Unforgotten Lives - Dean Mahomed

Sake Dean Mahomed was a man of many talents - a writer, restaurateur, bath house proprietor and a self-proclaimed “shampooing surgeon” to the King! We know this because Mahomed published several books, most notably his memoir The Travels of Dean Mahomet in 1794. Born in Patna in the modern state of Bihar, India, Mahomed travelled to Cork, Ireland in 1784 and settled there for 22 years, where he married and had a family.

In 1806 we find him living in Marylebone, apparently newly married to a Jane Jefferys and working in a vapour bath owned by Basil Cochrane, a wealthy East India Company official in fashionable Portman Square. Mahomed spent the next eight years in London. He married Jane at St Marylebone Church on 26 November 1806 and two of his children, Amelia and Henry Edwin, were born and baptised in the same parish.

In February 1810 Mahomed set up his own business, the 'Hindostanee Coffee House', at 34 George Street in Marylebone. Probably the first restaurant of its kind in London, it served Indian cuisine which Mahomed claimed “to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England”. Unfortunately, his restaurant failed leaving Mahomed bankrupt and in 1814 he moved to Brighton with his family to begin what became the most successful chapter of his life.  

Mahomed maintained his links with London. We find him back in London in 1838 setting up two Indian bathhouses at 11 St James Place and 7 Little Ryder Street in Westminster. By then, Dean Mahomed was nearly eighty years old, but clearly his entrepreneurial spirit was still strong. He died in Brighton on 24 February 1851 having led a long and richly varied life.