London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  CHAPTER 38

  Clubbing

  On the unhappy night of his drunkenness William Hickey was returning from a drinking club at the Red House. “Clubbing” is first used as a term in the seventeenth century; in July 1660, Pepys wrote that “We went to Wood’s, our old house, for clubbing.” But it was in the succeeding century that a variety of clubs emerged for a variety of members. Addison made the characteristic point that “Man is a sociable animal and we take all occasions and pretences of forming ourselves into those little nocturnal assemblies which are commonly known as clubs.” A club was not very different from a gang, however, a point which the Spectator made on 12 March 1712 in allusion to “a general History of Clubs” then being written. It is suggested that the compendium ought to include a “Set of Men” who have taken “the Title of The Mohock Club” and who set out to terrorise the streets of the city where citizens are “knocked down, others stabbed, others cut and carbonadoed.” In similar vein the Spectator noticed signs of “club” spirit at the opera where the women had placed themselves in opposite boxes with various “Party-signals” to display their loyalty to either Whig or Tory junta.

  This is the context, then, for the drinking clubs of the eighteenth century. Characteristically they met weekly, in a tavern, to eat and sing and debate. There was the Kit-Kat Club of notable Whigs, which met in Shire Lane, and there was the Robin Hood Club in Butcher Row, which included “masons, carpenters, smiths, and others.” The discussions in Shire Lane continued well into the night, but in Butcher Row “each member has five minutes allowed him to speak.” There was the Beefsteak Club, which met in a room in the Covent Garden Theatre, and was devoted to drinking and wit “interspersed with snatches of song and much personal abuse.” The atmosphere of such a place is evoked by Ned Ward in The London Spy: he entered “an old-fashioned room where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous Town-Essences were walking backwards and forwards with their hats in their hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use, lest it should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder … Bows and crimps of the newest mode were here exchanged … They made a humming like so many hornets in a chimney corner.” In contrast was the poor man’s Twopenny Club where one of the rules declared that “If any neighbour swears or curses, his neighbour may give him a kick upon the shins.” A club known as the House of Lords met at the Three Herrings in Bell Yard; it was made up from “the more dissolute sort of barristers, attorneys and tradesmen.” There were punch clubs, “cutter” clubs for those with boats upon the Thames, and “spouting” clubs for burgeoning public speakers.

  These were centres of argument in the combative London tradition, combining obscene songs and egalitarian speeches in equal measure. They were often known as chair clubs, but there were also card clubs for gamesters and cock and hen clubs for youths and prostitutes. There was a No-Nose Club, and a Farting Club in Cripplegate where the members “meet once a Week to poyson the Neighbourhood, and with their Noisy Crepitations attempt to out-fart one another.” C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, intones a litany of other London clubs: a Surly Club at a tavern near Billingsgate, filled with the tradesmen of that quarter who met to sharpen “the practice of contradiction and of foul language”; a Spit-farthing Club, which met weekly at the Queen’s Head in Bishopsgate, and was “composed chiefly of misers and skinflints; and the Club of Broken Shopkeepers, which met at Tumble Down Dick in Southwark and comprised bankrupts and others unfortunate in trade. The Mock Heroes Club met in an alehouse in Baldwin’s Gardens, where each member would assume the name of a “defunct hero,” while the Lying Club congregated at the Bell Tavern in Westminster where “no true word” was to be uttered during its proceedings. A Man-Killing Club which met at a tavern in a back-alley adjoining St. Clement Danes admitted to membership no one “who had not killed his man”; but there was also a Humdrum Club “composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes and say nothing till midnight” when they went homeward. An Everlasting Club was so called “because its hundred members divided the twenty four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise until he was relieved by his appointed successor.”

  The club tradition continued into the following century with members of the “free and easy” pub institution subscribing a shilling a week; there were also tavern debating clubs, characteristically to be found among such quarters of artisans as Spitalfields, Soho, Clerkenwell, or Finsbury. They were in part derived from the atheistical societies of the previous century, which had met in Wells Street as well as the Angel and St. Martin’s Lane, and were similarly disliked by the civic authorities. Many establishments flourished throughout the early nineteenth century in defiance of official policy, however, among them the Swan in New Street, the Fleece in Windmill Street, the George in East Harding Street and the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields. These taverns became the centre of London radical dissent. In 1817 the Hampden Club met at the Anchor Tavern, for example, from which alehouse issued the first demand for universal male suffrage.

  There is a case for arguing that these societies and tavern debating clubs are associated, in London at least, with the informal debates of the early eighteenth-century coffee house. Such was the formative influence of that institution, however, that it can be held responsible for a club quite different from those which met in Windmill Street or Moorfields. It became known as “the gentleman’s club” which, according to a nineteenth-century account, arose from the “ill-appointed coffee-house or tavern” to effect “a revolution in the constitution of society.” White’s Club, the oldest of these establishments (1736), is the direct descendant of White’s Chocolate-house; Brooks’s and Boodle’s are of eighteenth-century date but the others, including the Athenaeum and the Garrick, are all of nineteenth-century foundation. These more recent establishments combined private associations with buildings which were deemed and planned to be on a public scale. They were designed by architects such as Wilkins and Barry and Smirke, and, with their bas-relief sculpture and elaborate modelling, they resembled large country houses or Italian palaces. They remain impressive principally because of the essential vulgarity of their appearance. In that sense they are very much the stage property of London.

  The endless contrasts of the city can in fact be exemplified by those other gentlemen’s clubs of the nineteenth century, the working men’s clubs, generally held on the first floor of the local public house where the atmosphere was one of unrefined entertainment. Lectures were sometimes given, as in George Gissing’s The Nether World-“What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due. Ay, what shall happen, my boys, and that before so very long”-but adult education or jolly debate often gave way to “the rattle of bones, the strumming of a banjo, and a voice raised at intervals in a kind of whoop.” In Arthur Morrison’s account (1896) of the Feathers in Bethnal Green, there is a clubroom where “the sing-song began, for at least a score were anxious to ‘oblige,’” although the effect is somewhat diminished by Morrison’s comment that the countenances of those attending were “as of a man betrayed into mirth in the midst of great sorrow.” Here again the importance, indeed the stern necessity, of drink is left unstated.

  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 amp; 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 t
able, “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 Cheyne, 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.”