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.
Tobacco was at first supposed to have medicinal properties, and could be purchased at the shops of apothecaries, as a “Remedy for phlegmatick people.” Children were permitted to smoke it, too, and “in schools substituted a tobacco for breakfast, and were initiated into the trick of expelling the smoke through their nostrils by their masters.” One diarist in 1702 recalled an evening with his brother at Garraway’s Coffee House where he was “surprised to see his sickly child of three years old fill its pipe of tobacco, after that a second and third pipe without the least concern.”
This “strange drug” was everywhere in seventeenth-century London, but it had its detractors who denounced it for creating idleness and stupor. Even the King, James I, wrote a “Counterblast to Tobacco” in which he describes “an unctuous and oily kind of soot found in some great tobacco-takers that after their death were opened.” Yet nothing can dissuade Londoners from taking their amusements, or intoxicants, in a city so reliant upon excess. Although the medicinal properties of tobacco were advertised, its addictive properties soon became evident as a charm against anxiety and isolation-“a Companion in Solitude,” as one observer put it, “an Amusement in Company, an innocent Diversion to Melancholy.” We hear of early seventeenth-century vagrants, such as the Roaring Boys and the Bonaventoes, smoking pipes. Tobacco became, in that sense, one of the necessary pleasures of the London poor.
Another traveller to seventeenth-century London noted how the citizens smoked their small pipes at a play or in a tavern and how “it makes them riotous and merry, and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk … they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives.” It was also a matter of comment that a pipe was “passed round,” and that London women smoked “in secret.” There was a great trade in tobacco, close to half a million pounds, and so many shops sold pipes and tobacco that in themselves they formed “a large city.” So a city of smoke was wreathed within a city of trade. It has been suggested that, in the 1770s, the fashion if not the habit abated; but despite Samuel Johnson’s remark, in 1773, that “smoking has gone out,” in reality pipe-smoking effortlessly merged with the later use of the cigarette.
Cigarettes entered London soon after the Crimean War: the first manufactory was set up in Walworth in 1857. A second and third were set up in Queen Victoria Street and Leicester Square respectively, under the ownership of Greek immigrants, and the first filter-known as the “Cambridge” cigarette-was manufactured in 1865. “Fag” was the name applied only to the cheaper variety of cigarette. The addiction was always strongly present. In fact the city itself seemed to promote it. “I strive after tobacco,” Lamb once wrote, “as other men strive after virtue.” The tobacco warehouse in nineteenth-century London Docks contained almost five million pounds’ sterling worth of that commodity, and there were very many of the poor who spent time “picking up the ends of cigars thrown away as useless by the smokers in the streets,” selling the waste product at a price of 6d to 10d per pound. Every aspect of London can take part in trade.
CHAPTER 40
A Bad Odour
The smells of London linger. They are “always more pronounced in the heart of the City,” according to one late nineteenth-century Canadian writer, Sara Jeanette Duncan, “than in Kensington for instance.” She went on to report that “it was no special odour or collection of odours that could be distinguished-it was a rather abstract smell.” It has been likened to the smell of rain or of metal. It may be the smell of human activity or human greed. Yet it has been claimed that the smell is not human at all. When rain falls upon the city one of the most characteristic odours is that of “refreshed stone” but that dampness can also produce “the tired physical smell of London.” It is the smell of age or, rather, of age restored.
In the fourteenth century the odours were varied and multifarious, from the smell of baking meat to that of boiling glue, from the brewing of beer to the manufacture of vinegar; decayed vegetables competed against tallow and horse-dung, all of which made up “a richly confected cloud of thick and heavy smell which the people had to breathe.” This “medieval smell” is at this late date difficult to identify, although perhaps it lingers in stray doorways and passageways where a similar medley of odours confronts the passer-by. There are also parts of the world, as, for example, the souks of North Africa, where it is possible to savour something of the atmosphere of medieval London.
Every century, too, has its own smells. In the fifteenth century the dog house at Moorgate sent forth “great noyious and infectyve aiers,” while others complained about the reek of the lime kilns situated in the suburbs. The smell of sea coal, in particular, was identified with the smell of the city itself. It was, essentially, the odour of trade which proved unbearable. Thus in the sixteenth century the foundries of Lothbury were a source of much public disquiet. From the north came the smell of burnt bricks, while in the City itself by Paternoster Row emerged “a nauseous smell of tallow.” The smell of the Stocks Market, at the eastern end of Cheapside, was so strong that the worshippers in the adjacent church of St. Stephen Walbrook “were overcome by the stench” of rotting vegetables. Those who attended church risked other olfactory perils, however, and the odours emanating from the burial ground of St. Paul’s Churchyard alarmed Latimer in the sixteenth century. “I think verily that many a man taketh his death in Paul’s Churchyard,” he expounded in one of his sermons, “and this I speak of experience, for I myself when I have been there in some mornings to hear the sermons, have felt such an ill favoured unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after.” This odour of graveyards was in fact one of the most permanent and prolonged smells of the city, with complaints against it from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.