The Covent Garden Ladies (8 page)

5

The Rise
OF
PIMP GENERAL JACK

THE SHAKESPEAR’S HEAD
Tavern, even in the early 1750s when Harrison arrived there, had been a fixture in Covent Garden for several generations. Reputed to be the first tavern in the Piazza, the Shakespear did a handsome trade and was, along with the Bedford Head Coffee House, one of the most profitable places of resort with which to be connected. This had something to do with its location in the north-eastern corner of the square, within easy stumbling distance of the two major theatres, and also with the availability of upstairs rooms. Private rooms brought gatherings of men (and sometimes women) before the establishment of fee-paying private members’ clubs. The society meetings it hosted were entirely legitimate and trumpeted openly in local papers, the most notable of these being the dinners held by the Beef-steak Society. When the rooms were not let out to society members intent on satiating themselves with beef and beer, individual patrons might be permitted to do the same with any number of Covent Garden’s luminary whores.

The crowd at the Shakespear was a mixed and boisterous one. A recognised theatrical retreat, the raucous and drunken voices of Ned Shuter, Charles Macklin and Peg Woffington could be heard there
above the din following a performance night. Aristocrats and wealthy ‘Cits’, such as William Hickey, were as conspicuous at its tables as the Garden’s least savoury element. The Shakespear was very much a no-holds-barred type of establishment, where no one asked questions and punters did as they pleased. Devoted patrons and local scions of the law, Justice Saunders Welch and the vice-busting Fielding brothers, did little to impede the activities that flourished in the more inconspicuous parts of the taproom. While enjoying their beefsteaks above stairs, they feigned blissful ignorance as to what transpired directly below their feet.

Although gambling was officially banned from Covent Garden taverns, the Shakespear hosted a Hazard Club, where large sums of money were lost and won. Some fortunate souls could be seen carrying hats filled with guineas away from its illicit gaming tables. Bucks and bloods loved the Shakespear, Boswell being among them. Taking advantage of one of the empty rooms above stairs, the author escorted two willing ladies of pleasure to the Shakespear and ‘solaced my existence with them, one after the other, according to their seniority’. Those unable to afford or too impatient to wait for a private room could easily ‘solace’ themselves in a quiet corner with one of the ‘drunken and starving Harlots’, who often complained that such ‘wanton embracing’ on the tavern floor ‘soiled their clothes’.

There were few in Covent Garden who swaggered with an air of wealth more convincing than the Shakespear’s proprietor, Packington Tomkins. His tavern had everything the Covent Garden punter desired and more: drink, women, convivial company, celebrities, gaming, and the unexpected. The Shakespear’s popularity was enormous and Tomkins’s taps never ran dry; he had one of the most extensive cellars in the area, containing ‘never less than a hundred pipes of wine’. Naturally, roaring trade made Tomkins shamefully wealthy. In addition to a house in London, he also maintained a Herefordshire estate and a private coach to shuttle him there and back at his leisure. Although the owner of a disreputable business, he was able to wipe the smudges of moral taint from his person and walk the streets of London as a convincingly respectable family man. By the end of his life he had married his daughter into the Longman family of publishers, and he died with a fortune in
excess of £20,000. Unlike the majority of the patrons of his establishment, Tomkins was exactingly shrewd, and sober-headed enough to steer clear of the gaming tables.

A booming business required an army of assistants, and to keep his ship afloat Tomkins employed seven waiters, including a head-waiter, a cellarman and a pot-boy. He also took on apprentices and ran a kitchen noted for its culinary genius. For staff at the Shakespear, it was unlikely that a better-paid position could be found in all of London. Aware of the reputation he was required to maintain, Packington Tomkins insisted that ‘each waiter was smartly dressed in his ruffles’. New recruits like John Harrison would have been granted a clothing allowance to pay for his attire in the first instance, but soon would have had pockets heavy enough with gold to purchase any number of fine shirts, coats and breeches. The handsome tips proffered at the Shakespear permitted its waiters to smile smugly. As ‘Old Twigg’, a former cook at the Shakespear, recalled, a porter ‘thought it a bad week if he did not make £7’, a sum equivalent to a domestic servant’s entire year’s wages. This, even for the son of a tavern-keeper, was likely to have been an enormous allowance. When coupled with his takings as a pimp, any appetite for wealth that Harrison may have harboured would have been well satisfied.

Under Packington Tomkins’s roof, John Harrison would have been granted the precious opportunity of starting afresh. As a waiter at a Covent Garden back-street tavern, few but the locals would have known his name and face, but at the Shakespear, in the heart of the excitement, Harrison would become a recognised character in no time at all. The Shakespear’s Head was a destination in itself, a place where men from all corners of London would have gathered for an evening’s entertainment. As a fledgling pimp, Harrison would have recognised to what degree he could expand his fortune were he to make the most of his situation. He also could not fail to see the dangers that success might bring. Although discreet bawds, waiter-pimps and panderers higher up on the rungs of the sex-trade ladder had little to fear from the easily bribed authorities, Harrison was under no illusions as to the legitimacy of his craft. In his line of work, an alias would be a necessity, a kind of cloak of invisibility that could be pulled over the eyes in an instant. So when Tomkins’s patrons bellowed for a waiter to bring them a woman, they didn’t call
for John Harrison, instead they requested the watchful, well-dressed figure known simply as ‘Jack Harris’. His father’s name, however esteemed, reviled or inconsequential it may have been, was cast off in favour of an altogether new identity. No longer Harrison the taverner’s son, he was free to become anyone.

According to the two contemporary ‘authorities’ on Jack Harris,
The Remonstrance of Harris
and
The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray
, the key to the pimp’s success was his cool, calculating manner, his powers of observation and his rational approach to his trade. Like his employer Tomkins, Harris was a savvy businessman. He came to the Shakespear well acquainted with the role of waiter-pimp and, under Tomkins’s direction, was able to play his part to perfection. Harris had already established his understanding of the several fundamental characteristics required of a good pimp or panderer. The first and foremost of these was a knowledge of how to supplicate, which necessitated an aptitude for ‘insinuating, dissembling, flattering, cringing’ and ‘fawning’. Grovelling to badly behaved young gentlemen did not suit Harris’s personality, but he found that pragmatic self-control made him better able to ‘answer the huffing questions of fiery Blades’ and to ‘deprecate ire’. Although ‘ready to burst out of my head’ with anger, he learned to fix ‘my eyes on the ground … then raise them by degrees, speaking in the winning tone of submission’. This was a difficult pill to swallow, which Harris claimed he could not have managed had he not cultivated a certain strength of character and ‘philosophy enough to bear a kicking’. His only comfort lay in the revenge he was likely to reap at the expense of his wealthy client’s purse.

Harris also found that in a larger establishment conspicuously larger requirements were made of him by patrons. A wider pool of gentlemen, comprising regulars as well as visitors from other parts of London, required a more diverse body of women to keep them amused. Harris’s knowledge of local prostitutes would have sufficed for only a short period. At a venue as well trafficked as the Shakespear, demand could quite easily outstrip supply if he was to rely solely upon the flesh on offer within the precincts of the Garden, particularly if a number of his reliable ladies might be unfit for performance due to a bout of the pox or a case of the clap. Irrespective of the quandary in which he found himself, and with no obvious solution, ‘the Bucks still rutted and called
for coolers to quench their passions’. With hindsight, Harris was able to philosophise about the matter: ‘Man is an animal of passions’, he concluded, and ‘that which is subject to its passions has no steadiness … nor can it like anything for a long time’. The answer to such a problem was obvious: ‘provide a variety of faces’. But from where? And how could he vouch for the integrity of the goods on offer, if he was unfamiliar with the history of their suppliers? To make matters worse, what if these same bucks found ‘the fountains from which they drew their refreshment to be poisoned’? Certainly ‘they would blame those who led them to it, especially if it were done purely for the love of lucre’. Even in the early years of his career, Harris was likely to have been no stranger to physical violence. Jealous lovers, angry husbands and previously healthy clients who contracted the pox were all likely to have sought him out at some point. Of all three, none could be so vicious as the last of these, a gentleman whose entire life might have been cast into the balance as the result of a hasty and lustful encounter. Here might be someone who had unwittingly infected his wife and unborn offspring, who had shortened his own existence and that of his entire lineage due to the poor advice of a pimp. It may have been a picture of this figure standing before him that inspired John Harrison’s change of identity.

Managing ‘a variety of faces’ required the cultivation of a flawless memory. A successful pimp needed a means by which this range of varied visages could be easily recalled and summoned when requested. In the case of a high-profile pimp at the Shakespear, whose reservoir was expected to be as vast as all of London, this was no easy feat. Similarly, a clever pimp would put himself in good stead with his customers if he could remember them, their preferences and which of the ladies under his care they had already sampled. Recruitment also posed a problem, and might occupy a good part of a pimp’s energy. He would be constantly on the look-out for further conscripts, bearing in mind the partialities of his better-paying clients, making mental notes of who liked fresh-faced country lasses and who liked buxom older ladies. He might be given specific projects to pursue, orders from a bored peer or rich banker to hunt down a cleaner, younger mistress. On a lesser scale, at a smaller establishment, these tasks might have seemed less daunting, but now that his playing-field had been widened, Jack Harris’s challenge
was to come to terms with the demands placed on him. If he were to master them successfully, he would make both his and Packington Tomkins’s fortune.

When Tomkins took on John Harrison, he may have known something about the Covent Garden local or he may have divined it from the glint in his eye. Harrison had more ambition than most. He was, above all else, exceedingly clever, a man who might have fared equally well as a merchant or a banker, but who by virtue of his birth found himself in a realm far below that. ‘I saw great room for an amendment in the profession of pimping’, Harris claimed and therefore ‘… set about cudgelling my brain, and soon perceived that in the State, so in our business there was wanting a system to proceed methodically’. Pimps, he complained, ‘were men of expedients, devoid of all forecast’, who only managed problems as they arose in the present. After identifying the prevailing impediments, Harris, like any adept engineer, was determined to make some changes.

Supply, it seemed to Harris, was the major obstacle to effective pimping. The answer: ‘upon an absence or defection of the established veteran troops, to bring in a fresh supply’. New recruits must be brought in regularly from other parts of town: with demand as it was at the Shakespear, he could not draw solely from the well of Covent Garden resources. In the first instance, Harris found it easy enough to ‘make excursions from the colonnades of Covent Garden to the court-end of town one day; on another into the City; on another to the Tower Hamlet, and so successively to Rotherhith, Wapping and Southwark’. There he met with the area’s local cyprians and made note of their virtues and abilities. Back at the Shakespear, he was then able to put his plan into practice. When a regular patron asked to be entertained by a new face, ‘Out I ran and sent for a Borough or Tower Hill whore to come with all the blowzed haste of a tradesman’s wife’. Then, in order to pass the time until her arrival, ‘I sat down with my gentleman, or noble cull, drank his claret, smoaked a pipe with and told him lies till I almost tired myself’. This was a scheme that worked wonders, as Harris boasted, ‘I used to dispatch my court end of the town ladies of pleasure, who with fine quality airs would make their city-culls, or country bumpkins just come to town, so happy, as nothing could be like it’.

While this worked for some, it did not please all of Harris’s clients. Complications forced him to remain inventive. As he soon discovered, much to his embarrassment, a number of his patrons did not restrict their merrymaking to Covent Garden alone. A few were prone to wandering further afield in order to sample the delights of the infamous brothels in the City and in Southwark. They were hardly gratified to find the same faces there as Harris had presented to them across town in the Garden. Moral critics and social reformers of the era often complained that women found their way into the channels of prostitution because profligate men demanded constant variety, what the pimp’s patrons might call ‘fresh game’. Harris (or the pen that spoke for him) agreed. The quest to satisfy his customers’ tastes and to replenish his stock of women seemed never-ending. There were a few tried and tested methods, which purveyors of prostitution could fall back upon in order to catch unsuspecting prey. None of these was more mythologised in the era’s stories and engravings than the lure of the register office. Like job centres, register offices contained advertisements placed by those in need of domestic servants and were frequently the first port of call for an immigrant making an entrance into London. The arrangement lent itself perfectly to the inveigling of wide-eyed country girls by pimps and bawds, posing as respectable citizens in search of housemaids. Like his competitors, Harris also claimed to have employed this method of recruitment, although he disappointedly alluded to the fact that few who came to London via this route were as virginal as his clients might have liked.