Georgian London: Into the Streets (28 page)

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, designing 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.

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’.

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 dark, 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.

Initially, the leisured classes were drawn east to spend their money in the warehouses of the City, but shops soon spread along the smarter streets of Mayfair. Old Bond Street was established as early as 1696, and building began on the second section twenty years later. The
Weekly Journal
of 1 June 1717 recorded: ‘The new buildings between Bond Street and Mary-le-bone go on with all possible diligence, and the houses even let and sell before they are built.’ As Old Bond Street met New Bond Street across the open field known as Conduit Mead, the newer part became a haven for shopping and other activities of the fashionable rich.

The shops and establishments along Bond Street and Oxford Street reflected the sudden variety of pastimes and material goods available to those with money. Along the latter, hackney carriages waited for shoppers. At night the street was brightly lit with lamps,
and shops stayed open until midnight. On Bond Street, art galleries, hairdressers, tailors, jewellers, a veterinary surgeon, music shops, an opera ticket shop, hatters, print- and booksellers, as well as a lending library and a bathhouse called Culverwell’s, were all ready to take your money. In addition there were ordinary shops selling clothes, boots, gloves and ribbons. Hotels and eating houses sprang up to cater for those who were weary.

The rooms above the shops provided cheap lodgings and the perfect place for writers and other artists to be close to their patrons. In 1768, Laurence Sterne – the cheeky Irish priest, author of
Tristram Shandy
and friend to David Garrick and Elizabeth Montagu – died, aged fifty-four, in his lodgings on the west side above the ‘
silk-bag shop’. He was suffering from consumption and had just returned from a tiring journey. ‘In vain did the female attendant, a lodging-house servant, chafe his cold feet, in order to restore his circulation. He complained that the cold came up higher, and he died without a groan
.’

Other lodgers on Bond Street included the extraordinary Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford (1775–1804). Born in Boconnoc, Cornwall, to wealthy parents, at six years old he was listed on the books of HMS
Tobago
as the captain’s servant. Whether HMS
Tobago
was a threat, a promise, or even whether Thomas truly went to sea at six is unclear. He was certainly at sea in 1790 when, aged fourteen, he helped his commander guide the
Guardian
into Table Bay, Cape Town, after the ship hit an iceberg and the crew deserted.

In 1791, Thomas joined HMS
Discovery
as an able seaman rather than an officer. They were destined for the exploratory Vancouver Expedition to Canada, headed up by Captain George Vancouver. On the journey Thomas was flogged repeatedly for insubordination and general high jinks, but particularly for trying, aged sixteen, to win the favours of a local girl in Tahiti using a piece of broken iron from a barrel. Vancouver had him punished and, in the end, clapped Thomas in irons to try to control the boy. Aboard ship, he was regarded as one of the men. So it came as something of a surprise when, in 1793, his father died and he was called home to take over the helm of the estate. He didn’t rush back, serving instead on a series of ships before finally getting back to London in 1796.