At the Bell Tavern, Church-row, Houndsditch, was held the Beef-steak Club, instituted by Mr. Beard, Mr. Dunstall, Mr. Woodward, Stoppalear, Bencroft, Gifford, etc.—See Memoirs of Charles Lee Lewis, vol. ii. p. 196.
CLUB AT TOM'S COFFEE-HOUSE.
Covent-Garden has lost many of its houses "studded with anecdote and history;" and the mutations among what Mr. Thackeray affectionately called its "rich cluster of brown taverns" are sundry and manifest. Its coffee-houses proper have almost disappeared, even in name. Yet, in the last century, in one short street of Covent-Garden—Russell-street—flourished three of the most celebrated coffee-houses in the metropolis: Will's, Button's, and Tom's. The reader need not be reminded of Will's, with Dryden, the Tatler and Spectator, and its wits' room on the first floor; or Button's, with its lion's head letter-box, and the young poets in the back room. Tom's, No. 17, on the north side of Russell-street, and of somewhat later date, was taken down in 1865. The premises remained with little alteration, long after they ceased to be a coffee-house. It was named after its original proprietor, Thomas West, who, Nov. 26, 1722, threw himself, in a delirium, from the second-floor window into the street, and died immediately (Historical Register for 1722). The upper portion of the premises was the coffee-house, under which lived T. Lewis, the bookseller, the original publisher, in 1711, of Pope's Essay on Criticism. The usual frequenters upstairs may be judged of by the following passage in the Journey through England, first edit., 1714:—"After the play, the best company generally go to Tom's and Will's coffee-houses, near adjoining, where there is playing at piquet and the best conversation till midnight. Here you will see blue and green ribbons, with stars, sitting familiarly and talking with the same freedom as if they had left their quality and degrees of distance at home; and a stranger tastes with pleasure the universal liberty of speech of the English nation. And in all the coffee-houses you have not only the foreign prints, but several English ones, with the foreign occurrences, besides papers of morality and party disputes." Such were the Augustan delights of a memorable coffee-house of the reign of Queen Anne. Of this period is a recollection of Mr. Grignon, sen., having seen the "balcony of Tom's crowded with noblemen in their stars and garters, drinking their tea and coffee exposed to the people." We find an entry in Walpole's Letters, 1745:—"A gentleman, I don't know who, the other night at Tom's coffee-house, said, on Lord Baltimore refusing to come into the Admiralty because Lord Vere Beauclerk had the precedence, 'it put him in mind of Pinkethman's petition in the Spectator, where he complains that formerly he used to act second chair in "Diocletian," but now he was reduced to dance fifth flower-pot.'"
In 1764 there appears to have been formed here, by a guinea subscription, a Club of nearly 700 members—the nobility, foreign ministers, gentry, and men of genius of the age; the large front room on the first floor being the card-room. The Club flourished, so that in 1768, "having considerably enlarged itself of late," Thomas Haines, the then proprietor, took in the front room of the next house westward as a coffee-room. The front room of No. 17 was then appropriated exclusively as a card-room for the subscription club, each member paying one guinea annually; the adjoining apartment being used as a conversation-room. The subscription-books are before us, and here we find in the long list the names of Sir Thomas Robinson, Bart., who was designated "Long Sir Thomas Robinson," to distinguish him from his namesake, Sir Thomas Robinson, created Lord Grantham in 1761. "Long Tom," as the former was familiarly called, was a Commissioner of Excise and Governor of Barbadoes. He was a sad bore, especially to the Duke of Newcastle, the minister, who resided in Lincoln's Inn Fields. However, he gave rise to some smart things. Lord Chesterfield being asked by the latter Baronet to write some verses upon him, immediately produced this epigram:—
"Unlike my subject now shall be my song,
It shall be witty, and it shan't be long."
Long Sir Thomas distinguished himself in this odd manner. When our Sovereign had not dropped the folly of calling himself "King of France," and it was customary at the Coronation of an English Sovereign to have fictitious Dukes of Aquitaine and Normandy to represent the vassalage of France, Sir Thomas was selected to fill the second mock dignity at the coronation of George III., to which Churchill alludes in his Ghost; but he assigns a wrong dukedom to Sir Thomas:
"Could Satire not (though doubtful since
Whether he plumber is or prince)