The Beefsteak Club[#] was founded in the reign of Anne, and was composed of the 'chief wits and great men of the nation,' who were, however, silly enough to wear suspended from the neck by a green silk ribbon a small gridiron of gold, the badge of the club. Dick Estcourt the player, and landlord of a tavern called the Bumper, in Covent Garden, was made caterer of the club. He was, we are told, a man of good manners and of infinite wit, or of what in those days passed for wit, though much of it at the present time would be declined by the editor of the poorest comic paper. Steele, however, grows quite enthusiastic over him. The club first established itself at the sign of the Imperial Phiz, just opposite the famous conventicle in the Old Jewry; here the superintendent of the kitchen was wont to provide several nice specimens of their beef-steak cookery. Eventually the boys of Merchant Taylors' School were accustomed to regale the club on its nights of meeting with uproarious shouts of 'Huzza, Beefsteak!' But these attentions in course of time became irksome, and the club withdrew to more quiet quarters, but its final fate is left in the dark. Ned Ward, in his 'Secret History of Clubs,' from whom we get our chief information concerning the Beefsteak Club, simply says: 'So that now, whether they have healed the breach, and are again returned into the Kit-Kat community, whence it is believed, upon some disgust, they at first separated ... I shan't presume to determine, ... but, though they are much talked of, they are difficult to be found.'
[#] Not to be confounded with the 'Sublime Society of Steaks,' founded a few years after the club, and of which we shall speak more fully presently as the more important of the two associations.
The Beefsteak Society, or the 'Sublime Society of Beefsteaks,' as they chose to designate themselves, whilst severely objecting to be called a club, originated with George Lambert, the scene-painter of Covent Garden Theatre during Rich's management (1735), where Lambert often dined from a steak cooked on the fire in his painting-room, in which he was frequently joined by his visitors. This led to the foundation of the society in a room in the theatre. Afterwards the place of meeting was at the Shakespeare tavern in the Piazza, and subsequently at the Lyceum, and on its destruction by fire (1830), at the Bedford Hotel, and on its being rebuilt in 1834, at the theatre again. The members used to meet on Saturdays, from November to the end of June, to partake of a dinner of beefsteaks. The room in which they met was appropriately fitted up, the doors, wainscoting and roof, of English oak, being ornamented with gridirons; Lambert's original gridiron, saved from two fires, formed the chief ornament in the centre of the ceiling.
Among the members of this society, restricted to twenty-five, were George, Prince of Wales, and his brothers, the Dukes of York and Sussex, Sheridan, Lord Sandwich, Garrick, John Wilkes, the Duke of Argyle, the Duke of Leinster, Alderman Wood, and many other men of note. The club had its president and vice-president, its bishop, who said grace, and its 'boots,' as the steward was called; the Dukes of Sussex and Leinster in their turn discharged the office of 'boots.' Its festivals were of a somewhat bacchanalian character; the chief liquors consumed were port and punch, and fun, the more rampant the more relished, followed the feast. They had their bard, or laureate, Captain Morris, who had been in the Life Guards. Here is a stanza of one of his songs:
'Like Britain's island lies our steak,
A sea of gravy bounds it;
Shallots, confusedly scattered, make
The rockwork that surrounds it.
Your isle's best emblem there behold,
Remember ancient story;
Be, like your grandsires, first and bold,
And live and die with glory.'
Now what can we think of the literary taste then prevailing in the highest quarters, when we are told that this song rendered Morris so great a favourite with the Prince of Wales that he adopted him in the circle of his intimate friends, and made him his constant guest both at Carlton House and the Pavilion at Brighton? Truly, in those days fame and distinction were lightly earned! But does not our own time admire, or pretend to admire, the jerky platitudes of a Tennyson, and the jejune prose, cut up into measured lines, of a Browning as poetry? By the society Morris was presented with an elegant silver bowl for his 'pottery.'
In the decline of life and fortune Morris was handsomely provided for by his fellow-steak, the Duke of Norfolk, who conferred upon him a charming retreat at Brockham in Surrey, which he lived to enjoy until the year 1838, surviving his benefactor by twenty-three years, whilst hundreds of men of real merit were left to fight the battle of life unaided and unrewarded. But those who amuse the idle hours of fools with foolish nonsense are always more highly thought of than those who instruct and impart useful knowledge. There is more money spent at a State or Municipal banquet in one evening than would suffice for maintaining a scientific institution for a whole year. What did the Queen's Jubilee cost the nation, and what lasting benefit has this extravagant expenditure conferred on the nation? Of all this firework, what remains but the sticks and the burnt-out cartridge tubes? Carlyle, with whom we agree in few things, was right in what he said about the aggregate of fools. But return we to the 'sublime' Beefsteakers. The epithet they assumed reminds us that there is indeed but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. When a society, formed for the mere purpose of gorging and swilling, and howling drinking songs, the most stupid of all songs, calls itself 'sublime,' may we not ask, Where are the 'Lofty Taters-all-'ot' and the 'Exalted Tripe and Onioners?'
There were some queer members in the society. A wealthy solicitor, named Richard Wilson, popularly called Dick, having been to Paris, and not knowing a word of French, praised French cookery, and said that its utmost perfection was seen in the way in which they dished up a 'rendezvous'; he meant a ris de veau. Being asked if he ate partridge in France, Dick said 'Yes,' but he could not bear them served up in 'shoes'; he meant perdrix aux choux. William Taylor, another member, believed firmly that Stonehenge was formed by an extraordinary shower of immense hailstones which fell two thousand years ago. The society, we know, claimed to be a literary society, and had actually offered a prize of £400 for the best comedy. It had many dramatic authors among its members. One of them was Cobb, who, among other plays, wrote 'Ramah Drug'—drug or droog meaning in India, where the scene was laid, a hill-fort;[#] he was complimented by his fellow-members on the happy titles he always chose for his pieces. 'What could be better for your last attempt to ram a drug down the public throat than "Ramah Drug"?' said one of the Beefsteakers. But Arnold, a rival dramatist, disputed Cobb's claim to admiration on this account. 'What worse title,' said he, 'could he have chosen for his "Haunted Tower"? Why, there is no spirit in it from beginning to end!'
[#] The tower known as Severndroog on Shooter's Hill commemorates the taking of the fort of that name on the coast of Malabar.
When the Beefsteak Society was broken up in 1869, the pictures of the former members, mostly copies, were sold for only about £70. The plate, however, brought high prices; the forks and table-spoons, all bearing the emblem of the club, a gridiron, fetched about a sovereign apiece; the punch-ladle realized £14 5s.; a cheese-toaster brought £12 6s.; an Oriental punch-bowl, £11 15s. Wine-glasses, engraved with the gridiron, sold for from 27s. to 34s. a pair. The actual gridiron, plain as it was, fetched 5-½ guineas. Eulogies have been written on the society, as if it had been a really meritorious institution, and endless anecdotes are told, chiefly illustrating the gluttony of the members; but such details are neither attractive in themselves nor profitable to the reader, and we will not enter into them. We agree with Thackeray's estimate of the club-life of the last century: 'It was too hard, too coarse a life.... All that fuddling and punch-drinking, that club and coffee-house boozing, reduced the lives and enlarged the waistcoats of the men of that age.' But such were the convivial clubs of the past; it is as well to see the other side of things.