Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  John Murray was a pawnbroker and the Marrs’ neighbour. He had heard the same noise inside the house as Margaret, but hadn’t acted upon it. He came out to speak with the watchman. Worried, he then went to the back of the house and let himself in through the back door, which wasn’t locked. He carried a candle and called out as he went.

  Inside, John found the body of James Gowan the apprentice. His skull had been smashed in with a heavy object, his face was destroyed. Near him lay Celia Marr. She was face down on the floor and blood was still pouring from the bloody mess where her face had been. John Murray cried murder, bringing in other neighbours. The body of Timothy Marr was found in another room, his head smashed to pieces. Someone then remembered the baby: it was found in its cot, skull broken on the left side. Worse than that, the baby’s throat had been cut so deeply the head was almost severed.

  The shout went up, and brought Charles Horton from the Thames Police Office. He searched the scene himself, going through the victims’ pockets and finding more than five pounds on Timothy Marr. In the Marrs’ bedroom he found, leaning against a chair, a shipwright’s maul, or heavy hammer, with the letters ‘JP’ stamped into the head. They later discovered that this belonged to an ‘Old Swede’, John Peterson, who lodged at the nearby Pear Tree. There was also over £150 in the chest of drawers: either Margaret’s attempted breakin had alerted the murderer, or money had not been the motive.

  John Harriott, the magistrate in charge, had bills printed looking for information. For the next fortnight, the authorities investigated every avenue, with no results. Then, on 19 December, at the King’s Arms (in what is now Garnet Street) the publican John Williamson, Elizabeth his wife and the barmaid, Bridget Harrington, were found dead. A watchman had found their lodger, John Turner, shinning down knotted sheets from an upper floor and shouting murder after having disturbed a large man rooting through the dead Williamson’s things. They forced the cellar trapdoor and found the bodies. John Williamson’s body was hanging from the cellar stairs, his skull shattered and his throat cut. Their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kitty Stillwell, alone survived out of the Williamson family. She had been sleeping in an obscure back bedroom and escaped notice.

  The following morning, the Home Secretary appointed a Bow Street magistrate to come and sort things out. Several arrests were made, but they had little idea who they were chasing. One of the arrestees was James Williams, a sailor who had been drinking at the King’s Arms and was acquainted in a roundabout way with Timothy Marr through the East India Company. It was never clear whether the two had sailed together. He also lodged at the Pear Tree, and so could have taken John Peterson’s maul. Williams did not fit the lodger’s description, but circumstantial evidence was against him. Williams was never tried, or even questioned for a second time after his arrest; he hanged himself in his cell on the morning of Christmas Eve.

  On New Year’s Eve, Williams’ body was drawn through the streets on a wagon. The driver of a hackney coach leaned over and struck the corpse about the head three times with his whip, but there was no other disorder from the 10,000-strong crowd. The fury of the people was directed not only at a murderer – for murder was not uncommon in Wapping and Ratcliff – but at someone who would enter a private home. At St George’s East burial ground, where the Marrs had recently been interred, the body had a stake driven through the heart and was buried kneeling in the grave. James Williams remained there until he was dug up during the laying of the gas mains, decades later, and reburied elsewhere.

  DECLINE: ‘NOBODY CARES ENOUGH’

  By the end of the Georgian period, the glory of London’s water trade was over. Wapping, Rotherhithe and Deptford, which had been a lively, if rough, riverside sprawl began to decline into urban slums. The river was becoming increasingly polluted, and the last salmon was caught in this stretch of the Thames in 1833. The wooden ships which had been built in Deptford and Greenwich had run their course and were returned to London to be broken up. By 1815, steamships were on the Thames; and by 1830, iron ships were dominating the waterways. Henry Castle, born to a ship-building family in 1808, was living in Rotherhithe in the 1830s when he realized more wooden ships were being decommissioned than built. He set up a ship-breaking business in Rotherhithe and also on Baltic Wharf, Millbank.

  The yards were littered with the hulks of wooden ships being stripped down and recycled, often into garden furniture. A catalogue of their furniture later featured at the Great Exhibition of 1851, available for same-day delivery. Some ships were burned on the foreshore and the metal remnants scavenged for scrap afterwards. Legend has it that Turner’s Fighting Temeraire was being towed to Castle’s yard in his famous picture, mastless and damaged. Castle was keen to collect figureheads from old ships. In perhaps one of the most telling stories of the move from sail to steam, from Georgian to Victorian, the navy found that figureheads, absent from iron ships, had been a source of morale and inspiration for sailors, who wanted them preserved. The naval authorities found themselves in an awkward position, forced to deal with a new breed of ‘salvage’ dealers who knew the value of a 15-foot-high wooden woman. Castle’s yard perhaps best represents the sweeping away of an age: Georgian London’s seagoing stock might become Victorian London’s deckchairs.

  This area was particularly affected in the years leading up to Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1832, London’s first cholera epidemic hit Wapping. In 1831, cholera was spreading across Europe, and was particularly prevalent in the Baltic. Ships arriving in London were made to wait out a ten-day quarantine at Standgate Creek, in Deptford, but the precautions were not enough. Cholera arrived in Newcastle in the winter, and soon the Tyne colliers, whose vessels went up and down the east coast free of quarantine restrictions, brought it to London. One man, John Potts, arrived on a vessel named Mould, and was waiting to take another vessel, Dirt, back. He died quickly in Shadwell workhouse with cholera-like symptoms. A twenty-inch section of his bowels was removed for inspection, and the Central Board of Health pronounced that he had died, not from cholera, but ‘spontaneous gangrene of the bowels’. In February, three women who picked coals on the shore in Limehouse died of the disease. Their desiccated bodies had turned blue just before death, a sure sign of Asiatic cholera, or Cholera morbus. The whole of London was thrown into a panic.

  A cholera hospital was set up on HMS Dover, at Hermitage Pier, Wapping. Bodies from the ship were buried deep in the Woolwich scrubland, but the disease could not be contained. Cholera is spread through contact with contaminated faecal matter. Given the sheer scale on which sufferers evacuated water from their bodies, maintaining clean conditions was almost impossible. There is no accurate figure for the total number of deaths, but it was estimated between 2,000 and 3,000, of which almost half were in the nautical hamlets of east London. Cholera would revisit the city in the Broad Street epidemic of 1854, when a leaking cesspit contaminated with cholera polluted the water supply. A doctor, John Snow, began to understand how it was spreading, and progress was finally made on tackling the disease.

  As cholera swept Limehouse and Wapping, the old industries faded from the river, and new ones took over. The Thames Tunnel, running between Rotherhithe and Wapping, was bored beneath the river. It took a long time to complete, and work went on in fits and starts from 1825. Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom, finally succeeded in getting the tunnel open in 1834, following an earlier failed attempt by Richard Trevithick. It took years and lives to build, eventually opening in the Victorian era, when it was a huge attraction and proved that underwater tunnels could be built. (It is now part of the London overground system, after lying empty for years.) Further rapid innovations in engineering were evident in the area, and Deptford hosted London’s first railway station, opening in February 1836. The line was soon extended to London Bridge, linking the ancient with the modern along the arterial heart of London.

  The river, docks and surrounding areas continued to become increasingly busy and crowded during the nineteenth century
. But slowly, slowly the advent of improved rail and subsequently road travel meant that goods could come into other more convenient and deeper ports, such as Southampton, and still make it to London in reasonable time. Then, during the Blitz, bombs rained down upon the neglected Georgian squares of Stepney and the ancient, shabby tenements of Wapping. Some of the buildings were already empty, and many of the older residents did not return after the war. Soon, vast sullen estates would cover what had been London’s nautical hamlets. As historian and journalist Ian Nairn recalled, visiting in 1966, ‘Nobody cares enough.’

  9. Southwark and Lambeth

  South of the Thames was a marshy scrubland and a ‘hideous’ foreshore overladen ‘with dank tenements, rotten wharves, and dirty boat-houses’. Southwark encompasses Bankside, the Borough and Bermondsey, and away to the west lies Lambeth. It was a landscape punctuated by industrial buildings and windmills.

  These vast areas were too wet for building, and the expense of draining the land coupled with the lower returns meant people were not in a hurry to live there. Worse, the nearby tanneries filled the air with a pungent reek, relying as they did on human urine and dog excrement for the curing. Collectors of the excrement trolled the streets of the city, performing an entrepreneurial social service and filling buckets with what was ironically known as ‘pure’, which they then sold to the factories. Soon, these factories were exiled away from the city to belch their stink further afield.

  Here and there, small bonfires burned rubbish, and old women pegged out their washing on lines and bushes dotting the open spaces. To the east of London Bridge was St Saviour’s Dock, ‘or, as it is called, Savory … It is at present solely appropriated to barges, which discharge coals, copperas from Writtlesea in Essex, pipe-clay, corn and various other articles of commerce.’ Behind it lie the Borough and Bermondsey – an ancient, patchy settlement with a busy fruit and vegetable market and a medieval hospital, St Thomas’s. By the end of the eighteenth century, Savory marked the swampy boundary of London’s most terrifying slum, Jacob’s Island. The area was riddled with prisons: the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, the County Gaol, the House of Correction, as well as Borough Compter and the Clink.

  Away to the west is Lambeth, home then to a rambling bishop’s palace and the Baltic timber yards. There was also the School for the Indigent Blind where, from 1779, blind children were taught to weave baskets and to play musical instruments so that they might be able, wholly, or in part, to provide for their own subsistence. By the end of the Georgian period, the children were taught to read from books with raised letters. Small groups of blind musicians were employed throughout London, most famously in Covent Garden as depicted by Hogarth, to play at orgies.

  Southwark, showing Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals due south of London Bridge, detail of John Greenwood’s map, 1827

  Lambeth was rapidly becoming a pretty Surrey suburb housing nurseries, ‘pineries’ and melon pits for growing exotic fruits and forced vegetables. On the edge of the river was the huge Guy’s Hospital, founded in 1721 as a hospice for the ‘incurables’ from St Thomas’s. Close to the southern end of London Bridge were the lanes leading into Southwark, the medieval entertainment centre on the south bank, the back streets and rotting theatres of Bankside, and the already ancient Borough Market. Old and new was the theme of Southwark: medieval remnants, the new industries and pioneering medicine.

  BANKSIDE: WHERE BUTCHERS DO A BEAR

  Bankside had traditionally been the site of London’s bear-baiting. The Elizabethan court was particularly keen on this cruel sport. Bankside was a popular destination on Sundays where crowds of both rich and poor gathered to place wagers on the unfortunate contestants, though not everyone agreed it was an acceptable pastime.

  What folly is this, to keep with danger

  A great mastive dog, and fowle ouglie bear;

  And to this and end, to see them two fight,

  With terrible tearings, a full ouglie sight.

  Bear-baiting was prohibited under the Puritans, and only hare coursing remained as a dog-based sport. Upon the Restoration, the Bankside Bear Garden cranked back into life, but Charles did not encourage the sport. Cock-throwing (aiming stones or bottles at a cockerel tied to a stake), dog-fighting and dog-versus-rats matches abounded throughout. Bandogs, the frightening relative of the pit bull, were bred in Clerkenwell and used specifically for baiting larger animals. But when tastes turned towards seeing bears perform rather than die, these animals needed new targets. In February 1675, an elderly lion was baited to death on Bankside. In the same year, the Earl of Rochester’s ‘savage’ horse was ‘baited to death, of a most vast strength and greatness’.

  Approximately 19 hands high, the horse stood 6ft 3in at the shoulders. It had destroyed ‘several horses and other cattel’ and was responsible for human fatalities. Rochester sold him to the Marquess of Dorchester, but the horse then hurt his keeper and was sold to a brewer, who put him to a dray. Soon, he was breaking his halter and carting the fully laden wagon off behind him in order to attack people in the street, ‘monstrously tearing at their flesh, and eating it, the like whereof hath hardly been seen’. Realistically there was no option but to destroy this particular animal. Baiting was not the humane way of doing it, but nevertheless, the horse was put to the dogs for ‘the divertisement of his Excellency the Embassadour from the Emperour of Fez and Morocco; many of the nobility and gentry that knew the horse, and several mischiefs done by him, designing to be present’.

  The horse was put to the dogs in the ramshackle Hope Theatre (a Jacobean playhouse which had been taken over exclusively for blood sports). It killed or maimed them, all. The owner decided to stop the contest, but the crowd became a mob, demanding to see the horse baited to death, and started to pull the tiles from the roof of the theatre. Dogs were ‘once more set upon him; but they not being able to overcome him, he was run through with a sword, and dyed’. The ambassador failed to attend, owing to inclement weather.

  By the turn of the eighteenth century, baiting had moved north of the river – to Hockley-in-the-Hole, in Clerkenwell. In 1710, there was

  … a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate-market, against one from Honey-lane market, at a bull … which goes fairest and fastest in, wins all. Likewise, a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him. Also a mad ass to be baited. With a variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. To begin exactly at three of the clock.

  Hockley was the centre of bull terrier breeding in London, and so perhaps it is natural that the sport would move there. In 1756, Hockley disappeared with the continuing Fleet development, and bull-baiting moved to Spitalfields. Increasingly unpopular, it was soon confined almost exclusively to market towns.

  At the same time, Hogarth was campaigning against the ‘barbarous treatment of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind’. His ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ connected the cruel treatment of animals with the degenerate mind. The first plate of the ‘Four Stages’ features Tom Nero attempting to force an arrow into a dog’s anus, and another youth pleading with him not to.

  Attitudes were changing in London. In 1785, it was reported that

  … a fine horse, brought at great expense from Arabia, would be delightfully worried to death by dogs, in an inclosure near the Adam and Eve, in Tottenham-court-road; and to exclude low company, every admission-ticket was to cost half-a-guinea. But the interposition of the magistrates, who doubted of the innocence, or of the wisdom of training dogs and horses to mutual enmity, put a stop for once to that superfine exhibition.

  In 1822, the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle was passed. It was known as Martin’s Act. Richard Martin was a politician and campaigner for animal rights who brought Bill Burns, a costermonger, to trial for abusing his donkey. Deploying shock tactics, Martin brought the donkey i
nto the courtroom so that its injuries could be seen. Burns was the first man to be convicted for animal cruelty. In 1824, in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House on St Martin’s Lane, a group of men met with the idea of forming a new society concerned with enforcing Martin’s Act and heightening awareness of animal welfare. They were headed by the Reverend Arthur Broome and included Richard Martin and William Wilberforce. This society would soon have a new name: the RSPCA.

  CUPER’S AND VAUXHALL: ‘THE GREAT RESORT OF THE PROFLIGATE OF BOTH SEXES’

  From the early seventeenth century, Londoners busied themselves finding spas, or ‘spaws’ as they were often known. Mineral springs abounded, and the waters were sold throughout the city. Streatham water was a natural emetic sold in coffee houses as a rather drastic hangover cure. It was also said to have the alarming ability to expel worms from the body. Hoxton’s ‘balsamic’ water was a purgative, causing ‘much bustle and ferment in nature’. The water of St Pancras Wells made the boldest claims of all: it could, apparently, cure scurvy, scrofula, leprosy, piles, running sores, ulcers and cancer.

  After the Restoration, these spas became larger and more formal. More sophisticated food and drink were served, and events were held to bring in the customers. Usually, gardens were built around these spas, some with innovative designs and water features.

  Cuper’s was an old formal garden dating from at least 1589, on what is now the approach to Waterloo Bridge. In 1624, the Earl of Arundel acquired it and then leased it to Abraham Boydell Cuper, his gardener. The Cupers opened it as a pleasure garden, ‘with Bowling greens … whither many of the Westerly part of the Town resort for Diversion in the Summer Season’. The gardens were also famous for ‘their retired arbours, their shady walks ornamented with statues and ancient marbles, and especially the fireworks’.