Billy Brewer
Taunton, Somerset, 1818–1890
♣ Jack of Clubs | Keyword: Charm
William Brewer was born in 1818 at Lyng, a hamlet five miles east of Taunton, the son of a shoemaker named Abraham. He started as a ploughboy, learned to make clay pipes as a teenager, and spent the next several years walking the roads and footpaths of Somerset, east Devon and north Dorset, selling them door to door. This earned him the nickname Billy the Piper and made him a well-known face across the region long before he settled anywhere.
Around 1840 he arrived in Taunton, took a small grocery shop in Alfred Street, and planted a chestnut tree outside to mark the occasion. The tree was still flourishing fifty years later. The shop provided a respectable front for his legally ambiguous activities, and he appears in trade directories of the 1860s and 1870s as a modest marine store dealer. Nobody in Taunton was confused about what else he did. By the time his reputation was established, a letter addressed simply to Brewer, Taunton would find him without difficulty. The Post Office knew.
He read planets from the back of the shop. Servant girls came in numbers to have their fortunes told. Members of the middle classes arrived by carriage. Farmers came when their livestock sickened and no ordinary remedy worked. He visited clients across the Somerset Levels when required, sometimes staying for weeks, and was always given the best bed in the house. On one occasion he was called out to investigate mysterious deaths in a farmer’s herd, confirmed it as witchcraft, declared the cure would take a week, spent ten very comfortable days being fed and entertained at the farm, and then announced he had been successful. The farmer was overjoyed and Billy returned to Taunton with five pounds in his pocket.
He charged eleven shillings as his standard fee and always returned one shilling on prompt payment. He never over-charged, which was both a principle and a strategy: every cunning person who ended up before the magistrates had almost always been put there by a dissatisfied client who felt robbed. Even the newspapers most hostile to his trade conceded the point, allowing that he showed none of that grasping, sordid greed for lucre so often found in others of his profession. Billy kept his charges reasonable and his legal record clean for fifty years.
In person he cut an extraordinary figure. He wore a long Inverness cloak and a sombrero hat, with numerous gold and silver rings glittering on his fingers. In later life he added a dishevelled brown wig that contrasted so obviously with his grey whiskers that everyone who saw him noticed it and remembered it. He made a point of attending village club feasts across the Somerset countryside, turning up in his finest, wearing a distinctive pair of lavender gloves.
He never married but enjoyed the companionship of cats.
He died on 28 December 1890. His funeral was organised by the parish authorities despite the fact that he was insured with the Prudential, and it was so poorly arranged that the hearse and carriage stood outside his door for nearly an hour while the police and the relieving officer failed to appear. A large crowd gathered and began conversing, as the press delicately reported, not in the choicest of language. After his death the Taunton Courier published a selection of letters he had received from clients across the region, mocking the spelling and penmanship. The letters themselves survived. They suggest a man who was genuinely useful to a great many people who had nowhere else to turn.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.