HOLDING A LICENSE FOR 600 YEARS

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3205, 28 April 1911, Page 3

HOLDING A LICENSE FOR 600 YEARS

WONDERFUL HISTORY OF “YE OLDE WHYTE HARTE.”

What romantic stories of London life are recalled by the history of “Ye Oict:> Whyte Harte,” probably the most ancient and 'certainly the most interesting of London’s inns, which is at present in. course of reconstruction. Established' as long ago as 1278, at the top of Drury Lane, it has 'outlived all other inns in that part of the metropolis at any rate. It was first built on a plan familiar to all readers of Dickens’s novels —with the courtyard opening on to the main thoroughfare, with wooden galleries running round the building, approached dv steps from the courtyard. Good times there must have been for the Whyte Harte, when the citizens of London passed' its doors in their thousands when accompanying the condemned criminals on their way to Tyburn, and many a good sum must have passed into the coffers of mine host for the privilege of viewing the procession from its windows. Special interest was attracted to the Wlivte Harte when Jack Sheppard went, to Tyburn, accompanied by a crowd 1 numbering some 200,000, arid also when Jonathan Wild went to the gallows. Both of these worthies were for some time residents of Drury Lane, and also publicans in that locality, and doubtless they were frequenters of the Whyte Harte,. In the early days -of the history of the Whyte Harte Drury Lane was inhabited by a very different class of people from those who now occupy it. In it lived the Earl of Anglesey, for some time Lord Privy Seal; the Earls of Clare and Craven and numerous other members of the aristocracy. And in what was known as the Coal Yard, which abutted on the garden wall of the Whyte Harte, was born Nell Gwyn in 1650. It -was as an orange girl, holding a basket of fruit in. the pit of the King’s Theatre, ■ which stood where Drury Lane Theatre now stands, that she first attracted the attention of Charles 11. Nelly’s abode was the house at the top of Drury Lane and the corner of Wycn street, and it is Pepys who, in his diary, writes that on the Ist of May, 1667, on his way to Westminster, he “saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock sleeves and 'bodice, looking on at the milkmaids dancing with a fiddler before them. She seemed a mightly pretty (Creature. ”