Note 345 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 3)

Smith’s Beef Steak friend, John Nixon, was an Irish factor, who, with his brother Richard, lived over his warehouses in Basinghall Street. He was wealthy and convivial, a bachelor, a good business man, an admirable host, an amateur actor, and a comic artist. His drawing of “The Jolly Undertakers” regaling themselves at the Falcon Tavern, near Clapham Junction, is well known; the landlord’s name was Robert Death, and the undertakers are seen regaling themselves “at Death’s door.” Nixon’s original picture long remained at the Falcon (now rebuilt), and was considered a fixture.

The history of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks was mournfully recalled two years ago by the closing and subsequent sale of its last home, the Lyceum Theatre. John Rich, the patentee of Covent Garden Theatre, is usually named as its founder, but the germ of the Society (its members loathed the name of Club) lay in the creature needs of his scene painter, George Lambert, of whom Edwards relates in his Anecdotes of Painting—

“As it frequently happened that he was too much hurried to leave his engagements for his regular dinner, he contented himself with a beefsteak broiled upon the fire in the painting-room. In this hasty meal he was sometimes joined by his visitors, who were pleased to participate in the humble repast of the artist. The savour of the dish and the conviviality of the accidental meeting inspired the party with a resolution to establish a club, which was accordingly done under the title of the ‘Beefsteak Club’; and the party assembled in the painting-room. The members were afterwards accommodated with a room in the playhouse, where the meetings were held for many years.”

Among the earlier members were Hogarth, Theophilus Cibber, George IV., when Prince of Wales, the Earl of Sandwich, George Colman, Wilkes. Charles Morris, the Laureate of the Beefsteaks, was admitted in 1785, and remained a member till his death in 1838, after being for more than fifty years the life and soul of the Society. “Die when you will, Charles, you’ll die in your youth,” were Curran’s words, and Morris died young at ninety-three. His “Sweet shady side of Pall Mall” is the best London song of its kind.

The Society dined and wined itself into the nineteenth century without a thought of change, but when Covent Garden Theatre was burnt down in 1808, the Beefsteakers, who had taken shelter at the Bedford Coffee House, went to the Lyceum Theatre at the invitation of Samuel James Arnold. There, for sixty years, they met in a banquet room behind the stage. In 1867 the number of members had fallen to eighteen, and in that year the famous coterie closed its doors and sent its Lares and Penates to Christie’s, that mart of abandoned playthings. “Brother” Walter Arnold’s Life and Death of the Sublime Society of Beef Steaks (1871) is a singularly complete and interesting memorial of the “jolly old Steakers of England.”

The “Ad Libitum” Society, of which Nixon was also a member, and which was quite distinct from the Beefsteaks, held its meetings successively at the Shakespeare Tavern, the Piazza Coffee House, Robins’s Rooms, and the Bedford Coffee House. Thomas Dibdin gives a list of its members in his Reminiscences.