We Meet Again:
The Story of Léon Gillemand and John Callcott

The fog sitting over London in the middle of December in the year 1873 was dreadful. Breathing was hampered, visibility was severely reduced, and there were many accidents in the streets and on the river and the canals. A bargeman fell from his vessel while mooring on the Thames. He drowned. A woman stumbled into the Regent’s Canal. She too drowned. Londoners came to grief in the city’s docks, and on one evening alone, that of Tuesday 16 December, seven unfortunate individuals perished in their murky waters.

But not all of the fog’s victims came to grief in melancholy incidents of this kind. Those who were advanced in years or weak of constitution were also at risk, and the old fellow who lay in bed at 7 Gerrard Street in Soho, breathing with difficulty, was typical of this unhappy class of vulnerable citizens. He was seventy-four, and, suffering from bronchitis, he had not long to live.

His name was Léon Gillemand. He was a naturalised Frenchman who had lived and worked in England for nearly forty years, and his occupation during that time had been as a professor of fencing, which, in the arcane language of that most traditional of sports, made him what we would now call a qualified coach. Call him what you will, though, he had been at the top of his game, and his story, which now follows, is really rather remarkable. 

The Loyal Professeur

The sporting world Gillemand belonged to was one of time-honoured etiquette and conventions but also of hierarchies and nasty rivalries. In Our Swordsmanship, which was published in 1893, a Captain Alfred Hutton, late of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, bemoaned the absence of a national training school comparable to those of France or Italy. Whereas in England six months to a year of instruction was considered sufficient to turn out a competent fencing coach, in France the equivalent process demanded at least two years, and in Italy three.

And so, as a product of the French school of fencing, Gillemand had enjoyed a degree of celebrity in the salles of the metropolis. Although it is not known exactly when he settled in England, he married his first wife, Mary, in Westminster in 1839. A son, Edward, was born in 1844, but it is clear from the 1851 census that Gillemand then embarked on a second marriage to a young woman by the name of Harriet, who was thirty years his junior. At the time of the census they were living in Battersea, but later they moved to Newman Street in Marylebone before decamping to the address in Gerrard Street, where the distinguished maître d’armes would eventually fall ill and die.

Gillemand was linked, in a curious way, with Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III. In 1840, when his attempt to seize power in France ended in humiliating failure in Boulogne, Louis Napoleon, who was then living in London, counted Gillemand among his supporters. Later, as Emperor, he rewarded the loyal professeur with a pension worth £48 per annum, which must have gone some way towards supplementing a fencing coach’s income. In fact in 1856, when Gillemand filed for bankruptcy, he claimed that he earned only £80 per annum from the class he ran in Piccadilly, and certainly his precarious finances were dealt a serious blow in 1870 when Napoleon’s rule came to an end, and with it his generous patronage.

At Waterloo

Given his imperial connections, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Gillemand had been a follower of Napoleon Bonaparte. The story that went the rounds of the London fencing community was that he had been at Waterloo as a drummer with the cavalry regiment known in France as the Cuirassiers. If true, he would have been roughly sixteen at the time, but there are records of boys even younger than this on the field of battle on that fateful Sunday afternoon in June 1815.

Of course, the image of the drummer boy caught up in the hell of battle has been much romanticised, a notable example being the 1897 ‘Steady, the Drums and Fifes!’ painted by Elizabeth Southerden Thompson. In fact drummers were generally adults. However, there are records of teenage tambours in Napoleon’s army, one of them the boy whose life was spared when Sous-Lieutenant Legros’s squadron was massacred at the Château d’Hougoumont. Likewise there were a number of young drummers in Wellington’s army, some of whom were no more than sixteen or seventeen years old.

Exactly what the youthful Gillemand’s experiences at Waterloo were is a matter of speculation. However, a notice published in the Alnwick Mercury early in 1874, which offered an appreciation of the Great Swordsman’s life, suggested that he and his fellow French drummers had a rougher time of it than their British counterparts. According to this account, Wellington’s drummers

were ordered to the rear during the action by the humane commander; but the French accompanied their regiments, and sustained their share of the casualties of the fight.

English Fair Play

In a pointed allusion to Gillemand’s early Napoleonic career, the Saturday Review remarked that in his time in England he had ‘engaged only in the mimic warfare’ of the sport of fencing, notching up many appearances in so-called public assaults. These sound like activities for which Gillemand ought, by rights, to have been thrown into jail, but in fact they were what we would now think of as exhibition matches. Challenges were issued from one elite fencer to another, rooms were hired, and notices were placed in the newspapers in which the participants paraded their credentials like so many strutting peacocks, especially if they were ‘professors’ of the sport.

One such notice, which appeared in The Times in 1843, promised a glittering line-up of fencing luminaries, who would show off their skills in the opulent setting of the Hanover Square Rooms in Mayfair, with music provided by four soloists and a small orchestra under the baton of the eminent Louis-Antoine Jullien. Similar displays were staged at the Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea and at the Scottish fête at Holland House in Kensington. These spectaculars were given full newspaper coverage, and in 1850 a Times article noted that the crowds in the Cremorne Gardens were treated not only to dancing and feasting but also to fireworks, which lit up the sky with all the dazzle of the distinguished swordsmen’s brilliant blade-work.

However, there was a dark side to these happy scenes, and another assault in 1843, in Lang’s Shooting Gallery in Haymarket, was the occasion of an ugly dispute between Gillemand and his opponent, Pierre-Gustave Hamon, a fellow French maître. Hamon claimed that officials had given Gillemand an unwarranted victory, and the dispute generated a flurry of letters to the editor of Bell’s Life in London, in which there was a great deal of ill-humoured dismantling of reputations, not to mention appeals to the place of ‘fair play’ in English sport. The correspondence, which ran to well over a dozen exchanges, only ended when the editor of Bell’s put his foot down and ruled that if the disputants wished to continue their war of words, they must do so not in the letters section of the newspaper but in the form of advertisements, for which they would of course have to pay.

One Final Assault

As well as making regular appearances at public assaults, Gillemand found employment as an instructor at the London Fencing Club. This rather grand operation opened its doors in Piccadilly in 1848, but as its popularity grew, thanks in part to the fact that it gave over floor space to boxing and gymnastics as well as to fencing, it moved first to Pall Mall, in 1862, and then, two years later, to Cleveland Row in St James’s.

The roll call of the club’s more illustrious members, in and after Gillemand’s day, is positively eye-watering. The Prince of Wales — the future Edward VII — was clearly top of the aristocratic league. Not far behind, though, came various dukes and marquesses, followed in their turn by an assortment of military men, one of whom, General John Campbell, would win a Victoria Cross in the Great War. Less obviously martial members of the club included the actor Henry Irving and the composer Arthur Sullivan. The latter’s passion for swordplay may have had something to do with his father’s occupation. Thomas Sullivan was a bandmaster at Sandhurst.

We are now in the year 1868, when Gillemand, aged almost seventy, was engaged to appear in a public assault at Willis’s Rooms in St James’s Street. As the eminent fencer was about to retire, and this would be his final exhibition, it was a poignant occasion, but it had some suitably military features that would have reflected well on a man who in his teenage years had been at Waterloo. One of his fellow contestants, a much younger fencer who would take over his role as instructor at the London Fencing Club, had fought in the Crimean War, and the musical entertainment would be provided by the band of the 1st Surrey Rifles.

Harrison of Vinegar Yard

A display of fencing bouts is perhaps a far cry from the fashionable balls for which Willis’s Rooms, in their earlier incarnation as Almack’s Rooms, had once been known. However, times had changed, and this most eligible of society venues had become a meeting-place for a range of activities, anything in fact from Kemble’s readings from Shakespeare and Thackeray’s lectures on the English humorists to a performance of ‘mnemonics’ by Master Gustave Adolphe Bassle, a Dutch boy who could memorise and recall astonishing quantities of useless information. The Rooms were also the setting for lavish dinners, and in 1867, a year before Gillemand’s swan-song appearance, Charles Dickens had proposed the toast of the evening at the Ninth Anniversary Festival of the Railway Benevolent Society.

The actual fencing was described by the Saturday Review in an article that struggled to conceal its disappointment. Monsieur Simon, the hero of the Crimea, and John Musgrave Waite, a former Corporal-Quartermaster in the 2nd Life Guards who was able to slice a sheep’s carcass in half with a single stroke of his sabre, resorted to an ugly exchange of cut and thrust. Joseph Otterway, a trooper in Waite’s former regiment, manfully used his bayonet against the sabre of Professor Alfred Betteris Shury, but to little effect. Shury and Gillemand in their encounter did at least impress the Review with their ‘elegance of movement and position’, but ‘something of former vigour’ was lacking, which was a kind way of saying that the two old gladiators, whose ages averaged roughly sixty years, were a bit shaky on their legs.

Possibly the most remarkable of the fencers at Gillemand’s testimonial was Charles Harrison, a bruiser who styled himself ‘the strongest man in the world’ and underwrote his claim with demonstrations of his physical powers, which included working with heavy clubs and lifting an eighty-four-pound weight with his little finger. According to his publicist, Harrison had performed before Queen Victoria, and had been presented with a silver snuff-box by an admiring Rajah of Coorg. His pupils were drawn from the ranks of the British nobility and Indian royal families, and he himself, when not fencing or working out with dumb-bells, was a tavern keeper in Vinegar Yard. The more aesthetically minded of his admirers compared his physique with that of the Farnese Hercules.

That Iconic Moment

However, far more curious even than the mighty Harrison was the bandmaster of the 1st Surrey Rifles, a fellow by the name of John Callcott. He had previously served with the Coldstream Guards for almost thirty years, and was the regiment’s band sergeant in 1846 when he was discharged on medical grounds, suffering from chronic bronchitis. When his health permitted, he had also been third French horn in the orchestra of the Royal Italian Opera at Covent Garden, and he was, besides, the recipient of a gold medal as bandmaster of the Riflers at a contest in Brussels, a composer of military music, and the inventor of a modified instrument that he exhibited at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851.

Now, Callcott’s service with the Guards had started at an early age, and records show that in 1812, when he was twelve, he enrolled in the Corps of Drums. It was only in 1820 that he joined the band as a French horn player, by which time, of course, the Battle of Waterloo had taken place. The remarkable fact is that young Callcott, who at the time was barely fifteen, had been beating his drum on the English side of that fearful encounter while young Gillemand had been beating his on the French side.

The coincidence could be viewed as an example of that iconic moment, which one often stumbles upon in the histories of human conflict, when former combatants meet in later life, in more peaceful times. Old differences are forgotten, and a shared humanity is acknowledged. In the case of the French maître d’armes and the English bandmaster, both veterans of Waterloo, the setting of a fencing exhibition in Willis’s Rooms was quaint, but the emotional force of the moment would have been no less powerful for that. The two men, we are told, were delighted when the facts were laid before them.

Endings

There was a further coincidence, but a sad one, in that both men would die of identical causes. Five years after his testimonial appearance, wheezing painfully in his Gerrard Street home, Gillemand would succumb to bronchitis. Callcott would also die of bronchitis, the same medical condition that had ended his career in the Coldstream Guards. No doubt his health, like Gillemand’s, had been seriously affected by the terrible nineteenth-century fogs.

If only the French horn Callcott exhibited in 1851 had survived as some sort of memorial, but alas, it never caught on. He had a workshop in Vauxhall Bridge Road in Pimlico, and by all accounts he was an inventive fellow, but his ‘omnitonic horn’ in the end proved to be little more than a curiosity. However, it at least made it into the 1854 catalogue of the instrument makers Rudall, Rose and Carte, who listed it with a £14 price tag.

Callcott’s was a long life: he was eighty-one when he died. His wife, Margaret, had left him a widower in 1866, but they had many children, and a daughter, Charlotte, lived with him in his declining years. And when the time came in the winter of 1882, and the old bandmaster breathed his last, Charlotte Callcott, who was in her forties and unmarried, was at her father’s side.