Georgian London: Into the Streets (7 page)

Those further down the currency chain often turned to coin clipping. The edges of Britain’s modern coins are milled to prevent this
crafty exercise, but in the early Georgian period plenty of old, worn coins were swimming about in the system, their fine edges ripe for trimming and polishing back up. It was so prevalent that fakers even clipped their forgeries to make them appear more convincing. Coin clipping allowed poor but daring people to build up enough shavings to take to a smelter and have changed for money. The smelter had to be in on the act, but he was just another component of a complicated network, with one foot either side of the law. Coinage offences were taken very seriously by the courts: women caught clipping were supposed to be burned, and the men were hanged (although this wasn’t regularly enforced).

With so many fakes and devalued coins around, it was no wonder William III decided, in 1696, to give English money a makeover through recoinage, effectively revaluing the pound. Anticipating the demands of recoinage upon available bullion reserves, the Bank of England decided it needed to appoint ‘
a fit person
who understands gold and silver’. That man was Moses Mocatta, a partner in the firm Mocatta and Goldsmid. Moses Mocatta and his family worshipped at the Bevis Marks Synagogue and had strong ties with the Amsterdam bullion community. He established a repository near the Bank, known only as ‘The Warehouse’, where vast quantities of gold and silver bullion were kept. The early bullion trade was supplemented by the issuing of promissory notes, which were an instant and somewhat alarming success. Because Bank of England notes were payable instantly upon presentation and because the Bank’s credit was so good, Bank of England notes became an easy target for forgers. In 1724, the Bank thought it had found a solution. The Huguenot Henry Portal made high-grade paper at Bere Mill in Hampshire. This paper, when watermarked, was very hard to fake. The Bank began printing large numbers of notes for fixed sums, whereas previously they had been filled out for the sum specified by the customer. In 1725, the first modern banknotes appeared. The Portals still make the paper for all English banknotes.

The commissioning of the new banknotes came when the Bank was formalizing its structure. It became clear that the Bank needed both consolidating and securing; in the late 1780s, Sir John Soane was
appointed as the architect of a new building in the Classical style. From then until 1833, the Bank was slowly transformed into an enormous strongroom.

This transformation was both symbolic and real: the Bank had become a vast and wealthy institution, on its guard against theft and fraud. Clever forgers had caught up, and were making copies of the Portal banknotes. Many were caught, including Mary England. She and her husband, James, were arrested in January 1814 for circulating forged Bank of England notes. The penalty for forgery itself was death, but the Bank decided not to prosecute James for forgery. He promptly skipped out and boarded a ship. Mary was left, with her four children, facing prosecution for possessing forged notes. She was tried at the Old Bailey in February, and was sentenced to be transported for fourteen years. They were confined to Newgate Prison until the ship was full enough with other prisoners to sail.

By April, she had pawned all the family’s clothes and, in desperation, she wrote to the Bank, asking to be excused for troubling them, but: ‘
I have Been so Unfortunate
as to be in Newgate on Account of the Bank Business’. The Bank sent her an allowance of 10s 6d per week until she was transported. She applied to the Bank again, from on board the convict ship
Northampton
sitting at Deptford, asking for a lump sum for her family’s new life. Her letters are annotated by a bank employee: ‘Mr Kaye to pay her ten pounds.’ Mary signed for the money on board ship four days later, and the
Northampton
left England soon after that. That the Bank of England took pity on her reveals the complex attitudes to philanthropy and wealth during the Georgian period.

The change of the Bank of England from early modern money warehouse to a financial temple began both from within and without. Sadly, little of Soane’s original exists today. It was largely demolished in the 1930s, when Herbert Baker was charged with bringing the buildings up to date. The destruction of Soane’s work was described by Nikolaus Pevsner as an ‘
architectural crime
’. The Bank of England, dealer in money, looks south across the road to the Royal Exchange. Since Thomas Gresham built the Exchange in 1565, it had housed London’s trade in commodities and was where native
and foreign merchants gathered to conduct their business. Their trade was based on real commodities – such as spices, cloths, furs and gold – but things were changing. Just as the Bank of England became a reality in 1694, others, in the small coffee houses of Exchange Alley on the south side of the Royal Exchange, were starting to deal in what would become known as ‘stocks’ and ‘shares’.

The elite cabal of the Bank of England had opened a book in Mercers’ Hall for ordinary Londoners who wanted to invest. Investment was becoming increasingly appealing to the emerging middle classes who, for the first time, due to international trade and the boom in the City were finding themselves with spare cash. The rise in newspapers meant foreign and financial news was more easily circulated, and in London a particular type of venue hosted a class of men on the make: coffee houses.

Coffee houses were as numerous in Georgian London as they are now. They were places for men to gather and obtain news. Then, as now, many business meetings were conducted there. Coffee, although condemned initially as ‘
Mahometan gruel’, suited their purpose better than wine, as it did not dull the senses. Although alcohol was available at most coffee houses, the atmosphere was one of professional sobriety. The ‘Turkey merchants’ had long been familiar with coffee, having been given it on their trips abroad, where it was served by their hosts ‘in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it; black as Soot and tasting not unlike it
’. The purging nature of hot, strong coffee was soon seized upon by London’s quack health writers and in no time at all it was used to cure anything from the gout to period pain. Its stimulating effects were purported to sharpen the brain for commerce.

London’s first coffee house was opened in 1652, in a shed on St Michael’s Alley, by Pasqua Rosée, a Greek born in Sicily who had come to London as a servant. In the same year he published an advertising flyer,
The Vertue of the Coffee Drink
, advertising his coffee as ‘a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an
oven and ground to powder and boiled up with spring water’. Rosée asserted coffee had medicinal benefits, but it also gave imbibers the advantage of staying sober during business hours. His shed became known as The Turk’s Head, owing to his dark appearance and the fact that he used his own likeness as the shop sign. More coffee houses were springing up in the area; by the time Rosée disappeared from London in uncertain circumstances, coffee houses were part of the street scenery, even if they weren’t welcomed by everyone. One early coffee house proprietor, John Farr, was prosecuted by his neighbour because his business created an offensive smell, but by 1663 there were 83 licensed coffee houses in London, almost all of them near the Royal Exchange. They tended to specialize in a clientele with particular commercial interests in the Baltic or Levantine trade; they would carry the pertinent newspapers, and write up on chalkboards the news of ships about to dock or depart.
Just how important
these coffee houses were to City trade is seen in their rapid spread: almost 500 of them had appeared by the time George I was crowned in 1714.

The coffee houses represented an important mixture of common business and intellectual interests, sobriety and socializing. A large selection of newspapers were part of coffee house culture from the start, and thus patrons could keep up with all the latest domestic and foreign happenings. The papers were often complemented by a small selection of books, such as that offered by Walsal ‘
the Coffee-man against Cree-Church in Leaden-hall-Street’ who kept ‘a Library in his Coffee-Room for his Customers to read
’. Sometimes the library was run by the coffee house owner’s wife; these collections became some of the first lending libraries in London. Thus with their themed interests, their emphasis on business and their congenial surroundings, the coffee houses became an acceptable place for men of almost every culture and faith to be seen in, particularly those who otherwise would not venture into taverns or alehouses.

By 1690, there were at least 100 companies selling stocks that were traded in London. Their value fluctuated according to the news that came and went along the international information routes: the ships coming and going from London’s docks. News of lost cargoes, huge hauls, diseased crews and delays for repair were brought back by
thousands of vessels, both large and small. The coffee houses employed boys to go to the mouth of the Thames, wait for news and watch for ships. Then they would report back their findings, which would be displayed on a board behind the bar. Entry to the coffee house cost a penny, with the coffee, newspapers and current news included. Suddenly, literacy came to mean not only an increased chance of employment but also the ability to grasp fleeting opportunities from information displayed in the coffee houses. The entrepreneurial self-improving men the coffee houses attracted resulted in these establishments being nicknamed ‘Penny Universities’.

Investment trading suffered an early setback with the great fiasco of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which changed the nation’s attitude to investing in stocks for the rest of the Georgian period. The South Sea Company was founded in 1711 and operated using money from government bonds. These bonds paid a low return, so Robert Harley, the Lord Treasurer, offered to exchange the government bonds for stock in the South Sea Company. This would then give a greater return, as the company was operating so profitably.

In 1719, the South Sea Company wished to purchase more of the government debt, and so the company issued more shares for this purpose. To get people to buy the shares, agents were sent out amongst the traders in the coffee houses of Exchange Alley, spreading rumours of massive trading opportunities in the South Seas, with huge profits to be had. The names of prominent politicians who already held shares were freely circulated. The share price shot up from £128 in January to £550 at the end of May. In June, the government passed the Joint Stock Act to regulate the formation of such companies, but this only gave further impetus to the galloping rise in the already established South Sea Company, with the share price nearing £1,000 in August.

It couldn’t last, and the sheer volume of selling triggered a fall which snowballed into a crash. By the time the year was out, the price was back down to near its original level. Many were ruined. Ordinary Londoners came to fear the trade in stocks, often preferring to buy a ticket for the increasingly popular public and private lotteries instead. The instability of the market became the subject of
cartoons, songs and popular literature, and stockbrokers, known as ‘jobbers’, came to be seen as shady and unreliable.

Yet Londoners had got a taste for investment, and throughout the century the coffee houses remained centres of specific trades. Lloyd’s coffee house on Tower Street was a place where shipping merchants discussed insurance for their ships and cargoes. Soon the insurance deals began to dominate, and what had started in the coffee house became the Lloyd’s of London Insurance Market, finally moving to the Royal Exchange in 1774 as the Society of Lloyd’s. Jonathan’s, perhaps the most famous of all the London coffee houses, was opened by Jonathan Miles in 1680 and became one of the leading coffee houses for men who speculated in stocks and shares. Along with Garraway’s, it was frequented by City businessmen, although the ‘quality’ was thought to be better at the latter. John Castaing, a Huguenot broker who spent a lot of time at Jonathan’s, began to write up stock prices, bullion prices and exchange rates in 1698, publishing the sheet on Tuesdays and Fridays as
The Course of Exchange and Other Things
. Castaing’s prices were relied upon by many of the coffee houses in the City. His exchange rate was commonly used, and the publication continued for almost a century. Jonathan’s coffee house burned down in 1748, ending an era. A new Jonathan’s was built without delay, supported by various brokers, and soon took on the name of the Stocks Exchange. The coffee house was close to the site of London’s original livestock market, the Stocks Market. The two were soon combined, and the London Stock Market was born, where many a man traded ‘
whose great ambition
is to ride over others, in order to which, he resolves to win the horse, or lose the saddle’.

As the City moved increasingly towards its modern identity, one corner of it remained obstinately ancient. The Tower of London, sitting right on the eastern edge of the City for centuries, was still a political prison and an armoury. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was also a popular tourist destination. Occasionally
it housed political prisoners, but by the seventeenth century it was already a valuable income-generating attraction.

It was traditional for foreign dignitaries to make gifts of the exotic creatures of their kingdoms to the countries they visited. Britain acquired a polar bear from Norway in 1252. He was at first allowed to roam about the Tower of London, but when he became huge his keeper was given a muzzle and a chain and they were sent to spend their days outside, fishing and bathing in the Thames, apparently happy in each other’s company. By the time England had begun to squabble over a fair proportion of the globe under Elizabeth I, the animals were arriving thick and fast, with some, at times, being quartered in the empty moat. Elizabeth improved the menagerie and had it opened to the public on high days and holidays. In 1603, James I overhauled the menagerie again, providing much larger cages for the animals, and running water ‘
for the Lyons to drinke and wasche themselves in’. He also installed a viewing gallery so that visitors could look down upon them in safety.