Georgian London: Into the Streets (32 page)

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.)

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 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.

One man who was definitely not seeking happiness was John Elwes, ‘London’s meanest man’, and possibly the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Ebeneezer Scrooge. As Marylebone grew, there was money to be made from speculative building. Portman Square, with its elegant and varied residents, was rapidly followed by Portland Place, which isn’t a square, but a street. By the 1770s, it was filled with huge and elegant terraced houses.

The land was developed using the money of the ‘vastly eccentric’ John Elwes. He was inducted into the ways of the miser at a young age by his mother, who left him £100,000 after starving herself to death through meanness. Elwes thus came under the influence of his uncle, Sir Harvey Elwes, ‘the most perfect example of human penury perhaps that ever existed’.

After inheriting his uncle’s fortune as well, he was by the age of forty an extremely rich man and increasingly eccentric; he ate ‘Game in the last state of putrefaction and meat that
walked about his plate
’, though he soon gave up luxuries such as meat. He travelled between his country houses, maintaining them as little as possible, avoiding paying the turnpike tolls and once fishing an abandoned wig out of a hedge and wearing it in London for a fortnight.

Only on building, gambling and horseflesh would he spend a penny. It was said that Portman Place ‘rose out of his pocket’ after he began building there. Elwes found this very handy, as the half-built houses meant that he didn’t have to rent anywhere to live when in London. He hauled an old maidservant around with him, as well as a few sticks of furniture. The two of them were sometimes reduced to burning the carpenter’s leftover wood shavings for warmth. His monumental meanness reached its peak when a nephew tracked him
down in a building site in Great Marlborough Street, in a state of near starvation. The maidservant was in another room, apparently dead for some days.

Upon his recovery, Elwes took an even greater interest in his building projects and became a nuisance to the workmen, often sitting on the doorsteps at dawn and waiting for them to arrive. He died, in 1786, having succumbed to dementia. Despite his wealth, he was increasingly paranoid about loss and theft and took to hiding guineas about the place and then getting up to check they were there, as well as sleeping in all his clothes in case they were stolen in the night. His legacy lived on: John Nash would call Portland Place ‘
the finest street
in London’, and incorporated it into his plans for Regent Street and Regent’s Park.

Early cricket in London tended to be based more in the east and south. It was played by a combination of schoolboys, apprentices, parish labourers and the aristocracy, and was their choice of sport in the summer. In July 1739, a match between London and Kent had an estimated 10,000 spectators, all paying 2d each.

In 1744, The Laws of Cricket were laid down by the London Cricket Club, which played at the Artillery Ground on the eastern end of the City. They set the length of the pitch at 22 yards and limited an over to four balls. The batsman was also restricted to one attempt at the ball: previously, he’d been allowed two. This had resulted in serious head injuries and even some fatalities amongst enthusiastic fielders, who would crowd the batsman on the second ball. The death of a female fielder had caused widespread criticism of the two-ball rule. As the century went on, cricket became more formal. By the later 1700s, clubs began to emerge, including the Marylebone Cricket Club and the Hambledon Club.

The Hambledon Club was formed in Hampshire and marked a turning point in English cricket employing professional players. It was also a social club, and members liked a good dinner with plenty
of toasts, which included ‘cricket’, ‘the King’ and ‘the immortal memory of madge’. The madge of immortal memory is a jocular reference to female genitalia. Hambledon must have had a joker in the pack: Thomas Paine is down as one of the attendees at a meeting, just after he had been exiled for sedition after the publication of
Rights of Man
. By the late 1790s, the Hambledon was finished. But by then the Marylebone Cricket Club had taken up the slack.