them, are gone. To-day, Leicester Square is clean and lively, and on a Spring morning it is one of the most pleasant spots of the town. Entertainment is there, but of a fresher, more sensible kind, and people of all sorts frequent it at all hours of day and night. It is within my not-too-aged recollection that at one time women alone at night went some way round to avoid passing through it.

In place of the old type of lounge, in which women only of a "certain type" were seen, we have the hotel lounge. As America has captured our entertainment industry, and taken the marrow out of our colloquial talk and substituted trans-Atlantic zest, so it has imposed upon us the American feature of the hotel lounge, which in every American town is everybody's rendezvous. It can be, and is, put to many uses. People sit in it, and stand in it, and think in it, and walk in it, and meet their friends, or day-dream in it. There seems to be only one thing people don't do in a hotel lounge. They may sit, but they don't lounge. Only once have I seen a man actually lounging in the lounge, with all his limbs at disorderly ease; and it turned out that he was drunk, and the staff quickly stopped him from using the place in accord with its name. There should be some new word for it, since an hour in a lounge is anything but an hour of ease; it is more like an hour in a maelstrom.

Spend an hour in the lounge of one of the new popular hotels. From half-past ten in the morning until midnight it is in such a stir that for all the lounging you can do you might as well be in the middle of Cheapside. In the morning and afternoon it is occupied mainly by tourists and by women from the suburbs and provinces taking refreshment between spells of shopping, or meeting their friends. In the evening the company is diversified--clergymen and small business men; young people of all kinds; foreign students and wanderers for whom there is no label. The lounge lizard is neither so numerous nor so highly developed in England as in America, though if America will give us time we may be able to produce it as a successor to the Johnnies, the Mashers and the K'nuts. What we already possess is what I may call the Lounge Lizzie. She is not the housewife taking an hour's rest between shoppings. She is a quiet, respectable woman--and lonely. She appears to have no shopping to do, no work to do, nothing to do, and very little money. She sits in these places hour by hour, sipping coffee and wearing in her eyes the guilty look of one engaged in the dreary business of getting through life without living. The business is called Killing Time, and I think the hotel lounges of Europe and America have seen more of this kind of moral murder than any other enclosed places.

These lounges make a strong appeal to those living in cramped villas on cramped incomes. They are in the topographical centre of things. They are spacious and lofty. They are furnished like a private drawing-room imagined by a film-producer. They give to tired people a reflection of the world which they taste vicariously in novels and in movies: a Monte Carlo world which, in their view, is Life. They appease a modern appetite. They give colour and movement, and a tonic sense of affluence and ease, to millions who have never before had a share of them, and this reacts pleasantly upon the general social tenor and outlook.

In Victorian days, when places were built for the use of the people, nobody thought of making them gorgeous replicas of palaces. As little as possible was spent on them, and the promoters went on wondering why they failed. Then some bright spirit came along with the idea of building the kind of place that had formerly been built for the well-to-do, and of making the same charges that were made in the old dingy places. I can hear the comments of the prophets, who, like so many prophets, were thinking thirty years behind their time. "Hopeless. He'll never get his money back. How could he--with all that outlay and those ridiculous prices?" They forgot the simple economic fact that twenty shillings are the same as one pound; that three thousand people bringing in a shilling every day are as good as one hundred and fifty people bringing in a pound. More certain, too; since there are millions from whom the place can draw its three thousand, and not so many from whom it can draw its hundred and fifty. Mr. Woolworth's success is due to his discovery of the fact that millions of people can spend sixpence at five different times, or threepence at ten different times, who never at any time have half-a-crown to spend. It is irritating to be faced with proof of a proverb which you don't like and never believed; but these people have proved that if you look after the pence, the pounds will look after themselves.

The doubting attitude of the business-man-prophet recalls a story I read recently in a book of London gossip published in the late nineties. It was the recollections, mainly of clubs and taverns, of Edward Callow, who at that date could look back to London life in the eighteen-forties. The story concerns the time when there were no Charing Cross Station and no Charing Cross Hotel. In the Haymarket of those days there stood, where His Majesty's and the Carlton now stand, the Italian Opera House, still remembered in the Opera Arcade, running from Charles Street to Pall Mall. The Charles Street side of this block was occupied by a small hotel which, some time during the sixties, was wound-up and put on the market. The author and a few of his City friends formed a plan for purchasing the hotel, and with it all other interests in the whole block, and erecting upon the site the kind of hotel which is now the prevailing London hotel--namely, a huge American hotel. The plan went well. Many important people became interested in the project, as directors, and an advisory board of men with long experience of hotel management was formed. Plans and estimates were drawn up, and all arrangements made for the purchase of existing leases. Then, at one of the board meetings of the new company, it was announced that the South Eastern Railway had lodged plans for the erection of a large hotel at their new terminus at Charing Cross. Whereupon the advisory board of the proposed large hotel on the Haymarket site, the men experienced in the hotel business, gave advice to their directors as follows: That it was useless for them to proceed with their project, since London could not possibly support two such hotels. A few years later, as the author, with just bitterness, remarks, this advisory board had before their eyes Northumberland Avenue and its hotels.

Another type who was regarded at the beginning of the century as a permanent feature of London life, and is now in retirement, is the old horse-bus driver. The motor-bus driver of to-day is a fine type, and performs an exacting job with unusual skill and suave temper. But one does not know much about him. The horse-bus driver was in touch with his front-seat passengers, and they could talk to him. Londoners then were not over-sensitive to wind and rain, and the open top of the bus gave them a view of the world through which they rumbled, and inspired that casual conversation which open air always inspires among strangers, and which enclosed places always stifle. In sunshine or pouring rain the mere presence of the driver, and perhaps the presence of the horses, was an incentive to talk; but on the motor-bus, whether covered or open, the driver is set apart from his passengers. There is no chance of talking to him, and he goes so swiftly through the streets and makes such brief pauses that there is little chance even of observing him. In the past, men who lived in the suburbs and went every day to the City got to know their bus-driver, and their front seat was always reserved for them. If they were not at the corner when their bus stopped, the bus would wait for them. On the way to town they would discuss the news and the outlook with the driver. He made a faint link with the old coachmen whom the railways had expelled from the roads of England. He had their weather-beaten face, their independence, their stolidity. At times he was gruff, but he was seldom morose. When he, in his turn, was expelled from the roads of London, the public, which had taken him for granted, began to miss him. It even got sentimental about him, as it does about ordinary things which have ceased to be, and attributed to him many qualities which he did not possess.

One of these was wit. Older people began to tell each other about the witty bus-drivers they had known, and to recall examples of their salt. Within my own experience I am unable to confirm this ana. I was going about London for twelve years before the horse-bus left the streets, and was keeping my ears and eyes open, and not once did I encounter a flash of wit. Not once did I hear those drivers or conductors say anything of original spirit. What I did hear, and often, was constant echo of the latest music-hall gag. I may have been merely unlucky, but I believe that was all that anybody heard. A fair specimen could be heard when a horse-bus was passing one of the early motor-buses which had broken down--as they frequently did. "Hi--why donya sit on his head, mate?" The uneducated Cockney is not truly a wit. Where he does shine, and where he is richly characteristic of a great city, is in truculence and invective.

"Wodger mean, gin me that nasty look?"

"Oo--me? I-ne-geeya no nasty look."

"Su did."

"Ono I din. Yad it fore I sawya."

As no city can so abash the hero who sets out to conquer it in a week as London, so no man can wither and blast the pompous as the Londoner. But not with wit; with well-frozen scorn. And the Cockney girl is perhaps even better at it than the Cockney lad.

Around 1906-7 we could travel about London by the new vehicles or the old. We could make part of our journey by horse-bus and continue it by venturing on a Vanguard, an Arrow, or a Rapide. We could go to the theatre by hansom and return home by taxi. At that time the sway of the battle was not clearly indicated, and taxis and motor-buses were impertinent intruders among the horse-traffic, which pronounced upon them such bitter comment as is to-day pronounced upon what remains of the horse-traffic. By 1909 the issue was clear. The horse must go. By 1911 so far as buses were concerned, it had gone. It was in that year that the last horse-bus made its last over-the-bridge journey. For a few years more the hansom kept up a sort of guerilla warfare with the taxi, and up to 1918 it was not such a rarity on the streets as to be pointed out and looked at. But its day in London, and the horse's day, was done, and since the end of the war street-orderlies, lads who ran in and out of the traffic with pan and brush, have had little to do. Our main streets, which, since the beginning of London, had held the smell of the stable, were thenceforth to hold the reek of petrol. The taxi and the motor-bus were fixed, and will remain fixed until those plans for aerodromes and landing-stages in the centre of London become facts, and change yet again the face and tone of the London scene.

We have little chance, as I say, of knowing the motor-bus driver and comparing him in personality with the horse-bus driver. But the taxi-driver we can exchange words with, and get to know, and in comparing him with the hansom cabby of yesterday I think the balance falls in his favour. He and the motor-bus driver, I believe, are officially recognised as the most skilled and considerate of road-users. Foreign visitors to London talk so much and so often of the courtesy and efficiency of our police that one might think they had never noticed our other public servants. Could they not spare the blushes of the police for awhile, and give a nod of recognition elsewhere? Could they not tell us sometimes that our telephone operators sure know their stuff, that our postmen have gotten the world beat for snappy delivery, or that our taxi-drivers are--how you say?--zo zweet, n'est-ce pas? Like the contemporaries of the horse-bus driver, we too much take the taxi-driver for granted, and if we talk of him at all we talk of his faults. Only when he is gone shall we get sentimental about him and recall his peculiar flavour.

How many times, when I have been lost in wildernesses, has he picked me up and returned me to civilisation. When a storm has caught me in a lonely street without an overcoat he has appeared at the corner and rescued me. When I have had to keep an appointment at a club whose address I did not know he has delivered me there. When I have, on two occasions, stopped him and said "Nearest doctor" he has found him. And when, as happens to the best of us, I have had no money for his tip, and have told him so, he has not cursed me. "That's all right, sir. Another time, perhaps." Much of the vague hostility towards him seems to centre on this matter of tipping, but I have always found that if you frankly tell him you are short, he will accept the explanation civilly. To neglect this explanation, and to hand over the exact fare without a word, does sometimes lead to hard feeling. His economic position is by no means the bed of roses many people think it to be, and considering the hours he works, and that his best work is done in foul weather, his rough-and-ready good manners and his level civility are to be applauded.

He seldom bursts into spring-tide smiles, and is not much given to joking. This is because he has to be alert not only for his job itself, but for many external details. He has to be on his guard against those who consider him an easy mark--the bilkers, and those who want to treat him as taxi-man, porter, footman, banker and street-guide. His only job is driving a taxi, and he need perform no other service; though for people who behave decently he often will. He will almost always help with the luggage if you ask him; he will oblige a request where he is within his rights in ignoring a command; and his knowledge of London is usually available to any inquirer, whether his taxi is wanted or not. If you have run short of money, and can prove where you live, he will drive you anywhere and call for his fare next day; and I have met many instances of his kindness to really poor people.

Anybody who has had a year's experience of Paris taxi-men ought, I think, on meeting the London taxi-man to give him a benediction. You know how it is in Paris. You take your taxi and name a street. If it isn't a main street, the driver asks you where it is and how to get to it. If you don't know, out comes his Map and Guide. I fancy that any London taxi-man who was driven to consult a Map and Guide would either commit hara-kiri or be despatched by his colleagues. His knowledge of London is unassailable. Never have I known him hesitate, unless, that is, the street you want is an obscure street in a distant suburb. In the mad pride of my own knowledge of London I have sometimes put some pretty problems to him, but I have never puzzled him. I have taken a taxi in Coldharbour Lane and said "Percy Circus," and the man has nodded and landed me there. I have taken a taxi from a rank in Lewisham and said "Goldsmiths' Hall," and have been asked no question. I have tried the old trick of Trafalgar Square, but have never won. Always the man has come back with "Charing Cross, Chelsea, or Stepney?" I have tried to catch him taking a longer route than was necessary, but have never succeeded. There have been times when I have thought with impish delight that I had got him. "He's going the wrong way. He doesn't know. At last I can tell a taxi-man something." Then a sudden turn has brought us into a familiar street, and has taught me a quick way I didn't know. Sometimes I have been so sure that he was using too long a route that I have stopped him and challenged him. Always I have been crushed. "I know all about that. But the road's up in Euston Road. Take ten minutes getting through there."

Just as the coachmen of the early nineteenth century received their celebration in social history, and, later, the railway men received theirs, and the hansom cabbies received theirs, so, in time to come, will the motor-bus driver and the taxi-man receive theirs. I am sure it will be an affectionate celebration. The aerobus pilot we have yet to know in London, but we may be confident that when he does arrive he will be as efficient and as quietly cheerful as all other public figures of London's daily life.

My earliest impressions of London were, as I say, of lamps and shop-windows. The city seemed to me to be all shops: hundreds, thousands, millions of shops, every one of them an invitation, so that one was worried as to which to accept and which to pass. The shops of the little side-streets made as keen an appeal as those of the great streets. Each was an Aladdin's Cave, its windows only hinting at richer wonders awaiting those entitled to explore its dim recesses. Sometimes I was grieved to think that however zealously I set about it I would never, could never, look in the windows of every shop in London.

Among the first shops I ever saw was one whose window, at this moment of writing, is dressed as it was when I saw it from a height of three feet. While so many old-established businesses in one particular line have, in the past thirty or forty years, demolished their premises and returned to life as general stores, or at any rate six sizes larger, this shop has neither altered nor extended itself, nor even changed its style of display. It stands to-day as it did, and its windows have suffered the ferment of the years without ageing and without apeing the frantic young. It makes no concessions to those "times" which are often responsible for disastrous experiment. It has no need to. London can rush ahead or pull itself about as it pleases; this shop remains static and shows that window-dressing of the old sort can attract as many eyes as the most Picasso or Matisse challenge. It is pleasant in a world of change to find something which is at once an immovable object and an irresistible force, and I can never pass along Oxford Street without pausing at the old, familiar windows of Buszard's.

Their window-dressing may have changed in a minor point here and there, but to my eye they are the very windows of my childhood, holding the same number of tiered bride-cakes of the same design and confection, the same number of Falstaffian Dundee cakes, and the same fascinating juvenilia of the cake world. The first cakes I ever tasted must have been Buszard's, for I have a very early memory of being given money and of going in and of being served with objects more lustrous than jewels--jam-puffs, cream-buns and what-not. So long have its windows remained unchanged that it is possible that my infant godson, in his middle-age, will be able to pass along Oxford Street and show them to his infant godson as the windows to which his godfather brought him when he was a boy.

It is not the only London shop which has sat with folded hands and looked blandly upon all the change going on around it. The West End has some dozen examples, and the City one or two, while every suburb except the up-to-the-minute suburbs keeps an odd one tucked away somewhere. When one has used up all the general programme tours of London, one might make an Old Shop Tour. Freibourg and Treyer's, in Haymarket, looks much as it must have looked when my grandfather passed it. Berry's, the wine-merchant's, and Lock's, the hatter's, both in St. James Street, have also insisted upon retaining the hues of youth and growing old in the cravats and silk waistcoats of George Brummell. There is the chemist's shop in Drury Lane, which my mother, at the age of eighty-one, recognised as having the selfsame appearance and dressing it had when she was fourteen. There is the book-shop of Ellis, in Bond Street, one of a number in that street and its by-streets which have seen no good reason for having their faces lifted to six storeys of concrete.

My early acquaintance with Buszard's arose from my Aunt Jane and her shopping expeditions. We have all, I suppose, had an Aunt Jane, and have all, once or twice at least, gone shopping with her. Remembering those expeditions, one sees what a revolution has happened in thirty years in shops and the business of shopping, and in Aunt Janes themselves. The Aunt Janes of to-day are mainly Aunt Joans or Aunt Corals or Aunt Leslies, and are a very distant strain of the breed of Aunt Jane.

Recently a schoolboy friend brought his Aunt Leslie to see me. It was long since I had seen an aunt, as such, and it was amusing to note the thirty years' difference between her and my Aunt Jane. To the middle-aged the term Aunt still carries something which evokes respect, if not awe; for in our childhood Aunts were personages. Aunt Jane was affectionate and well-disposed towards "the children," but in the manner of a benevolent head-mistress. When she was visiting, it was necessary to be a little more or a little less than one's true self. She had an eye for failings; a gentle eye, perhaps, but still an eye. When she moved she rustled, as though her very dress were aware of its office in decorating so august a figure and were sh-sh-ing the surroundings into respect. "The children" to her were a lovely but alien tribe from a country beyond her borders. Her notion of amusing you was to tell you of the worm-eaten games she played when she was young; games no decent child would be caught playing. But she made up for this by the exciting packages she brought, by her "treats" to circuses and pantomimes, her postal orders on birthdays, and the shopping tours which we were allowed to share.

There was nothing of this about Aunt Leslie. Aunt Jane's first words to her nephews were--How were they getting on at school? Aunt Leslie's first words to her nephew were a question--why was he wriggling about there like a rheumatic eel instead of taking her coat. At five o'clock Aunt Jane always took tea. She didn't drink tea; she "took" it, with an elegant finger. Aunt Leslie said no tea for her; rather have a spot of gin and soda if that was gin she could see on that rickety table. She was at the age at which I remember Aunt Jane--fortyish; but there was no bearded and moustached "romance" in the background. She was unmarried because, running a little business with four branches, she had no time for it. Aunt Jane regarded any change of ways and habits which happened after she was twenty as unworthy of notice, or, if noticed, to be deprecated. Aunt Leslie regarded anything that didn't belong to this week as woolly and lousy. She liked things to change frequently and violently. When Aunt Jane spoke, one listened and kept silent until she had finished. One accepted, even if one didn't approve, everything she said. Aunt Leslie's nephew derided most of her views, as being three days behind the times, and more than once it appeared that they would come to blows. Three times he told her she didn't know what she was talking about, and her only answer was profanity. I tried to visualise myself saying that to my Aunt Jane, but chaos and lightning kept blurring the picture.

When Aunt Jane left us she always slipped half-crowns into the children's hands. When Aunt Leslie left my flat she stated that she was broke, and that her nephew must lend her half-a-crown for a taxi, and it was no good his saying he hadn't got it because she'd seen his mother that morning give him a pound note. Aunt Leslie, I think, could give her nephew a better "time" than Aunt Jane gave hers, though Aunt Jane tried hard enough; but while no modern nephew would welcome the gift of an Aunt Jane, there was a little something about Aunt Jane which Aunt Leslie hasn't got. She wasn't so "human" as Aunt Leslie, but she has left an aroma. She had dignity, delicacy, tenderness, and pathetic traits of that sort. At most times she was a bore, though maybe that was our fault for being bored; but when you were sick or in trouble she was magnificent. Aunt Leslie is always the good companion, and always ready to do what she can for people if it doesn't involve too much trouble; but I doubt her lasting capacity for sympathy. Still, she will probably earn her place in the heaven of Aunts. It won't be the same heaven as Aunt Jane's, which is a quiet, elegant heaven of chintz parlours and silver tea-sets. It will be a jolly heaven with golf-courses and dance-bands. And both heavens will be London, for Aunt Jane loved London in her way as much as Aunt Leslie in hers.

I do not now go shopping with women, but in walking about London and occasionally buying something, I observe the customers and the staff, and I can perceive a wide gulf between the old and the new technique of shopping. Even in the most serious of all departments of shopping, the dressmaker's studio, there is an air which--forgive the profanity--is almost snappy as compared with the rites and ceremonies of those places at the Diamond Jubilee era. When Aunt Jane entered her dressmaker's, or for that matter her chemist's, or grocer's, or florist's, she entered with the air of having come for the day. She never did spend the day there, not even at the dressmaker's, but it seemed like it. Often she got out of the chemist's, the grocer's, or the florist's, in forty-five minutes, I have known her do it in thirty. But the atmosphere of the affair in each shop was that the clock had stopped, and that she and the shopman were free to discuss until next week this matter of flowers or soap or biscuits. Women still, I suppose, take it leisurely at their costumier's and hair-dresser's, but "leisurely" is a relative term, and what passes as leisurely in 1934 would in 1897 have been thought rush. In the matter of minor purchases they are almost as brisk as men. In the time Aunt Jane took to buy a hair-net the modern women has given her favourite store the once-over and is snapping into one purchase after another. The shopman saves her the trouble of looking for bargains; he thrusts them before her in special departments. In Aunt Jane's time they had to be scented and stalked, and Aunt Jane had a nose for them. Her major expeditions were centred on the Autumn sales and the January sales, but she carried her bargain-hunting zeal into every shopping visit. It was her firm conviction that all shops existed for the purpose of swindling her. Even the sales did not satisfy her: half-price she considered an outrageous price.

Husbands of to-day often complain that their wives make a fuss about shopping. They should have seen Aunt Jane preparing for a descent on Regent Street, St. Paul's Churchyard and, occasionally, Bond Street. The week of the campaign was fixed well ahead; the route and the tactics were planned; and bundles of catalogues (quaint bibelots for us, those shop catalogues of yesteryear) were scrupulously examined. I recall being an eye-witness of many stages of the campaign, notably at Gorringe's, Peter Robinson's, Dickins and Jones, Liberty's, and "Phoebe's," where her bonnets came from.

Her way of checking any unruly outbursts on our part was to tell us what "ladies" did and did not do, though why she expected healthy boys to be patterns of English ladies I don't know. However, by close observation of her lady ways, we learned a lot. We learned how to deal with careless or casual shop-assistants, and particularly how to deal with cab-drivers. She was nervous of hansoms; they looked dangerous, and I believe she thought them a little frivolous. She would trust herself only to four-wheelers. The driver of the growler, if you remember, was inclined to be not perhaps so high-handed as the driver of the hansom, but much more surly. You should have seen Aunt Jane dealing with him. In those encounters her frailty and timidity and English-lady delicacy strangely went overboard. Many a strong, silent man was crushed by the drivers of those four-wheelers, but not Aunt Jane. The driver who questioned the sum which she handed to him--she had a fixed tip for any distance: twopence--usually, after a few seconds of speech from her, drove off. They all drove off; it was only a question whether they could stand ten seconds of it or a minute and a half. Those who stood ground longest got her ultimatum--"Another word from you and I take your number."

On these shopping campaigns she seemed to fight her way to victory by use of the mystic threat of taking people's "number." Three or four times a day, if she were impeded on her march, she would threaten to take cabmen's numbers, bus-conductors' numbers, porters' numbers, District Messengers' numbers, and there was a family rumour that she had been heard to threaten to take a policeman's number. What she was going to do with these numbers when she had "taken" them, I never discovered. I don't think she knew herself, and I never actually saw her take a number. But in her spinster wanderings about London she had found that the phrase had some runic potency of creating alarm among the lower orders and of making things easier for herself, and she used it on her shopping campaigns as ignorantly and as effectively as Ali Baba used the "Open, Sesame."

She expounded to me her attitude on these occasions by saying that it never "did" to stand any "nonsense" from these people. "Nonsense" meant for her what other people mean by business. She would stand no "nonsense" from shop-keepers or restaurateurs, or from anybody who wanted to make a living. She would stand no "nonsense" from her hotel--one of the many quiet places, now vanished, which used to stand thickly in the byways of Oxford Street. She knew that the hotel hoped to make a profit out of her visits, and she refused to be the victim of any such nonsense. She would beat them down until she reached a price for her room which she thought "fair," which usually meant that the hotel made nothing out of her. Having won that victory, she would give lavish presents to attentive chamber-maids, would feed them menthol and lavender water when they had headaches, and if they were run down would arrange holidays by the sea at her cost.

Full of sympathy for certain kinds of worker, she was merciless on the more public servants--cabmen, shop-assistants, etc. She would keep shop-assistants on hot days pulling down box after box of lace or ribbons for three-quarters of an hour, and then, if their courtesy relaxed under the strain, she would talk of "reporting" them. In these days, happily, the London shop-assistants (or store-clerks, seeing that we're all American) are manumitted souls who would soon show any Aunt Jane that they, in their turn, were not standing any "nonsense"; but at the beginning of the century the customer could unload all its pent-up bad manners on the assistant, and get away with it.

To-day, a woman can do her household shopping under one roof, but in those days the big department store for women, covering most of her personal and household requirements, was only in its infancy. Aunt Jane's shopping was therefore a business of visiting, during her week, some thirty different shops, and this meant a series of buses and four-wheelers. The buses in those days still lived in the last throes of the coaching atmosphere. Instead of cabalistic numbers and initial letters, they had names. Just as the coaches had been named Defiance, Quicksilver, Wonder, Rapid, Reliable, so the buses were The Atlas, The Favourite, The Royal Blue. Most of my early rides seem to have been associated with the Royal Blue. I forget its route, but I feel sure that it touched Piccadilly Circus, and I have memories of mounting and dismounting from it at that spot on these shopping tours. It may have touched Oxford Circus, too, since it seems that one was in the Royal Blue at a few minutes to eleven, and at eleven one was buying glories in Buszard's.

I recall visits to other "pastrycook's" besides Buszard's; it was Aunt Jane's regular custom to withdraw from the fray at mid-morning and take biscuits and a glass of "sherry wine," giving me the freedom of the pastry counter. I cannot find those pastrycooks now. Indeed, I know of but one pastrycook's of the old style remaining in London, and that one is in Jermyn Street. Unless Gunter's and Rumpelmayer's can be covered by that term. Aunt Jane would never patronise the new tea-shops, which were then opening in different parts of the town, chiefly because they were new and not of her youth. She must always find a pastrycook's. Lunch meant returning to her hotel, or looking about for one of the few restaurants to which a solitary female could go. In this matter the modern woman shopper enjoys another advantage over her mother and grandmother. Not only can she do her household and garden shopping under one roof; she can spend the day there and take lunch and tea in agreeable surroundings, without leaving it. If she cares to go elsewhere, any restaurant is open to her; she could even go to a public-house if she wished to, without incurring the suspicion, common in Aunt Jane's day, of being no better than she should be. (Though how any human creature could be anything else is a question which used to puzzle me every time I saw or heard the phrase.)

I believe it was some suburban drapery store which was the pioneer in this matter of refreshment. I think I have heard that somewhere in South London a large establishment of this sort made the experiment of setting aside one room of its premises for afternoon tea. The experiment was a success, and on the news of its success a number of central London houses followed its example, and soon extended it from afternoon tea to lunch, and finally to an all-day service. Then, of course, the giant stores arrived, with their roof-garden restaurants, their palm-lounges for tea, their rest-rooms, writing-rooms, telephone-rooms, hairdressing-rooms, exhibitions and entertainments, and all the other services of a metropolitan High Street. So that the housewife of to-day can not only cover all her domestic business in one shop, but can get for nothing the sort of Happy Day which her grandmother had when she went to the Crystal Palace.

The great store certainly has advantages over the old system of little individual shops, though, on the few occasions when I have done any shopping in one of these places, I have found that at the end of the business I have walked just as far as if I had been in the street and going from one shop to another. And really, had I been in the street, dodging from one shop to another, I would not have been so tired. I would have been able to hop into taxis or buses, and drop off at the particular shop I wanted. The stores do their best for us with lifts and soft carpets, but they have not as yet any taxis or bath-chairs to convey us from department to department. Another point in which I find them at variance from the little shops is the feeling one has of being secretly watched. In the shop there is a counter, and the goods are usually on the thither side of the counter. In the store the goods are spread openly before you, all round you, on open stands and often on the floor, in such a way that you almost feel that you are invited to Please Take One. At times you may find two or three stands without assistants, and when you want to buy something you have to wander about and search for somebody who is authorised to take the money. And while you are thus wandering with your intended purchase, you have the feeling of unseen eyes following you. Nobody minds being openly watched, but this feeling of secret watching is unpleasant. There is another side to this. If these people will display their goods in this casual way, and leave the stands without attendants, can they wonder at the temptation they offer to some poor women to Take One? They constantly complain of their losses by shop-lifting, and are constantly detecting and prosecuting poor women, when it need not happen at all. Shop-lifting doesn't happen in the small, personal shops; only in the big stores. And it wouldn't happen there if the stores saw that no stand was left without an attendant, and that their shop-detectives were open watchers in uniform. This is recognised in the outside world. The plain clothes man is useful in detecting the commission of crime, but the greatest preventive of crime is the constant presence of the uniformed constable. So, in the stores, the sight of the uniform, which meant detection, would quench any temptation.

I think I still prefer the small, personal shop, but no doubt that is because I am middle-aged. The sight and associations of our first twenty years remain with us for ever and are the standard by which we judge all innovation and development. The store is an inevitable and useful growth from the shop, but, like so many large things, it has no room for character. The flavour and aroma of those small, personal shops are outside its comprehension or attainment. The store has one large and nondescript smell, but when I think of shopping I think of each separate shop and its separate smell. There was the smell of the draper's shop; the smell of the chemist's; the smell of the grocer's; the smell of the pastrycook's--what a smell!--the smell of the oil-and-colourman's; the smell of the fruiterer's; the smell of the newsagent's; the smell of the sweetstuff shop; the smell of the furniture shop. You could range the gamut of the human nose from pungent to mawkish. With the peculiar smell went the peculiar type of proprietor or assistant. Mr. Jones, who served at the grocer's, was quite unlike Mr. Smith at the oil-and-colourman's, and Mrs. Brown who kept the sweetstuff shop was a notable divergent from the type of Mrs. Robinson who kept the newsagent's. In the large shop or store there are none of these salty distinctions. One assistant is much like another, whether serving at the chemistry counter or the lingerie counter. One felt that Mrs. Robinson had carefully decided that of all lives she desired most that of newsagent, and that Mr. Jones found himself in grocering. With these others of to-day one feels only that they decided to be shop-assistants--I mean store-clerks.

But the store and the mammoth shop have their credit entry. They are lighter, cleaner, brighter. The atmosphere is brisker. There is more space and more air to breathe. There is more display, or perhaps exhibitionism is the truer word. Window-dressing is cast in a high key, as though the flamboyant friend of Wells' Mr. Polly had dressed them. (You remember the ferocious mêlée resulting from that young man's ambition to do a "temperamental window.") There is less servility and more actual service. And of course, with the wider facilities for transport and trade which the last forty years have brought, there is a much more varied and fresher stock; and articles which formerly could be had only by the well-to-do are now available to the many. In these modern shops you can get to-day all the commodities of all the countries of the world, fresh and fresh. Think of something odd that you would like; something Peruvian or Hondurastian or Icelandic. It is fairly certain that some London shop has it.

I seldom enter a draper's shop in these days; not once in ten years, perhaps; but when I do, though I admire the new fabrics and the new arrangements and the rainbow colours, there is one thing I miss. One thing which used to reconcile me to otherwise dreary half-hours in those dim, poky shops, when Aunt Jane and the assistant were out on the pavement matching a ribbon by the daylight which never reached the shop. That thing was the cash-railway, by which the assistant packed the bill and the money in a wooden ball, and sent it up a spiral to an overhead track, whence it travelled across the shop and dropped off the rails on to the cashier's desk. I could have watched for many more half-h