William Hickey's England
Richard West
So much has been written of the United States in 1776 that it is pleasant for a change to read something of England during that same year, as seen through the eyes of our greatest autobiographer, William Hickey, from whom the Daily Express gossip columnist takes his pseudonym. It is still more pleasant to find that Hickey's England has not utterly vanished from our England.
At the start of 1776, Hickey was twentysix and living in Kingston, Jamaica, one of the several tropical posts to which his father had sent him in the hope that he would cease his debauches and make a proper career. The reason that Hickey gave for leaving Jamaica, against his father's express command, was the lack of available jobs in the legal profession, but he clearly missed English women as well as all the excitements of that turbulent year. Even at Kingston, the spirit of revolution was abroad. One evening Hickey and another Irishman overheard
two of the Scottish garrison talking treason in Gaelic: 'So I hear our lads are under orders for America to harass and destroY the brave fellows for opposing tyranny and slavery': these seem to have been Hickey s sentiments too. Because of the trouble in the revolting colonies, Hickey was not allowed ashore at Charleston on the way home, which may have been just as well because the boatswain, who had amused himself In the Old Harbour, contracted 'some very bad shankers and certainly had got a virulent pox'.
The same misfortune seems to have struck Hickey soon after landing at Portsmouth on 14 June 1776. After spending a few nights at his hotel in Berners Street, Soho, Hickey set off on a jaunt with a few cronies including George Dempster Esq. a Member of Parliament and no. doubt an ancestor of the Daily Mail columnist, and Sir Charles Bingham, later the first Earl of Lucan. After a visit to Margate where they attended the Rooms and supped, the party sailed for Boulogne where they went to visit some English wine merchants who did a Prodigious trade there. 'Having sacrificed freely at the shrine of Bacchus'. the young men continued to Paris where Hickey 'discovered that I had several shankers broken out, which had been threatening for two days. In great alarm I mentioned the circumstance to Mr Cane, who directly asked Mr Dempster to tell him who was the best Surgeon in Paris, as his friend, Will Hickey, had been unlucky in his amours and got poxed. "Has he?" said Mr Dempster "then I'll be bound I cure him without applying to any medical man, and that Within a week.He then sent his servant for a quart bottle of Velno's Vegetable Syrup, Which he desired me to take a wine glass full of twice a day, and he would be bound a second bottle should eradicateevery venereal sYmptom.'
The Dempster remedy proved effective, for Hickey was fit again on return to England. After a few days in London, anxious days for he did not dare confront his father. Hickey set off with another party of friends on a cutter, the Congress, named as a mark of sympathy with the American rebels. They stayed three days at Margate, went to Boulogne for more wine then headed for Brighthelmstone (Brighton) but were forced by bad weather to land at Eastbourne. then only a fishing village of eight houses. At the only public house in the Place they were given 'as fine a dish of fish as ever was seen at Billingsgate, with excellent lobster and oyster sauce', followed by well-dressed chicken, old Cheshire Cheese and claret supplied by the landlady's sons who were professional smugglers. From Eastbourne they went by carriage up the coast to Hampshire and back to Dover, drinking prodigiously all the way.
If Hickey could revisit the south-east coast, he would find it less changed than the rest of England. The fishermen are still there, although outnumbered by holidaymakers, retired people, boarding-school Pupils during the 'term-time and foreign students during the holidays. In towns like Dover, Eastbourne and Hastings now, you hear French spoken everywhere in the streets. Although some of the coast is built 11P, you can walk from Eastbourne to Seaford along the top of the cliffs without meeting more than a dozen people or any signs of civilisation except for the signs warning of cliff falls. It has been a record Year for deaths both suicidal and accidental. If You walk down the beach from Seaford to Newhaven you come to the ferry port where they found the car of the sixth Earl of Lucan, Who disappeared either by suicide or to France, pursued by the police, the sixth William Hickey, Dempster and other representatives of the public prints.
The old William Hickey might not have felt too out of place in Covent Garden and S°ho, his favourite quarters of London, Which both held festivals over the past
weekend. It was in Covent Garden that Hickey began his career in dens such as Wetherby's in Drury Lane and 'the three most notorious bawdy houses' of Bow Street, which he would visit in strict rotation. One of these, whose manageress was known as Mother Cocksedge, was next to the house of Sir John Fielding, the magistrate, who was a tolerant man. Covent Garden about this time was terrorised by the Mohawks, a group of aristocratic bullies, whom Hickey 'being brim-full of wine, invariably attacked, reprobating their scandalous behaviour'—or so he claims.
The Mohawks and whores have left Covent Garden, whose festival was a serious business devoted to conservation. Gay Liberation. Chile and Real Ale. Most of the real residents are ordinary working people who seem less interested in their festival than in the television. There is not t he exotic village life of next-door Soho, which this weekend was celebrating its three hundredth anniversary, although why this year was chosen is not made clear. Although Hickey in 1776 did not remark on the hundredth anniversary (Soho in those days did not employ a public relations company) he became very fond of this quarter, enjoying amours in Berners Street, Dean Street and Soho Square. However, the kind of high-class courtesans with whom Hickey dallied are now to be found only in West End clubs and hotels where Arabs and other people of wealth foregather. The few whores left in Soho (some of them from Jamaica, which Hickey had fled) are outnumbered by stripteasers and by purveyors of homosexual or flagellationist literature—none of which things would have interested Hickey. Although a lawyer Hickey would not have indulged in that lawyers' Soho 'pursuit of rummaging through the dust-bins outside Private Eye.
Hickey would have approved the Chinese occupation of Gerrard Street (which started only ten years ago) for as a young man he had made a stay in Canton, which he enjoyed in spite of contracting the pox from a girl in Lob Lob Creek.
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