Georgian London: Into the Streets (21 page)

The theatre of late-eighteenth-century London was at its high point as an art form, filled with men and women who were household names and popular idols. The cult of celebrity had begun. In 1777, the Robin Hood Society posed the question: ‘
Whether the love of fame may be truly said to be a universal passion?’ It was carried unanimously ‘in the affirmative
’.

The Covent Garden magistrate Henry Fielding is now remembered mainly for his novel
Tom Jones
, but in 1747 he was London’s Chief Magistrate. Fielding, a colossal drinker and seditious playwright, was an odd character to make a magistrate. His assistant was his blind brother, John, who had lost his sight five years before and wore a black band across his eyes. They lived at 4 Bow Court, in the house of Thomas de Veil, the first Bow Street magistrate, and a man who believed in vigorous examination of the accused and the accuser before he committed a case to trial. The Fielding brothers learned much from him.

The Fieldings came to Bow Court at a time when London’s problems with gin were at their height. Covent Garden was riven with petty theft and prostitution. The city’s underworld was becoming more sophisticated as the trade in luxury goods grew. Fence-shops had been established since at least the 1630s, when Moll Cutpurse operated her thieves’ warehouse from Fleet Street. Cohesive social networks formed in local communities, from the professional beggars at the bottom of the heap to the highwaymen and fences at the top. Thief-takers, who had traditionally brought in criminals in return for a reward, trod a thin line regarding the law. It was a system of pardons, rewards and informers, all of which encouraged dishonesty. Henry
Fielding couldn’t stop this, but he knew its evils. He also knew that the deterrent of hanging at Tyburn wasn’t working, writing in the
Covent Garden Journal
‘
we sacrifice the lives of men, not for their reformation but for the diversion of the population’.

Fielding was sure that if he could get a group of men who had wages ‘to apply themselves entirely to the Apprehending of Robbers
’ then he could really make a difference. The Bow Street Runners were formed in 1749–50, when Henry gathered a group of Westminster constables and had them track down suspected offenders. They were then brought to Bow Street to be examined before him. If the case warranted it, the offender was committed to the criminal courts. In 1754, he was granted £200 from the Secret Service funds to run a permanent team of between six and eight officers. But by this time he was sick, most likely due to long-term alcohol abuse, and departed for Lisbon to rest. He died there two months later, and John rose to the challenge of Bow Street.

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.

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