The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List (3 page)

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THE
LEGEND
OF
Jack Harris

JACK HARRIS WAS
born in the very cradle of illusion, in the space that existed between two theatres. Nothing was as it seemed in Covent Garden, where actors assumed the identities of imaginary characters and masked men and women moved through the pleasure-seeking swarms anonymously. Against such a backdrop it was easy to vanish or to become someone else. Until he grew proud and foolish, he had never stepped into the direct glare of the limelight; he had never allowed anyone to truly know him or his story. Jack Harris had hidden well, and what little he revealed to the world about himself was complete fabrication.

After his sensational arrest in 1758, those who had only ever seen him as a silhouette moving against the backdrop of Covent Garden wanted to hear his tale. Although no one had ever demonstrated any interest in him before, he decided with the assistance of a hack journalist to recount his narrative and offer an explanation for his wickedness.

Long before his parents brought him into being, destiny had marked out his family for suffering. His father, he claimed, came from ‘a good
Somersetshire
family’, but had the misfortune of being born a younger son with no inheritance and few prospects. The marriage he contracted with Harris’s mother had been formed out of love and consequently had fallen foul of his upstanding relations. Cast adrift with no money and no position, the young couple set out for London, where Harris senior had been given ‘many promises from great men of places, sinecures and pensions’. As a member of the landed class, he believed that he had no shortage of allies within the government willing to assist his ambitions. Unfortunately, upon his arrival in the capital he found that doors were shut to him, that men who had at one time guaranteed him their favour could only shrug their shoulders and wish him the best of luck elsewhere. With the birth of Jack in the mid-1720s, the young family found their resources rapidly expiring. In order to keep the wolf from the door, his father had no choice but to turn to his pen for support. Fuelled by his sense of anger and betrayal at those who had lured him to London on false hopes, Harris senior lashed out in a series of invectives and ‘failed not to abuse those who had so abused him’. As a Whig by birth, Harris’s father also began to rethink his political affiliations. If his traditional associates among the aristocracy would not have him, he would cross the floor and wound them as a member of the opposition. Shunned by his own society, Harris senior ‘soon made himself very remarkable among the anti-ministerial writers of those days; and the Country Party enlisted him under their banner’.

In spite of stringent libel laws, Harris’s father flaunted the dangers inherent in being so vicious an antagonist of the parliamentary leader, Sir Robert Walpole. Once he had whetted his sharp pen, he found it difficult to put down, especially as his hostile epistles were at last bringing in money and winning him the support of several wealthy backers. It seemed that the situation had begun to brighten for the Harrises, who were now contemplating an appropriate education for their eldest son. Then quite unexpectedly, when his father ‘was upon the point of sending me to Westminster School’, events took a turn for the worse; Harris senior was arrested.

Harris’s father had made the fatal error of attaching himself to Nathaniel Mist, a notorious thorn in the side of the establishment.
Mist’s Weekly Journal
, a scurrilous publication renowned for spouting
unabashed
Jacobitism, rolled off a secret printing press until the authorities sniffed it out and smashed it to bits in 1728. Despite stints in prison and in the stocks, Mist and his numerous colleagues continued to publish their libel, this time in the form of
Fog’s Weekly Journal
. A series of raids soon put an end to this enterprise as well. Among the handful of anti-ministerial writers rooted out during the course of these arrests was Harris’s father.

Once again, Harris senior, this time locked away in the local compter, looked to his friends and political associates to assist him in his time of need, but no one ever came. ‘He was there for some weeks in want of bail, all his party deserting him, as soon as they had notice of his misfortune’, Jack recounted. His father soon sank into an irretrievable depression. Matters were only to grow worse. The authorities looked upon Harris senior’s crime with gravity and, as such, he was transferred to the King’s Bench Prison where ‘he was sentenced to be imprisoned for three years’. Additionally, he was ‘fined the penalty of five hundred pounds’, a crippling amount for a family in the Harrises’ position. It was during this time, in the mid-1730s, that Jack made regular visits to his father, ‘although his keeper pretended that he had strict orders to let nobody see him’. In later years, Jack admitted that observing his father in such a despondent and weathered state profoundly affected him. Harris senior had been broken:

His misfortunes had so sowered his natural temper that he had become a perfect misanthrope. The ill treatment he had received from both parties had given him an utter detestation of all; and he seemed now to languish at his confinement, only because he had not an opportunity of imposing upon the world, as much as they had imposed upon him.

Betrayed, exhausted and ill, Harris’s father bid him to learn from the mistakes he had made and not to waste himself in pursuit of an honest life. In a final paternal gesture, Harris senior reached for his pen and committed his instructions to paper. In his ‘Wholesome Advice to His Son for His Conduct in Life’, he summarised those thoughts he had expressed to his child as they sat together in his cell. Harris senior reminded his boy that as he had no fortune, a conventional education
would
be of no use to him. At any rate, it was his experience that there was ‘nothing so great an obstacle to getting money as learning’. ‘No, no my son’, he continued, ‘I have taken care to prepare you for quite another employment’:

Would you get money, my son – study men’s passions; ply them. Is a man ambitious of fame – go through thick and thin, to make him the greatest patriot that ever existed; but be sure of your reward before you give the finishing stroke to his reputation. Does he love wenching – pimping is a thriving calling, it must be orthodox, or some who do would not possess it. Does he want a seat in the House – vote for him, bribe for him, swear for him; there is no harm in all this. A scrupulous man, indeed may object to an oath because it is false, but it may be true; read it not, and then you can not tell which it is, and they administer it so fast that you can not understand it, even if you would. If your patron loves Play, learn dexterity of Hand and cheat as much as you can; take care, do not be detected, if you are, swear and bluster, challenge, fight and kill, and then your honour is retrieved. This is done every day with success; there is nothing washes off the slur of infamy, but the man’s blood you have offended! Let no scruple of your conscience preponderate with you; to thrive in this world, a man must not have a grain of that commodity.

Although shocked at first by his father’s recommendations, Jack Harris eventually came to understand the logic in it. It was a message touched with poignancy, one that had been placed in his hand upon his father’s death.

In death, Harris senior had left his family nothing but the prospect of starvation. He had also laid the seeds of vice in his eldest son. Armed with his father’s advice, which he ‘looked upon as my only personal estate’, Jack plunged himself headlong into a career of criminality. In order to gain the confidence of society, his first act was to appear convincing. With the appropriate attire and gait, Harris assumed the respectable persona of a gentleman, ‘without any other pretensions to that rank, but impudence and ignorance; which indeed make so great of the modern man’s accomplishments’. Unfortunately, he admitted, it required some trial and error before he alighted upon his true calling. In
the
first instance, he looked into becoming a political bully, one who lived by the extraction of bribes. For this purpose, he states that he ‘took a house in Westminster in hopes of making my fortune by elections; but no general one soon ensuing, I was obliged to lay aside, with my house, all my hopes upon that score’. Harris then tried his luck as a cardsharp, teaching himself how to ‘cheat at play’, but sighed that, ‘having no head for calculations and no knowledge of figures, it was of little avail to me.’ It was sometime shortly thereafter that he realised where his true talents lay. With a flattering, obsequious bent to his personality, his destined path unfurled before him. ‘Nature’, he announced quite frankly, ‘designed me for a pimp’.

This was Harris’s sad tale. Those who read it when it featured as part of
The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray
would have been quite taken in by the narrator’s earnestness. It was a history that suited his identity well; it added flesh to the bones of his legend. But as Jack Harris generally preferred to lead his life unobtrusively, lingering behind the dim yellow light of the tavern candles rather than in the full blaze of public view, these few snippets were all that most of his clients ever learned of him. Only a select handful knew the truth. In 1779, twenty years after Jack Harris’s story appeared in print, one ripe old member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club decided to dispel the ambiguity once and for all. In his chronicle of London’s sexual underworld,
Nocturnal Revels
, he decried ‘No such man as Harris (as he is called) a Pimp, now or probably ever did exist’. He was right, of course. Harris’s real name was John Harrison, and his story was very different from the one he had invented to fit his alias.

Unlike Harris’s early years, Harrison’s were distinctly unremarkable. He had been born the son of George Harrison, keeper of the Bedford Head Tavern in Maiden Lane, a street that just trimmed the outskirts of Covent Garden Piazza. While John Harrison could hardly boast of a landowning lineage, there were a few very loose parallels in his tale. As with Harris, it seems that the Harrison family at the time of John’s birth were not local to the parish of St Paul’s Covent Garden. John would have been a child when the Bedford Head (one drinking establishment of several going by that name in the area) threw open its doors to business in 1740. When Harrison assumed the role of proprietor, the tavern with its freshly cut wooden interiors had been a new venue, unsoiled by
the
stench of coal smoke, the sourness of alcohol and the odour of bodies. For a publican, there were few other locations as ideal as Covent Garden for setting up shop. Here he could draw from the circulating pool of carelessly spent wages and inherited wealth and make a tidy income for himself. As taverns were regularly managed as family businesses in the eighteenth century, it is possible that the Harrisons may have been in the tankard-serving trade for generations, and possibly moved their enterprise from somewhere not so very distant from the Piazza. Irrespective of its location, however, London taverns on a whole were not ideal nurseries for rearing scrupulous, law-abiding children. In the dinginess of the taproom, young John Harrison would have learned through observation about the libidinous and violent sphere into which he had been brought.

As the child of a tavern-keeper, he also would have been put to work from an early age. His first defined role within the Bedford Head would have been as a pot-boy, or a general assistant, helping to ferry drinks to customers and carry away their empties. As reading, writing and figuring would have also been considered skills necessary for the management of a public house, a taverner’s son would have received some formal education, most likely provided through a local charity school. Most of his truly useful learning, however, would have been acquired by shadowing his father or any other elder male family member as they performed the tasks essential to their trade. When not assisting at the tap or counting the profits of his labour, George Harrison would have stood at the background of his operation, overseeing the work of the waiters who tottered from table to table with their containers of ale, and keeping a narrowed eye on suspicious characters. As he approached an appropriate age, John would have joined his father in these duties and eventually joined the ranks of the Bedford Head’s devoted male waiting staff. As a tavern waiter, young Harrison would have assumed the role of a compliant servant to his father’s clientele. In doing his best to see that their demands for drink and food were fulfilled, he could come to expect remuneration in the form of tips. While respectfully laying plates of meat and glasses of port before gentlemen may have earned him a few pennies, he would have learned that gratifying their less legitimate requests might supply him with far more handsome sums.

Simply because the Bedford Head Tavern was a family-run business did not make it an honest one. There is nothing to suggest that its reputation was any better than those of its sister establishments, the notorious watering holes that blighted Maiden Lane. Only a few doors down from the Bedford Head throbbed a stinking sore of a public house, Bob Derry’s Cider Cellar. Bob Derry, with his wife, daughter and son-in-law, just about managed the alcohol-fuelled traffic that pushed in and out of his rancid den. ‘As its name implied’, wrote John Timbs, a recorder of tavern history, the interior and fittings of the Cider Cellar ‘were rude and rough’. Bob Derry’s was open all night and accepted into its fold the dregs of an evening out: those already too intoxicated to walk or talk straight. There, under Derry’s blind eye, pickpockets and disease-ridden streetwalkers did a roaring trade. As Samuel Derrick wrote in 1761, the establishment was noted for its regular hiccups of violence – spectacles of brutality where men bludgeoned their rivals and ladies of the night tore at each other’s faces. Patrons of Derry’s were not known for interceding in a good fight, but rather for placing bets on its outcome. On one occasion, the outcome was the double murder of two drinkers, who after a fierce argument were mercilessly stabbed to death.