17th Century – A Drinker’s History of London

Smithfield’s Great Day

December 14, 2021December 14, 2021 by The Drinker

*Meat porters at Smithfield in the 1920s; the market was a bit less bloody by then.*

What follows is a mid-19th century description of The Great Day at Smithfield; that is, the Monday before Christmas, when the Christmas dinner was bought.

‘It presented an agitated sea of brute life. Drovers were scurrying hither and thither, carrying flaming torches in their hands, and arranging the cattle in rings and sheep in pens. The poor cattle, could not, from very want of room, be tied up in rows … In one place was a group of brown-coated Devons; in a second a group of bulky Herefords … a mass of black Scottish cattle diversified the picture in one spot; … a small number of rugged-coated monstrously horned Spanish cattle … Here, at one place, was an ox towering over all the rest, and having the reputation of weighing 300 stones; and there, at another spot, was a pig of 40 score, a weight at least equal to that of an average Smithfield ox. … The salesmen, drovers and butchers, many of them booted to the thighs, dashed in amongst the dense masses, and after incredible difficulties separated the animals sufficiently to enable the butchers to inspect them before purchasing. … Great cruelty was practised, the poor animals being goaded on the flanks and struck on the head before they could be marshalled in their proper places.‘ (Unsourced quote: I got it from Smithfield Past and Present, Forshaw and Bergstrom, Heinemann,1980.)

Thirty thousand animals, driven from all over the country (Highland cattle would have been on the road for three weeks), were crowded into a four acre space, beaten through narrow medieval streets by brutal City corporation drovers and lining the pavements with mud and shit. The fact that Smithfield was home to other trades besides butchery was a source of endless tension between the meat merchants and the other local shopkeepers, who bemoaned the mayhem of the cattle trade, the damage to their premises by rogue animals, and so on. Stray animals were constantly turning up in bizarre places, and were occasionally rescued from the Fleet or even the Thames. Contemporary newspapers covered the ‘accidents’ at Smithfield: in 1828 a woman looking in a jewellery shop window in Hatton Garden was killed by a bullock that had been goaded by a group of boys. Market days were great opportunities for pickpockets, who would sometimes attack the drovers and scare their animals, using the ensuing stampede as cover (and this is what the boys who scared that bullock may have been doing). On one day in the 1830s, there were reports of a gentleman gored by a bull in Kingsgate Street, a young lad trampled by a bullock in Long Lane, and of a rogue pig who got into a house in Turnmill Street and attempted to eat a baby. (Urban myth alert: there are other stories about a baby-eating pig that lived hereabouts, so I suggest that this latter item should be taken as a bit of period sensationalism.)

*Smithfield live market circa 1830: note the gate to St. Bart’s hospital at rear right.*

Apart from live animals causing disturbances, the chaotic conditions in which livestock was butchered lent a hellish, blood-spattered character to Smithfield’s streets. In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes the locale thus: ‘Through the filthy lanes and alleys no-one could pass without being butted by the dripping end of a quarter of beef, or smeared with the greasy carcase of a newly-slain sheep.’ An entire industry of slaughtering, flaying, rendering, dressing, tanning, soap making and tallow making was based in Smithfield, right up until the market was abolished in 1855. The district was peppered with slaughterhouses in basements, yards and even ordinary houses, unlicensed killing pits whose greasy entrances opened onto the street and into which pigs and sheep were flung to their doom. Cowcross St. was known for its knackers’ yards, each one of which would slaughter and boil down as many as sixty worn-out horses per day; this process was known in the trade as ‘melting’. Naturally, they weren’t just trading in old horses, as horse theft was endemic; a gentleman’s horse could be stolen, sold to a slaughterhouse and have its throat cut before its owner noticed it was gone. Sharp’s Alley, a meandering tributary of courts off Cowcross St., was home to Atcheler, ‘knacker to his Majesty’, alongside a ‘bladder-blower’, several cat-gut dealers, a manufacturer of cart-grease and various butchers of diseased cattle. There were furriers who specialised in rabbit and even cats’ fur, often taken from stolen cats, and who flayed the animals whilst still alive so as to preserve the quality of the pelt. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rats in Sharp’s Alley were said to be the biggest and fiercest in London.

Sarah Wise’s terrific book The Italian Boy includes a chapter on the character of Smithfield in the 1830s and mentions The Bear and Ragged Staff, a tavern that used to stand at the north-eastern side of the market, which functioned as a combination pub and slaughterhouse. Market inspectors reported finding a putrefying cow’s carcass hanging up in the doorway, prior to being transformed into the cheapest of cheap meat products: cattle feed. (Even in the 1830s there was concern that feeding any meat – let alone diseased meat – to herbivores was an outrageous practice, yet it wasn’t disallowed until after the BSE crisis in the 1980s.) The Italian Boy is the story of how ‘resurrection men’ ensured that the medical schools of early 19th-century London had a regular supply of fresh meat to work with. This loathsome trade in the dead was centred around Smithfield and the Fortune of War pub, which stood on Giltspur Street, handy for St. Bart’s hospital (and near Newgate Gaol, almost within sight of the public executions held outside the prison’s Debtors Door). Smithfield, a place of slaughter since the 1200s, had evolved its own shadow trade in human corpses. In Great Expectations, Pip calls Smithfield ‘the shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam […]’; but, like any provincial market town, the area was well-served by pubs: the index to The Italian Boy also lists The George, The King of Denmark, The Bell, The Three Tuns … hostelries where traders in flesh of all kinds could take refreshment between deals and bloodshed. And, in August, Smithfield played host to Bartholomew’s Fair, an ancient cloth fair, est. circa 1180, which functioned as an annual Londoners’ holiday. The rowdiness of Bartholomew’s Fair was celebrated by Ben Jonson in his titular play, celebrating the event as a microcosm of English society. (But that’s for another post.)

Despite the distaste of Charles Dickens and the public at large, private interests kept the live market at Smithfield going until 1855, after which it was moved a much bigger site north of Islington. The noble Victorian City Corporation buildings that comprise today’s Smithfield market constitute a (successful) bid to sanitise the consumption of animal flesh. The City Corporation suppressed Bartholomew Fair at the same time as they closed the live market; but for those who seek contemporary excitement, there’s always the nightclub Fabric, opposite the Corporation market buildings on Charterhouse St., which hosts a distinctly 21st century bacchanalia.

*Christmas display at Smithfield Market; note the illuminated crib fashioned from lard. From ‘Panoramas of Lost London’, Philip Davies, pub.: English Heritage.*

Poets, Tarts, Cheese

December 7, 2021December 7, 2021 by The Drinker

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is one of those carefully time-locked London pubs where one is invited to experience a idealised ‘heritage’ drinking experience. The Cheese was rebuilt after the Great Fire and escaped the Victorians, the Blitz and post-war redevelopment and has survived into the 21st century as an authentically preserved/recreated old London boozer. The building is genuinely old, and its basement bars may once have formed part of the crypt of a Carmelite monastery. All right, the interior is a re-creation, as the pub was burned out in World War 2, an incident caused by a careless electrician rather than the Luftwaffe. At time of writing, the only beer on offer in the Cheese is Sam Smith’s, a rather dense, tawny ale brewed in Yorkshire; its main appeal is that it is remarkably cheap, but it is perhaps no coincidence that Samuel Smith Brewery Co. currently lay claim to several other historic London pubs: these include the legendary Fitzrovia hangouts The Wheatsheaf and The Fitzroy Tavern, and The Princess Louise in High Holborn.

Y.O. Cheese has a glut of writers associated with it, from Samuel Johnson (allegedly) and Charles Dickens, up to Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. It remained a writers’ pub even in the 1980s, a hangout for those journos who still worked on Fleet Street even as the newspapers began to leave. But my focus today is the 1890s, when The Cheshire Cheese was home to The Rhymers’ Club, an austere flower of the Aesthetic movement which met in the pub from the 1890s up to 1904. The likes of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Rhys and other tremulous young men would meet once a month in a top floor room and share new poems over drinks and clay pipes. (They usually met at the Cheese, but not always; other venues, including The Cafe Royal, were sometimes used for the Club’s purpose.) The group aimed at the creation of a literary salon in the contemporary Parisian style (with Stephane Mallarme and, in particular, Paul Verlaine as their lodestars), but the decidedly mixed ability of the poet-members means that The Rhymers’ Club is remembered for its ambition rather than any lasting corporate accomplishment. But there were some real talents, notably Dowson whose great ‘Cynara’ poem made its debut before the poets of The Club in 1890. The Cheshire Cheese was where Wilde came to hear John Gray, the model for Dorian Gray and quite possibly Wilde’s lover, read some lines of verse. And it was through Rhymers’ Club member Lionel Johnson that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas, a meeting that he may have regretted later. (In Richard Ellmann’s great biography of Wilde, Douglas is described as ‘even better looking than John Gray, and even less talented.‘)

The Wilde connection has probably, retrospectively, elevated the company somewhat; visiting poet Arthur Lynch characterised the Rhymers as ‘a small assemblage of poetically pious young men’, and went on to observe that on the occasion he visited the club he felt that the only real outcasts present were himself and the waiter. And the tendency of the original members who survived past 1900 and into old age to mythologise their own pasts is glimpsed in this excerpt from the memoirs of Richard Le Gallienne, here ‘fresh from Liverpool’, describing a visit to Lionel Johnson’s rooms in Grays Inn shortly after meeting him for the first time at the Cheese:

‘I hope you drink absinthe Le Gallienne – for I have nothing else to offer you.’
Absinthe! I had just heard of it. As a drink mysteriously sophisticated and even Satanic. […] I had never tasted it then, nor has it ever been a favourite drink of mine. But in the ‘90s it was spoken of with a self-conscious sense of one’ s being desperately wicked, suggesting diabolism and nameless iniquity. Did not Paul Verlaine drink it all the time in Paris! – and Oscar Wilde and his cronies, it was darkly hinted, drank it nightly at the Café Royal.

As it happened, Johnson was Lord Alfred Douglas’s cousin and was of the view that Oscar had corrupted ‘Bosie’ a sentiment Johnson committed to verse in a poem dedicated to Wilde, To The Destroyer Of A Soul. The poem opens with the line: ‘I hate you with a necessary hate.‘ Wilde made no comment on the poem; but Johnson, who was both an alcoholic and a midget, was waspishly characterised by the great dramatist thus: ‘Every morning at 11 o’clock you can see him come out of the Café Royal and hail the first passing perambulator.’

*Richard Le Gallienne all aesthetic and hand-coloured in the 1890s.*

The Cheese was convenient for Rhymers’ Club stalwart Arthur Symons, who had digs in Fountain Court just off the Strand, rooms that Symons shared for a while with W.B. Yeats. Yeats left an account of an evening at Fountain Court when Dowson dropped in accompanied by a prostitute known in the poet’s circle as ‘Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’. She was called that because she charged more if she was fully made-up and well turned out. In Yeats’s account, ‘Penny Plain’ wearying of some insufferable bore’s pontificating, took all her clothes off and sat by the fire, unnerving the pompous ass who was holding court but delighting Dowson and his energetically heterosexual pals. She delighted in telling the young lions of her sexual adventures, one of which involved an old man whose fetish was to see her strangle a pair of pigeons, which he would bring to her in a little basket. She interspersed her anecdotes by disappearing into a bedroom with a writer or two, only Yeats and Symons refraining from sampling the delights on offer. Penny Plain must have appreciated the company: by this time many of the prostitutes who worked the Strand were wary of coming into the Temple, as they considered the resident writers and law students to be dangerous lunatics. By a charming coincidence, Symons’s next-door neighbour in Fountain Court was Henry Havelock Ellis who was at that time busy writing his pioneering study Sexual Inversion. (According to a friend of Ernest Dowson’s, Penny Plain didn’t do too badly in life; she ended up married to a rich brewing magnate.)

*Lionel Johnson: doomed, ‘Decadent’, and short.*

The Romantic ’90s, as Le Gallienne’s memoir has it, seemed to come to an abrupt end with Oscar Wilde’s arrest in 1895, followed by the deaths of many of the protagonists of London’s ‘Decadent’ or ‘Symbolist’ movement. Johnson lived just long enough to write a memorial poem for Dowson on his death in 1900, but was himself dead just two years later, dying in the most unfortunate – albeit appropriate – circumstances. Broke and seriously alcoholic, he suffered a drink-related stroke in a Fleet Street pub. By the time Ezra Pound visited the Cheese for a valedictory event in 1910, the Rhymers’ Club seemed to represent an idea of poetic expression that was totally moribund, and Pound demonstrated his modernist credentials by eating two red tulips during a recital by Yeats. In his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound satirised the elder poets associated with the pub and the Decadent scene as a whole:

For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club;

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub …

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels …

I have, in the company of a couple of other Dowson aficionados, visited the private room at the top of the Cheese where the Rhymers used to meet. No longer panelled and lit by candles, it’s just a room for hire in a pub, done out in standard 21st century catering décor. No chance of summoning the ghosts of the great dead now. You can, however, eat dinner in the ground floor grill room – where the Rhymers had their chops before adjourning to the top floor – which retains the atmosphere of 17th century inn, even if the interior is a reconstruction following the 20th century pub fire. And Samuel Smith’s should be congratulated for the sensitivity of their management of these historic pubs. The problem is that the loving restoration reinforces the sense of theme park, that creep of ‘Heritage’ (a tainted word if ever there was one) that imprisons London. The ghosts of the past are marooned amongst the tourists and the centre of town is closed off to the truly louche and experimental. The Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf can never be what they were in the 1920s and 40s; and where would The Rhymers’ Club meet today? A loft in Peckham or Dalston, probably. Except they’ve probably already moved to Margate. Or Folkestone.

London Airs

October 12, 2021October 12, 2021 by The Drinker

*Denmark St., with Centre Point looming behind, in 2015.*

I have written about old St Giles before: as a dreadful ancient slum, Victorian London’s most fearful rookery, a festering warren inhabited by the poor, according to Charles Dickens, ‘like maggots in a cheese’. Did I mention that there was once a gallows roughly where Centre Point stands now? Seems fitting, especially as the phrase ‘one for the road’ derives from the custom of halting at St Giles to give a final drink to doomed convicts en route from Newgate to execution at Tyburn. (The Bowl and The Angel are both mentioned as pubs known for this charity.) In the 1660s St Giles became notorious as point of origin for the Great Plague, and the areas woes went on and on. Crumbling, fragile Denmark St., laid out in the 1680s, still survives, squeezed by the towering 1960s bombast of Centre Point and an assortment of wind- swept plazas that form an inner-city desert. You would be hard pressed to realize it now but this bit of town was once a mecca for British popular music. The Astoria Theatre, at the northern end of the Charing Cross Rd., was one of the most important clubs for breaking rock bands until it was sacrificed on the altar of Crossrail. A few yards to the north, on the southern reaches of the Tottenham Court Road, in an Irish dancehall (The Blarney, long since bulldozed), you would once have found the pioneer psychedelic club UFO, a short-lived temple to progressive music and expanded consciousness. For a few months in 1967 you could go there on a Friday night to lose your mind to the sounds of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd or Soft Machine, who were the resident bands, and the hallucinatory light shows (pioneered by Mark Boyle, amongst others) that constituted a new form of art installation.

And you hardly need me to tell you that Denmark St. (‘London’s own Tin Pan Alley!’) used to be London’s music business quarter. In the fifties, this was the fiefdom of Larry Parnes, impresario and Svengali-figure, manager of Tommy Steele, Georgie Fame, and improbably-named singers like Billy Fury, Marty Wilde, Vince Eager, Dickie Pride, Johnny Gentle (these latter supposedly – urban myth alert – re-named by Parnes according to sexual type). Parnes was so risible that he was mocked by Muir and Norden in a famous Peter Sellers sketch, and the 1958 musical Expresso Bongo by Wolf Mankowitz (father of music photographer Gered) satirised Parnes’s domination of the contemporary pop scene. Expresso Bongo was promptly made into a film, wherein the satire was largely ditched in order to make it a star vehicle for Cliff Richard; this seems, somehow, entirely appropriate. Other local fixtures included songwriter Lionel Bart, the jingle genius Johnny Johnston (Softness is a Thing Called Comfort, Beanz Meanz Heinz, and five thousand other commercial ditties), and all the other personalities of the pre-Beatles universe. In the later sixties, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Donovan, Bowie, Hendrix all came here to record, in studios (e.g. Regent Sound, at no.4) carved out of 17th-century basements. The likes of David Bowie and Paul Simon came to schmooze publishers and hang out at the Giaconda coffee bar. Ten years later it was the turn of the phlegm-flecked protégés of Malcolm McLaren (the seventies version of Larry Parnes, plus value-added Situationist bullshit) The Sex Pistols, who rehearsed and lived here for a while. And, whilst he is unlikely to get a blue plaque, the mass-murderer Dennis Nilsen spent the early 1980s working in a jobcentre that used to be on the corner of Denmark St. and the Charing Cross Road (where, at one year’s Christmas staff party, Nilsen served his colleagues punch in a large pot he brought from his home, the same pan he used for boiling his victims’ heads).

*Barbara Windsor and Lionel Bart during dress rehearsals for ‘Twang!!’*

Wandering a bit further east from Denmark St., past Renzo Piano’s aggressively bright St. Giles Central development, you find Shaftesbury Avenue, St.Giles High St., and Bloomsbury St. converging in an unlovely funnel of tarmac. On the other side of the churning traffic lies the Shaftesbury Theatre, a crumbling Edwardian edifice stranded amidst the one-way system. The Shaftesbury is a survivor, narrowly escaping demolition in the 1970s, during the interminable run of the hippie operetta Hair, which ran from September 1968 until July 1973, when the theatre’s ceiling caved in. The owners, EMI, wanted to redevelop the site but the actor’s union Equity managed to get the building Grade 2 listed and it has since established itself as a successfully venue in a blighted location. The Shaftesbury also played a role in the downfall of local hero Lionel Bart. After rising to prominence as a writer of hits for Larry Parnes’s stable, Bart’s zenith was the celebrated musical Oliver! which opened at the New Theatre (now the Noel Coward theatre) on St Martin’s Lane in June 1960. A few years later, hubris struck as his under-prepared Robin Hood satire Twang!! – that’s two exclamation marks – had its chaotic London premiere at The Shaftesbury in December 1965. Reviews were terrible and the show closed after five weeks. Ignoring the wisdom that one should never invest your own money in your own show, Bart threw his fortune at the mess to try to keep it running and lost just about everything. At one point he sold his Oliver! copyrights to Max Bygraves for something like loose change. (As some of Oliver!‘s numbers were re-workings of old London street cries, this is another eventuality that has a pleasing inevitability about it.)

If 1840s St Giles was the ultimate in city squalor, its 21st century incarnation is the very model of a modern townscape: a sterile concrete tundra, safely contemporary, safely cheerless. Around 1900, London suffered the destruction of Wych St. and environs to create ‘new’ Aldwych and Kingsway, the loss of which it is hard to overstate. That particular act of civic philistinism didn’t just obliterate some of the prettiest streets in the capital, it cauterized life on the streets – which is exactly what it was intended to do, removing ‘unwholesome’ theatres and booksellers and erasing one of London’s cultural centres. The destruction of the area around Denmark Street is the contemporary equivalent. How do we characterise it? A few years ago, I saw chalked graffiti on the hoarding in front of the remains of the 12 Bar club that summed it up …

(Speaking of the Shaftesbury Theatre, there used to be a strange wine bar beneath it, The Grapes, which boasted an Escher-drawing of an interior and small, inadequate tables. It is now another branch of the London Cocktail Club. Some years ago I got into trouble there in a memorable episode which I describe here. A cautionary tale of sorts.)