Such places were known variously, according to their locations, as glee clubs or mughouses. Between songs, there were toasts and speeches. The more formal of these establishments were known as saloons and generally demanded money for entrance in exchange for refreshment varying from “ale, inky-coloured porter, or strong beer” to tea and brandy. Tables with covers of oilcloth or leather were pushed against a wall, while at the end of the room was a table and a piano or harp. “There was no curriculum of entertainment,” one customer is reported as saying in Roy Porter’s London: A Social History, “every now & then one of the young women would say, ‘I think I’ll sing a song.’” A French visitor reported how, at the sound of an auctioneer’s hammer rapped upon the table, “three gentlemen, as serious as Anglican ministers, start singing, sometimes alone, sometimes in chorus, sentimental ballads.” He also noticed that in some taverns of the same type the landlords “have unfortunately installed mechanical organs which grind away unceasingly.” So complaints about pub entertainment are as old as public houses themselves. These taverns and saloons had their counterparts in “night cellars” such as the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole in Fountain Court, the Strand, where established entertainers appeared as singers or performers among the combined fumes of ale, gas-jets and tobacco …
CHAPTER 39
A Note on Tobacco
All visitors to clubs and pubs saw and smelled “the fume of pipes,” and that smoke has hovered over London taverns since Sir Walter Raleigh, according to local legend, first began to smoke in Islington. A few years later an early seventeenth-century German visitor noted that Londoners “are constantly smoking tobacco and in this manner—they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that may be rubbed into powder, and putting fire to it.” Clay pipes are to be found everywhere in archaeological excavations.
Tobacco was at first supposed to have medicinal properties, and could be purchased at the shops of apothecaries, as a “Remedy for phlegmatick people.” Children were permitted to smoke it, too, and “in schools substituted a tobacco for breakfast, and were initiated into the trick of expelling the smoke through their nostrils by their masters.” One diarist in 1702 recalled an evening with his brother at Garraway’s Coffee House where he was “surprised to see his sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco, after that a second and third pipe without the least concern.”
This “strange drug” was everywhere in seventeenth-century London, but it had its detractors who denounced it for creating idleness and stupor. Even the King, James I, wrote a “Counterblast to Tobacco” in which he describes “an unctuous and oily kind of soot found in some great tobacco-takers that after their death were opened.” Yet nothing can dissuade Londoners from taking their amusements, or intoxicants, in a city so reliant upon excess. Although the medicinal properties of tobacco were advertised, its addictive properties soon became evident as a charm against anxiety and isolation—“a Companion in Solitude,” as one observer put it, “an Amusement in Company, an innocent Diversion to Melancholy.” We hear of early seventeenth-century vagrants, such as the Roaring Boys and the Bonaventoes, smoking pipes. Tobacco became, in that sense, one of the necessary pleasures of the London poor.
Another traveller to seventeenth-century London noted how the citizens smoked their small pipes at a play or in a tavern and how “it makes them riotous and merry, and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk … they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives.” It was also a matter of comment that a pipe was “passed round,” and that London women smoked “in secret.” There was a great trade in tobacco, close to half a million pounds, and so many shops sold pipes and tobacco that in themselves they formed “a large city.” So a city of smoke was wreathed within a city of trade. It has been suggested that, in the 1770s, the fashion if not the habit abated; but despite Samuel Johnson’s remark, in 1773, that “smoking has gone out,” in reality pipe-smoking effortlessly merged with the later use of the cigarette.
Cigarettes entered London soon after the Crimean War: the first manufactory was set up in Walworth in 1857. A second and third were set up in Queen Victoria Street and Leicester Square respectively, under the ownership of Greek immigrants, and the first filter—known as the “Cambridge” cigarette—was manufactured in 1865. “Fag” was the name applied only to the cheaper variety of cigarette. The addiction was always strongly present. In fact the city itself seemed to promote it. “I strive after tobacco,” Lamb once wrote, “as other men strive after virtue.” The tobacco warehouse in nineteenth-century London Docks contained almost five million pounds’ sterling worth of that commodity, and there were very many of the poor who spent time “picking up the ends of cigars thrown away as useless by the smokers in the streets,” selling the waste product at a price of 6d to 10d per pound. Every aspect of London can take part in trade.
CHAPTER 40
A Bad Odour
The smells of London linger. They are “always more pronounced in the heart of the City,” according to one late nineteenth-century Canadian writer, Sara Jeanette Duncan, “than in Kensington for instance.” She went on to report that “it was no special odour or collection of odours that could be distinguished—it was a rather abstract smell.” It has been likened to the smell of rain or of metal. It may be the smell of human activity or human greed. Yet it has been claimed that the smell is not human at all. When rain falls upon the city one of the most characteristic odours is that of “refreshed stone” but that dampness can also produce “the tired physical smell of London.” It is the smell of age or, rather, of age restored.
In the fourteenth century the odours were varied and multifarious, from the smell of baking meat to that of boiling glue, from the brewing of beer to the manufacture of vinegar; decayed vegetables competed against tallow and horse-dung, all of which made up “a richly confected cloud of thick and heavy smell which the people had to breathe.” This “medieval smell” is at this late date difficult to identify, although perhaps it lingers in stray doorways and passageways where a similar medley of odours confronts the passer-by. There are also parts of the world, as, for example, the souks of North Africa, where it is possible to savour something of the atmosphere of medieval London.
Every century, too, has its own smells. In the fifteenth century the dog house at Moorgate sent forth “great noyious and infectyve aiers,” while others complained about the reek of the lime kilns situated in the suburbs. The smell of sea coal, in particular, was identified with the smell of the city itself. It was, essentially, the odour of trade which proved unbearable. Thus in the sixteenth century the foundries of Lothbury were a source of much public disquiet. From the north came the smell of burnt bricks, while in the City itself by Paternoster Row emerged “a nauseous smell of tallow.” The smell of the Stocks Market, at the eastern end of Cheapside, was so strong that the worshippers in the adjacent church of St. Stephen Walbrook “were overcome by the stench” of rotting vegetables. Those who attended church risked other olfactory perils, however, and the odours emanating from the burial ground of St. Paul’s Churchyard alarmed Latimer in the sixteenth century. “I think verily that many a man taketh his death in Paul’s Churchyard,” he expounded in one of his sermons, “and this I speak of experience, for I myself when I have been there in some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill favoured unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after.” This odour of graveyards was in fact one of the most permanent and prolonged smells of the city, with complaints against it from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
But there is the smell of the living as well as of the dead. References in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dramatic literature point to the distinctive odour of a London crowd, in particular what Shakespeare described in Cori-olanus as “their stinking breaths.” Julius Caesar is felled by the savour of filthy bodies which belong more to London than to Rome. In the eighteenth century George Chey
ne, in The English Malady, recoiled from “the clouds of Stinking Breaths and Perspirations … more than sufficient to poison and infect the Air for twenty miles.” In social reports of the nineteenth century, there are accounts of the noisome scents of “low” tenements and lodging houses which left inspectors faint and sick.
In a city of work and trade one of the principal inconveniences will be that of perspiration, “of greasy cooks at sweating work.” London is a kind of forcing house, and within it lies “the mixture of Scents that arose from Mundung as Tobacco, Sweaty Toes, Dirty Shirts, the Shit-Tub, stinking Breaths and uncleanly carcasses.” Certainly the more refined Londoner would, on a still day, be aware of the presence of other citizens without necessarily seeing them. The image generally employed is one of close, suffocating contact as if the inhabitants were pressing in on all sides with their rank bodies and dirty breath. This was one of the reasons why strangers and travellers at once felt so anonymous in London: suddenly they became aware of, and part of, the intimate yet cloying smell of human life. When a sixteenth-century report notes that the sick and infirm lie upon the streets of London where “their intolerable miseries and griefs … stunk in the eyes and noses of the City,” the olfactory sense is linked with the visual to suggest an overpowering sensory horror.
It is also an ageless smell. To walk down a narrow and evil-smelling passage in contemporary London—and there are many such off the main thoroughfares—is to walk again down Fowle Lane or Stinking Alley. To pass too close to an unwashed vagrant is to experience the disagreeable sensation of an eighteenth-century Londoner when confronted with an “Abraham man” or a common beggar. In its smells the city can inhabit many past times.
It should not be assumed, however, that the entire citizenry were unwashed. There was soap as early as the fifteenth century, as well as lozenges to sweeten the breath and unguents to perfume the body. The real problem, as with so many others in the city, concerned the presence and the perceived contamination of the poor. In the seventeenth century the smells of poverty intruded into fashionable areas with “stinking Allies” and “suffocating Yards” beside newly designed squares. The smells of London were a great leveller. The rushes laid upon the floors of poorer households harboured “spittle, vomit, scraps of food, and the leakage of dogs and other animals.” In areas such as Bethnal Green and Stepney some of those animals were pigs; in Orchard Street, Marylebone, there were twenty-three houses, which between them contained seven hundred people together with one hundred pigs creating “very nauseous smells.” Once more the difference between smell and no smell is decided in London by money. Money is odourless. In the city of finance, poverty stinks. So in the mid-nineteenth century an urban traveller visited the slums of Agar Town by St. Pancras which not even wind and rain could cleanse and where “The stench of a rainy morning is enough to knock down a bullock.”
In that century, too, other localities had their own especial odours. The area around Tower Street smelled of wine and tea (in the previous century its aroma was of oil and cheese), while Shadwell’s odour was that of the adjacent sugar manufactories. From Bermondsey issued the smells of beer, tanyards, pickle and “the odour of fruits fomenting for jam” while by the river itself Thomas Hardy, lodging in Adelphi Terrace, suffered from illness as a result of the smell of mud at low tide. In nineteenth-century Islington the smell was of horse-dung and fried fish, while the area around Fleet Street and Temple Bar was apparently permeated by the “odour of brown stout.” Visitors recall that the “characteristic aroma” of the City itself was of the stables, with an “anticipatory stench of its cab-stands.” The experience of walking from the Monument to the Thames, however, would unleash a series of identifiable smells from “damaged oranges” to “herrings.”
There were delightful smells as well as disagreeable ones. In the seventeenth century, at midnight, when the bakers of London began to heat their ovens, and when the kitchens and stoves using sea coal were finally at rest, then “the air begins to clear and the smoke of the bakeries, which are heated with wood rather than with coal, spreads a very country-like smell in the neighbouring air.” There were also London streets which had a reputation for being sweet-smelling; such a place in the sixteenth century was Bucklersbury in “simple” or herb time, and newly built Pall Mall. A Japanese visitor of 1897 said that the city smelled of food, while at the same time commenting unfavourably on the breath of London servants. The French poet Mallarmé suggested that the city had the odour of roast beef as well as the scent of fog with “a special smell you only find here.” At a slightly later date, J.B. Priestley recalled the odour of “greasy little eating houses” as well as that of “a smoky autumn morning … with a railway station smell about it.” The smell of transport, in all its forms, has always been characteristic of the city. In the spring the omnibus, for example, had the odour of onions and, in winter, of “paraffin or eucalyptus”; in the summer it was simply “indescribable.” Fog caught the throat “like a whiff of chlorine.” Rose Macaulay remembered a passage off High Street, Kensington, which “smelled of vaseline.” Long Acre smelled of onions, and Southampton Row of antiseptic. Twentieth-century London has been filled with odours, from the smell of chocolate along the Hammersmith Road to the smell of the chemical works down Chrisp Street in the East End and along the locally named “Stinkhouse Bridge.”
Old smells have lingered, like the odour of the river and of pubs, while whole areas have retained their own especial and identifiable atmosphere. An account of the East End written in the late 1960s notes “an almost overpowering smell of fish” and “boiled cabbage,” together with “a musty smell of old wood and crumbling bricks and stagnant air”; almost a century earlier in 1883 the area was similarly described, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, as imbued with “the fragrance of stale fish or vegetables,” and the nineteenth-century odour “of drying matchboxes.”
The ubiquitous twentieth-century smell, however, has been that of the bus and the motor car. The “air is tainted with their breath,” wrote William Dean Howells in 1905, “which is now one of the most characteristic stenches of ‘civilisation.’” Other persistent presences include the smell of dog excrement upon the pavements, and the greasy savour emanating from fast-food restaurants. And then, too, there is the dull acrid smell of the underground which is also the smell of London dust and burnt London hair. Worse, however, is the clinging odour of the morning rush hour below the ground with lungfuls of morning breath leaving a metallic quality at the back of the throat. It is both human and inhuman, like the smell of London itself.
CHAPTER 41
You Sexy Thing
Sex, in the city, has commonly been associated with dirt and disease; if not with these, then with trade. The resemblance exists even within the language itself; “hard core” is a term conventionally applied to pornography but its original meaning, in a London context, was that of “hard, rock-like rubbish” used in the building of roads and houses. Where there is rubbish, there is also death. The area around the Haymarket, a notorious haunt of prostitutes, encompasses “a march of the dead. It is a plague-spot—the real plague spot.”
From its earliest days London has been the site of sexual activity. A Roman model of a phallus was found in Coleman Street—later, paradoxically, a haven for Lollards and Puritans—as well as an architrave depicting three prostitutes. In the precincts of the Roman temple, where Gracechurch Street and Leadenhall Street now are, there would have been erotic celebrations connected with Saturn or Priapus, and beside the amphitheatre on the present site of the Guildhall we might expect to find a palaestra or promenade frequented by male and female prostitutes. There were brothels licensed by the Roman authorities, as well as “fornixes” or arches beneath which were located “mere dirty shacks” employed for the purposes of fornication. E.J. Burford, in his learned London: the Synfulle Citie, has remarked that on certain street corners a “herm” was placed, “a short stone pillar of Hermes” with an erect penis and “prepuce painte
d a brilliant red.”
Yet the use of arches and brothels meant that, in this most commercial of cities, sex had itself already been commercialised. In the centuries of Danish and Saxon occupation, young women were bought and sold like any other merchandise. “Gif a man buy a mayden with cattle,” according to one Saxon injunction, “let the bargain stand if it be without guile.” A thousand years later an eighteenth-century nursery rhyme contained the line, “I had to go to London town and buy me a wife.” There are supposed to have been auctions for women in certain secret markets, continuing well into the nineteenth century, and the emphasis upon finance is sustained by the enquiry of the late twentieth-century prostitute, “Do you want any business?” So does the spirit of London imprint itself upon the desires of its inhabitants. London is dedicated to selling. But the poor have nothing to sell, so they sell their bodies. Thus, sexual lust is free to roam down every lane and alley. London has always been the scene of covert debauchery.
Those medieval chroniclers who cited London for its drunkenness and sin-fulness also rebuked it for its rapists and its lechers, its harlots and its sodomites. In the twelfth century there is reference to Bordhawe, an area of brothels in the parish of St. Mary Colechurch. In the thirteenth century, and probably much earlier, there was a Gropecuntlane in the two parishes of St. Pancras and St. Mary Colechurch (also known as Groppecountelane, 1276 and Gropecontelane, 1279); the context and meaning here are obvious enough. In the same period there are references to Love Lane “where yonge couples were wont to sport” and Maid Lane “so-called of wantons there.”
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