The programme of the theatre and the concert-room was less exciting. The Cremorne theatricals never aimed much higher than the farce and the vaudeville, but there were some good ballets, in which (_circa_ 1847–1851) the Deulins took part. Under Simpson some of the old favourite comic singers were engaged—Sam Cowell in 1846, Robert Glindon in 1847 and 1850. {10b} Herr Von Joel, who appeared in 1848, was ‘a peculiar old German’ {10c} who had made a sensation—which became a bore—at Vauxhall Gardens. His business was to appear at unexpected moments and in unsuspected parts of the gardens, to yodel. Swiss ditties, and to give imitations, on his walking-stick, of birds and feathered fowl. In his later days he was a familiar figure at Evans’s Supper-Rooms, where he used to retail dubious cigars, and dispose of tickets for benefits which never came off. J. W. Sharp (‘Jack Sharp’), who sang at Cremorne in 1850, was at one time the rage of the town, and his comic songs were in demand at Vauxhall and at such places as Evans’s and the Mogul in Drury Lane. But he took to dissipated ways, lost his engagements, and died in the Dover Workhouse at the age of thirty-eight. {10d} Simpson’s varied enterprises resulted in a substantial profit, even if he did not make (as he told the impecunious Baron Nicholson) the sum of £100,000 during his first years at Cremorne. His patrons were people of all ranks, and of varying degrees of virtue. But Cremorne was never able to parade in the newspapers that array of fashionable and distinguished personages who ‘last night’ visited Vauxhall. It was not, for one thing, a place that ladies (in the strict sense of the word) were in the habit of visiting, unless, perhaps (as Mr. Sala puts it) ‘in disguise and on the sly,’ or, at any rate, under the safe conduct of a husband or brother. Ladies of some sort were, no doubt, considerably in evidence there, though we are not to think of Cremorne as so entirely given over to ‘drink, dancing, and devilry’ as its sterner critics declared. If it was a place for the man about town, it also attracted a number of worthy citizens and country cousins who went there for an evening’s pleasure with their wives and daughters, and were ‘not particular.’ A livelier element was imported by the medical students—a high-spirited race made responsible in those days for the sins of many non-medical youngsters—by Oxonians and Cantabs, by temporarily irresponsible clerks and shopmen, and ‘flash’ personages of various kinds. [Picture: Cremorne Gardens in the Height of the Season. By M’Connell, 1858]