THE END OF A FAMOUS PART OF LONDON

Evening Post, Volume CXVIII, Issue 90, 13 October 1934, Page 25

THE END OF A FAMOUS PART OF LONDON

It ii now 600 years since people feeftled into Clifford's Inn, off Fleet Street, and now the last of them has moved out. Clifford's Inn ceases to exist, says a writer in the '' Manchester Guardian."

Possibly its ancient hall, where the Crown Commissioners sat to decide on the claims of the people whose houses had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London^ may be,saved. The Government, at- any rate, can save it, as it is their property, along with the end of the little seventeenth century row of brick houses that abuts on the Eecord Office gardens. The rest is to be knocked down at once and new blocks of flats will arise on the site. Its own little garden had been largely bujlt over in the war, but the two good plane trees there are somehow to survive.

Clifford's Inn housed as curious and interesting a congregation of tenants as Dickens could have invented. I remember one who lived up a crazy stair in a queer panelled office with a leaded window who used to design mosques for Arabia, and got them built, too.

No hive could have held the bees in the bonnets of the men who lived so snugly and obscurely in these dusty, creaky chambers. Strange students and experts who worked in the Records Office over the way and put in their spare time on their own parchments; lawyers whose old pleas had become their obsessions, and they and their bankrupt clients would walk together debating earnestly on the old cobblestones among which grass sprouted, with Fleet Street so near that you could tnrow a deed into it; authors with long hope!! ant! small incomes:, and all kinds of out-of-the-way and forgotten societies.

There were, of course, n. sprinkling nf well-known and successful men in the Tnn. Mr. Gilbert Frankau, for instance. anA Mr. Uichard Sujrhes, the author of ♦'High Wind in Jamaica," Mr. Emery

Walker, the distinguished printer and friend of the pre-Kaphaelites, worked here for fifty years.

It'was the very place,'of course, for Samuel Butler to have lived in, the place for a lonely man of genius, who hated people but could only live in the middle of the London whirlpool. He lived in No. 15, on the second floor. It would be difficult to think of a snugger retreat. The two long- windows of the main room come down to the floor, and he would look out on the pleasant little garden.

It is the seventeenth century part, and the rooms are panelled and have old mantelpieces, although not so old as the house. It is a three-roomed set of chambers, with a pantry that opens off the main room by a curiously large arched door, one side of which works. In the smallest room at the back there is an eighteenth century curved china cupboard in a recess with neat shelves and a painting inside the curved top— a half-length of a woman bearing flowers, or a sheaf of com, dim but fanciful. The author of "Erewhon" had, at any rate, ono woman in his life in Clifford's Inn. He died here in his loneliness, probably in the back room shadowed by the Fetter Lane buildings, with the noise of printing and the cries of news-sellers and the deep booming of the bell of St. Paul's around him.

The lawyers and the law students who had been at Clifford's Inn since 1345 had all gone at the beginning of the century, and their representatives cot a fair share of the £100,000 which Mr. Willett, the daylight-saver, gave for the property. He died without carrying out his scheme for rebuilding, and only now has the place come into the hands of an investment trust that can work its will on the old Inn, which seemed to havp been forgotten these thirty years. Tonight it is an empty shell, and no one save the deserted caretaker hears the chimes at midnight any more in this desiccated little inn.