Near Town and Out of Sight
Before it became a public park, the ground at Primrose Hill and neighbouring Chalk Farm had exactly the qualities a duel required. It was open, unbuilt land on the edge of the growing city, close enough that a party could reach it from the West End early in the morning and be back before the day properly began, yet secluded enough that an illegal encounter stood a fair chance of passing unobserved.
Duelling was against the law throughout the period, and a fatal outcome was in principle murder. In practice, among officers and gentlemen, it was tolerated to a degree that the courts reflected. That gap between the law and the code is the whole background to what happened on these slopes.
The Chalk Farm Tavern
The focal point was the Chalk Farm Tavern, established in the eighteenth century to serve walkers coming out to the hill. It stood on what later became the northern side of Regent's Park Road, had a veranda along the front and gardens below, and hosted wrestling matches, balls and travelling entertainments alongside its ordinary trade.
Behind the building lay heavily wooded ground, and that is where the meetings took place. The tavern served as assembly point, refuge and, on at least one occasion, deathbed. It was demolished in the early 1850s, by which time the practice it had accommodated was itself dying out.
Quarrels on the Record
The Victorian topography Old and New London lists a number of encounters at Chalk Farm and Primrose Hill:
- In the summer of 1790, Captain Hervey Aston was shot through the neck by a fellow officer named Fitzgerald. Aston survived that meeting, though he was killed in a later duel elsewhere.
- In April 1803 a quarrel that had begun with a fight between two Newfoundland dogs in Hyde Park ended with Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery dead and Captain Macnamara badly wounded. Macnamara was tried for the killing and acquitted.
- In 1806 the poet Thomas Moore and the critic Francis Jeffrey met over a review. Officers arrived before shots were exchanged, and Byron later mocked the whole business in verse.
- In February 1821 John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, was severely wounded in a duel arising from a literary feud and died of his injuries some days afterwards.
The Italian poet Ugo Foscolo, then living in London, is also said to have fought a bloodless duel on the smaller western rise of the hill in around 1813.
Trivial Pretexts
What is striking in the local accounts is how slight the provocations often were, and how often drink was involved. Recorded causes of challenges in the neighbourhood include being pushed off a pavement, an insulting nickname, a broken appointment, a slighting remark about the Navy and the dispute between the two dogs. Two piano journeymen are said to have gone out over a disagreement about tuning.
Seconds were expected to attempt a reconciliation on the ground before pistols were loaded, and a great many meetings ended without injury, either because the reconciliation worked, because both parties deliberately missed, or because the authorities turned up in time. The fatal cases were the minority, but they were the ones that reached the newspapers and fixed the hill's reputation.
Why the Meetings Stopped
Two things ended it. The first was the ground itself: the land was acquired from Eton College in the early 1840s and secured by Act of Parliament in 1842 as public open space, which removed the seclusion at a stroke. The second was a broader shift in attitude and enforcement, and duelling faded out in England around the middle of the nineteenth century.
The Royal Parks still acknowledge the hill's earlier reputation for duels and prize-fights. Nothing on the slope commemorates it, which is arguably as it should be, but the reason a Georgian gentleman would have named this particular spot is still visible in the shape of the ground.