Patrick Comerford
Over the years, I have tried to search for the oldest coffee house in England. The story of these early coffee houses is told in the cafés on Queen Street in Oxford and the street names on the Coffee Hall estate in Milton Keynes.
While I was London last week, I went in search of the oldest coffee shops in London. But they are long predated by two coffee shops in Oxford that vie for the title of the oldest coffeehouse in England.
Gianfrancesco Morosini – whose family gave their name to the Morosini Fountain in Lion Square in Iraklion, Crete – first brought coffee to the attention of Venetians in 1585. He reported how the Turks had developed a taste for drinking ‘a black water, boiled up as hot as they could bear it, which is distilled from a seed called kahvé and which they say has the property of making a man stay awake.’
By the mid-17th century, coffee was being sold in Venice as a medicine, and the first coffeehouse beyond the Levant opened in Venice in 1647. However, although Caffé Florian on Saint Mark’s Square claims to be ‘the first real café in Europe’, it did not open until 29 December 1720. The Café Procope on the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, which claims to be the oldest café in Paris in continuous operation, opened in 1686.
‘Jacob the Jew’ from Lebanon is said to have opened the very first coffeehouse in England at the Angel Inn on the High Street in Oxford in 1650. Jacob’s coffeehouse in Oxford is believed to have been the first European coffeehouse after Venice, and the Grand Café now stands on the same site on the High.
According to the diarist Samuel Pepys and others, Jacob opened his coffeehouse in Oxford in 1650. Anthony à Wood, the Oxford antiquarian, records that ‘Jacob the Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel’ in Oxford in 1651, ‘and there it was by some, who delighted in noveltie, drank.’
Some years later, across the street, Cirques Jobson, a Jewish merchant from the Levant or Syria, opened the Queen’s Lane Coffee House in 1654. Anthony à Wood records Cirques Jobson sold coffee ‘in a house between Edmund Hall and Queen College Corner’ – the site of today’s Queen’s Lane Coffee House. It claims to be the oldest coffeehouse to continually serve coffee in Europe.
Both cafés in Oxford opened around the same time as the Jamaica Wine House first opened as a coffeehouse in the City of London. I found this Grade II listed building last week behind Saint Michael’s Church, Cornhill, hidden away in St Michael’s Alley, amid a labyrinth of mediaeval courts and backstreets just off Cornhill and near the Royal Exchange.
Today it is one of the Square Mile’s most popular pubs and wine bars, known to many as ‘The Jampot’. It is a traditional London pub, with a wood-panelled bar and high ceilings. But it claims to be the birthplace of London’s coffee house scene and a history stretching back hundreds of years.
The Jamaica Wine House stands on the site of on the site of what is widely regarded as London’s first coffee house. It was opened by Pasqua Rosée in 1652 and counted Samuel Pepys amongst its earliest patrons.
Pasqua Rosée was born in the early 17th century into the ethnic Greek community in Ragusa, now southern Croatia, and by 1651 he was living in Smyrna (İzmir) in the Ottoman Empire, where he became the servant of Daniel Edwards, an English merchant of the Levant Company.
Edwards brought Pasqua Rosée to London in 1651 to prepare coffee for him and his household. A year later, Edwards helped his former servant to open his own coffee house, where some claim coffee was made and sold to the public for the first time in England. The coffee house quickly became a meeting place for merchants and traders, and is known in some accounts as the Turk’s Head.
Rosée’s own profile was depicted in the sign at his coffeehouse sign. He was shown resplendent in a turban, with a twirly moustache. The image of the head of a man of Turkish origin became the default sign for all coffee houses, and may explain why the ‘Turk’s Head’ became a popular name for pubs.
After the Great Fire of London destroyed much of the surrounding area, a new Jamaica coffee house was established on the same site between 1674 and 1680. Rosée’s coffee house was probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, but its replacement escaped the fire of 1748, which began nearby in Exchange Alley or Change Alley.
Coffeehouses in England became melting pots of independent thinking and political debate from the mid-17th century, and were known as ‘penny universities’ – a penny was the price of a coffee, with unlimited refills and a newspaper to read.
But the coffeehouses were soon identified with egalitarian and republican politics. Charles II considered banning them in 1675, claiming that ‘by occasion of the meetings of such persons therein, diverse False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports are devised and spread abroad, to the Defamation of His Majesties Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.’ In the face of a public outcry, the king relented after two weeks.
By the 18th century, the Jamaica had become closely associated with trade between London and Jamaica and the wider British West Indies. The Jamaica Coffee House was to the West India trade what the Jerusalem Coffee House was to the East India trade. Merchants, ship owners, insurance brokers and traders used it for business meeting. By the mid-18th century, the Jamaica, London, was recognised as a reliable address for receiving letters and documents destined for Jamaica.
Most of the coffee houses in 17th and 18th century London were involved in the slave trade in some way. The Jamaica Coffee House accommodated all sorts of individuals buying and selling cargo from Jamaica, including people bought and sold as slaves. London newspapers often printed appeals for information regarding enslaved and bonded runaways that gave the Jamaica coffee house as their point of contact.
The popularity of coffeehouses began to decline in the 18th century, as tea became more popular and as exclusive gentlemen’s clubs began to develop. As tastes changed and tea became increasingly popular, the traditional coffee house evolved into a tavern, and it began trading as the Jamaica Wine House in 1869. The building now on the site, a Victorian public house, dates from 1885. A plaque on the wall reads, ‘Here stood the first London Coffee house at the sign of the Pasqua Rosee’s Head 1652.’
There were several coffee houses close to the Royal Exchange and Lloyds. The Jerusalem and East India Coffee house was in Cowper’s Court, Lloyd’s Subscription Coffee house was at the west end of the Royal Exchange, and Jonathan’s Coffee House was a significant meeting place in London in the 17th and 18th centuries, famous as the original site of the London Stock Exchange.
Jonathan’s coffee house was opened around 1680 by Jonathan Miles in Change Alley, or Exchange Alley, in the City of London. By 1694, Jonathan’s was one of a few coffee houses where clients could meet stockbrokers and obtain prices. But in 1696, several patrons were implicated in a plot to assassinate William III, and it was thought to be associated with the ‘Popish’ Plots.
One broker, John Castaing, used the coffee house to post the prices of stocks and commodities in a list titled ‘The Course of the Exchange and Other Things’ in 1698. That year, dealers expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdiness migrated to Jonathan’s and Garraway’s.
Jonathan’s was described in The Anatomy of Exchange Alley’, a pamphlet by Daniel Defoe in 1719. It was the scene of a number of critical events in the history of share trading, including the South Sea Bubble and the panic of 1745, and the London securities market was working from Jonathan’s by 1748.
Jonathan’s was destroyed by fire that year but was rebuilt. A club of 150 brokers and jobbers was formed in 1761 to trade stocks. The club built its own building In 1773 in Sweeting’s Alley, which was dubbed the New Jonathan’s. It was later renamed the Stock Exchange, and is now the London Stock Exchange.
While I was in Change Alley, I failed to find the site of Garraway’s Coffee House. Its original proprietor, Thomas Garraway, was said to be the first person in England to sell tea before he opened his coffeehouse. The Hudson’s Bay Company held its first sale of furs at the coffee house in 1671.
Daniel Defoe wrote of it being frequented by wealthy traders from the City, and Charles Dickens makes many references to Garraway’s in his writings. Garraway’s was also famous as a sandwich and drinking room, and it was said the sandwich-maker spent two hours preparing each day’s food.
All three coffeehouses that I went in search of last week – Jamaica, Jonathan’s and Garraway’s – and many more have given their names to streets on the Coffee Hall estate in Milton Keynes: Jamaica is a laneway or passage off Jonathans, but with no street sign; there is Jonathans [sic] and Jonathans Court that provides sheltered housing; while Garraway’s is an appropriate name in Milton Keynes as Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who was in Garraway’s almost every day while he worked as Wren’s surveyor in London after the Great Fire, was also the architect of Saint Mary Magdalene Church, Willen.
I was also in Change Alley looking for some 19th century connections with the Comerford family. But that’s another story from London for another day, hopefully.
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