Pretending I was dead, while the smashing of glass and stamping of feet reverberated through the floorboards around me, I peeped out from underneath my jacket to see my mates scattered, apart from Andrew, who was successfully disappearing into the ladies’, still clutching the beer. I don’t know exactly how long all the mayhem lasted, but it felt like a lifetime, as I did my level best to lie still and silent on the floor. Finally, just as I was beginning to think I’d never make it out of the pub, never mind to the Roxy, the boot boys tired of their sport and moved on to pastures new.
One by one we emerged from our various hiding places and reconvened at the bar, remarkably unscathed considering the state of the pub. Camaraderie confirmed and stories exaggerated, we downed what was left of our drinks, headed out into the sodium-yellow night and were soon piling down the dingy stairwell into the Roxy.
As far as I can remember, a certain Johnny Rotten was working behind the bar that day (whatever happened to him?) and a band called Eater - average age about 14 - were leaping around like lemmings on the stage. Looking the part, feeling the part and, most importantly, taking part, I was hit by the intoxicating feeling that this was our time and anything and everything was possible.
Of course, striving to look the part as a teenager in the great street theatre of London goes back much further than the 1970s. A constant in this city, and arguably the country as a whole, has always been the need of each generation to look and behave so very differently to the last. That short-haired young chap stepping out in all his aquamarine magnificence was tagging along behind a very long line of others who’d walked the same road before him: teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, hippies, soul boys and punks - and those are just the cultural tribes from my lifetime. It’s a tradition stretching back right through the centuries, to the time when London was still in the first flush of youth.
And for every fashion-conscious London male there’s one man above all the rest who serves as an inspiration and a role model. A legendary dandy, wit, and style guru. A sartorial showman who turned heads and caused commotion by simply strolling down the street. No, not me, you fool - I’m talking about Beau Brummell.
Brummell, born in London in 1778, was a fascinating fellow who became one of the Prince Regent’s closest pals. But his story doesn’t have a happy ending, unfortunately: a fall-out with the Prince plus an extravagant spending habit saw him finish his life in France in 1840, penniless and insane. But in his heyday, by all accounts, he was quite the thing.
There’s a rather charming statue of Beau on Jermyn Street in the West End. There he stands, all bronzed, bequiffed and beautiful, gazing imperiously down the tunnel of the Piccadilly Arcade - a glittering passageway full of high-class shops and boutiques. Top hat and cane in his right hand, left hand on his hip, he looks for all the world as if he’s just about to spring elegantly from his pedestal and skip off down the Arcade, drawing gasps of awe from the shoppers as he parades the latest gear. He’s easy to miss as you window-shop your way past the delights of Jermyn Street, but he is the perfect figure to represent a street in which you can still find handmade shirts, shoes and even perfumes.
At the base of Beau’s statue, there’s a surprise. An engraved inscription of a quotation, attributed to the great man himself, a line which sums up his fashion creed: ‘To be truly elegant, one should not be noticed.’ Reading that inscription for the first time brought me up short. This wasn’t the Beau Brummell I’d imagined. The raffish dandy portrayed by Stewart Granger in the 1950s movie would surely never have uttered those words. In fact, it seemed to contradict everything I thought I knew about the man. I’d always assumed Beau was the quintessential English dandy - a peacock who delighted in parading himself in the latest and most daring fashions, the more outrageous the better; a man who craved attention, taking the timeless urge to be noticed and turning it into performance art. This, however, does not appear to be the case at all, according to a fascinating book,
Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy
, written by a chap called Ian Kelly.
Beau was the man who invented understated cool. A dandy, certainly, but also the inventor of the style which still characterises up-market British fashion to this day - sober colours, nice cuts, definitely no flares. Without Beau, we wouldn’t have the suit as we know it, or lots of the other beautifully made items you see on display in so many of the shop windows around Jermyn Street. Nor, according to Cecil Beaton - the Queen’s favourite designer in days gone by - would we have the lovely double-breasted overcoats the guards wear outside Buckingham Palace. It is Beau’s influence, according to Beaton, which keeps London at the centre of masculine elegance, and who am I to argue? Even those second-hand suits hanging in the window of Kemp’s were, it seems, the great-great-grandchildren of the Regency outfits which Beau commissioned from the posh tailors of Piccadilly. Who knows, he might even have given my tonic suit the thumbs up, but perhaps not the red socks.
For Beau, it seems, the devil was always in the detail. According to another of his biographers, Lewis Melville (
Beau Brummell: His Life and Letters
, 1924), one of Brummell’s greatest triumphs was his neckcloth.
The neckcloth was then a huge, clinging wrap, worn without stiffening of any kind and so bagging out the front. Brummell, in a moment of inspiration such as rarely comes to a man in a lifetime, decided to have his starched. The conception was, indeed, a stroke of genius. But genius, in this case, had to be backed by infinite pains. What labour must Brummell and his valet, Robinson, have expended on experiments to discover the exact amount of stiffening to produce the best result!
The sensation that Brummell made when he first appeared in his starched neckcloth was tremendous. It must have rewarded him amply for all the toil and moil. What was a shoe buckle five inches wide to a stiffened cravat? Nothing else was talked about for a few days in polite circles. The clubs were sparsely occupied, as all the members were at home practising before the looking-glass.
It’s been a while since I toiled, or indeed moiled, with my neckcloth, but I wanted to look the part on my sartorial voyage of discovery. Which is why I climbed into my nattiest two-piece and a crisp white shirt before setting out to investigate how much survives of the London that Beau once knew. If he were to leap from his Jermyn Street perch today and join me on a stroll through his old stamping ground, how many old friends might he recognise in the modern streets of Piccadilly?
In Beau’s day, as now, Piccadilly was the place to come and shop if you were a city gent with an eye for fine tailoring and a wallet fat enough to pay for it. In fact, its very name is proof that this neck of the woods has been linked to the rag trade for centuries. A ‘piccadill’, I’m reliably informed, was a stiff collar, like a ruff, worn by high-ranking gentlemen in the days before Rolexes were widely available as a statement of style and distinction. Sometime in the early 1600s a tailor called Robert Baker set out his stall in these parts and began flogging piccadills to the great and good. Quite what made his ruffs such a must-have item is not recorded but he was obviously doing something right, because over the years he made a fortune from them. He used the profits to build himself a grand house, which obviously became something of a local landmark in these parts. Within a few years it had become known as Piccadilly Hall, which some historians suggest was a derisive nickname bestowed upon a successful tailor’s new house. But it was Baker who had the last laugh. The nickname stuck and lived on, long after the house itself had been demolished. Over the years, it became a shorthand way of describing the neighbourhood which once stood around the house. Which is why Piccadilly, this most fashionable and swanky part of London, still has a name which recalls its long-standing links with the rag trade.
Standing among the crowds beneath the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, it’s almost impossible to imagine what the area must have looked like when Baker built his house. The history books tell us it consisted of a small handful of green and no doubt very pleasant estates belonging to the super-rich, a slice of the country in what is, today, the heart of the city. Baker’s new pad must have stood out like a sore thumb, but it also represented the shape of things to come. By the late 1600s the builders were descending on the area in ever-growing numbers, parking the seventeenth-century equivalent of white vans and cement mixers on the grassy parkland of the aristocrats. The Great Plague and Fire of London had devastated large areas of the city further east, so many wealthy Londoners were moving west to set up shop in new developments here. Another major attraction, of course, was the fact that the area was within spitting distance of the royal court at St James’s Palace, the home of the royal family until Victoria upped sticks and moved into Buckingham Palace in 1837. Not that any of the locals around here would ever have been caught doing anything as common as spitting. They paid people to do that sort of thing for them.
By the time Beau swaggered on to the scene in the late 1700s, this was rapidly becoming the place to be seen if you were a well-heeled eighteenth-century gent. And there weren’t many who sported fancier footwear than Beau: according to legend, he polished his boots with champagne.
Being seen wasn’t difficult as far as Beau was concerned, because people were usually looking. He may have advocated understated dress but, according to his biographers, that didn’t stop an audience from gathering every morning at his house in Chesterfield Street to watch him get into it. As a style icon, his opinion was keenly sought on matters of taste and fashion, and he would hold court to the great and good of London - including the Prince Regent himself - while his valet, Robinson, scurried backwards and forwards with selections of cravats and such-like for the great man to choose from. I’m not sure I’d fancy a crowd of spectators oohing and aahing as I get dressed in the morning, although a bit of help finding a matching pair of socks wouldn’t necessarily go amiss, but Beau was cut from a different - and no doubt very expensive - cloth. It’s said that the daily performance could last anything up to five hours, not least because he was also a pioneer of the new-fangled habit of getting washed and shaved every day - not a very common practice in those days.
Once he was finally washed and scrubbed, Beau might have headed out for a spot of retail therapy. There are some London streets whose names are inextricably tangled up with the trades that have been practised there over the years: from hacks in Fleet Street to quacks in Harley Street to slacks in Savile Row. It’s largely thanks to the sterling efforts of Beau Brummell and his chums that Savile Row became known as the spiritual home of British tailoring. Like Jermyn Street, it was born during that late seventeenth-century building boom, when so many people left the East End to set up shop in the newly fashionable West End, and quickly became a popular haunt for high-ranking army officers. The first tailor arrived in the street in 1806 and Beau - an officer in the Hussars - was one of those who immediately beat a path to his door.
That original shop has long since disappeared, but others have fared better, and Beau would definitely have recognised some of the names above the doors here, including Henry Poole and Gieves & Hawkes, although in his day they were based at premises on Piccadilly. I don’t know if Beau ever patronised Gieves & Hawkes, but if he did he would have bumped into some pretty distinguished military men in the changing rooms, including Nelson and Wellington. From the early days, the firm was linked to the military, a tradition which continued into the nineteenth century, when they supplied suits and headgear for all those empire-building Brits who travelled far and wide to conquer the world wearing fine British tailoring. When Livingstone and Stanley doffed their hats to each other in the middle of the African jungle, an eagle-eyed observer might have spotted that both their pith helmets carried Gieves & Hawkes labels. The firm’s services to the military didn’t end there: in the Second World War they helped develop a range of James Bond-style gadgets, such as hollow buttons used to hide explosives or poison and stitched on to the outfits of undercover agents in occupied France or Germany. Sadly, that clothing line has since been discontinued, although they still do a jolly nice line in dinner jackets.
Once he’d done his shopping, Beau - like any self-respecting London male - would probably have fancied a sit-down and a cup of something warming while he enjoyed some me time. At this point I must ask you to risk a dizzying leap of the imagination and picture a world before Starbucks and Costa Coffee. That may be harder for modern Londoners to swallow than a scalding Americano (without milk), but I should add that this did not mean Beau could not have enjoyed a cup of coffee. Coffee houses were all the rage then, as now, and he would have been spoiled for choice.
If he craved something milky, he could have found it at another place which is still going strong today: White’s, at 37-38 St James’s Street. These days White’s is known as Britain’s oldest and most prestigious gentlemen’s club, a status which it has somehow managed to cling on to despite the fact that it does not boast me among its membership. But it started life in the 1690s as a chocolate house, at a time when drinking chocolate - a rare luxury which only the rich could afford - was the latest craze to hit London. Back then it was known as Mrs White’s Chocolate House and was based not at its current address, but on nearby Chesterfield Street, a five-minute stroll to the north. If you’re wondering who Mrs White was, the answer is that she didn’t actually exist: this quintessentially English establishment was founded by an Italian called Francesco Bianco. My grasp of Italian may not stretch to Dante in the original, but I think I can follow the logic that leads from Bianco to White. I hope Francesco didn’t break the bank for that piece of rebranding advice.