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

by Rubenhold, Hallie

  In the eighteenth century, prison guards liked visitors, especially those with plenty of coin to lie in their palms. By rubbing a few together, Dr Hill would have gained access to Harris’s cell and encouraged him to spill his story. To Harris, the Doctor’s face would have been a familiar one, and perhaps the relief of having a guest may have eased the words from the pimp’s mouth. More importantly, Hill would have popped a few shillings into Harris’s needy hands, as was the custom. Through Hill, Harris was given a mouthpiece, a means by which he could project his voice out of Newgate Prison and into the ears of all who might listen. In effect, what he did was the era’s equivalent of selling his story to The Sun. Hill knew precisely what the public wanted to hear before Jack Harris had even uttered a word. His readers were hungry for a villain, one who bore his teeth and snarled, an unrepentant, remorseless beast, a caricature of how the respectable classes might imagine a pimp. Not surprisingly, Hill quickly learned that Jack Harris was very, very angry and although much of his wrath was directed against Justice Wright, even more of it was aimed at Packington Tomkins.

  According to Hill, no one was more surprised at his arrest than the pimp himself. Harris had for years thrived ‘unmolested’ by ‘the watch and constables of the night’, who ‘never let loose but after street-walking bunters, low wretches, and those quite beneath the protection of justice’. He acknowledged that due to the recent ‘legislation to force modesty on the town’, he and Mother Douglas became the targets of reformation: ‘they call it’, he sighed, ‘laying the axe to the root’. But then Harris continued in a more personal vein. While Mother Douglas, ‘a venerable grey headed gentlewoman’, was bailed out by her friends, he was left to rot in gaol by his one supposed protector; Packington Tomkins. ‘In the hour of my distress’, he ranted, ‘Tomkins (such is the base ingratitude of the man) who owes half of his fortune to me; Tomkins, I say (hear it and hate him all ye whores) abandoned me.’ Harris would never forgive Tomkins, who had made no bones about washing his hands of his head-waiter when the situation became sticky. The taverner, who fought hard to appear law-abiding, had realised that there might come a time when jettisoning the pimp would become essential to his own survival. Tomkins, Harris felt, had unjustly emerged from this debacle unscathed, but from the bowels of Newgate he would use Hill’s visit to attempt to sink him.

  Whatever vitriol Harris had reserved for his former master was launched in one long spew at the journalist. The pimp revealed all of his master’s dirty dealings, laying down in great detail Tomkins’s dishonest tricks. If the world pointed their finger at Harris for his misdeeds, he claimed, they should redirect their reprehension towards Tomkins, who the pimp imitated in his business practices and to whom he ‘had always looked up to with eyes of veneration’. Tomkins was a cheat and a liar, a gentleman who ‘bows lowly, smiles submissively and lisps’ as he fleeces his customers. Harris claimed that Tomkins made a large portion of his profits from serving overpriced, substandard wine which he dressed up with different coloured wax seals. He derided his patrons behind their backs and instructed his staff not only on how to be rude but how to be crafty. Such deceits, Harris claimed, were exercised on various customers ‘five or six times in a night’, while the patrons were none the wiser. Harris recalled bitterly how they all would laugh when hearing ‘the taken-in young squires, run out in raptures on my master’. Certainly, this was not the kind of publicity that the owner of the Shakespear’s Head sought to cultivate, and it is unlikely that Dr Hill would have concocted such libellous accusations without some prompting. Harris had every right to feel slighted by someone whom he considered to be a partner in crime, and his open attack may have been his only viable means of exacting revenge. The partnership that had been so profitable for both parties was now irrevocably dissolved.

  Hill also got what he wanted from his encounter with Harris. From the grains of truth that the pimp proffered about his life, his business and his state of mind, Hill created the monster that his readers longed to see. Harris the pimp emerged as an evildoer, void of humanity, boastful about the wickedness of his misdeeds. Hill’s Harris rides into the countryside to abduct and debauch unsuspecting young gentlewomen. He meets the wagons on the road to London, offering food and rest to innocent female passengers before raping them. He drugs the wives of City gentlemen and inducts them into a life of prostitution. He laughs at his conscripts’ misfortunes, the desperation and deaths of their parents, their illnesses and traumas. Most abhorrent of all, Dr Hill’s Harris claims to have ‘received the favour’ of ‘initiating’ (whether willingly or not) over 400 women into ‘the rites of Venus’. Were it to be believed, an assertion so bold would make Jack Harris one of the most notorious rapists in British history. In a society so recently shaken by the trial of Elizabeth Canning and titillated by talk of repentant Magdalens, Hill’s tale would have been swallowed with both horror and relish. The Remonstrance of Harris, Pimp General to the People of England raised enough eyebrows to warrant a second print run in 1759, the year after its first appearance. It was not the only publication to attempt to fill in the blanks of the enigmatic Jack Harris’s life. The author of The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray devoted at least a quarter of his work to telling Harris’s history. Unlike Dr Hill’s publication, the author of the Memoirs paints a much more sympathetic picture of Harris: a man, like his prostitutes, wronged by society and forced into a profession that he understood to be repugnant. The cruelty of the world made a cruel man, apologises the pimp. The reality of Harrison’s situation most likely lay somewhere between the two possibilities.

  Over the three-year period of his incarceration, and even beyond, the name Jack Harris became synonymous with the standard image of the despicable procurer. Hack writers dropped his moniker into their stories and wrote dedications to his life’s achievements in their pamphlets and journals. Jack Harris was more a legend than a living, breathing man. The prisoner inside Newgate quickly came to realise that if he were ever to resume the semblance of a normal life, his name would have to die.

  12

  The Fleet AND O’KELLY

  WITH THE EXCEPTION of Newgate, there were few places in London with a worse reputation than the Fleet Prison. What made it marginally more bearable than the stinking, disease-bathed sink of Newgate were the comparative freedoms granted to those committed to its confines. Surrounded by a twenty-five-foot wall and a moat dug into the side of the now paved-over Fleet river, the prison existed like a small hamlet within a city. This, however, did not make the environs any more cheerful. The Fleet might be defined today as an open or minimum-security prison, although a dungeon did exist for those particularly unrepentant few who had to be locked into shackles. For the most part, the majority of the prison population were free to roam within the boundaries of its walls, and for the even fewer fortunate souls who could produce the bribes necessary, the possibility of lodging outside of the enclosed area within the ‘rule of the Fleet’ also existed. The prison itself contained around 100 cells in addition to an alehouse, a coffee house, a chapel, a common kitchen and an outdoor area where those interred were allowed to socialise, and even play games of ninepins. Ironically, gaming, the vice that bore the responsibility for landing many of the prisoners within the Fleet’s precincts in the first place, was not prohibited. Some played cards in their cells or tried their luck at billiards. Similarly, the prison’s two drinking establishments gave inmates the opportunity to continue enjoying the same pleasures they had so heartily indulged in on the opposite side of the wall. But however much these few privileges succeeded in lightening the miseries of existence, they could have never eradicated them entirely. That which wound the mechanism of this microcosm was a brutal tradition of extortion and exploitation. There was nothing about life in the Fleet that could lull an inmate into believing that they were anywhere other than in a prison.

  Order in the Fleet emulated the two-tiered system of hierarchy that prevailed within society: those with money could buy comfor
t, those without suffered doubly. In theory, everyone inside the Fleet was there because they owed money to someone whom they couldn’t repay. This, however, did not mean that every prisoner was without some form of assets. The unofficial objective of the warden and his staff was to shake these last pennies, shillings or guineas from the debtor’s tight fists, and to make as much from a prisoner’s misfortune as was possible. Everything at the Fleet had to be purchased. The first fee that fell due was one of £1 6s 8d, payable to the prison for hosting the debtor’s stay. Beyond this, prisoners soon learned that further sums were required to secure virtually every other item or necessity, from food to bedding to writing implements, chairs or medicines. What one ate or how one slept was then determined by the amount of money or possessions a prisoner was willing to exchange for these pleasures. To simplify such matters of entitlement, the Fleet was divided into two sections: the Master’s side, for those who could spare a few shillings a week for better lodgings, and the Common side, for those who found themselves with less than five pounds in total to their names. Those on either side of the prison were squeezed incessantly for every possible ha’penny by cruel guards, who reaped a livelihood through extortion. Threats and physical violence came not only from the turnkeys but from fellow inmates. A sudden absence of resources could result in starvation, and an illness or an injury could often prove fatal without the requisite bribe to bring a surgeon. Although the inmates of Common side were made to endure the worst of the Fleet’s abuses, the prison’s proliferation of rats, fleas and lice, its gurgling pools of effluent, its virulent outbreaks of disease and insurmountable stench made no distinction between the two halves.

  Those who lived their lives in the streets surrounding the prison or who strolled down Farringdon Street could not fail to be reminded of what lay inside the ominous structure near Smithfield Market. The scabby arms of Common-side dwellers reached out through the barred windows, endlessly imploring passers-by for alms. Even the most meagre donation might have filled the void between life and death. When the delivery of alms did not prove sufficient, and having been divested of all remaining hard cash, prisoners soon learned the value of what remained to them. It was possible to buy off antagonistic cellmates and prison staff with personal possessions and even articles of clothing. It was not unknown for prisoners to barter away every last stitch of fabric and to shiver naked in exchange for the ‘privilege’ of bread. The Fleet’s handful of female inmates were usually spared from having to resort to these types of measures. Most learned quickly that the key to their survival resided between their legs.

  Due to her connections, and the fact that she hadn’t been made entirely destitute in the aftermath of Tracy’s inopportune departure, Charlotte was committed to the Master’s side of the prison. Although this would have saved her from the unrelenting misery experienced by those on the Common side, the realities of her situation were just as deeply distressing. Charlotte Hayes’s reputation as one of the ‘Great Impures’ would have caused more trouble for her than if she had been an unknown. Those greasy, disease-ridden Fleet dwellers, both guards and inmates, who could only have afforded to admire her from a distance in her silk gowns and jewels, could now demand, through physical threats, that she yield to their desires. Never would she have experienced the implications of her profession so distinctly than during her time at the Fleet. Since the date of her initiation, Charlotte’s cullies had been of her own or Mrs Ward’s selecting. As a high-priced piece of flesh, she had always exercised the freedom to refuse customers who appeared unsavoury or medically unsafe. The horrors of back-street soliciting, and the wretchedness associated with it, would have been as foreign to Charlotte as a life of chastity. In the Fleet, however, her body was subjected to anyone who might exert influence over it. Her only hope of reclaiming a degree of control would be to attach herself to a protector, someone who might defend her interests and limit the demands placed on her by the prison’s lustful predators.

  How much time elapsed before Charlotte Hayes made the acquaintance of a man who could fulfil this role, both inside the Fleet and in her life thereafter, is unknown. At some point during her three-year sentence, her path crossed that of an Irishman called Dennis O’Kelly. The relationship they forged while in prison, and the tales of the couple’s escapades carried out under the noses of the Fleet’s authorities, were to become legendary among the more dissolute circles of society.

  Charlotte and Dennis had met at a juncture in both of their lives where luck, uncharacteristically, had deserted them. Only a few years younger than her, O’Kelly, like Charlotte, had already experienced ‘all the varieties of life’. Bearing a curious similarity to W.M. Thackeray’s infamous character, Barry Lyndon, Dennis O’Kelly had been born into an impoverished family of minor landholders in Tullow, County Carlow. With no hopes of an inheritance and no prospects of furthering a career, Dennis left home for Dublin as a teenager, where some accounts of his life claim that ‘he was first introduced into bad company’. Other sources, including a posthumous publication entitled The Genuine Memoirs of Dennis O’Kelly Esq., Commonly Called Count O’Kelly, maintain that Dennis arrived in London before experiencing the seamier side of existence. Described as being ‘about five feet eleven inches high, very broad in the shoulders and equally deep chested’, with ‘legs well proportioned, and … hands finely formed by nature’, O’Kelly was able to cut a dash for himself as a sedan chairman, exerting his strength and displaying ‘the comeliness of his person’ in the exercise of heaving ladies’ chairs onto his strong back. Not surprisingly, his looks did not escape the notice of many of his female passengers, one of whom he supplied with the same services that Charlotte was offering to men. Through his amours he was able to earn a fair sum of money, which eventually allowed him to shed his servant’s ‘long coat and purchase smart clothes’, for the purpose of ‘commencing a fine gentleman’. It was at this period that Dennis ‘acquired that invincible disposition for play, which proved in the end the happy source of his good fortune’.

  O’Kelly was considered, in every sense, what the folk of the era would term ‘an adventurer’ or a ‘sharper’. His villainy was difficult to detect beneath his polished air and his fine laced coat, but his wealth was won and maintained through a fatal combination of convincing deceits and charm. Accounts vary as to how many tricks at the expense of others he was able to successfully carry out in the years before he met Charlotte. His mastery of ‘the long shuffle’, a highly orchestrated method of cheating at cards, was said to have begun at the gaming tables of ‘the polite circle’. This group was comprised in part of the same crew of indulgent young bucks who also frequented London’s billiards tables and tennis courts, where Dennis had worked as ‘a marker … and … attendant’. As with the other inhabitants of the sphere in which he now moved, the girth of O’Kelly’s purse was in a constant state of flux, and in order to dig himself out of one particularly bad round at the tables, he began to search for an expedient method of relieving his indebtedness. According to Town and Country Magazine, O’Kelly and a companion established a scheme to entrap two sisters ‘who had a thousand pounds between them’. After encouraging the ladies to enter into clandestine unions, Dennis decamped with both marriage portions, disappearing ‘to Scarborough, where he remained for some time, and appeared as a man of fashion’, gaming ‘as high as any man, according to the present etiquette of play’. With his illicit proceeds he embarked upon a tour of the country, appearing first ‘at York races,… at Bath, and all the other genteel watering places, where he behaved as well as gamesters generally do, a variety of fortune attending him and his different operations’. In later years, horrified by the indignity of his actions, Dennis took pains to sweep all vestiges of the disreputable incident under the carpet. Although he and Charlotte profusely denied the accusations as they periodically reared their heads, Dennis’s previous union may offer an explanation as to why he and Charlotte never officially married.

  Dennis O’Kelly had been gam
bling his way around Britain for roughly ten years before he met with any serious objection to his practices. By the late 1750s O’Kelly was such a master at his art that few could catch him out, although many suspected that his wins were not acquired through chance alone. One particular gentleman, a visiting officer from the American colonies who had lost his purse to Dennis at the Bedford Arms, was convinced that he had been defrauded of his fortune. In a fury, the officer marched directly over to Justice Fielding and reported the incident. According to legend, it was only through the persuasions of O’Kelly’s friend, Samuel Foote, that the charges were mitigated, enabling the cardsharp to wiggle his way out of the Tyburn nooses and land instead in the Fleet. Another account claims that Dennis’s ‘disposition for dress and play’, one which ‘far exceeded his means’, bore the responsibility for a trail of unpaid bills and receipts. Although skilled at making money, he had become shamefully adept at spending it as well, so much so that when it came time to inscribe his name into the Fleet’s committal book, it was placed under the Common side.