London

by Peter Ackroyd

  By the end of the eighteenth century some seven thousand artisans—almost half the parish—were dependent upon watch-making. Clerkenwell itself produced some 120,000 watches each year. In almost every street there were private houses which had as door-plates the sign of escapement-maker, engine-turner, springer, finisher, and so on. These were modest but solid properties, with the workshop generally constructed at the back. But not all the tradesmen were so fortunately placed, and a nineteenth-century essay upon clocks in Charles Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London remarks that “if we wish to be introduced to the workman who has had the greatest share in the construction of our best clocks, we must often submit to be conducted up some narrow passage of our metropolis, and to mount into some dirty attic where we find illiterate ingenuity closely employed in earning a mere pittance.” The passages, closets and attics may be compared with the wheels and dials of the clocks themselves, so that Clerkenwell itself becomes a vast mechanism emblematic of time and the divisions of time. The census of 1861 listed 877 manufacturers of clocks and watches in this small parish. But why here? The historians of horology have pondered the question and arrived at no satisfactory conclusion; “the commencement of that remarkable localisation” is not certain, according to one authority cited by Charles Knight, except that “it appears to have made a noiseless progress.” Another remarks: “nor have we heard any plausible reason assigned by those who, residing on the spot, and carrying on these branches of manufacture, might be supposed to be best informed on the matter.” So, we may say, it just happened. It is one of those indecipherable and unknowable aspects of London existence. A certain trade emerges in a certain area. And that is all.

  But in Clerkenwell we have learned, perhaps, to find larger patterns of activity. Did the presence of skilled artisans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actively promote the cause of radicalism? By 1701 the manufacture of the watch was being used as the best example of the division of labour, so that one might say that the creation of time-pieces formed the paradigm of industrial capitalism. “Here every alley is thronged with small industries,” George Gissing wrote of Clerkenwell in The Nether World (1889), “here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil’s sake … have worn their lives away imagining new forms of weariness.” Lenin and Eleanor Marx had found fertile ground. Or was it that the creation of the division and subdivision of time was an obvious neighbourhood idol, to be smashed by those patriotic radicals who wished to return to an earlier polity and a more innocent state of society? Nevertheless the clock- and watch-makers are there still. The mystery of the place remains.

  The Marx Memorial Library is still to be found on Clerkenwell Green, within which is preserved the small office where Lenin once edited Iskra. Beside it are a snack bar and a restaurant, which have been owned by the same Italian family for many years. Until recent days Clerkenwell Green and its vicinity retained that dusty, faded look which was a direct inheritance of its past. It was secluded, out of the way of the busy areas to the south and west, something of a backwater which few Londoners visited except those whose business it was to be there. The green harboured printers, and jewellers, and precision-instrument makers, as it had done for many generations. St. John’s Street was dark and cavernous, lined with empty or dilapidated warehouses.

  Then, in the 1990s, all was changed. Clerkenwell became part of a social revolution, in the process of which London seemed once more able to renew itself. The great transition occurred when Londoners decided that they would rather live in lofts or “shell” spaces than in terraced houses; these were not the same as Parisian apartments, since the loft offered inviolable privacy as well as proximity. Since Clerkenwell itself was noticeable for its warehouses and commercial properties, it became part of that movement of refurbishment and modernisation which had begun in the warehouses of Docklands before reaching other parts of inner London. St. John’s Street, and the lanes around it, have now been extensively redeveloped with floors of glass attached to old structures and new buildings rising so fast that parts of the area are now almost unrecognisable. As one character says in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, a novel set in early twentieth-century Clerkenwell, “You’d scarcely think it … but this district was very fashionable once.” It was indeed “fashionable” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as even the presence of the mad duchesses testifies, and now perhaps that period has returned. Yet that same speaker when alone had another realisation, of “the ruthless, stoney, total inhospitality of the district.” Even in the middle of its restoration and rebuilding, St. John’s Street is curiously empty; from dusk to dawn it affords echoic effects rather than the energy of any real movement or business. One is reminded of the fact that in the eighteenth century travellers felt obliged to walk together down this road, guarded by link-boys bearing lights, in case they were harassed or attacked. Whether it was wise of property speculators and developers to choose the street as a great site of renovation is an interesting question, therefore, since it may not be easy to impose a new method of living upon a thoroughfare with so ancient and violent a past.

  Clerkenwell persists in London’s history as a kind of shadowland, therefore, complete with its own recognisable if ambiguous identity. But it is also important to realise that the same effects may be found almost anywhere within the city. Of violence, for example, there is no end.

  Violent London

  An anonymous engraving of the Gordon Riots in London in 1780; here the mob attacks and fires Newgate Prison, one of the most hated symbols of the city’s oppressive authority.

  CHAPTER 52

  A Ring! A Ring!

  London has always possessed a reputation for violence; it stretches back as far as the written records. In a signal instance of city savagery the coronation of Richard I in 1189, for example, was marked by the wholesale murder of the Jews in London; men, women and children were burned and cut to pieces in one of the first but not the last pogroms against resident foreigners. Under cover of the general savagery of the Peasants Revolt, which was also a London revolt, apprentices and others fell upon the Flemings and butchered many hundreds while “the cries of the slayers and slain went on long after sunset, making night hideous.”

  But the violence was not directed at aliens alone. The record of bloody attacks upon tax-raisers like William de Aldgate (stabbed to death) and John Fuatara (finger bitten off by a woman) emphasises what one historian, G.A. Williams in Medieval London, has called the Londoner’s reputation for “reckless violence.” In the Latin records of London’s courts in the early thirteenth century, that violence is vividly depicted. “Roger struck Maud, Gilbert’s wife, with a hammer between the shoulders, and Moses struck her in the face with the hilt of his sword, breaking many of her teeth. She lingered until Wednesday before the feast of St. Mary Magdalen and then died … while he was conducting him to the sheriffs the thief killed him … They dragged him by the feet on to the stairs of the solar, beating him severely about the body and under the feet, and wounding him in the head.”

  Violence was everywhere—“endemic” is the word used by one scholar. Robberies, assaults and manslaughters are recorded with predictable frequency; quarrels degenerated quickly into fatal affrays, while street fights often turned into mass riots. Random brutality was common, and at times of political crisis the crowd to the well-known cry of “Kill, kill!” would set upon perceived enemies with unmatched ferocity. Many of the trades—notoriously those of saddler, goldsmith and fishmonger—were prone to “periodical gusts of homicidal rage,” while the guilds fought one another in the most pugnacious way. The religious orders were not immune from violence. The prioress of Clerkenwell took barley from disputed land belonging to the prior of St. Bartholomew’s “with force and arms to wit with swords, bows and arrows.” The memoirs of every century are filled with blood lust.

  There was also violence against animals. When a horse being baited by dogs seemed likely to be spared, a seventeenth-century London crowd “cryed out it
was a cheat, and thereupon began to untyle the house, and threatened to pull it quite down, if the Horse were not brought again and baited to death. Whereupon the Horse was again brought to the place, and the dogs once more set upon him; but they not being able to overcome him he was run through with a sword and dyed.” Cock-fighting was the Shrove Tuesday sport of schoolboys, so that the young Londoner could acquire an early taste for blood and death. Bears and bulls were often baited together, and “at such times you can see the breed and mettle of the dogs, for although they receive serious injuries from the bears, are caught by the horns of the bull, and tossed into the air so frequently to fall down again upon the horns … one is obliged to pull them back by the tails and force open their jaws.” Evelyn, a more fastidious citizen than most, complained about the “barbarous cruelties” as well as the “rude and dirty” pastimes of the people. He remarked, on visiting the famous bear garden by the Bankside, that “One of the bulls tossed a dog full into a lady’s lap, as she sate in one of the boxes at a considerable height from the arena. Two poor dogs were killed: and so all ended with an ape on horseback.” It might be remarked that blood sports are common to every culture and to every city; nevertheless this form of London violence is described as something intrinsic and particular. As Dryden put it in the seventeenth century:

  Bold Britons, at a brave Bear-garden fray,

  Are rouz’d: and, chatt’ring Sticks, cry Play, Play, Play.

  Mean time, your filthy Foreigner will stare, And utter to himself, Ha! gens barbare!

  This was indeed how Europeans considered Londoners—as barbarous people—although, as Dryden’s couplets intimate, that ferocity was perhaps a matter of civic pride. “If two little boys quarrel in the street,” one seventeenth-century French traveller observed, “the passengers stop, make a ring round them in a moment, and set them against one another, that they may come to fisticuffs … During the fight the ring of bystanders encourages the combatants with great delight of heart … The fathers and mothers of the boys let them fight on as well as the rest.”

  “A ring! A ring!” was one of the perennial cries of the London street. “The lower populace is of a brutal and insolent nature,” another traveller remarked, “and is very quarrelsome. Should two men of this class have a disagreement which they cannot end up amicably, they retire into some quiet place and strip from their waists upwards. Everyone who sees them preparing for a fight surrounds them, not in order to separate them, but on the contrary to enjoy the fight, for it is a great sport to the lookers-on … the spectators sometimes get so interested that they lay bets on the combatants and form a big circle around them.” This is “congenital to the character” of Londoners, according to yet another foreign reporter, which suggests how unfamiliar and alarming these street fights in fact were to non-Londoners.

  Combats between men and women were also frequent—“I saw in Holbourn a woman engaged with a man … having struck her with the utmost force, he retreated back … the woman seized these intervals to fall upon his face and eyes with her hands … The Police take no cognizance of these combats of individuals.” By “the Police” is meant the watch in each ward, which took no notice of these fights because they were common and familiar. Yet it did not end there. “If a coachman has a dispute about his fare with a gentleman that has hired him, and the gentleman offers to fight him to decide the quarrel, the coachman consents with all his heart.” This pugnacity could, and often did, have fatal consequences. Two brothers fought, and one killed the other outside the Three Tuns Tavern—“His brother intending, it seems, to kill the coachman, who did not please him, this fellow stepped in and took away his sword, who thereupon took out his knife … and with that stabbed him.”

  A “diversion” of the English, according to many reports, was female combat in places of resort and amusement such as Hockley-in-the-Hole. It was recorded that the “women fought almost naked with two handled swords which, at the points, were sharp as razors.” Both combatants were frequently cut with these weapons, and retired briefly to have their wounds “sown up” without the benefit of any anaesthetic other than their own animosity. The fight continued until one of the participants swooned, or was so badly wounded that she could fight no more. On one occasion, one combatant was twenty-one and the other sixty. It became a highly ritualised, if bloody, affair. The two female warriors would bow to the spectators and salute each other. One was decked in blue ribbons, the other in red; each carried a sword, about three and a half feet in length with a blade approximately three inches wide. With these fierce weapons, and only a wicker shield for defence, they attacked each other. In one fight a swordswoman “received a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat”; some coins were thrown to her from the crowd, but “she was too badly hurt to fight any more.”

  The introductory “chaff” between the two women (one declaring, for instance, that she beat her husband every morning to keep her hand in) was also echoed in the advertisements or “notices” which preceded each fight. “I Elizabeth Wilson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfeld and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle.” The coin was held to prevent the participants scratching each other. To which a reply was printed: “I Hannah Hyfeld, of Newgate Market, hearing of the resolution of Elizabeth, will not fail to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows and from her no favour.” The London Journal reported in June 1722 that “They maintained the battle with great valour for a long time, to the no small satisfaction of the spectators.”

  Men also fought one another with swords, each with a “second” bearing a large wooden club to ensure fair play, and again the struggle ended only when the participants’ wounds were too disabling for them to continue. On many occasions the audiences joined in the battle. “But Lord!” Pepys wrote, “to see in a minute the whole stage was full of watermen to revenge the foul play, and the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him; and there they all fell to it, to knocking down and cutting many on each side. It was pleasant to see, but that I stood in the pit, and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt.” This account emphasises the almost tribal loyalties engaged in civic violence, the effect of which could be witnessed in even the most “polite” circles. When the speculator Barebone engaged some workmen to build upon Red Lion Fields, the lawyers of the adjacent Gray’s Inn “took notice of it, and thinking it an injury upon them, went with a considerable body of one hundred persons; upon which the workmen assaulted the gentlemen, and flung bricks at them, and the gentlemen at them again; so a sharp engagement ensued.”

  The tribalism of the city was manifested, in a no less unhappy way, with the exploits of a group of young people known as the Mohocks, named after “a sort of cannibals in India,” according to the Spectator, “who subsist by plundering and devouring all the nations about them.” These young Londoners would rush down the streets with linked arms for the pleasure “of fighting and sometimes maiming harmless foot passengers and even defenceless women.” Street-brawling has an ancient history within the city, and similar gangs of youths were known in previous generations as Muns and Tityre-Tus, then Hectors and Scourers, and then Nickers and Hawkubites. The Mohocks themselves began the evening by drinking too much, before tumbling on to the streets with their swords ready. The consequences are revealed in Walford’s Old and New London. As “soon as the savage pack had run down their victim, they surrounded him, and formed a circle with the points of their swords. One gave him a puncture in the rear, which very naturally made him wheel about; then came a prick from another; and so they kept him spinning like a top.” That is why they became known as Sweaters, and also as Slashers since in more ferocious mood they took pleasure “in tattooing, or slashing people’s faces with, as Gay wrote, ‘new invented wounds.’” Another poet of London has memorialised their exploits in more expressive
verse:

  And in luxurious cities, where the noise

  Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,

  And injury and outrage, and when night

  Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons

  Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.

  So did John Milton place the violence of London within the context of myth and eternity.

  Within the context of the streets, the Mohocks were not alone in their depredations. In the 1750s William Shenstone wrote that “London is really dangerous at this time; the pickpockets, formerly content with mere filching, make no scruple to knock people down with bludgeons in Fleet Street and the Strand, and that at no later hour than eight o’clock at night; but in the Piazzas, Covent Garden, they come in large bodies, armed with couteaus, and attack whole parties.” Here is a graphic illustration of how at night the city, without an adequate police force, could become terrifying. Sir John Coventry had his nose slit by a street gang. A courtesan named Sally Salisbury, displeased by an admirer’s speeches, “seized a knife and plunged it into his body”; she was conveyed to Newgate, surrounded by plaudits. “Now it is the general complaint of the taverns, the coffee-houses, the shop-keepers and others,” wrote the City Marshal in 1718, “that their customers are afraid when it is dark to come to their houses and shops for fear that their hats and wigs should be snitched from their heads or their swords taken from their sides, or that they may be blinded, knocked down, or stabbed; nay, the coaches cannot secure them, but they are likewise cut and robbed in the public streets etc. By which means the traffic of the City is much interrupted.”

  “Traffic” is as much in goods as in vehicles, and this is one of the indications that the prosperity of the city was being threatened by the violent propensities of some of its citizens. In this period, too, the apprentices would “go to Temple Bar in the evening, set up a shouting and clear the pavement between that and Fleet Market of all the persons there. The boys all knew boxing, and if anyone resisted one or two would fall upon him and thrash him on the spot, nobody interfered.”