by Lucy Inglis
River sports included sailing and swimming, although the latter was only for the very strong. Benjamin Franklin swam in the Thames, much to the surprise and admiration of his colleagues. By the end of the century, sailing was becoming a popular sport for the young bloods, but it was mainly carried on to the west, closer to Chelsea and Putney, where there was much less traffic.
LONDON ON ICE: THE FROST FAIRS
The English obsession with weather means we have one of the oldest sets of climate records in the world. They reveal a very different London than the one we know now. London froze regularly between December and March, and the 1690s had six winters when the temperature was consistently below 3ºC for more than three months; this was definitely the sort of weather when a man like Samuel Pepys would have worn two shirts, a waistcoat and a jacket.
Before Sir Joseph William Bazalgette’s Embankment of 1862, the Thames was a wider, slower river with gently sloping muddy banks covered in duckboards, which must have been very slippy in wet and icy conditions. The bridges were shored up with wide wooden ‘starlings’ which trapped debris and slowed the current. London Bridge, in particular, blocked the flow of the river, making it easier for ice to form. The couple of days it took for the Thames to freeze completely was a dangerous time. The watermen wanted to keep trading as long as possible, and some traded their lives for the opportunity of one last fare.
However, once the river had frozen, it was time to celebrate. Frost fairs have been recorded since Elizabethan times, when it was customary to push a printing press out on to the ice as a test. If it held, souvenir cards were printed off and sold as a memento of the occasion. Booths and cook-stalls were set up, selling skates (made from whalebone), puppets, gloves, hats and scarves as well as hot chestnuts and pork sandwiches from spits, along with sticky gingerbread and baked apples eaten from newspaper with a spoon. There were street performers, puppet shows and other entertainments, such as singing. Sometimes, as in the winter of 1683, the freeze was so solid that the Thames became a miniature shopping village and the booths were arranged into ‘streets’. The Reverend Derham wrote up London’s unusually cold winters for the Royal Society, recalling the Long Frost of the 1680s:
… the Waters were so frozen, that above the Bridge, ’tis well known, many Booths were erected, Fries made, and Meat dress’d; and on January 10th I my self saw a Coach and two Horses drive over the River into Southwark, and back again, a great number of People accompanying it.
Even the earliest frost fairs had merry-go-rounds for children, boat-swings and pony-drawn rides, but life off the river probably wasn’t quite so much fun. One of the greatest problems during freezes such as this was that the ground froze to depths of two or three feet, making the drawing of water from the wells in the streets difficult, if not impossible. Ice was gathered and melted, then boiled for domestic use. One group of people who didn’t complain were the ice merchants who used this weather to fill their underground stores and cellars with the cold stuff, packed in straw so that it could be sold in warmer weather. By the 1720s, the demand for ice had become great enough for dealers in ‘ice and snow’ to be making a living all year round. From then on, they were importing ice from the frozen north.
The thaws, when they came, were sudden and terrifying. The Universal Spectator of 26 January 1740 recorded how
… the inhabitants of the west prospect of the Bridge were presented with a very odd scene, for on the opening of their windows there appeared underneath on the river a parcel of booths, shops and huts of different forms [on a broken-off piece of ice], but without any inhabitants.
Booths rarely fell through the ice, so the stallholders knew when to get out. But in 1789, a ship moored to the quay of a public house pulled down both structures when it fell back into the thawed river. There is also the sad tale in The Gentleman’s Magazine, in 1763, of a wretch, ‘with skaits on … found frozen to death upon some floating ice over against the Isle of Dogs’.
The Thames froze for the last time in 1814, and the ice was solid for four days – solid enough to lead an elephant across the ice near Blackfriars Bridge and erect fairground rides. The innovations of the Victorian period, such as the new London Bridge and the Embankment, made the river narrower, deeper and faster, ending London’s life on ice.
LONDON BRIDGE: ‘BRIDGE OF WONDERS’
I remember well the street on London Bridge, narrow, darksome, and dangerous to passengers from the multitude of carriages: frequent arches of strong timber crossed the streets, from the tops of the houses, to keep them together, and from falling into the river. Nothing but use could preserve the rest of the inmates, who soon grew deaf to the noise of the falling waters, the clamours of the watermen, or the frequent shrieks of drowning wretches.
The bridge that now joins the north to the south bank, one hundred feet west of its predecessor, is little more than an ugly though useful advertisement for the properties of concrete. Three centuries ago, London Bridge was a busy village in its own right with a church, houses, shops, gardens, roof terraces and plenty of traffic. The history of London Bridge stretches from the tenth century, at least, right up to the present day. Early in its life, it was the southern defence of the City. For hundreds of years, it bore the heads of traitors as a warning: William Wallace was the first and Oliver Cromwell one of the last. Houses stood three storeys high above their cellars, which were within and between the piers. Over the houses at the north end were stately platforms surrounded with railings; there were walks and gardens over the street, which was twenty feet wide. In contrast, the south end appeared a mass of awkward structures and narrow passages above a street fourteen feet and, in some places, twelve feet wide.
The street was lined with shops and ‘piazzas’, with a row of colonnaded shops at the north end. For centuries, many of the shops had been famous for selling needleworking tools and other small easy-to-transport items, whilst other shops included Edward Butling, a wallpaper maker in the 1690s, John Allan at the Locks of Hair, selling ‘all sorts of Hair Curled or Uncurled’ and Robert Vincent, ‘Scale Maker, at the Hand & Scales … the Second Door from the Bear Tavern, Southwark-side. Makes Curious Sets of Scales & Weights for Diamonds.’
By 1722, traffic on the bridge was so great that the wagons and carts were fined if they didn’t have their pennies ready to pay the toll. Traffic ran on the west side coming into the City, and on the east side out of the City. Legend has it that this is one of the precedents for why we now drive on the left.
The opening of Westminster Bridge, in 1740, meant that London Bridge had competition. For the City aldermen, it was a clear signal from the west that their monopoly on London traffic from the south was over. Plans were soon drawn up to improve London Bridge and to increase the traffic it could bear: the houses had to go. During this period, the old bridge was captured in all its ramshackle glory by a young Italian painter living in London at the time: Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto. He had come to the city to find patrons, as the flow of ‘grand tourists’ to Italy had been stopped by the War of the Austrian Succession. His drawing of ‘Old London Bridge’, now in the British Museum, gives perhaps the truest picture of what was a bridge, a shopping mall and a residential neighbourhood.
No matter how beautiful Canaletto rendered it, the ‘bridge of wonders’ was finished. Much of the stone was recycled, with the stone columns from the piazzas going to David Garrick, who recycled them in his villa at Hampton. In 1756, a wooden bridge was built alongside the stone one to bear the traffic for a short while as the houses, some of them five centuries old, were taken down. In 1758, the wooden bridge burned down, possibly the work of an arsonist. If it was meant to sabotage the work on London Bridge, it failed and instead speeded it up: the houses were cleared in the same year. London’s antiquaries began to document the history of the bridge, recording both the memories of those who knew it and the artefacts and relics found as the bridge was repaired and later destroyed. Many were genuinely sorry to see it go.
They especially regretted the demolition of the bridge’s Chapel of Thomas of Canterbury. It was in the ninth pier from the north end and had an entrance from the river, as well as the street, via a winding staircase. It was also said to be beautifully paved, with black and white marble. On the chapel pier was a square hollow, covered by wire netting with a hole in it. This netting created a pool in which to catch fish, and at low tide the young men used to climb down to fish in it. From July to September, the whole bridge was covered with self-seeded Sisymbrium irio, or London Rocket, painting it with bright yellow flowers.
Despite this sense of romance, London Bridge was lethal. Beneath the bridge, tales of boats ‘upset’ or ‘overturned’ were common. Usually, ‘all perished’. Of the 27 people reported who fell in between 1758 and 1770, 11 died. The crowded street, full of vehicles with their grinding wheels, coupled with the roar of the water, meant that broken legs were commonplace. In 1752, a young man, unknown, was crushed between the wheels of two carts going in opposite directions, as was a young woman and her child, in 1758. Fatalities reached a peak during the demolition of the houses, when two workers fell from ladders into the river, and one man was killed by falling masonry which was being pulled down by the labourers.
The bridge was not only a site of accidental death: it also drew those looking for a permanent exit from their troubles. John Temple, the only son of a diplomat, hired a small boat with one waterman, on 14 April 1689. He told the waterman to shoot the bridge rapids, and threw himself into the water. The waterman said Temple sank so quickly he had probably filled his pockets with stones. He left a note on the seat of the boat: ‘My folly in undertaking what I could not perform, whereby some misfortunes have befallen the king’s service, is the cause of my putting myself to this sudden end: I wish him success in all his undertakings, and a better servant.’ He left a wife and two small daughters. Later, the waterman was distressed to find out from a colleague that Temple had hired his boat earlier that day, and had stared fixedly out at the water as they shot the bridge. But he had then alighted, having lost his courage. On a Sunday evening in 1752, a man who outwardly had every reason to live carried out his purpose. He was ‘a middle-sized man, clean dress’d with ruffles, and a fine drab great coat, black stockings and clean shoes’ and was seen on the bridge, looking over the rails. A fisherman called up to him, but he didn’t take any notice. When the fisherman looked away, he threw himself into the river. ‘The fisherman threw a rope to him but he took no notice and was soon afterwards carried under one of the water wheels and drowned.’
At the end of the eighteenth century, the cleared London Bridge was six centuries old and still struggling on. In 1811, building began on Waterloo Bridge, and it appeared that traffic on London Bridge would lessen again. In the hard winter of 1814, frost set in on 27 December along with a freezing fog which didn’t shift for the following eight days, when two days of heavy snow fell. The bridge was damaged but struggled on until, in 1824, work began on a replacement bridge to designs by Scottish engineer John Rennie.
Rennie’s bridge was remarkable. Weight of traffic meant that it was widened between 1902 and 1904. More granite corbels were quarried on Dartmoor for the work and some still lie there, unused. Eventually, the bridge began to sink under its own weight. By the 1920s, engineers realized they had made a mistake: it would not stand the test of time, although there was little reason to replace it. A historian noted, in 1927, ‘One day Rennie’s bridge, whose granite stones were quarried from grey and rain-swept Dartmoor, will go, and some great structure of strange design will be built in its place.’
Forty years later, Rennie’s bridge was put up for sale. It was eventually sold to an American entrepreneur who had it shipped to Arizona, where it was reassembled. The ‘structure of strange design’ which replaced it was designed by Lord Holford and engineers Mott, Hay and Anderson, and opened in 1973.
WAPPING: ‘THAT NAUTICAL HAMLET OF STEPNEY’
Wapping was a hive of taverns, full of dock workers and day labourers. Rough and unpredictable, it was home to London’s early trade in opium, and to the Chinamen who provided it. Blewgate Fields hosted one of the first of London’s ‘dens’. That, and other infractions, led to rough justice being meted out by the merchant navy at Execution Dock. The bleak and lonely dock is still there, not far from The Prospect of Whitby pub. It was ‘in use as often as a melancholy occasion requires. The criminals are to this day executed on a temporary gallows placed at low-water mark; but the custom of leaving the body to be overflowed by three tides, has long since been omitted’.
Going to sea was a hard decision, but for young men of decent families it could lead, like the army, to social improvement. It could also be a miserable and perilous life, and some never got that far: ‘Fishermen off Poplar caught a shark on New Year’s Day, 1787, and inside it found a watch and chain and a cornelian seal. Apparently the watch had been bought by a man in Whitechapel for his son’s first sea voyage. The boy fell overboard almost immediately and was never seen again.’
Samuel Johnson said most men would rather go to prison than to sea, as the food and company were both better in prison, and ‘being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned’. Press gangs operated throughout London, particularly in the river areas and on the bridges, snapping up ‘persons who had not any visible method of livelihood’. They were looking for the aimless and friendless.
Apart from the shipwrights and male workers on the docks, the area contained the largest population of women living alone in London. Wives, widows, girlfriends and whores lived in tenements, no doubt feeling pestered, harassed and lonely by turns. Mixed-race children, fathered by foreign sailors, roamed the streets along with their white siblings. Women didn’t always stay ashore; a letter to Samuel Pepys detailed how the navy ships were ‘pestered with women’.
It wasn’t only the navy ships but also the merchant boats that allowed women aboard. Henry Teonge was, in 1675, the chaplain on Assistance when he wrote, ‘You would have wondered to see here a man and a woman creep into a hammock, the woman’s legs to the hams hanging over the sides or out at the end of it.’ Complaints continued regularly throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and opinion was deeply divided. Admiral Thomas Hardy, of Nelson-kissing fame, stated, ‘I consider it right that women should be admitted into ships; when I was at sea, I always admitted them.’ Others, though, considered it gross indecency.
Admiral Edward Hawker, an overzealous reformer, wrote in 1821 that the sailors and their women go below decks and
… in sight and hearing of each other, shamelessly and unblushingly couple like dogs … In a case that has lately occurred, the captain and his wife were actually on the quarterdeck on a Sunday morning while seventy-eight prostitutes were undergoing an inspection of the first lieutenant to ascertain that their dress was clean.
The first lieutenant wasn’t checking out the girls’ latest fashions; ‘clean dress’ was Admiral Hawker’s euphemism for inspecting the women for venereal disease. William Robinson, who served in the Royal Navy, wrote about their condition in the early nineteenth century, coming to the conclusion that: ‘Of all the human race, these poor creatures are the most pitiable; the ill-usage and the degradation they are driven to submit to are indescribable.’ These women lived mainly in small dwellings strung out between the river and Ratcliff Highway, now known just as The Highway. Those who worked as prostitutes kept an eye out for ships arriving. They didn’t have to look far, as ‘between the houses and the water, in all this long tract of street, are frequent docks, and small building yards. The passenger is often surprised with the sight of the prow of a ship rising over the street, and the hulls of new ones appearing at a number of openings.’
THE ‘BEST REMEMBERED ATROCITIES OF THE CENTURY’: THE RATCLIFF HIGHWAY MURDERS
As Ratcliff became rapidly more built up, it became associated with the vagaries of seamen and their variable fortunes. ‘The Wapping Landlady’, lo
oking to make a quick turn on the ‘tars just come ashore’, either through girls or drink, was a London icon famous enough for Francis Hayman to feature her in his canvasses for Vauxhall Gardens. Ratcliff Highway was
A long narrow street, well-paved, and handsomely flagged on both sides, winding along the banks of the Thames, as far as the end of Limehouse, an extent of near two miles; and inhabited by multitudes of sea-faring men, alternate occupants of sea and land: their floating tenements lie before them.
The area was rough and the general quality of the inhabitants poor. But poverty cannot explain everything. Mention a famous East End killer and no doubt Jack the Ripper’s name will come up, but he wasn’t the first. The Ratcliff Highway murders, committed within a fortnight in 1811, terrified London.
On 7 December, just before midnight, 24-year-old draper Timothy Marr was shutting up his shop at 29 Ratcliff Highway. He had been a sailor with the East India Company for four years during his teens, but had returned to London and was making his way running his own business.
Living above the shop with him were his wife, Celia, their three-and-a-half-month-old baby, the apprentice James Gowan and their serving girl, Margaret Jewell. Timothy Marr sent Margaret off to get them some oysters for a midnight snack, and to pay their bill at the baker’s around the corner. Margaret found both shops closed. Nipping back to the shop, she saw her boss still inside, working. She decided to try another shop for the oysters. That decision saved her life.
She returned, again empty-handed, at twenty past midnight. The shop and house were in darkness so she pulled the bell. No answer. She tried again; inside, there was a scuffle and the baby cried. Suddenly anxious, Margaret attempted to kick the door in, only desisting when she was heckled by a passing drunk. She stopped and sat on the step, frightened and cold. When the watch arrived at around one, she told parish watchman George Olney what had happened. George had already passed by while Margaret was on her second oyster run. By this time, the shutters were closed, so he tried them and found they weren’t locked. Someone was in the shop, and he shouted through that they hadn’t locked their shutters. A voice he hadn’t recognized called back that they knew, and it was fine.