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RAINBOW COFFEE-HOUSE

The Rainbow, in Fleet-street, appears to have been the second Coffee-house opened in the metropolis.

"The first Coffee-house in London," says Aubrey (MS. in the Bodleian Library), "was in St. Michael's-alley, in Cornhill, opposite to the church, which was set up by one —— Bowman (coachman to Mr. Hodges, a Turkey merchant, who putt him upon it), in or about the yeare 1652. 'Twas about four yeares before any other was sett up, and that was by Mr. Farr." This was the Rainbow.

Another account states that one Edwards, a Turkey merchant, on his return from the East, brought with him a Ragusian Greek servant, named Pasqua Rosee, who prepared coffee every morning for his master, and with the coachman above named set up the first Coffee-house in St. Michael's-alley; but they soon quarrelled and separated, the coachman establishing himself in St. Michael's churchyard.—(See pp. 2 and 4, ante.)

Aubrey wrote the above in 1680, and Mr. Farr had then become a person of consequence. In his Lives, Aubrey notes:—"When coffee first came in, Sir Henry Blount was a great upholder of it, and hath ever since been a great frequenter of coffee-houses, especially Mr. Farre's, at the Rainbowe, by Inner Temple Gate."

Farr was originally a barber. His success as a coffee-man appears to have annoyed his neighbours; and at the inquest at St. Dunstan's, Dec. 21st, 1657, among the presentments of nuisances were the following:—"We present James Farr, barber, for making and selling of a drink called coffee, whereby in making the same he annoyeth his neighbours by evill smells; and for keeping of fire for the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber hath been set on fire, to the great danger and affrightment of his neighbours." However, Farr was not ousted; he probably promised reform, or amended the alleged annoyance: he remained at the Rainbow, and rose to be a person of eminence and repute in the parish. He issued a token, date 1666—an arched rainbow based on clouds, doubtless, from the Great Fire—to indicate that with him all was yet safe, and the Rainbow still radiant. There is one of his tokens in the Beaufoy collection, at Guildhall, and so far as is known to Mr. Burn, the rainbow does not occur on any other tradesman's token. The house was let off into tenements: books were printed here at this very time "for Samuel Speed, at the sign of the Rainbow, near the Inner Temple Gate, in Fleet-street." The Phoenix Fire Office was established here about 1682. Hatton, in 1708, evidently attributed Farr's nuisance to the coffee itself saying: "Who would have thought London would ever have had three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality, and physicians?" The nuisance was in Farr's chimney and carelessness, not in the coffee. Yet, in our statute-book anno 1660 (12 Car. II. c. 24), a duty of 4d. was laid upon every gallon of coffee made and sold. A statute of 1663 directs that all Coffee-houses should be licensed at the Quarter Sessions. And in 1675, Charles II. issued a proclamation to shut up the Coffee-houses, charged with being seminaries of sedition; but in a few days he suspended this proclamation by a second.

The Spectator, No. 16, notices some gay frequenters of the Rainbow:—"I have received a letter desiring me to be very satirical upon the little muff that is now in fashion; another informs me of a pair of silver garters buckled below the knee, that have been lately seen at the Rainbow Coffee-house in Fleet-street."

Mr. Moncrieff, the dramatist, used to tell that about 1780, this house was kept by his grandfather, Alexander Moncrieff, when it retained its original title of "The Rainbow Coffee-house." The old Coffee-room had a lofty bay-window, at the south end, looking into the Temple: and the room was separated from the kitchen only by a glazed partition: in the bay was the table for the elders. The house has long been a tavern; all the old rooms have been swept away, and a large and lofty dining-room erected in their place.

In a paper read to the British Archæological Association, by Mr. E. B. Price, we find coffee and canary thus brought into interesting comparison, illustrated by the exhibition of one of Farr's Rainbow tokens; and another inscribed "At the Canary House in the Strand, 1d., 1665," bearing also the word "Canary" in the monogram. Having noticed the prosecution of Farr, and his triumph over his fellow-parishioners, Mr. Price says:—"The opposition to coffee continued; people viewed it with distrust, and even with alarm: and we can sympathize with them in their alarm: when we consider that they entertained a notion that coffee would eventually put an end to the species; that the genus homo would some day or other be utterly extinguished. With our knowledge of the beneficial effect of this article on the community, and its almost universal adoption in the present day, we may smile, and wonder while we smile, at the bare possibility of such a notion ever having prevailed. That it did so, we have ample evidence in the "Women's Petition against Coffee," in the year 1674, cited by D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, vol. iv., and in which they complain that coffee "made men as unfruitful as the deserts whence that unhappy berry is said to be brought: that the offspring of our mighty ancestors would dwindle into a succession of apes and pigmies," etc. The same authority gives us an extract from a very amusing poem of 1663, in which the writer wonders that any man should prefer Coffee to Canary, terming them English apes, and proudly referring them to the days of Beaumont and Fletcher and Ben Jonson. They, says he,

One of the weaknesses of "rare Ben" was his penchant for Canary. And it would seem that the Mermaid, in Bread-street, was the house in which he enjoyed it most:

Granger states that Charles I. raised Ben's pension from 100 marks to 100 pounds, and added a tierce of canary, which salary and its appendage, he says, have ever since been continued to poets laureate.

Reverting to the Rainbow (says Mr. Price), "it has been frequently remarked by 'tavern-goers,' that many of our snuggest and most comfortable taverns are hidden from vulgar gaze, and unapproachable except through courts, blind alleys, or but half-lighted passages." Of this description was the house in question. But few of its many nightly, or rather midnightly patrons and frequenters, knew aught of it beyond its famed "stewed cheeses," and its "stout," with the various "et ceteras" of good cheer. They little dreamed, and perhaps as little cared to know, that, more than two centuries back, the Rainbow flourished as a bookseller's shop; as appears by the title-page of Trussell's History of England, which states it to be "printed by M. D., for Ephraim Dawson, and are to bee sold in Fleet Street, at the signe of the Rainbowe, neere the Inner-Temple Gate, 1636."

John Timbs
Club Life of London Vol. II
London, 1866