A Brief History of Cecil Court

A few notes by Tim Bryars.

Please email tim@timbryars.co.uk if you have any old photographs, memorabilia or recollections about Cecil Court which you would be happy to share, or if you spot any literary references to the street. Did Hogarth use the court as a shortcut on his way to St Martin’s Lane from his house in Leicester Square? Did the First World War poets take tea at number 24? We hope to put together a comprehensive history.

Early years: Stews in the Great Wen

Cecil Court was laid out in the late seventeenth-century, filling in open land between St Martin’s Lane and Leicester Square as London spread steadily west. It is still owned by the family from which it takes it name, the Cecil family of Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, who are the descendants of Robert Cecil, created first Earl of Salisbury by James I after he smoothed over the transition from the house of Tudor to that of the Stuarts. A protégé of Sir Francis Walsingham, Cecil had been trained by him in matters of spycraft as well as statesmanship, and as Secretary of State for both Elizabeth I and James I he was deeply involved in matters of state security. The land on which Cecil Court now stands was purchased in 1609, in Cecil’s lifetime, and it is one of a number of nearby streets and places that have since been named for the land-owning family including both Cranbourn Street and the Salisbury pub on St Martin’s Lane. A sketch-plan of ‘St Martin’s Field’ as it then was can be found in the Survey of London.

Cecil Court is generally thought to have been laid out in the 1670s (for example by Gillian Bebbington in ‘Street Names of London’, 1972). However, it does not appear on William Morgan’s extraordinarily detailed 1682 map, ‘London &c. Actually Survey’d’. Cecil Court’s outline can be found on later maps – most clearly on Richard Horwood’s map of 1799 which was the first to show individual house numbers. The only known illustration from that period is from an eighteenth century advertisement for Kendrick’s bootmakers, which includes a woodcut depiction of the shop’s interior accompanied by the legend: “There lives a man in Cecil Court / Where all the bucks and beaus resort / In Cordovian taste so neat / To grace their handsome legs and feet”. However, two watercolours painted shortly before Cecil Court’s redevelopment of 1889-1894 are held in local archives. The first is in the London Metropolitan Archives, printed in volume 20 of the Survey of London (1940) .

Painted by J.P. Emslie in 1883 it shows the south side of Cecil Court, but while the architectural details are interesting the perspective is quite misleading: it appears to have been painted from a vantage point set well back from the picturesque shop-fronts, from across a broad piazza, quite impossible in the narrow confines of Cecil Court! The second picture, painted in 1892 by F. Calvert, can be found in Westminster Archives and gives a better impression of how the Court would have looked. Goodwin’s Court on the opposite side of St Martin’s Lane, entered through a narrow passageway which is easily missed, is probably the best place for the modern observer to get a feel for Georgian and Victorian Cecil Court.

The earliest description of the street we have is from John Strype’s “Survey of the Cities of London & Westminster” (a thoroughgoing revision and expansion of Stow’s much earlier Survey) which was published in 1720: “First St. Martin's Court, a large handsome Court, with good new built Houses, and a Free-stone Pavement, having a Passage into Castle-street; and in the Midst it hath an open Square, at the End of which there is another Passage into Castle-street. Cecil-Court also a new built Court, with very good Houses, fit for good Inhabitants, and hath a large Passage, with a Freestone Pavement, into Castle-street, and out of this Court is a Passage into St. Martin's Court.” The whole of this tremendously useful work is now available online thanks to the Stuart London Project.

Cecil Court may have been “fit for good inhabitants” but we have good reason to suppose that eighteenth century Cecil Court was not an especially salubrious address. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, fully searchable online, give an insight into life in the street at the time, whenever the inhabitants fell foul of the law. Residents crop up regularly in the trial transcripts, mostly for petty theft but also for highway robbery, forgery and arson.  In 1735 Elizabeth Calloway, keeper of a Brandy Shop in Cecil Court where her clientele could be found “drinking, smoaking, and swearing, and running up and down Stairs till one or two in the Morning” seemingly over insured her goods and set the place alight. Her neighbours’ houses were also burned to the ground while she sat smoking her pipe and drinking good Sussex beer with friends a few streets away. Calloway’s poor lodgers - the widow Feltham, her daughter and young grandson who rented the cellar - fortunately escaped with their lives just as their ceiling collapsed (Calloway had offered to treat them, but they rejected this uncharacteristic offer). Various witnesses gave evidence that her storeroom was empty and, on rescuing barrels from the fire (presumably expecting them to be full of spirits) discovered that they were empty too. The blaze could have been started by the heat from the cook’s shop next door (kept by Eleanor Pickhaver, accused by Calloway of selling ‘sandy’ boiled beef), or the bundles of kindling purchased by Mrs Calloway a fortnight before the fire might have had a sinister purpose. The jury was inclined to acquit. Other residents of the Court went on a spree of looting under cover of the flames. Another cellar dweller, Mary Steward alias Young, ‘accidentally’ took in a bed and three pictures from one of the burning houses “in the hurry and fright she was in”, mistaking them for her own. The jury acquitted her too (perhaps because a conviction would have invoked the death penalty), and also one Eleanor Newby, who ‘assisted’ her former employer by removing six curtains and five China Dishes from his house during the fire, which were subsequently discovered at her lodgings; however, James Newby was transported for stealing iron bars and an iron pin from a press valued at 18d. The thieving didn’t stop with the fire itself. William Gordon and his wife were burnt out by the fire, and took lodgings in Cranbourn Alley, where they were robbed by their servant. Again, although the goods were found on her person she was acquitted.

The fire spread to neighbouring St Martin’s Court, where a further 15 houses were destroyed (as opposed to three in Cecil Court itself). The “Daily Journal” of June 11th  described how the fire “continued with great Fury for the Space of two Hours before water could be got to supply the Engines.  His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, the Lord James Cavendish, Sir Thomas Hobby, and Mr Cornwallis were present; a detachment of Foot Guards also assisted: His Royal Highness went of top of a house in St Martin’s-Court to take a View of it, and the came down to direct the Engines, and animate the Firemen & c.”. (Prince Frederick held court a few hundred yards away at Leicester House in Leicester Square – he predeceased his father but his son became George III).

The only person known to have died as a result of the fire was the mother of the painter William Hogarth: the unfortunate lady died the following morning “at her house in Cranbourn-Alley, of a Fright, occasion’d by the Fire in St Martin’s Court. She was in perfect Health when the unhappy Accident broke out, and died before it was Extinguish’d”.  See Ronald Paulson: “Hogarth: High Art and Low 1732-1750” (1992) p. 54.

Cecil Court crops up again and again in the Old Bailey trial records in alibis (‘I couldn’t possibly have been committing highway robbery your honour; I was drinking and conversing with some charming ladies in Cecil Court at the time’ – a précis of the alibi of Benjamin Jones at his trial in 1770; verdict: death) and occasionally as the scene of the crime. The pick pocketing of a watch in 1779, in a house of ill repute known as the Ham, is fairly typical. William Stonehouse, apothecary, out for a night on the town with a gentleman friend and already “a little elevated” was accosted by two women who asked for wine and led them to the Ham in Cecil Court. In common with other public houses which crop up in the trial reports, there was a room for ‘company’ and several private rooms. They called for wine and water and Stonehouse’s friend retired briefly with one of the ladies. When he emerged he made his way home without further comment, leaving Stonehouse cosily flanked by ladies of doubtful virtue. After they departed in their turn the lady of the house immediately asked for payment, and Stonehouse discovered that he was missing his gold watch …

In February 1799 (just as Christopher Horwood was putting the finishing touches to his map of the area – see “Cecil Court on the map”) a side of bacon was stolen from Mr Crisp, cheesemonger, of 8 Cecil Court, by a fifteen year old boy called Edward Edwards. Richard Aldred, proprietor of the Bell, observed the theft and together the shopkeepers gave chase. The boy went on his knees in the snow and begged them not to call the watch as he had a bedridden father, but of course as one is reading a trial transcript the next step is predictable enough. Edwards was fined a shilling and confined two years in the House of Correction.

The popular image of Georgian justice is a harsh one, children sentenced to hang for stealing a pinchbeck buckle or a bun. The Westminster House of Correction was the notorious Bridewell, named for the Tudor Palace and illustrated by Hogarth in the Rake’s Progress. Edwards’ imprisonment seems harsh enough to modern eyes, but the jury had recommended mercy and the Houses of Correction were genuinely intended to inculcate reform through hard labour. One also feels for James Newby, transported to America with the prospect of approximately 14 years unpaid labour ahead of him. However, transportation was seen as a humane alternative to the death penalty. What is striking is not the harshness of the punishments but the number of acquittals. Although the number of capital offences rose dramatically during the eighteenth century through a series of so called Black Acts, with limited discretionary sentencing juries often proved reluctant to convict for minor offences even when the prisoners were palpably guilty – a factor seized on by early nineteenth-century reformers who were looking for practical reasons to cut the number of capital crimes beyond the purely humanitarian. And so, a stone’s throw from Seven Dials and the Rookeries of St Giles, the denizens of Cecil Court went about their murky business.

One of the Court’s most famous – albeit transient – residents was eight year old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91), who visited London in 1764-5. During his stay in the city he met Karl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach and composed his first symphony. On arriving in London the Mozart family spent a single night at The White Bear in Piccadilly (as was usual for travellers arriving from the Continent), but between April 24th and August 6th 1764 they lodged with barber John Couzin at 19 Cecil Court, paying twelve shillings a week for three rooms which were smaller than they might have wished, according to Leopold Mozart, and without cooking facilities so that all meals were brought in (John Jenkins, Mozart & the English Connection, 1998 p. 47). The family later moved from their Cecil Court lodgings to 21 Frith Street, Soho (then 15 Thrift Street). According to the edition of Mozart’s letters edited by Hans Mersmann, Leopold Mozart was absent for part of this time, convalescing at Dr Randall’s in Fivefields (Ebury Street) and Mr Williamson’s at 51 Frith Street. Evidently the family moved over to Frith Street to join him. (See also Otto Erich Deutsch: Mozart: A Documentary Biography. pp 32 and 34-36.) One can only speculate as to whether the sound of the child genius practising ever disturbed or delighted his decidedly motley assortment of neighbours, but we do know that on April 27th and May 19th Wolfgang and his sister Nannerl left the street to perform before King George III and Queen Charlotte.

The distinguished musicologist and Mozart scholar, the late Stanley Sadie, argues convincingly that Mozart’s first symphonies were actually composed in Cecil Court and not in the stretch of Ebury Street (then Fivefields Row, now Mozart Terrace, just to keep things simple) where Mozart is commemorated with a plaque and a statue. In his biography (Mozart, the early years 1756-1781 (2006), pp. 64-65) he writes: “It is usually supposed that it was during the time at Ebury Row that Mozart composed his first symphonies and perhaps the keyboard pieces in the so-called London Sketchbook. That does not square with the facts about Leopold’s illness and Nannerl’s oft-quoted accounts: “In London, when our father lay ill and close to death we were not allowed to touch the clavier. So, to occupy himself, Mozart composed his first symphony, with all the instruments, above all with trumpets and drums. I had to sit by him and copy it out …” [This is often assumed to have happened in Chelsea, some time after August 5th] By the time the family were in Chelsea … Leopold was recovered and there was no need for silence; clearly the symphony had been composed in Cecil Court”.

The rate books for 1764, the year of Mozart’s visit, record the presence of just one ‘gentleman’ in Cecil Court: Humphry Cotes Esq. Humphry (or Humphrey) Cotes was a friend and an executor of the poet, satirist and playwright Charles Churchill and seems to have moved in some of the same circles as Garrick and other literary figures of the day. Cotes and Churchill were both friends of John Wilkes (Churchill died while he and Cotes were visiting Wilkes in France in October-November 1764), and it was Cotes’ involvement in radical politics which apparently led to his ruin: he is described in the memoirs of fellow radical John Horne Tooke (ed. Alexander Stephens 1813, vol. 1 p. 69) as “a celebrated politician and wine merchant of the city of Westminster, who had recently become a bankrupt by steadily supporting the cause of patriotism”. He was the author of various anonymous pamphlets attacking the government of the day, but when he stood in the general election of 1774 polled a meagre 130 votes (less than 1% of the total). 

Humphrey Cotes wasn’t the only Cecil Court radical. Evidence is scanty and somewhat slanted, but in his pamphlet ‘The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in This Metropolis’ (London, 1800), William Hamilton Reid (a bookseller and former radical, alarmed, like so many of his contemporaries, by the way in which events had unfolded across the Channel) describes an ‘atheist’ debating society which met at the Angel pub in Cecil Court in the 1790s.  Unlike private debating clubs where new members had to be approved and speeches were often prepared beforehand, such as those attended by Burke, Pitt, Boswell and Goldsmith earlier in the century, public debating societies were open to all who paid the weekly entrance fee and anyone could stand up and speak, frequently expressing political and religious ideas which were far from orthodox. (See Mary Thale: ‘London Debating Societies in the 1790s’, Historical Journal 32, 1, pp. 57-86.) Regarding them as potentially dangerous and a cause of unrest, the government clamped down hard towards the end of the decade. According to Reid there were two such societies in the West End, one on Wells Street and one on Cecil Court; the Wells Street society finished its business earlier and some of its members then made their way across town so that “some of the speakers contrived to exhibit at two places on the same night”. Reid continues: “The Wells-Street Society being dissolved, in consequence of some disagreement among the members, the whole focus of Deism and Atheism was concentrated at the Angel, in Cecil-Court, St Martin's Lane, where a mingled display of real talent and miserable imitation was continued, on the Sunday and Wednesday evenings, till February, 1798; when, without any previous notice from the Westminster-magistrates, as had been customary in the city, a period was put to this promising school; the whole of the members and other present, being apprehended, and, the next day, obliged to find sureties for their appearance, to answer any complaint, at the next Quarter-Session, at Guildhall, Westminster; but no bill being found, the business ended with the withdrawing of the recognizances of the parties, 7 in number; which would certainly have been doubled, if the police-officers, sent to apprehend the club, had stayed till the business of the evening had commenced. This meeting was then deemed wholly political, an idea which could have no other foundation than the silly appellation of citizen, made use of by the members; or the circumstance of its being attended by John Binns, who was apprehended about the same period this society was disturbed, in company with Arthur O'Connor, in Kent. This unexpected stroke of justice, however, put the last hand to the Sunday-night meetings at the west end of the town; the associators in that quarter, after holding a few thin sittings, at a house near Compton-Street, Soho, being completely dispersed.”

In 1776 the engraver Abraham Raimbach was born in Cecil Court to a Swiss father and English mother. (see Macmichael, J. Holden: ‘The Story of Charing Cross and its Environs’, 1906, p. 190.) He is best remembered for his collaboration with the artist Sir David Wilkie, engraving "The Village Politicians" (1814), "Blind Man's Buff" (1822) and other paintings of Wilkie’s, which brought him public recognition and financial security. His memoirs were published posthumously in 1843. His life (in connection with Sir Walter Scott) is discussed here. 

 

Flicker Alley

Cecil Court was rebuilt at the peak of the political career of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the third Marquess of Salisbury, who was Prime Minister 1886-1892 and again from 1895 until 1902. Doubtless he had plenty of other things on his mind and he may never set foot in the street which bears his family name, but he probably saw the clearance of the old buildings as a great improvement and the shops and mansion flats which replaced them are attractively proportioned and sturdily built. 

Politics certainly played a leading part in the demolition of the original buildings, as the Liberal press sought to make political capital out of the supposedly wretched state of the Tory Prime Minister’s ‘slums’, a mere stone’s throw from Parliament itself. On October 1st 1888, under the headline “The Premier’s Rookeries Fall”, The Star thundered: “The roof of one of Lord Salisbury's rookeries, in Cecil-court, St. Martin's-lane, has given way. We recently described the delapidated and dangerous condition of his lordship's property, which he still refuses to repair, and leaves it an eyesore to the district and a disgrace to the metropolis. The houses in Cecil-court, which were long since ordered to be closed by the parish authorities, are now giving way all round. The court itself is now shut, and the public have to pay two policemen to keep people away from the property of the Prime Minister of England in case it should fall on their heads. But, then, there is no scarcity of policemen for West-end work. It is in the East they are needed, and are not there.” The story crossed the Atlantic where the ‘scandal’ was picked up by the New York Times (October 23rd 1888): “The dilapidated, rickety, unsanitary tenements in Cecil-court have at last reached such a stage of decay that they can hold together no longer … When a few more formalities have been gone through what is left of the wretched structures will be demolished by the Board of Works. A pretty state of things this, truly, on the estate of the Prime Minister of England, and a leading authority on the housing of the poor!”  

Part of the background to all this was the hysteria surrounding the Ripper murders (The Star’s report appeared on the day following the discovery of two of the victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes): Policemen were needed in the East End, not stationed at either of Cecil Court to stop the PM’s property falling on people. But just how rickety was Cecil Court at the time? Another figure pacing the streets of London in the late 1880s with an entirely less sinister purpose was the philanthropist Charles Booth, preparing his famous ‘poverty maps’ - large-scale surveys in which the wealthy were differentiated from the ‘very poor’ and ‘semi-criminal’ by careful colour coding. His original notebooks are held by the LSE, and he describes the two neighbouring Courts (in B354 p. 185) as follows: St Martin’s Court had “residential chambers inhabited by all sorts. Respectable otherwise. Shops below. The same with Cecil Court all red rather than the purple …” Red was the colour Booth used for ‘comfortable’ whereas purple denoted ‘poor & comfortable’. There were probably worse places to live than Cecil Court.

Historian Anthony Wohl makes explicit reference to the Star’s article and the motivation for it in his 1977 book ‘The Eternal Slum’: “Salisbury was a ground landlord in Cecil Court, a slum off St Martin's Lane, and some years later [ie in various articles May-September 1888] the Star, which had replaced Reynolds' and the Daily News as the most influential Liberal paper, tried to discredit the tory leader at a time when ground landlords were attracting attention.” In the 1870s the concentration of property ownership in a few hands peaked, and one could argue that the British Isles were more greatly affected than the rest of Europe. Radical voices charged wealthy landowners like Salisbury with driving rural labourers into the cities and housing them in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions when they got there. Housing became a live political issue in October 1883. Agents acting for the key players, Joseph Chamberlain and Salisbury, investigated each other (employment conditions for Chamberlain’s factory workers vs. housing conditions for Salisbury’s tenants) but found nothing discreditable. In his 1994 biography of Chamberlain Peter Marsh suggests that Salisbury always maintained the edge in the argument – for example, he was first to appreciate that overcrowding was an issue, not just poor sanitation (pp. 168-9). Be that as it may, Cecil Court had become a liability in its present form and the ‘Agreement concerning the realignment of Cecil Court between Charing Cross Road and St Martins Lane’ held by Westminster Archives is dated May 8th 1889. 

Steel fire door in the cellar of Greening Burland c. 1912

Amongst the first tenants of the new buildings, completed in 1894, were early film distributors, publishers of promotional material and trade journals such as the Bioscope Annual and suppliers of technical equipment (though peppered with other businesses: a naval and military tailor at number 24; an artificial florist; an ostrich feather manufacturer). However, it was Cecil Court’s central role in the burgeoning British film industry inspired the nickname Flicker Alley. The searchable database produced by the London Project, a major study of the film business in London, 1894-1914, organised by the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, throws up over forty entries for Cecil Court. It can be consulted here. “Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry” is the title of an article by Simon Brown in issue 10 the journal Film Studies, which can be downloaded in PDF form here.

Simon Brown appears to be the first to critically examine “the legendary heart of the early Industry” and ask “how […] could one street in London occupy such an iconic place?” Cecil Court is associated with some of the most important names in early cinema:  Gaumont, Hepworth, Nordisk, Williamson, Globe, Tyler and Vitagraph had offices here, and the Cecil Court’s “importance has been frequently cited by pioneer filmmakers and historians alike”. Brown stresses the importance of the regional film trade, notes that many older companies which began to cater for the needs of the new industry were already too large for the units on Cecil Court and never came (the size of the shops also led to a fairly rapid turnover of tenants on the street as they outgrew their premises) and he suggests that the recollections of some of the pioneer filmmakers themselves were rose-tinted, motivated by a desire to present themselves as gentlemanly amateurs. However, Brown also argues that Cecil Court saw the first concentration of film-related businesses, and what’s more they were almost exclusively new businesses, bringing new skills to the industry and sharing “information, products, resources and clientele” (for example, sharing the costs of transporting the film reels themselves and offering joint screenings to the showmen who hired them).  The earlier businesses tended to be one-stop shops - filmmakers and dealers in films and equipment. From 1907 the ‘new wave’ of businesses were often more specialised: dealers in the import and distribution of foreign films, or specialists in film rental or equipment alone.  Brown concludes that Cecil Court “was the heart of what was new in the British film industry, attracting young companies who clustered together to learn from one another. The history of early British cinema has for too long been couched in terms of failure … Although British film production undoubtedly ran into serious problems around 1909, the wider film industry was vibrant, diversifying, expanding, and spawning new and very different trades and companies year by year. Far from being the quaint home of the gentleman pioneers, it was to this industry that Flicker Alley was home.”

One can certainly detect the self-deprecating ‘amateurish’ tone identified by Brown, even in early accounts. For example, in 1936 Cecil Hepworth addressed a meeting of the British Kinematograph Society: “Next, I opened a shop in Cecil Court to sell plates and cameras—I never did sell any —opposite to one which had just been opened by young Bromhead in the name of Leon Gaumont of Paris. While I was sitting there at the receipt of custom which never came, I designed a lantern with a cinematograph attachment for the showing of occasional films—the lantern lens and the film machine were slung on a pivot so that they could be interchanged in an instant. I bought the film machine from Bonn for a pound, and half a dozen forty-foot films- out of Paul’s junk basket for five bob apiece. With those six films, a couple of hundred lantern slides of my own making, two cylinders of gas and a lot more much cheaper gas of my own, I toured the country with an early cinematograph show.”

Brass ash-tray made for the Pioneer Film Company, c. 1912.

We have no photographic record of the street at this time. The door in the basement of number 27 illustrated here is no ordinary door, but a solid steel fire door, a reminder of the highly flammable nature of early film stock and one of the last surviving physical links with the film trade. Such was the fear of fire that questions were asked in Parliament. Following a fire at the Globe Film Company in May 1911 Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, assured the House that the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery were in no danger from their proximity to Cecil Court. One or two other relics of the period survive. Number 27 was home to the Pioneer Film Company Ltd circa 1912-1915 and a brass ash tray from the same period advertises them as “the house for up-to-date exclusive comedies”. Cecil Hepworth’s 1951 autobiography “Came the Dawn” is a partial but useful source, and a website dedicated to Hepworth contains a great deal of valuable information and useful links. In 1903 Hepworth released the first ever film version of Alice in Wonderland from his offices at 17 Cecil Court. Recently restored by the BFI, the film can be watched here. 

Later in the century Cecil Court’s links with the film industry were more directly concerned with what went on in front of the camera. In the controversial 1961 film “Victim”, starring Dirk Bogarde and Sylvia Syms (the first British film to discuss homosexuality sympathetically and openly) Norman Bird plays the character of a Cecil Court bookseller, ‘Harold Doe’, who has fallen prey to the blackmailers. Unsurprisingly Cecil Court also featured in the 1987 film of the Helene Hanff novel ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ and more recently was one of the locations for the 2006 biopic ‘Miss Potter’, starring Renée Zellweger as the eponymous children’s author. In 1983 Cecil Court was the venue for the famous ‘Yellow Pages’ advertisement, in which Norman Lumsden appears as the elderly author searching for a copy of his own book, ‘Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley’; the advert became so popular that the book was subsequently written and published. 

Booksellers’ Row

Booksellers and publishers had already moved into the street before the First World War. Some were quite technical in nature and sat well alongside the early film pioneers. The Camera Club had premises on the corner of the street at the Charing Cross Road end from 1891 (a meeting is illustrated in a November 1895 issue of the Graphic), and enthusiasts were catered for by the Photographic News, published at 9 Cecil Court in the early 1900s. However, “The Dome”, a

The Dome postcard.

periodical devoted to literature and the arts which is closely identified with the aesthetic movement and the ‘nineties scene’, was published by the Unicorn Press at number 7 between 1897 and 1900.“The Dome” attempted to cover a broader range of verbal and visual art, music and theatre than either “The Yellow Book” or “The Savoy”, which were primarily literary periodicals. “The Dome” postcard shown here was illustrated by the famous wood-engraver Edward Gordon Craig and the book, Windjammers and Sea Tramps, by former merchant seaman and shipowner Walter Runciman (1902), is illustrated as another example of Unicorn Press printing.

Details from the Photographic News

One of the employees of Ernest Oldmeadow at the Unicorn Press, circa 1901-1902, was 18 year old Arthur Ransome, the future children’s author and spy (he was to write ‘Swallows and Amazons’ and marry Trotsky’s secretary). In his autobiography (published posthumously in 1976) Ransome describes turn-of-the century Cecil Court at some length (pp. 74-76) as it was where he used to spend his lunch hours, browsing in the bookshops, during his brief period of employment as a publisher’s office boy on neighbouring Leicester Square. One day, in the window of the Unicorn Press, Ransome saw a notice saying that ‘An Assistant’ was wanted, and he was delighted to secure the job at £1 per week, more than double his previous salary but with fewer opportunities for advancement in the publishing world. He describes the Unicorn Press as being on “very thin financial ice” already, so that “the firm lived under an almost continual threat of disaster”, but Ransome himself “had ample time for reading and writing” and he made all the use of it he could, honing his skills as an author and essayist. Oldmeadow, described by Ransome as “a short, stout, beady-eyed little man with an odd air of lay-brotherhood” went on to become “a wine-merchant, a writer of popular novels, a music-critic, a restaurant proprietor and, after conversion to Roman Catholicism, a successful and respected editor of the Tablet.”    

Cecil Court was also home to publishers Greening Ltd “whose main stock-in-trade was novels” according to Ransome, “some of which were described as ‘sensational’”. Ransome must also have been amongst the earliest customers of Watkins, the oldest esoteric bookshop in London, which arrived at number 21 in 1901. He describes a shop “devoted to theosophy, philosophy, spiritualism and kindred subjects” where he bought “a very well printed and edited American edition of Hume’s Essay on the Human Understanding which delighted me and continued to delight me for many years”.

In 1904 William and Gilbert Foyle opened their first West End shop at number 16.  After failing their Civil Service exams the brothers offered their old text books for sale and were so encouraged by the results that they opened a small shop in Peckham where they painted ‘With all faith” above the door. Cecil Court was the next step. David Low recounts the story in his autobiography “With All Faults”. Rent for the shop was £60 per year, but they were so successful that they were raided by Police (who suspected clandestine betting activities) and within a year were able to take on their first member of staff (who promptly disappeared with the weekly takings). Low records that they occasionally needed to borrow money from John Watkins to pay the wages, but by 1906 they were doing well enough to move to the famous premises on the Charing Cross Road where the firm can still be found today.

Lawrence of Arabia made at least one brief foray into Cecil Court. In the mid thirties artist Frederick Carter exhibited his works at the Basilica Gallery at number 6, and his portrait of Lawrence (which serves as frontispiece of a bibliography of his minor works by T.I.F. Armstrong) is dated from Cecil Court, March 1934. Carter (1883-1967) was a poet as well as artist and book illustrator with leanings towards mysticism and astrology. A friend of D.H. Lawrence he was also closely associated with figures such as Aleister Crowley, Arthur Machen, and Austin Osman Spare. Many of the leading occult figures of the day such as W.B. Yeats and Crowley were already customers of Watkins.

Specialist foreign language bookshops have always found a home on the street. William Griffiths (1898-1962) opened a Welsh-language bookshop with his brothers in 1946. In 1935 bookseller, publisher and translator Joan Gili (1907-1998) founded the Dolphin Bookshop at 5 Cecil Court, selling Spanish and Catalan books (the business transferred to Oxford in 1940 to escape the Blitz). With his English wife Elizabeth Gili was a founder of the Anglo-Catalan Society. According to his obituary in the Independent: “No 5 Cecil Court became such a centre for supporters of the Spanish Republic that in 1938 Joan Gili received threats from an official from the rival nationalist insurgent Spanish Embassy in London that his family in Barcelona would suffer if he did not rein in these activities.” Today number 5 is home to the Italian Bookshop.

In the 1930s Cecil Court became a well known meeting place for Jewish refugees, which in 1983-4 inspired R.B. Kitaj to paint Cecil Court W.C.2. (The Refugees), a work now in the Tate Collection. An online image is available. Cecil Court was one of Kitaj’s favourite haunts and the painting was born out of an increasing awareness of his own Jewish heritage. Kitaj himself is depicted reclining in the foreground, and to the left (holding flowers) is the Cecil Court refugee bookseller Ernest Seligmann, for whom he was a regular customer.

A more unfortunate incident worthy of brief mention is the Cecil Court antique shop murder. In March 1961 Elsie Batten, a 59 year old assistant in Louis Meier’s antique shop at 23 Cecil Court, was stabbed to death. Her murderer, Edwin Bush, was identified and caught within days following the circulation of Identikit pictures - the first case to be solved in the UK using the Identikit System, a significant advance in crime detection. Full details are available on the Metropolitan Police website.

Not all shops on the street were bookshops. Model railway enthusiasts may remember Hambling’s model shop, founded by radio ham and modeller A.W. Hambling, which came to 10 Cecil Court c. 1938 and specialized in miniature gauges. They manufactured their own range of kits and accessories as well as stocking famous brands.

Bob Chris on the telephone in 8 Cecil Court, probably in the 1950s. The sign pinned to the wall above the mantlepiece reads: “Do not mistake courtesy on my part as an invitation to stay all day”.

Mr John Shaw, who arrived at the shop in 1954 and spent most of his working life in Cecil Court, recalls that Mr Hambling was the creator of ‘00 Gauge’. His hobby was model railways, especially HO (half ‘O Gauge’) trains from the US and the Continent. The bodies of British-outline locomotives were too small for the motors (reflecting the loading gauge of the real thing) and Hambling enlarged them – creating 00. He made the first body tools for Hornby Dublo. His own tools were destroyed during the war when his workshop on Endell Street near the Opera House was bombed and although profits from his wartime manufacturing kept the business afloat it never quite recovered its pre-war level of innovation. Mr Shaw remembers that Hambling refused to have anything to do with plastic – even though most of the clientele were serious modellers who demanded the last word in accuracy (and plastic was cheaper).  The shop moved across the street to the old LMS/BR Midland Region parcel offices (now part of Lipmans) in the 1970s, but closed after 47 years when faced with an impossible hike in rent.

Between 1963-1970 Mr Trevor Vincent-Edwards worked for Rays Agency at number 19, a curious survival from an earlier age which “only ever dealt in "Classified" advertisements.  Situations Vacant, Cars for Sale, etc.  They never charged clients a fee, but derived their income from the commission paid by the newspapers.” According to Mr Vincent-Edwards: “In the 1960's a working day at Rays Agency had probably changed very little since the agency was founded in 1921.” 
The perspicacious reader will note that I have not written much about the booksellers who have made Cecil Court famous today. Names such as R.V. Tooley, H.M. Fletcher, Harold Mortlake, Harold Storey, bookseller and British Buddhist Harold Edwards, George Suckling, Robert Chris and David Low are renowned in the world of books and well within living memory. Did you work for them or were you a customer? Please get in touch with your anecdotal evidence!

Photos of Cecil Court taken in 1966 by Trevor Vincent-Edwards