The Covent Garden Ladies (26 page)

The apprehension of Jack Harris made the public ask questions. For all of his boldness and arrogance, Harris had managed to remain an elusive character, even to much of his clientele. The lascivious bucks who conversed with him at the Shakespear were more interested in the women he could procure for their pleasure than in his idle chat. In all the years he had resided under Tomkins’s roof, very few were genuinely acquainted with the person rather than the pimp. Even fewer knew his real name. But now, in June 1758, the talk in Covent Garden was all about Jack Harris. In the absence of knowledge, rumour and legend came to fill the void. Punters would have gathered around the tables at the Shakespear and the Bedford Coffee House, recounting stories that they had heard about the pimp whom Judge Wright had so recently pulled out of the Garden. There were tales of his exploits, how he inveigled poor country lasses, the lies he told to bring them to bed, the sham marriages enacted to secure maidenheads. Others would have remembered incidents they had witnessed at the Shakespear, or relayed information they had heard about his profits
or the extent of his empire. Already, Jack Harris’s name was being committed to legend.

Until this time, the personal history of the chief waiter-pimp at the Shakespear’s Head was not really of much interest to anyone, but from the moment he was thrown into Newgate Prison until the date of his release in 1761 an appetite emerged for tales of his escapades. Harris’s timely arrest had made his situation both sensational and topical. For most of the year, Londoners had read the colourful accounts in Hanway and Fielding’s Magdalen tracts depicting prostitution’s victims, the innocents cruelly entangled in a web. Now, due to Justice Wright’s efforts, the law had clapped a glass over one of the profession’s perpetrators and the perfect opportunity presented itself to unveil a picture of the spider. All that was required was for someone to reveal him, and Dr John Hill, a man with a nose for opportunity, stepped forward to do just this.

Even Dr Hill (or ‘Sir’ John Hill as he was later called), with all his literary panache, could not have fabricated a character as eccentric as himself. Hill could never quite define his line of work. Trained as an apothecary, he also practised as a botanist and a physician, as well as an actor, a garden designer, a Justice of the Peace, a novelist and a hack. Of all of these occupations, Hill excelled himself at hack journalism. There were few during his lifetime who could have kept up with his inexhaustible stream of articles and pamphlets. Known as ‘The Inspector’ to his readership, Hill was like a modern-day tabloid reporter and made his living from scandalising his readers, rooting out the stories that would most horrify the middle classes. Dubbed by contemporaries as a ‘versatile man of unscrupulous character’, nothing was off limits. His lack of judgement cost him his credibility and his bad temper involved him in constant spats, with everyone from the Royal Society to Samuel Derrick and William Hogarth. Hill was at heart an opportunist, and no one could smell a good story better than he. It is likely that he caught wind of Harris’s arrest from his friends at the Bedford Coffee House, where ‘The Inspector’ used to congregate with other members of the literati. The work that was born out of the pimp’s arrest,
The Remonstrance of Harris, Pimp General to the People of England
, is true to Hill’s style: the child of both fact and fiction. For the fiction, Hill need only skim the circulating pool of legends that had
appeared after the pimp’s arrest. For the fact, he went straight to the horse’s mouth.

In the eighteenth century, prison guards liked visitors, especially those with plenty of coin to lie in their palms. By rubbing a few together, Dr Hill would have gained access to Harris’s cell and encouraged him to spill his story. To Harris, the Doctor’s face would have been a familiar one, and perhaps the relief of having a guest may have eased the words from the pimp’s mouth. More importantly, Hill would have popped a few shillings into Harris’s needy hands, as was the custom. Through Hill, Harris was given a mouthpiece, a means by which he could project his voice out of Newgate Prison and into the ears of all who might listen. In effect, what he did was the era’s equivalent of selling his story to
The Sun
. Hill knew precisely what the public wanted to hear before Jack Harris had even uttered a word. His readers were hungry for a villain, one who bore his teeth and snarled, an unrepentant, remorseless beast, a caricature of how the respectable classes might imagine a pimp. Not surprisingly, Hill quickly learned that Jack Harris was very, very angry and although much of his wrath was directed against Justice Wright, even more of it was aimed at Packington Tomkins.

According to Hill, no one was more surprised at his arrest than the pimp himself. Harris had for years thrived ‘unmolested’ by ‘the watch and constables of the night’, who ‘never let loose but after street-walking bunters, low wretches, and those quite beneath the protection of justice’. He acknowledged that due to the recent ‘legislation to force modesty on the town’, he and Mother Douglas became the targets of reformation: ‘they call it’, he sighed, ‘laying the axe to the root’. But then Harris continued in a more personal vein. While Mother Douglas, ‘a venerable grey headed gentlewoman’, was bailed out by her friends, he was left to rot in gaol by his one supposed protector; Packington Tomkins. ‘In the hour of my distress’, he ranted, ‘Tomkins (such is the base ingratitude of the man) who owes half of his fortune to me; Tomkins, I say (hear it and hate him all ye whores) abandoned me.’ Harris would never forgive Tomkins, who had made no bones about washing his hands of his head-waiter when the situation became sticky. The taverner, who fought hard to appear law-abiding, had realised that there might come a time when jettisoning the pimp would become essential to his own survival. Tomkins, Harris felt, had
unjustly emerged from this debacle unscathed, but from the bowels of Newgate he would use Hill’s visit to attempt to sink him.

Whatever vitriol Harris had reserved for his former master was launched in one long spew at the journalist. The pimp revealed all of his master’s dirty dealings, laying down in great detail Tomkins’s dishonest tricks. If the world pointed their finger at Harris for his misdeeds, he claimed, they should redirect their reprehension towards Tomkins, who the pimp imitated in his business practices and to whom he ‘had always looked up to with eyes of veneration’. Tomkins was a cheat and a liar, a gentleman who ‘bows lowly, smiles submissively and lisps’ as he fleeces his customers. Harris claimed that Tomkins made a large portion of his profits from serving overpriced, substandard wine which he dressed up with different coloured wax seals. He derided his patrons behind their backs and instructed his staff not only on how to be rude but how to be crafty. Such deceits, Harris claimed, were exercised on various customers ‘five or six times in a night’, while the patrons were none the wiser. Harris recalled bitterly how they all would laugh when hearing ‘the taken-in young squires, run out in raptures on my master’. Certainly, this was not the kind of publicity that the owner of the Shakespear’s Head sought to cultivate, and it is unlikely that Dr Hill would have concocted such libellous accusations without some prompting. Harris had every right to feel slighted by someone whom he considered to be a partner in crime, and his open attack may have been his only viable means of exacting revenge. The partnership that had been so profitable for both parties was now irrevocably dissolved.

Hill also got what he wanted from his encounter with Harris. From the grains of truth that the pimp proffered about his life, his business and his state of mind, Hill created the monster that his readers longed to see. Harris the pimp emerged as an evildoer, void of humanity, boastful about the wickedness of his misdeeds. Hill’s Harris rides into the countryside to abduct and debauch unsuspecting young gentlewomen. He meets the wagons on the road to London, offering food and rest to innocent female passengers before raping them. He drugs the wives of City gentlemen and inducts them into a life of prostitution. He laughs at his conscripts’ misfortunes, the desperation and deaths of their parents, their illnesses and traumas. Most abhorrent of all, Dr Hill’s Harris claims to have ‘received the
favour’ of ‘initiating’ (whether willingly or not) over 400 women into ‘the rites of Venus’. Were it to be believed, an assertion so bold would make Jack Harris one of the most notorious rapists in British history. In a society so recently shaken by the trial of Elizabeth Canning and titillated by talk of repentant Magdalens, Hill’s tale would have been swallowed with both horror and relish.
The Remonstrance of Harris, Pimp General to the People of England
raised enough eyebrows to warrant a second print run in 1759, the year after its first appearance. It was not the only publication to attempt to fill in the blanks of the enigmatic Jack Harris’s life. The author of
The Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny Murray
devoted at least a quarter of his work to telling Harris’s history. Unlike Dr Hill’s publication, the author of the
Memoirs
paints a much more sympathetic picture of Harris: a man, like his prostitutes, wronged by society and forced into a profession that he understood to be repugnant. The cruelty of the world made a cruel man, apologises the pimp. The reality of Harrison’s situation most likely lay somewhere between the two possibilities.

Over the three-year period of his incarceration, and even beyond, the name Jack Harris became synonymous with the standard image of the despicable procurer. Hack writers dropped his moniker into their stories and wrote dedications to his life’s achievements in their pamphlets and journals. Jack Harris was more a legend than a living, breathing man. The prisoner inside Newgate quickly came to realise that if he were ever to resume the semblance of a normal life, his name would have to die.

12

The Fleet
AND
O’KELLY

WITH THE EXCEPTION
of Newgate, there were few places in London with a worse reputation than the Fleet Prison. What made it marginally more bearable than the stinking, disease-bathed sink of Newgate were the comparative freedoms granted to those committed to its confines. Surrounded by a twenty-five-foot wall and a moat dug into the side of the now paved-over Fleet river, the prison existed like a small hamlet within a city. This, however, did not make the environs any more cheerful. The Fleet might be defined today as an open or minimum-security prison, although a dungeon did exist for those particularly unrepentant few who had to be locked into shackles. For the most part, the majority of the prison population were free to roam within the boundaries of its walls, and for the even fewer fortunate souls who could produce the bribes necessary, the possibility of lodging outside of the enclosed area within the ‘rule of the Fleet’ also existed. The prison itself contained around 100 cells in addition to an alehouse, a coffee house, a chapel, a common kitchen and an outdoor area where those interred were allowed to socialise, and even play games of ninepins. Ironically, gaming, the vice that bore the responsibility for landing many of the prisoners within the Fleet’s precincts in the first
place, was not prohibited. Some played cards in their cells or tried their luck at billiards. Similarly, the prison’s two drinking establishments gave inmates the opportunity to continue enjoying the same pleasures they had so heartily indulged in on the opposite side of the wall. But however much these few privileges succeeded in lightening the miseries of existence, they could have never eradicated them entirely. That which wound the mechanism of this microcosm was a brutal tradition of extortion and exploitation. There was nothing about life in the Fleet that could lull an inmate into believing that they were anywhere other than in a prison.

Order in the Fleet emulated the two-tiered system of hierarchy that prevailed within society: those with money could buy comfort, those without suffered doubly. In theory, everyone inside the Fleet was there because they owed money to someone whom they couldn’t repay. This, however, did not mean that every prisoner was without some form of assets. The unofficial objective of the warden and his staff was to shake these last pennies, shillings or guineas from the debtor’s tight fists, and to make as much from a prisoner’s misfortune as was possible. Everything at the Fleet had to be purchased. The first fee that fell due was one of £1 6s 8d, payable to the prison for hosting the debtor’s stay. Beyond this, prisoners soon learned that further sums were required to secure virtually every other item or necessity, from food to bedding to writing implements, chairs or medicines. What one ate or how one slept was then determined by the amount of money or possessions a prisoner was willing to exchange for these pleasures. To simplify such matters of entitlement, the Fleet was divided into two sections: the Master’s side, for those who could spare a few shillings a week for better lodgings, and the Common side, for those who found themselves with less than five pounds in total to their names. Those on either side of the prison were squeezed incessantly for every possible ha’penny by cruel guards, who reaped a livelihood through extortion. Threats and physical violence came not only from the turnkeys but from fellow inmates. A sudden absence of resources could result in starvation, and an illness or an injury could often prove fatal without the requisite bribe to bring a surgeon. Although the inmates of Common side were made to endure the worst of the Fleet’s abuses, the prison’s proliferation of rats, fleas and lice, its
gurgling pools of effluent, its virulent outbreaks of disease and insurmountable stench made no distinction between the two halves.