Salacious Local in Nursery Rhyme Shock!

Countryside Column for 28 March

The Courtesan Casanova Turned Down 

 

You remember the old nursery rhyme: “Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher Found it”? Well there are many in my village hoping that our Lucy doesn’t lose a packet or at any rate isn’t out of pocket on her latest venture.

Now before you start complaining about strained metaphors, there’s a reason why I introduced the 18^th century doggerel. Lucy is the landlady of our village pub. And she and husband Mark have just taken over the second inn in the village, the old William IV.

Opinion is divided as to whether this is a cunning ploy to remove their main competition, or an unconventional business model, inevitably taking custom away from their current, successful establishment. Either way, along with a revamp, they’ve given the William a new name.

Normally I’m not keen on renaming pubs. And this one seems to me to be a particularly high-risk strategy. It’s to be called the Kitty Fisher.

A little delving will disclose that Ms Fisher was a high class courtesan and mistress to the sixth Earl of Coventry. It seems that Lucy Locket was in the same line of work, and the ‘pocket’ she lost was in fact a client who Kitty took on, only to find he was broke. (There are other interpretations of the rhyme, particularly a double meaning for the word ‘pocket’ but this being a respectable publication it’s perhaps best we don’t dwell on it.)

Now what, you may well ask, is our Lucy doing naming her new pub after a woman who, as Casanova rather ungallantly said, one could have for ten guineas? Moreover, is this the sort of association that a rectitudinous village like ours would wish for?

The trouble is it’s a bit late for moral scruples because Kitty Fisher is apparently buried in our churchyard. After publicly eating a £100 note, sitting for portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds and having open spats with Lady Coventry, Kitty renounced her ways, settled down and married the son of the MP for Rye. He was John Norris who lived at Hempsted, today the home of the girls’ school famously attended by Princess Anne.

Kitty was apparently generous to the poor and thus well liked in the village but, sadly, she died in 1767, only a matter of months after her marriage.

I suppose if nothing else, the name will provide patrons of Lucy’s new pub plenty to talk about.