THE OLD LONDON COFFEE-HOUSES

By G. L. Apperson, I.S.O.

For something like a century and a half the coffee-houses formed a distinctive feature of London life. The first is said to have been established by a man named Bowman, servant to a Turkey merchant, who opened a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, in 1652. The honour of being the second has been claimed for the "Rainbow" in Fleet Street, by the Inner Temple Gate, opposite Chancery Lane. Aubrey, speaking of Sir Henry Blount, a beau in the time of Charles II., says: "When coffee first came in, he was a great upholder of it, and had ever since been a constant frequenter of coffee-houses, especially Mr. Farre's, at the 'Rainbow,' by Inner Temple Gate." But according to The Daily Post of May 15th, 1728, "Old Man's" Coffee-house, at Charing Cross, "was the Second that was set up in the Cities of London and Westminster." The question of priority, however, is of no importance. It is quite certain that in a surprisingly short space of time coffee-houses became very numerous. A manuscript of 1659, quoted in The Gentleman's Magazine for 1852 (Part I., pp. 477-9), says that at that date there was

Tea made its way slowly; but coffee took the town by storm.

The coffee-houses, as resorts for men of different classes and occupations, survived till the early years of the nineteenth century; but their palmy days were over some time before the end of the eighteenth century. They were at the height of their fame and usefulness from the Restoration till the earlier years of George III.'s reign.

From the description given in The Spectator and other contemporary writings—such as "facetious" Tom Brown's Trip through London of 1728, and the like—it is easy to reconstruct in imagination the interior of one of these resorts as they appeared in the time of Queen Anne. Occasionally the coffee-room, as at the famous "Will's" in Russell Street, Covent Garden, was on the first floor. Tables were disposed about the sanded floor—the erection of boxes did not come in until a later date—while on the walls were numerous flaming advertisements of quack medicines, pills and tinctures, salves and electuaries, which were as abundant then as now, and of other wares which might be bought at the bar. The bar was at the entrance to the temple of coffee and gossip, and was presided over by the predecessors of the modern barmaids—grumbled at in The Spectator as "idols," who there received homage from their admirers, and who paid more attention to customers who flirted with them than to more sober-minded visitors; and described by Tom Brown as "a charming Phillis or two, who invite you by their amorous glances into their smoaky territories."

At the bar messages were left and letters taken in for regular customers. In the early days of Swift's friendship with Addison, Stella was instructed to address her letters to the former under cover to Addison at the "St. James's" Coffee-house, in St. James's Street; but as the friendship between the two men cooled the cover was dispensed with, and the letters were addressed to Swift himself at the coffee-house, where they were placed, doubtless with many others, in the glass frame behind the bar. Stella's handwriting was very like that of her famous correspondent, and one day Harley, afterwards Earl of Oxford, seeing one of Stella's letters in the glass frame and thinking the writing was Swift's, asked the latter, when he met him shortly afterwards, how long he had learned the trick of writing to himself. Swift says he could hardly persuade him that he was mistaken in the writing.

The coffee-houses were the haunts of clubs and coteries almost from the date of their first establishment. Steele, in the familiar introduction to The Tatler, tells us how accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment were to come from "White's" Chocolate-house; poetry from "Will's" Coffee-house; learning from the "Grecian"; and foreign and domestic news from the "St. James's." Nearly fifty years later, Bonnell Thornton, in the first number of The Connoisseur, January 31st, 1754, similarly enumerates some of the leading houses. "White's" was still the fashionable resort; "Garraway's" was for stock-jobbers; "Batson's" for doctors; the "Bedford" for "wits" and men of parts; the "Chapter" for book-sellers; and "St. Paul's" for the clergy. Mackay, in his Journey through England, published in 1724, says that

It was only natural that people of similar occupations or tastes should gravitate in their hours of leisure to common social centres, and no one classification, such as that just quoted, can exhaust the subject.

The devotees of whist had their own houses. The game began to be popular about 1730, and some of those who first played scientific whist—possibly including Hoyle himself—were accustomed to meet at the "Crown" Coffee-house in Bedford Row. Other groups soon met at other houses. A pirated edition of Hoyle's Whist, printed at Dublin in 1743, contains an advertisement of "A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, as play'd at Court, White's, and George's Chocolate-houses, at Slaughter's, and the Crown Coffee-houses, etc., etc." At "Rawthmell's" Coffee-house in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, the Society of Arts was founded in 1754. "Old Slaughter's" in St. Martin's Lane was a great resort in the second half of the eighteenth century of artists. Here Roubillac the sculptor, Hogarth, Bourguignon or Gravelot the book illustrator, Moser the keeper of the St. Martin's Lane Academy, Luke Sullivan the engraver, and many others of the fraternity were wont to foregather. Near by was "Young Slaughter's," a meeting-place for scientific and literary men.

R. L. Edgeworth, in his Memoirs (p. 118, Ed. 1844), says:—

A favourite resort of men of letters during the middle and later years of the eighteenth century was the "Bedford" Coffee-house, under the Piazza, in Covent Garden. This house, it may be said, inherited the tradition from Button's, which that famous coffee-house had taken over from Will's. To the "Bedford" came Fielding, Foote, Garrick, Churchill, Sheridan, Hogarth, and many another man of note. Another haunt of literary men, as well as of book-sellers, was the "Chapter" Coffee-house in Paternoster Row. Chatterton wrote to his mother in May, 1770: "I am quite familiar at the 'Chapter' Coffee-house, and know all the geniuses there." Goldsmith was one of its frequenters. It was here that he came to sup one night as the invited guest of Churchill's friend, Charles Lloyd. The supper was served and enjoyed, whereupon Lloyd, without a penny in his pocket to pay for the meal he had ordered, coolly walked off and left Goldsmith to discharge the reckoning. It was at the same house that Foote, one day when a distressed player passed his hat round the coffee-room circle with an appeal for help, made the malicious remark: "If Garrick hear of this he will certainly send in his hat."

Close by was the "St. Paul's" Coffee-house, where, according to Bonnell Thornton, "tattered crapes," or poor parsons, were wont to ply "for an occasional burial or sermon, with the same regularity as the happier drudges who salute us with the cry of 'Coach, sir,' or 'Chair, your honour.'" The same writer relates how a party of bucks, by a hoaxing proffer of a curacy, "drew all the poor parsons to 'St. Paul's' Coffee-house, where the bucks themselves sat in another box to smoke their rusty wigs and brown cassocks."

Business men gathered at "Jonathan's" and "Garraway's," both in Exchange Alley, where the sale and purchase of stocks and bonds and merchandise of every kind formed the staple talk. The former house was a centre of operations for both bubblers and bubbled in the mania year of 1720. "Lloyd's" Coffee-house was for very many years a famous auction mart.

says the author of The Wealthy Shopkeeper, published in 1700. Addison, in No. 46 of The Spectator, tells how he was accustomed to make notes or "minutes" of anything likely to be useful for future papers, and of how one day he accidentally dropped one of these papers at "Lloyd's Coffee-house, where the auctions are usually kept." It was picked up and passed from hand to hand, to the great amusement of all who saw it. Finally, the "boy of the coffee-house," having in vain asked for the owner of the paper, was made "to get up into the auction pulpit and read it to the whole room." The "Jerusalem" Coffee-house, in Exchange Alley, was for generations the resort of merchants and traders interested in the East.

The doctors met at "Batson's" or "Child's." The pseudonymous author of Don Manoel Gonzales' Voyage to Great Britain, 1745, speaking of the London physicians, says: "You find them at Batson's or Child's Coffee-house usually in the morning, and they visit their patients in the afternoon." The Jacobites had two well-known houses of call—"Bromefield's" Coffee-house in Spring Gardens, and, later, the "Smyrna" in Pall Mall. Mr. J. H. MacMichael, in his valuable book on Charing Cross, 1906, quotes an order "given at their Majesties' Board of Green Cloth at Hampton Court" in 1689, to Sir Christopher Wren, Surveyor of Their Majesties' Works, to have "bricked or otherwise so closed up as you shall judge most fit for the security of their Majesties' Palace of Whitehall" a certain door which led out of Buckingham Court into Spring Garden, because Bromefield's Coffee-house in that court was resorted to by "a great and numerous concourse of Papists and other persons disaffected to the Government." Mr. MacMichael suggests that probably "Bromefield's" was identical with the coffee-house known as "Young Man's." "The Smyrna," in Pall Mall, was the Jacobite resort in Georgian days. It was also a house of many literary associations. Thomson, the poet, there received subscriptions for his Seasons; Swift and Prior and Arbuthnot frequented it. In 1703 Lord Peterborough wrote to Arbuthnot from Spain:—"I would faine save Italy and yett drink tea with you at the Smirna this Winter." But it is impossible to catalogue fully all the different coffee-house centres. The "Grecian" in Devereux Court, Strand, was devoted to learning; barristers frequented "Serle's," at the corner of Serle and Portugal Streets, Lincoln's Inn Fields; the Templars went to "Dick's," and later to the "Grecian"; and so the list might be prolonged.

In the earlier days of the coffee-houses the coterie or club of regular frequenters foregathered by the fire, or in some particular part of the general room, or in an inner room. At "Will's" in Russell Street, Covent Garden, where Mr. Pepys used to drop in to hear the talk, Dryden, the centre of the literary circle which there assembled, had his big arm-chair in winter by the fireside, and in summer on the balcony. Around him gathered many men of letters, including Addison, Wycherley, Congreve, and the juvenile Pope, and all who aspired to be known as "wits." On the outskirts of the charmed circle hovered the more humble and modest frequenters of the coffee-room, who were proud to obtain the honour even of a pinch of snuff from the poet's box. Across the road at "Button's," a trifle later, Addison became the centre of a similar circle, though here the tone was political quite as much as literary. Whig men of letters discussed politics as well as books. Steele, Tickell, Budgell, Rowe, and Ambrose Phillips were among the leading figures in this coterie. Pope was of it for a time, but withdrew after his quarrel with Addison.

Whig politicians met at the "St. James's"; and Addison, in a Spectator of 1712, pictures the scene. A rumour of the death of Louis XIV. had set the tongues going of all the gossips and quidnuncs in town; and the essayist relates how he made a tour of the town to hear how the news was received, and to catch the drift of popular opinion on so momentous an event. In the course of his peregrinations the silent gentleman visited the "St. James's," where he found the whole outer room in a buzz of politics. The quality of the talk improved as he advanced from the door to the upper end of the room; but the most thorough-going politicians were to be found "in the inner room, with the steam of the coffee-pot," and in this sanctum, says the humorist, "I heard the whole Spanish monarchy disposed of, and all the line of Bourbon provided for, in less than a quarter of an hour."

In later days coffee-house clubs became more exclusive. The members of a club or coterie were allotted a room of their own, to which admission ceased to be free and open, and thus was marked the beginning of the transition from the coffee-house of the old style to the club-house of the new. In The Gentleman's Magazine for 1841 (Part II., pp. 265-9) is printed a paper of proposals, dated January 23rd, 1768, for enlarging the accommodation for the club accustomed to meet at Tom's Coffee-house, Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, by taking into the coffee-room the first floor of the adjoining house. Admission to this club was obtained by ballot.

Coffee-houses were frequented for various purposes besides coffee, conversation, and business—professional or otherwise. The refreshments supplied were by no means confined to such innocuous beverages as tea and coffee and chocolate. Wines and spirits were freely consumed—"laced" coffee, or coffee dashed with brandy, being decidedly popular. Swift relates how on the occasion of his christening the child of Elliot, the proprietor of the "St. James's," he sat at the coffee-house among some "scurvy companions" over a bowl of punch so late that when he came home he had no time to write to Stella. The prolonged sittings and too copious libations of the company at Button's Coffee-house gave the feeble and delicate Pope many a headache; and Addison, who was notoriously a hard drinker, did not, we may feel sure, confine himself during those prolonged sittings to coffee.

The coffee-houses were also public reading-rooms. There could be read the newspapers and other periodical publications of the day. When Sir Roger de Coverley entered "Squire's," near Gray's Inn Gate, he "called for a clean pipe, a paper of tobacco, a dish of coffee, a wax candle, and The Supplement."

Mackay, in his Journey through England, already quoted, says that "in all the Coffee-houses you have not only the foreign prints, but several English ones with the Foreign Occurrences, besides papers of morality and party disputes." Swift, writing to Stella, November 18th, 1711, says, "Do you read the Spectators? I never do; they never come in my way; I go to no coffee-houses"; and when The Tatler had disappeared, a little earlier, Gay wrote that "the coffee-houses began to be sensible that the Esquire's lucubrations alone had brought them more customers than all their other newspapers put together." Periodical publications were filed for reference; and at all the better houses The London Gazette, and, during the session, the Parliamentary Votes could be seen. At least one house possessed a library. This was the "Chapter," in Paternoster Row, already referred to as a literary haunt. Dr. Thomas Campbell, the author of a Diary of a Visit to England in 1775, which was published at Sydney in 1854, says that he had heard that the "Chapter" was remarkable for a large collection of books and a reading society.

The coffee-houses served as writing-rooms as well as reading-rooms. Many of Steele's numerous love-letters to "dear Prue," the lady who became his wife, the lovely Mary Scurlock, written both before and after his marriage, are dated from the "St. James's," the "Tennis Court," "Button's," or other coffee-house. But a popular coffee-room could hardly have been an ideal place for either reading or writing. A poet of 1690 says that

And many years later, Gilly Williams, in a letter to George Selwyn, dated November 1st, 1764, says: "I write this in a full coffee-house, and with such materials, that you have good luck if you can read two lines of it."

A curious proof of the close and intimate way in which the coffee-houses were linked with social life is to be seen in the occasional references, both in dramatic and prose literature, to some of the well-known servants of the coffee-houses. Steele, in the first number of The Tatler, refers familiarly to Humphrey Kidney, the waiter and keeper of book debts at the "St. James's"—he "has the ear of the greatest politicians that come hither"—and when Kidney resigned, it was advertised that he had been "succeeded by John Sowton, to whose place of caterer of messages and first coffee-grinder William Bird is promoted, and Samuel Bardock comes as shoe-cleaner in the room of the said Bird." "Robin, the Porter who waits at Will's Coffee-house," plays a prominent part in a little romance narrated in No. 398 of The Spectator. He is described as "the best man in the town for carrying a billet; the fellow has a thin body, swift step, demure looks, sufficient sense, and knows the town." A waiter of the same name at Locket's, in Spring Gardens, is alluded to in Congreve's The Way of the World, where the fashionable Lady Wishfort, when she threatens to marry a "drawer" (or waiter), says, "I'll send for Robin from Locket's immediately."

The coffee-houses were employed as agencies for the sale of many things other than their own refreshments. Most of them sold the quack medicines that were staringly advertised on their walls. Some sold specific proprietary articles. A newspaper advertisement of 1711 says that the water of Epsom Old Well was "pumped out almost every night, that you may have the new mineral every morning," and that "the water is sold at Sam's Coffee-house in Ludgate Street, Hargrave's at the Temple Gate, Holtford's at the lower end of Queen's Street near Thames Street, and nowhere else in London." A "Ticket of the seal of the Wells" was affixed, so that purchasers "might not be cheated in their waters." The "Royal" Coffee-house at Charing Cross, which flourished in the time of Charles II., sold "Anderson's Pills"—a compound of cloves, jalap, and oil of aniseed. At the same house were to be had tickets for the various county feasts, then popular, which were an anticipation of the annual dinners of county associations so common nowadays.

Razor-strops of a certain make were to be bought in 1705 at John's Coffee-house, Exchange Alley. In 1742 it was advertised that "silver tickets" (season tickets) for Ranelagh Gardens were to be had at any hour of the day at Forrest's Coffee-house, near Charing Cross. "All Sorts of the newest fashion'd Tye Perukes, made of fresh string, Humane Hair, far exceeding any Country Work," were advertised in 1725 as to be bought at Brown's Coffee-house in Spring Gardens.

House agents, professional men, and other folk of more questionable kind, were all wont to advertise that they could be seen by clients at this or that coffee-house. The famous and impudent Mrs. Mapp, "the bone-setter," drove into town daily from Epsom in her own carriage, and was to be seen (and heard) at the "Grecian." Most of the houses were willing to receive letters in answer to advertisements, and from the nature of the latter must often, it is pretty certain, have been assisting parties to fraud and chicanery of various kind. At some houses, besides those like Lloyd's specially devoted to auction business, sales were held. A black boy was advertised to be sold at Denis's Coffee-house in Finch Lane in 1708. In the middle of the eighteenth century sales were often held at the "Apollo" Coffee-house, just within Temple Bar, and facing Temple Gate. Picture sales were usually held at coffee-houses. The catalogue of one such sale, held at the "Barbadoes" Coffee-house in February, 1689/90, contains a glowing address on the art of painting by Millington, the Auctioneer, written in the style made famous later by George Robins. Says the eloquent Millington:

and so on and so on.

Many of the early book sales, too, were held at coffee-houses. The third book auction in England, that of the library of the Rev. William Greenhill, was held on February 18th, 1677/78, "in the House of Ferdinand Stable, Coffee-Seller, at the Sign of the 'Turk's Head,'" in Bread Street. When sales were held elsewhere, catalogues could usually be had at some of the leading coffee-houses.

Besides serving as reading, writing and sale rooms, they seem sometimes to have been used as lecture rooms. William Whiston, in his Memoirs written by himself (1749), says:

Some of the houses, as an additional attraction to visitors, offered exhibitions of collections of curiosities. The most famous collection of this kind was that to be seen for many years at Don Saltero's Coffee-house at Chelsea. Don Saltero, by the way, was simply plain James Salter disguised. Some of his exhibits were supplied by his former master, Sir Hans Sloane, and by other scientific friends and patrons. But mixed with things of genuine interest were to be seen all sorts of rubbish. Steele made fun of the collection in The Tatler. But people came to see the "piece of nun's skin tanned," "Job's tears, which grow on a tree, and of which anodyne necklaces are made," a "waistcoat to prevent sweating," and the many other strange articles which were shown side by side with the wooden shoe (of doubtful authenticity, one would think) which was placed under Mr. Speaker's chair in the time of James II., the King of Morocco's tobacco pipe, Oliver Cromwell's sword, and the like "historical" curiosities; and Mr. Salter had no reason to be dissatisfied with the results of his ingenuity. The most interesting association of this coffee-house, perhaps, is Pennant's story of how it was frequented by Richard Cromwell, the quondam Lord Protector, described in his peaceful age as "a little and very neat old man, with a most placid countenance, the effect of his innocent and unambitious life."

Not far from Don Saltero's was the old Chelsea Bun-house, which also contained a museum. The last relics of this collection were sold in April, 1839, and included a few pictures, plaster casts, a model of the bun-house, another, in cut paper, of St. Mary Redcliff Church, and other things of a still more trumpery character.

Richard Thoresby tells us that when he was in London, in the summer of 1714, he met his "old friend Dr. Sloane at the coffee-house of Mr. Miers, who hath a handsome collection of curiosities in the room where the virtuosi meet." As the name of the proprietor only is given, it is not easy to identify this house, but possibly it was the "Grecian" in Devereux Court, which was a favourite resort of the learned. It was at the "Grecian," by the way, that Goldsmith, in the latter years of his life, was often the life and soul of the Templars who were wont to meet there. In their company he sometimes amused himself with the flute, or with whist—"neither of which he played very well." When he took what he called a "Shoemaker's holiday," Goldsmith, after his day's excursion, "concluded by supping at the 'Grecian' or 'Temple-Exchange' Coffee-house, or at the 'Globe' in Fleet Street."

A word must be said as to the manners of the frequenters of coffee-houses. The author of A Trip through London, 1728, tells of fops who stare you out of countenance, and describes one man as standing with his back to the fire "in a great coffee-house near the Temple," and there spouting poetry—a remarkable specimen, indeed, of the bore; but on the whole the evidence goes to show that bad manners were usually resented by the rest of the company, and that good humour and good manners were marked characteristics of coffee-house life. There were exceptional incidents, of course. A fatal duel once resulted from a heated argument at the "Grecian" about a Greek accent. One day, soon after the first appearance of The Tatler, two or three well-dressed men walked into the coffee-room of the "St. James's," and began in a loud, truculent manner to abuse Steele as the author of that paper. One of them at last swore that he would cut Steele's throat or teach him better manners. Among the company present was Lord Forbes, with two friends, officers of high rank in the army. When the cut-throat had uttered his threat, Lord Forbes said significantly, "In this country you will find it easier to cut a purse than to cut a throat," and with the aid of the military gentlemen the bullies were ignominiously turned out of the house. Many years later, in 1776, the "St. James's" was the scene of a singular act of senseless violence. It is tersely described in a letter from Lord Carlisle to George Selwyn. He writes:

Incidents of this kind, however, were of rare occurrence.

But it is impossible to attempt to exhaust the subject of the Old London Coffee-houses in one brief chapter. For a hundred years they focussed the life of the town. Within their hospitable walls men of all classes and occupations, independently, or in clubs and coteries, met not only for refreshment, but for social intercourse—to read and hear the news, to discuss the topics of the day, to entertain and be entertained. This was the chief end they served. Incidentally, as we have seen, they served a number of other subsidiary and more of less useful purposes. They died slowly. Gradually the better-class houses became more exclusive, and were merged in clubs of the modern kind. The inferior houses were driven from public favour by the taverns and public-houses, or, degenerating from their former condition, lingered on as coffee-houses still, but of the lower type, which is not yet quite extinct.