The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  Hollingshed’s personal obsessions with Vice and Bad Air (as if the two were inextricably connected) can become wearisome, but he had a strong sense of place and accurately perceived the historical sequence by which old areas such as Bankside had reached the state they had by 1860. Under the heading ‘Mistaken Charity’ he inveighs against the preservation of ancient almshouses, since ‘the field or country lane of the sixteenth, seventeenth or even the eighteenth century in which [the inmates’] original hermitages were built, has become a close street of busy warehouses, if not an alley of dirty hovels … Let anyone, in passing over London Bridge, towards Southwark, look down upon a squat row of cottages lying between St Saviour’s church and the wharf warehouses of Messrs. Humphrey and others … New London Bridge and its approach from the south have raised a noisy roadway high above their heads, and wharf buildings, Bridge House hotel, and other places have towered up round them, until they seem now to live at the bottom of a deep brick well … huge packages seem always hanging over them at the end of cranes, threatening to fall and crush them.’ Such buildings should be sold off, he declared, and the money used to maintain the old people elsewhere, where there were no passing costermongers or boatmen to call them ‘witches’.

  Unlike some other writers of his time, who were content to emote and make their readers in Camberwell or Kensington feel guilty, Hollingshed understood that increasing charitable awareness of the great city’s multiform social problems was providing only panaceas, not adequate solutions. England, he pointed out sardonically, spent more on charity than anywhere else in the world – ‘Nearly a million “cases” receive free medical advice and assistance in London alone every year. The hat is always going round. The first stone of some benevolent building is always being laid. We dine, we sing, we act, we make speeches in aid of a thousand institutions … Casinos, harmonious pot-houses and pugilistic exhibitions catch the benevolent infection and work like mill-horses to aid noisy soup-kitchens …’

  The wheels of the world’s greatest industrialised capital system turned, producing more spare wealth for more people in Britain than ever before, but the very nature of competitive trade was that some people got ground up in it or were simply left out. There was also the paradox, familiar already from the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth, that social evils were spoken or written of in scandalised terms as if they were something new, whereas really they had always been there and the fact that they were now being discussed was an indication that something was beginning to be done about them. People who were old by the mid-century, such as the radical working-class reformer Francis Place, were in no doubt that, as compared with the days of their youth, ordinary London people were far less likely to be scrofulous, rickety or lousy, far more likely to be wearing shoes and stockings and to be able to read. Fewer babies and children died. There was an abundance of cheap food and a whole network of soup kitchens, dispensaries, night shelters and Ragged Schools: many fewer poor people succumbed to absolute want. There was also generally agreed to be less roughness, violence and street theft than there had been a generation earlier: the establishment of the Metropolitan Police in the 1830s had been more successful than most people had expected. (Although not yet officially part of London, Southwark had had to accept the police.) These positive trends continued throughout the rest of the century and into the next one, when such wonders as free, compulsory schooling for all and old-age pensions began to be established.

  Nevertheless, and perhaps necessarily, the note of shocked revelation continued to be sounded through the decades. It was as if the more comfortable the proliferating middle classes became, living in miles and miles of stuccoed, porticoed villas (‘bran-new people, in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London’ in Dickens’s words),3 the more they wanted to be regaled with horror stories from the hidden, parallel world. In 1883 a twenty-page pamphlet written by the clergyman who was Secretary to the London Congregational Union, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, produced an effect quite disproportionate to its real content. At the same time George R. Sims, a successful journalist, was playing the by now familiar explorer role in a series of articles called How the Poor Live, taking his readers on a journey into ‘a dark continent that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office’.

  Hollingshed, Sims and others shed light on the chronically deprived section of society, or on those who had been more or less respectable members of the working classes till a sudden misfortune had tumbled them ‘into the abyss’. How far did life on Bankside exemplify this? Had it become a sinister, exotic place where decent Londoners would hesitate to go? Well, hardly. It is true that Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, written in the 1860s, begins with the furtive snatch of a dead body from the river, and that this takes place from ‘a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance … float[ing] on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was drawing in’. But the sinister Jesse Hexham, the depraved waterman with his trade in the dead, actually lives much further downstream, beyond Wapping. Bankside is simply the almost incidental site of this particular expedition – though no doubt Dickens chose this spot, right opposite the City, to emphasise the alien and secret nature of the world or worlds he is going to reveal.

  When the last of the Sells’s households had moved out of Bankside in the 1850s, leaving the house at 49 simply as the business address of the firm, there were still a few genteel neighbours. In 43 was a long-established sail maker, Joseph Sutton, with his wife, one teenage son still at home, two servants and his wife’s elderly aunt. With the coming of the steam-vessels, sail making cannot have been quite the rock-solid, prestigious trade it had been for hundreds of years, but no one yet seriously thought that commercial sailing ships would disappear entirely. The old, elegant Horne house, number 44, where the Reverend Mann had lived with his numerous daughters, was let to yet another coal- and coke-merchant; while 47 was occupied by a paint manufacturer and his wife, with two children down as ‘scholars’, an unmarried brother described as an ‘agent’, one living-in servant and, on (Census-night) two visitors, one a ‘Provision broker’ from County Down and the other a tea-merchant who had been born in Bombay and was noted to be blind. (These sound potential characters for minor roles in a novel by Dickens or Thackeray.) At 48 lived a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines. Aged fifty-seven and employing one servant, he had presumably retired, after a not particularly illustrious career, to gaze out over the water.

  Number 53 was, as it had been a decade earlier, a small shop, apparently the sort of all-purpose general supplier of dry groceries, soap, candles, patent remedies, clothes pegs, sewing thread and the like that was then known as a ‘chandlers’. It was kept now by a widow of forty-two with a daughter in school. In the same house lived a man of fifty-four whose occupation is illegible, and his own daughter of twenty who worked in the drapery business. I would like to believe this to be evidence of a happy if irregular relationship, but it may merely be a sign of the social descent into multioccupation of one-time family houses, that was going to overcome Bankside in the decades to follow.

  At the next Census in 1861 the principal working occupant of number 49 was a young wharf clerk called William Tuckfield, whom I assume was employed by what had then become Charrington, Sells, Dale & Surtees. I think that it was at this time that the ground-floor room overlooking Bankside was partitioned to create a narrow passage from the front door going towards the central hallway and the stairs. The doorway into this room from the passage was placed next to the front door, which suggests that this room was now to be an office more readily accessible from the quay rather than from the rest of the house. The partition remained for the next hundred-odd years before the house was restored to something nearer its original state, and the mark of it is still visible today on the old floor-boards.

  Listed as the head of the house was William Tuckfield’s widowed mother, aged fifty. William wa
s only twenty-three, but he had on his hands several younger brothers and sisters. The youngest boy was still at school, but the three teenage girls were all down as ‘military embroideresses’, and an eighteen-year-old brother as a coppersmith. The Tuckfields had in fact done well to launch William into the responsible job of wharf clerk, for they can be glimpsed elsewhere on the Bankside in the Census of twenty years before in a humbler situation, when Joseph Tuckfield the father was down as a male servant. Like most of his kind, Joseph had been born somewhere in the country, but his wife was a girl from Limehouse, and in the intervening years of their married life they had, judging from the birthplaces of successive children, moved about quite a bit but remained faithful to the Thames shores. In 1861 the Tuckfields had no servant living in, but they would almost certainly have employed a housewife in a sacking apron from one of the alleys round about for a few hours a week to do ‘the rough’: blackleading the kitchen stove, scrubbing the floors and in particular the front step, since no woman with any pretence at refinement could be seen doing that herself. Anyway, the Tuckfield girls – neat centre partings, slightly greasy ringlets, crinolines when they went out – would have needed to keep their hands smooth for their long hours at the military embroidery.

  The neighbouring household across Cardinal Cap Alley in 1861 was in a similar situation, also headed by a widow. Martha Gabb was only forty, but she is described as a ‘fundholder’: evidently her husband had left her something besides a large family. The three sons, of eighteen, seventeen and sixteen, were all clerks, respectively in engineering, the railway and haberdashery; that is to say, they were white-collar workers, however modestly paid, with the possibility of ‘bettering’ themselves by and by. Two more sons were said still to be ‘scholars’: since they were in their teens too, they were presumably at the stage of acquiring a commercial education, perhaps at St Saviour’s Free Grammar School, to fit them, too, to wear tight black suits and push pens. Three girls in the family, all younger, were also down as scholars. They had their aunts to keep an eye on them, and possibly to run up their dresses and pinafores on one of the new sewing machines that were just beginning to revolutionise home needlework, for the household was completed by Martha’s two unmarried sisters, aged forty-four and forty-two, with no occupations mentioned.

  It is clear that the Gabbs, like the Tuckfields, enjoyed a social status which, while considerably below that of the departed Sells, was well above that of the labouring poor. I was a little puzzled to see that all the Gabb children but the eldest two had been born in the Bear Garden, a working-class address, but when I sought them there in the Census of ten years previously it was to find that the late Mr Gabb, eleven years older than his wife, had been the licensed victualler in charge of the White Bear Inn, a hostelry whose origins went back to Tudor times. Publicans were proverbially much more prosperous than those who drank in their establishments: evidently it was the proceeds from this business that had secured the boys their clerkly education and were now keeping Martha Gabb and her sisters. The sisters, in 1851, had been ‘assistants in the business’, in other words, bar-maids. It looks as if, with the move to Bankside and the boys’ occupations, a greater gentility had now come over the family, at any rate in its public face.

  Such were the vast mid-Victorian lower middle classes, impotent as individuals but collectively a powerful force. The poet Matthew Arnold, writing in the 1860s, famously derided this class for being ‘dismal and illiberal’, in thrall to a ‘narrow, unintelligent, repulsive religion’ which allowed them no entertainments beyond the occasional lecture on ‘teetotalism or nunneries’, and of thinking ‘it is the highest pitch of development and civilisation when … letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.’ One might note in passing that, while both Islington and Camberwell were now beginning to slip down the social scale, as the green fields receded further from them and the London fogs increased, the railway connection between them was hardly direct. But the overall sense of Arnold’s scathing remarks is not accurate either, since huge numbers of this class, including the Tuckfields and the Gabbs, impress one rather by the vitality and determination they must have employed to haul themselves out of the working class and make use of the unprecedented opportunities the nineteenth century offered. For such people, the trains, the steamer trips to the Kent coast, the postal services, trams, gas-light and water on tap, and indeed the whole spread of London with its new plate-glassed shops, public libraries, public baths, institutes, concert halls, evening lectures and church socials, were not the marks of a ‘dismal, illiberal life’ but of a newly liberated one. And if some of these new middle classes did embrace religious observance and teetotalism too fervently for the taste of the more confident and moneyed upper classes (from which Arnold came), that is hardly surprising when you think that society as yet offered no other safety nets but self-conscious respectability and caution. ‘The abyss’ – in Victorian parlance – was always there, yawning in wait for the self-indulgent and unwary. For the earner who spent his wages on drink or gambling, or the woman who deviated too publicly from a strict moral code, a descent to the hand-to-mouth life of the slum and the pawnshop was the all-too-likely fate. In Southwark, you could not fail to be aware of this.

  The Gabbs, at any rate, can hardly have been teetotal. I have no idea if the Tuckfields were adherents of the huge Temperance movement that had risen in response to working-class drinking habits, whether they were eager attenders at matins and evensong or at the exciting hellfire sermons of a Dissenting chapel, or whether they went to the popular winter evening lectures at the Surrey Chapel in the Blackfriars Bridge Road – ‘Rambles around Italy and the Italian Lakes’, ‘Sowing and Reaping’ by A Clergyman. Maybe they even ventured into the music halls, which were now just developing towards their Victorian heyday. The very first Tavern Concert Room to use the term ‘Music Hall’ was in the Southwark Bridge Road, and another followed in the 1850s in Union Street. Did the Gabb sisters, having retreated from the bar of the White Bear into unpaid respectability, regard such places as being for the boys only? Or had each of them acquired, like many of their kind, a discreet ‘gentleman friend’ of a slightly higher social class, with whom they enjoyed outings to places unknown to the wives of clerks in Islington and Camberwell? Were the Tuckfield girls pretty enough to attract young men from similarly obscure but equally energetic families, who would one day take them away from the exacting work of sewing gold thread onto epaulettes and into neat suburban villas of their own?

  One would like to think so. By the time of the next headcount both families have vanished from Bankside. The individuals who were momentarily fixed in the copperplate ink of the Census-taker have rejoined the mass of innumerable others, and without any clue to their movements we cannot follow them. They have been absorbed again into the ‘vast, immense London, rain-sodden, smelling of heated iron and soot, smoking continuously into the foggy air’4 that so impressed all foreign vistors.

  By the time another ten years had passed quite a few of the old houses along that stretch of Bankside seem, judging from Directories, to have become primarily wharf-offices rather than residential property, but number 49 still retained its status as a one-family home. We know that it and its immediate neighbours on the other side of Cardinal Cap Alley were now in the possession of Moss Isaacs, iron-merchant, who would buy the freehold outright in 1873. During the sale, the Holditches seem to have been in residence there, but in the Census of ’71 the house is lived in by an iron-merchant who was presumably in business with Isaacs. He was oddly, almost wittily, named Urban Gardener. ‘Urban’ is hardly a standard working-class Christian name, but suggests that, as with the Sells family, there was some French connection. He was born in Oxfordshire by the Oxford Canal, which was by then a main trade link, via the Grand Union Canal, with London. It is tempting to think that the canal played some part in his ev
entual presence on Bankside, particularly since that same Census lists twenty-six people who were sleeping on barges that happened to be moored that night in the vicinity of Mason stairs.

  The Gardeners then had four sons and a daughter, all born in south London, ranging in ages from eleven to one year, and two living-in female servants of eighteen and fourteen. I imagine the fourteen-year-old was there chiefly to mind the baby. Ten years later the family were still on Bankside, but now in another of the Isaacs’s houses, number 51. By this time they had had three more sons and another daughter; all nine children were still at home, and the eldest had joined his father in the business. Clearly, the Gardeners were in the same fertile, healthy mould as the Sells of forty years earlier. Number 49 was by then occupied by a ‘lighterman and barge builder’, as if time were circular and we were back to the days of the first Edward Sells a hundred years before. There had been fears, when the great off-river docks were built earlier in the century, that they would irreparably damage the lighterage trade, but since the lighters were allowed in and out of the docks without paying dues, and the sheer volume of trade had increased enormously, the lighters continued to flourish. The lighterman who was in number 49 in 1881 lived with his wife, an elderly female boarder and one servant.

  It is for this same year that I know what this section of Bankside actually looked like, by putting together the small elevation drawings from Flood Prevention plans, as described in Chapter IV. These form a complete single snapshot of a moment when Bankside was into its relentless evolution from pretty residential terrace to working waterfront, but still retained much of the physical structure of its previous life. By this date, some large warehouses have appeared up river of Cardinal’s Wharf, at the coal-wharves then in the possession of Hinton & Horne, and at Queen’s Wharf, which was the point at which the western end of Bankside veered away from the river to run behind the riverside buildings rather than in front of them.