Arthur Machen by Dreads & Drolls

Author:Dreads & Drolls [Dreads & Drolls]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-27T02:19:30+00:00

Lloyd’s was once Lloyd’s Coffee House, and White’s was White’s Chocolate House in the year 1700, and for some time after. Indeed, as late as 1733, the proprietor, Mr. Arthur, “having had the misfortune to be burnt out of White’s Chocolate House, is removed to Gaunt’s Coffee House, next the St. James’s Coffee House in St. James’s Street, where he humbly begs they”—”all noblemen and gentlemen”—”will favour him with their company as usual.” Evidently, it was still an open house, in name at all events; and it would probably be a difficult matter to trace the successive steps by which White’s became a club in the modern sense, open to its members, but strictly private as far as all others were concerned. Possibly a room was at first appropriated to the use of a few constant and privileged customers, who constituted the club and eventually took possession of all the rooms in the Chocolate House. There was, no doubt, a transitional period, as Davies, writing of Colley Cibber, remarks: “But Colley, we are told, had the honour to be a member of the great club at White’s and so, I suppose, might any man who wore good clothes and paid his money when he lost it.”

Indeed, it is certain that Colley Cibber was a member, since a book of rules and list of members dated 1736 contains his name, with those of the Duke of Devonshire, the Earls of Cholmondeley, Chesterfield and Rockingham, Sir John Cope, and Major-General Churchill. It seems likely, then, that Davies—he was the Tom Davies who kept the bookseller’s shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, where Boswell first met Johnson—was wrong in thinking that any well-dressed man who paid his gaming debts could be a member of “the great club at White’s.” There might have been a public room into which the well-dressed man might stroll; but I do not think he would stay very long in the room occupied by the Duke and the Earls.

The first traces of a club subscription are to be found in the 1736

rules. It is directed that “every member is to pay one guinea a year towards having a good Cook,” and it was not till 1775 that this guinea became ten and of general application. A few years later an order was made that dinner should be served daily while Parliament was sitting, the reckoning to be twelve shillings a head: in our money, at least two guineas, and probably more. The old Chocolate House, as it existed in the days of the Tatler and Spectator had been distinguished for “gallantry and intrigue, pleasure and entertainment,” the later club had become the headquarters of high play. Walpole writes in 1750:

“They have put in the papers a good story made on White’s. A man dropped down dead at the door was carried in; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not, and when they were going to bleed him the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet.

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