It’s a mark of the low status given to working class history that the role in London’s life and economy played by the city’s thousands of street and river porters, the men who gave their name to the beer, is almost completely forgotten, only 70 or so years after the last of the porters died.
Almost no modern books on the history of London mention the Ticket Porters and their rivals the Fellowship Porters, not even Weinreb and Hibbert’s 1,000-page London Encyclopedia (which does, however, manage to mangle a nonsensical story about ale conners and the Tiger pub at the Tower of London).
The exception is Peter Earle’s A City Full of People, subtitled Men and Women of London 1650-1750, published in 1994, which leans for its scholarship about the subject on Walter Stern’s The Porters of London, written in 1960.
This lack of general knowledge about the people who played an irreplaceable role in London’s economy from the 17th to the 19th centuries, one that was the equivalent of white van delivery driver, motorcycle courier and postman rolled into one, meant confusion for beer writers in the 1970s when they came to write about porter the drink.
They read comments by people such as John Feltham in 1802 that the drink was “a very hearty nourishing liquor … very suitable for porters and other working people. Hence it obtained the name porter.” But they thought the porters he referred to must be the only porters they knew of, the only ones surviving in London at that time, the porters of Billingsgate fish market and Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market, the ones famous for walking about with towering baskets of fish or fresh produce balanced on their heads. So they wrote, like Michael Jackson in 1977, about porter getting its name because of its “popularity … among porters in the London markets.”
The market porters, however, were only a fraction of the 5,000 or so men employed in full-time portering in London in the early eighteenth century, the time that porter the beer came into being (thousands more, incidentally, worked as porters on a casual basis). The full-time porters were regulated by the City of London, and divided into two groups, the Fellowship Porters, who carried “measurable” goods (grain, coal, salt and the like) on and off ships moored in the Thames and in and out of warehouses, and the Ticket Porters (that’s a Ticket Porter pictured at the top of this blog, taken from Hogarth’s engraving Beer Street).
The Ticket Porters, who wore a pewter badge carrying the arms of the City, a cross and a dagger, were subdivided into two themselves, the waterside Ticket Porters, who dealt with all ship-borne cargoes the Fellowship Porters did not carry, and the Street or Uptown Porters. This last group carried everything from letters to parcels to merchant’s goods of all descriptions, which might weigh up to three hundredweight, nearly 350 pounds, the heaviest loads requiring a team of four porters with poles and chains. The Street Porters waited to be hired at 100 or so official stands placed around the City, and they charged up to five shillings a day, a good sum for a manual labourer.
Portering was hard work, however, and porters needed a considerable amount of carbohydrate as fuel – much of which they got from drinking. One estimate is that 18th century manual workers were getting 2,000 calories a day from beer. Pubs were used as fuelling stops: it was “universal” in the 18th century, according to a writer in 1841, for public houses in London to have a bench outside for porters to sit at and a board (that is, table) alongside it “for depositing their loads” while they stopped for “deep draughts of stout … such as are idealised in Hogarth’s Beer Street.” That was “stout” as in stout porter, of course: the strong, dark brew London’s brewers developed out of the brown beer they brewed at the beginning of the 18th century was just the sort of refreshing, energising brew the porters wanted, and its popularity with the portering class is why it was given their name.
Brewers were big hirers of porters, with Barclay Perkins’s Anchor brewery in Southwark, by the Thames, for example, taking on up to 140 Fellowship Porters at a time to unload malt barges. Reid & Co of the Griffin Brewery, in what is now Clerkenwell Road, like Barclay Perkins one of London’s 11 or 12 big porter brewers, also hired teams of porters to shift sacks of malt into the brewery. Reid’s then made the porters pick up their pay at one of its pubs, and it expected them to drink a pint of beer in the pub after they had been paid. When the brewery raised the price per load of malt it paid to the porters, it also increased the amount of beer they were expected to drink, to a “pot”, or two pints.
London had at least a couple of public houses actually called the Ticket Porter, one in Moorfields, which was kept by a man who worked as a Ticket Porter and the other (which was only closed and demolished around 1970) in Arthur Street, hard by London Bridge. (The former pub’s name is reflected in the name of a modern, and not very attractive bar, the Porter’s Lodge, at the bottom of Arthur Street.) Another pub, the Stave Porters, was in Jacob Street, Southwark until at least the 1930s. Charles Dickens invented a riverside pub called the “Six Jolly Fellowship Porters” in his novel Our Mutual Friend which was based, it is claimed, either on the Grapes, Limehouse or the Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping.
The Fellowship Porters are said, in fact, to have used the Ship, in Gate Street, near Holborn, where new members were initiated. A description of the rite written in the 1920s says that a quart of strong ale was ordered, and the novitiate’s badge of office was dropped into the mug. The would-be porter then had to extract the badge with his teeth without spilling any ale.
By the 1920s, however, the Fellowship had been wound up for 30 years or so. In fact, the power of the official portering organisations had been evaporating since the very beginning of the 19th century. As the big dockyards began opening to the east of the City from 1802 onwards, the companies that built and operated them barred the ticket porters and fellowship porters from exercising any right to work in their dockyards. The same bar was operated by the railway companies when they opened their London termini, and employed their own porters. Rowland Hill’s Penny Post knocked on the head the Street Porters’ monopoly of letter carrying.
The ticket porters had vanished by the late 1870s. Fewer than a hundred men earned their living as a Fellowship Porter in the 1860s, though when a meeting was held to talk about dissolving the fellowship in 1892, more than 160 members turned up. An Act of Parliament finally dissolved the fellowship in 1894, giving each former porter compensation for the disappearance of his job. However, ex-porters continued to make claims on the City of London for some decades: there were still 16 former Fellowship Porters alive in 1932.
Porter the drink was pretty much on its deathbed in London by then, too, its gravity down to 1036 OG or less. The writer TEB Clarke in 1938 called porter “a lowly brand of draught stout selling in the Public [bar] at fourpence a pint”, making it one of the cheapest (and presumably weakest) beers available.
It was, literally a drink for old men and boys: my father, Arthur, remembered being sent aged 11, around 1933, to the bottle-and-jug department of the family’s local pub in North London to bring back a quart jug of porter for his grandfather, who would then have been 70 or so. On the way home the young boy would take a sly, and strictly illegal, mouthful of beer: I wonder if my great-grandfather ever noticed, and decided a sip was a fit fee to pay for my father portering the porter.
