“The dear old street of clubs and cribs,
As north and south it stretches,”
is one which, if its record were fully written, would be found to have no little connection with the annals of the country. Its position, its proximity to the Palace, its past inhabitants, its famous club houses (where so much of the history of the country was, and is, evolved,) all make for its claim in this respect.
WHITE’S CLUB.
On our left is the famous bow window of “White’s,” where the dandies used to assemble to quiz the ladies on their way to the drawing-rooms. What a history has that club! It has been written, and fills two large volumes, and the “betting book” is a sight for gods and men—if not for young men and maidens. In the old days they used to bet on anything and everything, and there is the story of the man who fell down in a fit, outside the club windows, and wagers being immediately laid as to whether he was dead or not, certain interested members solemnly objected to means being taken to revive the unhappy individual—as it would have affected the validity of the bets laid!
White’s Club. JAMES’S STREET IN THE REIGN OF GEORGE III Brooks’s Club.
It was by giving his arm to one then unknown to fame, from the bottom of the street to the door of White’s, that Brummell considered he had rendered a very important service to a young man, and as it were, given him a splendid set-off in life!
The origin of the club, for which, it will be remembered, Horace Walpole once designed a coat of arms, was White’s Chocolate House, which was established in 1698, just ten years after Stewart’s Bakery, as we have seen, opened its doors at the corner of Bond Street. White’s was then on the west side of St. James’s Street, five doors from the bottom, and occupied the one-time residence of that Countess of Northumberland, who was such a “grande dame,” that her grand-daughter-in-law, the Duchess of Somerset, is reported to have never sat down in her presence without previously asking her leave. It soon became a hot-bed of aristocratic gamesters. Robert Harley never passed by without cursing it, as the bane of half the nobility; Whitehead, in one of his poems, does not hesitate to call it a den of thieves; and although Chesterfield once wrote to his son that “a member of a gaming club should be a cheat or he will soon be a beggar,” that teacher of manners and morals practically lived at White’s, not putting in practice, it is to be hoped, what he taught by precept.
The Club was burnt down in 1733; but, phœnix-like, sprang up again soon after, at Gaunt’s Coffee House, which was next door to the St. James’s Coffee House near the south-west corner of the street. Arthur, Mackreth, Martindale, and Raggett, all names familiar to students of the social life of the eighteenth century, were the successive proprietors of White’s, after 1736, when the Chocolate House was formed into a regular club. Nineteen years after that date it was removed to the premises it now occupies and its present outward appearance is due to alterations made nearly a century later.