There is a case for arguing that these societies and tavern debating clubs are associated, in London at least, with the informal debates of the early eighteenth-century coffee house. Such was the formative influence of that institution, however, that it can be held responsible for a club quite different from those which met in Windmill Street or Moorfields. It became known as “the gentleman’s club” which, according to a nineteenth-century account, arose from the “ill-appointed coffee-house or tavern” to effect “a revolution in the constitution of society.” White’s Club, the oldest of these establishments (1736), is the direct descendant of White’s Chocolate-house; Brooks’s and Boodle’s are of eighteenth-century date but the others, including the Athenaeum and the Garrick, are all of nineteenth-century foundation. These more recent establishments combined private associations with buildings which were deemed and planned to be on a public scale. They were designed by architects such as Wilkins and Barry and Smirke, and, with their bas-relief sculpture and elaborate modelling, they resembled large country houses or Italian palaces. They remain impressive principally because of the essential vulgarity of their appearance. In that sense they are very much the stage property of London.
The endless contrasts of the city can in fact be exemplified by those other gentlemen’s clubs of the nineteenth century, the working men’s clubs, generally held on the first floor of the local public house where the atmosphere was one of unrefined entertainment. Lectures were sometimes given, as in George Gissing’s The Nether World-“What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due. Ay, what shall happen, my boys, and that before so very long”-but adult education or jolly debate often gave way to “the rattle of bones, the strumming of a banjo, and a voice raised at intervals in a kind of whoop.” In Arthur Morrison’s account (1896) of the Feathers in Bethnal Green, there is a clubroom where “the sing-song began, for at least a score were anxious to ‘oblige,’” although the effect is somewhat diminished by Morrison’s comment that the countenances of those attending were “as of a man betrayed into mirth in the midst of great sorrow.” Here again the importance, indeed the stern necessity, of drink is left unstated.
Such places were known variously, according to their locations, as glee clubs or mughouses. Between songs, there were toasts and speeches. The more formal of these establishments were known as saloons and generally demanded money for entrance in exchange for refreshment varying from “ale, inky-coloured porter, or strong beer” to tea and brandy. Tables with covers of oilcloth or leather were pushed against a wall, while at the end of the room was a table and a piano or harp. “There was no curriculum of entertainment,” one customer is reported as saying in Roy Porter’s London: A Social History, “every now amp; then one of the young women would say, ‘I think I’ll sing a song.’” A French visitor reported how, at the sound of an auctioneer’s hammer rapped upon the table, “three gentlemen, as serious as Anglican ministers, start singing, sometimes alone, sometimes in chorus, sentimental ballads.” He also noticed that in some taverns of the same type the landlords “have unfortunately installed mechanical organs which grind away unceasingly.” So complaints about pub entertainment are as old as public houses themselves. These taverns and saloons had their counterparts in “night cellars” such as the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane and the Coal Hole in Fountain Court, the Strand, where established entertainers appeared as singers or performers among the combined fumes of ale, gas-jets and tobacco …
CHAPTER 39
A Note on Tobacco
All visitors to clubs and pubs saw and smelled “the fume of pipes,” and that smoke has hovered over London taverns since Sir Walter Raleigh, according to local legend, first began to smoke in Islington. A few years later an early seventeenth-century German visitor noted that Londoners “are constantly smoking tobacco and in this manner-they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the farther end of which they put the herb, so dry that may be rubbed into powder, and putting fire to it.” Clay pipes are to be found everywhere in archaeological excavations.
