jewellery, get a valuation, or simply have your watch set to rights.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century the pace of change picked up as men and women from the countryside poured into the City, bringing their skills as carpenters, printers, carriage builders, sign painters, butchers, glue boilers, farriers, nail makers – everything, in short, that a community needed to thrive in a pre-industrial age. On top of this, the large financial institutions that had settled in the area a hundred years earlier were beginning to expand as Britain became the money capital of the world. Threadneedle Street, home of the Bank of England, was both the heart of the financial district and the place where prostitutes queued patiently, like cabs. From there it was a short walk to the Stock Exchange, Royal Exchange, the Baltic and Lloyd’s coffee houses, not to mention the offices of bill brokers, merchant bankers, and private bankers. Yet even in the middle of the nineteenth century many of these smaller ‘houses’ were still family businesses, handed down from father to son with occasional injections of capital from a lucky marriage. Right up to the middle of Victoria’s reign the City of London continued to be a place where the public and private, professional and personal sides of life were pursued from the same streets, often, indeed, from the same set of rooms.
At the heart of these overlapping worlds stood the public house. The ‘pub’ was built as a house, looked like a house, and in this early period was indistinguishable from the family homes on either side of it. Yet it was public, in the sense that anyone might enter from the streets and use its domestic facilities – food, chairs, fire, silent companionship or lively conversation – for the price of a drink. It stank, of course, as all public places did, from a mixture of its clients’ private smells and a few extra of its own: old food, flat beer, dead mice, linen that never quite got dry. The Dolphin, just like an ordinary domestic house, had its own aura that you would recognize as instantly as that of your child’s or lover’s. The plans for the pub do not survive, but this kind of place usually had five separate rooms on the ground floor, including a public parlour, taproom, kitchen, and the publican’s private parlour. There was no bar as such; beer (not spirits, which needed a separate licence) was brought to the customers by waitresses and potboys. The effect was simply as if you had popped into someone else’s sitting room to be offered refreshment by the mistress of the house, or her maid. Often these people felt as familiar as your own.
The Dolphin, like all pubs in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled as a community hall, council chambers, coroner’s court, labour exchange, betting shop, canteen, and park bench. It would not be until the 1840s that the temperance do-gooders would manage to forge the link in people’s minds between social respectability and total abstinence from drink. In fact until that time, which coincided with the first steps in public sanitary reform, drinking alcohol was a great deal safer than risking the local water. It was for that reason that when Milk Street tradesmen like Mr Chamberlain at number 36, a lone leather worker in a sea of cotton, came to take their lunch at the Dolphin every day, they washed it down with several glasses of port before tottering back for the afternoon’s work. And in a world before town halls and committee rooms – the very setting in which Mr Chamberlain’s own son, the Liberal politician Joseph, would eventually make his mark in faraway Birmingham – many political organizations, charities, chapters, friendly societies and trades associations including, oddly, the fledgling temperance societies, would choose to hold their meetings in the snug surroundings of a public house rather than trying to pile into someone’s inadequate lodgings.
From 1808 the Dolphin was run by Samuel Beeton, a Stowmarket man who was part of his generation’s tramp from the Suffolk countryside into the capital. Born in 1774 into a family of builders, Beeton had broken with tradition by becoming a tailor. Arriving in London in the closing years of the century he settled at a number of addresses around Smithfield Market, the centre of the skinning, cobbling and clothing trades. The market at the time was a smoking, bloody tangle of streets where life was nasty, brutal and short, at least for the livestock. Cattle and sheep were herded up from the country before being slaughtered, dismantled, and sold on in bits. The best meat went to the butchers, the bones to the glue makers, the hides to the cobblers and tailors who had settled in surrounding Clerkenwell.
It might seem lazy to use Dickens to describe the streets that Beeton knew, but there is no one else who does London – stinking, noisy, elemental London – quite so well. Here, then, is the master’s description from Oliver Twist, as Bill Sikes drags Oliver through Smithfield on their way to commit a burglary:
It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.
Samuel Beeton lived right at the heart of all this driving, beating, whooping chaos. By 1803 he was keeping a pub, the Globe, in the aptly named Cow Lane which led straight off the marketplace and most likely catered mainly for his former colleagues, the tailors. His first daughter – by now he was married to Lucy Elsden, a Suffolk girl – was christened at nearby St Sepulchre, the church from where ‘the bells of Old Bailey’ rang out twelve times on the eve of an execution at adjoining Newgate. Perhaps the child, Ann Thomason (Thomasin had been Samuel’s mother’s name), found this doomy world too hard to bear: born in May 1807, she left it soon afterwards. Her siblings, by contrast, were patterned on what would soon emerge as the Beeton template: robust, canny, pragmatic. All seven survived into thriving middle age.
Beeton’s shift from tailoring to the hospitality business played straight to his natural strengths. He was outgoing, clubbable, the sort of man who joined organizations and rose through them by being pleasant, useful, good to have around. In October 1803, and already working as a ‘victualler’, he paid to become a member of the Pattenmakers’ Guild. Pattens, those strap-on platforms that raised the wearer’s everyday shoes above the dead cats, horse shit and other debris of the metropolitan streets, might seem exactly the right thing for filthy Smithfield. But, in fact, pattens and their makers had been in decline for some time. The guild clung to existence by exploiting the fact that it was one of the cheapest to join, and so provided an economical way into City of London politics for those who might otherwise find it too rich for their pockets. You did not need to know how to make wooden clogs in order to belong, although plenty of its members, like Beeton himself, had once belonged to the allied tailoring trade.
By 1808, and with the arrival of their second daughter Lucy, the Beetons had moved to the Dolphin in Milk Street. Samuel may not have been born to the life of a City worthy, but he lost no time in catching up. In 1813 he was elected to the Common Council for the ward of Cripplegate Within (you had to be a guild member to qualify – the Pattenmakers had come in useful) and proved both popular and effective. Fifteen years on and he was still getting the highest number of votes for re-election. The Common Council, part of the arcane City of London government, was a mixture of the powerful and the picturesque. Seen from the outside the 234 council men were pompous and reactionary, clinging to ancient rights of administration in a way that blocked London from getting the city-wide police force or sewerage system it so desperately needed. The council men, however, saw themselves as defenders against creeping bureaucracy and standardization, proud advocates of an ancient and honourable independence. The minutes for Cripplegate Ward during the period Beeton served show the council men setting the rates, choosing the beadle, worrying about street security, congratulating the alderman on his recent baronetcy and, in the manner of ponderous uncles, sending their thoughts