LXXIII BURNING OF THE LYCEUM STORAGE

At ten minutes past five on the morning of Friday, 18th February 1898, I was wakened by a continuous knock at a door somewhere near my house in Chelsea. I soon discovered that it was at my own house. I went downstairs and opened the door, when a muffled-up cab-driver gave me a letter. It was from the police station at Bow Street telling me that the Lyceum Storage, Bear Lane, Southwark, was on fire. The four-wheeler was waiting, and I was soon on the way there as fast as the horse could go. It was a dim, dark morning, bitterly cold. I found Bear Lane a chaos. The narrow way was blocked with fire-engines panting and thumping away for dear life. The heat was terrific. There was so much stuff in the storage that nothing could possibly be done till the fire had burnt itself out; all that the firemen could do was to prevent the fire spreading.

These premises deserve some special mention, for they played an important part in many ways, as shall be seen.

One of the really great difficulties in the management of a London theatre is that of storage. A “going” theatre has to be always producing new plays and occasionally repeating the old. In fact, to a theatrical manager his productions form the major part of his stock-in-trade. Now, no one outside theatrical management—and very few who are inside—can have any idea of the bulk of a lot of plays. In Irving’s case it was really vast; the bulk was almost as big as the whole Lyceum theatre. To get housing for such is a very serious matter. Scenery is long, difficult stuff to handle. That of the Lyceum was forty-two feet long when the cloths were rolled up round their battens; the framed cloths were thirty feet high and six feet wide in the folding plaques. We were always on the look-out for a really fine storage; and at last we heard of one. This consisted of two great, high railway arches under the Chatham and Dover Railway, then leased to the South-Eastern. It was a part of Southwark where the ground lies low and the railway line very high, so that there was full height for our scenes. In the front was a large yard. We took the premises on a good long lease and set to work to make them complete for our purpose. The backs of the arches were bricked up. Great scaffold-poles were firmly fixed for the piling of scenery against them. It is hard to believe what lateral pressure a great pack of scenery can exercise. Before we had occupied this storage a year, one of the poles gave way and the scenery sinking against the new wall at the back of the arch carried it entirely away. We had to pay expenses of restoration to the injured neighbour and to compensate him. We had the entire yard in front roofed over, brought in gas, which was carefully protected, and water, and made the storage the best of its kind that was known. The experience of a good many years went to the making of it.

We had had to put in a clause when making the agreement to take the lease for a reason not devoid of humour to any one not a sufferer by it. When I went to look at the arches I found them full almost to the top with mud—old mud that had been put in wet and had dried in time to something like the consistency of that to be found at Herculaneum. The manager of the estate office of the railway told me the history of it.

Some years before, the arches were placarded as to let, and in due course came an applicant. He said he was satisfied with the rent and took out his lease. The railway people were pleased to get such a big place off their hands and took no more trouble about it till the half-year’s rental became due. They applied to the lessee, but could get no reply. So they sent to the premises to make inquiries. There was no one there; and they could not hear any tidings of the lessee. They did find, however, that the arches were filled with mud, and discovered on inquiry that the lessee had taken a contract for the removal of road sweepings. This is a serious item in municipal accounts, for the conveyance of such out of London is costly, whether by road or barge or rail. Into the arches he had for half a year dumped all the stuff; thousands and thousands of loads of it. He had drawn his money as earned from the municipal authorities. Rent day drew near, and as he feared discovery he had bolted, leaving every one, including the contractors for carting, unpaid.

It took the railway company months of continuous work with a large staff of men and carts and horses to remove the accumulation.

As the premises were secure in every way we could devise we looked upon them as comparatively immune from fire risk. No one lived in them. They were all brick, stone, and slate—as the insurance policies put it. They were completely isolated front and back; at the sides were blocks of solid brickwork like bastions. I had at first, with Irving’s consent, insured the contents for £10,000, but only that year when the policies were to be renewed he said it was wasting money as the place was so secure, and would not let me put on more than £6000.

In these premises were the scenes for the following plays, forty-four in all, of which in only ten Irving himself did not play. Twenty-two were great productions:

Hamlet.

The Merchant of Venice.

Othello.

Much Ado About Nothing.

Twelfth Night.

Macbeth.

Henry VIII.

King Lear.

Cymbeline.

Richard III.

The Corsican Brothers.

The Cup.

The Belle’s Stratagem.

Two Roses.

Olivia.

Faust.

Werner.

The Dead Heart.

Ravenswood.

Becket.

King Arthur.

Richelieu.

The Lady of Lyons.

Eugene Aram.

Jingle.

Louis XI.

Charles I.

The Lyons Mail.

The Bells.

The Iron Chest.

Iolanthe.

The Amber Heart.

Robert Macaire.

Don Quixote.

Raising the Wind.

Daisy’s Escape.

Bygones.

High Life Below Stairs.

The Boarding School.

The King and the Miller.

The Captain of the Watch.

The Balance of Comfort.

Book III. Chapter V.

Cool as a Cucumber.

For the plays there were over two hundred and sixty scenes, many of them of great elaboration. In fact, each scene, even if only a single cloth at back with wings and borders, took up quite a space. There were in all more than two thousand pieces of scenery, and bulky properties without end. And the prime cost of the property destroyed was over thirty thousand pounds sterling.

But the cost price was the least part of the loss. Nothing could repay the time and labour and artistic experience spent on them. All the scene-painters in England working for a whole year could not have restored the scenery alone.

As to Irving, it was checkmate to the répertoire side of his management. Given a theatre equipped with such productions, the plays to which they belong being already studied and rehearsed, it is easy to put on any of them for a few nights. There is only the cost of carting and hanging the scenes and generally getting ready—small matters in the vast enterprise of putting on a big play. They had had their long runs, and though they were good for occasional repetitions, few of them could be relied on for great business over any considerable period. Several of them were held over for a second run, of which good things might have been fairly expected. For instance, Macbeth was good for another season. It was taken off because of the summer vacation when it was still doing enormous business. Ravenswood, too, had only gone a part of its course when the Baring failure, as I have shown, necessitated its temporary withdrawal. Henry VIII. and King Arthur and Becket and Faust were certain draws. When for répertoire purposes in later years several were required, Louis XI., Charles I., The Bells, The Lyons Mail, Olivia, Faust, Becket were all reproduced at an aggregate cost of over eleven thousand pounds.

The effect of the fire on Irving was not only this great cost, but the deprivation of all that he had built up. Had it not occurred he could have gone on playing his répertoire for many years, and would never have had to produce a new play.

The fire was so fierce that it actually burned the building of the railway arches three bricks deep and calcined the coping-stones to powder. The Railway Company, therefore, not only made a rule that in no case was theatrical scenery ever to be stored on their premises, but actually refused to allow us to reinstate or to have use for the term of their lease. They were prepared to fight an action over it, but the scenery having all been burned, we had no more present use for so large a storage, and we compromised the matter.