The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the pace of change picked up as men and women from the countryside poured into the City, bringing their skills as carpenters, printers, carriage builders, sign painters, butchers, glue boilers, farriers, nail makers – everything, in short, that a community needed to thrive in a pre-industrial age. On top of this, the large financial institutions that had settled in the area a hundred years earlier were beginning to expand as Britain became the money capital of the world. Threadneedle Street, home of the Bank of England, was both the heart of the financial district and the place where prostitutes queued patiently, like cabs. From there it was a short walk to the Stock Exchange, Royal Exchange, the Baltic and Lloyd’s coffee houses, not to mention the offices of bill brokers, merchant bankers, and private bankers. Yet even in the middle of the nineteenth century many of these smaller ‘houses’ were still family businesses, handed down from father to son with occasional injections of capital from a lucky marriage. Right up to the middle of Victoria’s reign the City of London continued to be a place where the public and private, professional and personal sides of life were pursued from the same streets, often, indeed, from the same set of rooms.

At the heart of these overlapping worlds stood the public house. The ‘pub’ was built as a house, looked like a house, and in this early period was indistinguishable from the family homes on either side of it. Yet it was public, in the sense that anyone might enter from the streets and use its domestic facilities – food, chairs, fire, silent companionship or lively conversation – for the price of a drink. It stank, of course, as all public places did, from a mixture of its clients’ private smells and a few extra of its own: old food, flat beer, dead mice, linen that never quite got dry. The Dolphin, just like an ordinary domestic house, had its own aura that you would recognize as instantly as that of your child’s or lover’s. The plans for the pub do not survive, but this kind of place usually had five separate rooms on the ground floor, including a public parlour, taproom, kitchen, and the publican’s private parlour. There was no bar as such; beer (not spirits, which needed a separate licence) was brought to the customers by waitresses and potboys. The effect was simply as if you had popped into someone else’s sitting room to be offered refreshment by the mistress of the house, or her maid. Often these people felt as familiar as your own.

The Dolphin, like all pubs in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled as a community hall, council chambers, coroner’s court, labour exchange, betting shop, canteen, and park bench. It would not be until the 1840s that the temperance do-gooders would manage to forge the link in people’s minds between social respectability and total abstinence from drink. In fact until that time, which coincided with the first steps in public sanitary reform, drinking alcohol was a great deal safer than risking the local water. It was for that reason that when Milk Street tradesmen like Mr Chamberlain at number 36, a lone leather worker in a sea of cotton, came to take their lunch at the Dolphin every day, they washed it down with several glasses of port before tottering back for the afternoon’s work. And in a world before town halls and committee rooms – the very setting in which Mr Chamberlain’s own son, the Liberal politician Joseph, would eventually make his mark in faraway Birmingham – many political organizations, charities, chapters, friendly societies and trades associations including, oddly, the fledgling temperance societies, would choose to hold their meetings in the snug surroundings of a public house rather than trying to pile into someone’s inadequate lodgings.

From 1808 the Dolphin was run by Samuel Beeton, a Stowmarket man who was part of his generation’s tramp from the Suffolk countryside into the capital. Born in 1774 into a family of builders, Beeton had broken with tradition by becoming a tailor. Arriving in London in the closing years of the century he settled at a number of addresses around Smithfield Market, the centre of the skinning, cobbling and clothing trades. The market at the time was a smoking, bloody tangle of streets where life was nasty, brutal and short, at least for the livestock. Cattle and sheep were herded up from the country before being slaughtered, dismantled, and sold on in bits. The best meat went to the butchers, the bones to the glue makers, the hides to the cobblers and tailors who had settled in surrounding Clerkenwell.

It might seem lazy to use Dickens to describe the streets that Beeton knew, but there is no one else who does London – stinking, noisy, elemental London – quite so well. Here, then, is the master’s description from Oliver Twist, as Bill Sikes drags Oliver through Smithfield on their way to commit a burglary:

It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Samuel Beeton lived right at the heart of all this driving, beating, whooping chaos. By 1803 he was keeping a pub, the Globe, in the aptly named Cow Lane which led straight off the marketplace and most likely catered mainly for his former colleagues, the tailors. His first daughter – by now he was married to Lucy Elsden, a Suffolk girl – was christened at nearby St Sepulchre, the church from where ‘the bells of Old Bailey’ rang out twelve times on the eve of an execution at adjoining Newgate. Perhaps the child, Ann Thomason (Thomasin had been Samuel’s mother’s name), found this doomy world too hard to bear: born in May 1807, she left it soon afterwards. Her siblings, by contrast, were patterned on what would soon emerge as the Beeton template: robust, canny, pragmatic. All seven survived into thriving middle age.

Beeton’s shift from tailoring to the hospitality business played straight to his natural strengths. He was outgoing, clubbable, the sort of man who joined organizations and rose through them by being pleasant, useful, good to have around. In October 1803, and already working as a ‘victualler’, he paid to become a member of the Pattenmakers’ Guild. Pattens, those strap-on platforms that raised the wearer’s everyday shoes above the dead cats, horse shit and other debris of the metropolitan streets, might seem exactly the right thing for filthy Smithfield. But, in fact, pattens and their makers had been in decline for some time. The guild clung to existence by exploiting the fact that it was one of the cheapest to join, and so provided an economical way into City of London politics for those who might otherwise find it too rich for their pockets. You did not need to know how to make wooden clogs in order to belong, although plenty of its members, like Beeton himself, had once belonged to the allied tailoring trade.

By 1808, and with the arrival of their second daughter Lucy, the Beetons had moved to the Dolphin in Milk Street. Samuel may not have been born to the life of a City worthy, but he lost no time in catching up. In 1813 he was elected to the Common Council for the ward of Cripplegate Within (you had to be a guild member to qualify – the Pattenmakers had come in useful) and proved both popular and effective. Fifteen years on and he was still getting the highest number of votes for re-election. The Common Council, part of the arcane City of London government, was a mixture of the powerful and the picturesque. Seen from the outside the 234 council men were pompous and reactionary, clinging to ancient rights of administration in a way that blocked London from getting the city-wide police force or sewerage system it so desperately needed. The council men, however, saw themselves as defenders against creeping bureaucracy and standardization, proud advocates of an ancient and honourable independence. The minutes for Cripplegate Ward during the period Beeton served show the council men setting the rates, choosing the beadle, worrying about street security, congratulating the alderman on his recent baronetcy and, in the manner of ponderous uncles, sending their thoughts on various topics to His Majesty. The Beetons clearly felt themselves intimately implicated in the life of the royal family: two of Samuel’s grandchildren would be christened ‘Victoria’ and ‘Edward Albert’.

Beeton was also active within his adopted trade. He served on the Committee of the Society of Licensed Victuallers, becoming their chairman in 1821. This meant attending the meetings every week on Monday at 5 p.m., either in the Fleet Street office of the publicans’ daily paper, the Morning Advertiser, or at Kennington Lane at the Licensed Victuallers’ School which, despite its name, was more orphanage than academy. The minutes from those first decades of the century show Beeton making grants from the bereavement fund: Mary Cadwallader wants £4 to bury her husband, James Pearce is given 6s a week for some unspecified purpose. In 1821, the year of his presidency, Beeton is busy investigating whether a certain Mrs Michlin really should be allowed places for her two children at the school since it looks as though she may have inherited property from her late husband (Mrs Michlin, it turns out, is in the clear). At the end of his presidency, Beeton was presented with a snuffbox, the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the carriage clock, in recognition of his ‘exemplary conduct, strict integrity and unceasing perseverance’.

As the nineteenth century, with its new opportunities for personal advancement, got under way Beeton’s steady climb up the twin ladders of respectability and wealth provided a model for the rest of his extended family. The first of his generation to leave the countryside for London, he became a beacon, pattern, and support for those who followed in his wake. There was Benjamin, his much younger brother, who arrived in London around 1809 and set up in Marylebone as a farrier, and may well have been an acquaintance of the jobmaster Isaac Jerrom. Samuel’s nephew Robert, meanwhile, made the journey from Suffolk ten years later and also went into the pub-keeping business, initially in Spitalfields and then in St Pancras, borrowing money from his uncle to buy the substantial Yorkshire Grey. By the time he died in 1836 Samuel Beeton had built up a tidy estate, consisting not only of the Dolphin itself, but property carefully husbanded both in London and back home in Suffolk. For a man who had started out as a tramping tailor, it was a glorious finish.

The child who matters to this story is, fittingly, the eldest son of Samuel’s eldest son. First, the son. Samuel Powell Beeton – named after a fellow member of the Society of Licensed Victuallers – was born in 1804, Samuel and Lucy’s first child. He was not christened until July 1812, when he was taken to St Lawrence Jewry with his new baby brother, Robert Francis. The intervening girls – the frail Ann Thomason and Lucy – had been baptized in the usual way, as babies. This suggests two things. First, that Samuel Powell was obviously robust, so there was no need to whisk him off to the church in case he died before being formally accepted as one of God’s own. Second, that the Beetons were not religious people. They christened a child because it seemed frail, or because a nagging vicar told them they should, not out of any urgent personal need. To be a Beeton was to live squarely on the earth, planted in the here and now.

Samuel Powell did what first sons should and modelled himself on his father. In 1827 he joined the Pattenmakers, this time by patrimony rather than purchase, and from 1838 he was a member of the Common Council for Cripplegate Ward. He was prominent in City politics, to the point where he felt it necessary in January 1835 to write to The Times to explain that he was emphatically not the Beeton who had signed the Conservative address to His Majesty (his affiliation was Liberal). It was assumed that Samuel Powell would eventually take over from his father at the Dolphin. But until that moment came in 1834, he filled the years as a Manchester warehouseman, trading out of Watling Street, a stone’s throw away from Milk Street on the other side of Cheapside. In 1830 Samuel Powell married Helen Orchart, the daughter of a well-to-do baker from adjacent Wood Street. The Beetons’ first child, Samuel Orchart, was born on 2 March 1831 at 81 Watling Street and christened at All Hallows Bread Street, a church traditionally connected with the brewing trade.

As early as the 1830s Londoners were dreaming of getting out and getting away, partially retracing the journey that their fathers had made from the countryside a generation earlier. The City was getting used up, stale, filthy. In 1800 you could swim in the Thames on a hot summer’s day. By 1830 a gulp of river water would make you very ill indeed. The graveyards were so overstocked that a heavy downpour regularly uncovered the dead who were supposed to be sleeping peacefully. The streets were hung around with a greasy fug that followed you wherever you went, sticking to your clothes and working its way deep into your skin. In the circumstances, Samuel Powell and his wife, being modern kind of people, decamped to Camberwell, a short walk over London Bridge, to an area that still passed for country. It was there, south of the river, that the Beetons had a second son, a child who until now has slipped through the records, perhaps because the parish clerk at Camberwell was particularly careless, or hard of hearing. For William Beeton, born September 1832, is recorded as the son of ‘Samuel Power Beeton’ and his wife ‘Eleanor’. William must have died, because no other mention is made of him. He probably took his mother with him, for Helen Beeton – this time going by her correct name – was buried only eight weeks later. Family tradition always had it that Helen died of TB, which she bequeathed to her firstborn, Samuel Orchart. In the days before death certificates it is impossible to be certain, but it looks as if Helen Orchart was a victim of that other nineteenth-century common-or-garden tragedy, the woman who died as a result of childbirth.

Samuel Powell lost no time in doing what all sensible widowers with young children were advised to do and went looking for a new wife. Eliza Douse, the daughter of a local warehouseman, was working for people out in Romford when she and Samuel got married in 1834. On becoming mistress of the Dolphin two years later, Eliza quickly ensured that her sisters Mary and Sophia were provided for by getting them jobs and lodgings in the pub. If Helen, the first Mrs Beeton, had been a delicate merchant’s daughter, too weak for a world of bad fogs and babies, her successor Eliza proved to be a sturdy workhorse. She produced seven children, all of whom survived into adulthood and, following Samuel Powell’s early death in 1854, continued to run the pub on her own before making a second marriage three years later.

Life as a Beeton was typical of the way that the families of the trading classes organized themselves in the early nineteenth century. Every member of the family, including the women, was expected to contribute something to the family enterprise whether it was a dowry (in the case of Helen Orchart) or labour, as in the case of her successor Eliza. If an extra pair of hands was needed at the Dolphin they were supplied from the extended family, as was the case with the Douse sisters. If there was no one immediately available, then a cousin might be imported from the home county. Thus Maria Brown, a cousin from Suffolk, was brought in to help in various Beeton enterprises. She shuttled between Marylebone and Milk Street until, in an equally likely move, she married Thomas Beeton, Samuel Powell’s youngest brother who lodged at the Dolphin.

Marriage alliances were used to strengthen business connections in a way that seems cold to modern eyes. Thus Thomas Orchart, the baker from Wood Street, had a financial stake in the Dolphin before marrying his only daughter to his business partner’s eldest son. Samuel Powell, in the years before taking over the pub from his father, worked as a warehouseman in partnership with Henry Minchener who was married to his younger sister Lucy. In the next generation down, their children – first cousins Jessie Beeton and Alfred Minchener – married. Samuel Powell’s best friend, a warehouseman called George Perkes, had a son called Fred who married his second daughter Victoria. Meanwhile Samuel Powell’s second son Sidney was given the middle name of ‘Perkes’ as a token of respect and friendship. The man you did business with was the man whose name your son bore and whose daughter married your younger brother.

Old women were not exempt from responsibility to the family enterprise. Just as Mary Jerrom spent her long years of widowhood running a nursery on the Epsom Downs for the overspill of children from Ormond House, so Lucy Beeton looked after the eldest Dolphin children. In this case, though, her satellite nursery was far away in Suffolk. In 1836 the newly widowed Lucy returned to her native Hadleigh, where her elder brother Isaac was one of the chief tradesmen. Along with Lucy came her 5-year-old grandson, Samuel Orchart. With the boy’s mother dead and his stepmother busy creating a new family with his father, the Dolphin was overflowing. Family tradition puts a more benign spin upon it, saying that it was for the benefit of little Sam’s precarious lungs (the ones he was supposed, for reasons that seem increasingly unlikely, to have inherited from his mother) that he was shuffled off to the country to live with his grandmother. This is fine in principle, except that by 1841 he had been joined by his younger half-sister Eliza whose lungs, as far as we know, were clear as a bell.

The other reason why it is unlikely that Sam was sent to stay with his grandmother for the sake of his health was that life in Hadleigh was hardly a pastoral idyll. Stuck in a dip between two hills, drainage was always a problem (after a storm it was possible to sail down the High Street), and the brewery near Lucy’s house discharged its effluent into the open gutter. What’s more, the town was a byword for viciousness and street crime: arson, sheep stealing, horse theft, house breaking and ‘malicious slaying and cutting and wounding’ were all everyday hazards to be avoided by right-minded citizens, who were constantly agitating for extra policing. And yet, there can be no doubt that little Sam and his half-sister Eliza lived well in Hadleigh. Their grandmother had been left with a comfortable annuity of £140, her house in the High Street was substantial and her brother, Isaac, a wealthy maltster, had pull. And then, there was 18-year-old Aunt Carrie who acted as nursemaid, at least when she was not busy courting a local gentleman farmer called Robert Kersey. All the same, it was ten hours by coach back to the Dolphin.

We know as little about Samuel Beeton’s childhood as we do about Isabella Mayson’s. Sometime before the age of 10 he was sent to a boarding school just outside Brentwood in Essex, midway between Hadleigh and London. Part of its appeal must have been geographical convenience, since Brentwood is only half an hour’s journey by rail into the terminus at Shoreditch, which in turn is only a short cab ride away from Milk Street. Pilgrim’s Hall Academy – also known as Brentwood Academy – had been set up in 1839 to educate the sons of the very middling classes. These kinds of boys’ small private schools, very different from the ancient foundations such as Eton or Winchester, were as ephemeral as their female equivalents. Indeed, Pilgrim’s Hall managed to last only thirteen years as a school, before reverting once again to a private residence. Although the advertisement that appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1843 promises prospective parents that pupils would be prepared for the universities as well as ‘the Naval and Military Colleges’, it seems unlikely that any of them really did continue on to Oxford or Cambridge or make it into the Guards. Instead, most of the fifty-three pupils were, like young Samuel, destined for apprenticeships or posts in their fathers’ businesses: tellingly, the 1841 census shows no boy at the school over the age of 15. Rather than ivy-covered quads and ancient towers, Pilgrim’s Hall was a higgledy-piggledy domestic house from the Regency period which had been chopped and changed to make it a suitable place to house and school sixty or so boys as cheaply as possible (the house still stands but these days it caters for, on average, seven residents).

The fact that Pilgrim’s Hall Academy was started by one Cornelius Zurhort who employed Jules Doucerain as an assistant master suggests that the school concentrated on a modern syllabus of living rather than dead languages. And even once the school passed to a young Englishman, Alexander Watson from St Pancras, in 1843, the stress on modern languages remained, with the employment of another Frenchman, Louis Morell. Clearly, though, the school prided itself on developing the whole boy, rather than merely helping him to slot into a world where he might be called upon to stammer a few words of business French. The Illustrated London News advertisement promises that the pupils’ ‘religious, moral, and social habits and gentlemanly demeanour are watched with parental solicitude’ and, indeed, as early as 1839 a gallery had been built in the local church for the very purpose of accommodating the shuffling, coughing Pilgrim’s Hall boys as they trooped in every Sunday morning.

Samuel Orchart was quick and knowing, bright rather than scholarly. Like his future bride he had a flair for languages, winning a copy of Une Histoire de Napoléon le Grand for his work in French. Extrapolating from his adult personality we can assume that he was boisterous, involved, fun as a friend, cheeky with the teachers. Working back from the letters that he wrote to his own sons when they were at prep school in the mid 1870s we can guess that the young Sam was always bursting with enthusiasm for ‘the last new thing’, whether it was comets, cricket scores, spring swimming, close-run class positions, or clever chess games. Clearly keen on literature – his father gave him a complete Shakespeare when he was 12, and Samuel Powell was not the kind of man to waste his money on an empty gesture – there was, nonetheless, no question of the boy going on to university.

But a career as a publican was not quite right either, despite the fact that as the eldest son Samuel Orchart stood to inherit a thriving business. In the end none of Samuel Powell’s three sons chose to run the Dolphin. That was the problem with social mobility, you left yourself behind. There was, though, a kind of possible compromise, one that allowed Sam to follow his literary bent without taking him too far from his social or geographic roots. He had grown up a few hundred yards from Fleet Street and its continuation, the Strand, which had for two centuries been the centre of the publishing trade. Now, in the 1840s, as the demand for printed material of all kinds exploded, it seemed as if everyone who set foot in the area was in some way connected with print. Inky-fingered apprentices hurried through the streets at all hours and from the open doors of taverns around Temple Bar you could see solitary young men poring over late-night proofs while gulping down a chop. Up and down Fleet Street new-fangled rotary presses were clanking through the night, producing newspapers, magazines, and books, books, books. In Paternoster Row – an alley off St Paul’s, a hop, skip, and a jump from Milk Street – booksellers and publishers so dominated the landscape that, among those in the know, ‘the Row’ had become shorthand for the whole Republic of English Letters.