Drury Lane

Trigger warning: sex, sex work, sexual assault, rape. Unsuitable for children. * Drury Lane has been a very culturally important street for a very long time. Until Kingsway was finished in 1905, it was the main arterial route for traffic between, on one side, Bloomsbury and all of the fashionable new developments to the west, and on the other, the River Thames and the City of London. Due to its length, it was split between several parishes. Within St. Clement Danes was only the eastern side of Drury Lane from the junction with Wych Street (now bulldozed and replaced with Aldwych) to just south of the junction with Princes Street. Even this tiny stretch of Drury Lane was so heavily populated and economically important it gave its name to an entire ward of the parish. * The theatre was a very important influence on this part of Drury Lane from the Restoration onwards, with the Drury Lane playhouse just yards away from the St. Clement Danes parish boundary; this was for a long time one of only two ‘patent theatres’ in London, with royal permission to perform spoken drama. In lesser theatres, like Sadler’s Wells, there were a variety of light theatrical entertainments, but only Drury Lane and its lone competitor – based out of the Portugal Street playhouse from 1695 until the early 1720s – staged full plays. From the 1730s a dedicated opera house opened not far from the playhouse in Covent Garden, again yards away from St. Clement Danes’s portion of Drury Lane. These two uniquely important venues brought hundreds of genteel audience members to Drury Lane every week during the London season, all purchasing tickets and transport, and many seeking refreshment, or even carnal pleasure. This exuberance of spending allowed a professional leisure industry to flourish, from elite musicians to actors to sex workers. * As you would expect, a lot of the servants recorded in the St. Clement Danes parish settlement examinations (see the record for St. Clement Danes) who worked along Drury Lane worked for public houses. There were plenty of tradesmen’s servants too, though – a servant to a cheesemonger, another to a button maker, and a third to a coach maker. A shoemaker’s servant and a tailor’s servant worked in some of the courts and alleys leading off Drury Lane. Other than the coach maker, there were tradesmen like this in every neighbourhood of London, providing victuals and mending clothes. There were also some servants to country gentlemen who were staying in lodgings in Drury Lane, probably above a shop or public house. However, musicians, actors and sex workers are all invisible in these records, since they rarely hired servants to help them in their work (and in the case of the latter category, servants would not wish to disclose their employer’s trade to a parish official). We have to find other ways to discover who lived and worked in Drury Lane. * Researcher Catherine Harbor, drawing from a database of musical newspaper advertisements, collected a list of musicians’ names and addresses, as well as concert venues in the first half of the eighteenth century. I have placed all of those in the vicinity of St. Clement Danes on a German map of 1735 (see cover image). Although most of these genteel musicians lived further to the west, amongst the gentry in St. James Westminster and the new developments around Oxford Street, there are considerable clusters of musicians living on either side of Drury Lane, including the composer Thomas Arne, who lived on Duke Street and (at a different point in his life) Great Queen Street, both opening onto Drury Lane. Arne composed ‘Rule Britannia’ and harmonised ‘God Save the Queen’. Actors also lived and congregated in the area, an informal theatrical club forming at the Black Jack tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (see record for Carey Street). * In terms of sex work, although brothels and sex workers could be found in every poorly-lit alley, Drury Lane had a notorious reputation as a red-light district. In a short, lewd booklet named The Female Glossary, published in 1732 (which attempts to define various euphemisms for a woman’s genitals) a number of sexual terms are considered unique to ‘the Hundreds of Drury’, namely, Drury Lane and all of the many narrow courts, lanes and alleys that led from it. (Hundreds were an ancient, purely nominal division of English local government separate from parishes or counties.) This reputation made sense when you consider the urban landscape. Drury Lane was a principal arterial route between London and Westminster, a playground for the wealthy and the ‘middling sorts’, and yet it was a narrow street lined with old, warren-like buildings and narrower, noisome courts and lanes. All manner of people passed through Drury Lane, many of them at perfect leisure to indulge their appetites. The old, complex warrens of narrow yards and tall buildings provided plenty of privacy. As for the nature of the work carried out, and the complex relationships between sex work, rape culture and misogyny, see the record for Star Court. * However, the central infrastructure of all early-modern leisure – musical, theatrical, conversational, sexual – was the public house, and Drury Lane abounded in these. (For more information about how the public house was central to commerce, trade and work, see the record for Claremarket.) They came in all shapes and sizes, from the grandness of the Crown and Anchor Tavern on Arundel Street – important enough to merit its own record – to the dusty parlours of unlicensed gin distilleries. This record will explore how people used public houses for leisure, what the sources of entertainment were, what food and drink and other services were available, and the power dynamics of the public house. If you are looking for a full-length history of English public houses, I thoroughly recommend Peter Clark’s book The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830. * Let’s look at some real examples of visitors to Drury Lane’s public houses. Data collected from court witness statements (analysed by Hans-Joachim Voth) suggests most people stopped work around 6, at the end of a 12-hour workday, but many people popped into public houses for refreshment or meetings throughout the day. Even so, Drury Lane’s public houses would probably have been fullest in the late evening. Even well past midnight some witnesses were entering and leaving public houses. Between 1 and 2 am Benjamin Gosling, a bricklayer, met with one Phillis Noble at the corner of Bennet’s Court, a tiny, densely inhabited alley a couple of blocks from Blackmore Street. This was in the early hours of a chilly Monday morning, 3rd January 1726. Sunday was almost always a day off in the early modern period, unless work was absolutely unavoidable. Those who did not go to church – and some who did – often drank heavily on a Sunday, and took Monday off as well when they could. This practice was so common the day was nicknamed ‘St. Monday’ – for, like a saint’s day, there was more drinking and sleeping than working. Benjamin Gosling, being out so late into Sunday night, probably was not preparing to wake at 6 a.m. the next day to begin heavy manual work. * Thanks to the wildly inconsistent level of detail the Old Bailey Proceedings provide (see the record for Hollowell Street), we have a verbatim record of what Gosling said in court. This is how he described meeting Phillis Noble: “as I was coming by the Corner of Bennets Court, in Drury-Lane; who should I meet but [Phillis]? so says she, How dye do my Dear, - 'tis bloody cold Weather, - I wish you'd give me a Dram. Whereof, says I again, I don't care if I do, if we can come to a good Fire, and so - what signifies lying - we struck a Bargain, and went to a Gin Shop, and I thought I had better do so than wander about the Street all Night, tho' I must needs say, I might as well have gone home to any Wife, - but that's neither here nor there”. There is a certain level of innuendo here that suggests their tryst was not merely platonic. Although women were vilified for having sexual partners outside marriage, it was increasingly acceptable among men (see the record for Star Court), so that he felt happy making these intimations in a public sphere. Public houses were a great place to begin an affair or negotiate a night’s paid fun. Benjamin Gosling’s case very closely resembles that of William Hopkins. In February 1728, 11 pm on a Sunday night, he “treated [Sarah Hudson] with a Quartern of Geneva [gin]”, in a Drury Lane brandy shop “he knew … to have a very ill Name”, before the two retired together to a back room, where his pocket was allegedly picked. The way Phillis Noble picked up Benjamin Gosling was exactly the same, asking for a shot of hard liquor (a dram) in a public house and seeing how things would go from there. * In any case, whether your interest in a person was sexual, friendly or commercial, introductions were important to early modern Londoners. Around 75% of Londoners had come to the city from elsewhere – in the seventeenth century, often escaping rural poverty in the North of England, and in the eighteenth, mostly young people from the Home Counties attracted by higher wages and new social opportunities. You needed a network of friends and acquaintances around you to gain a good, trustworthy reputation – otherwise getting a job, getting credit from shopkeepers or defending yourself from crimes or disputes was impossible. People also supported each other through lean times or cash flow crises. Getting to know new people was not just an emotional imperative, then, but necessary for survival. One way people introduced themselves to each other was through song. There are many instances of people gaining a stranger’s trust through song, often in the street, or in the public house. In one robbery case from 1756, from the other side of London, is a striking description of a group of friends accepting a new member: “I [John Williams] went along with Clark to that house about eleven o'clock that night, and at the same time [Rice Price] follow'd us in, where we found [William Pratt], James Nailer , another man, and my landlord together; they were drinking rum and water. I took hold of the pot and drank to the man of the house, he drank to Clark, and Clark to [Price], [he] drank it up, and bid the landlord till it. Then [Price] went and sat down by the right side of [Pratt], sat there some time, and sang a song or two”. Late in the evening on a Tuesday night, Rice Price – probably a Welshman – entered a public house to find a convivial scene. Four men were drinking together, happy in each other’s company; two more men came in, their acquaintances, and Price came in with them. They toasted each other and paid their respects to the landlord (“the man of the house”), and by dint of being included in the toasting, Price was included into the group too. He then cemented his status in the group by sitting with them and singing. Given he was in new company he knew little about, that was a sound choice. With his vocal tone and the content of his song he could persuade them he was a convivial companion, without revealing much about himself or assuming too much about his newfound acquaintances. If it was a song they already knew, it was something you had in common; if it was a new song to them, it might pique their interest. Whether your song was bawdy and rowdy or elegant and operatic, music could help you find new friends and establish your status in a new environment. In the record for Hollowell Street you will find more about ballads and how people learned, selected and sang them. Footmen could act like gentlemen and sober tradesmen like drunken kings with the right language of song, gesture and dress. * Power and social status still mattered, however. You might have been able to perform a higher-status role in the theatre of the public house, but there was still an implicit hierarchy that restricted the roles you could play, and meted out terrible consequences to those who stepped outside the boundaries. Most explicitly, in the mid-seventeenth century there were still sumptuary laws, which banned people of low social status from wearing particular items of high-status clothing. The eighteenth century saw an end to these laws, and a more fluid attitude to the language of clothing, but this horrified elite writers, people like Daniel Defoe, who feared that maidservants might be mistaken for mistresses and the clarity of the social order undermined. Presenting yourself in higher-status clothing than your status at birth merited was, however, increasingly normal, despite the increasingly deranged anger of moralists. Yet by the eighteenth century, enforcing the hierarchies of race and gender became more and more important to the average public house visitor. * Eighteenth-century anti-Black attitudes were gradually hardening into the reflexive scientific racism we unfortunately still recognise today. For more evidence from St. Clement Danes about how this process took place, see the record for Clement’s Inn. As for gender, public houses in England were safer for women than Paris’s cabarets in the same period, where a woman merely passing the threshold would face shouted abuse and violent threats. Even so, the unequal expectations of men and women, where men were considered sexually incontinent and women charged with protecting their chastity at all costs, meant women were hardly free to inhabit public space without danger. Sometimes, the same behaviour was interpreted very differently when men and women performed it. When women sang, for instance, it was always sexualised in a way that it rarely (but occasionally) was for men. This can be seen in one of the rare rape trials that actually led to a conviction (in an era when obstacle after obstacle was placed in the way of women seeking justice). One Thomas Meller and his friend coerced a 17-year-old maidservant and her friend from public house to public house, out on the north eastern fringes of London, finally dragging her into a ditch in a deserted field and raping her. In one of the public houses, however, he had sung “several Songs”, and a witness for the defence alleged the women also sang. He claimed to be “a slender acquaintance” of Meller’s, who happened to be in the public house at the same time. He testified: “Then I came into the room where they were. I heard the prisoner sing. I thought it was very agreeable. He sung a good song. … We went into another room by ourselves to hear the ladies sing. They sang a little bit of a song, which was very agreeable. There was nothing but modesty on both sides. The girls did not appear to be there against their wills, but far from it.” Here, Meller’s song is supposed to be evidence of his good character, while the women’s song – which the witness seems to have invented – is evidence that they consented to his advances and were attracted to Meller. The double standard could not have been clearer. On this occasion, even the jury was not convinced, sentencing Meller to death. However, if a woman was assaulted in (or rather, usually just outside) a public house, most juries tended to side with her attacker. Men had all kinds of ways to destroy a woman’s reputation in a public house, from buying strong liquor, to pretending intimate familiarity, to alleging theft. This ensured women knew that their access to the public house was conditional only on men’s approval, keeping them in their ‘proper’, subservient role. * Benjamin Gosling and his newfound companion Phillis Noble confined themselves to enjoying only gin and a good fire in the unnamed Drury Lane gin shop they walked to together. But different kinds of public house had different facilities for hospitality. Most gin shops, especially the illegal, unlicensed ones that proliferated in the 1720s and 30s, confined themselves to basic furniture, a roaring fire, and hard spirits, not needing to diversify to satisfy their customer base. * Alehouses, several rungs up the ladder from the notoriety of the gin shop, were starting to become more substantial institutions, with more furniture and even sometimes private rooms for functions or large groups. In a good London alehouse you could drink in the main parlour, a small room to the side, or in the kitchen, the warmest and brightest space, if the messiest and busiest. Alehouses offered ale, of course, which in the seventeenth century was often brewed onsite but by the end of the century was usually from a local professional brewery. Prices were fairly low, and remained stable from the late 1690s until the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. You could also get simple bar snacks in a good alehouse, with bread, cheese and bacon being staple foods. Some occupations, like tailoring and haberdashery, had ‘houses of call’, alehouses where customers were sure to come across the freelance tradesmen they needed. Alehouse owners were quite happy with this arrangement, since it kept their house full of tradesmen drinking beer and eating snacks until they could find their next job. * At the top of the scale were inns and taverns. St. Clement Danes had several along the Strand, and around Claremarket, but Drury Lane was too old and too narrow for any of these grand institutions. Some of these inns and taverns had seating capacities of thousands, and generally added hot meals, multiple private rooms – some of them very grand – and accommodation for guests and their horses (for more about horses, travel and transport, see the record for Boswell Court). This kind of public house was extremely important to communication and infrastructure, as well as a place where all classes could take their leisure. The record for Claremarket explains how taverns like the Sun were tremendously useful for business. All sorts of people often used inns, taverns, and the better sort of alehouses as their mail addresses, since in the period before house numbers, when tenancies were often very short-term, a public house was an easily found address. What distinguished inns and taverns from alehouses was their hard-won sense of genuine respectability. Women and the gentry sometimes met at alehouses, but not without a sense that these were spaces that could tarnish their reputation – especially among the flesh-pots of Drury Lane. In contrast, even when men got hideously drunk at a tavern’s glee club, or quietly executed scams on gullible marks in a corner of an inn’s public bar, the reputation of inns and taverns were not much affected. They were seen almost as a neutral space, like the street itself. However, just like a street, they could become unfashionable, and this was the fate that met several of St. Clement Danes’ grand inns in the nineteenth century, notably Lyon’s Inn. Without genteel support, even a healthy customer base was not enough to keep these huge ventures profitable. * Drury Lane, in many ways, has remained a playground for wealthy and middling visitors. It might not have the same reputation for sex work, since 19th-century gentrification efforts – and, to be honest, sex worker eradication efforts – succeeded in driving sex work to other areas. Yet there are still plenty of public houses along Drury Lane. Next time you’re in a public house, think about how you perform a variety of social roles while you’re buying drinks, socialising with friends, and interacting with strangers. How are you performing your gender, race and class identity? Are you enforcing or breaking down hierarchies? What can we learn from early modern pub etiquette?