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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  17

  Full CIRCLE

  JOHN HARRISON HAD been anticipating trouble from the day that he assumed the proprietorship of the Rose Tavern. Harrison recognised his enemies, and knew who might attempt to fell him as his fortunes rose. Whether it was Justice Fielding or Packington Tompkins, whether the threats came from angry clients or broken women, the pimp had learned from his past experience and was ready for any sort of confrontation. What he hadn’t foreseen was that the greatest challenge to his empire wouldn’t emanate from any of these predictable sources. Instead it came from Theatre Royal, just next door.

  In the early 1770s his neighbour, David Garrick, who was always striving to stay one step ahead of his competition at the Covent Garden theatre, had become increasingly dissatisfied with the state of the facilities at Drury Lane. The house, after years of wear by boisterous hooligans who perpetrated violence against its carved interiors, had begun to look shabby. The theatre had not seen substantial renovation in some time and, with the Drury Lane’s centenary approaching in 1774, Garrick saw this as a perfect opportunity to make necessary cosmetic improvements. The Theatre Royal, however, required more significant work than simply a facelift. For years, the managers had been irked by the inaccessibility of its main entrance. It was hemmed in on all sides by the thoroughfares of Russell Street and Drury Lane and surrounded by a ring of smaller buildings, and patrons frequently complained that they were forced to navigate a series of uncomfortable passages in order to approach the lobby. In order to remedy these problems Garrick was looking to substantially alter the shape and design of the theatre, and his plans spelled trouble for the Rose Tavern.

  For a century, the Drury Lane theatre and the Rose had shared their prosperity, like two conjoined twins. Their songs and sounds, like their clientele, passed through their shared wall, the business of one governed by the presence of the other. Those who worked in the Theatre Royal came to rely on the Rose for their refreshment and diversion, using it as an adjunct of its own facilities. Although mutually dependent upon one another, there was no question as to which structure took precedence; the blossoming of the Rose’s business was a credit due almost exclusively to the theatre. After years of co-existence it was not suggested that the Rose be demolished altogether, but rather that the theatre should stretch out her arms and embrace her smaller, dependent sister. In order to rectify the problem of accessibility, Garrick’s fashionable architect, Robert Adam, suggested an extension of the theatre’s façade which would in turn swallow up the tavern and incorporate it as an in-house convenience. In this decision, it seems the Rose had little say.

  Harrison could not have been pleased when the news of Garrick’s renovation project reached him. Regardless of how much authority he may have been able to wield over his whores, tenants and patrons, the proprietor of the Rose would be no match for ‘Little Davy’, one of the most powerful and well-connected men in all of Covent Garden. Adam’s plans cast a long shadow across the future of John Harrison’s livelihood, but it was not likely that the pimp was prepared to stand by idly while the heart of his empire was cut out before him. Harrison would have to be compensated, but how much he received from the managers of the Drury Lane theatre is anyone’s guess. In addition to taking in the edifice of the Rose, the adjoining dwelling where Harrison had been living appears to have been affected as well, and from 1775, the year the works commenced, he is no longer recorded at the address. Although disruptive, the change in circumstance did not put Harrison out of business altogether, and it is probable that Garrick may have had to indulge a number of the publican’s requests in order to move forward with the redesign. Possibly the decision to integrate the tavern’s signboard into the external décor was one such concession to its grumbling proprietor. Irrespective of the reduction of the Rose’s scale, the tavern continued to thrive and remained a popular place of resort.

  On the surface, Harrison’s trade might not have diminished much, but the alterations to Drury Lane appear to have had a negative pull over his finances. By 1776, he had relinquished control of the other buildings he owned on Brydges Street, in addition to his own home. His only dwelling space remained a set of apartments above his tavern. What caused the contraction of his trade is quite mysterious: was an ailment or an accident at the bottom of it? Or did the law catch his collar once more? It is possible that, now in his late forties or early fifties, the ageing ruffian was starting to feel the effects of the loss of his youth. By the standards of his time, Harrison had managed to claw his way into what would have been considered a substantial age. Surveying the passing of his years, he may have begun to undergo something of a change of heart and decided to take a step back. With a small fortune accumulated, Harrison may have looked at himself in the mirror, felt the sagging of his jowls, straightened the stock around his neck and decided that it might behove him to pursue an air of legitimacy.

  There is something almost disappointing in the image of a once terrible man putting himself out to pasture and ageing quietly in front of a fire in an upstairs set of rooms. Although Harrison’s name remained as proprietor of the Rose, by the mid-1780s the business of tavern-keeping was conducted on his behalf by an employee, James Cresdale. Harrison, the former tiger who kept an entire street at bay, who ensured that even the night watch remained tight-lipped, was not often to be seen on the sanded floors of the Rose. In the taproom beneath his feet, the tavern’s usual comedies and tragedies continued to play themselves out beside Drury Lane’s stage. Above, the old pimp had probably reconciled himself to dying where he sat, in the last hold-out of his now diminished domain. Fate, however, had one card yet to play.

  In the 1750s, when John Harrison was Jack Harris, one of his army of Covent Garden ladies had temporarily lost her means of making a living. Sex with a heavily pregnant whore was not an experience that most punters sought. One would hope that Jack Harris had it within his heart to ease her burden by offering her some money and perhaps finding her a place at one of the many privately run lying-in houses where ladies of ill repute could go to give birth. She was, after all, carrying his child. Then again, this was probably not the first instance of a pregnancy to which the pimp had contributed, and it would certainly not be the last. One of the perks of being a pimp was that he could gain access to a whore’s favours gratis, whenever the need might take him. He claimed that it was necessary for men of his profession to try out their women before recommending them to clients, and that they were ‘not a whit worse for gentleman’s use and amusement after having passed under the operation of us scurvy fellows’. While such a brash assertion may have been cooked up to inflame Dr Hill’s readers, Harris’s boasts reflected a traditional practice in the trade. Unless plagued by bouts of infertility brought on by venereal disease, by these means John Harrison may have produced any number of illegitimate offspring. The mothers themselves in many cases may not even have known the identity of the father, making it easy for Harrison to absolve himself from any responsibility. Although he was probably unaware of it, the pimp may have passed his sons and daughters in the streets around the Piazza nearly every day of his life.

  The woman, who bore a little boy whom she called Charles, had her own personal reasons for believing that the child was fathered by England’s Pimp General. As was the convention in the eighteenth century, mothers frequently gave their babies the surname of the infant’s father, whether or not the parents had been married. This mother gave her boy the surname of Harris. She probably never knew that the name was not a genuine one. History has not recorded what became of Charles Harris’s mother after the birth. The details of the boy’s life are also lost. All that is known is that at some point he found his father.

  At about the time when John Harrison would have been looking forward to his comfortable death, the managers of the Theatre Royal were becoming restless again. Shortly after Drury Lane’s last renovation, Garrick had sold his patent to the Irish playwright-turned-politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was eager to lea
ve his mark upon the theatre through a programme of expansion. This time, the managers wanted to start entirely afresh. The old theatre and its dependent buildings had to come down, the fate that Harrison had feared most. After just over a century of service, the era of the Rose Tavern was at its end. Like its proprietor, a quiet demise for the Rose, whose interior walls had seen some of the most extravagant debauchery and could probably recount some of the most ruinous stories, did not seem a fitting conclusion to its existence. Sheridan, a newcomer to the parish of St Paul’s Covent Garden and already one generation removed from the ability to recall the tavern’s heyday, would not have felt so much as a pang of remorse when condemning it. The theatre’s new patent holders envisioned a more modern venue for drama, something suitable for the coming nineteenth century. All around it, the area was stretching and changing. Even Brydges Street, over the years, had lengthened and almost doubled in population. London and its fickle fashions were moving forward, leaving Covent Garden like a cast-off frock coat, a remnant of elegance from a previous age. The young bucks and bloods who used to raise hell in the Rose’s private rooms with posture girls and whores, with modish courtesans and flamboyant actresses, had decamped to St James’s and Piccadilly, where the brothels were adorned like palaces. Defaced portraits, overturned chamber pots and the boisterousness featured in Hogarth’s vision of the rough enjoyment on offer at the Rose were no longer deemed acceptable in the closing decades of the eighteenth century.

  For many, the demolition of the Rose would have been a welcomed event. The large clutch of enemies that John Harrison had accumulated throughout his life would have been among these individuals: souls whose lives he had ruined, women who had been indentured to him and his ambitions, who had sacrificed their health and any prospect of happiness so that the pimp could lead a comfortable existence. These people would have had hopes of Harrison sharing in their misery, and relished the imagined scenes of an old homeless wretch suffering on the streets as he had caused them to do. It would have seemed a just ending to his story. But what had possibly made John Harrison more reviled than most was the undeserving devotion shown to him by good fortune. Through a combination of luck, shrewdness and graft, Harrison always managed to come out the other end; from the position he gained at the Shakespear to his successful acquisition of the Rose, opportunities to prosper seemed to fly to him. As sure as one door closed, another swung open. It may have been the case that, until the end of his life, John Harrison had never met his son – then one day, he simply appeared. Alternatively, he may have been at his father’s side for some time, but only in 1790 did he make himself of much use to his parent.

  For some time, the ageing pimp must have been sitting on a sizeable lump of money. Like his rival Packington Tomkins, it is easy to believe that the depth and breadth of his wealth had expanded and contracted at various intervals. The fullness of his purse may have been depleted by the careless living and extravagance for which men within his circle were noted. Without a wife or a legitimate family, Harrison may have seen no need to make provisions. Like Sam Derrick, his life had always been lived for the immediate pleasures it offered: riches were meant to be spent and not saved. It is also unlikely that a man with such a well-honed business sense would not reserve some of the fruits of his industry in case of need. In 1790, that need arose. It would be supremely naïve to suggest that, as if by magic, just at the time when the Rose had been slated for destruction, the lease for the Bedford Head Tavern on Maiden Lane suddenly became available. It is more likely that luck was lubricated with money, and that the two together brought about an opportunity that was more than simply financial. The funds that Harrison had safeguarded were used to buy him the comforts of a family – the one thing he had not anticipated wanting in his many years of marketing lust in place of love, and sex instead of tenderness. It may have been a sense of loneliness, or another nagging unnamed regret, that made Harrison focus his thoughts upon the Bedford Head, his father’s tavern where he had spent his boyhood and first acquired the artistry of a waiter-pimp. In some way, this place offered him a secure harbour, somewhere he could contentedly live out the last years of his life. He could have chosen to embark upon this venture with any one of those people who had served him well during his years at the Rose, but instead Harrison held out the offer to his son Charles and his wife. This would be a family enterprise, operated as it had been when Harrison himself was a boy. Presiding over this establishment would have allowed him a satisfaction more penetrating than any other achievement, legitimate or ill-gotten, that he had reaped since the day he last left the place.

  Harrison provided the finances and experience necessary for the business, while Charles and his wife managed the operations. For the first year and a half, Harrison’s name appeared as proprietor, before his son assumed the title in late 1792. It seems that Harrison, who would have been in his mid-to-late sixties, was now ailing, perhaps hindered in his movements by infirmity. By the following year his condition had worsened, and as the chill of winter approached, seeping through the thinly glazed windows and cold brick walls, the old man could hold out no longer. Harrison must have expired around Christmas time, when the merrymakers below were filling themselves with warm punch and proffering kisses and gropes below corners green with mistletoe. His body was taken to St Paul’s, the Inigo Jones church that had always stood at the western end of the Piazza, watching sinners indulge themselves in venal pleasures. There, in the churchyard, hardly a moment’s walk from where his life had come full circle, he was laid to rest on 14 January 1794, the ground consuming his misdeeds and his secrets, leaving only the name John Harrison by which this enigmatic figure could be remembered. The details of his identity were left to recede into legend.

  Harrison died at around the time the penultimate Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies would have made its annual appearance on the booksellers’ stalls. It is amusing to imagine the elderly pimp still scowling at the taunts of the publication’s title, and at its unwillingness after so many years to simply expire. Harris’s List followed him remorselessly, reminding him of the folly of his youth and his inability to have foreseen the work’s success. In its last incarnation, however, the book that had evolved over the decades from his prototype and Derrick’s prose would appear virtually unrecognisable to him. As he opened its slim leather cover, he could see within an instant how far the publication had strayed from his own bulging ledger of women, and how the years had changed the flesh trade and the proclivities of punters. The pages were filled with new names: Lydias and Sophias replaced the Molls and Nans who had since bloomed and withered. The randy roysters who had lusted after lewd women were now genteelly known as the sons of Bacchus, and the objects of their affection as the daughters of Venus. Old man Harrison would have shaken his head ruefully. Even the delightfully base act of fornication was now ruined by these latest authors of the Harris’s List, who described the lifting of a whore’s skirts in terms of fountains and temples, conjuring all the pastoral splendour of Arcadia. Society was becoming damnably prudish, he would have lamented, fixing his eyes upon a frontispiece decorated with garlands and artistically rendered nymphs. Harrison would never know that the Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies outlived him by only one year. Time had run out for the both of them.

  18

  THE Respectable MRS KELLY

  AS BOTH SAM Derrick and John Harrison had learned, once touched by the brush of the sex trade, one could never wholly wash its taint from one’s character. Outrunning past associations would prove impossible. While Charlotte never attempted to hide what she was, she had hoped to place some distance between herself and the obligations of her professional life. However, if being in London meant that her friends expected her to assume her former occupation, then the retired Abbess figured it behoved her not to disappoint. No longer Charlotte Hayes of King’s Place, her return to the flesh market warranted a new name appropriate to her status as a grande dame of property and experience. When she stepped f
rom her front door and into the sedan chair that ferried her to one of her many discreet houses of assignation around St James’s and Piccadilly, she called herself Mrs Kelly. Should she desire to retreat into respectability and shed her bawd’s mantle, she might return to her elegant home on Half Moon Street and receive company as Mrs O’Kelly, the ‘wife’ of the landed race horse owner Dennis O’Kelly, the ‘aunt’ of the fashionable gentleman Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Dennis O’Kelly, and the mother of Mary Charlotte O’Kelly. She now took a more proactive role in maintaining the premises she had entrusted to her disciples, which included houses on Arlington Street, Duke Street and later in Berkeley Square. Away from the spotlight and crowded thoroughfare of King’s Place, her intention was to conduct business on a much more modest scale than before, so that she might enjoy the freedom of turning her back on her practice whenever she desired. Such an arrangement would have permitted her at least a degree of ease and privacy behind the doors of her Half Moon Street home.

  At this late stage in her life, Charlotte had long since abandoned any great aspirations of Tahitian orgies or lewd masquerades. She was not in the market for new patrons, nor was she interested in competing with her rivals. She had already been to the top and bowed out gracefully. This re-emergence was merely an encore. Neither was she especially interested in increasing her flock, limiting the numbers of nymphs residing in her houses to two at a time, with any additional assistance to be drafted in on a kind of freelance basis. In the early 1780s, Arlington Street was home to two ladies known as the Duchess of Portland and the Duchess of Devonshire, ‘from a likeness they were respectively thought to bear to those elevated personages’. Again in 1788, Charlotte was harbouring just two carefully selected beauties, who appeared in the Harris’s List for that year: Betsy Hudson and the enigmatically named ‘Betsy’. The author couldn’t resist the temptation to fill the latter’s entry with horse racing allusions, decrying the ‘often hack’d’ ‘Post steeds of Venus’ who are ‘broken winded, halt in their paces, and are well nigh founder’d’, a situation which renders them ‘scarce fit for anything but brood mares’. Needless to say, under the expert training of Mrs Kelly Betsy was not one of these.