Georgian London: Into the Streets (27 page)

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), laid out a set of rules for aristocratic men to live by. Chesterfield House sat on the corner of Curzon Street, south of the sprawling Grosvenor Square development. There the Earl wrote Georgian London’s most celebrated series of letters. They were aimed at one target: his illegitimate son, also Philip, born in March 1732 to Elizabeth de Bouchet, a French governess. In 1733, Chesterfield had married the
illegitimate daughter of George I and the Duchess of Kendal, Petronilla Melusine von der Schulenberg. She was his next-door neighbour and, at forty-one, a year older than him. He maintained mistresses of varying social standing, and Petronilla contented herself with taking an active interest in her stepson’s welfare. Chesterfield could not afford to be too fussy: his stock may have been noble but he was very short, with a large head and bad teeth. ‘
I have wished myself
taller a thousand times, but to no purpose, for all the Stanhopes are but a size above dwarfs.’ He was painfully aware of the importance of appearance and tried to impress this upon his son in his 448 letters, which were often harsh and insensitive. There was hardly an aspect of Philip’s life he did not seek to either dominate or invade.

Philip was a straightforward and gentle boy. Chesterfield sent him on a grand tour, and his instructions by letter become increasingly precise as the distance between them increased. He saw the grand tour as Philip’s ‘apprenticeship’, which must be served diligently in order to become a gentleman. Philip should get to grips with language and the fundamentals of a ‘proper’ education.

Poor, good-natured Philip tried to please and wrote chatty letters back, including observations upon the English abroad in eighteenth-century Turin, to which his father replied: ‘
Who they are
, I do not know; but I well know the general ill conduct, the indecent behavior, and the illiberal views of my young countrymen abroad; especially wherever they are in numbers together.’

Chesterfield’s preoccupation with appearance continued, and he fretted:

Mr. Tollot says
, that you are inclined to be fat, but I hope you will decline it as much as you can; not by taking anything corrosive to make you lean, but by taking as little as you can of those things that would make you fat. Drink no chocolate; take your coffee without cream … It is a real inconvenience to anybody to be fat, and besides it is ungraceful for a young fellow.

All such advice is accompanied with the balm of ‘dear boy’ and ‘dear friend’ but quite how far that removed the sting is hard to tell. Yet
Chesterfield wasn’t a humourless man. He was often funny and expressive in his correspondence, but his ideas of life and conduct were fixed and finely detailed.

It seems unlikely that Philip was dedicated enough to spend his time at the bottom of the garden reading the great poets. He was no star, but he pottered along with a career facilitated largely by his father’s influence. In 1768, he died at the age of thirty-six, at which point Chesterfield was shocked to discover that his only son, himself illegitimate, had been married to the natural daughter of an Irish gentleman for a decade and had two sons of his own. Perhaps he had simply been too frightened of his father to tell him about his wife. Philip’s death caused a decline in his father, and Chesterfield wrote, ‘
I feel a gradual decay
 … and I think that I shall not tumble, but slide gently to the bottom of the hill of life.’ He was right; it took eight years for him to reach the bottom of the hill, at Chesterfield House, on 24 March 1773. He left money to his servants, whom he described in his will as ‘equals by Nature, and my inferiors only by the difference of our fortunes’. Chesterfield’s letters to his son reveal the tiny incidences, pressures and expectations of upper-class life in Georgian London, and really do seem to have been written from the heart.

Around the edges of the Grosvenor estate, other aristocrats were building. The buildings are less regular, and so were their occupants. In 1696, the 3rd Lord Berkeley sold Berkeley House to the 1st Duke of Devonshire. Devonshire didn’t want the house’s view to the north compromised, and the open space left for this purpose in the end became Berkeley Square.

The east side’s most famous resident was Horace Walpole, who occupied Number 11 for the last fifteen years of his life. There he wrote many of his famous letters, full of ‘
lively descriptions
of those public events whose nicer details, without such a chronicler, would be altogether hid under the varnish of what we call history’. The site of his home is now covered with car showrooms and offices.

Commercial buildings also cover Domenico Negri’s ice cream parlour, which would go on to become the legendary Regency cake shop Gunter’s. In 1757, Negri established himself as a confectioner at the Pineapple, in Numbers 7 and 8 Berkeley Square. His elaborate trade card proclaims him as making

… all Sorts of English, French and Italian wet and dry Sweet Meats, Cedrati and Bergamot Chips, Naples Diavolini and Diavoloni. All sorts of Biskets and Cakes, fine and Common, Sugar Plums, Syrup of Capilaire, Orgeate and Marsh Mallow, Ghimauve or Lozenges for Colds & Cough, all Sorts of Ice, Fruits and Creams in the best Italian manner, Likewise furnishes Entertainments in Fashions, Sells All sorts of Deserts & Glass work at the Lowest Price.

Two of Negri’s apprentices went on to publish successful recipe books of their own. Frederick Nutt’s
The Complete Confectioner
contains recipes for ice creams which are now served up as modern and innovative, such as almond and parmesan. Ice cream was made in a pewter sabotiere, or ‘freezing pot’, which was packed into a wooden tub of ice. A wooden paddle or spade was then used to pull the freezing crystals away from the sides, churning the mixture to keep it smooth. Negri’s also served brown bread, elderflower and pistachio ice creams. All flavours we assume to be ‘modern’.

In 1777, Negri took James Gunter as a partner and, by the end of the century, Negri’s became Gunter’s, a fixture in many a Regency romance. Far from being a run-of-the-mill pastry shop, Gunter’s was a place full of ambition. James Gunter wanted to source his own produce and so began to buy small market gardens in the area to the west, known as Old Brompton. He would buy enough land to build Earl’s Court Lodge, cheekily christened ‘Currant-Jelly Hall’ by the press. Over time, he acquired the land on which The Boltons is now built, ensuring wealth for the future generations of his family. His name carries on in the form of Gunter Grove, Fulham.

The west side of Berkeley Square was home to another type of empire builder. Robert Clive was a badly behaved schoolboy, but he grew into the man who secured India for the British Empire. Part soldier, part civil servant, part stockbroker and all self-publicist, he
was born in Shropshire to an old family engaged in the law. He was still a teenager when he was sent out to work as a scribe for the East India Company in Madras.

Less than one lonely year into his time in India, Clive twice attempted suicide. His pistol misfired both times. His failure encouraged him to commit himself to his work instead. In September 1746, Madras fell to the French and Clive was called to help with the English defence of their compounds. By the time of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, Clive was a quartermaster and had begun to lay the foundations of his private fortune.
He began to turn
to opium to help him with his nerves. He was twenty-five.

Edmund Maskelyne was Clive’s closest friend in India and read to him the letters he received from England.

‘
Who is the writer?
’ inquired Clive. ‘My sister,’ was the reply; ‘my sister whose miniature hangs there.’ ‘Is it a faithful representation?’ Clive asked. ‘It is,’ rejoined Maskelyne, ‘of her face and form; but it is unequal to represent the excellence of her mind and character.’ ‘Well, Maskelyne,’ said Clive, taking him by the hand, ‘you know me well, and can speak of me as I really am. Do you think that girl would be induced to come to India and marry me?’

Remarkably, Edmund persuaded his seventeen-year-old sister Margaret to come to India and marry his charming and wealthy young friend, who was by now a depressive drug addict. Just over one month later, they set sail for London, but not before Clive had put his Indian investments into diamonds. In England, he tried to break into politics. But two years later, still not yet thirty, he was persuaded by the East India Company to return to India. In August of the following year, 1756, the Nawab of Bengal seized Calcutta, and forty English soldiers died in the ‘Black Hole’ incident. The Battle of Plassey, in 1757, saw Clive victorious and in receipt of huge gifts of cash and land from Mir Jafar, the grateful nawab who was placed in power.

It was in Calcutta that Clive was given four giant tortoises by British seamen who had brought the animals from the Seychelles. Three died almost immediately and the sole survivor was known as Adwaitya, or ‘The Only One’. Clive kept Adwaitya as a pet, and the tortoise
patrolled the garden in Calcutta long after his owner had left India for the last time. (In 1875, with no one left to look after him, he ended up in Calcutta Zoo, where he died in 2006, aged 256, having enjoyed the longest recorded lifespan of a giant tortoise.)

In 1760, Clive returned to London and arrived at 45 Berkeley Square a stupendously rich man. He was relying heavily upon opium to manage his nervous ‘pain’, and public outrage at his personal fortune was growing. He entered politics by buying parliamentary seats, but
The Public Advertiser
together with
The Gazetteer
and
New Daily Advertiser
featured pages of letters, accounts and debate over his wrongdoings in India. Londoners knew too much about his ruthless climb to the top.

By summer 1769, things were becoming unsettled in India and the East India Company itself was in chaos. A select committee looked into the company’s affairs and subjected all the upper officers to interviews, Clive included. He would not admit to any wrongdoing, and his arrogance at times bordered upon delusion: when questioned about his actions in accepting the huge payment from Mir Jafar, he exclaimed angrily, ‘
Mr Chairman
, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

In 1773, it was put before the House of Commons that Clive had acted illegally in taking the money from Mir Jafar. Clive was cleared of wrongdoing – his actions had, ultimately, helped secure India for the British Empire – and later that year, Parliament passed an Act which pulled the East India Company into governmental control. The Act was also the beginning of the end for Clive. Increasingly alienated from the East India Company and from his former allies, he went off to Italy to buy pictures. He returned to London in November of 1774, and arrived in Berkeley Square suffering from a heavy cold. On 20 November, he excused himself while playing cards with friends; a short time later, he was found dead on the floor of the next room. Clive died by his own hand, but quite how is still unclear. Some say he stabbed himself in the throat with a penknife, others that it was a fatal dose of opium.

The newspapers reported his death quietly, with none of their usual vitriol. The outpouring of public scorn and criticism which
had been a constant during his final decade ceased. His monument bears the simple and truthful line: ‘
Primus in India
’.

Many of Berkeley Square’s occupants refused to conform to the uniformity of the rest of Mayfair. Most of the north side of the square belonged to the Grosvenors, and here, one of Georgian London’s most remarkable furniture workshops set up in business.

William Linnell trained as a carver and established himself in business as a carver of frames and furniture in Long Acre. The firm prospered – diversifying from carving and going into all types of fine furniture and mirrors – and so, in 1754, they had to find bigger premises. William had a new house built on land he had acquired from a farrier who was living and working on what had been farmland on the north side of Berkeley Square, four years before Clive arrived. The house had a 65ft frontage. It covered three floors, four in some parts at the back, of which workshops filled almost every part. On the ground floor at the front was the showroom or ‘Fore Ware Room’, with a ‘glass-room’ or mirror showroom, and a joinery shop as well as an office and lumber room. The lumber room didn’t contain virgin wood but picture frames and pieces of furniture customers had traded in. In the hall were marble slabs, stacked up waiting to be made into tabletops. Through the hall into the wood yard there was a saw pit (for the joiners), equipment for sharpening tools and also a ladder. The yard was used to pack the furniture for transport to its new home. Some of these homes were hundreds of miles away, and each piece was carefully packed for its journey along bumpy unfinished roads. Mats woven from plaited rushes at a shilling each were used to cushion the furniture which was then suspended in a frame inside a crate. Smaller items, such as mirrors, were delivered to London buyers by sedan chair.

On the first floor was a cabinet-making and chair-making room, housing thirteen workbenches, and an upholstery room. Also on the
first floor was the studio of William’s son John, educated at the St Martin’s Lane Academy and ‘
an excellent carver
of wood’. The room was hung with pictures and also held ‘
a box with colours
, a painting box for travelling, a mahogany eazel, a porphiry stone and muller (for grinding paint pigment) and a hat box of drawings’. The top floor held the carving, gilding and ‘feather’ garrets, where the cushions were stuffed. The gilding room would have been one of the cleanest rooms in a house full of sawdust. In jars on the benches were over 50lbs of gold ‘size’, the gilt paste used for getting the gold on to the furniture, giving some idea of the amount of gilded furniture the Linnells were producing and how much money they must have put into it. Also key to the mixture were linseed oil, parchment, white lead, turpentine, spirits of wine and whiting – all kept indoors, rendering the garrets highly flammable.