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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  Supply, it seemed to Harris, was the major obstacle to effective pimping. The answer: ‘upon an absence or defection of the established veteran troops, to bring in a fresh supply’. New recruits must be brought in regularly from other parts of town: with demand as it was at the Shakespear, he could not draw solely from the well of Covent Garden resources. In the first instance, Harris found it easy enough to ‘make excursions from the colonnades of Covent Garden to the court-end of town one day; on another into the City; on another to the Tower Hamlet, and so successively to Rotherhith, Wapping and Southwark’. There he met with the area’s local cyprians and made note of their virtues and abilities. Back at the Shakespear, he was then able to put his plan into practice. When a regular patron asked to be entertained by a new face, ‘Out I ran and sent for a Borough or Tower Hill whore to come with all the blowzed haste of a tradesman’s wife’. Then, in order to pass the time until her arrival, ‘I sat down with my gentleman, or noble cull, drank his claret, smoaked a pipe with and told him lies till I almost tired myself’. This was a scheme that worked wonders, as Harris boasted, ‘I used to dispatch my court end of the town ladies of pleasure, who with fine quality airs would make their city-culls, or country bumpkins just come to town, so happy, as nothing could be like it’.

  While this worked for some, it did not please all of Harris’s clients. Complications forced him to remain inventive. As he soon discovered, much to his embarrassment, a number of his patrons did not restrict their merrymaking to Covent Garden alone. A few were prone to wandering further afield in order to sample the delights of the infamous brothels in the City and in Southwark. They were hardly gratified to find the same faces there as Harris had presented to them across town in the Garden. Moral critics and social reformers of the era often complained that women found their way into the channels of prostitution because profligate men demanded constant variety, what the pimp’s patrons might call ‘fresh game’. Harris (or the pen that spoke for him) agreed. The quest to satisfy his customers’ tastes and to replenish his stock of women seemed never-ending. There were a few tried and tested methods, which purveyors of prostitution could fall back upon in order to catch unsuspecting prey. None of these was more mythologised in the era’s stories and engravings than the lure of the register office. Like job centres, register offices contained advertisements placed by those in need of domestic servants and were frequently the first port of call for an immigrant making an entrance into London. The arrangement lent itself perfectly to the inveigling of wide-eyed country girls by pimps and bawds, posing as respectable citizens in search of housemaids. Like his competitors, Harris also claimed to have employed this method of recruitment, although he disappointedly alluded to the fact that few who came to London via this route were as virginal as his clients might have liked.

  Servants and working women were Harris’s primary targets for enrolment and it was unusual, he believed, if such specimens hadn’t already compromised their virtue. In the unforgiving eyes of eighteenth-century society, women forced to labour for a living could be bought and sold in any number of ways. A working woman, whether she had been formally trained as an apprentice in millinery or hosiery, whether she was a laundress, a kitchen maid or an apple seller on a street corner, sold herself for money. She could never be a lady or an individual of any real value in the world, and men, particularly those of a higher social status, knew this implicitly. Harris found that women such as these were by far the most pliable of all of his converts. He was constantly on the prowl for them as he went ‘lunging thro’ the streets’ keeping ‘a sharp look out at every door’. He continued that ‘wherever I decried a pretty wench, I repaired immediately to the next public house, called for a pint of liquor, and there got all the necessary informations’. After arranging a meeting, Harris found that most of them were easily swayed by a frank discussion of their circumstances and ‘soon gave into the doctrine of preferring a life of luxurious happiness to one of drudgery. Which at best, according to the usual course of things, could only end in marrying with some serving man, or else with the journeyman of some laborious trade.’ In fact, according to contemporary accounts, many whom Harris might have approached, particularly those holding positions as domestic servants, would not have been strangers to prostitution. Poor pay induced many to spend their lives in circulation, seeking work in bawdy houses as well as below stairs in more reputable ones.

  Aside from working women, there existed another inviting reservoir from which to draw resources. Harris claimed that his experience with the fair sex taught him never to discount the possibility of bringing married women into his fold. Certainly, these would be new ‘pieces’ that no man (barring their husbands) had sampled before. In terms of adding to variety, it made perfect sense. When looking to snare this species of recruit, he made a point of visiting the theatres:

  My practice there was to nuzzle in amongst the women of not uncomely features, whom I discovered had no male friend accompanying them. I complimented them with fruit and other little civilities usual in such places. By indirect and not over eager questions, I soon learned the situation of most of them.

  Like labouring women, the unhappily married woman required only an honest description of how he might ‘make her present state more agreeable to her’. An offer of financial independence from ‘an ill-natured surly husband’ who ‘was totally remiss in his conjugal duty’ was generally all the encouragement required. Harris boasted that ‘By this scheme I drew in several married women, particularly a packer’s wife, who lived not far from the Royal Exchange; and that of a drug vendor near Crutched Friar’s, both remarkably handsome women’.

  In addition to creating a veritable pantheon of available London women, Harris also gained a reputation for his ‘fine nursery’ of Irish whores. In both The Remonstrance of Harris and The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray, he claims to have drawn upon these women in order to swell his numbers. In both cases, Harris recounts that he actively went in search of ‘Irish recruits’; he not only ‘ply[ed] all the Chester-waggons from Highgate to St. Alban’s’ but, as he became more successful in his enterprise, took ‘a trip every Summer to Dublin’ in order to import ladies. In his travels, Harris had stumbled upon a rich vein of potential conscripts. He found that many Irish prostitutes, as a result of being ‘rarely paid and frequently beaten’, enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to escape to London. Others, upon his approach, he found to be so ‘light in purse’ and ‘strong in appetite’ that they were willing to follow his direction at the promise of a hot meal. Both tracts also go on to mention that Harris had ingeniously established a type of school for his Hibernian girls, in order to ‘break them of their Irish wildness and civilise them a little’, ensuring that they were ‘perfect adepts in their art’ before setting them loose on the public. Such practices were not unknown within the profession. London’s more elite procuresses were noted for schooling their newer girls, teaching them how to speak and move alluringly before proffering them to wealthy male clientele. Harris claimed to be as skilled at refining their roughness as any bawd, boasting that after some training he was able to ‘pass them upon some of our very own sensible English gentlemen as charming creatures, as goddesses; in short as Venuses for beauty, and as Minerva for understanding’.

  However, even when scrubbed up and disciplined, not all of Harris’s acquaintances were eager to accept a nymph of the pimp’s indiscriminate choosing. Instead, a number of his wealthier, titled customers approached him directly for a more select service. According to his story, Harris was frequently instructed to pluck specific girls for the enjoyment of his clientele. The crooked tales of bawds and pimps scheming on how to entrap an unsullied young lady was the meat and potatoes of eighteenth-century literature and, as contemporary court cases attest, such scenarios were not the sole preserve of the fictional world. Not surprisingly, Harris’s name makes an appearance in several such tales. It was claimed that the pimp kept a number of rented rooms and ‘little l
odges’ dotted throughout the capital. Here he perpetrated many of his foul deeds against young women, ‘seducing’ them and then ‘maintaining’ them on the premises so they could be ‘prepared’ for a particular patron. This, according to The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray, was how a woman who went by the name of Charlotte Spencer was first initiated into her profession.

  It was one of Harris’s classic coups, executed at the height of his influence. While visiting Newcastle, Lord Robert Spencer spotted a desirable young lady dancing at an assembly, with whom he fell instantly in love. Charlotte, as it soon came to his attention, was the daughter of an eminent but tight-fisted coal merchant, who in spite of his vast wealth offered little in the way of a dowry for his child. In an age when the suitability of a marriage partner was frequently determined by the size of one’s promised settlement or inheritance, women with pretty faces and charming manners but no money almost always lost out. They did, however, become ideal candidates for titled men on the hunt for attractive, accomplished mistresses. Unable to cure himself of his lovesickness, but unwilling to court a woman with so meagre a dowry, Lord Spencer appealed to the talents of Jack Harris. For a considerable fee, Harris was hired to go to Newcastle and woo the object of Spencer’s affection until she consented to elope with him to London. Posing as a gentleman of good family, Harris won Charlotte’s trust, and she agreed to a clandestine wedding performed by a man who claimed to be her betrothed’s brother in his apartments near Temple Bar. After the ceremony had been performed, Charlotte and Jack Harris took to their bed in the adjacent chamber. The candles were blown out and, as she stated, ‘he came to me as I had thought’. Upon awakening the next morning Charlotte received the shock of her life. A strange man occupied the space beside her. Her screams of terror eventually brought Harris from the next room to offer his explanation. After he ‘frankly acknowledged the whole plan of villainy’, she recounted that ‘Mr. Harris, the pimp … had been employed by Lord Spencer to seduce me to town, under pretence of marriage; that the ceremony performed was not lawful; and that he had received five hundred pounds, besides the reimbursement of all expenses to let my Lord, who was secreted ready in a closet in my chamber, till such time as the candles were extinguished, possess me the first night in his stead’. Charlotte was a reluctant recruit. Harris instructed her that, from this point, she should ‘endeavour to get into the good graces of My Lord Spencer’, so that ‘His Lordship will make a handsome provision for you’. Although his new mistress was well rewarded for her service, we are reminded that any triumph Harris secured was for his and his client’s benefit alone. Charlotte ends her story on a bitter note, concluding that after ‘cloying his lust with my constancy’, Lord Spencer ‘turned me off, and my supposed husband put me on his list, for the advantage of himself and my destruction’.

  Were it not for Jack Harris’s skills as a manager of information, he might never have won such acclaim for his resourceful pimping. No matter how large his bag of tricks, no procurer could have governed his trade or his army of ladies without some type of methodical system. A truly successful pimp would either have been blessed with an ingenious memory for names or the ability to write. In this case, Harris had literacy on his side.

  By no means did Jack Harris invent the pimp’s list. It is likely that anyone contending with a large volume of prostitutes did what other tradesmen and women might; they kept a record of their inventory. It may also be imagined that as general literacy rates rose among the British population, information which was previously stored in the archives of the mind was transferred to paper. Whether committed to memory or scribbled down on parchment, a personally held list, frequently updated and as detailed as possible, was the most essential implement in a negotiator’s trade, as indispensable as a chimney sweep’s broom or a knife grinder’s wheel. Not every pimp would have maintained a list, but those like the waiter-pimp, who occupied a more genteel station than the slum bully and who presided over the venereal pleasures of a large tavern, would have required some manner of formalised administration in order to perform their role satisfactorily. By the middle of the eighteenth century, at least among some of the more trafficked public houses in London, the practice among waiter-pimps of accumulating a handwritten list of the known prostitutes in the area appears to have been fairly common. Jack Harris himself mentions that lists were used by his ‘brother pimps’ and that names were regularly ‘marked on our catalogues’ or ‘razed out of our books’. Similarly, a writer for The London Chronicle in June 1758 commented that during a visit to a tavern his waiter ‘… pulled out a List containing the names of near four hundred [prostitutes], alphabetically ranged, with an exact account of their persons, age, qualifications and places of abode. To me … this list was more entertaining than the real objects of its description and I perused it with great attention.’

  A handwritten list probably took the form of a small ledger or bound notebook. In it, a pimp would record a prostitute’s name and the location where she might be contacted. This might be the street where she resided or a drinking establishment where she was known to pay regular visits. Then, depending on the extent of a pimp’s written skills, might follow some description of the woman and the services she offered. Her age, physical features and sexual specialities, in addition to a price for her labour, would assist either the pimp or the punter in making his choice. The same London Chronicle hack noted that the pimp’s list he inspected consisted of a basic roll call of names with commentary written into the margins: ‘Ann Gill – aged 19 – has been in company two years – Bow Street. Elizabeth White, down in a sal; ditto – Mary Green, going into keeping, sees company till the end of the week, ditto.’ No doubt the savvier procurer embellished his entries with further useful information, citing the names of the prostitute’s favoured customers, something about her past health and sexual history as well as a scale of prices charged at various times to different clients. Just by virtue of the size of Jack Harris’s empire, his trade would have required a handwritten list to beat all others: a veritable encyclopaedia of whores’ names. Constant annotation and alteration would have required clerk-like attention to detail and an ear for the gossip that provided it. If Harris’s claim to be tirelessly chasing conscripts is to be believed, his list would have bulged to mammoth proportions during his reign at the Shakespear. It is likely that its size alone contributed to his notoriety among the pleasure-seeking revellers of the Garden and was responsible for the inspiration behind the intention to publish it.

  Jack Harris’s handwritten list was not the only thing to be growing fat as a result of his pimping expertise. Packington Tomkins from the outset had always held a stake in Harris’s ability to do trade. At around the time Harris gained employment at the tavern, he claimed that his master had designs on establishing a ‘practice in procuring pleasure’ to his patrons by providing ‘ladies for their recreation’. Tomkins had drafted Harris in as part of this plan. Through ‘supplying his house with the newest and gayest of game’, the pimp claimed he became instrumental in enabling his master to make ‘a very competent fortune’ within the short span of a few years. Whatever their arrangement may have been, Tomkins skimmed a certain percentage off the takings Harris acquired through plying his trade under the taverner’s roof. The agreement, obviously, would have been transacted in secret, although Harris may not have been shrewd enough at the time to realise what implications this ‘special understanding’ might have held if the law came calling. Jack Harris had no objections to visibly fronting this side of Tomkins’s business and foolishly came to enjoy the fame it attracted.

  There is also evidence to suggest that the bawd next door, Mother Jane Douglas, was in on Harris’s game. The placement of her brothel beside the Shakespear appears to have fostered an amicable arrangement between the two businesses since her occupation of the site in 1741. The presence of Jack Harris’s enterprise would have in the first instance threatened to impede the natural flow of drunken, sex-hungry punters from
the Shakespear into her adjacent parlour. A financial settlement must have been made to appease her, which may have also included an agreement to proffer her girls to the Shakespear’s patrons. In exchange, Mother Douglas offered to sell some of the first published editions of the Harris’s List along side her ‘cundums’, aphrodisiacs and other sex-shop paraphernalia.

  Organising and maintaining his empire was only one aspect of Jack Harris’s enterprise. Reaping the financial harvest was the other side. True to Harris’s style, there was an observed protocol for this as well. Like all pimps, Harris displayed an acute talent for making money by every possible means. From the moment a woman’s name was entered into his list, to the moment a punter demanded her presence, and once again after she had performed the required services, Jack Harris was there to collect his share of the profits.

  Fanny Murray’s Memoirs provide an insightful glimpse behind the curtains of Harris’s operation. According to the author, the enrolment ‘upon his parchment list as a new face’ was subject to a certain degree of ceremony. Having no cause to trust his votaries of Venus (as they undoubtedly did not trust him), Harris insisted that they undergo an examination by a medical practitioner before he accepted them into his corps of ladies. Only after ‘a surgeon’ undertook ‘a complete examination of her person … to report her well or ill’, did Harris then call upon ‘a lawyer to ingross her name, etc. after having signed a written agreement to forfeit twenty pounds, if she gave the wrong information concerning the state of her health in every particular’. Once satisfied that his conscript was clean, the pimp would have ‘her name … ingrossed upon a whole skin of parchment’. With room provided for the exercise of poetic licence, the author of the memoirs claims that the handwritten entry would have then read something like: