The Revolutionary Power of The Coffee-house

 

Coffee plotting

 This extension of my blog to further consider the place and influence of the coffee-house was originally unintended till I suddenly remembered that I had read somewhere, sometime ago, that conspiracies and plotting over the French Revolution and the American Revolution had occurred in the coffee-houses of London, Paris, Boston among other gatherings. In fact, history appears to be steeped in ideas argued over cups of coffee, so I delved deeper.

The first coffee-houses in the Ottoman Empire provided spaces for Muslims to socialise; they could not frequent taverns or drink alcohol but cafes became commonplace; alternative places to socialise and 

An early Turkish Coffee House

gather together, based on affordability with, chiefly, egalitarian access. After the murder of the brother and uncle of Sultan Murad 1V, reputedly by janissaries** who frequented coffee-houses, he decreed that coffee-drinking was a capital offence and subsequent Sultans issued and retracted coffee-house bans well into the eighteenth century. So, controversy accompanied even the earliest of coffee-houses.[** members of  the Sultan's Guard]

An arena for important discussion.
Note a woman serving coffee to the left

My previous coffee blog mentioned the first coffee-house in London opened by Pasqua Rosee in 1652 and the point was made that, at that time, women were not allowed to frequent these places, though they sometimes worked  there. I had not considered that the general layout and ethos of the coffee-house with its communal table littered with newspapers and periodicals, meant egalitarian male access via a cheap cup of coffee, to enter discussions with educated and informed men. This enabled public consideration of the then-current political, social and religious ideas; heady stuff in the rigidly structured atmosphere of hierarchical England.

The English Civil War [1642-1651}, in reality, a succession of smaller, often regional, linked wars, had resulted in the end of the monarchy with the decapitation of King Charles 1. In 1666, his son, Charles 11 was able to restore the monarchy following the end of the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell on his death, and as King, Charles remained understandably wary of widespread political discussion. In June 1672 he issued a proclamation to Restrain the Spreading of False News …whereby “men have assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in Coffee-houses, but in other Places and Meetings, to censure and defame the proceedings of the State by speaking evil of things they understand not.” His Secretary of State, Sir Joseph Williamson then instituted a network of spies in London’s coffee-houses which lead briefly to the threatened closure of ALL coffee-houses in London by 10th January 1676. Uproar ensued following this pronouncement, and discontent loomed large. Many important and powerful men not only frequented and enjoyed coffee-houses but relied on them for their gathering of up-to-date news, events and information. The ban lasted 11 days only and Charles withdrew, never challenging the legitimacy and power of the Coffee House clientele again!

In his diaries, Samuel Pepys recorded many of the stimulating conversations

Grecian Coffee House where
Whigs and Royal Society members met.

he enjoyed joining or overhearing in the coffee-houses he frequented. Often, in London, many coffee-houses catered for a specific clientele. The Grecian Coffee House near Fleet Street, was where Whigs met, together with members of the Royal Society like Isaac Newton. Poets and writers gathered at Will’s Coffee House including John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Stockbrokers congregated at Jonathan’s Coffee House in Exchange Alley after official hours, to trade shares leading, eventually, to the establishment of the London Stock Exchange while the Lloyd’s Coffee House provided a hub for sailors and merchants which progressed to the creation of the Lloyds of London insurance company. But the open discussion the King feared, led to a burst of new ideas during the Enlightenment when people began to question traditional ideas about religion, politics and society, emphasising reason, logic and scientific discovery.

Frederick the Great of Prussia

One hundred years later, another King, Frederick the Great of Germany was revealed as a Royal opponent of coffee and he attempted to ban the drink in favour of beer on September 13th 1777. He required all coffee sellers to register with the Crown in an endeavour to prevent the

Coffee sniffers at work

importation of coffee which affected the country’s business profits including his. Short-sightedly, coffee licences were then denied to all but a favourite few while ‘sniffers’, ex-soldiers, were employed to roam the streets in search of contraband coffee roasters The King had strong opinions recorded in a letter of 1799 decrying the extent of coffee consumption and urging an artificial limit so that people could resume drinking ‘beer soup’ which was ‘much healthier than coffee’.

The Boston Tea Party 16/12/1773

In the Colonies, coffee was seen as a patriotic drink, particularly after the Boston Tea Party on December 16th  1773 when the anti-British tax party, the Sons of Liberty, destroyed an entire shipment of tea, taxed by the British and carried by the powerful East India Company. This cargo of tea represented a violation of their colonists’ rights and caused the famous

insurrectionist American slogan of ‘No taxation without representation’. 

Green Dragon Tavern, Boston. 1890s

American taverns served coffee alongside beer and whisky and the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston was referred to as the Headquarters of the Revolution by Daniel Webster for accommodating the Sons of
Liberty in numerous meetings leading up to and during the Revolutionary War. Meanwhile the Merchants’ Coffee House in New York was a hub of patriots anxious to break free from George 111 and this intense coffee-house activity eventually generated the foundation by merchants of the Bank of New York and the reorganisation of the New York Chamber of Commerce.

Cafe de Foy, still there in
Montparnasse today

Parisian coffee Houses were more egalitarian than the British and offered a perfect atmosphere for pre-Revolutionary dissent and mutiny. As a French Royalist opined, “...a crowd of minor clerks and lawyers, … unknown writers, starving scribblers who go about rabble-rousing in clubs and cafes” set the mobs alight and “forge the weapons with which the masses are armed today.” Indeed, during this frantic period, the Cafe de Foy hosted the call to arms for the storming of the Bastille. This was a pivotal moment in the French Revolution [14/07/1789] when revolutionary insurgents seized control of the mediaeval armoury, the prison and the fortress, known collectively as the Bastille. The Revolution was the violent result of a multitude of ongoing social, economic and political crises; none caused by the Coffee Houses but certainly amplified and magnified by the agitators who gathered therein and seized their moment.

After the ferment of the Revolution, eventually the Parisian cafes and coffee houses resumed their earlier tranquillity providing sanctuary and stimulus for creative writers and philosophers with famous names like Apollinaire and Andre Breton at Cafe de Flore; Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitxgerald and T.S.Eliot at La Rotonde and later Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre using Cafe de Flore in Saint Germain as their all-day workplace fortified with the occasional coffee and lunch. 

Cafe de Flore, Saint Germain, opened 1911
Still  little changed since WW2 and still a 
hub of cafe culture.

Not quite part of a Coffee House but provides local colour.
A Parisian street crier selling coffee as a side-line.

+

Street cafe, Istanbul 1900
A  more egalitarian coffee gathering.

A very nice little 1674 engraving expressing the
coffee fears of women

This blog is indebted to the writer, Jessica Pearce Rotondi for information.

The Honourable Tradition of the Coffee-House

 

Situated in St Michael's Alley in the City of London

 The coffee house is a centuries-old institution and indeed, I discover in my search for historical facts about this venerable custom, that they existed for centuries in the Muslim Ottoman regions before spreading to Christian Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, introduced by merchants, migrants and missionaries as they journeyed on their different paths to enlightenment. The first was established in St Mark’s Square in Venice in 1657 when Florian Francesco opened Caffe Florian [still famous today] and only five years later came the second, opened by Pasqua Rosee, a Greek, who opened up Britain’s first coffee-house in St. Michael’s Alley in the City of London although an alternative source claims the first English coffee-house was opened in Oxford in 1650 with Pasqua Rosee following in 1652 and London’s second, The Rainbow, in Fleet Street in 1653.

Armenians were important in the establishment of the first coffee-houses/cafes in Paris, at the St Germain Fair in 1671, and also in initiating Vienna's first kaffeehaus in 1685. Unlike in taverns, also growing in parallel popularity, there was no intoxication involved though there was the delicious stimulus of coffee-drinking in spaces specifically designed to make it available and fashionable for those who could afford it. This wealthy, or comfortably off, coffee-loving cohort included predominantly professional, wealthy and/or educated men who usually shared a love of talking, discussing, arguing, conducting business transactions. And coffee-houses became their sanctuaries, providing opportunities for political discussion and debate and, importantly, for being seen in fashionable places. 

Caffe Florian, Piazza Marco, Venice 2020 open for 300 years

 

 

Cafe Frauenhuber, Vienna, the oldest continuously open
cafe in the city since 1834. 
Both Mozart and Beethoven ate and performed here.

 

Although coffee-houses claimed to admit anyone, in practice, women were excluded, or they excluded themselves, from spaces and discussions which were not, by general consent, considered appropriate for respectable women. Interestingly, in 1673 the ‘Women’s Petition Against Coffee’ was issued, claiming that coffee-drinking made men ‘unfruitful’ and a pamphlet, ‘The Character of a Coffee House’, was published condemning the diversity of topics and the free thought which occurred in coffee-houses. Nonetheless, by 1683 there were approximately 2000 coffee-houses in London alone and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coffee-house culture came to dominate civic life in European cities. As is the way with fashion, interest in coffee gatherings faded somewhat in early nineteenth century city life but bounced back magnificently in the kaffeehauser of great European cities like Paris, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin in the 19th and early twentieth centuries where they were architecturally  and socially

Late 18th century coffee-house

important hubs of political and social  discussion. This extended wave of coffee culture ended, as did so many social structures, in the maelstrom of the First World War, not to be revived until the 1950s and 1960s in somewhat less majestic, but nonetheless, ubiquitous form. As a young woman in the late Fifties, teaching during the week, I ran a coffee bar on Saturdays, for a friend in business as a restaurant owner who wanted to cash in on the craze! The cultural conditions obtaining then in the U.K. included the growth of provincial universities, the post-war hunger for the 'new and the latest’ which included the development of the marvel of shiny new Italian espresso machines which became ‘a craze’!

Coffee culture continues to thrive today. The latest to open, among dozens in Bury St Edmunds, is Alema on High Baxter Street and is the reason for this article. Fabian, the owner from Loja in Ecuador, is Serious about coffee. He buys his Arabica beans directly from the family coffee farm run by his 

Fabian, owner of Alema Coffee with his splendid
gleaming brass roaster and grinder.

father in Loja, grinds and roasts the beans himself on some impressive-looking shiny brass machinery, funded by a bank loan. He is not only knowledgeable about coffee, he cares deeply about it, now bringing in his five year old son for part of Saturday to learn to share his passion. It goes without saying that his coffee [in hand-made mugs from a friend’s studio] is excellent and no more expensive than the coffee from at least 20 or 30 other outlets in town. And Fabian sends part of his profits back to the family farm.

Samuel Pepys 

There is a long article possible on the literary appreciation of coffee-house culture. Samuel Pepys enthused about his great pleasure in its ‘diversity of company and discourse’; Stefan Zweig, in his poignant 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday, remembered fondly the coffee-houses of Hapsburg Vienna as ‘actually a sort of democratic club, where every guest can sit for hours……. to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all, consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.’  While, as late as 2004, George Steiner described Europe as ‘made up of coffee-houses and cafes…. The cafe is a place for assignation and conspiracy, for intellectual debate and gossip, for the flaneur and the poet or metaphysician at his notebook.’

Stefan Zweig

My only comment on this wealth of history and culture is to suggest that the current phrase, 'coffee shop', does not in any way, suggest the intellectual richness of the earlier coffee-houses though it is still a much-valued meeting place where gossip and friendships are forged and maintained, newspapers consumed, romance can flourish and loneliness expiated.

The public conversation continues in today’s coffee-houses..

George Steiner in his Cambridge study

Thomas Garraway's Coffee-house, 
Exchange Alley, Cornhill.
Closed in the nineteenth century
after two hundred years of 
continuous business. 
One of the first cafes to sell tea also
which respectable ladies could drink in public.

 

The Future is Green

 

Port Talbot steelworks

Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station

 A notable fact caught my attention this week; actually, TWO notable facts! The two being broadcast simultaneously were, I think, mere synchronicity. One was the closure of the blast furnace at the Port Talbot steelworks; two was the shutdown of the last coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire. Chance simultaneous closures in timing, perhaps, but nonetheless, significant ones. Both occurrences represent aspects of the past economic significance of the UK and both mark the 

A somewhat rosy view of the usually overcrowded and 
insanitary pit villages of the North. Many of the miners
were also keen gardeners.

present transition to a greener future. Gone are the late nineteenth century and virtually, the complete twentieth century, of the UK’s economic supremacy featuring heavy industry, chiefly in the North of the country which overtook the then more rural South in financial prosperity and, incidentally, in landscape ugliness. Steel-making in Port Talbot occurred there because of the proximity of abundant supplies of high-grade coal hewn from a number of pits in the Welsh valleys. The first coal-fired power station opened at 57, Holborn Viaduct in London in 
1882. Coal was burnt to drive a steam engine which in turn drove a 27tonne 93 kw generator. This then, initially, lit just under 1000 incandescent lamps along the street.

Descent to the coal face

Coal production in the UK reached a peak in the mid 20th century when domestic use was ubiquitous and export was healthy. The shutdown of the 57 year old plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in September 2024, thus ends 140 years of coal power generation in the U.K. It is estimated by Carbon Brief, that during that period, the U.K. burned its way through 4.6 billion tonnes of coal and 10.4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, more than almost all other nations have ever produced from all fossil fuels.

Marco Polo 
Venice 1254-1324

It is believed that the Romans first saw the potential of coal and possibly started mining in the Nettlebridge area of Somerset. Marco Polo *** described coal as 'black rocks that burn like wood'. He noted that where coal was plentiful, people took two to three baths a week rather than the usual one or two a year. 

Newcomen steam engine 1712

Although demand for coal grew rapidly in the 17^th century, it was the invention of the first practical steam engine in 1712 which made the coalfields of central Scotland, south Wales, the Midlands and the North East accessible for transportation. In the early 1700s about 3 million tonnes of coal were mined each year but by the 1830s, over a hundred years later, the amount had leapt to 30 million tonnes. The opening of the first public coal-fired power station came relatively late [1882] but other, small plants followed and by the start of the 20 century, almost all of Britain’s electricity was produced by coal-generated plants. Even by 1950, 96% of coal power generation remained, and in 1966 Ferrybridge C, a so-called ‘super coal plant,’ opened to be followed by plants of similar size across Britain’s coalfields; in total, 12 were established between 1966 and 1974 and continued to need huge amounts of coal. The Miners’ Strike, so seminal in several ways, abruptly stopped mining between 1984/5 after which coal power failed to return to its pre-strike zenith. 

Orgreave, a bitter confrontation between striking
miners and the police, which exemplified the
divisive and long-lasting social and political effects
of the Miners' Strike.

In the early 1990s the dash for gas and rising environmental concerns signalled the eventual demise of coal. And over the next decade, coal plants became increasingly expensive to run as legislation insisted on expensive upgrades to coal mining to help reduce pollution and uphold increasing public concern with the environmental costs incurred. The Climate Change Act of 2008 committed to an 80% reduction in carbon emissions relative to the levels of 1990, and finally a new tax in 2013 aimed at increasing the cost of carbon emissions was eventually responsible for closing 10 of the UK's largest coal plants. The Government set out plans in 2015 to end all coal-powered generation within the next ten years but in 2021 the ban was brought forward to October 2024. This was the final coup de grace for this venerated black rock, the mining of which had established coal-related commercial and mining activities over more than a century and a half and which was responsible in the late eighteenth century for the emergence of the much-loved mining villages in the industrial North and Midlands. The social, emotional aspects of this finale to the coal industry have been divisive and long-lasting in the pit villages as the way of life over generations has been eroded or ended. The economic cost to former miners has been amplified by the non-appearance of the promised ‘green’ jobs, another area demonstrating the failure of Governmental planning and economic investment.

In the Forties, this was a common sight in various 
industrial areas: miners walking home after work, 
carrying their 'snap' tins and en route for a wash.
There were normally no pithead baths.

Auckinleck, Scotland. 
Traditional mining village complete with the coal
ration delivered and awaiting removal to the 'coal house'
at the back of the house.

                                                                          Marco Polo ***

Born in Venice in 1254 and died there in 1324 after an astonishingly adventurous life. Polo became a merchant, explorer and adventurer, travelling Europe along the Silk Road, living and exploring in China for nearly a quarter of a century.

        

Sharing the Joke

 In a rare bout of 'sorting out stuff' I recently came across the following sequence of cartoons produced by a friend and former neighbour, Pat  *****. According to the accompanying note, I had given her 'a charming little book' which I had produced and which had pleased her. Her 'thank you' was the joyful collection of her typical cartoons below, lampooning her experiences and observations of ageing. The whole delightful sequence was dated 20/10/03 and I cannot ask her permission to reprint here in my blog as really sadly she has since departed for the Great Studio in the Sky.

The reason I want to display Pat's brilliant drawings/caricatures is that so many of them echo very strongly, my own contemporary experiences now that I am 90! Pat possessed not only artistic ability and a great sense of humour but also amazing  prescience and notable perception. So this is a loving tribute to a clever, funny and wise woman who is missed and who is, moreover, missing countless opportunities to produce more of the same. 

Cartoonist extraordinaire