Simpson retired in 1861, {12b} and on July 30 there was a new manager, Edward Tyrrell Smith. {12c} He has been denied, somehow, a place in the great _Dictionary of National Biography_, but one cannot turn over a programme of London amusements in the fifties or sixties without encountering the name of E. T. Smith—an interesting man, of boundless energy and resource, and a lucky, if wayward, speculator, who was everything by turns and nothing long. He was the son of Admiral E. T. Smith, but his aspirations were not lofty, for he began life—he was born in 1804—as a Robin Redbreast, one of the old red-waistcoated Bow Street runners. When the new police force was established Smith was too young for superannuation, so he was made an inspector. But he soon tired of this, and after trying his hand as a sheriff’s bailiff or auctioneer, went into the wine trade. In 1850 we find him landlord of a tavern in Red Lion Street, Holborn, attracting custom by dressing his barmaids in bloomer costume. From about this date his speculative genius turned to the management of London theatres. He took the Marylebone, then Drury Lane, where he made quite a lengthy stay, and even plunged into opera at Her Majesty’s. One of his eccentricities was to present silver snuff-boxes and watches to his master-carpenters and property-men, each presentation taking place on the stage, accompanied by an appropriate speech. He was lessee of the Lyceum, of the Surrey, of Astley’s (when Ada Menken appeared as Mazeppa), and he took Highbury Barn for one season. He also founded the Alhambra in Leicester Square, making short work, for his purpose, of its instructive predecessor, the Panopticon. He effected another transformation by turning Crockford’s gaming-house into the Wellington Restaurant, and opened a second restaurant—but this was a dismal failure—in the vaults of the Royal Exchange. He further made a handsome profit out of a French bonnet-shop which he established at Brighton, under the alluring name of Clémentine. He financed Baron Nicholson at the Coal Hole, became proprietor of the _Sunday Times_, and finally settled down in the metal trade. If Smith had little money of his own, he had a marvellous talent for extracting it from others, for, with some managerial humbug in his doings, he was a good-natured man, with plenty of friends who believed in his speculative _flair_. One of his early devices was ingenious. He hired from a money-lender at the rate of £1 a day a £1,000 banknote, which he always carried in his pocket—not to spend, but to deposit when he made a purchase, and to inspire confidence generally. He retired from Cremorne in 1869, and managed just to outlive the gardens, for he died in 1877, on November 26.