removed the club from its quarters in Pall Mall to its present position, and opened it in 1778, but, unlike Crockford, he does not appear to have made a fortune out of the concern.
The members included such great ones as Reynolds and Burke and Garrick, Hume and Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Sheridan, and Wilberforce. The latter has recorded his first appearance here, thus: “Hardly knowing anyone, I joined, from mere shyness, in play at the faro table, where George Selwyn kept bank. A friend, who knew my inexperience and regarded me as a victim decked out for sacrifice, called to me, ‘What, Wilberforce, is that you?’ Selwyn quite resented the interference, and, turning to him, said, in his most expressive tone, ‘Oh, sir, don’t interrupt Mr. Wilberforce; he could not be better employed.’”
Apropos of Gibbons’ membership of Brooks’s, a curious memento should still be among the treasures of some lucky bibliophile, for, when Fox’s effects were sold, at his death, in 1806, there was included among them the first volume of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” presented by the writer to the great statesman who had written the following words on one of the blank leaves:—
“The author, at Brooks’s, said there was no salvation for this country until six heads of the principal persons in administration were laid upon the table. Eleven days after, this same gentleman accepted a place of lord of trade under those very Ministers, and has acted with them ever since!”
There are no end to the anecdotes connected with Brooks’s, and the famous or notorious people with whom they are connected. Here is Roger Wilbraham, what time honours were in the air, asking Sir Philip Francis, an absorbed player, what he thought they would give him; and the irate gamester, suddenly turning round and roaring out, “A halter, and be d——d to you!”; here, it is said, the Prince of Wales was a party to the hoax by which Sheridan got elected in the very teeth of the redoubtable Selwyn; here, at a later date, the brewer, Alderman Combe, losing heavily to Brummell who patronisingly said he would never in future drink any porter but his opponent’s, retorted with “I wish every other blackguard would tell me the same;” and here is the Duke of Devonshire partaking of that broiled bladebone of mutton for which he had such a passion, and which was regularly prepared for him at the club!
OTHER ST. JAMES’S STREET CLUBS.
Many other clubs which to-day are to be found in this street, are descendants of earlier institutions, while some have taken the place of older ones; among the latter may be named the Devonshire, and the New University, with its noticeable buildings which Waterhouse designed: the former are distinguished by their names alone; the “Cocoa Tree,” the “Thatched House,” and “Arthur’s.” Built in 1825, on the site of the original Chocolate House, “Arthur’s” took its name from that Arthur whose son-in-law, Mackreth, eventually succeeded to its ownership.
It will be remembered that it was on the occasion of one of the waiters here being convicted on a charge of robbery, that Selwyn remarked: “What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate.” The Thatched House Club, which grew out of the “Thatched House,” where the Dilettanti Society and innumerable other fraternities were wont to foregather, does not stand on the site of the original clubhouse, which was till recently occupied by the Civil Service Club at the corner of King Street; but the name was formerly preserved in “Thatched House Court,” which has long since passed away.
ST. JAMES’S STREET CHOCOLATE HOUSES.
Just as the St. James’s Chocolate House was the resort of the Whigs in the Augustan age so the Tory headquarters were at the “Cocoa Tree,” which was metamorphosed into a club some time in George II.’s reign, and was then noted for high play. There is extant the story of one O’Birne, an Irish gamester, who had won a round £100,000 at the Cocoa Tree from a young man named Harvey. “You can never pay me,” said the Irishman. “I can,” replied Harvey, “my estate will sell for the debt.” “No,” said O’Birne, “I will win ten thousand—you shall throw for the odd ninety,” which, being done, Harvey, who would seem to have hardly deserved his luck, won! Gibbon, and later Byron, belonged to this club, and this reminds me that it was while lodging in St. James’s Street that the latter awoke one morning and found himself famous. An extraordinary medallion portrait under glass commemorates the house (No. 8) in which the author of “Childe Harold” lodged, and it was from here that he set forth to deliver his maiden, and only speech in the House of Lords.