Well knowing the value of a first-class cuisine, he provided every sort of culinary luxury, and took care that the suppers should be so excellent as to make his club the resort of all sorts of men about town, who flocked in about midnight from White’s, Brooks’s, and the Opera, to titillate their palates and try their luck at the hazard-table afterwards. Many who began cautiously, and risked but little, by degrees acquired a taste for the excitement of play, and ended by staking large sums, which they generally lost. Some few only were lucky; a certain young blood, for instance, who one night won the price of his “troop” in the Life Guards, purchased it, and never touched a dice-box again. If, however, people were more or less sure to lose their money at Crockford’s, they were equally certain of getting admirable food at a quite nominal price, and for this reason many men of small means had little reason to complain of the great gambling institution in St. James’s Street. As was once wittily said, a certain text of Scripture exactly applied to the proprietor. This was: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.” Benjamin Crockford had begun life as a fishmonger near Temple Bar, but, being of a sporting character, was accustomed to stake a few shillings nightly at a low gaming-house kept by George Smith in King’s Place; later, he was lucky in a turf transaction. His first venture as a gaming-house proprietor was the purchase, for £100, of a fourth share in a hell at No. 5, King Street. His partners here were men named Abbott, Austin, and Holdsworth, and their operations were not above suspicion. Afterwards Crockford, in partnership with two others, opened a French hazard bank at 81 Piccadilly, and here again there was foul-play. The bank cleared £200,000 in a very short time; false dice were found on the premises and exhibited in a shop window in Bond Street for some days, and Crockford was sued by numbers of his victims, but took care to compromise every action before it had entered upon such an acute stage as to entail publicity. Crockford’s patrons were all men of rank and breeding, the utmost decorum was observed, and society at the club was of the most pleasant and fashionable character. There was no smoking-room, and in the summer evenings the habitués of Crockford’s used to stand outside in the porch, with their cigars, drinking champagne and seltzer, and looking at the people going home from parties or the Opera. White’s, except in the afternoons, was deserted, members naturally going across the way, where there was a first-rate supper with wine of unexceptionable quality provided free of cost. Crockford was well repaid for his liberality in these matters. By the profits of the hazard-table he realized in the course of a few years the enormous sum of £1,200,000.