Bawds, Gigolos and Apple-Johns
This Worshipful Company regulates a choice range of licensed bordellos catering to all religions. Most of the town’s major inns are ‘full service’ establishments in that they combine the services of a restaurant, hotel, Turkish bath, manicure salon and brothel.
Mobile bordellos also visit the outlying villages upon a regular schedule, which is a great convenience for the aged and disabled.
Details of visiting bordello services are displayed at most street corners and on church notice boards. Alternatively, they may be had from Luton Tourist office: 01582 471012. (Do mention Secret Luton when you call.)
Gongscourers, Jakesmen & Laystall Operatives
Theirs is the task of periodically removing the contents of privies, cesspits and garden middens.
It would be a mistake to feel that their work is in any way menial or ill-rewarded. Like as not, that grinning odiferous goblin who pops his head up from your hotel privy, dumb-well or dunnekin is a millionaire!
Fortunes can be made by sifting valuables out of the solid dross and distilling the liquid effluvia for saltpetre which can be sold to the firework companies. The dried residue is traded to the paddy farmers and hydroponic cucumber houses at Harpenden where it is beneficially recycled for culinary purposes.
Mendicants, Skelderers & Abraham Men
No Luton alley is considered properly dressed for visitors without its compliment of beggars. They are such wags! They will thrust into your path their suppurating limbs, push their pox-eaten noses into your face, or stifle you with their mephitic breath while they seek to inveigle you into the acceptance of an airline credit card or a no-risk endowment mortgage.
Never take offence. All is in fun. They rent their working clothes from the Luton Library Playhouse.
At the end of the day, they will typically call for their carriages and mistresses and repair to the TravelLodge penthouse to dine upon champagne and Lea River lobsters. As I have noted elsewhere, nothing in Luton is what it seems!
In my book Secret Luton, I have attempted to enumerate all of the town’s guilds, companies, cabals, sororities and secret societies. However, if I gave you all this information free, out of the goodness of my heart, you would neither trust it nor take me seriously, charity being so suspect in these times.
Do please reserve your own copy of my book now.
