These things were relatively trifles, and it was really not till the seventies—under Baum—that Cremorne became an impossible place. The Westminster Police Court was now hardly ever without its drunk or disorderly case from the gardens. Even the normal evenings at Cremorne were fairly fertile in incident, but a big crop followed the abnormal evenings—the night of some great event, the Derby, the Oaks, the return of the Prince from India, or—a new institution—the Bank Holiday. At such times extra late hours were always granted, and they were those occasions when champagne is said to ‘flow like water.’ It was half-past ten, half-past eleven, twelve, and still the theatres and music-halls were sending down fresh visitors, and the cabs came rattling down the King’s high road. The bars and boxes were so many hives of drinking mortals—men who had lost and men who had won, and the drinking quickly led to an almost indiscriminate pugnacity. The wretched waiters, even, were assaulted, though the pugilist thought he amply atoned by a money payment ‘on the spot.’ The efforts of the half-hearted Chelsea Vestry of 1857 were renewed with more vigour (and with more justification) from 1870 onwards, and they had a valuable ally in Canon Cromwell, the principal of St. Mark’s Training College, which stood almost opposite the entrance of Cremorne. One of the many unedifying illustrated papers of the seventies, the _Day’s Doings_, portrays the Canon in cap and gown ejecting two flashily dressed females from the gardens, and he and his docile students for the next six years are said to have given Mr. Baum a very rough time. This opposition was not popular, and on one 5th of November the worthy Canon was paraded on a coster’s barrow in front of Cremorne as a guy. The comic papers sneered at the petitions ‘signed by all the babies and children under ten,’ and issued a revised set of Cremorne Regulations. All ladies were henceforward to have certificates of respectability from the Board of Guardians, though members of the London School Board were to be admitted free. No fireworks, dancing, smoking, laughing, or flirting were allowed, but by an order from the Vestry you could obtain a coffee cobler or a cocoa cocktail. Ridicule is sometimes a legitimate weapon against the Puritan, but in this case Canon Cromwell and the Vestry were hardly in the wrong.