The Earl Rings A Bell

AUTHOR’S NOTEIn Medieval days tumblers and musicians amused the Nobles in their strongholds. Minstrels going from place to place carried news of victories or defeats between the Clans. In London there were the famous pleasure gardens. At one time there were two hundred around Greater London alone and these, like Vauxhall Gardens, became the favourite pick-up for the mashers, swells and blades of the time. By 1820 there were innumerable taverns like The Coal Hole and Cider Cellars where there were singers, sketches, conjuring acts and a striptease entitled ‘plastic poses’. By 1860 the most important of these was Evans’s Supper Rooms in Covent Garden. As a rule the bills were changed every week and from the Supper Rooms there emerged the Music Halls where there were seats and not tables for eating and drinking. Tights were first introduced in America in 1850 and caused an outcry of horror. People protested about them and they were condemned as immodest and immoral beyond words. The public outcry was loud and prolonged. In fact tights became synonymous with sin. When eventually they came to London, they were used in the ‘poses plastiques’, which had come from the Continent, but the women who portrayed in it were, until they adopted tights, not allowed to move. They were, needless to say, not seen or even talked of by any woman who considered herself a lady.