You Dirty Boy!

If I asked you to name a famous Miser, I’m sure most of you would plump for Mr Ebeneezer Scrooge, the literary creation of Charles Dickens. It is well known the Dickens created many of his characters from an assemblage of real life people, taking traits and idiosyncrasies from several to created his fully formed character. Scrooge as we know is a money grabbing business man. It’s difficult to say if Ebeneezer was based on a single person, but there was a real life character that Dickens, that superb investigator into all facets of London life would have been very aware of and that was a gentleman known as Nathaniel Bentley.

Nathaniel was born into a fairly wealthy family in 1735, his father, Nathaniel senior was what you might describe as a Trader. He bought and sold various commodities and put most of his money into acquiring properties which he would then lease. He did very well and accrued a tidy fortune and was wealthy enough to pay for a new bell at the church of St Katherine’s Cree in Leadenhall Street in the City of London.

Not much is known about Nathaniel juniors early life, but by the time he’d reached his majority he was quite the young man around town. At this period, his favourite suit was blue and silver, with his hair dressed in the highest style of fashionable extravagance. He paid several visits to Paris and was present at the coronation of Louis XVI, to whom he was personally introduced, and was considered one of the most accomplished English gentlemen then at the French court. He spoke several languages, particularly French and Italian, with great fluency, and associated with characters of the highest respectability.

Nathaniel senior died in 1760 and left all his fortune to his son, which included around fifteen properties. One of these was based at 46 Leadenhall Street not far from St Katherine’s Cree. It was a warehouse that bought, sold and stored hardware, jewelry and precious metals and went by the rather unflattering name of The Dirty Warehouse

It’s difficult to say why this property should pique Nathaniel’s interest, he was a wealthy man after all, but he decided to move into the warehouse and run the business himself. Still in his mid twenties he continued to move in the higher circles of fashionable London and on these social occasions he was as well turned out as he had always been. However, during this time his standards of dress and personal hygiene while working in the warehouse started to slip. He would wear the same shirt and breeches for months at a time and as they say soap, water and himself were not well acquainted. This prompted a friend to mention to him that he was cloaked in a rather unpleasant odour, to which Nathaniel replied, “It is of no use, Sir. If I wash my hands today they will be dirty again tomorrow.“

He became increasingly more miserly dismissing all the staff from the warehouse and would no longer employ anyone to prepare his meals, but did employ someone to do his shopping.

His diet was a rather strange and spartan one. It consisted mainly of the cheapest vegetables that could be purchased, most on the edge of being edible. He rarely ate meat but when he did it was bacon which had to be lean as he claimed that the fat was wasteful. He drank a gallon of beer every three days which came from a local brewery that he held the lease for and probably came free of charge. After a couple of years of living this way he shunned the social occasions as dressing up was considered “an expense too lavish to be contemplated.“

The running of the warehouse single handedly was obviously too much for one man alone and Nathaniel struggled to keep any real control over the stock, both in purchasing and sales and also it’s storage. This lead to the interior being crammed full of artifacts from floor to ceiling making movement around the warehouse difficult and in some cases dangerous. On one occasion Nathaniel is said to have fallen from a tottering tower of wooden boxes injuring his leg. Not wanting the expense of involving a doctor he paid a local woman to deliver poultices that he would apply himself, but his leg got worse until eventually, he was forced to seek the service of a surgeon. Close to losing his leg Nathaniel had no choice but to pay to get it treated effectively.

His behaviour and unpleasant appearance meant that his circle of friends and acquaintances dropped away and he rarely if ever left the confines of the warehouse. He corresponded regularly with one remaining friend, a Mr Delevant and also a Mrs Mary Dunbar who lived locally. He did have one regular visitor though, his sister Sarah, who would travel from her home in Chelsea to see him. His deterioration shocked her and the conditions he lived in became more intolerable to her sensibilities, so much so that in the end she could not enter the warehouse and would converse with her brother from the safety of her carriage.

As the years went by the warehouse became dirtier and dirtier, with no repairs lavished on it’s outside structure or appearance. His neighbours especially those on the opposite side of the street who had a full view of this ramshackle property even offered to help with having it repaired and painted, but he refused stating that the property was known as the Dirty warehouse and that was what his customers expected. It was at this time that he adopted the persona of Dirty Dick. Perhaps Nathaniel was an early marketing genius? His miserliness increased to the extent that he would not light a fire even when extremely cold, but instead, he would fill a box with straw and stand in it to keep his feet warm.

When someone asked him if he kept a cat or a dog to destroy any vermin in the house, he answered with a smile, “No sir, they only make more dirt and spoil more goods than their services are worth and as to rats and mice, how can they live in my house when I take care to leave them nothing to eat.”

You may be wondering how his business continued to flourish given his strange way of life? Well, firstly he seems to have had his father’s acumen for buying and selling. The warehouse and the dishevelled state of both it and it’s owner was a draw to visitors and Nathaniel being a very good salesman ensured that even the most casual visitor to brave the interior would leave having been talked into a purchase. Probably most important of all was notwithstanding his curious behaviour, he was remarkably polite to his customers, and the ladies in particular highly praised the elegance of his manners.

Around the early 1800s the lease on the warehouse expired and the ownership of the building was passed to the lease holder Mr Gosling. Despite several attempts to enter the premises Nathaniel refused him admission. Their relationship was not an amicable one and Mr Gosling began to threaten legal action against Nathaniel, who could not even consider the expense of hiring a lawyer, even if he was forced to quit his place of business and finally in 1804 he handed to keys to Mt Gosling and moved out. The astute Mr Gosling then rebranded the ramshackle warehouse as a museum of curiosities and started to charge paying customers to visit Nathaniel’s living accommodation. Around this time Nathaniel decided to make a will, in which he left the bulk of his estate to his two remaining friends, Mr Delevant and Mrs Dunbar, with a some of money for Mrs Dunbar’s son Charles. The properties he owned were transferred to the ownership of his sister Sarah.

Nathaniel rented a large house in nearby Aldgate taking many of his possessions from the warehouse with him, but this was a short lived stay as the Landlord fearful of his property becoming another incarnation of the Dirty Warehouse refused to renew the lease. It appears that word had got round to the landlords of the local area and despite many attempts Nathaniel was unable to rent another large property. Stuck without any means of storage, he was forced to sell all of his stock at a knockdown price. It was said that in total it comprised of around £4,000 worth ( around £300,00 today) but Nathaniel let it all go for £1,000 most of it being bought by the brewery that was once his tenant. Still a very tidy sum, but it appears that at this point that Nathaniel is either conned out of or physically robbed of his entire savings. Given his hoarding instincts it most likely the latter as he distrusted banks and kept his money at home. Now destitute and failing to seek help from his two friends or even his sister, Nathaniel took to a life on the road and became a beggar. He died in 1809 in the hamlet of Haddington in Lincolnshire aged seventy four.

Today his name still lives on in the City. The Brewery that once rented their property from him and which bought a lot of his stock was located in Bishopsgate and several years after Nathaniel’s death started to fill their tavern, The Old Jerusalem, with many of the artifacts that had once belonged to Nathaniel and in what could be the earliest theme pub on record changed it’s name to Dirty Dick’s and created a replica of the Dirty Warehouse inside.

It became such a popular venue that by the end of the nineteenth century, its owner, a public house company called William Barker Ltd., was producing commemorative booklets and promotional material to advertise the pub. The pub had to undergo a degree of deep cleansing in the 1980s in order to comply with health and safety legislation and today although there are a few remaining artifacts it’s a shadow of it’s former self.

So that was the story of Nathaniel “Dirty Dick” Bentley and as I said earlier his story would have been well known to Dickens. However he does not seem to have all the avaricious and detestable traits of an Ebeneezer Scrooge, but I found something while researching this piece that chimes with another well known Dickensian character, that of Miss Haversham to be found in Great Expectations. As mentioned, in his twenties Nathaniel, a well heeled, well educated man about town would have been considered as something of a catch for the single ladies who moved in the same circles.

It is said that having returned from the continent, Nathaniel met and fell in love with a young lady of a similar age and they made plans to be married. Just days before the ceremony Nathaniel arranged and invited a large number of her relatives to partake of a sumptuous feast and entertainment. Having prepared everything for their reception, he anxiously awaited in his apartments the arrival of his intended bride, when a messenger entered, bringing the melancholy news of her sudden death.