by Lucy Inglis
In 1777, Negri took James Gunter as a partner and, by the end of the century, Negri’s became Gunter’s, a fixture in many a Regency romance. Far from being a run-of-the-mill pastry shop, Gunter’s was a place full of ambition. James Gunter wanted to source his own produce and so began to buy small market gardens in the area to the west, known as Old Brompton. He would buy enough land to build Earl’s Court Lodge, cheekily christened ‘Currant-Jelly Hall’ by the press. Over time, he acquired the land on which The Boltons is now built, ensuring wealth for the future generations of his family. His name carries on in the form of Gunter Grove, Fulham.
The west side of Berkeley Square was home to another type of empire builder. Robert Clive was a badly behaved schoolboy, but he grew into the man who secured India for the British Empire. Part soldier, part civil servant, part stockbroker and all self-publicist, he was born in Shropshire to an old family engaged in the law. He was still a teenager when he was sent out to work as a scribe for the East India Company in Madras.
Less than one lonely year into his time in India, Clive twice attempted suicide. His pistol misfired both times. His failure encouraged him to commit himself to his work instead. In September 1746, Madras fell to the French and Clive was called to help with the English defence of their compounds. By the time of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, Clive was a quartermaster and had begun to lay the foundations of his private fortune. He began to turn to opium to help him with his nerves. He was twenty-five.
Edmund Maskelyne was Clive’s closest friend in India and read to him the letters he received from England.
‘Who is the writer?’ inquired Clive. ‘My sister,’ was the reply; ‘my sister whose miniature hangs there.’ ‘Is it a faithful representation?’ Clive asked. ‘It is,’ rejoined Maskelyne, ‘of her face and form; but it is unequal to represent the excellence of her mind and character.’ ‘Well, Maskelyne,’ said Clive, taking him by the hand, ‘you know me well, and can speak of me as I really am. Do you think that girl would be induced to come to India and marry me?’
Remarkably, Edmund persuaded his seventeen-year-old sister Margaret to come to India and marry his charming and wealthy young friend, who was by now a depressive drug addict. Just over one month later, they set sail for London, but not before Clive had put his Indian investments into diamonds. In England, he tried to break into politics. But two years later, still not yet thirty, he was persuaded by the East India Company to return to India. In August of the following year, 1756, the Nawab of Bengal seized Calcutta, and forty English soldiers died in the ‘Black Hole’ incident. The Battle of Plassey, in 1757, saw Clive victorious and in receipt of huge gifts of cash and land from Mir Jafar, the grateful nawab who was placed in power.
It was in Calcutta that Clive was given four giant tortoises by British seamen who had brought the animals from the Seychelles. Three died almost immediately and the sole survivor was known as Adwaitya, or ‘The Only One’. Clive kept Adwaitya as a pet, and the tortoise patrolled the garden in Calcutta long after his owner had left India for the last time. (In 1875, with no one left to look after him, he ended up in Calcutta Zoo, where he died in 2006, aged 256, having enjoyed the longest recorded lifespan of a giant tortoise.)
In 1760, Clive returned to London and arrived at 45 Berkeley Square a stupendously rich man. He was relying heavily upon opium to manage his nervous ‘pain’, and public outrage at his personal fortune was growing. He entered politics by buying parliamentary seats, but The Public Advertiser together with The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser featured pages of letters, accounts and debate over his wrongdoings in India. Londoners knew too much about his ruthless climb to the top.
By summer 1769, things were becoming unsettled in India and the East India Company itself was in chaos. A select committee looked into the company’s affairs and subjected all the upper officers to interviews, Clive included. He would not admit to any wrongdoing, and his arrogance at times bordered upon delusion: when questioned about his actions in accepting the huge payment from Mir Jafar, he exclaimed angrily, ‘Mr Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’
In 1773, it was put before the House of Commons that Clive had acted illegally in taking the money from Mir Jafar. Clive was cleared of wrongdoing – his actions had, ultimately, helped secure India for the British Empire – and later that year, Parliament passed an Act which pulled the East India Company into governmental control. The Act was also the beginning of the end for Clive. Increasingly alienated from the East India Company and from his former allies, he went off to Italy to buy pictures. He returned to London in November of 1774, and arrived in Berkeley Square suffering from a heavy cold. On 20 November, he excused himself while playing cards with friends; a short time later, he was found dead on the floor of the next room. Clive died by his own hand, but quite how is still unclear. Some say he stabbed himself in the throat with a penknife, others that it was a fatal dose of opium.
The newspapers reported his death quietly, with none of their usual vitriol. The outpouring of public scorn and criticism which had been a constant during his final decade ceased. His monument bears the simple and truthful line: ‘Primus in India’.
THE EMPORIUM OF WILLIAM AND JOHN LINNELL: CURIOUS CARVERS IN WOOD
Many of Berkeley Square’s occupants refused to conform to the uniformity of the rest of Mayfair. Most of the north side of the square belonged to the Grosvenors, and here, one of Georgian London’s most remarkable furniture workshops set up in business.
William Linnell trained as a carver and established himself in business as a carver of frames and furniture in Long Acre. The firm prospered – diversifying from carving and going into all types of fine furniture and mirrors – and so, in 1754, they had to find bigger premises. William had a new house built on land he had acquired from a farrier who was living and working on what had been farmland on the north side of Berkeley Square, four years before Clive arrived. The house had a 65ft frontage. It covered three floors, four in some parts at the back, of which workshops filled almost every part. On the ground floor at the front was the showroom or ‘Fore Ware Room’, with a ‘glass-room’ or mirror showroom, and a joinery shop as well as an office and lumber room. The lumber room didn’t contain virgin wood but picture frames and pieces of furniture customers had traded in. In the hall were marble slabs, stacked up waiting to be made into tabletops. Through the hall into the wood yard there was a saw pit (for the joiners), equipment for sharpening tools and also a ladder. The yard was used to pack the furniture for transport to its new home. Some of these homes were hundreds of miles away, and each piece was carefully packed for its journey along bumpy unfinished roads. Mats woven from plaited rushes at a shilling each were used to cushion the furniture which was then suspended in a frame inside a crate. Smaller items, such as mirrors, were delivered to London buyers by sedan chair.
On the first floor was a cabinetmaking and chair-making room, housing thirteen workbenches, and an upholstery room. Also on the first floor was the studio of William’s son John, educated at the St Martin’s Lane Academy and ‘an excellent carver of wood’. The room was hung with pictures and also held ‘a box with colours, a painting box for travelling, a mahogany eazel, a porphiry stone and muller (for grinding paint pigment) and a hat box of drawings’. The top floor held the carving, gilding and ‘feather’ garrets, where the cushions were stuffed. The gilding room would have been one of the cleanest rooms in a house full of sawdust. In jars on the benches were over 50lbs of gold ‘size’, the gilt paste used for getting the gold on to the furniture, giving some idea of the amount of gilded furniture the Linnells were producing and how much money they must have put into it. Also key to the mixture were linseed oil, parchment, white lead, turpentine, spirits of wine and whiting – all kept indoors, rendering the garrets highly flammable.
After his father’s death, in 1763, John Linnell took the business into the upper realms of furniture manufacture. He often worked with Robert Adam, desig
ning furniture to suit the architect’s interiors or executing Adam’s own designs. John’s private life was unconventional. He had a great love of actresses and the theatre. He finally married, aged sixty-five, but made no mention of his wife in his will, which was made in favour of a series of other women and an illegitimate daughter.
John was determined that the Linnell furniture-making empire should die with him. On his death, his house became one of London’s first ‘hotels’ owned by Tycho Thomas. Venture into Berkeley Square today and there is little of merit to see, but the London plane trees in the central garden have been shading the square since John Linnell was carving furniture in a garret on the north side.
HILL STREET AND THE BIRTH OF THE BLUESTOCKINGS
In nearby Hill Street, 26-year-old Elizabeth Montagu set up home, in 1744. She determined that it was to be ‘the central point of union’ for ‘all the fashion and intellect of the metropolis’. She once wrote to David Garrick, ‘I never invite idiots to my house.’ Montagu would earn the nickname ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’, but in her childhood was called Fidget for her inability to be still. It was a mental as well as physical characteristic.
Just like Lady Mary Pierrepoint, Elizabeth married, somewhat reluctantly, a man named Edward Montagu. Montagu was not a diplomat but a fifty-year-old bachelor with extensive coal mines in the north-east. He too would live in the shadow of a brilliant wife. Their son, John, nicknamed Punch, was born nine months and six days after the wedding. Punch died in September of the following year, during the building of the Hill Street house. Elizabeth was devastated, doubly so when she lost her mother to cancer almost immediately afterwards. There is no record of how Edward felt. They remained good friends for the rest of his life, but there would be no more pregnancies, and they spent more and more time apart.
In 1746, Elizabeth’s father moved to London and set up home with his housekeeper. A general lack of convention in the family’s married state was also seen in Elizabeth’s sister, Sarah. After a short marriage she was removed from her husband by her family, and they divorced on grounds of non-consummation. In 1762, Sarah published anonymously A Description of Millennium Hall and the Country Adjacent. This utopian novel features a group of smart women from the higher reaches of society who manage to avoid courtship and marriage and thus avoid a wedding night, which probably played a prominent part in Sarah’s idea of utopia. It went through four editions, becoming something of a bluestocking bible.
After giving her sister much support and working hard to suppress the scandals of her family, Elizabeth threw herself into becoming a London hostess, bringing together the kernel of an intellectual group which would form the ‘bluestockings’. They met to talk in considerable depth about the theatre and literature, Elizabeth’s two great loves. They gained their nickname from the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet, who used to attend the smart parties in his rough blue worsted stockings.
By the 1760s, her parties were becoming famous. Cards and heavy boozing were banned. Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, David Garrick and Joshua Reynolds were all friends, and her gatherings were the London equivalent of a Parisian literary salon. Getting to and from Hill Street, though, was not always a sedate and civilized affair. Mayfair – and the areas of Hay Hill and Hill Street, in particular – were the focus for a rising wave of street robbery during the middle of the century and were described as ‘infested with highwaymen and footpads’.
THE FOOTMEN OF MAYFAIR
When carriages became common in the late sixteenth century, footmen went before them and cleared a route, carrying a stout stick for the purpose. They were called ‘running footmen’ because as carriage speeds increased, grander owners continued to employ footmen to run alongside. In summer 1663, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary for 3rd July that the ‘town talk’ was
… of nothing but the great foot-race run this day on Banstead Downs, between Lee, the Duke of Richmond’s footman, and a tyler, a famous runner. And Lee hath beat him; though the King and Duke of York and all men almost did bet three or four to one upon the tyler’s head.
Pepys records two other races in his diary, both featuring a footman as one of the contestants.
Life as a footman was good: ‘they swarmed in anterooms: they sprawled in halls and on landings … guzzled, devoured, debauched, cheated, played cards, bullied visitors for vails’. The average wage in 1750 was about £7, but ‘vails’, or perquisites, were worth about £40, which means it paid very well (somewhere in the region of £60,000 in modern money). You had the best uniform in the house, including a good supply of white stockings and shirts, and your job was to be at least six feet tall, look fit, nonchalant and handsome. Public houses for Mayfair workers included The Three Chairmen (a taproom in Bruton Mews), and The Only Running Footman (in Berkeley Street).
Footmen were notorious for being sources of the best gossip, and traditionally trusted with clandestine errands. They were also famed for being cocky and ‘above their station’. In 1725, César de Saussure complained: ‘If you take a meal with a person of rank you must give every one of the five or six footmen a coin on leaving. They will be ranged in a file in the hall, and the least you can give them is a shilling each, and should you fail to do this you will be treated insolently the next time.’
John Parry, a footman turned Mayfair street criminal, was twenty-seven when he was executed for theft, in 1754. ‘He was a genteel well-made young Fellow, not a little fond of his own Person.’ He came to London after being brought up in Monmouthshire, taking employment as a footman in Hanover Square. He was an accomplished fives player and often played at Higgins’s Court, near Leicester Square. After a brief spell at sea, he came back to London to work as a footman again, life on the waves being ‘too boisterous’ for him. He returned to his first employer, by that time living in Berkeley Square. Whilst living there, he ‘contracted an Acquaintance with a Publican’s Wife’ and the two absconded, having stolen about £60 from her husband. She came back after seven weeks, and her husband took her back. Parry crept off to Oxfordshire to continue working as a footman, ‘but he remained not long there, the Town being his chief Enjoyment and Delight’.
In 1750, he was taken on by another noblewoman in Berkeley Square, where he was
… looked upon as a good handy Fellow, and of good Appearance, he was frequently borrowed to wait at Table by Nobles of the Lady’s Acquaintance, when they had any extraordinary Entertainment. He was very active, and would do the Work, and be as useful, as any other two or three People.
In July 1753, Parry was ‘sent to his Lady’s Banker’s to receive a considerable Sum of Money, in order to pay off some Bills’. He pocketed the money and forged receipts from the tradesman. In one week, he had been entrusted with £1,100, showing the amount of good faith footmen were often given. He absconded to Charing Cross, where he took the midnight Dover coach. Soon he was in Paris, living the life of a gentleman, cutting a ‘great Figure at the Tennis-Court there, and beat the best Players in Paris; and ’tis thought he was the best Player at Fives and Tennis in Europe’.
His ex-employer was determined to track him down and wrote letters to her contacts in Paris. Parry was arrested. He confessed and returned £400, but France would not deport him. Then, after nineteen weeks, they relented and kicked him out of France. He went to Genoa, but soon fled after being involved in a murder. He returned to England in March 1754.
Parry’s arrival in London saw him embark on a life of further criminality. He arrived at Woolwich and took lodgings at the Vine Pub, in Vauxhall. For one day, he slept. The next day, at ten in the evening, he rode into Mayfair on a hired horse and ‘just against Lord Chesterfield’s Garden-Wall, he stopped a young Lady, and robbed her of some Money and a Gold Watch’. The watch must have been very fine: he got fourteen guineas for it the following morning. ‘Then he went to a Gunsmith in the Strand, and gave four Guineas for a Brace of Pistols, and went back again, by Water, to his Quarters at the Vine.’
That evening, after da
rk, he stopped a Mr Nisbet in Berkeley Square and took his watch and nine guineas in cash. Then he held up a coach in the square and robbed Lord Carisforth and Captain Proby of around £9. He pawned the watch that night, in one of the shady shops near the Strand. Then he paid a chairman to take his horse back to the Vine and walked to the Leicester Square bagnio where he engaged a whore.
On 30 March, four unnamed men of Mayfair set out to see if they could apprehend the man who ‘had put such a Terror upon all the Quality at the upper Part of the Town’. They met Parry almost at the same spot where he had robbed the young lady the previous evening. When they questioned him, he said he was from Oxford and on his way to Bloomsbury Square. The men were not convinced and found a cocked and loaded pistol tucked between his leg and the saddle. They asked him to dismount, but he spurred his horse and attempted to get away. One man hung on to the horse’s bridle, and the others set their dog on the horse. It had been bred for fighting and leapt for the horse’s muzzle, rendering it immobile. Parry was placed under citizen’s arrest and brought before Henry Fielding to whom he confessed everything. He was committed to Newgate, found guilty at trial and hanged at Tyburn.
Parry’s downfall came at the beginning of the end of the glory days of the footman. By the end of the eighteenth century, the streets were too crowded or carriages too fast to be accompanied. Running footmen were ‘passing out of the world where they once walked in glory’. The Duke of Queensberry, known as ‘Old Q’, is said to have kept the last ones as a mark of his own virility. The Duke was in the habit of trying the pace of candidates for his service by seeing how they could run up and down Piccadilly, watching and timing them from his balcony. They put on a livery before the trial. On one occasion, a candidate presented himself, dressed and ran. At the conclusion of his performance he stood before the balcony. ‘You will do very well for me,’ said the Duke. ‘And your livery will do very well for me,’ replied the man, as he gave the Duke a last proof of his ability by running away in it.