by Lucy Inglis
Not all Huguenots were the serious, God-fearing people Hogarth depicted in ‘Noon’. The court had to reprimand those ‘members of the congregation spending their days and nights in taverns to abandon their excesses, debaucheries and licentiousness’. The court warned them this was ‘ill befitting their condition as persecuted Protestants and refugees’. Whatever their expertise in beer, the Huguenots assisted the Trumans with brewing England’s first hop beers, belying the sober reputation the French Church wanted for them.
The Threadneedle Street Church was not only a meeting place and a source of charity, it was also the hub of a knowledge network. Many of these people, particularly those dealing in luxury goods, found Soho to be the most congenial place to settle. Soho, however, would not do for the weavers or those associated with the silk industry, who needed abundant water supplies and large open spaces.
Weaving in England had been conducted largely as a cottage industry, or by piecework, and was therefore one of the industries most susceptible to changes in the market. Robert Campbell’s words of advice to those thinking of the weaving industry for their children are edged with warning: ‘They are employed Younger, but more for the advantage of the Master, than anything they can learn in their Trade in such Infant Years.’ So, the weaving industry tended to make the masters – those at the top – wealthy, particularly if they had a good eye for silk design and fashion. Those at the bottom, who cleaned and fixed machinery or ‘ran’ for rooms full of weavers, remained poor and were liable to be laid off at any given moment, as soon as there was a lull in demand.
Still, there was far more demand for unskilled workers in the silk factories being built in east London than there was in the small, tightly knit households of Huguenot tradesmen establishing themselves in Soho. The poorest of the refugees arriving at the Threadneedle Street Church were sent to Spitalfields to labour for the weavers, and to take sustenance from ‘La Soupe’, the Huguenot charity kitchen.
Many English perceived all the Huguenots who arrived as penniless, and this suited the rich Threadneedle Street Church very well: it could administer charity from within, and strengthen the community. But, in fact, many Huguenots arrived with plenty of money. In 1691, the French Church scolded the parishioners for their large and noisily extravagant weddings ‘undermining [the English people’s] compassion for our poor refugee brethren. We should weep with those who weep, not undermine their cause by flaunting wealth and so discouraging charity.’ So, within the Huguenot community itself, there was already a division between those who had arrived with means, and the ‘poor refugee brethren’. The richer members soon established their own church, separate from Threadneedle Street, but allied to it.
At 19 Princelet Street lived the Ogiers. Peter was a silk weaver from Poitou, and his daughter, Louisa, married Soho silversmith Samuel Courtauld. After Samuel died, Louisa continued the business on her own. In their Cornhill shop she employed women such as Judith Touzeau, a Huguenot girl whose signature appears on receipts from the shop. In the interconnected fashion typical of the Huguenots, Samuel and Louisa’s son, George, was apprenticed in the silk trade, and Courtauld textiles was born, soon employing many French hands.
The structure of employment and social life was very different in the East End to that of the West End, where silversmith Paul de Lamerie was his master’s servant and social inferior only so long as he was an apprentice. The situation for female members of the family and workforce was also different in these larger East End establishments. In the small messuages of Clerkenwell and Soho, a cohesive family structure enabled widows to control the business after the death of a master. They had known many of the apprentices and journeymen for years, most of whom would be happy to pull together to perpetuate a successful enterprise. However, in the larger business model of the East End – where employee numbers were higher, and trade was often business to business – women struggled to continue after their husband died. Daniel Defoe commented on the situation for a widow in such a business, particularly if she had not taken the time to become well acquainted with her husband’s dealings:
… if her husband had e’er a servant, or apprentice, who was … acquainted with the customers, and with the books, then she is forced to be beholden to him to settle the accounts for her, and endeavour to get in the debts … and, it may be at last, with all her pride, lets the boy creep to bed to her.
By the time Christ Church, Spitalfields, was finished, in 1729, there was already a growing problem with indigent poor in the area. The Huguenots had, largely, got themselves together and were starting to make huge progress with the creation and sale of fashionable new silks. These were not only used for clothing, but also in furnishings and wall coverings. There was almost nothing fashionable that silk could not be applied to. Yet it could not be grown here. Every attempt to establish native British silkworms had failed. So the nature of the supply of raw material – coming in from wherever it could be obtained from overseas – plus the fickle nature of fashion itself meant that not everyone was employed all the time, and those who were out of work were finding things increasingly difficult. Violence was not uncommon, as was extreme poverty through lack of work. In 1729, the same year that Hawksmoor’s glorious church was finished, the Spitalfields Soup Society was established to cater for those who had no other means of feeding themselves or their families.
THE WEAVERS AND THE SPITALFIELDS MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
Despite the charming streets around Christ Church, Spitalfields remained largely given over to warehouses and workshops, as well as the large Truman Brewery. London weaving was affected terribly by the introduction of the power loom. It also suffered through the wars with France, which affected the supply of raw silk, and re-export sales. As early as 1736, the Spitalfields weavers gathered in Moorfields to protest about standards of pay. In 1742, outsourcing to the provinces began. The Spitalfields weaving community was soon on a slippery slope into large-scale poverty.
A typical manufacturer would employ wage-earning weavers. During the early part of the century, there was an agreed list of piecework rates, which was kept in a ‘book’ and adhered to, more or less, by all manufacturers and master weavers. By 1767, the rates in the book were being undercut. Pressure from the provinces and the power looms was making London-manufactured goods increasingly unviable. Riots resulted, during which the weavers ‘traversed the streets at midnight, broke into the houses, and destroyed the property of the manufacturers’.
The book was reinstated and new rates negotiated. In 1773, Parliament granted the first Spitalfields Act, designed to force the weavers to agree piecework rates. Sadly, they were up against an economic decline so marked that there was little to be done. The weavers of Spitalfields battled on. The Act was extended twice, once to bring in all types of silk-mix materials, and the second time to include the journeywomen often employed in the silk-ribbon trade and previously neglected. But almost all but the finest silk work had been driven out of London. One weaver, Stephen Wilson, kept ‘a book of lost work’ in which he lamented: ‘They had driven away crape, gauze, bandanna handkerchiefs and bombazine in turn.’ The crêpe and gauze were now manufactured largely in Essex, the bombazine in Kidderminster and the bandannas in Macclesfield. A short time later, Wilson noted London had lost ‘all small fancy works’.
By the early nineteenth century, London couldn’t compete with the far lower wages more provincial workers could subsist upon. This was particularly marked after the French Wars ended, when fashion became more fleeting, international and hungry for novelty. The Spitalfields model, as protected by the Acts, was even more outmoded. Other parts of the country struggled under fierce competition, yet the weavers of Spitalfields had their rates protected by law and the Justices. It was unsustainable; in 1824, an Act was passed which essentially left Spitalfields to the mercy of the free market. Poverty descended upon the area – a poverty it would not shake off for another century and a half.
London’s weavers could be dismissed a
s largely foreign, uppity and violent. But their skill as craftsmen, as well as the social and intellectual vigour which permeated Spitalfields, was unique. The atmosphere of endeavour and creativity, and the eternal prospect of poverty, created in Spitalfields an atmosphere of self-improvement more often associated with the later Victorian period. Many Huguenots were educated to a good level and continued to place a high value upon education. It was seen as by no means impossible for an intelligent man to learn the basics of almost everything there was to know.
Most of those who wished to continue their education and discover more of the world could not hope to join the Royal Society, which was really open only to the upper echelons of society. So a group of Spitalfields men decided to create their own society to hold experiments and feature lectures for the improvement of their members. In the eighteenth century, there were sharp divides between what was ‘scientific’ and what was not, and many wanted to explore that divide. The Spitalfields Mathematical Society was born.
This interest in finding out more about scientific advances, as well as promoting self-improvement, was significant amongst the humbler Huguenot weavers of Spitalfields. In 1717, John Middleton was a teacher of mathematics and a navy marine surveyor. He began, with a group of Frenchmen numbering around sixty, to meet at the Monmouth Head Tavern in Monmouth Street, near the building site that was Christ Church, Spitalfields. ‘The Society met on Saturday evenings and it is said that one of its rules was that any member who failed to answer a question in mathematics asked by another member was fined twopence.’ Middleton’s emphasis was on practical mathematics, and those who attended were relatively prosperous men – even if they were classed socially as artisan labourers.
A mathematical academy soon opened in Spital Square, and one of the masters, John Canton, went on to become a famous electrical experimentalist and Fellow of the Royal Society. Another member was the naturalist Joseph Dandridge, who began to design silk patterns based on scientific illustrations. Spitalfields became known as a place of educated trades and craftsmen.
From the late 1740s, the Mathematical Society invested heavily in scientific apparatus that was used for demonstrations. By the 1790s, this ‘cabinet of instruments’ had grown so large that it indicated the society was conducting demonstrations before considerable audiences. By 1804, it had a large library at the disposal of its members. To belong was a mark of both education and sensibility.
Towards the end of the century, the proportion of weavers in the society began to fall, and the number of gentlemen rose. What remained was the society’s commitment to public education. From the middle of the century, weavers comprised about 40 per cent of the subscribers, but they were increasingly supplanted by chemists, druggists, apothecaries and seedsmen, as well as distillers, dyers, brewers, sugarmen, ironmongers, instrument makers and teachers.
The Mathematical Society was the first and most important of all the Spitalfields societies. A resident of Spital Square for over thirty years reminisced:
… it may appear strange, but I believe the origin of many of our most flourishing societies may be traced to Spitalfields. The Spitalfields Mathematical Society is second in point of time to the Royal Society, and still exists. There was an Historical Society which was merged into the Mathematical Society. There was a Floricultural Society, very numerously attended, but now extinct. The weavers were almost the only botanists of their day in the Metropolis.
He also remembered that many of the weavers were ‘great bird-fanciers and breeders of canaries, many of whom now cheer their quiet hours when at the loom’.
THE MIXED FORTUNES OF WHITECHAPEL AND STEPNEY
South of Spitalfields, in Whitechapel, there were many French-descended weavers, but another type of textile-dealing immigrant was more prominent on the local streets. Jewish dealers in second-hand clothes were traditionally situated in Whitechapel and dominated the local population. From there they could easily make it to Rag Fair, near the Tower of London, to ply their trade; and their accommodation remained cheap, yet was within striking distance of the City synagogues.
These dealers, often working in family groups, offered ready money for clothing that was worn out, or no longer wanted, which they then sold on to others who could use it, for industrial or recycling purposes. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a curious story to relate about an Old Clo’ Man he met in the street, showing how those who used street cries were adopting an accepted, yet indistinct ‘patter’. Coleridge was so irritated by one Jewish man’s cry of ‘Old Clo’ that he snapped at him. The man
… stopped, and looking very gravely at me, said in a clear and even fine accent, ‘Sir, I can say “old clothes” as well as you can; but if you had to say so ten times a minute, for an hour together, you would say Ogh Clo as I do now;’ and so he marched off … I followed and gave him a shilling, the only one I had.
The Jewish population of Whitechapel was distinctive in that, unlike Spitalfields, there wasn’t a coherent band of workers, and very few masters. The vast majority of the Jewish population just ‘got by’, working as hawkers, pedlars and dealers. By the beginning of the Victorian period, they numbered over 15,000.
St Mary Matfellon Church, at the heart of the area, became known as the White Chapel during the medieval period due to its white-washed exterior, giving the district its name. In 1711, Brasenose College, Oxford, purchased the right to appoint a priest of their choosing there. After 1715, the Rector fell out with the Dean and painted his likeness over the character of Judas in the painting depicting the Last Supper, above the altar. He annotated it helpfully with ‘Judas, the traytor’. The Dean pretended not to notice, and the Bishop of London ordered the picture removed and repainted. St Mary’s was destroyed in the Blitz and never rebuilt, like much of Whitechapel.
When John Strype revised Stow’s Survey of London, in 1720, he described Whitechapel as ‘a spacious fair street, for entrance into the City eastward, and somewhat long’. The area housed many successful medium-sized businesses, such as the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, founded in 1570 (and Britain’s oldest continual manufacturer). By the eighteenth century, the foundry was exporting bells to the Americas, including the Liberty Bell, in 1752. The Liberty Bell left England bearing a biblical inscription which would have been familiar to both the French Protestants who had sought refuge only a stone’s throw away, and also the Jews who worshipped close by. It came from the book of Leviticus 25: 10: ‘Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.’
Further out again from the rapidly filling Whitechapel was Mile End. Mile End, named for being one mile from Aldgate, had long been a settlement on the road to Colchester. At the beginning of the Georgian period, plans were made for a newer settlement closer to Spitalfields. Mile End was divided into Old Town and New Town. Old Mile End is now covered by the modern Stepney Green conservation area. It was one of the earliest country retreats for Augustan and Georgian bankers and the more prosperous members of the maritime community, including the Scandinavian merchants who had profited so handsomely from the demand for timber created by the rebuilding.
In 1696, a Danish-Norwegian Church was constructed in Wellclose Square, by which time the square was already neat and prosperous. Just to the east, in Princes Square, a Swedish Church was completed in 1729, as the area was popular with Scandinavian merchants trading in the City.
But by the 1760s, the area was losing its prestige. The arrival of the sickly-smelling sugar refineries pushed the more respectable residents out. The sheer volume of traffic using the Port of London meant that sailors were swarming through streets and squares which had previously been so genteel. The Scandinavian merchants moved out and, in 1816, handed their church over to trustees so that it could be used as a charity base to benefit seamen from their own countries.
In contrast, Mile End New Town, to the west, was on the rise. In 1717, John Cox and John Davies declared they were in possession of ‘diverse Lands in the hamlet of Mile-End new towne’ and th
ey set about draining what had been known as the Hares Marsh, intending to create a smart new community. Early attempts to install public amenities weren’t without hiccups: in February 1718, James Withy was caught with a bag containing ‘25 Fountains of Lamps of the Convex-Lights’ from the Mile End New Town High Street. Mile End New Town, despite such setbacks, continued to flourish. In the 1780s, it was a model of civic planning, creating a workhouse and providing funds for lighting and patrolling of the streets. It was just close enough to Spitalfields to thrive, and it avoided the decay which was already setting into Stepney.
Stepney would continue to decline, and although much of the Georgian village survived the Blitz, it was swept away in the improvements of the 1950s as London’s planners drove all before them in the prolonged fit of barbarity which buried so much of the eighteenth-century city under concrete.
11. Hackney and Bethnal Green
Hackney is one of the largest parishes in London. The marshes alone covered 335 acres at the end of the eighteenth century. The parish itself stretched from Stamford Hill in the north to Cambridge Heath in the south. It began in the west at Shoreditch workhouse, and terminated in the east at the boundary with the parish of St Matthew, in Bethnal Green. Within Hackney, the hamlets were Clapton, Dalston, Homerton, Shacklewell and Kingsland. Throughout the eighteenth century, most of the land was turned over to farming, with a small proportion of market gardening and horticulture, concentrating mainly on ‘exotics’. It was a community where cattle were raised on the lush pastures, and where Samuel Pepys saw trees of oranges ripening in the sun. South of Homerton High Street were extensive watercress beds. The area was attractive, with small pleasure gardens, pubs, ponds for swimming and fishing, and pleasant open spaces within striking distance of the City.