‘The company assembled had the pleasure of inspecting the extensive factory of Messrs Silver at Silvertown where they carry on their India-Rubber Works, which are not only remarkable for their extent but also for their arrangement both mechanically and socially. Besides the master-mind, there are a chaplain, a surgeon, a sick club and a school for the children of the workmen, and the evenings of the men and their families are enlivened and rendered instructive by lectures from men of first-rate ability.’
How enlivening and instructive the lectures were considered by men at the end of a long, hard, dirty, noisy day is possibly open to debate. Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine waved the flag in 1862, declaring that ‘the tall chimney by the river-side at Woolwich, marks, in fact, not only a place of mechanical industry, but the centre of a cheerful, wholesome influence; and this is, happily and honourably, becoming true now-a-days of many a tall chimney in our land of factories’.
Yet not everyone was swayed by the PR of progress. As the Chelmsford Chronicle reported in June 1859, three months after the initial glowing report of a workers’ utopia above, ‘the system of sewerage now in course of formation by the West Ham Board of Health will, when completed, materially improve the sanitary state of Plaistow Marsh, which during the winter or rainy seasons, from the amount of mortality among the inhabitants, exhibits evidence of its insalubrity’.
Silvertown was far from a sun-kissed utopia of industry in which the benevolent industrialist walked arm-in-arm with the healthy, ruddy-cheeked labourer through leafy streets breathing air thick with the scent of lavender and apple-blossom. Dickens himself visited the area and noted how the reclaimed land was some seven feet below the Thames’s high-tide level, going on to describe basic houses of four rooms containing several families with no drainage or amenities that were ‘mere bandboxes placed on the ground’. The streets, which were unsurfaced tracks, were little more than a series of deep puddles of brown mud where the local doctor, he continued, ‘is drawn to wearing sea boots and the clergyman loses his shoes through neglecting to take a similar precaution. The national school is a wooden lean-to where the mistress, when it rains, conducts the lessons from beneath an umbrella to protect herself from the leaking roof.’
That clergyman, a Rev. H. Douglas, was deeply troubled by the poverty of the area and had written about it in a letter to The Times published on Christmas Day 1859.
‘The district is occupied chiefly by works for transforming the refuse of slaughterhouses into manure and for the manufacture of vitriol and creosote,’ he wrote. ‘The habitable areas consist of islands of liquid filth, surrounded by stagnant dikes … Poverty alternates with fever. Every gust of prosperity brings an influx of strangers to the neighbourhood; every succeeding stagnation overwhelms the district with destitution. At the time of writing the cry for food and fire is frightful. Amongst other distressing cases of illness three whole families are down with fever and on one day recently no less than seven accidents occurred.’
Perhaps cowed by these reports, in 1863, as Silver’s waterproofing business really began to take off, the expanding company began to invest a little more in creating its own community. The architect S.S. Toulon completed St Mark’s Church to a design that divided opinion: Pevsner described Toulon’s church as being ‘as horrid as only he can be and yet of a pathetic self-assertion in its surroundings’. The church was flanked closely to the north by the new North Woolwich Railway, re-routed around ‘The Vic’ because its initial, pre-dock route interfered with both shipping and the railway timetable. The design of St Mark’s may not have pleased everyone but the church would go on to establish itself at the heart of the Silvertown community. Its Normanesque steeple, as imposing as it was curiously squat, would become a familiar landmark to locals and those arriving in Silvertown by train, even as it became surrounded in the following years by a forest of belching chimneys and gas and oil holders.
A year after the consecration of the church, three more streets appeared immediately opposite the Silver works. Andrew Street and Constance Street jutted north into marshy fields, while Drew Road bisected them both from east to west. The houses in these streets were a step up from the basic workers’ cottages nearby: they had, according to a report at the time, ‘bay windows, well-lighted stairs and a grate as well as a copper in the washhouse’. Some had been constructed as shops and commercial premises too.
At the southern end of Constance Street stood the Railway Tavern, an imposing, sturdy public house which had opened in 1855 under the tenancy of William Owston, while opposite was constructed Silvertown Station, opened in 1863, the same year as Constance Street, meaning that, barely a decade since humanity arrived in the region, Silvertown had a name, a church, a pub and a railway station: the four basic tenets of a community were in place. All Silvertown needed now was a population.
Chapter Eight
From all over, they came. The entry for Constance Street in the 1871 census recorded inhabitants who hailed from Warwickshire, Norfolk, Scotland, Wiltshire, Ireland, Dorset, Somerset and Devon. They were wire makers, cordwainers, machinists, shoemakers, telegraph engineers, waterproofers, boiler makers, coat makers, dressmakers, telegraph instrument makers, iron ship platers, dockers and stokers. These were the Silvertown pioneers, people like Stanfield Sutcliffe at No. 1, a wire drawer from Halifax, and his neighbour James Press, a Gloucestershire-born carpenter and his son John, a clerk at the telegraph works. Across the road from them were Joseph Taylor and his family, a shipwright from up the river in Rotherhithe, and his neighbour, James Parsons, a boiler stoker from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. All would have trudged through the muddy puddles of the unmade road to the Railway Tavern, its dark wooden fittings and brass fixtures reverberating with accents from just about every part of Britain. Across the road the trains would pass with the shriek of a whistle while the hisses, bangs and clanks of the india rubber works provided a constant backdrop to life in Silvertown where at night there were still mysterious flashes of light and strange noises on the marsh – but now their provenance was progress.
It was not generally a pleasant place to be, however. Silvertown’s remoteness made it difficult to keep order, the surrounding marshes and frequent fogs providing locals with little protection from those with malice in mind. And there were plenty of them, it seems.
‘In those days when the neighbourhood was full of disorderly characters, the policeman conspicuously absent, and the houses few and far between, it required some courage to walk the ill-lighted roads after dark,’ wrote Arthur Crouch, secretary of the Gutta Percha company, in a history of the area published at the turn of the twentieth century. Louisa Boyd, the sister of the first vicar of St Mark’s, would help her brother minister to the fledgeling community but made sure to carry a loaded revolver with her when walking the streets after dark.
In 1875 Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine had visited Silvertown, calling it ‘the dubious region between half-fluid and almost solid water’, and while marvelling at the scale and variety of production at the rubber works the writer also noted ‘near at hand, useful but odiferous gasworks, a shabby railway station’ and that ‘out of a chaos of mud and slime have sprung near lines of cottages, a grim hostelry called The Railway Hotel, huge wharves and the seven acres of now solid ground which form the cause and explanation of the whole curious development’.
The writer ends by noting how Silvertown is ‘perhaps the gloomiest and most uncomfortable spot in London on a chilly winter evening’.
Despite this less-than-glowing endorsement of the place, a couple of years later arrived the product for which Silvertown would arguably become best known: sugar.
When Henry Tate had in 1877 relocated from Liverpool to Silvertown to produce his revolutionary sugar cubes on the site of the old Campbell Johnstone shipyard next door to the Silver’s complex, he was followed four years later from Greenock in the west of Scotland by Abram Lyle & Co, another sugar-based operation producing golden syrup. Although the two m
en never met, in 1921 the two firms would combine to create Tate & Lyle, the largest sugar refinery in the world, a business whose black-tipped chimneys and towering works dominate Silvertown even today.
A year after Tate’s arrival, one of Britain’s worst ever maritime disasters washed up on its shores. On the evening of 3 September 1878 the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer, was returning from Rosherville in Kent with some 700 Londoners who’d enjoyed a warm late summer’s day out by the estuary, when it was rammed by a huge, ancient collier barge, the Bywell Castle, and sank within four minutes. Everyone aboard the Princess Alice ended up in the water; very few came out alive. The raw sewage pouring into the river from the outflow by Barking Creek and the industrial effluent oozing from the various establishments at Silvertown meant that even by Victorian standards the water along this stretch was disgustingly foul. Even those who could swim were overcome by the effluent around them: barely anyone stood a chance. The exact number of casualties isn’t known, but nearly everyone on board drowned: at a conservative estimate 550 lost their lives. If any good came out of the Princess Alice disaster it was an acceptance that the section of the Thames east of the City was far too busy, and this tragedy on a notoriously congested and dangerous stretch of river helped to rubber-stamp the construction of the Albert Dock on the marshland east of the Victoria Dock, about half a mile north-east of Silvertown.
It was the 1880 opening of the Albert Dock, immediately adjacent to the Victoria Dock, that sealed Silvertown’s unique character, for as soon as the sluices opened and the water gushed in to the giant expanse of the new dock, Silvertown became an island and its people became islanders. Opened on 24 June, the Albert Dock – one and three-quarter miles long and nearly 500 feet wide – contrived with its sister to cut Silvertown off completely from the rest of the country. You could no longer leave Silvertown without crossing water. You still can’t.
Chapter Nine
In barely thirty years a bare patch of marshy land known only to a few shepherds and cattlemen had become a thriving industrial heartland and the focus of the empire’s international trade. In their squalid little cottages on marshy land beneath the high-tide level the people who had flocked here, the industrial poor from across Britain, the Irishmen who had helped to dig the docks, the eastern Europeans fleeing persecution, were isolated, psychologically and physically, hemmed in on all sides by filthy, stinking water and living on a soggy island that squelched underfoot, while myriad smells and stenches filled their lungs from the chimneys and outflows. Curious green and yellow smogs settled over them, seeping through cracked window panes and around ill-fitting door frames into every home, so there was no escape from the relentless choking industry of Silvertown.
And the noise. The constant noise. The clanking of machinery, the hissing of pressurised steam, the whistling of trains, the factory hooters and sirens parping and screeching, the bells of the ships on the river, the thunderous roar of their foghorns, the inescapable, constant industrial tinnitus that never stopped, not even at night, because Silvertown was never, ever quiet. The furnaces raged, the boilers steamed, the people snaked along the muddy streets, passing in and out of the gates, feeding the monstrous, noisy, hungry beast with a never-ending stream of labour, while away from the factories and works and plants and muck and grease and soot they tried to make lives for themselves, tried to claim a piece of the oozing, damp land as their own, even if it was just two rooms lined with mildewed wallpaper and a couple of flames attempting to flicker in the grate above a few dusty pebbles of coal.
This was the lot of the Silvertonian as the nineteenth century ended. On Constance Street they came out of their houses straight onto the muddy street. When they looked one way, across the railway line, they saw the clanking premises and belching chimneys of the rubber works, the Tate sugar refinery and Keiller’s jam factory. When they looked the other way, across a patch of scrubland, there was the high dock wall and beyond it the cranes working the holds, dipping and rising, cranking and lifting; occasionally they’d see a giant ship easing into the dock, bright-coloured funnels against the blackened brickwork and smoky air. If they looked up they could usually see the sky but sometimes they could just see the yellowing smog and the smoke belching from the chimneys, pinning them in, sealing them further from the rest of the world, compressing their island, reminding them that their place was as a tiny cog in the giant, flame-fuelled, smoke-belching monster machine of Silvertown.
The speed of industrial growth outstripped everything, from basic sanitary amenities to ensuring safe workplaces, which meant that disease, injury and death were a constant threat and frequent reality. Two months before the Albert Dock had opened the Burt, Boulton & Hayward premises blew up. An enormous still containing 2,000 gallons of oil exploded: according to witnesses the reinforced steel roof of the still bulged like a balloon before it breached, and the explosion was heard for miles around. The blaze was so intense that fire crews came from as far afield as Rotherhithe and Southwark to assist. Crowds of onlookers gathered on the other side of the river at Woolwich and Charlton for what must have been a spectacular conflagration. As the Essex Newsman pointed out in its coverage, ‘creosote, tar, pitch, naphtha, benzoline etc rendered the place peculiarly liable to an accident’.
Eleven men died as a result of the explosion, of whom ‘in some cases little more than charred bones remained’.
Fires and explosions were commonplace: there would be a ‘crump’ from somewhere along the riverside and hundreds of wives going about their business at home would freeze, wondering if this time it would be their husband or son not coming home, their task to be shown into a room above the Graving Dock Tavern or the Railway Hotel to be presented with a charred, mangled husk of a human being contorted into a terrifying mass of limbs, the smell of burnt flesh and death lingering in the nostrils long, long after they’d left the room.
As the nineteenth century entered its smoky twilight, the London Daily News summed up Silvertown.
‘Silvertown has not any beauty that one can desire in it,’ it said in 1891. ‘Great works are springing up and though their proprietors and their managers and clerks know better than to take up their abode in the neighbourhood, the workpeople are settling there and in their interests it should be known that the condition of the wasteland and the rude tracks that are called roads are a disgrace to civilisation.’
Far from the glamorous sound of its name, then, Silvertown at the turn of the twentieth century was a place of muddy tracks, dank and fetid housing, belching chimneys, stagnant ditches and air so thick with fumes and gases you could taste it (when James Keiller opened his jam factory a stone’s throw from Tate’s sugar refinery the very air in Constance Street could feasibly have rotted your teeth). Close by, the river and docks ran with human excrement and toxic industrial effluent, enclosing Silvertown within a ring of stinking water that could kill just by brief immersion.
This wasn’t just a slum, then. This was the worst of the slums, a place fraught with physical danger, from intoxication by air or water, from explosions and fire, from disease lurking in the dank puddles and ditches, from the trains that went to and fro carrying people and cargo with little in the way of safety regulations.
So who were the people of Silvertown? Who were the thousands that created a burgeoning population from nothing? As the London Daily News pointed out, they weren’t the factory owners, the managers and the clerks. They made their homes far from the smells and the noise. Silvertown people were in general the poor, the displaced and the desperate. Occasionally they were the persecuted. These were rootless people, driven to where the work was, however unpalatable, however dangerous. Here was a place without a history where they could be a person without a history. Retreating to the island to escape creditors, spouses, a broken heart, family tragedy or the law, they found security behind their dock and river moat. Silvertown was a blank canvas, a chance to make a life and invent a life, a place of secrets.
Chapter Ten
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br /> Constance Street was about as well-to-do as Silvertown got. Having been one of the first streets in the area, located close to the Silver’s works and the station and with the Railway Hotel at the end of the street, it was almost inevitable that Constance Street would be at the very heart of the community. The houses were well built for the area, and their bay windows made them easily adaptable as shops. Hence the street soon began to attract tradespeople, people with aspirations, as well as the urban working class. The census returns for 1911 show a street that mixed residential properties and commercial ones and gives a fascinating insight into the heart of a working-class community of the times. At No. 4, for example, was David Jones, 55 years old, from Newport in the industrial heartland of South Wales. His occupation is listed as ‘engine fitter/tobacconist’, suggesting that while he was employing his industrial skills and know-how in one of the factories or works nearby, he’d also seen a business opportunity to make him less dependent on manual labour. He was 55, after all, and more than likely he was tired of the industrial grind of engine fitting – the grease, the grime, the noise – and, conscious of his advancing years, recognised an opportunity to change his and his family’s life. His 15-year-old daughter Olive was, according to the census, the ‘assistant to the tobacconist’ – maybe he was trying to build a future for his family away from the constant grind of relentless daily toil ruled by the factory hooter? Selling tobacco was a respectable trade, there would always be a market for tobacco and cigarettes among the urban working class, and 4 Constance Street was just a few feet from the junction with Connaught Road, meaning it was close to the pub, the railway station and the entrance to the rubber works: all establishments packed with smokers.
Constance Street Page 4