The Covent Garden Ladies (10 page)

Organising and maintaining his empire was only one aspect of Jack Harris’s enterprise. Reaping the financial harvest was the other side. True to Harris’s style, there was an observed protocol for this as well. Like all pimps, Harris displayed an acute talent for making money by every possible means. From the moment a woman’s name was entered into his list, to the moment a punter demanded her presence, and once again after she had performed the required services, Jack Harris was there to collect his share of the profits.

Fanny Murray’s
Memoirs
provide an insightful glimpse behind the curtains of Harris’s operation. According to the author, the enrolment
‘upon his parchment list as a new face’ was subject to a certain degree of ceremony. Having no cause to trust his votaries of Venus (as they undoubtedly did not trust him), Harris insisted that they undergo an examination by a medical practitioner before he accepted them into his corps of ladies. Only after ‘a surgeon’ undertook ‘a complete examination of her person … to report her well or ill’, did Harris then call upon ‘a lawyer to ingross her name, etc. after having signed a written agreement to forfeit twenty pounds, if she gave the wrong information concerning the state of her health in every particular’. Once satisfied that his conscript was clean, the pimp would have ‘her name … ingrossed upon a whole skin of parchment’. With room provided for the exercise of poetic licence, the author of the memoirs claims that the handwritten entry would have then read something like:

Name: Fanny Murray

Condition: Perfectly sound in wind and limb

Description: A fine brown girl
¹
, rising nineteen years next season. A good side-box piece
²
– will shew well in the flesh market – wear well – may be put off for a virgin any time these twelve months
³
– never common this side of Temple-Bar, but for six months
⁴
. Fit for high keeping with a Jew merchant. – N.B. a good praemium from dittos
⁵
– Then the run of the house – and if she keeps out of the Lock
⁶
, may make her fortune, and ruin half the men in town.

Place of Abode: The first floor at Mrs.—’s, milliner at Charing Cross.

The twenty-pound bond, taken as a security of her health, was only the first fee of many that Harris’s ladies would find themselves owing to their pimp. ‘Poundage is the pimp’s long established tax of five shillings out of every guinea (The Sportsman’s pound) which pretty ladies receive for favours granted to gentlemen’, the pen that spoke for Jack Harris wrote. It was standard practice for Harris’s ladies to clear their debt with their pimp each Sunday evening when they convened in Covent Garden. At that point they might also find themselves reaching into their purses to provide him with what was referred to as ‘Tire-money’. ‘Tire-money’, Harris explained, ‘is what I make the ladies pay for equipping them with all the necessaries fit to appear in. There are
other folks in the town who do the same and are called tally-people, but they can shew nothing like my wardrobe.’ The unfortunate girls who fell for the enticement of being permitted to don lavish clothing would have been hit hardest by this tax. Along with the bawd or pimp’s percentage, this method of exacting money from a prostitute was one of the oldest. As any recent recruit would most likely have fallen upon hard times in order to have consented to her new profession, it was unlikely that she possessed a store of clothing appropriate for attracting men to her side. Fine gowns, lace cuffs, dainty hats with ribbons and shoes with glittering buckles were given to a young lady as she was pushed out of the door to solicit business. Nothing more would be said about the ‘gift’ made to her, until her procuress or pimp asked for their weekly percentage and the young woman found that she had been charged for the hire of her clothing. Frequently, this left a girl with virtually nothing to show for her unpleasant labour, as Fanny Murray learned ‘by the end of the week she had picked up five pounds, ten shillings and sixpence’ but after she had paid her dues ‘she was sixpence in pocket’. This finely honed programme of fleecing did not end with charging tire-money. Harris managed to squeeze one final fee out of his wretched volunteers. After the pimp’s dues had been paid on Sunday, many of Harris’s ladies would choose to meet for a night of drinking. Officially they had dubbed themselves the Whore’s Club, in imitation of many of the male drinking and dining clubs that frequently met in the taverns and coffee houses around Covent Garden. Like any society, the members of the Whore’s Club also were liable to pay dues and, in this case, women were asked to spare a half crown. While one shilling of this sum was ‘applied to the support of such members as may be under a course of physic, and not fit for business, or can not get into the Lock’, yet another sixpence went ‘to the use of our negotiator for his great care and assiduity in the proper conducting of this worthy society’. The remaining shilling, not undeservedly, was ‘to be spent on liquor’.

Although it may appear as if the prostitute was in receipt of the sharp end of Harris’s stick, a thought should be spared for the punter whose purse was also bled to the point of exhaustion. An intoxicated man at the mercy of his erection was a procurer’s dream. Pimps and bawds invented
seemingly limitless schemes designed to part desperate men with handfuls of their cash. While his prostitutes were charged poundage and tire-money, their cullies were subject to paying chair-money:

Chair-money, is when I charge a chair for a girl who had been in the house [the tavern] when called for; or living not far off, walked to the house: or when there is a necessity from the badness of the weather of coming in a chair, to charge double the fare, saying that the lady, a kept mistress, lives a great way off, at Berkeley Square.

If this was an additional charge that could be tacked on to straightforward requests for women whose names appeared on his list, a man who demanded the services of a more exclusive cyprian might find himself an unwitting donor to what Jack Harris referred to as his ‘humming fund’:

The humming fund is when we pretend to a rich cull, the mighty difficulty there will be to get such a girl for him, who is a kept mistress; or one that will grant her favours only where she likes – we bleed him from time to time of a few guineas; now giving hopes, now diffident of success. We play him off a thousand ways, and at last stipulate in the lady’s name for a good round sum to be paid ere the consent …

It was a practised trick of pimp and prostitute to then conspire in an attempt to eke even more money out of the client. If a customer began to betray a certain partiality for a lady, it might be arranged that:

After a night or two’s cohabitation, off she goes in some pretend pique and retires; no-body knows where. Then we are employed to find her out – But … we advise him to think no more of her – which advice whets his desire the more, till he decides he will have her at any rate.

Having played directly into the pimp’s hands, Harris then closes in for the ultimate clinch: he informs his client that his inamorata has been located, but that restoring her to him will cost not only a cash fee of ‘30 pounds or so’, but that she will only agree to the reconciliation on the condition that ‘he make gifts of trinkets, etc … to her’. Naturally, the
pimp will save the cully the bother of making such purchases, if he would be so kind as to simply hand over the money.

The range of ploys used to extract money from punters varied from pimp to pimp and from tavern to tavern. Casanova, who was doing the rounds in London in 1764, complained bitterly of his treatment by a waiter at the Star Tavern in the Strand. The great lover had called for a woman, and much to his frustration learned that he must pay a shilling for each one he viewed, whether he chose her for his bedfellow or not. The pimp marched a string of unappealing whores by him, leaving the most attractive until the very end. Twenty shillings later, and still without a woman to show for it, Casanova left in a huff. If Casanova were one of Jack Harris’s clients, there would still be no guarantee that the lady he elected to accompany him above stairs would perform her duties undisturbed. In order to screw the maximum profit out of a prostitute’s company, Harris regularly double-booked his ladies; he referred to the practice as arranging ‘a Flier’. He was loath to turn away any request for one of his women, especially if a punter had asked for her by name. Although engaged in the act with another man, Harris would coyly interrupt the couple and ‘Tell Miss a lady wants to speak with her in another room. Those who are ignorant of the tricks of the town, let her go.’ The whore smoothes her skirts, adjusts her hair and enters the next room, where her eager paramour awaits. A quick sexual interlude follows and she once again ‘returns to her company as demure as if nothing had happened’. This, Harris conceded, could prove to be a rather fraught manoeuvre as the girl ran the risk of contracting the pox from lover number two and passing it straight on to lover number one. ‘Thus’, he explained, ‘a girl who has often come clean into company, by these short digressions gets herself infected’.

Systems, procedures and regimentation were the order of Jack Harris’s ever-expanding empire. Like a true
imperial ruler, he also ensured that his subjects lived by an established code. Laxity in his leadership, Harris would have learned, was a sure path to the encouragement of trouble. There was to be no indulgence of his listed ladies’ personal difficulties, and no transgressions of behaviour would be tolerated. Although Harris (or Harris’s literary interpreter) never mentions that he resorted to violence in order to enforce his authority, other punishments could be implemented just as effectively. Harris recognised that if a woman was ‘struck off his list’, she had little chance of ‘repairing her fortune’. A good many of Jack Harris’s ladies were a mere cut above the lowest of the low: the destitute streetwalkers whom Tobias Smollett describes as ‘naked wretches reduced to rags and filth’, who ‘huddled together like swine in the corner of a dark alley’. A thrust down the stairs, from being a listed prostitute to a friendless pariah, required only the blackening of a woman’s healthy reputation. Unfortunately, it did not take much to incur Harris’s wrath. All a woman need do was to lie. More than anything, Harris would not stand for being ‘bilked’, or cheated out of his percentage. The repercussions for this were severe. The ruthless pimp erased her name from his list and ‘whenever after she is called for by any company, we say she is down in a salivation and so stop the channel of her commerce, – many have starved in consequence, which was a necessary expedient in
terrorem
for others, to make them behave honest’. According to the author of Harris’s
Remonstrance
, a similar fate awaited those who might refuse to share his bed if he desired their services for the night.

The knowledge that Harris’s Covent Garden ladies were, for the most part, exposed to any whim their pimp might impose upon them might very well have been the impetus behind the creation of the Whore’s Club. Whether or not this was a tongue-in-cheek invention of the brains behind Fanny Murray’s
Memoirs
, it seems likely that listed prostitutes would under the circumstances band together for companionship and protection, just as their streetwalking counterparts were known to do. Not surprisingly, the roll of club rules appears to indicate that the society’s immediate function was the intoxication of its members, but its more enduring design was to raise support for the sisterhood.

By definition, the only women who qualified for membership were those who were ‘upon the negociator Harris’s list; and never have incurred the penalty of being erased therefrom; either on account of not paying poundage, making proper returns of her health, or any other cause whatever’. It further stipulated that: ‘No member of this society must have been in Bridewell above once’ and that ‘Any member of this society that may have been tried at the Old Bailey, for any crime except picking of pockets shall not be objected re-instating, if acquitted, upon condition that she did not plead her belly’.

One can imagine the Shakespear’s Head on a Sunday evening, perhaps the only slow night of the week. It was a time where Harris’s ladies might be able to enjoy something resembling a night off from their normal travails. Some arrived by chair, lowered to the ground with grace. Others arrived half-inebriated, leaving a trail of gin behind them. As they greeted one another, gossiping excitedly, expostulating, embracing, the handful of drinkers raised their eyes to watch a flutter of cheap silk and lace caps disappear above stairs. Before the hard drinking began in earnest, any serious business would be addressed. Principally, this would relate to raising financial support for those who found themselves in prison or who suffered with the pox. This fund was amassed through club dues, and also through nominal donations made by members who became ‘modest’ women ‘by going into keeping’. The Whore’s Club anticipated generosity in this case, insisting that the money given be ‘in proportion to her settlement allowance’. Once the business was dispatched, the fun could begin.

In spite of being foul-mouthed, tipple-loving prostitutes, the club rules recognised that a certain degree of civility and decorum should prevail. Evidently the meetings (not unlike those held by men’s clubs) degenerated somewhat by the end of the evening. There were, however, rules in place to deal with any unfortunate alcohol-related mishaps. It was established that if ‘any member by an overcharge of liquor, should in clearing her stomach, spoil any other member’s cloaths, she shall be obliged to take the same off her hands, and furnish her with new ones, or in some other manner compensate the damages’. Penalties were also exacted from those who broke ‘glasses, bottles, etc. or behave[d] in a riotous manner’ and for others ‘not able to walk’ at the end of the meeting. Throughout, Jack Harris would have kept an eye on the proceedings, periodically tugging at the sleeves of those whose names had been called from down below.