The estate of Cremorne House (or Farm), which was afterwards to be developed into the notorious Cremorne Gardens, had once belonged to the pious Lady Huntingdon, and George Whitfield had prayed and discoursed within the house. Later on, it passed to the Earl of Cremorne, then to his widow, a descendant of William Penn. The last owner was Granville Penn. {2a} The purchaser of 1830, in whom we are interested, was Charles Random de Berenger, who styled himself Baron de Beaufain, or, more often, the Baron de Berenger. His name seemed French, but he boasted of ancient Prussian lineage, and long before this date had settled in London. He was a skilful draughtsman, an inventor of peculiar guns {2b} and explosives, and believed to be the owner of innumerable patents, which had only brought him to a debtors’ prison. In the summer of 1815 he had emerged from a term of imprisonment in the King’s Bench, for it was he who with consummate skill and audacity had carried through the great Stock Exchange hoax of 1814, in which Lord Cochrane and his friends were so painfully involved. {2c} In fifteen years these things were nearly forgotten, and the Baron, who was a sportsman and a dead shot, found himself well supported when he opened his Cremorne Stadium in 1832. [Picture: The Stadium, Chelsea. From a lithograph, published in 1831] The subscription was two or three guineas, and the members, under the Baron’s tuition, could shoot, box and fence, and practise ‘manly exercises generally’ in his beautiful grounds. He also established, so to speak, a ‘Ladies’ Links,’ with its clubroom, ‘which Gentlemen cannot enter,’ unless (such is his quaint proviso) ‘by consent of the Ladies occupying such.’ In 1834 George Cruikshank made a design for a ‘Chelsea Stadium Shield,’ which was quite Homeric in its form, and showed every conceivable kind of sport and exercise, including pole-jumping and golf. {2d} The Stadium flourished, or, rather, lingered on, till 1843, but only with the adventitious aid of occasional galas and balloon displays that already foreshadowed Cremorne. {3} [Picture: ‘Baron’ Nicholson at a ‘Judge and Jury’ Trial. From Life in London Illustrated, circa 1855]