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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  Name: Fanny Murray

  Condition: Perfectly sound in wind and limb

  Description: A fine brown girl1, rising nineteen years next season. A good side-box piece2 – will shew well in the flesh market – wear well – may be put off for a virgin any time these twelve months3 – never common this side of Temple-Bar, but for six months4. Fit for high keeping with a Jew merchant. – N.B. a good praemium from dittos5 – Then the run of the house – and if she keeps out of the Lock6, may make her fortune, and ruin half the men in town.

  Place of Abode: The first floor at Mrs.—’s, milliner at Charing Cross.

  The twenty-pound bond, taken as a security of her health, was only the first fee of many that Harris’s ladies would find themselves owing to their pimp. ‘Poundage is the pimp’s long established tax of five shillings out of every guinea (The Sportsman’s pound) which pretty ladies receive for favours granted to gentlemen’, the pen that spoke for Jack Harris wrote. It was standard practice for Harris’s ladies to clear their debt with their pimp each Sunday evening when they convened in Covent Garden. At that point they might also find themselves reaching into their purses to provide him with what was referred to as ‘Tire-money’. ‘Tire-money’, Harris explained, ‘is what I make the ladies pay for equipping them with all the necessaries fit to appear in. There are other folks in the town who do the same and are called tally-people, but they can shew nothing like my wardrobe.’ The unfortunate girls who fell for the enticement of being permitted to don lavish clothing would have been hit hardest by this tax. Along with the bawd or pimp’s percentage, this method of exacting money from a prostitute was one of the oldest. As any recent recruit would most likely have fallen upon hard times in order to have consented to her new profession, it was unlikely that she possessed a store of clothing appropriate for attracting men to her side. Fine gowns, lace cuffs, dainty hats with ribbons and shoes with glittering buckles were given to a young lady as she was pushed out of the door to solicit business. Nothing more would be said about the ‘gift’ made to her, until her procuress or pimp asked for their weekly percentage and the young woman found that she had been charged for the hire of her clothing. Frequently, this left a girl with virtually nothing to show for her unpleasant labour, as Fanny Murray learned ‘by the end of the week she had picked up five pounds, ten shillings and sixpence’ but after she had paid her dues ‘she was sixpence in pocket’. This finely honed programme of fleecing did not end with charging tire-money. Harris managed to squeeze one final fee out of his wretched volunteers. After the pimp’s dues had been paid on Sunday, many of Harris’s ladies would choose to meet for a night of drinking. Officially they had dubbed themselves the Whore’s Club, in imitation of many of the male drinking and dining clubs that frequently met in the taverns and coffee houses around Covent Garden. Like any society, the members of the Whore’s Club also were liable to pay dues and, in this case, women were asked to spare a half crown. While one shilling of this sum was ‘applied to the support of such members as may be under a course of physic, and not fit for business, or can not get into the Lock’, yet another sixpence went ‘to the use of our negotiator for his great care and assiduity in the proper conducting of this worthy society’. The remaining shilling, not undeservedly, was ‘to be spent on liquor’.

  Although it may appear as if the prostitute was in receipt of the sharp end of Harris’s stick, a thought should be spared for the punter whose purse was also bled to the point of exhaustion. An intoxicated man at the mercy of his erection was a procurer’s dream. Pimps and bawds invented seemingly limitless schemes designed to part desperate men with handfuls of their cash. While his prostitutes were charged poundage and tire-money, their cullies were subject to paying chair-money:

  Chair-money, is when I charge a chair for a girl who had been in the house [the tavern] when called for; or living not far off, walked to the house: or when there is a necessity from the badness of the weather of coming in a chair, to charge double the fare, saying that the lady, a kept mistress, lives a great way off, at Berkeley Square.

  If this was an additional charge that could be tacked on to straightforward requests for women whose names appeared on his list, a man who demanded the services of a more exclusive cyprian might find himself an unwitting donor to what Jack Harris referred to as his ‘humming fund’:

  The humming fund is when we pretend to a rich cull, the mighty difficulty there will be to get such a girl for him, who is a kept mistress; or one that will grant her favours only where she likes – we bleed him from time to time of a few guineas; now giving hopes, now diffident of success. We play him off a thousand ways, and at last stipulate in the lady’s name for a good round sum to be paid ere the consent …

  It was a practised trick of pimp and prostitute to then conspire in an attempt to eke even more money out of the client. If a customer began to betray a certain partiality for a lady, it might be arranged that:

  After a night or two’s cohabitation, off she goes in some pretend pique and retires; no-body knows where. Then we are employed to find her out – But … we advise him to think no more of her – which advice whets his desire the more, till he decides he will have her at any rate.

  Having played directly into the pimp’s hands, Harris then closes in for the ultimate clinch: he informs his client that his inamorata has been located, but that restoring her to him will cost not only a cash fee of ‘30 pounds or so’, but that she will only agree to the reconciliation on the condition that ‘he make gifts of trinkets, etc … to her’. Naturally, the pimp will save the cully the bother of making such purchases, if he would be so kind as to simply hand over the money.

  The range of ploys used to extract money from punters varied from pimp to pimp and from tavern to tavern. Casanova, who was doing the rounds in London in 1764, complained bitterly of his treatment by a waiter at the Star Tavern in the Strand. The great lover had called for a woman, and much to his frustration learned that he must pay a shilling for each one he viewed, whether he chose her for his bedfellow or not. The pimp marched a string of unappealing whores by him, leaving the most attractive until the very end. Twenty shillings later, and still without a woman to show for it, Casanova left in a huff. If Casanova were one of Jack Harris’s clients, there would still be no guarantee that the lady he elected to accompany him above stairs would perform her duties undisturbed. In order to screw the maximum profit out of a prostitute’s company, Harris regularly double-booked his ladies; he referred to the practice as arranging ‘a Flier’. He was loath to turn away any request for one of his women, especially if a punter had asked for her by name. Although engaged in the act with another man, Harris would coyly interrupt the couple and ‘Tell Miss a lady wants to speak with her in another room. Those who are ignorant of the tricks of the town, let her go.’ The whore smoothes her skirts, adjusts her hair and enters the next room, where her eager paramour awaits. A quick sexual interlude follows and she once again ‘returns to her company as demure as if nothing had happened’. This, Harris conceded, could prove to be a rather fraught manoeuvre as the girl ran the risk of contracting the pox from lover number two and passing it straight on to lover number one. ‘Thus’, he explained, ‘a girl who has often come clean into company, by these short digressions gets herself infected’.

  Systems, procedures and regimentation were the order of Jack Harris’s ever-expanding empire. Like a true imperial ruler, he also ensured that his subjects lived by an established code. Laxity in his leadership, Harris would have learned, was a sure path to the encouragement of trouble. There was to be no indulgence of his listed ladies’ personal difficulties, and no transgressions of behaviour would be tolerated. Although Harris (or Harris’s literary interpreter) never mentions that he resorted to violence in order to enforce his authority, other punishments could be implemented just as effectively. Harris recognised that if a woman was ‘struck off his list’, she had little chance of ‘repairing her fortune’. A good many of Jack Harris’s ladies w
ere a mere cut above the lowest of the low: the destitute streetwalkers whom Tobias Smollett describes as ‘naked wretches reduced to rags and filth’, who ‘huddled together like swine in the corner of a dark alley’. A thrust down the stairs, from being a listed prostitute to a friendless pariah, required only the blackening of a woman’s healthy reputation. Unfortunately, it did not take much to incur Harris’s wrath. All a woman need do was to lie. More than anything, Harris would not stand for being ‘bilked’, or cheated out of his percentage. The repercussions for this were severe. The ruthless pimp erased her name from his list and ‘whenever after she is called for by any company, we say she is down in a salivation and so stop the channel of her commerce, – many have starved in consequence, which was a necessary expedient in terrorem for others, to make them behave honest’. According to the author of Harris’s Remonstrance, a similar fate awaited those who might refuse to share his bed if he desired their services for the night.

  The knowledge that Harris’s Covent Garden ladies were, for the most part, exposed to any whim their pimp might impose upon them might very well have been the impetus behind the creation of the Whore’s Club. Whether or not this was a tongue-in-cheek invention of the brains behind Fanny Murray’s Memoirs, it seems likely that listed prostitutes would under the circumstances band together for companionship and protection, just as their streetwalking counterparts were known to do. Not surprisingly, the roll of club rules appears to indicate that the society’s immediate function was the intoxication of its members, but its more enduring design was to raise support for the sisterhood.

  By definition, the only women who qualified for membership were those who were ‘upon the negociator Harris’s list; and never have incurred the penalty of being erased therefrom; either on account of not paying poundage, making proper returns of her health, or any other cause whatever’. It further stipulated that: ‘No member of this society must have been in Bridewell above once’ and that ‘Any member of this society that may have been tried at the Old Bailey, for any crime except picking of pockets shall not be objected re-instating, if acquitted, upon condition that she did not plead her belly’.

  One can imagine the Shakespear’s Head on a Sunday evening, perhaps the only slow night of the week. It was a time where Harris’s ladies might be able to enjoy something resembling a night off from their normal travails. Some arrived by chair, lowered to the ground with grace. Others arrived half-inebriated, leaving a trail of gin behind them. As they greeted one another, gossiping excitedly, expostulating, embracing, the handful of drinkers raised their eyes to watch a flutter of cheap silk and lace caps disappear above stairs. Before the hard drinking began in earnest, any serious business would be addressed. Principally, this would relate to raising financial support for those who found themselves in prison or who suffered with the pox. This fund was amassed through club dues, and also through nominal donations made by members who became ‘modest’ women ‘by going into keeping’. The Whore’s Club anticipated generosity in this case, insisting that the money given be ‘in proportion to her settlement allowance’. Once the business was dispatched, the fun could begin.

  In spite of being foul-mouthed, tipple-loving prostitutes, the club rules recognised that a certain degree of civility and decorum should prevail. Evidently the meetings (not unlike those held by men’s clubs) degenerated somewhat by the end of the evening. There were, however, rules in place to deal with any unfortunate alcohol-related mishaps. It was established that if ‘any member by an overcharge of liquor, should in clearing her stomach, spoil any other member’s cloaths, she shall be obliged to take the same off her hands, and furnish her with new ones, or in some other manner compensate the damages’. Penalties were also exacted from those who broke ‘glasses, bottles, etc. or behave[d] in a riotous manner’ and for others ‘not able to walk’ at the end of the meeting. Throughout, Jack Harris would have kept an eye on the proceedings, periodically tugging at the sleeves of those whose names had been called from down below.

  In the rise and rise of his fame, Jack Harris may have lost sight of the fact that while he had come to know a vast number of names and faces, so a vast number of names and faces would also come to know him. The more people who had Jack Harris’s name on their lips, the more exposed his position became. As his dominion expanded, so would the volume of gossip among patrons of the Garden. Second-hand stories about his past and present exploits would have been swapped by a cross section of society, from the lowest bunter to the aristocratic heir. Like all names that attract notoriety, legend also would have accompanied him like a shadow.

  For the most part, Harris believed that he had nothing to fear. In spite of the Shakespear’s proximity to the headquarters of the local magistrate on Bow Street, hardly a shout’s distance away, neither Packington Tomkins nor his head-waiter ever experienced any trouble from the law. The Shakespear and its activities were well known in the area, yet remarkably no concerted effort had been made to quash its illicit business. The law was explicit in the eighteenth century; the open solicitation of sex and the keeping of bawdy houses were both illegal after 1752, but the enforcement of these two edicts was entirely haphazard. The night watch, the closest London came to a police force before the advent of the Bow Street Runners, were more interested in maintaining calm on the volatile London streets than proactively enforcing the law. While grubby streetwalkers might make a nuisance of themselves, calling out lewdly from doorways and grabbing at men, those who conducted their business quietly indoors ensured that they were inconspicuous enough to be almost impossible to prosecute. This was particularly the case for those who occupied the upper tiers of the sex trade: waiter-pimps, more expensive prostitutes and brothel-keepers. These individuals, due primarily to their discretion, to the high rank of their clientele and to their faux appearance of gentility, were rarely fingered by the long arm of the law. Their illusory immunity from prosecution provided them with a sense of security upon which they might build their fortunes.

  By 1758, Harris was feeling invincible in his dominion of the Covent Garden sex trade. At the height of his influence, he boasted that from pimping alone he had acquired a fortune of ‘four or five thousand pounds in about a half dozen years’, a sum comparable to the salary earned by the first Lord of the Treasury. His list was rumoured to have stretched to 400 names, including women from all parts of London, from Southwark to Shoreditch, to Bloomsbury and Chelsea. In addition, he had in his employ a staff of ‘under-pimps’, young apprentices recruited to learn the trade and to manage the outposts of his empire. Unfortunately, Jack Harris’s sense of pride was growing alongside the boundaries of his kingdom. Where once John Harrison had acted with calculated discretion, now Jack Harris swaggered in defiance, unconcerned about the extent of his exposure. Pride would be his weakness. As the self-proclaimed ‘Pimp General of All England’ stepped out into the Piazza attired in his ill-gotten finery, it was not just his neighbours and patrons who noticed the glint of his shoe buckles and bright buttons. The gaze of Bow Street had also affixed itself to him, and much more closely than he had imagined.

  6

  Slave TO GRUB STREET

  SAM DERRICK’S ESCAPE from linen-draping had been years in the planning. In all the care he took to dupe Mrs Creagh, in all the relationships he had nurtured across the Irish Sea, in all of the letters he had written to those he had hoped to impress, not once did he contemplate the possibility of failure. His convictions drove him headlong towards Fleet Street, London’s ‘Street of Ink’, where he believed his laurel wreaths awaited. It was only a matter of time before he was crowned by the kings of patronage and publishing as a reigning genius, another Dryden or Pope. When Sam scrutinised his work he saw only excellence, but when those patrons and publishers read his verses and examined the small eccentric man who produced them, they saw something far less auspicious.

  Sam was drunk on the promise that London, and Covent Garden in particular, had offered him. Bursting with enthusiasm for his new
liberated lifestyle, and with money enough in his pocket to sustain him, Sam threw himself into the capital’s manifold pleasures. He loitered in the watering holes of the literati and attended the theatrical performances of the friends he had made at these places. In the hours between and afterwards he drank, gambled, spent his money like an heir and occasionally found time to write. Sam canvassed his acquaintances for roles in their plays and when they had none to offer him, he thrust his dramatic works into their hands. These were usually returned to him with the curt response of ‘not calculated to succeed’. One theatrical manager with whom Derrick had cultivated an acquaintance told him that although he had managed to lose the unmemorable tragedy Sam had written, he was welcome to put his hand into his bureau ‘and take two comedies and a farce instead of it’. When not buzzing around backstage at the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres, Sam was continuing his campaign of subscription-raising for his collection of poetry. Although no one seemed especially interested in reading an entire book of Derrick’s verses, his cautious supporters were intrigued enough to endow him for the printing of one poem: Fortune, a Rhapsody. It may have helped matters that the work was dedicated to David Garrick, who had stumped up part of the money necessary for its publication. Although the poem expressed some cogent sentiments about the fickleness of success and the difficulties of being an artistic genius whose talents no one recognised, in the words of Sam’s previous critics, Fortune, a Rhapsody ‘was not calculated to succeed’. In fact, at some points the calibre of his writing borders on the atrocious:

  For he who can the purse command,

  Must ev’ry science understand;

  Or tell him so – and it agrees,

  As well, as with a Welchman’s cheese …