This is the context, then, for the drinking clubs of the eighteenth century. Characteristically they met weekly, in a tavern, to eat and sing and debate. There was the Kit-Kat Club of notable Whigs, which met in Shire Lane, and there was the Robin Hood Club in Butcher Row, which included “masons, carpenters, smiths, and others.” The discussions in Shire Lane continued well into the night, but in Butcher Row “each member has five minutes allowed him to speak.” There was the Beefsteak Club, which met in a room in the Covent Garden Theatre, and was devoted to drinking and wit “interspersed with snatches of song and much personal abuse.” The atmosphere of such a place is evoked by Ned Ward in The London Spy: he entered “an old-fashioned room where a gaudy crowd of odoriferous Town-Essences were walking backwards and forwards with their hats in their hands, not daring to convert them to their intended use, lest it should put the foretops of their wigs into some disorder … Bows and crimps of the newest mode were here exchanged … They made a humming like so many hornets in a chimney corner.” In contrast was the poor man’s Twopenny Club where one of the rules declared that “If any neighbour swears or curses, his neighbour may give him a kick upon the shins.” A club known as the House of Lords met at the Three Herrings in Bell Yard; it was made up from “the more dissolute sort of barristers, attorneys and tradesmen.” There were punch clubs, “cutter” clubs for those with boats upon the Thames, and “spouting” clubs for burgeoning public speakers.
These were centres of argument in the combative London tradition, combining obscene songs and egalitarian speeches in equal measure. They were often known as chair clubs, but there were also card clubs for gamesters and cock and hen clubs for youths and prostitutes. There was a No-Nose Club, and a Farting Club in Cripplegate where the members “meet once a Week to poyson the Neighbourhood, and with their Noisy Crepitations attempt to out-fart one another.” C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, intones a litany of other London clubs: a Surly Club at a tavern near Billingsgate, filled with the tradesmen of that quarter who met to sharpen “the practice of contradiction and of foul language”; a Spit-farthing Club, which met weekly at the Queen’s Head in Bishopsgate, and was “composed chiefly of misers and skinflints; and the Club of Broken Shopkeepers, which met at Tumble Down Dick in Southwark and comprised bankrupts and others unfortunate in trade. The Mock Heroes Club met in an alehouse in Baldwin’s Gardens, where each member would assume the name of a “defunct hero,” while the Lying Club congregated at the Bell Tavern in Westminster where “no true word” was to be uttered during its proceedings. A Man-Killing Club which met at a tavern in a back-alley adjoining St. Clement Danes admitted to membership no one “who had not killed his man”; but there was also a Humdrum Club “composed of gentlemen of peaceable dispositions, who were satisfied to meet at a tavern, smoke their pipes and say nothing till midnight” when they went homeward. An Everlasting Club was so called “because its hundred members divided the twenty four hours of day and night among themselves in such a manner that the club was always sitting, no person presuming to rise until he was relieved by his appointed successor.”
The club tradition continued into the following century with members of the “free and easy” pub institution subscribing a shilling a week; there were also tavern debating clubs, characteristically to be found among such quarters of artisans as Spitalfields, Soho, Clerkenwell, or Finsbury. They were in part derived from the atheistical societies of the previous century, which had met in Wells Street as well as the Angel and St. Martin’s Lane, and were similarly disliked by the civic authorities. Many establishments flourished throughout the early nineteenth century in defiance of official policy, however, among them the Swan in New Street, the Fleece in Windmill Street, the George in East Harding Street and the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields. These taverns became the centre of London radical dissent. In 1817 the Hampden Club met at the Anchor Tavern, for example, from which alehouse issued the first demand for universal male suffrage.
