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colossal sum, worth, if the website Measuring Worth is a guide, nearly £4.5 million in today’s money. You have to back an awful lot of winners, and sleep with an awful lot of men, to earn that sort of cash. Still, there is no doubt that the couple did extraordinarily well. Charlotte set up a brothel in Soho, and moved on to the fashionable environs of St James’s. Dennis hit the coffee houses and the racecourses.
    There were – historians’ figures vary – between five hundred and two thousand coffee houses in London, and men spent substantial portions of their days in them. The rudimentary spaces, murky with pipe smoke, contained communal benches and tables, counters, and fires above which coffee bubbled in giant pots; the overbrewed beverage must have tasted disgusting. Some had booths, as well as private rooms upstairs. Coffee houses offerednewspapers to their customers, and so contributed to the rise of the press. They had particular clienteles: marine insurers met at Lloyd’s, the clergy at Child’s, authors at Button’s, actors and rakes at the Bedford. And blacklegs congregated at Munday’s.

    The Coffee-house Politicians by an anonymous artist (1772).This is an elegant establishment. Dennis O’Kelly’s favourite haunt, Munday’s, was probably more rough-and-ready.
    Munday’s was at New Round Court, near the Strand, until in the late 1760s or early 1770s it moved nearby to number 30, Maiden Lane. It became notorious briefly in the mid-1760s as a source of sedition, when a writer styling himself ‘Junius’ left at the counter the latest instalments in a series of letters satirizing George III and members of the Grafton administration. But it was more lastingly notorious for its association with Dennis O’Kelly, Dick England, Jack Tetherington, and their gang. Anyone inexperienced in gambling was advised to stay clear of Munday’s. One day, a butcher at the table made the mistake of accusing England of thievery, and the even bigger mistake of referring disparagingly to the blackleg’s background. England, who was as prone to violent rages as a psychopathic Mafioso in a Martin Scorsese film, beat him up until he recanted.
    In spite of this edgy atmosphere, professional men and ‘persons of quality’ would also drop in, knowing that they would be able to find sportsmen willing to bet to hundreds of pounds. The equestrian writer John Lawrence was, some years later, among these more refined regulars. He found the proprietor, Jack Medley, an amusing fund of sporting anecdotes, though he sensed that Medley’s knowledge of racing was not deep. The proprietor was popular with his customers, providing a four-shilling dinner each Sunday at 4 p.m., after some of them had been for their ride in Rotten Row. On Munday’s closure, Medley lived on a retirement income of £50 a year provided by, according to Lawrence, the coffee house regulars. 52
    Medley’s general line, that his customers’ racing conductwas not entirely scrupulous, was well informed enough. When he heard that O’Kelly’s horse Dungannon had been well beaten in a race, after starting at odds of 7-4 and 6-4 on, he exclaimed, ‘Pshaw, tis false it was not three , the horse has only two pails of water before starting!’This anecdote, which appeared in The Times , is not entirely transparent (what has ‘three’ got to do with it?), but in general alleges that the water was meant to hinder Dungannon’s progress. Dennis, Medley is implying, wanted either to bet against Dungannon, or to ensure that the horse would, on the back of a loss, start at longer odds next time.
    That was in the future. Meanwhile, Dennis was growing wealthy from gambling, on horses and on cards. We can be sure that his sportsmanship was often dubious, but also that mostly he made money from horses because he understood them. He could spot the good ones to back, and he could