On this day in 1720, the Court Minutes recorded:
Samuel Rutter who was the apprentice of John Pemberton Citizen and Stationer and
served M’ John Watts the Toothdrawer a member of this Company and his father
in law was admitted into the freedom of this Company by Redemption for 31: 3: 0
Rutter’s prospective occupational change to toothdrawer might appear unusual, but Anne S. Hargreaves tells us that “[i]t may be of relevance that Pemberton’s father was a barber, so the young Rutter might have become more aware of teeth through this channel, since the barbers still retained the legal right to clean and extract teeth and to let blood.”
Rutter’s master John Watts was admitted to the Company in 1697, having been apprenticed to David Middleton, son of Thomas Middleton (1618-1684), ‘Royal Operator for the Teeth.’ Watts set up shop in 1702 in Racquet Court off Fleet Street, where the Express Building now stands.
Hargreaves states “[t]he success of the new practice was in considerable measure due to John Watts’ general entrepreneurial awareness” and his canny use of advertisements in news sheets to reach a male clientele in the coffee houses and almanacks to reach women.
Watts’ and Rutter’s services advertised in The British Merlin Almanack in 1726 were presented as follows:
“ARTIFICIAL TEETH, set in so firm, as to eat with them and so Exact as not to be distinguish’d from natural: they are not to be taken out at Night, as is by some falsely suggested; but may be worn Years together: Yet are they so fitted, as to be taken out and put in at the pleasure of the Persons that use them; and are an Ornament to the Mouth, and greatly helpful to the speech: Also Teeth clean’d and drawn by John Watts and Samuel Rutter, Operators, who apply themselves wholly to the said business, and live in Racquet-Court, Fleet-Street, LONDON.”
Another Company member, William Green, admitted 1739, went into practice with Watts and Rutter in Racquet Court as an ‘operator for the teeth.’ Green was appointed ‘Operator for the Teeth to the King’ (George III) in 1756. His handiwork was immortalised in poet Charles Churchill’s The Ghost. Book IV of 1753:
Teeth, white as ever Teeth were seen
Deliver’d from the hand of GREEN
The Racquet Court premises continued for many years, but its practitioners after 1750 were members of the newly formed Company of Surgeons, formed after the 1745 split from the Barbers. Samuel Rutter however benefited from the separation; from Court Assistant he was elected Renter Warden at the first Court meeting of the new Barbers’ Company on 25 June 1745, and progressed to Master in 1747. John Watts in his turn had been Master in 1736, possibly the first dedicated dental practitioner to hold that office.
One of the first practitioners to be described as a ‘dentist,’ Rutter made a comfortable living, leaving bequests of £4,700 (the equivalent of £887,328 today) and four properties on his death in 1761. The tools of his trade were bequeathed:
to my partner M’ William Green all my Instruments of Drawing or Cleaning Teeth together with all the Sea Horse Teeth Ivory Tooth Powder and other
Implements whatsoever used in the said Business which Shall belong to me at the time of my Decease.
Further reading:
The first sixty years of the Racquet Court practice, by A. S. Hargreaves, Dental Historian Number 25 November 1993, available to read online here.
London Dentists in the 18th Century: A Listing from the trades directories in the Guildhall Library, by D.W. Wright, Dental Historian Number 12 October 1986, available to read online here.