British Coffee House

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catering

Street View: 77
Address: 26-27 Cockspur Street

The British Coffee-House in Cockspur Street, Charing Cross, became the cultural and social centre of the Scots in London and as such, an easy target for mockery. Daniel Defoe is usually credited with saying “the Scots go generally to the British”, but it was in fact John Macky who, in 1714, wrote in his Journey through England in familiar letters from a gentleman here, to his friend abroad that particular phrase when explaining that the various coffee houses had their own clientele. In 1764, the publication of the anonymous The British Coffee-House. A Poem was announced. It was a satire, mocking the Scots in London who tended to stick together, easily recognised by their dress and accent. In the poem, a young uncouth Scot named Sawney makes his way to London and is directed to the British coffee-house via various other establishments, such as Will’s and Tom’s, until he reaches his destination, “My journey’s done – and thank the happy hour / See, Sawney enters at the British door”. A mirror on the wall spooks the young man and he lashes out at his own reflection, “Then to the bar with bleeding fingers reel’d, / And told, elated, ‘how he’d bang’d the Chield‘” The proprietor is named as Mrs. D—-s in the poem, which must be Mrs Douglas, although the Survey of London has the Douglasses relinquish the coffee house in 1755 to the Andersons.⁽¹⁾

The Public Advertiser, 18 January 1864

Tallis lists John Element as the proprietor of the coffee house and hotel. With the help of the Survey and a few other sources, we can make a list of the managers since the earliest mention of the establishment in the 1710 Rate Book (a ? before a year means ‘probably earlier, but not certain’):

1710-1728: Sarah Fenwicke, otherwise Moreau, the widow of William Moreau
1729-1734: George Forrest
1735-1755: Archibald, Isabella and Jane Douglas
1756-1772: Robert Anderson
1773-1777: Helen Anderson
1777-1825: David and Atkinson Morley
1825-1841?: John Element
?1849-1854: Charles Heginbotham
?1861-1871: Nicolas Smith
?1877-1881: Augustus Frederick Christian Meyer
1882-1886: ?

Robson’s Directory of 1842 tells us that the four coaches per day that came from Hampton and Hampton Court coming through Richmond, Twickenham and Teddingham stopped off at the British coffee house before continuing to their final destination, the White Hart, 296 Strand. In the one and three quarter century of its existence, the coffee-house and hotel saw innumerable visitors through its doors, some fortunately wrote about their shorter or longer stay in letters and diaries, others had their correspondence sent to the hotel, although that does not necessarily mean that they actually stayed there. They may just have used the place as a convenient post-office. I can only mention a few: James Boswell wrote that Samuel Johnson joined him and George Dempster for dinner at the British on Saturday, the 9th of May, 1772,⁽²⁾ and Edward Gibbon dined there on 28 January, 1774, “with Garrick, Colman, Goldsmith, MacPherson, John Hume, &c”.⁽³⁾ But not just private individual made use of the hotel. The National Conservative Association was launched by Lord Sandon at the British Hotel on 25 April, 1836⁽⁴⁾ and on 21 March, 1843, the Society of British Authors held their first meeting at the hotel.⁽⁵⁾

Robert and James Adam, The Works in Architecture (1773-1779)

Robert Adam re-designed the coffee house in 1770. According to The Survey, this new building “was considerably extended in 1817 by the addition of premises in the rear running along the north side of Red Lion Yard”. At some point in time, probably around 1810 when the Morleys were in charge, the adjacent no. 26 was added to incorporate the hotel business. In 1886, it was all over. The building was demolished and the contents sold off.

The Era, 6 March 1886

Meeting at the British Coffee House of the National Convention, 4 February 1839 (Source: magnoliabox.com)

Date unknown (Source: Look and Learn)

vignette from Tallis’ Street View, ±1839

Detail of R. Sandeman & G.E. Leighton’s Grand Architectural Panorama (1849)

There appear to be two versions of the Grand Architectural Panorama of London. The illustration above comes from the one available at the British Library (here) and Oberlin College (here). The other one, from the Guildhall Library via Getty Images, can be seen here. Please note the figures in the foreground of the Guildhall one which are totally different from the ones in the picture above.

UPDATE AND QUESTION 10 Sept. 2015: One of my readers sent me a message that she had found a decorative plate amongst her mother’s belongings which seemed to come from the British Hotel, see picture below. Was it a commemorative plate or, more likely in my opinion, a plate that was used every day in the hotel and somehow managed to escape destruction in 1886? Anyone any thoughts on the pottery/factory that made the plate? Anyone recognise the small marks on the back of the plate? Anyone any thoughts on the value of the plate? Were they made in their hundreds with different hotel names on the back, or were they exclusively made for the British Hotel? Or any other thoughts ….? Please leave a comment and I will pass them on to the owner of the plate.

————-
(1) Survey of London, Volume 16, St Martin-in-The-Fields I: Charing Cross (1935).
(2) James Boswell, The life of Samuel Johnson (1792), p. 60.
(3) Miscellaneous works of Edward Gibbon, Esquire. With memoirs of his life and writings, composed by himself: illustrated from his letters (1796), p.7.
(4) Philip Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National parties, 1832-1841 (2002), p. 48.
(5) Catherine Seville, The Internationalisation of Copyright Laws (2006), p. 257.

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Fribourg & Pontet, tobacconists

Tags

tobacco

Street Views: 76 and 77
Addresses: 60 Charing Cross and 124 Pall Mall

      

Farewell to Snuff, An Elegy
1.
Box, thou art clos’d – and Snuff is but a name!
It is decreed – my nose shall feast no more!
To me no more shall come – whence erst it came –
The precious pulvil from Hibernia’s shore!
2.
Virginia, barren be thy teeming soil –
Or may the swallowing earth-quake gulf thy fields!
Fribourg, and Pontet! cease your trading toil, –
Or bankruptcy be all the fruit it yields!

The stanzas above are the first two of twelve of James Beresford’s ‘Elegy’ which was published in 1807 in The Miseries of Human Life (online here).

As we saw in a previous post, the firm of Fribourg & Treyer added a small sentence to one of their advertisements, “To prevent mistakes, they find themselves under the necessity of giving this public notice, that they have no concern whatever with any other shop in London”. They seemed to be referring to their competitors at 134 (later 124) Pall Mall, Fribourg & Pontet. The feeling was apparently mutual as Fribourg & Pontet (Tallis calls him Puntet, but that is a mistake) added a sentence to their trade card, “no connection with any other shop”.

Trade card (Source: British Museum)

Frederick William Fairholt in his Tobacco: its history and associations: including an account of the plant and its manufacture; with its modes of use in all ages and countries of 1859 says that a bill of 1768 is headed “John Saullé and Pontet, successors to the late James Fribourg”, but the British Museum has one of 1774 headed “Fribourg & Saulle” with “& Pontet” added in handwriting, which seems to suggest a later take-over. Please note that the signature is for one C. Pontet, which is Claude Pontet. James Fribourg is mentioned in the Westminster ratebooks for St. James Piccadilly in the 1740s, but in the 1760s, the rates were paid by John Saulle.

1774 bill (Source: British Museum)

Claude Pontet had married Anne Hill at St. George’s, Hanover Square and their son Franciscus Josephus Maria was born on 24 February 1768 and baptised a week later at the Roman Catholic Church in Lincolns Inn Fields (Sardinian Chapel). Claude died in December 1800, and the business in Pall Mall was continued by his son Francis. We will call him Francis sr. from now on as his son Francis Claude also entered the snuff business. Francis sr. died in 1842, 74 years old. It is said that he had married the daughter of James Fribourg, but I have found no evidence for that. In his will, drawn up in 1824, he names his wife Mary as his executor. He had married Mary Toussaint in 1791 at St. James’s, Piccadilly.⁽¹⁾ Another suggestion is that it was Claude who married Fribourg’s daughter, but here we run into a similar problem; the only marriage I found for Claude is the 1757 one with Ann Hill.

The Fribourg that preceded Treyer was Peter Fribourg, but the one whose name was linked to Pontet’s was James Fribourg. Whether Peter and James Fribourg were related remains unclear, although it does seem likely as Fribourg was not a very common name in London. According to John Arlott they were father and son, but he gives nor references or sources, so I have no idea whether that is true.⁽²⁾ Arlott has James Fribourg working from the Haymarket before he moved to Pall Mall in ±1738, while Peter Fribourg took over the shop at 34 Haymarket. Arlott also says that James Fribourg moved to Pall Mall with his daughter and her French immigrant husband Pontet, but that cannot be Claude or Francis as they had either not been born yet or were not old enough. Was there an earlier generation of Pontets who married into the Fribourg family, but then why would Fribourg have a partnership with Saulle while the Pontet name was only added in the 1770s after Fribourg’s death? More questions than answers here I am afraid.

Portrait Francis sr. (Source: shorehambysea.com)

Over the years, the address for Fribourg and Pontet changed a number of times, and Francis junior had a different address altogether, so below an attempt to make sense of the various moves. The dates are just those that I could find in various resources and for the 1818 and 1819 entries, I do not know whether Francis sr. or jr. is meant. The list makes no pretence at completeness.

1740s	Fribourg	Pall Mall
1760s	Fribourg & Saulle	Pall Mall
1773-1783	Fribourg, Saulle & Pontet	Pall Mall
1791-1799	Claude Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	3 Pall Mall
1797	Francis Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	3 Vigo Lane
1799-1803	Francis Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	24 Cockspur Street (see here)
1806-1814	Francis Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	134 Pall Mall
1818	Francis Pontet	5 Cockspur Street
1819	Francis Pontet	30 Haymarket
1821-1842	Francis Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	124 Pall Mall
1843-1877	Edward Pontet (Fribourg & Pontet)	124 Pall Mall
1822-1826	Francis Pontet jr	59 Charing Cross
1827-1851	Francis Pontet jr	60 Charing Cross

The British Museum date this trade card to 1810, but it must be earlier as Pontet can already be found at 134 Pall Mall in 1806

It is always hard to know who the customers were of a particular shop, other than in the rare cases where the administration of a business is still extant, and even then, you will not find the customer who just came in off the street for a single purchase and paid in cash. But sometimes individual customers make their appearance, such as the Honourable Charles Howard to whom the 1774 bill shown above was addressed, and George F.M. Porter, MP for Shoreham, whose letters were read when Pontet’s portrait turned up (see here). Abbé Count Jenico de Preston, a member of an Irish aristocratic family, who was involved in erecting a Catholic chapel at Abergavenny, was also a customer. On 9 April 1798, he wrote a letter to James Peter Coghlan, a Catholic printer and bookseller at Grosvenor Square, in which he says, “I would be much obliged to you if you were so good to get for me from Fribourg Pontet No. 3 in Pall Mall, twelve pounds of his fine plain rappee snuff such as you sent me once last year, and as I used to get from him when I lived the year before last at No. 6 in Bulstrode Street, which I paid him at 5 shils per pound”.⁽³⁾

Snuff pot (Source: Etsy.com)

After the death of Francis senior, the Pall Mall shop was run by Edward Pontet, Francis’s brother, still under the name of Fribourg & Pontet. Edward died in February 1878 and in June of that year, his “collection of engravings, drawings, paintings, and a few books, miniatures, snuff-boxes, &c.” was auctioned by Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge.⁽⁴⁾

Francis junior married Charlotte Hale in 1834 and the couple had five girls and three boys, none of whom seems to have gone into the snuff business. Francis jr died in 1863 and on his probate entry⁽⁵⁾, no mention is made of the shop at 60 Charing Cross and if we look back at the 1861 census, Francis is given as “retired tobacconist” at 32 Cambridge Terrace. The eldest son of Francis and Charlotte, Frank Fribourg, went into the Merchant Navy.⁽⁶⁾ According to the census records, the next son, Claude Hale, became a clerk at the Post Office Savings Bank, and the youngest son, Horace William George, is described as an unemployed purser in the 1871 census and his probate record tells us that he died in 1878 in Calcutta.⁽⁷⁾ The 1856 Post Office Directory names one Richard James Sherriff, snuff maker and importer, as the occupant of 60 Charing Cross, but I am afraid that he died on 29 December 1859.⁽⁸⁾ What happened to the shop after that is slightly unclear, but at some point the Sun Fire Office had their office at that address.⁽⁹⁾

Engraved plate for Fribourg & Pontet (Source: Pipemuseum.nl)

(1) They were married by licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury on 8 September 1791. Witnesses: James Toussaint and Claude Pontet. Many thanks to Kathryn (@kaffgregory) for sending me the information.
(2) John Arlott, The Snuff Shop (1974).
(3) The Correspondence of James Peter Coghlan (1731-1800), ed. F. Blom et al. (2007), p. 336.
(4) The Standard, 1 June 1878.
(5) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1863.
(6) Master’s Certificates, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, number 23.170 (1860, 2nd mate).
(7) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1880.
(8) England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1860.
(9) Advertisement in T.G. Austin, The Straw Plaitting and Straw Hat and Bonnet Trade (1871).

You may also like to read the post on Fribourg & Treyer, tobacconists, or Georgian Gentleman’s blog post on snuff here.

Neighbours:

<– 58 Charing Cross	61 Charing Cross –>
<– 13 Cockspur Street	123 Pall Mall –>