Suggs and the City: Journeys Through Disappearing London (14 page)

Mrs White’s soon acquired a racy reputation as ‘the common rendezvous of infamous sharpers and noble cullies’. A cully, my dictionary informs me, was someone ‘easily deceived, tricked or imposed on’. The sharpers, we can presume, were undertaking the deceiving and tricking. It was a meeting place for men of the world to swap stories and debate politics, or to buy tickets for the nearby Royal Drury Lane Theatre. Over the years it evolved into a fully fledged gentlemen’s club, before moving to its current premises in 1778, the very year that Brummell was born.

The members of White’s weren’t only there for the chocolate. They also came to gossip, read the papers, smoke their pipes and partake of a little light lunch. As a matter of pure research, you understand, and not at all because of White’s extremely extensive wine cellar, I recently arranged to have lunch at this venerable institution with my brother-in-law, Keith, and an old pal, Rupert, who is a member, in order to experience an environment that has barely changed since Beau and chums came in for their afternoon constitutionals.

I would have done well to have spent a little time moiling with my neckcloth, as my first faux pas as I enter the mahogany-lined portals is a lack of tie, a problem that’s hastily attended to as two wooden boxes are politely proffered by the doorman, each containing an array of ties carefully graded through a rainbow of colour to suit any outfit. I select a suitable navy-blue tie to set off my Prince of Wales two-piece, and we make our way up the stairs and into the impressive dining room. It has huge windows running along St James’s that give the room a lovely and rather magical light which reflects evenly from an enormous arched ceiling running the length of the room, which was apparently the template for all future gentlemen’s clubs.

We are a little late and the place is already packed with other diners. As a consequence, we miss out on the best tables lining the windows and have to take our place at the members’ table towards the back of the dining room instead. This consists of a long table of 14 place settings and we arrange ourselves at one end. We have barely started our first course, smoked eel in my case (not a wobble of jelly in sight), and are taking inaugural and appreciative sips of the house Macon, when a rather jolly-looking gentleman in a pink bow tie makes a beeline for our end of the table and proceeds to sit down next to us. Given the generous dimensions of the dining table, this feels rather like it does on the top deck of an empty bus when a stranger makes it his business to sit right next to you. But this is the form on the members’ table. If a lone member feels like a chat, he can sit right next to you, if not he’ll leave a place or two between. Our companion’s body language suggests he’s definitely in a Michael Parkinson mood.

Halfway through a bottle of superior claret and the second course underway (a plump roast grouse with bread sauce), conviviality is soaring. Not least at the sight of Keith nearly falling off his chair at the length and affordability of the wine list. The light is fading as we reach the cheese course, and a group of octogenarian dukes opposite are finishing a bottle of port in silhouetted silence. Bill settled and feeling replete, we are heading back down the grand stairs and out into Piccadilly. But I can’t leave without having a little peek at White’s famous bow window. This was installed sometime around 1811, when Beau was in his pomp, and it rapidly became a prime spot for the club’s top dogs to sit and display themselves for the delight and titillation of the passing public - and Beau hogged it more than most. And although I doubt you would have seen any 14-year-old punk bands in Beau’s club of choice, there was certainly plenty of youthful recklessness among the sharpers and cullies in his company.

According to club legend, a good friend of Brummell, a certain Lord Alvanley, once bet three grand on which of two raindrops would roll down a pane of the bow window first. For sheer scale and recklessness, his bet certainly beats my occasional flutters on the horses. When you realise that back in the early 1800s three grand was roughly the equivalent of £200,000 in today’s money, you can see why he was more than a little disappointed when the two competing raindrops conspired to merge halfway through their descent, thus making the bet null and void.

In Beau’s day, it’s said that Londoners in search of some free entertainment would gather outside the bow window hoping to catch a glimpse of him or his pals in all their elegant finery. I stand there for some time and can only conclude that a little light drizzle has deterred the crowds from gathering to check out the cut of my strides.

If Beau fancied something a little stronger than hot chocolate, he could have given White’s a miss and headed further down the street to Berry Bros, another remarkable eighteenth-century survivor, based at 3 St James’s Street. Berry Bros & Rudd, to give it its full name, must be one of the oldest shops anywhere in the world, with a lineage which they can trace back all the way to 1698, when a grocer’s shop called the Coffee Mill was opened here by a certain Widow Bourne. The front of the shop today - with its row of elegantly glazed windows, dark paintwork and rich golden lettering - can hardly have changed since the early years. The sign which hangs above the entrance, depicting an old-fashioned coffee-bean grinder, is a reminder that this place was once more famous for its coffee than its claret. But all that had changed by 1810 when, having passed through a succession of proprietors, the shop changed its name to reflect a change of owner. George Berry - son of a wine merchant from Exeter - was the first of eight generations of the Berry family to work in the shop, a tradition which continues to this day. George would have been the man who welcomed Beau into the premises when he first came calling.

I don’t know if he bought his boot-polishing champagne from here, but if he did he would have been spoilt for choice: Berry Bros stocks some of the finest wines known to man, all stored in a network of underground cellars which stretches right up to the precincts of St James’s Palace. It’s said that there was once a secret passageway linking the palace itself to the shop, making it possible for lascivious royals to slip out of the palace and indulge in whatever they fancied without fear of detection. I’m assured this passageway has long since been bricked up, not that I can imagine any of the present-day Windsors ever feeling the urge to use such a cut-through in any case. Perish the thought. You don’t need to descend to the cellars to see another of Berry Bros’ most famous objects, a huge set of scales which were once used to weigh coffee, but which have also traditionally been used to weigh the customers. Just think how useful it would be to have a speak-your-weight machine in your local off-licence, right next to the crisps and peanuts. You’d save a fortune on snacks.

My wife Anne very kindly bought me and my mate Tony two places at a wine-tasting at Berry Bros as a birthday present last year. Yes, brothers and sisters, all once again in the name of research, I went just so that you too can share the experience without actually having to suffer the ghastly ordeal.

We descended to the first level of cellar, to be greeted by five or six rows of trestle tables facing a small desk and an audiovisual set up. Each place-setting had arranged before it eight glasses of red wine in two rows of four, from the relatively affordable to the fabulous and enormously expensive, going from left to right. A jolly and extremely knowledgeable wine merchant from the firm then proceeded, very entertainingly, to take us through the finer points of Bordeaux wine. It was all going swimmingly. Tony and I eschewed the spittoon and were savouring some very fine wines. Judging by the level of questions coming from the floor, there were some serious people in the room. What wines to lay down, the different
terroir
and the effect of close proximity to water - you name it, we covered it. As the various geographical and topographical charts were flashed across the screen, Tony and I were holding our own and keeping up with the notes in our information pack.

About halfway through the event, while we were discussing the subject of gravel, I think, Tony noticed that the two people either side of us hadn’t turned up and that their gleaming rows of glasses were unattended. Checking his notes, he realised we were heading towards some very marvellous - and in some cases thousand-pound-a-bottle - glasses of wine. He decided it would be a waste if he didn’t swap one of his slightly inferior glasses for one of the top-end glasses belonging to his vacant neighbour. These were the wines that even the merchant wasn’t spitting out.

I followed suit and soon we were slightly out of kilter with the rest of the class. While subtlety of nose and notes in the flavour were being discussed, we were three or four wines ahead and, needless to say, my notes were getting in a bit of a tangle, as was my head. I looked down to see the word ‘GRAVEL’ written on my pad in capital letters, and that was the last serious contribution to my information pack.

The lecture wound down and as we had a 15-minute break before lunch, I took it upon myself to head for the surface and some fresh air. Feeling more than slightly light-headed, I checked my phone for messages and - ping! ping! ping! - three from my agent. ‘You haven’t forgotten your voiceover in an hour . . . half an hour . . . fifteen minutes?’ Voiceover? What voiceover? I called her. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘Er, no,’ was all I could reply. I had ten minutes to get to Soho: this was a serious bit of business and I couldn’t get out of it. Striding swiftly, albeit with a slight weave, I headed up Piccadilly, talking loudly to myself. Fortunately this is not an unusual sight in Piccadilly Circus.

Equally fortunately, when I arrived at the recording studio, I discovered there were no huge tracts of information to recite - just a few words to replace something I had recorded earlier. Even that was a struggle. Job done, I headed back to meet my mate Tony just as they were tipping out after lunch. Always impeccably dressed, he looked remarkably unscathed and could have passed for the soberest of judges, were it not for one button in the wrong buttonhole on his jacket. At which point, I could have sent him, had he still been around, to one of Brummell’s many Piccadilly tailors, a certain Mr Weston, described by Beau as ‘an inimitable little fellow - a little defective, perhaps, in his linings, but irreproachable for principle and buttonholes’.

If you turn right after leaving Berry Bros and head down St James’s Street to number six, you find yourself at the door of yet another emporium that Beau would have recognised at once. Even in Beau’s day, Lock & Co., Hatters was already a distinguished elder statesman in this neck of the woods. There’d been Locks on St James’s Street since the 1670s, when the family joined the exodus from the east following the Great Fire and bought up the leases of seven houses here. They soon joined forces with a hat-maker called Davis, who also owned premises on the street. When he died, James Lock inherited the business which bears his name to this day. There can’t be many shops that still trade from the same premises they set up in three centuries ago, but this grand old place is one of them, and it remains one of London’s top hatters to this day. Don’t take my word for it, ask the Post Office. It’s said they once delivered a postcard from overseas which was simply addressed to ‘the best hatters in the world, London’.

From the outside, the shop is all understated elegance. Its three-storey Georgian facade is rather dwarfed by the two buildings on either side, underlining the sense of this place as a dignified survivor from an earlier age, when style wasn’t something you needed to shout about. Over the years, a hatful of famous customers have stepped through the green front door of Lock’s, including Admiral Nelson, who was clearly a model client. One of his last acts before setting sail on the
Victory
in 1805 was to settle his bill here.

I don’t know if Beau was ever a customer, but you can still buy top hats at Lock’s, just like the one our statuesque pal is brandishing on Jermyn Street. I imagine you’d cause quite a stir if you strolled round Piccadilly sporting one today, but then, if the legend is to be believed, there’s nothing new there. It’s said that the chap who invented the topper - John Hetherington - first wore one in public in 1797 and promptly started a riot. When he was later brought before the Lord Mayor on a ‘breach of the peace’ charge, the officers of the crown reported that ‘several women fainted at the unusual sight, while children screamed, dogs yelped, and a younger son of Cordwainer Thomas was thrown down by the crowd which collected and had his right arm broken’. I have no idea who Cordwainer Thomas was, or what his young son may have been up to when he was trampled by the terrified throng, but the fact remains that Hetherington was hit with a whopping £50 fine for his crime of fashion - wearing ‘a tall structure having a shining lustre and calculated to frighten timid people’. And you thought Amy Winehouse got there first.

Quite what a respectable company like Lock’s is doing openly selling such scandalous headwear today is beyond me, but for those of you who wish to meddle in such territory, the last time I checked prices start as low as £340 - although a vintage example in silk could set you back thousands. Beware, though. After the Hetherington debacle a law was passed which banned the wearing of top hats on the streets of London and, as far as I have been able to ascertain, it has never been repealed. Maybe that’s why you don’t see many toppers around today - we’re a law-abiding bunch, us Londoners.

I have always admired Lock’s and that admiration only grew greater when I discovered that it was here that my favourite style of hat was born. A hat that has never, to my knowledge, caused riots on the streets and only occasionally filled timid Londoners with fear and terror; a hat that became an integral part of the London city gent’s uniform for decades, alongside the briefcase and the brolly; a hat that starred in movies with screen legends like Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Oddjob; a hat sported by the dashing John Steed in
The Avengers
and the bumbling Captain Mainwaring in
Dad’s Army
; a hat made sinister in
A Clockwork Orange
and cool by Louis Armstrong; a hat that’s appeared in more than one Madness video over the years; a hat that transcends the class divide; a hat that’s known and loved around the world; a hat they call the ‘coke’. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of it?