The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  As the child of a tavern-keeper, he also would have been put to work from an early age. His first defined role within the Bedford Head would have been as a pot-boy, or a general assistant, helping to ferry drinks to customers and carry away their empties. As reading, writing and figuring would have also been considered skills necessary for the management of a public house, a taverner’s son would have received some formal education, most likely provided through a local charity school. Most of his truly useful learning, however, would have been acquired by shadowing his father or any other elder male family member as they performed the tasks essential to their trade. When not assisting at the tap or counting the profits of his labour, George Harrison would have stood at the background of his operation, overseeing the work of the waiters who tottered from table to table with their containers of ale, and keeping a narrowed eye on suspicious characters. As he approached an appropriate age, John would have joined his father in these duties and eventually joined the ranks of the Bedford Head’s devoted male waiting staff. As a tavern waiter, young Harrison would have assumed the role of a compliant servant to his father’s clientele. In doing his best to see that their demands for drink and food were fulfilled, he could come to expect remuneration in the form of tips. While respectfully laying plates of meat and glasses of port before gentlemen may have earned him a few pennies, he would have learned that gratifying their less legitimate requests might supply him with far more handsome sums.

  Simply because the Bedford Head Tavern was a family-run business did not make it an honest one. There is nothing to suggest that its reputation was any better than those of its sister establishments, the notorious watering holes that blighted Maiden Lane. Only a few doors down from the Bedford Head throbbed a stinking sore of a public house, Bob Derry’s Cider Cellar. Bob Derry, with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, just about managed the alcohol-fuelled traffic that pushed in and out of his rancid den. ‘As its name implied’, wrote John Timbs, a recorder of tavern history, the interior and fittings of the Cider Cellar ‘were rude and rough’. Bob Derry’s was open all night and accepted into its fold the dregs of an evening out: those already too intoxicated to walk or talk straight. There, under Derry’s blind eye, pickpockets and disease-ridden streetwalkers did a roaring trade. As Samuel Derrick wrote in 1761, the establishment was noted for its regular hiccups of violence – spectacles of brutality where men bludgeoned their rivals and ladies of the night tore at each other’s faces. Patrons of Derry’s were not known for interceding in a good fight, but rather for placing bets on its outcome. On one occasion, the outcome was the double murder of two drinkers, who after a fierce argument were mercilessly stabbed to death.

  Although the annals of Covent Garden never placed the Bedford Head’s name on a par with that of its vice-riddled neighbour, in its day it would hardly have been considered a paragon of lawfulness. The majority of the area’s establishments would have involved themselves in some form of criminal trade, whether this entailed permitting prostitutes to solicit openly (a generally accepted practice), receiving stolen goods or harbouring known criminals from the watch. Frequently, far worse activities committed by proprietors or their staff, such as coin-clipping, counterfeiting, theft, extortion, violent assault and incidents of rape, were allowed to transpire in upstairs rooms and cellars. In an environment where the orderly and the unlawful were woven inextricably into a single fabric, John Harrison would have been initiated into the realm of the law-breaker before he could have even differentiated between the two. As tavern-waiting and pimping were virtually inseparable practices, it is unlikely that George Harrison would have discouraged his son from earning money by ‘making introductions’. Not unlike his alter ego, it would have been circumstance as well as a father’s encouragement that made him a pimp.

  In the eighteenth century, the urban tavern and its cousin the coffee house were primarily male domains. They could at times be quite close in definition, serving as social meeting houses and as a forum where business and news could be discussed between gentlemen. Although certain professions might hold preferences for specific locations, generally a range of occupations and social strata brushed elbows under their roofs. While the coffee houses’ main attraction was the caffeinated novelty tipple they peddled, they also, like the cafés of continental Europe, provided alcohol. The better venues of both variety offered food in addition to liquid refreshment, which could be taken either in the communal taproom or in a private, above-stairs space, if the patron was wealthy enough. Over the course of the century, the activities of these upstairs rooms took on a history of their own. They were ideal areas for the members of gentlemen’s societies to host their monthly or yearly gatherings. These events, which frequently began in the evening hours with discussions of politics, science or art over a formal meal, had a habit of degenerating into a night of wholesale debauchery. Respectable society dictated that men could not be considered either dignified or safe when soused with liquor, and therefore any woman who had pretensions of calling herself a lady would not venture near the door of such an establishment. Nevertheless, women abounded in taverns and coffee houses, especially those around Covent Garden. These were the women that writers of the age might argue were designated by virtue of their class to entertain men. For centuries, where men drank prostitutes would follow. Once satiated with alcohol and a full belly of food, the only urge left to be fulfilled was the venereal one, making the prostitute’s job of searching for punters as straightforward as fishing in a barrel. The man who just happened to be standing between the inebriated customer and his much-desired sexual release was the waiter.

  ‘Passing an evening a few weeks ago at a certain tavern near Covent Garden, the wine operated so strongly upon the blood of some of my companions, that they rang for the gentleman porter and actually asked him if he could get them some girls’, wrote a young journalist inexperienced in the customs of contemporary procuring. Although a number of means existed whereby lustful men could satisfy their needs, seeking a sexual partner through the intermediary of a procurer might offer fractionally more protection against disease than an encounter with a random streetwalker. This, at least, was the theory. A waiter-pimp’s job in the most basic sense might only amount to ushering over the appropriate women currently within the tavern, or those local girls nearby with whom the waiter was familiar. As Jack Harris himself clarifies, ‘By pimp, nothing more was signified than to run about the neighbourhood and bring the first bunter to the gentlemen then come a table at the tavern I belonged to’. This gesture fell within the remit of keeping customers content while they sojourned in the tavern-keeper’s rooms. As long as patrons were willing to continue spending their money at his establishment, a taverner would have little cause for complaint.

  Unfortunately, the epithet of pimp, one which conjured (and still conjures) some of the nastiest, most remorseless images of men, was applied even-handedly to any man who ‘introduced women into company’. While the author E.J. Burford’s assessment of pimps throughout history as being ‘evil, heartless, vile creatures, without any redeeming features – wretched men living off wretched women’ is not incorrect, the position of the eighteenth-century waiter-pimp digresses somewhat from this commonly held perception. Just as there existed a range of different statuses within the profession of prostitute, so the same held true for procurers. Not every pimp was a brutish bully lurking in dark, filthy alleys. The practice of pimping, or what the era occasionally called ‘pandering’, beneath the veneer of table-waiting sought to remove at least the whiff of ugliness from this pursuit. In any case, Harrison had come to believe that there was no harm in simply bringing two willing parties together. In later years, this was all that he as Jack Harris had claimed to have done as a pimp. It was in itself, he reasoned, something that he ‘need not be ashamed of’.

  Rather than actively seeking to become a procurer, purveying sex was a vocation that found John Harrison once he assumed the responsibilities of a waiter. Fortunately for him,
it was a calling that suited his circumstances. Many of the young women who haunted the Bedford Head would have been those he had known since childhood, as neighbours and playmates. The daughters of needy families within the parish, those who lived in nearby houses or who worked as servants or marketers in the Piazza, were the girls who would one day turn to prostitution in order to earn their bread. Stories of their entrée into the life would have been common public house banter; Harrison may have even heard about their circumstances from their own mouths. In many cases he would have been intimate with their parents or their siblings. It is equally likely that he would have known their debauchers and, eventually, their keepers. Harrison’s ears would have hummed with the gossip of the neighbourhood – whose daughter’s belly was looking unusually round, and who had been caught with his hands up his kitchen maid’s skirts. He would have had a better idea of who was poxed than most punters, a valuable insight for a pimp to possess. Irrespective of when he began ‘making introductions’, Harrison did not come to recognise himself as a pimp until around 1751, shortly before the creation of his alias, Jack Harris.

  As easy as it may have been to prosper in his role at his father’s tavern, John Harrison did not earn his infamous name at the Bedford Head. Fate had another venue in mind for him. In 1753, something occurred in Harrison’s life that catapulted him from his familiar Maiden Lane surroundings into an altogether different sphere. Whether through death or financial mismanagement, by 1754 George Harrison was no longer the proprietor of the establishment where John had passed his youth. What may have become of the members of the Harrison family, where they lived or how they continued to win their bread, is a mystery. Only John chose to remain in Covent Garden, a place that he, perhaps more than the others, chose to recognise as his home. Now released from the ties of his family’s enterprise, his future lay elsewhere. Fortunately, he did not have to travel far in order to find it. In the eastern corner of the Piazza, under a colourfully embellished sign, sat the Shakespear’s Head Tavern.

  3

  THE Irish POET

  JUST AS THE rough taverns and back streets of Covent Garden had already pressed their indelible ink onto John Harrison’s character, so the theatres and bookstalls of Dublin were in the process of leaving their mark upon another young man. At about the time that the youthful Harrison was ferrying pots of ale to the patrons of the Bedford Head, a privileged Irish schoolboy was frantically scribbling rhyming couplets. Already, by the age of thirteen, Samuel Derrick had determined that he would be a poet. Not a second-rate poet or an author of menial, insignificant works, but rather one whose name would be recorded alongside that of Jonathan Swift and William Congreve in the pantheon of Anglo-Irish literature. His tutors, as well as ‘some ingenious men in the world of letters’, had seen promise in his early works. One of them, Swift’s publisher George Faulkner, and perhaps even the celebrated author himself, had offered praise. Little were these ‘ingenious men’ to know that their early ‘approbation’ would set into motion a chain of events that would take Samuel Derrick far off his prescribed path.

  Verse-writing would not be a skill required in the life that others intended for Sam. His aunt and guardian, the formidable widow Mrs Elizabeth Creagh, had resolved to make a linen merchant (or draper) of her nephew. As his fourteenth birthday approached, the period when his formal schooling would come to an end, Sam began to grow anxious. In a few months his beloved Latin grammars and Greek texts, the history books and works of French literature over which he had bent his head so studiously, would be packed away. In exchange Sam would be handed fat ledgers filled with mind-numbing accounts. The fingering of linen and the measuring of its nap would take the place of his passions. His apprentice-master would lecture him about the wonders of bleaching and the costs of transportation; he would be taught all of the nuances of the linen trading hall, the posturing, the bartering, who to fleece and who to pay fairly. For seven years Sam would be ‘bound’ to a draper before he emerged as a fully-fledged one himself. For seven years he would live under the roof of a stranger, who would examine his every movement, who would impose a curfew, forbid excessive drink and venal association with members of the opposite sex. There would be no time and no need for works of literature, be they the hide-bound tomes of Addison and Pope, or his own inventions.

  As he felt his last months of schoolboy freedom slip away, Sam launched into a fury of writing, in the hope that he might eventually create something worthy of publication. He began producing poetic paraphrases of the Psalms, but was most inspired by the work of the Tudor poet, John Skelton, upon whose ‘Truth in a Mask’ he composed his own verses.

  Sam’s youthful pen, still too inexperienced to wax lyrical about the joys of love or the mysteries of women, produced a moralising allegory: ‘The Caterpillars; a Fable’. But between his preachy lines, advising patience to an impetuous caterpillar unwilling to wait for his butterfly’s wings, lurked an alarming taste of Sam’s private sentiments:

  Teach fools such fancies to believe,

  Me with such flams you’ll ne’er deceive;

  Content with smaller joys, I chuse

  To live, nor real pleasures lose

  For doubtful hopes, nor shall abstain,

  But quick the leaf alluring gain;

  And wherefore should I thus delay,

  When instinct kindly points the way?

  Farewel, fond dupe to fortune’s pow’r –

  ‘Tis mine t’improve the present hour.

  Had those closest to the boy scrutinised the work, they might have caught a glimpse of what his future life would hold.

  Beyond the most basic facts of his birth, very little is known about the Dublin boy who came into the world in 1724. Even the identities of Sam Derrick’s parents have been lost to us, possibly through his own connivance. In later years, ever reaching for greatness, Sam presented the world with a version of his lineage, something romantically suited to a poet. He was by his own admission descended from the Derrick family of County Carlow, in the south-east of Ireland, who were said to have come over from Denmark ‘at an early period’. The Derricks rose to become Protestant landowners and until the uprising of 1641 maintained holdings in Carlow and Meath, in addition to a manor house known as ‘Old Derrick’ near Carlow Town. In 1641, however, when the country was plunged into religious unrest, the family was divested of their land. The bloody struggle, as the author claimed, resulted in the ‘massacre … of several of my kindred’, who had been hunted down ‘… and murdered upon the seacoasts’. Only a few survivors managed to escape to England. The war brought the ruin of his father’s family, although his mother’s side, the Drakes of Devonshire, prospered under the rule of Oliver Cromwell. Sam’s grandfather, he proudly boasted, had been a Parliamentarian general.

  Cromwellian generals and landed gentry aside, what Sam neglected to relay about his circumstances was that his immediate family were tradespeople. There is nothing among the remnants of his correspondence, or within any of his writings, to suggest that while Sam lived he had either parents or siblings. The reality of their situation may not have fit the legend he sought to construct for himself. Only a rumour that his mother ‘moved in the humble sphere of a petty linen draper’ presents an enticingly possible glimpse of the truth. As for his other relations, irrespective of any loss they may have suffered during the previous century, their fortunes had taken a more positive turn by the 1720s. Having recaptured something of their lost stature through an involvement in Dublin’s prospering linen industry, by the period of Sam’s birth they were able to include themselves among the city’s quietly comfortable and diversifying middle classes. Success smiled broadly on those who bought and sold the cloth that supplied the English with their undergarments and adorned their tidy tables. While cottage workers wove and embroidered in gloomy sod houses, the wealthy merchant-drapers lived off their labour, selling their wares at Dublin’s cavernous linen hall. For centuries Irish linen would be the country’s pride, and off its profits
the drapers would grow into the town burghers.

  It was linen money, in part, that fuelled the expansion of Dublin during what would become its Georgian golden age. The sturdy terraced houses with their delicate fanlights soon became the homes of the city’s successful tradesmen. Street upon street and square upon square appeared in the thriving quarter around Temple Bar, and across the Liffey near Oxmanstown Green. These houses were occupied by Protestant families, who by contrast with their Catholic counterparts could afford to indulge in Dublin’s luxuries. Their houses would have been well appointed, not only with the finest linen, but with the objects that indicated wealth during the eighteenth century: fine dark wood furnishings, imported carpets and china, silver tea services and stern-faced portraits. This was the comfortable existence that Sam Derrick would have known, at least for part of his youth.

  When and under what circumstances Mrs Creagh’s nephew entered her household, Sam never discloses. Whatever the story may have been, whether one of illegitimacy, hardship or untimely death, Sam had been chosen to become the heir of his aunt’s substantial fortune, a hoard that had been spun from the trade of linen. Her husband’s toils as a draper had yielded a comfortable profit, and although the precise amount of what she intended to pass on to her nephew is never mentioned in Sam’s correspondence, he certainly remained under the impression that it was a considerable sum. While she lived, Derrick also stood to benefit from her generosity. The expenses of his maintenance and his education were absorbed into her accounts, as were the costs of his prestigious linen-draping apprenticeship. In spite of standing to inherit, Sam, like most boys of the successful class of merchants and the younger sons of the gentry, was expected to turn his mind to some form of worthy profession. Generally, the future careers of such boys were non-negotiable. The highly esteemed avenues of the law, the clergy or the military, along with the top end of trade for those of the middle classes, were the only acceptable options. In eighteenth-century Ireland, a linen-draping apprenticeship was one of the more expensive training schemes available to young men. A tradesman or a master craftsman would expect some financial compensation from a young man’s family for taking a boy into his home, for feeding him, watering him, putting up with his adolescent antics and teaching him a craft. During the early part of the century, Daniel Defoe wrote of the extortionate size of indentures demanded by London apprentice-masters, and that it was ‘very ordinary to give a thousand pound with an apprentice to a Turkey merchant, £400 to £600 to other merchants; from £200 to £300 to shop-keepers, and wholesale dealers, linnen drapers especially; and so in proportion to other trades’. In Dublin, however, an apprenticeship with a linen draper or merchant would have required one of the more sizeable deposits. By the standards of the day, these were enormous sums, more than most middle-class family’s yearly incomes, but they were passports to a guaranteed living and the position of prestige that would one day accompany it.