Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  John’s blindness does not seem to have been an obstacle to his career. He carried on Henry’s theories that effective ‘policing’ had to comprise rapid reporting by victims, a quick response by the Bow Street ‘Runners’ and effective judicial action within Bow Street itself. Encouraging the public to come forward to the authorities and report crime was the thing he deemed fundamental. For this, victims needed to feel that they had someone to come to, and to that end John opened up 4 Bow Street, creating a theatre-like arrangement where members of the public, ‘whether brought there by business or curiosity’, could see how the process worked. His method of working inspired other magistrates, and soon crimes could be reported to courts in Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Shadwell and St Margaret’s Hill, in Southwark.

  John Fielding was a skilled magistrate, and the ‘Blind Beak of Bow Street’ was famous for extracting the tiniest details about a crime. He was also diligent and hardworking: John tried half the cases at Bow Street. Between 1756 and 1780, Bow Street submitted anywhere between 35 per cent and 49 per cent of the Old Bailey’s cases. It dropped to 20 per cent after his death. By the late 1750s, John had established a strong infrastructure at Bow Street, using such new methods as identity parades, and training the men who continued to act as his runners. The runners had to be men ‘of tried courage’. Any ‘act of cruelty or injustice’ got them kicked out, which is probably why the band remained very small. They didn’t even have their own office initially and were stationed at the Brown Bear pub opposite number 4. Much of the Fieldings’ work in their court-theatre was petty crime to do with either alcohol, or Covent Garden’s perennial problem: prostitution.

  Certain motifs or items of clothing signified a prostitute: a red hood or scarf, a skirt hitched on the left side, or a nosegay of flowers pinned on to her breast. Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz, the German diarist, was agog at the numbers of streetwalkers in Covent Garden and the Strand, and taken aback by how the lower class of prostitutes would ‘accost the passengers, and offer to accompany them: they even surround them in crowds, stop and overwhelm them with caresses and entreaties’. He was even more shocked by what happened after midnight, when ‘the old wretches, of fifty or sixty years of age, descend from their garrets, and attack the intoxicated passengers, who are often prevailed upon to satisfy their passions in the open street’.

  The girls interviewed by John Fielding suggest that street prostitutes were usually aged between eighteen and twenty, although some were younger. They were predominantly from London, the eastern counties and Ireland. Many eighteenth-century men and women believed that sex with a virgin, even a child, would cure venereal disease. Both Fieldings were well aware of the problems of child abuse, and John Fielding in particular made moves towards getting children off the streets who might otherwise be in danger; he was instrumental in assisting the philanthropist Jonas Hanway to found The Marine Society which took young boys off the streets. After all, it wasn’t only the girls who fell prey. Link boys, who offered to light the way at night, would also sometimes prostitute themselves. Archenholz, after watching such children attempting to sell their bodies upon the street, wrote ‘such is the corruption of the human heart, that even they have their lovers’.

  Attitudes varied, and not everyone in London was outraged by the presence, practice and permanence of the exchange of money for sex. Men married, on average, at around the age of twenty-five, and it was accepted that young men, ‘strangers to wedded love and domestic comforts, range at large on the common of prostitution’. The well-to-do James Boswell engaged many street prostitutes during his career in London, including his favourite kind, ‘the civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling’. Not all Boswell’s engagements left him feeling quite so pleased with himself. On Thursday 13 March, in 1763, he engaged the first whore he met on an evening stroll. ‘She was ugly and lean and her breath smelled of spirits.’ He did not ask her name, they exchanged few words, and he used a condom. Afterwards, she ‘slunk off’ and Boswell was left with the lingering impression of having engaged in a ‘gross practice’, although he was back for more exactly a fortnight later when he engaged with, ultimately unsuccessfully, ‘a monstrous big whore in the Strand’. The casual, opportunistic nature of these encounters made sure that on the Strand, Piccadilly, Pall Mall, Oxford Street and Coventry Street, no woman would loiter making wilful eye contact if she did not want to be picked up.

  Those who preferred to complete their business inside had various options, one of which was to retire to a free-thinking public house where rooms were set aside for women to entertain clients. These were ordinary pub rooms, rather than bedchambers, although some were decorated with pornographic tiles or hangings. Otherwise, the girls might rent a room or a building for the purpose. Covent Garden, much of which had started to be built at the same time as the creation of the piazza, was starting to fall into disrepair, particularly the area between the market and the Strand. Here, landlords did not bother to repair the housing; girls rented rooms simply to do business from, which enraged John Fielding. These were the women who featured in Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies.

  Harris’s List was written by a man named Samuel Derrick, a failed actor and poet. Lodging in Covent Garden, Derrick was familiar with Jack Harris/Harrison who was the chief waiter at the Shakespear’s Head and kept a list of women inside his jacket from which he could choose the appropriate woman for a client’s requirements. The list was famous, and Harris was known as ‘The Pimp-General of All England’. In 1757, fresh from debtors’ prison, Derrick began to pen the guide to London’s ladies of the night and where they might be found, with graphic descriptions of their prices, bodies and talents. It was an instant success and ran for the next thirty-eight years. For the man who liked the larger lady, there was Miss Jordan at Number 20, Little Wild Street, who was ‘an absolute curiosity, weighing at least seventeen or eighteen stone, and considering that this is no light weight to carry, she is very nimble - we must confess we should be very loath to trust ourselves with her in bed lest we should be overlaid’. Eliza was a ‘downright mulatto’ and a ‘d——d fine hairy piece’. Redheads, whose ‘carroty locks create lewdness’, had their own section, as did busty girls including, in 1773, Betsy Miles, ‘Known in this quarter for her immense-sized breasts … Very fit for a foreign Macaroni - entrance at the front door tolerably reasonable, but nothing less than two pound for the back way’.

  Derrick died in 1769, and with him the earlier distinctive humour. The List also contains some more comforting entries about sex workers, such as Mrs Dodd, from the 1788 edition, who ‘is, indeed, turned of forty, rather fat and short, yet she looks well, dresses neat … keeps the house, and after giving you a whole night’s entertainment, is perfectly satisfyed, and will give you a comfortable cup of tea in the morning, for one pound one’.

  All these women kept their own house, or had a permanent lodging or place of business, but those who did not care to do so would work from a brothel or one of Covent Garden’s many ‘bagnios’. Bagnios had arrived in London at about the same time as Mary Wortley Montagu was writing her Turkish Embassy letters, in 1717, sparking a craze for all things Eastern. She wrote of a Turkish hammam: ‘I am now got into a whole new World.’ Many were respectable, offering steam baths, massage and cupping. Husband and wife teams catered for both sexes with propriety. But most of the Covent Garden bagnios were a cross between a tavern, a massage parlour or sauna, and a college hot-tub party. Bathing was available, as were drinks and girls. One such bagnio in the piazza went under the unfortunate name of Haddock’s. Richard Haddock ran it with his wife, Elizabeth. He predeceased her and she then ran it alone for three years, until 1752, when it was taken over by a Sophia Lemoy. Haddock’s was more sophisticated than some of its neighbours, which included the rough Piazza Coffee House, the notorious Shakespear’s Head Tavern, Mother Douglas’s brothel and the booth on
the corner of Russell Street selling pornography. It was fitted out with good mahogany furniture, fine mirrors and good beds, and it was clearly a place of high, if rakish style.

  In August 1760, Ann Bell had turned to make her living from prostitution. She and another girl picked up two men and went to Haddock’s, where they stayed for two nights. On the second night, Ann was attacked by one of the men. She died painfully over the next few weeks, after such ‘shocking usage’ from ‘some Libertine’. The incident and her subsequent death were the talk of the papers all that autumn.

  The story was that Ann had been engaged to entertain a gentleman by another agent, an ‘actor’. He and Ann were to meet at the bagnio. It seems clear from the peripheral material that the man had wanted a particular sexual service for which he felt he had to pay, and he believed that, in Ann, he had found someone who would comply. When he attempted to play out his desire, Ann proved ‘quite averse to his inhuman proceedings’. When she resisted, he took a knife from his pocket and ‘cut her in the most shocking manner’.

  Ann was removed from the bagnio and taken to Marylebone, where she spent some weeks before dying, probably as the result of an infection. The coroner pronounced her death due to a fever. Someone, probably Ann’s attacker, appeared to have paid off the surgeons and coroner, as they also paid to have the report put into the press. But two newspapers wouldn’t let it lie. The Gazetteer reported that ‘this rape was attended with circumstances of pitiless barbarity’. The Ledger repeatedly inferred corruption. Public opinion was also that someone rich and well connected had mutilated a poor girl, resulting in her death, and was now paying everyone to cover it up. In the end, the coroner had to put out a justification of his actions. This included a description of the wounds Ann had received, and only made things worse. She had sustained deep stab wounds near her anus, adding fuel to the barbarity claims. The authorities took the line that Ann had died of venereal disease due to her ‘putrid’ lifestyle, but the public were not content.

  In 1761, the Old Bailey, swayed by public opinion, held a trial. It opened with the accusation that Ann had died of the wounds to her private areas ‘whereof she did languish from the 30th of August, till the fourth of October, and then died’. The man in the dock was Willy Sutton, a merchant. He had been present at Haddock’s, but had he killed Ann? The trial was full of contradictory evidence and, in the end, there was no conviction. Ann joined the ranks of the estimated 5,000 prostitutes to perish from assorted causes in London every year, as estimated by The Times in 1785.

  SEX, FOOD AND GARDEN SUPPLIES: COVENT GARDEN SHOPPING

  Richard Steele the journalist went on a night run to Covent Garden Market, in 1712. He took a boat up from Putney with the traders in the early hours of a summer morning, where he

  … soon fell in with a fleet of gardeners … I landed with ten sail of apricot boats at Strand-bridge, after having put in at Nine Elms, and taken in melons. We arrived at Strand-bridge at six of the clock, and were unloading, when the hackney-coachmen of the foregoing night took their leave of each other … I could not believe any place more entertaining than Covent Garden, where I strolled from one fruit-shop to another, with crowds of agreeable young women around me who were purchasing fruit for their respective families.

  Women dominated the market, and Steele tells of their cheerful, sometimes bawdy exchanges with porters and boatmen. Many labour under the misapprehension that Londoners of the past ate either nothing but meat, with no fresh vegetables or fruit, or they ate no meat at all and lived upon bread and cheese. The fruit mentioned in Steele’s article are apricots and melons, which were grown in specialist ‘pits’ in Vauxhall. Pineapples and purple sprouting broccoli were also grown there. Salads and tomatoes seem to have been universal. In the cooler seasons Londoners resorted to cooked vegetables, and Frenchman Henri Misson de Valberg remembered his roast beef ‘besiege[d] with five or six Heaps of Cabbage, Carrots, Turnips, or some other Herbs or Roots, well pepper’d and salted and swimming in Butter’.

  The market fostered a healthy tavern and alehouse trade, with every level of toper catered for. Ned Ward required only an alehouse selling quality pints that would ‘not fill my guts with thunder’, but François de La Rochefoucauld praised the local taverns as ‘fine inns where it is accepted that men go for prolonged bouts of wine drinking’. Nearby was Teresia Constantia Phillips’ sex shop, the Green Canister, which she opened around 1732 after breaking up with her long-term keeper. During her time as a courtesan, Con had learned a thing or two, and so she set up shop in Half Moon Street, which is now Bedford Street. Printed handbills advertising her wares were given out in the street by link boys earning a few extra pence.

  Con’s ‘preservatives’, or condoms, were so famous they featured in Plate Three of Hogarth’s ‘Harlot’s Progress’. They were made from the caecum of a sheep’s intestine, and the standard length was between seven and eight inches, secured with a coloured ribbon about the base. The treatment process to make them thin and flexible was extensive, and they were tested by blowing them up to check for leaks. They were soaked in water then squeezed out before use, to keep them elastic and comfortable. They certainly had some degree of efficacy, and they were popular. Casanova swore by them, and bought them by the box whenever he found a reliable source.

  Sex shopping of all kinds aside, the Strand was the main food shopping centre for the West End. Covent Garden Market provided fresh produce, almost all of which could be delivered by messenger boys or porters. Home delivery provided employment for thousands across the city. Coal was delivered to the house by men who rented storage space in cellars and then carried individual sacks or small barrowloads to each house. This was the same with water, which was usually clean water from a local well but also came from as far away as Epsom or even Buxton, for the discerning palate. Milkmaids carried their milk about the streets using a yoke and shouting their wares. Their hours were long, and their pay low. Independent self-employed milkmaids were often Welsh. Those who offered a premium service led their cow on their rounds and milked it at the door. Babies and those with a cow’s milk intolerance could have milk from the asses who were also led around the streets. Pretty girls were deployed from the market gardens of Fulham and Chelsea to sell perishable foods and herbs – such as cherries, asparagus and lavender – from baskets carried on their heads.

  Although most food was sold by roving basket carriers, or from market stalls, some foods with a longer shelf life, such as cheeses and preserved meats, were sold in large warehouses around the Strand. Many of these warehouses specialized according to nationality, including Mrs Holt’s Italian warehouse, the trade card for which was designed by William Hogarth.

  Italian diplomat Lorenzo Magalotti remarked in his diary that these shops were ‘mostly under the care of well-dressed women’ who were aided by their young apprentices. This seems to have been an excellent system, appealing to almost all buyers.

  Italian Warehouse at ye two Olive Posts in ye Broad part of the Strand almost opposite to Exeter Change are Sold all Sorts of Italian Silks as Lustrings, Sattins, Padesois, Velvets, Damasks Fans, Legorne Hats, Flowers, Lute & Violin Strings Books of Essences, Venice Treacle, Balfornes, &c. And in a Back Warehouse all Sorts of Italian Wines, Florence Cordials, Oyl, Olives, Anchovies Capers, Vermicelli, Bolognia Sausidges, Parmesan Cheeses, Naple Soap

  Later in the century, fixed shop windows became popular, with a permanent and often elaborate display of books, wallpapers, paintings, carving, silks and fabrics, gloves and lace. Many tailors’ and dressmakers’ shops doubled as places to meet and drink tea and coffee. Most sold clothes off the peg, which could then be altered by seamstresses who hung out large wooden needles from their windows when they were available to work. Pet shops on the north side of Covent Garden sold everything from song thrushes caught on Hampstead Heath to marmoset monkeys in little outfits. There were opticians who tested the eyes and sold spectacles, both made to measure and off the peg, with the ‘focus’ engraved on
the arm. Plain green and blue lenses were also used as sunglasses. This was an idea imported from Venice, where reflections from the lagoon caused light sensitivity.

  Shops were dependent upon the rhythm of daylight hours. Food shops opened at dawn and stayed open until they had sold out for the day, or until dark. Most other shops opened at 8 a.m. and stayed open until nightfall, or 9 p.m. in the summer. There were few chain stores, and each shop traded as they saw fit – much more interesting than the modern high street. I particularly like the sound of Arabella Morris’s garden centre, also on the Strand.

  ARABELLA MORRIS

  At the Naked-Boy and Three Crowns, against the New Church in the Strand, LONDON

  SELLETH all Sorts of Garden Seeds, Flower Seeds, and Flower Roots; Fruit Trees, Flowering Shrubs, Ever-Greens, and Forest Trees

  ALSO Shears, Rakes, Reels, Hoes, Spades, Scythes, Budding and Pruning Knives, Watering Potts, Matts, Sieves, and all Sorts of Materials proper for Gardening. Also Riga, Dantzink and Dutch Flax Seed, and all Sorts of Grass Seed.

  N.B. The True Durham, and the common Flower of Mustard Seed

  All along the Strand were small outlets selling clothes and accessories, as well as books. The Exeter Exchange was built at the end of the seventeenth century, opposite the old Savoy Palace and close to what became Exeter Street. It was largely occupied by women selling hats, dresses and lace. This was all to change in 1773, when the upper rooms were let to the Pidcock family. The Pidcocks were entrepreneurs, specializing in exotic animals. Soon they had established a menagerie on the first floor of the Exchange. Like the Tower menagerie, the big cats were popular, but the biggest attraction was the elephant.