Note 127 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY
Reading edition
The sights in this famous cockpit are recorded by Hogarth in his print of 1759, and by Rowlandson in Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808).
Bainbridge Street survives as a narrow lane behind New Oxford Street, leading from Dyott Street to the back of Meux’s brewery.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the cockpit behind Gray’s Inn (its exact locality is not easily discovered), enjoyed “the only vogue” (Hatton). Mr. William B. Boulton (The Amusements of Old London, 1901) quotes a description of it by Von Uffenbach, a German traveller, who says it was specially built for the sport.
Pickled-Egg Walk, afterwards Crawford’s Passage (now Crawford Passage, Ray Street, Clerkenwell), was named after the proprietor of the Pickled-Egg Tavern, who brought from the West of England a recipe for pickled eggs and supplied this novel cate to his customers. Pink mentions a tradition that Charles II. once paused here in a suburban journey and ate a pickled egg. The mains fought at the cockpit here were regularly advertised in the newspapers.
Charles Hughes and Charles Dibdin, the song-writer, opened the “Royal Circus and Equestrian Philharmonic Academy” in 1782.
Cock-fighting was made illegal in 1849, but a statement in Cocking and its Votaries (1895), by S. A. T. (for private circulation), makes it quite manifest that “not a few wealthy men in England still follow up this sport, stealthily but with much zeal—a fact that is as discreditable to the guardians of the law as it is to themselves.” I quote Mr. J. Charles Cox in his admirable edition of Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes (1903).