The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List Read Online Free Page A

handful knew the truth. In 1779, twenty years after Jack Harris’s story appeared in print, one ripe old member of the debauched Hell-Fire Club decided to dispel the ambiguity once and for all. In his chronicle of London’s sexual underworld,
Nocturnal Revels
, he decried ‘No such man as Harris (as he is called) a Pimp, now or probably ever did exist’. He was right, of course. Harris’s real name was John Harrison, and his story was very different from the one he had invented to fit his alias.
    Unlike Harris’s early years, Harrison’s were distinctly unremarkable. He had been born the son of George Harrison, keeper of the Bedford Head Tavern in Maiden Lane, a street that just trimmed the outskirts of Covent Garden Piazza. While John Harrison could hardly boast of a landowning lineage, there were a few very loose parallels in his tale. As with Harris, it seems that the Harrison family at the time of John’s birth were not local to the parish of St Paul’s Covent Garden. John would have been a child when the Bedford Head (one drinking establishment of several going by that name in the area) threw open its doors to business in 1740. When Harrison assumed the role of proprietor, the tavern with its freshly cut wooden interiors had been a new venue, unsoiled by the stench of coal smoke, the sourness of alcohol and the odour of bodies. For a publican, there were few other locations as ideal as Covent Garden for setting up shop. Here he could draw from the circulating pool of carelessly spent wages and inherited wealth and make a tidy income for himself. As taverns were regularly managed as family businesses in the eighteenth century, it is possible that the Harrisons may have been in the tankard-serving trade for generations, and possibly moved their enterprise from somewhere not so very distant from the Piazza. Irrespective of its location, however, London taverns on a whole were not ideal nurseries for rearing scrupulous, law-abiding children. In the dinginess of the taproom, young John Harrison would have learned through observation about the libidinous and violent sphere into which he had been brought.
    As the child of a tavern-keeper, he also would have been put to work from an early age. His first defined role within the Bedford Head would have been as a pot-boy, or a general assistant, helping to ferry drinks to customers and carry away their empties. As reading, writing and figuring would have also been considered skills necessary for the management of a public house, a taverner’s son would have received some formal education, most likely provided through a local charity school. Most of his truly useful learning, however, would have been acquired by shadowing his father or any other elder male family member as they performed the tasks essential to their trade. When not assisting at the tap or counting the profits of his labour, George Harrison would have stood at the background of his operation, overseeing the work of the waiters who tottered from table to table with their containers of ale, and keeping a narrowed eye on suspicious characters. As he approached an appropriate age, John would have joined his father in these duties and eventually joined the ranks of the Bedford Head’s devoted male waiting staff. As a tavern waiter, young Harrison would have assumed the role of a compliant servant to his father’s clientele. In doing his best to see that their demands for drink and food were fulfilled, he could come to expect remuneration in the form of tips. While respectfully laying plates of meat and glasses of port before gentlemen may have earned him a few pennies, he would have learned that gratifying their less legitimate requests might supply him with far more handsome sums.
    Simply because the Bedford Head Tavern was a family-run business did not make it an honest one. There is nothing to suggest that its reputation was any better than those of its sister establishments, the notorious watering holes