William Almack

William Almack (died 1781) was an English valet, merchant and tavern owner, who became the founder of fashionable clubs and assembly-rooms. His Almack's Coffee House was bought in 1774 and became the gentlemen's club, Brooks's.

According to one account he was descended from a Yorkshire family of Quakers; he came to London at an early age as the valet of the James Douglas-Hamilton, 5th Duke of Hamilton. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century Almack became proprietor of the Thatched House Tavern in St. James's Street. Before 1763 he opened a gaming-club in Pall Mall, which was known as Almack's Club, and from that date till his death he was the leading caterer for the amusement of the fashionable world of London. Among the twenty-seven original members of Almack's Club were the Duke of Portland and Charles James Fox, and it was subsequently joined by Edward Gibbon, William Pitt, and very many noblemen. Brooks's, one of London's most exclusive gentlemen's clubs, was founded in 1764 by 27 men, including four dukes. Its original premises in Pall Mall managed by the famous William Almack who also set up the iconic Almack's Assembly Rooms in nearby Duke Street. The club is named after Almack's successor Brooks, who only survived its rebuilding by three years.

Almack's was noted for its high play, and Horace Walpole wrote of it in 1770: ‘The gaming of Almack's, which has taken the pas of White's, is worthy of the decline of our empire.’ The club passed subsequently into other hands, and still survives as ‘Brooks's.’ In 1764 Almack erected, from the designs of Milne, out of the profits acquired in his previous speculations, the large assembly-rooms in King Street, St. James's, by which he is chiefly known. They were opened on 20 February 1765, before they were quite completed; and at Almack's inaugural reception, among the visitors, who were not very numerous, were the Duke of Cumberland and Horace Walpole. The weather was bitterly cold, and Horace Walpole writes that, to induce his patrons to attend on the opening day, ‘Almack advertised that the new assembly-room was built with hot bricks and boiling water.’ Gilly Williams, in a letter descriptive of the ceremony addressed to George Selwyn, says: ‘Almack's Scotch face in a bagwig waiting at supper would divert you, as would his lady in a sack, making tea and curtseying to the duchesses.’

...
Wikipedia