The Five

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Wishing to secure the best possible outcome for their social experiment, the Peabody trustees took pains to ensure that only the “most deserving of the working poor”—those with the appropriate moral character as well as the means to meet the weekly cost of their rent—were admitted as residents. The screening process was rigorous. All male heads of household had to produce a letter of character from their employers in order to demonstrate that their jobs were not only relatively secure but that “there was nothing in [their] conduct . . . to disqualify [them] from partaking in the benefits of the fund.”5 The trustees then visited an applicant’s home. Anyone who was found to be a “habitual drunkard” or had been entangled with the law was disqualified. Equally, those judged to have too comfortable an income or a family too large for the accommodations were also refused. Finally, to gain admission, each household member needed to provide proof of inoculation against smallpox.

  In 1876, the Nichols family was judged to be an ideal match for the Peabody Buildings on Stamford Street. When the trustees called upon them at their home on Trafalgar Street, they would have found William, Polly, and their three children washed and dressed in their Sunday best, their rooms swept and tidy. There was no indication of low morals or alcoholism, and William’s employer, the printing house of William Clowes and Sons, which lay just opposite the gates of the Stamford Street estate, endorsed him as an industrious family man. As one of the trustees’ aims was to provide housing for residents convenient to their places of work, it is likely that the firm directed its employees’ attention to the Peabody scheme. William Clowes and Sons was a formidable operation by the time William Nichols began drawing his salary of thirty shillings a week. Its Duke Street premises contained six composition rooms, where type was assembled, and no fewer than twenty-five steam-driven printing machines, which Nichols assisted in operating. By the middle of the century, the company employed over six hundred members of staff and was engaged in printing some of the era’s most memorable books, including many works of Dickens, who until his death in 1870 used to come to Duke Street to correct his proofs. Like its staff members, the company prided itself on its reputation as a trustworthy and respectable business. Even its compositors insisted on wearing top hats and starched collars to work until the end of the nineteenth century.

  After spending most of her life in ramshackle dwellings, Polly must have been thrilled at the prospect of making a home in the clean, modern rooms on Stamford Street. To have a proper stove on which to cook, a working indoor toilet, and a place to dry laundry where it didn’t gather soot or the scent of smoke would seem a luxury. The children would have a separate bedroom, and the married couple might even enjoy some occasional privacy. Just as the Peabody trustees had hoped, William’s home was no more than a few minutes from his workplace, enabling him to return for dinner with his family. Work, community, family, health, industry, and moral well-being would all come together as the era’s social reformers intended.

  On July 31, 1876, the Nicholses took up residence on the second floor of D block, at number 3. For the first time in her life, Polly would not be sharing a home with her father. Edward Walker had gone to live with his son, also named Edward, and his young family on nearby Guildford Street. The new apartment, with its four rooms and abundant space, would be occupied exclusively by Polly, her husband, and their children.

  The six shillings and eight pence the Nicholses paid in weekly rent allowed them to experience a remarkably innovative living environment. Unlike the managers of the privately operated slum dwellings they had known, at Stamford Street, the superintendent and porters enforced regulations concerning cleanliness and order. Tenants were charged with keeping communal spaces clean; the corridors, steps, and “closets” were to be swept every day before ten o’clock and washed every Saturday. Children were allowed to play outside in the courtyard but were forbidden to make a ruckus on the stairs, in the passageways, or in the laundry. Residents could not sublet their apartments nor open a shop on the premises. Women were barred from “taking in laundry” to make a few extra shillings from the tubs and basins on the attic floors. Should tenants break the rules, they were threatened with “being turned out.”6 However, in many cases, it seems some regulations were very loosely applied. When a journalist from the Telegraphcame to visit the Stamford Street buildings, he reported children “playing at hide and seek along the passages.” He commented on their cheerfulness and that in spite of being “poorly clad . . . most of them were clean and tidy and had their hair nicely arranged.” The superintendent remarked to the reporter that most families new to the buildings arrived with bad habits acquired as a result of slum living. But they soon learned that dirty windows and barefoot children incurred the disapproval of fellow Peabody residents. “Poor people like to be as good as their neighbours,” he stated. Another visitor noticed “flowers in the windows and bright, happy faces looking from them.” Neither were there any “quarrelling or fighting children, no drunken women, or discouraged looking men.”7 Stamford Street’s superintendent credited this to the buildings’ distance from public houses; it kept women at home, tending to their responsibilities. “Most husbands,” he said, were pleased to think that their wives would not be “gossiping about from court to court” after a few glasses of beer, “but minding the children and keeping the place clean.”8

  But gossip they did, as well as occasionally flout the rules, and lead lives that were no more or less complicated than if they had inhabited lodgings on the opposite side of the buildings’ gates. The Nicholses’ neighbors in D block hailed from a number of different professions and circumstances. Among those who shared their building were railway porters, packers, policemen, widows, laborers, warehousemen, charwomen (day servants doing general housework), carpenters, and numerous employees of William Clowes and Sons. The three children of Cornealus Ring, who lived next door at number 2, would have run and tumbled with the Nicholses’ own brood. Having lost his wife in childbirth, Cornealus had asked his sister to look after the family, including a three-month-old infant. At number 9, William Hatch’s family continued to grow. The six children placed the family at the outer limit of occupants allowed by the Peabody Buildings; however, Hatch’s bachelor brother, Arthur, who lived next door at number 8, took in the overflow. Polly and the other women would have kindly kept an eye on the building’s widows: Anne Freeman at number 7, Emona Blower with her two children next door in 4, and Eliza Merritt, who had a pension (perhaps unbeknownst to her neighbors) of sixty-five pounds per year, in number 1.9

  This close community, who shared walls and water closets, who would have whispered over the mangles in the laundry rooms, bred no small amount of drama. The records of the Peabody Buildings tell tales of hopes and losses, of love and ruin, and the characters who made their homes beside the Nichols family. Walter Duthie was a Scottish railway porter, but his wife, Jane, had been born in Ambala, India. The Gaytons at number 10 aspired to a better life. While Henry Gayton worked as a picture packer, he also began a side business as an art dealer, eventually saving enough money to immigrate with his family to Australia. In 1877, Polly and her neighbors would have discussed poor John Sharpe, who had not only lost his wife but his two children to illness. Sharpe had been made to leave number 6 and move to number 8, a single room. Devastated by his misfortune, he was unable to manage. By September, the superintendent was forced to turn out the grieving widower for his “dirtiness.” There were celebrations and love stories too. Jane Rowan, a widow with four children who worked as a laundress, was about to move to the buildings in Southwark when another resident, Patrick Madden, asked her to marry him.10 Then there were the secrets, the acts that occurred behind closed doors or in snatched moments, which were never noted in the superintendent’s record book.

  Sarah Vidler was one of the many widows who successfully secured a place for her family in the Stamford Street buildings. On April 19, 1875, she and four of her five children—eleven-year-old Sarah Louise, fourteen
-year-old Jane, and sixteen-year-old William, moved into number 5, in D block, along with her eldest daughter, twenty-one-year-old Rosetta. Rosetta’s situation was not a happy one. The year before, on January 4, she had married a ship’s cook called Thomas Woolls (or Walls). The date of the wedding may have anticipated her husband’s next job, aboard the Russia, a screw steamer that would sail from Glasgow on February 2.11 Undoubtedly, Woolls assured his new bride that their separation was to be only temporary, and for a time the couple would have lived together for the short weeks or months when he was in port. However, Thomas’s absences gradually grew longer, and the pair drifted apart.

  Rosetta’s separation from her husband left her in a difficult position. While she was still legally bound to Woolls, she could not remarry. She remained a dependent in her mother’s household, both of them taking employment as charwomen, the most poorly paid and worst regarded of all service occupations. Rosetta accepted whatever work became available, so when her neighbor Polly Nichols required assistance around the time of the birth of a new son, in December 1878, Rosetta was in no position to refuse.

  The summer before, the Nicholses had found it financially expedient to exchange their four-room tenement for three rooms, and they moved into apartment number 6, next door to Sarah Vidler and her family. At the time, Polly was about four months pregnant with Henry Alfred, the child who would become her fifth.* At the end of 1876 she had given birth to Eliza Sarah, whose arrival likely prompted this domestic belt-tightening.*

  Three rooms, four children, and another on the way would have made the home environment busier and more hectic, though the Vidler girls, who were old enough to assist with the Nicholses’ smaller children, would have lent a hand when required. The two families appeared to have got on well together; Sarah’s son, William, secured a position as a porter at W. Clowes and Sons, while her two girls took on book-folding work, possibly on the recommendation of William Nichols. The internal adjoining doors of apartments 5 and 6, as well as the shared water closet, would foster a strong sense of intimacy between the two families, who would have been regularly in and out of each other’s homes, with hardly an inch of space between each other’s business.

  It is impossible to know when the arguments began between Polly and William Nichols, or what precisely lay at the heart of their initial difficulties. Their closer quarters, larger family, and greater financial pressures may have played some role. As with any domestic dispute, there are at least two sides to the story. William later asserted that their disagreements arose because of his wife’s sudden affinity for drink. Yet any change in Polly’s habits could not be as dramatic as William implied. If such was true, it would have come to the attention of the superintendent and been noted in the family’s records. Steps would have been taken to remove the Nicholses, as had been the case for other tenants who developed a drinking problem. Later, Edward Walker, Polly’s father, offered another explanation: he claimed that William, his son-in-law, had begun an affair with Rosetta Walls.

  Walker would have heard these accusations from his daughter, who, it seemed, had begun to make regular appearances at the house on Guildford Street that he shared with his son. Polly did so to escape her increasingly toxic home environment. In the wake of the birth of Henry Alfred on December 4, 1878, the couple’s disagreements had escalated; each of their shouted grievances shared through the wall with the Vidlers, scarcely a room away.

  Perhaps jealousy and suspicion, rather than firm evidence of an affair, motivated Polly. She may have seen a warmth growing between her husband and the younger, curly-haired, blue-eyed woman next door. With four children and a newborn to rear, Polly would be exhausted, and possibly suffering from postnatal depression. Perhaps her new affinity for the bottle was not simply William’s invention, but rather a means of coping with her feelings of estrangement from her husband.

  It will never be known what Polly witnessed transpire between her own husband and Rosetta—or indeed if she saw anything at all. Awake in the middle of the night, cogitating on the woman who slept on the opposite side of the wall, she may have found it difficult to interpret a fleeting touch, a look, or an affectionate word. Whatever the case, whatever suspicions Polly may have harbored, the Nichols family’s physical proximity to the Vidlers meant that Rosetta’s presence would have been constant and therefore a perpetual source of agitation and concern to Polly. Even the sound of Rosetta’s voice, whether echoing from the corridor or the rooms adjacent to their own apartment, would have been inescapable. Whomever Polly blamed for her woes, whether it was her husband or her neighbor, she could never have entirely escaped the reminder of them.

  Daily, the couple’s rows and accusations increased. William would later claim that between the birth in December 1878 and the first few months of 1880, Polly stormed out of their home “perhaps five or six times,” to land herself on her father’s doorstep. According to Edward Walker, by then Polly’s husband “had turned nasty.”

  This level of disruption could not continue. Polly’s father or her brother would remind her of her duty to her five children, one of whom was still a tiny infant. There was no room for her at Guildford Street. She would have to return to her family, and she and William would have to work out their problems.

  But they couldn’t. Polly would limp back to Stamford Street, and another round of angry confrontation would begin.

  That which must have dawned upon her one day was a simple fact; Rosetta Walls could not be removed from their lives. So long as the two families lived beside each other, so long as they inhabited D block, so long as they continued to reside in the Stamford Street Peabody Buildings, Rosetta would be there. To Polly it must have seemed that William had made his choice, and now she had to make hers.

  On March 29, 1880, the day after Easter, Polly finally tired of arguing. Whether she had made plans to depart on that day or whether anger had suddenly pushed her to it, Polly Nichols decisively turned her back on her family home. She walked through the gates of the Peabody Buildings, never to return, leaving behind the life she had known and handing her children over to their father, the only person able to support them.

  An Irregular Life

  On July 31, 1883, the couple at 164 Neate Street, with their five children, attired themselves in their Sunday best. “Mrs. Nichols,” as her neighbors called her, fastened the little ones’ buttons and adjusted their uneven ribbons. She had learned over the years which of the children sat still and which had to be coaxed into good behavior. She knew which were most likely to cry and how to soothe them when they did. It was she who cooked their dinners and mended their clothes. It was she who assumed the role of mother, and she who would have felt entitled to lead the children around the corner to the church on Coburg Road. As she did so, she proudly carried in her arms little Arthur, not quite three weeks old, wearing his white christening gown. He was the first child to be born to William and Rosetta Nichols, at the house they had taken almost exactly one year ago to the day. It is unlikely the neighbors or shopkeepers or even the clergyman who performed the rite of baptism guessed at their true circumstances. Instead, they stood before the font with their newborn between them and witnessed his acceptance into the Church of England. On that day too, five-year-old Henry Alfred, Polly’s youngest, was also christened, his name entered beside those of his “Christian parents,” William and Rosetta, on the parish register.1

  The comfortable domestic arrangement that the couple enjoyed was not one that would have been open to them had they wished to remain at the Peabody Buildings. A decision had to be made as to their future together and what they were willing to risk in order to secure it. Although living in adjoining apartments was convenient, ultimately, it would not have been an ideal situation for a man and a woman in love, who wished to share a home and a bed, despite being married to other people. If both the Nicholses and the Vidlers were aware of the affection that existed between the couple, then it would not be long before their neighbors discovered it too and word w
ould find its way to the superintendent. “Irregular unions,” the term for couples who lived together without benefit of marriage or who carried on extramarital relationships, went against the strict regulations of the Peabody Buildings. The Stamford Street ledgers document many such situations; invariably, when they were discovered, the tenants involved were ejected. In 1877, two of the Nicholses’ neighbors, George Henry Hope and Fanny Hudson, were asked to leave after both had parted with their spouses. Arthur Scriven in K block lost his housing because he had been “living apart from his wife with another woman,” while Mary Ann Thorne had been ejected for being “a widow who gave birth to a child.” While William and Rosetta pursued their relationship, they were gambling with the reputation and the secure living circumstances of both the Nicholses and the Vidlers. In the meantime, how William explained Polly’s absence to the Peabody authorities, who were bound to have noticed it, is anyone’s guess.