The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (25 page)

Miss Tamer Gordon, Near Long Acre Bagnio

‘Her chains you’ll find too difficult to bear’

Miss Gordon is of Northumberland, which may be easily distinguished by her speech. Her mother and two other sisters came with her to London about a law-suit, the success of which not answering their expectations, with some other concurrent circumstances, drove her to us about five years ago.

She has a fine round face, pleasing figure, and limbs moulded like a Venus; affable, and extremely good-natured. But there her qualifications cease, for in the rites of Venus she is as cold as a Dutch woman; from whence we naturally suppose the inconstancy of her lovers. Her other sisters are among the nymphs, but where we are totally ignorant.

We wish she would not drink so much, as nothing hurts both health and beauty like it. (1773)

Miss C—l—d, No.4, Glanville St.

‘Here you may gaze, if gazing will suffice

or for a spanker take a luscious slice’

This lady is about eighteen, rather tall, though reckoned a fine figure; she is dark complexioned, but has a very engaging countenance with fine dark hair and expressive eyes of the same colour; she has a remarkable fine leg and foot, which she exhibits to great advantage occasionally. Miss C—d is engaging in her manners and entertaining in her conversation. She has not been long in the line of life she now moves in, and appears to have an utter aversion to it, waiting only for an opportunity of being selected by some elderly gentleman for his housekeeper or companion. She has very little of the courtezan about her, never asking for any present or gratification, by which means she is often bilked,
²⁴
or put off with a trifle, when she has reason to expect a handsome gratuity. (1789)

11

THE
Pimp PAYS

IN THE DRAWING
rooms and closets of some of London’s most respectable men, a storm was brewing. It began in a pile of paper: letters with strong sentiments scratched into them, pages of inky philosophy addressed to newspapers and journals. As it picked up momentum it whirled around the houses of London’s authorities, Justice John Fielding and Saunders Welch, the High Constable of Holborn. It blew in through the windows of wealthy leaders of business, upstanding men such as Robert Dingley and Jonas Hanway. Concerned parties began to gather in order to discuss what might be done. By the beginning of 1758 such a gale of good intention had been whipped up that, within the year, it threatened to sweep away Jack Harris and his empire forever.

It was not Jack Harris in particular that the founders of the Magdalen charity targeted, but rather those on his list. Their purpose was to quell the spread of prostitution through a course of reformation – their desire: ‘to induce women who have lived as prostitutes to forsake their evil course of life’. For this they proposed opening a hospital (what now might be considered a refuge or rehabilitation centre) based along the lines of that opened for orphaned children by Thomas Coram a decade earlier. The plan took remarkably little time to put into action. They had hardly been agitating for more than a year before the funds were raised and a site for the Magdalen Hopsital located. Influence-wielding men had been
shading
their eyes from the realities of prostitution for so long that this, the first genuine and concerted public gesture towards righting the wrongs of an unfortunate lifestyle, was met with overwhelming support. In 1758, news of the Magdalen charity was on everybody’s lips. As the year’s hot topic, the newspapers and bookstalls were filled with discussions and proposals on the subject. There was much debate surrounding the condition of prostitution and the susceptibility of women to its lures, but few were willing to address the male behaviour or societal beliefs that contributed to the evil, or to be so bold as to suggest a plan for its complete eradication. What Jonas Hanway, John Fielding, Saunders Welch and Robert Dingley couldn’t say was that in order for their masculine order to prevail, a state of prostitution for at least some segment of the female population had to exist.

Among members of the well-intentioned public, the fervour for the Magdalen charity gained a momentum of its own. With the vice of prostitution the focus of the day, the onus of enacting change within the community soon dropped into the laps of the law-enforcers. Local magistrates’ attitudes towards the sex trade had always been fickle and frequently, as some neighbourhoods and religiously motivated reform societies had noticed, it required much vocal persuasion to move the authorities into action. The laws against keeping bawdy houses or soliciting sex for money were so grossly complicated that the rigorous enforcement of them wasn’t worth the watch’s or the magistrate’s effort. Occasionally, if public sentiment called for it, the authorities might rattle the cages of the local bawds in order to remind them that they were in breach of the law. But more likely than not, anyone of dubious repute rounded up in the course of a night would be set free the following morning. Where prostitution and the law were concerned, both had settled into an almost comfortable pattern of mutual toleration. This state of affairs, however, did not sit well with onlookers, those neither involved in the sex trade nor appraised of the difficulties involved in the enforcement of the law. At some point, both Fielding and Welch must have felt the hot breath of public scrutiny on their necks. It would be difficult to advocate the reformation of prostitution without making some attempt within their own precincts to stamp it out.

In April of that year, the raids began:

Information having been given to Saunders Welch Esq., that a great number of loose and disorderly persons, both men and women was secreted in houses of ill fame in Black Boy Alley and Chick Lane, Mr. Welch, with the City Marshal, High Constables and other officers went yesterday morning about 6 o’clock to the above places, where they found upwards of seventy such persons, forty eight of whom they secured and sent to the two compters and new prison for their examination by the Lord Mayor.

This announcement, printed in the
London Chronicle
for 22–25 April, was to be the first of many that filled the newspapers. There were further swoops targeting some of the most notorious streets in the City and the West End; this included actions taken against a row of brothels in Hedge Lane, and in specific locations within the parish of St Giles and along Drury Lane. However well intentioned this may have appeared, Fielding still had a difficult time escaping the hypocrisy of residing on Bow Street, snugly tucked into a nest of brothels and bagnios. As one writer to the
London Chronicle
pointed out in his ‘Congratulatory Epistle from a Reformed Rake to John Fielding Esq. Upon the New Scheme of Reclaiming Prostitutes’, why should the magistrate go as far afield as Hedge Lane to arrest prostitutes ‘when you may, with equal justice, dispose of those next door to you’? He continued:

Since the constables (even those of Covent Garden) are obliged to make oath there are no brothels in their parish; and you, sir, are authorised to search and commit the prostitutes (supposing there are any;) I should be curious to know, what particular act of parliament exempts the bawdy houses in Bow Street and in and about Covent Garden, from the like confinement … it is highly incredible to imagine, that the most active justice in England would let any such houses remain under his very nose.

Increasingly, there were calls to strike at the heart of Covent Garden, the previously untouchable bastion of vice. Those bearing the standard of the
true
reformer were not satisfied with the day’s minor catches – street-walking minions, petty brothel-keepers from the city and the rancid back streets of St Giles. They wanted the big fish, the genuine perpetrators of prostitution. In June, the drag net was cast out, and what it brought back surprised everybody.

On a warm summer’s evening, no one could have guessed what a bad night it would be in the Piazza. An almighty noise, more boisterous than the usual drunken revelling, began to rise. The banging of doors and shouts of the watch were volleyed against the vengeful curses of foul-mouthed women. Squealing and screaming followed as scantily-clad harlots were hauled out of their premises, their culls escaping down the back routes. A crowd gathered. Patrons put down their drinks as taverners, waiters and customers clambered to the windows and doors in the hope of catching view of the unfolding scene. Much to the disbelief of regulars, the watch had gone straight to the north-eastern corner of the Piazza. Announcing that they carried a warrant, they boldly marched through the threshold of Mother Douglas’s elegant establishment: the brothel that had only recently entertained the Duke of Cumberland. Hers was the most notable, most fashionable house of pleasure to be found, but on that night nothing, not even a royal patron, could have prevented its pillaging. Her girls were arrested and later set free, but Mother Douglas, who had not been troubled by the law in over fifteen years, was thrown into the clink.

After the arrests had been made at Jane Douglas’s, the authorities turned their attention next door to the Shakespear’s Head. It was there that they found Jack Harris, the Pimp General of All England. He too was apprehended, escorted away in front of his clients and Packington Tomkins. Like Mother Douglas, he spent the night locked away in the local compter before being hauled up before Justice Wright, the gentleman who signed the warrant for his arrest. He would not have done so had not one of Harris and Mother Douglas’s girls turned informer. Tired, no doubt, of paying a percentage to both a pimp and a bawd, the woman boldly did what few of her class dared in the eighteenth century: she spoke out for herself. According to the chronicler of Harris’s tale, she went directly to Justice Wright and ‘made an information upon oath … of Mrs. Douglas and Master Harris, having procured for her a gentleman and taken poundage from her’. This was all that the magistrate required to make the
long-called-for
arrest of two high-profile Covent Garden players. Fortunately, Mother Douglas, who was elderly and ill, found bail and thereby ‘preserved her liberty’. Jack Harris, smug and unrepentant, was not so lucky.

For the week of 17 June 1758,
Owen’s Weekly Chronicle
reported that ‘A warrant being granted by Justice Wright, of New Palace Yard to search the houses of ill-fame in the parishes of St. Paul Covent Garden and St Martin in the Fields, upwards of 40 persons were taken, and many of them sent to Tothill-Fields, Bridewell.’ This would be news to anyone who didn’t live within the precinct or frequent Covent Garden’s establishments, but even before this informative blurb had appeared in print, tales of the extraordinary event would have been flying about the taverns and disorderly houses of the West End. The apparently unprovoked attacks levelled against the king and queen of the Garden’s flesh market were startling. The law, in one of its rarer moments, had unexpectedly come to life, flexing its muscles in the face of every disreputable tavern, bagnio and brothel-keeper in the area. While this performance may have sent a shiver down the spine of pimps and bawds alike, it threw Grub Street’s hack writers into a frenzy of excitement.

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.