by Lucy Inglis
… was once standing to see the workmen pull down the wooden railing and brick-work which surround the centre of Cavendish-square, when a sailor walked up to him and asked for a quid of tobacco: his Lordship answered, ‘My friend, I don’t take tobacco.’ … As [the sailor] was turning away, his Lordship turned to him and said, ‘Here my friend, here is something that will enable you to buy tobacco,’ and gave him half a crown.
In another instance of kindness, the Earl once noticed a woman in widow’s weeds curtsey to him in the street. She looked poor, ‘but remarkably clean’ and had two small children with her. He stopped, turned back and gave her money. But in the transaction, the coins fell into the dirty kennel, or channel, in the middle of the road. Billy picked them up, cleaned them on his handkerchief, then handed them over to her.
His kindness did not stop at people. The Earl was a great fan of the work of renowned miser Joseph Nollekens, and often used to visit the sculptor’s Marylebone studio. The Nollekens kept a thin, badly treated dog but ‘whenever the animal saw his Lordship’s leg within the gate, he ceased barking, and immediately welcomed the visitor; who always brought a French-roll in his blue greatcoat-pocket purposely for him’.
Looking north from Cavendish Square, with the rear view of the statue of the Duke of Cumberland, 1771. The sheep were removed later that year
In the late 1780s, Billy’s charwoman at Number 3 was ‘took sudden’ and had her baby in the house. He was named Billy. Billy grew up in the house until Billy Ponsonby’s death, in 1793, ‘for whilst he lived [his mother] wouldn’t leave him, not for nothing’.
Aged nineteen, Billy took to selling watercress about the streets but he had to stop as the market wouldn’t support him, his mother and his aged father. He struck upon the idea of working as a crossing-sweeper in Cavendish Square: ‘I’m known there; it’s where I was born and there I set to work.’
Crossing-sweeping was one of the humblest professions, but Billy was known as the ‘aristocratic’ crossing-sweeper. In wet weather he could be seen sheltering ‘under the Duke of Portland’s stone gateway’. Billy’s unique position as street furniture gives an insight into the charitable inclinations of the Marylebone rich. Some gave him clothes, some money, one ‘a shilling and a religious tract’. Billy remembered his religious benefactor as ‘a particular nice man’.
Billy was such a familiar sight around the square that he was given odd jobs, such as scouring the mild-steel knives, taking cash to the bank for the Duke of Portland, and even cashing cheques for other gentlemen. He attended houses early in the mornings to clean shoes, knives or put letters in the post: ‘It’s only for the servants I does it, not for the quality.’ In a twist of social hierarchy, although he was entrusted with £80 in cash by one gentleman, the servants didn’t allow Billy to intrude into the domestic setting beyond the kitchen, where he received ‘broken foods’. Like anyone in a job for a long time, Billy remembered ‘the good old days’. In particular, he wasn’t fond of the new invention of tarmacadam – or ‘muckydam’, as he liked to call it – reducing the life of a broom from three months (on cobbles) to a fortnight.
The story of the two Billys of Cavendish Square highlights the area’s slightly more relaxed social structure. After all, many of the local residents, no matter how wealthy, were outsiders. Marylebone was popular with officers of the East India Company, who often returned to England with their racially mixed households. However, these mixed households were not only East Indian; many white West Indian families had returned to London to spend their sugar money.
PORTMAN SQUARE: MONTAGU VS HOME
On 31 January 1765, The Public Advertiser declared: ‘Portman Square now building between Portman Chapel and Marylebone will be much larger than Grosvenor Square; and that handsome walks, planted with Elm Trees, will be made to it, with a grand reservoir, in the middle.’ Construction on the north side did not start until 1773, when Robert Adam undertook to build a house for Elizabeth, the Countess of Home. At the same time, Elizabeth Montagu, whose star was firmly fixed in London’s social firmament, left Hill Street in Mayfair and took the lease of the large plot which ran, unusually, across the south-west corner. She employed James ‘Athenian’ Stuart to raise a huge mansion in competition with her neighbour. The Countess of Home was proud of her colonial heritage. Elizabeth Montagu and her bluestockings were violently opposed to slavery. As the question of slavery became increasingly uncomfortable, the battle lines were drawn in Portman Square.
The Countess of Home had been born Elizabeth Gibbons, in Jamaica. She married young, to the son of the Governor; his death, in London in 1734, had left her a very wealthy eighteen-year-old. Social mobility was high in the West Indies, and the rougher, hardier European men and women often flourished. A commonly held view was that the islands were ‘the Dunghill wharone England does cast forth its rubbish’. Jamaica started out as a trading island but when it gave itself over to sugar plantations there were opportunities to make huge fortunes. European mortality rates were staggering at around 27 per cent a year, owing to ‘bad fruit’, hurricanes and yellow fever. With the rate of attrition so high, marriages did not last long and relatively few islanders succeeded in bringing up families. Native-born white islanders surviving to adulthood were scarce. The successful few were opportunists and adventurers. Added to this potent mixture, as well as the ever-present spectre of violent uprising and death, was the massive wealth attainable through sugar. The average white plantation owner on Jamaica was ten times richer than those in mainland America.
Sugar was an increasing presence in London. In 1700, national consumption was 4lbs per head per annum; by 1800, this had grown to 18lbs. Jamaica and its cash crop was the jewel of the British Caribbean. White Jamaicans were starting to exert an influence on British politics and the City. The planters and merchants who represented them formed an influential lobbying group which successfully opposed the attempt to introduce large quantities of East Indian sugar to Britain.
Elizabeth arrived in London as a rich planter’s wife. But after her husband’s early death, she disappears and doesn’t reappear until 1742, when she married the Earl of Home. She was thirty-eight, he was some years younger. He deserted her in the first year of their marriage. Upon his death, in 1761, his possessions were auctioned and Elizabeth bought back the silver dinner service he had taken with him. William Beckford, himself an heir to sugar money, described Elizabeth as a ‘flamboyant eccentric, given to swearing like a trooper’. In 1772, aged seventy, she decided to build a new house on the north side of the square, where she was ‘known among all the Irish Chairmen and riff-raff of the metropolis by the name and style of the Queen of Hell’. Money was no object when Elizabeth engaged James Wyatt to design her new house, in June 1772. Wyatt was only twenty-six, and unable to keep up with the amount of commissions he was receiving. The two fell out. Elizabeth sacked him and brought in Wyatt’s great rival, Robert Adam, to finish the job.
Adam’s taste coupled with Elizabeth’s money produced one of London’s finest interiors. Adam blended formal with informal, blurring the line invisibly between family and servants whilst keeping the two entirely separate. In Home House he was triumphant, and the house was used as an entertaining space of the highest order.
Elizabeth’s heyday in Home House coincided with the consolidation of virulent abolitionist feeling amongst London intellectuals. Public sentiment was turning against the ‘sugar rich’, their unbelievable wealth and the methods on which it was founded. William Cowper wrote a pamphlet addressed ‘To Everyone Who Uses Sugar’, reproving those who used it with: ‘Think how many backs have smarted, for the sweets your cane affords.’ It was no hole-in-the-corner publication, and was exactly the sort of thing the West Indian planters were hoping to avoid. East Indian tea accompanied by West Indian sugar had become an English staple, but now the ordinary man and woman were exhorted to think, to consider the reality behind this daily treat, and: ‘As he sweetens his tea, let him consider the bitterness at the b
ottom of the cup.’
On the other side of the square were the tea parties of Elizabeth Montagu and her intellectual circle.
Montagu House was vast: the housewarming party was a breakfast for a modest 700 guests. Elizabeth later held a May Day breakfast for London chimney sweeps, where they had only to present themselves on the front lawn to receive a celebratory meal of beef and a pudding. Her literary salons continued, as they had in Hill Street, but the topics of the conversation were evolving with the times, and abolition became a constant feature.
The bluestockings put great store by intellectual equality between the sexes and by ‘conversation’. Their debates reflected popular feeling at the time. On 20 March 1783, The Gazetteer ran an advertisement asking, ‘Are there any grounds for supposing that the understandings of the female sex are in any respect inferior to those of the men?’ There were even debates asking ‘Ought not the Word Obey to be struck out of the Marriage Ceremony?’ Elizabeth’s salons were held in the beautiful drawing rooms of Montagu House, where chairs were ranged around her in a semicircle and she literally acted in the role of ‘chairwoman’. Samuel Johnson said of her: ‘She diffuses more knowledge than any woman I know, or indeed, almost any man.’ Hester Thrale described her, kindly, as ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement’. Her friends included Elizabeth Vesey, Sir Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Samuel Johnson, Fanny Burney, Hester Thrale, Margaret Bentinck and the abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Quite what the Countess of Home thought of her neighbour’s abolitionist tea parties is unknown. Her steely identity as a white Jamaican is unlikely to have allowed her to feel regret for the vast wealth she inherited through the sweat and sometimes the blood of others. The true movement towards abolition was played out in Westminster Hall and other quarters less glamorous than the rival Home and Montagu Houses. Yet Marylebone would continue to hold a curious attraction for both those who profited by slavery and those who had suffered from it.
In 1833, when West Indian plantation families lodged compensation claims for the financial damage caused by abolition, a large proportion of those families gave Marylebone addresses. Black Londoners also made Marylebone their own. In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, numbers were relatively low, and most found employment in the grander houses. Thus London’s black population during the eighteenth century is largely hidden and hard to assess. Guesses range from 4,000 to 10,000. They comprised freed and unfree slaves, soldiers who had fought for Britain in the unsuccessful Revolutionary War, and domestic servants. Marked out as ‘alien’ by the colour of their skin, many found it hard to integrate. By the 1780s, the ‘black poor’ had become a distinct problem but also a fashionable one. The abolition movement was gaining ground quickly, and in liberated circles it was the done thing to be seen to support the ‘indigent blacks’.
Soon, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was established, and prominent abolitionist members of society were signing up, encouraged by Elizabeth Montagu and others. When the Duchess of Devonshire became involved, many others of her position followed, including the Countess of Salisbury, the Countess of Essex and the Marchioness of Buckingham. The committee set up a scheme for a new ‘colony’ in Sierra Leone. It remains unclear whether the ultimate motive was to get rid of the poor blacks from London’s streets, or whether it represented a naive attempt to return them to their ‘native Africa’. Either way, the scheme and the colony failed soon after 1791.
In January 1786, The Public Advertiser ran with a notice that Mr Brown, the baker in Wigmore Street, was to ‘give a Quartern Loaf to every Black in Distress, who will apply on Saturday next between the Hours of Twelve and Two’. Two pubs were used to distribute alms to the needy: the Yorkshire Stingo, in Marylebone, and the White Raven, in Mile End.
The Yorkshire Stingo became something of a legend. It had been named after the brand of particularly strong beer, and it hosted Thomas Paine’s large-scale cast-iron bridge model, in 1790 – the second ever to be built. It was also the departure point for the first commuter omnibus service running into the City, in 1829. As well as acting as the focus for the poor members of the black community in west London, it long remained a stopping point for those heading in and out of the city. (It was demolished in the 1960s to make room for the Westway.)
THE HINDOSTANEE, LONDON’S FIRST KNOWN INDIAN RESTAURANT
It wasn’t only West Indians who were attracted to Portman Square and Marylebone. Those arriving or returning from the East Indies brought with them the tastes of India, and a small infrastructure grew up around them, providing ethnic food and experiences. One such character was Deen Mahomet. Born to a Muslim family in Bihar, in 1759, he was raised as a servant in the Bengal branch of the British East India Army.
In 1784, Deen was in Cork, after following an officer who had taken him under his wing. There he met Jane Daly and, in 1786, they eloped. Deen began to write the story of his travels. In 1794, he published the first book by an Indian written in English, The Travels of Deen Mahomet. He and Jane came to London, where he found employment with the Hon. Basil Cochrane, who had made a fortune in India and liked the people and way of life. Basil opened a bath house at 12 Portman Square and employed Deen to offer Indian head and body massage, or ‘champissage’, with perfumed oils. It became a huge success, and we derive the word shampoo from the Indian ‘champi’.
Advertisement for the Hindostanee Coffee House, 1811
Late in 1809, Deen opened the Hindostanee Coffee House, and The Times announced its arrival. Although the Hindostanee was reviewed favourably in the publications of the time, Deen expanded too quickly after early successes. By 1813, he was bankrupt. However, the coffee house continued until 1833, under different management.
Deen and his wife moved to Brighton, where the building of the Pavilion was lending an exotic flavour to local life. He became ‘Shampooing Surgeon’ to George IV and, later, to William IV. His son, Frederick, became a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital and completed pioneering research into hypertension before his early death, at the age of thirty-five. Deen Mahomet and his family’s integration into British society is a heady mixture of affection, family, money, skill and intellect, as well as financial mismanagement and disaster.
MANCHESTER SQUARE: A PROPHETESS AND A PIG-FACED WOMAN
Manchester Square is dominated by Manchester House, now Hertford House, situated on the north side, home of the Wallace Collection. The house was built originally by the Duke of Manchester, but became Hertford House in 1797, when the 2nd Marquess of Hertford acquired it. Francis Seymour-Conway, the 3rd Marquess of Hertford (1777–1842), was remarkable not only for his spectacular romantic career, but also the lineage of his wife. Maria Fagnani was a half-Italian beauty, possibly the daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry (the lecher known as ‘Old Q’) or possibly the daughter of the Tory George Selwyn. Both men left her huge legacies, but it is most likely Maria’s father was Selwyn’s butler. Contemporary gossips sniped that her mother had never learned the English words for constancy and fidelity, and William Makepeace Thackeray parodied Maria and her husband in Vanity Fair.
Manchester Square later made the papers when prophetess Joanna Southcott moved in. Born in Ottery St Mary, Devon, in 1750, she realized she had the gift of ‘prophecy’, though not until 1792. She thought the French Revolution heralded an apocalypse. Napoleon became her Antichrist. She made special ‘seals’ which would protect the wearer ‘even at the cannon’s mouth’ and called herself ‘the woman clothed with the sun’. In 1814, she declared herself to be pregnant with the ‘Prince of Peace’. She was sixty-four.
Joanna called the bump ‘Shiloh’. The medical profession was unsure whether it was a phantom pregnancy, or a colossal tumour. She died in a house in Manchester Square during December 1814, undelivered of the Saviour.
Joanna’s followers were widely reported in the press as delusional. At exactly the same time, London was under a different delusion regarding another resident of Manchester Square: the ‘
pig-faced lady’. In February 1814, The Times reported: ‘There is at present a report in London, of a woman, with a strangely deformed face, resembling that of a pig, who is possessed of a large fortune, and we suppose wants all the comforts and conveniences incident to her sex and station [as in, marriage].’
This was followed by what was essentially a denunciation of the existence of the pig-faced lady, comparing it to Joanna Southcott’s folly. Yet many hundreds tried to find the house in Manchester Square where she was supposed to live, including the hunchbacked and dwarfish Sholto, Lord Kirkcudbright, who wanted to pay his addresses to one equally unfortunate in looks. The Times continued its scathing denouncement: ‘The pig’s face is as firmly believed in by many, as Joanna Southcot’s pregnancy, to which folly it has succeeded … there is hardly a company in which this swinish female is not talked of; and thousands believe in her existence.’
The pig-faced lady hoax was cruel and misogynistic, but it was inspired by an undertow in current affairs. Just as women were asking if they had to keep ‘obey’ in their marriage vows, others were taking the initiative in getting a man to the altar. They were even going so far as to advertise. The City Debates club asked in the Daily Advertiser, on 11 November 1790: ‘Is it consistent either with female prudence or delicacy to advertise for a husband?’ Even more intriguing, it appears that women were seeking companionship abroad. A London society asked: ‘Do Ladies by going to India, for the purpose of obtaining Husbands, deviate from their characteristic delicacy?’ The question was ‘almost unanimously decided in the affirmative’.
That women were advertising for husbands, or actively seeking them in another country, was a reflection of the growing desire for marriage in the late eighteenth century. Fashion, a rise in the standards of living and health, plus the growth in media and art meant that there was an ever-greater emphasis on beauty and desirability. In the late seventeenth century, up to 20 per cent of women didn’t marry but remained within extended family groups as quasi-servants. By the late eighteenth century, this number had dropped below 10 per cent, as women became wealthier and increasingly unwilling to live out their lives in spinsterish limbo. The more affluent women of the Georgian period, and particularly the Regency, are often imagined as a simpering, corseted bunch. Yet many were questioning their position in marriage and society, and some of them were actively seeking happiness on their own terms.