London

by David Brandon

  Brewing was a highly competitive industry in London in the early nineteenth century. Companies vied with each other to build and operate ever-larger vats for the storage of beer. Size definitely counted as far as brewery prestige was concerned. One enormous container was 60 feet in diameter, 23 feet high and had a capacity of 10,000 barrels of beer. Before it came into use a banquet for 200 guests was held inside it. In 1814 a similar giant vessel at Meux’s Brewery in St Giles, just off the Tottenham Court Road, burst and a tsunami of porter knocked down the brewery walls, demolished a number of nearby houses and caused the death of eight people by drowning, injury, inhaling poisonous fumes or terminal intoxication. Scandalously, the company was not required to pay compensation to the relations of the bereaved or those whose property was damaged, but it successfully petitioned Parliament for a refund on the duty it had already paid on what it claimed were 7,664 lost barrels of porter. It received 18s 11d per barrel. Independent experts reckoned that about 3,500 barrels had actually been lost.

  In November 1802, three men ambushed and robbed a well-to-do merchant on Hounslow Heath. He died from injuries sustained in what was evidently a particularly ferocious attack. There was no clue as to the identity of the attackers until about four years later when a convicted thief called Benjamin Hanfield was awaiting transportation. Believing that he was dying, he confessed to his part in the murder and named his accomplices. They were Owen Haggerty and John Holloway who were both found guilty and sentenced to be hanged outside Newgate Prison on 23 February 1807. Fascinated by the brutality of the murder and the time it had taken to solve it, an unusually large crowd of about 40,000 turned out. From 1783 the street named Old Bailey, adjacent to Newgate, had become the major place of execution in London. Theoretically, crowd control was easier here than at the previous location at Tyburn, close to Hyde Park. However, the southern end of Old Bailey tapered towards Ludgate and seriously constricted the movement of the crowd in that area. Such was the density of the crowd that panic broke out as some attempted to fight their way out of the press. A pie-man bent over to retrieve the pies that had been knocked to the floor. He fell and disappeared in a melee of flailing feet. Like skittles, others fell and many never rose again. A baby made a miraculous escape when its mother handed it to her neighbour as she lost her footing and went down, only to be crushed to death. The baby was passed to safety over the heads of the crowd. Twenty-eight people died and about seventy received serious injuries. An enterprising local publican was quickly on the scene moving among the dead and the dying and gathering up scarves, gloves and other minor items of clothing which he placed in a hand barrow. There was always a buoyant demand for second-hand clothes in London.

  Caroline was undoubtedly one of England’s most rumbustious Queens. She was also one of the most popular for a wide variety of reasons. Her husband, who after waiting an inordinately long time to become King George IV, was, on the other hand, one of the most widely loathed and scorned. Caroline was German and when she died in 1821 it was arranged that her hearse would be taken through the West End before heading east for Harwich and the Continent. The London crowd turned out in huge numbers to wish the dead Queen well, and to display their contempt for the King. The mood was ugly and the forces of law were limited. They consisted of a Bow Street foot patrol and a company of Life Guards. Although the Bow Street patrols can clearly be identified as the predecessors of the Metropolitan Police a few years later, they were ill-equipped to deal with large and angry crowds. They were not uniformed, their only weapons were wooden staves and their training and discipline were poor. The Life Guards were of course regular mounted soldiers in a crack regiment and should have been highly trained and disciplined.

  The mood of the crowd grew uglier and uglier, and some spectators started to pelt the patrolmen with mud and then with stones. Injuries were inflicted. Ironically it was not members of the Bow Street patrol that provoked what became a riot. While a magistrate stood by impotently, the Life Guards fired warning volleys over the heads of the crowd. This only caused greater resentment and as the crowd surged forward, the soldiers began to lay about them with the flats of their swords. When a Life Guard was knocked from his horse by a man wielding a flagpole, his companions panicked as the crowd surrounded them and fired shots indiscriminately into the crowd, causing two fatalities. The incompetence and the impotence displayed by the forces of law and order on this occasion added substance to the demand that was gradually building up for the creation of a permanent, uniformed, trained and professional police force.

  London in the nineteenth century was the busiest seaport in the world. The Pool of London extended eastwards from London Bridge as far as Wapping on the north bank of the Thames and the Surrey Docks on the south bank. The range of goods that occupied the holds of these ships was baffling in its extent and variety. By 1860 many enclosed docks had been built, starting with the West India Docks in 1802 and 1806, the London Docks in 1805 and East India Docks in 1806. Much of the cargo that arrived in the ocean-going ships was transferred to lighters and brought upstream to wharves just below London Bridge before being stored in massive riverside warehouses. Many of these were located in Tooley Street on the Southwark side of the river. The cargo they contained included such commodities as sugar and spirits and were potentially highly flammable. The buildings in which the goods were housed were multi-storey buildings with wooden floors and features such as hoist ports, stairwells and chutes which could act as conduits for air to feed the flames if a fire broke out. Their complicated internal layout provided problems for fire-fighters. The owners of these premises preferred to pay insurance rather than to install expensive fire precautions. The scene was set for the greatest conflagration in London since the Great Fire, and one that would not be equalled until the Blitz.

  One summer’s evening in June 1861 a fire broke out in Scovell’s warehouse, which contained a potentially volatile mix of such items as sugar, rice, saltpetre, tallow, jute and cotton. It had been a hot day and, fatally as it turned out, workers had understandably opened every door and window they could in order to allow in what little circulating air there was. It was a Saturday night with only a skeleton staff on the premises. Scovell’s was quickly ablaze and it was soon evident that it could not be saved. With frightening speed the fire spread through the close-packed complex of warehouses and factory premises, some of which contained other combustible substances such as paint and oil. Men from various fire brigades attended but there was little they could do as the fire spread hungrily and it had to be left to go out of its own accord. Vast numbers of sightseers made their way to any vantage points from which they could enjoy this bonanza of free visual entertainment. Perhaps surprisingly only two fire-fighters were killed. One of them was James Braidwood who was London’s first overall fire chief. He had been trying to get some semblance of order out of the chaos that passed for fire regulations and fire-fighting in London at that time. The Tooley Street fire was evidence of how urgent the job was and how much still had to be done. Other fatalities were among the kind of people always drawn to the scene of disasters. Many barrels of liquor had fallen from the burning buildings into the Thames. A number of opportunists, oblivious to the dangers, had obtained boats and were attempting to heave some of these casks aboard when they were caught in the treacherous currents and swept downstream into a great pool of blazing tallow. There was no escape.

  The issue of Irish nationalism was a running ulcer in the body of British politics for the best part of two centuries. There were periods of relative inactivity and others when it forced itself to the top of the political agenda. Such a time was 1867. Two leading Fenians, Burke and Casey, had been arrested and placed in the House of Detention in Clerkenwell, but their comrades decided to free them. They laid their plans with some care. While Burke and Casey were taking their exercise in the prison yard, the others were to place a wagon filled with explosives against the outside of the prison wall. When the wagon was detonated, a large hole would be m
ade in the wall through which Burke and Casey would escape. The date for the escape attempt was to be 13 December 1867. Unfortunately for the Fenians, the prison governor had received a warning that there might be an ‘incident’ and he had cancelled the open-air exercise for the prisoners that day. The conspirators did not know this and went ahead. The explosion was spectacular and the hole they blew in the prison wall was 60 feet wide but while it did not enable their comrades to escape, it did bring down a terrace of working-class dwellings nearby, killing twelve people and injuring 120 others. Six suspects were arrested. Five of them were acquitted, the other, Michael Barratt, being convicted of murder as it was believed that he had triggered the explosion. Barratt had the dubious distinction of being the last man to be judicially hanged in public. This was outside Newgate Prison on 26 May 1868.

  Mass murder and unintentional cannibalism make a powerful and intriguing duo of elements for devotees of the murkier aspects of human behaviour. They come together in one of London’s most enduring legends – that of Sweeney Todd. So many melodramas have been penned around the theme that it is hard to distinguish fact from fiction. The fundamentals are these: in the 1780s, a barber with premises in Fleet Street would invite selected customers to sit in a particular seat in his shop. When the barber activated a hidden device, the chair tipped up and precipitated its occupant into the cellar below. Usually the victim broke his neck, but the barber could finish him off with a cutthroat razor if necessary. The bodies, so the story goes, were then manhandled along an underground passage to a cellar belonging to the diabolical barber’s equally devilish accomplice, a female pastry cook and pie-maker in Bell Yard. The couple then dismembered and chopped up their victims and used the fleshy parts as the main ingredient in mutton pies whose tastiness was such that they enjoyed great popularity with those members of the legal fraternity who had chambers nearby and others who came from miles around. The number of those murdered and disposed of in this fashion has been estimated to be between 30 and 160.

  This gruesome phantasmagoria has provided novelists, dramatists, poets and film-makers with a wealth of material but many of them probably do not realise that beneath the melodrama there is almost certainly a substantial residue of fact. There was indeed a barber’s shop, possibly at No. 186 Fleet Street, very close to the church of St Dunstan’s-in-the-West. This church had extensive cellars and passages radiating in various directions. Fleet Street was the semi-respectable façade, as it were, of a notorious criminal rookery or ‘Alsatia’ and these passages were probably used by local thieves and others to escape from the scene of their crimes. Bell Yard, where the egregious pie-maker had her premises, still exists, but in 1780 it consisted of a jumble of down-at-heel dwellings and shops. The pie shop was probably at the north end of Bell Yard, close to Carey Street. A character with the name Sweeney Todd seems to have been hanged outside Newgate Prison in 1802 and was buried, as was the practice, within the precincts of the prison. He had apparently been an unrepentant villain of the darkest hue. It may be the same man who was a barber, renting premises in Fleet Street, and who is recorded as having been arrested on unspecified ‘serious charges’. Subsequent excavations during building work in this area of Fleet Street have unearthed large numbers of human bones. Such gory caches are by no means uncommon and do not by themselves constitute absolute proof that Sweeney Todd and his no less awful pie-making accomplice practised their fiendish activities in this locality.

  Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, is a bogey-man deeply etched into the popular culture of London. Like Jack the Ripper, the very mention of his name evokes frissons of terror. If he did indeed exist, he was almost certainly responsible for far more premature deaths than the Whitechapel Murderer. He even made his way into Cockney rhyming slang, in which Sweeney Todd or ‘The Sweeney’ refers to the Flying Squad.

  Smithfield is a district of London with blood on its hands, a place of mass death. Trading in live and dead sheep, pigs and cattle took place there for 500 years or more and, remarkably, the London Central Meat Market continues to function to this day. At Smithfield in 1381, Wat Tyler was stabbed by the perfidious Lord Mayor of London, William Walworth, as he parleyed with the King on behalf of his peasant followers. Shortly afterwards, he was beheaded close by. Many political prisoners, possibly including the Scottish patriot William Wallace, were executed at Smithfield but the district’s most infamous associations are probably with the many men and women who died there rather than abjure their religious beliefs. In many cases, of course, these unfortunates were regarded as heretics. The crimes for which they were called upon to answer, were, in effect, political.

  The first Smithfield martyrs were Lollards, supporters of John Wycliffe (1324–84) whose heterodox views led to their persecution, especially during the reign of Henry IV (1399–1413). Those accused of heresy were given the opportunity to recant and, if they did not, they were burnt at the stake. Lollard trials and burnings continued sporadically through the fifteenth and into the sixteenth century. In 1494 Joan Broughton died at Smithfield, the first female Lollard to die for her beliefs. She was over eighty years of age.

  Those in power have always believed, quite wrongly, that they can expunge ideas simply by destroying the people who voice them. So it was with Henry VIII (r. 1509–47) who destroyed those who denied his position as Supreme Head of the Church. One such was John Forest, although he had already infuriated the King. He was one of Catherine of Aragon’s chaplains and had loyally supported her over the matter of the divorce from the King. He was consigned to Smithfield where he was roasted alive in a metal cage. Henry was ready to have Catholics and Protestants alike executed for heresy, but when his daughter Mary came to the throne in 1553, a wave of terror was unleashed against those bold enough or stupid enough to stand up for their Protestant beliefs. The first Protestant to die at Smithfield during Anne’s reign was John Rogers, the vicar of St Sepulchre without Newgate. He was burnt at the stake on 4 February 1555 in front of a large crowd which included his wife and their eleven children, one a baby at the breast.

  In June 1558, seven Protestants were burnt at Smithfield, an unusually large number to be burnt at one time. They were among twenty people who had been arrested for attending a clandestine Protestant service but they refused to attend Mass, that being the price for their pardon. A large, sympathetic crowd turned out to watch them die and were warned that any of them showing support for the condemned prisoners would be severely punished. The threat notwithstanding, the crowd gave vent to its accumulated rage and there was little that the authorities dared to do.

  An estimated 283 Protestants were burnt during Mary’s bleak reign, fifty-six of them at Smithfield. Those hoping for the fresh wind of ecumenicalism and tolerance to course through English Christianity with the arrival on the throne of Elizabeth, were in for a severe disappointment. Now it was the turn of Catholics to suffer persecution and many were immolated at Tyburn, often after having suffered on the rack – a fiendish torture device which underwent various technical refinements and enjoyed great popularity, although not with its victims, at this time. Given the numbers that died at Smithfield, it is not surprising that many people over the years have attested to the ghostly smell of burning flesh and the sound of anguished, terrified screams drifting across West Smithfield, and especially around the gateway into the churchyard of St Bartholomew the Great. The place has ‘atmosphere’, as they would say.

  9

  Pestilence and Public Health

  London has always been dirty, but most of time it was also stinking and pestilential. Epidemics, pandemics and stench were not the monopoly of London; other English towns were foetid and disease-ridden. London, however, has always provoked the superlatives. Its enormous size relative to all other towns and cities meant that it was quite simply the filthiest, most noxious and most effective breeding ground for disease in the Kingdom. The diseases were often fatal. In 1831, the death rate in London stood at 25.2 per thousand. This compared with
22.5 for England as a whole. The diseases which ravaged the capital only began to be tackled effectively in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  London’s history could be viewed as the history of its water supplies. London stood on a large river into which many tributaries flowed. Wells and springs provided access to a huge water table trapped by the clays and gravels of the Thames Basin. Such names as Camberwell, Clerkenwell and Sadler’s Wells are reminders of their existence. The Romans chose to build a city on the site for many reasons, one of which was that there seemed to be an abundance of fresh water.

  As London grew, so demand for water increased. As the ague-ridden marshes on the south bank were drained, watercourses built over and the wells and springs dried up, efforts had to be made to find water elsewhere. As late as the nineteenth century, men eked out a frugal living by walking the streets with a yoke over their shoulders from which hung open-topped barrels of water, often drawn from nearby wells. They touted for custom and added their shouts to the general cacophony that was such a feature of the streets of London. The lucky ones found custom with the owners of taverns and eating-places who placed regular orders for fresh, cool and clean water to accompany the meals they provided.

  In about 1238 a pipe-line was built from the manor of Marylebone in open country about three miles west of the City. It conveyed water from the stream known as the Tyburn to the Great Conduit in Cheapside. This was close to St Paul’s and was erected specially for the purpose. It was a huge lead cistern reinforced with stone and at first the water was freely available to all. Other conduits were added over the centuries to help to feed London’s ever-growing demand for water. Pipes were sometimes of stone or clay but more often they were made from hollowed-out pieces of elm. Over short distances, for the purpose of connecting into the premises of domestic and industrial consumers, the pipes were often made of lead. Even in those days, much water was lost through leakages.