Many thanks to David Herbert, The Lansdowne Club for this fascinating article:
Mayfair
According to Sydney Smith, Mayfair enclosed “more intelligence, human ability, to say nothing of wealth and beauty than the world ever collected in so small a space before”. And indeed, this area of London has always been associated with social status and prestige; a Mayfair address is as desirable today as it has been for the past three centuries. However, the origins of the name “Mayfair” reveal a somewhat less respectable side of life in the early days. The May Fair was originally St James’s Fair, held in aid of St James’s Hospital, a hospital for leprous women which stood where St James’s Palace is now. The fair was held on the eve of St James’s Day (May 1st, the feast of St James the Less), the day itself, and for four days following. It was held in the grounds of the hospital and as it became more popular, the many booths and stalls spread to the north and west into the area now known as Mayfair, then nothing but open fields and meadows.
The fair had a chequered history. The earliest record of it is in 1560, although it is possible that it dates back much further than this to the thirteenth century. The fair enjoyed its heyday in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when its reputation attracted people from far and wide. It was frequented by people from all levels of society including the nobility and gentry. It was a rowdy event, with showmen, tricksters, gamblers and prostitutes jostling with each other to entice the throngs of customers. Frequent quarrels and drunken brawls added to the riotous atmosphere. Attempts were made to put an end to the fair in 1664, as it was “considered to tend rather to the advantage of looseness and irregularity than to the substantial promotion of any good, common and beneficial to the people”. However, the popularity of the fair made it difficult to suppress. Later on during that century, in 1688, Royal permission was granted for a cattle market to be held in Brookfield (so called because the Tyburn stream ran through it) in the vicinity of modern-day Curzon Street. This was where the old St James’s Fair had taken place and within a few years, the market had become an excuse to revive the old custom. The May Fair, as it became known, extended to last throughout the first two weeks in May.
The fair offered attractions of many kinds. As well as the stalls selling food and drink, there were booths housing puppeteers, jugglers, prize-fighters, acrobats, dancers, fire-eaters, wild animals, freaks and all kinds of shows and sights persuading people to part with their money. One such show was the spectacle of a woman who, in spite of her small build and delicate appearance, demonstrated how she could lift a blacksmith’s anvil with her long hair. She would then lie down, the anvil would be placed on her chest, and a horseshoe would be forged upon it, and all this “without the least discomposure of her dress or person”.
Tight-rope walking and dancing was a particularly popular show. One famous rope-dancer was a certain Lady Mary, said to be the daughter of a nobleman who had eloped from her home in Florence with a showman. Lady Mary met her death at the May Fair one year when she fell from the rope. She gave birth to the child she was carrying, which was stillborn, and subsequently died herself.
The May Fair, London. Artist unknown (1716).
[Courtesy of the Guildhall Library.]
Exotic animals from abroad were on display; one handbill of the time advertised “ a great collection of strange and wonderful rarities, all alive, from several parts of the world”. Amongst other wonders, this boasted of “two wood monsters, from the East Indies, male and female, being the admirablest creatures that ever was seen in this kingdom” and a little marmoset which “dances the Chesshire-rounds; he also dances with two naked swords, and performs several other pretty fancies”.
A favourite sport was ducking which took place on the large duck pond situated in the vicinity of today’s Hertford Street, off Curzon Street. This involved setting dogs on a duck whose wings had been clipped. The duck had no escape except to dive underwater repeatedly, only to be met by the waiting dogs when it resurfaced. Wagers were laid on which dog would be the first to bring the duck out of the pond, exhausted and dying, if not already dead. The duck pond was surrounded by a knee-high boarded fence to prevent spectators falling in the water in their excitement. The could find refreshment at an inn, aptly named the “Dog and Duck”.
One well-known character at the May Fair was Tiddy Dol, a gingerbread seller whose name had survived as the name of a restaurant and notorious brothel in Hertford Street, now known as 5 Hertford Street. He received his nickname from the refrain of a song he was wont to sing to advertise his wares. Dressed in “a white gold-laced suit of clothes, laced ruffled shirt, laced hat and feather, white silk stockings, with the addition of a fine white apron”, he was a famous figure.
On one occasion, when he was missing for a week from his stand in the Haymarket where he sold his wares at other times of the year than in May, a news sheet described his murder in lurid detail. The news sheet sold in thousands, until Tiddy Dol returned from his visit to a country fair and put paid to the rumour. Tiddy Dol appears selling his gingerbread in Hogarth’s picture “Execution of The Idle ‘Prentice at Tyburn” and in 1816, long after the days of the May Fair, the cartoonist Gillray represented Napoleon as Tiddy Dol making gingerbread kings and queens for the countries he had conquered.
Hostility against the fair was inflamed by an incident in 1702 in which a constable was killed in a fight. The supposed murderer, one Thomas Cook, fled to Dublin but was brought back to trial at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death. This caused a public outcry and those who protested Cook’s innocence brought his body back from the gallows at Tyburn to lie in state before a burial.
The May Fair continued as ever, but increasing pressure for its prohibition was brought to bear. Tracts were printed publicising the moral and physical dangers of “one of the most pestilent nurseries of impiety and vice”, with its booths of “constant and open scenes if impiety and profaneness… and impurities not to be mentioned”. In 1708, a presentment (or formal complaint) was made to Queen Anne by the Grand Jury of Westminster complaining of the “publick nuisance and inconvenience” at which “many loose, idle and disorderly persons do rendezvous, and draw and allure young persons and servants and others to meet them to game, and commit lewd and disorderly practices, to the great corruption and debauchery of their virtue and morals”. The presentment also pointed out the danger to Her Majesty herself who lived at nearby St James’s Palace, when in London, and might be in danger of “seditious and unreasonable men, taking thereby an occasion to execute their most wicked and traitorous designs”. The Grand Jury for the County of Middlesex made a similar presentment the following month, and the Grand Jury of Westminster twice more made their complaints, referring to the fact that Charles II had supressed the old St James’s Fair in 1664 for the same reasons as they now gave.
In response, a Royal proclamation was issued against the fair in 1709 allowing trading to take place but forbidding “any plays, shows, gambling, music meetings, or other disorderly assemblies”. But once again the suppression proved ineffectual and the fair continued for decades to come. If anything, it was made more permanent by the building of a two-storey market-house in 1738. During the fortnight when the cattle market was replaced by the fair, the butchers’ stalls on the ground floor made way for the show-men’s booths and the upper storey was converted into a theatre. This market-house was built on land eased from Sir Nathaniel Curzon by the architect Edward Shepherd, hence the name “Shepherd Market” (nothing to do with any more romantic pastoral connections.) Incidentally, Edward Shepherd built and lived in the house on Curzon Street – later named Crewe House when the Earl of Crewe lived there at the beginning of last century – now to become the Saudi Arabian Embassy and much altered since Shepherd’s time.
The annual fair was finally brought to an end in 1764. The Earl of Coventry had purchased a house in Piccadilly, the grounds of which backed onto the land where the fair was held. He found the noise and disturbance intolerable and it was largely through his personal influence that the fair was eventually brought to an end.
But by this time, the May Fair was already being gradually forced out of existence for another reason. From the early eighteenth century, the increase in building on land in this area was restricting the activities of the fair. Open fields were being covered; fine houses on yards; narrow alleys were giving way to proper streets; building was spreading northwards from Piccadilly and westwards from Regent Street, creating a respectable and prestigious residential area. Situated as it was near the Court of St James’s and the Royal Parks, Mayfair owed much of its early fashionable status to its topographical location. Aristocratic London soon found its home here, moving westwards from the previously fashionable Covent Garden and Soho. Unlike these areas, and despite many social changes, Mayfair has retained its status to the present day.
