Free The Covent Garden Ladies: The Extraordinary Story of Harris's List by Hallie Rubenhold Page A

exactingly shrewd, and sober-headed enough to steer clear of the gaming tables.
    A booming business required an army of assistants, and to keep his ship afloat Tomkins employed seven waiters, including a head-waiter, a cellarman and a pot-boy. He also took on apprentices and ran a kitchen noted for its culinary genius. For staff at the Shakespear, it was unlikely that a better-paid position could be found in all of London. Aware of the reputation he was required to maintain, Packington Tomkins insisted that ‘each waiter was smartly dressed in his ruffles’. New recruits like John Harrison would have been granted a clothing allowance to pay for his attire in the first instance, but soon would have had pockets heavy enough with gold to purchase any number of fine shirts, coats and breeches. The handsome tips proffered at the Shakespear permitted its waiters to smile smugly. As ‘Old Twigg’, a former cook at the Shakespear, recalled, a porter ‘thought it a bad week if he did not make £7’, a sum equivalent to a domestic servant’s entire year’s wages. This, even for the son of a tavern-keeper, was likely to have been an enormous allowance. When coupled with his takings as a pimp, any appetite for wealth that Harrison may have harboured would have been well satisfied.
    Under Packington Tomkins’s roof, John Harrison would have been granted the precious opportunity of starting afresh. As a waiter at a Covent Garden back-street tavern, few but the locals would have known his name and face, but at the Shakespear, in the heart of the excitement, Harrison would become a recognised character in no time at all. The Shakespear’s Head was a destination in itself, a place where men from all corners of London would have gathered for an evening’s entertainment. As a fledgling pimp, Harrison would have recognised to what degree he could expand his fortune were he to make the most of his situation. He also could not fail to see the dangers that success might bring. Although discreet bawds, waiter-pimps and panderers higher up on the rungs of the sex-trade ladder had little to fear from the easily bribed authorities, Harrison was under no illusions as to the legitimacy of his craft. In his line of work, an alias would be a necessity, a kind of cloak of invisibility that could be pulled over the eyes in an instant. So when Tomkins’s patrons bellowed for a waiter to bring them a woman, they didn’t call for John Harrison, instead they requested the watchful, well-dressed figure known simply as ‘Jack Harris’. His father’s name, however esteemed, reviled or inconsequential it may have been, was cast off in favour of an altogether new identity. No longer Harrison the taverner’s son, he was free to become anyone.
    According to the two contemporary ‘authorities’ on Jack Harris,
The Remonstrance of Harris
and
The Memoirs of Miss Fanny Murray
, the key to the pimp’s success was his cool, calculating manner, his powers of observation and his rational approach to his trade. Like his employer Tomkins, Harris was a savvy businessman. He came to the Shakespear well acquainted with the role of waiter-pimp and, under Tomkins’s direction, was able to play his part to perfection. Harris had already established his understanding of the several fundamental characteristics required of a good pimp or panderer. The first and foremost of these was a knowledge of how to supplicate, which necessitated an aptitude for ‘insinuating, dissembling, flattering, cringing’ and ‘fawning’. Grovelling to badly behaved young gentlemen did not suit Harris’s personality, but he found that pragmatic self-control made him better able to ‘answer the huffing questions of fiery Blades’ and to ‘deprecate ire’. Although ‘ready to burst out of my head’ with anger, he learned to fix ‘my eyes on the ground … then raise them by degrees, speaking in the winning tone of submission’. This was a difficult pill to swallow, which Harris