The Exeter Road

emoved to this spot in 1825, opposite where the

vals in 1837 which have long sinc

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e: KNIGHTSBRIDGE

DGE TOLL-G

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keman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and battery. In fact, they were

ailable: T

PIKE

knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it must now needs be lost in{48} the mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades, where he p

away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an

NEW P

: KNIGHTSBRIDGE B

GE BARRACKS

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When the last years of the coaching age along this road were still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’ as he was

lable: THE ‘

NEW P

till, however, lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution, the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours in a curious sing-song voice wi

d, whacked, larrupped, and beat them unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’ who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows. Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to, although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the supposition that the continental system of a semi-military gendarmerie was intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was,