Chapter 7

And now we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in 1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until 1854.

There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been swept away. Toll-gates,{45}
THE PIKEMEN
Image unavailable: KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.
KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.

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for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself, or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to pay toll then, and a favourite amusement of the young bloods was fighting the pikeman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and battery. In fact, they were such sporting times that, whether the pikeman or the Corinthian youth won, the latter would probably chuck his antagonist a substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman would say that ‘his honour was a gemman,’ and exeunt severally to purchase beef-steaks for the reduction of black eyes.
Image unavailable: THE PIKEMAN.
THE PIKEMAN.

The present generation has, of course, never seen a pikeman. He wore a tall black glazed hat and corduroy breaches, with white stockings. But the most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen apron. No one knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it must now needs be lost in{48} the mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades, where he probably is still going through a series of shadowy encounters beside the shores of the Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of long ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his ferry across the stream.

But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 as quiet a spot as you could find round London, with scattered cottages of the rustic, rose-embowered kind. Knightsbridge Green was a green in those days, and not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and for many years afterwards, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks would walk with the nursemaids in the country lanes, and take tea in the tea-gardens which stood away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an instructive thing to take them, tottering in their old age, by the hand and say: ‘Here, my gallant warrior of eighty years or so,’ and ‘Here, my pretty maiden of four-score, is Knightsbridge, the self-same Knightsbridge you knew, but with some new, and somewhat larger, buildings.’ They would be as strangers in a strange land, and, dazed by the din of the thronging traffic amid the sky-scraping buildings, beg to be taken{49}
THE ‘NEW POLICE’
Image unavailable: KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.
KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.

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away. But to bring back the policeman of that era, if that were possible, and set him to control this traffic, would be more instructive still. When the last years of the coaching age along this road were still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’ as he was variously named, had an easy time of it here. Not so his successors, who have to deal with an almost continual block, all day long and every day.
Image unavailable: THE ‘NEW POLICE.’
THE ‘NEW POLICE.’

The ‘New Police’ were a novel body of men in the early years of the reign, having been introduced in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel. Hence the brilliant appropriateness of those nicknames. There still, however, lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution, the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours in a curious sing-song voice with remarks upon the state of the weather added. Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant: ‘Twelve o’clock, and a stormy night!’ and found comfort in the companionship of that voice.

The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living can have seen one of those many-caped, tottering old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us. That is because we have read so much about them in the exploits of Tom and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of the glorious days of George the Fourth, when the most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching, bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A{52} ‘Charley’ was, of course, a watchman. The thrashing of a ‘Charley’ was not an heroic pursuit, but (or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular. They were generally old men, and not capable of very serious reprisals upon the gangs of muscular youths who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’ who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows. Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to, although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the supposition that the continental system of a semi-military gendarmerie was intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was, of course, necessary, one as nearly as possible like civilian dress was chosen. The present uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if they had then worn a helmet, would have been howled out of existence by the violent Radicals and Chartists who troubled the early years of the Queen’s reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all, but a tall glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A swallow-tailed coat, tightly buttoned up, with a belt round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin, and trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a very respectable and citizen-like aspect. It has been left to later years to alter this uniform.