London: The Biography

The phenomenon of transference from age to age is in certain respects inexplicable. It may be that the previous reputation of an area attracts its new residents, so that there is a kind of advertised continuity; but this does not apply to other districts which simply flare and fade away. Or is it that an atmosphere of freedom and unfamiliarity, first created by the Huguenots liberated from the cruelty of their compatriots, has continued to linger? Certainly immigrants arrived in their wake, from Russia and from Hungary, Italy and Greece. In the churchyard of St. Anne’s, Soho, there was a tablet with the following inscription: “Near this place is interred Theodore, King of Corsica, who died in this parish, December 11, 1756, immediately after leaving the King’s Bench Prison by the benefit of the Act of Insolvency; in consequence of which he registered his kingdom of Corsica for the benefit of his creditors.” He had accepted his crown in March 1736, but could not raise enough money to pay for his army; so he travelled to London where, finding himself in debt, he was soon arrested and consigned to prison. On his release on 10 December 1756, he took a sedan chair to the house of a tailor and acquaintance in Little Chapel Street Soho. But he died the next day, and his funeral expenses were paid by an oil-man in Old Compton Street. So a foreign king is buried in the middle of Soho, thus emphasising its reputation as a foreign land in the heart of London. This penniless exile might almost be considered the true monarch of the area.

Its reputation for heterogeneity and freedom was also associated with liberties of another sort, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was notorious for courtesans. A celebrated member of that order, Mrs. Cornelys, arranged weekly assemblies in Carlisle House on the south side of Soho Square. There was a notice outside in which she “begs the chairmen and hackney-coach drivers not to quarrel, or to run their poles through each other’s windows,” which suggests that the spirit of disorder affected anyone who came within the parish. In Carlisle House were held masquerades and promenades which featured scantily dressed ladies “in violation,” according to one observer, “of the laws, and to the destruction of all sober principles.” Mrs. Cornelys was one of those redoubtable London characters holding court to thieves and nobility alike, who dominated all company with a quick wit and a loud if vulgar manner. She was enterprising, irrepressible, charming and scathing in equal measure; she created a great stir in the 1760s and 1770s until after the failure of one of her fashionable schemes she “retired into private life.” She started selling asses’ milk in Knightsbridge, and in 1797 died in the Fleet Prison.

She was the very type of the London club hostess, a figure so much larger than life that no one-not even the most drunken or aristocratic customer- would dare to cross her. Kate Hamilton and Sally Sutherland both managed dubious “night-houses” of the 1860s, and Kate was described as “presiding as a sort of Paphian queen” over her scantily clad dancers. There is a wonderful description of her “weighing some twenty stone, with a countenance that had weathered countless convivial nights. Mrs. Hamilton presented a stupendous appearance in the low cut evening dresses which she always wore. From midnight to dawn she sipped champagne [and] with her foghorn voice, knew how to keep her clients of both sexes in order.” Her establishment was in Leicester Square, which by the mid-nineteenth century had become associated with the delinquencies of neighbouring Soho, and her twentieth-century successor was Muriel Belcher who ran the Colony Room Club, a drinking room in Dean Street. She also kept her clients in order with a voice as piercing, if not as loud, as a foghorn, and specialised in a form of obscene badinage which only the vulgar mistook for wit.

From its beginning, in fact, Soho has been associated with demonstrative and sometimes difficult women. In 1641 “a lewd woman,” Anna Clerke, was bound over for “threteninge to burne the houses at Soho” for reasons unknown. A once famous inn known as the Mischief, in Charles Street, had as its sign a drunken courtesan straddling a man’s back while holding a glass of gin with the legend “She’s as Drunk as a Sow” inscribed beside her. The female, and male, prostitutes of the area were well known by the middle of the nineteenth century; once more the relative “foreignness” of the neighbourhood ensured that it would be the context for more relaxed sexual behaviour than in Lombard Street, for example, or in Pimlico. The proximity of the rookeries, in St. Giles and elsewhere, also meant that there was no shortage of fresh bodies for the clients. Only the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report, in 1957, managed to keep “the girls” off the streets; but they migrated instead to small rooms and attic spaces in the same area.