Georgian London: Into the Streets

by Lucy Inglis

  For centuries, Hackney had been served by St Augustine’s Church, built in 1253 – at the same time as the parish was mentioned in Henry III’s state papers. From 1578, the Black and White House sat beside the church, serving first as a grand private home for a merchant of the Muscovy Company and then for many years as a boarding school for girls before being shut down and demolished at the end of the eighteenth century. By then, it was clear that St Augustine’s would not do. In 1789, St John-at-Hackney was built to hold 2,000 parishioners. The nave of St Augustine’s was demolished, leaving just the tower standing. The ancient settlement had given way to the modern, just as Hackney’s pastures were giving way to the brickfields of Kingsland and the encroaching streets.

  Hackney had long been famous for its quality of education. In the Elizabethan period, many intellectuals made it their home, and various highly regarded schools were established over the next centuries. Sir John Cass, whose family moved from the City to South Hackney to escape the plague, left money for the education of ninety boys and girls. Forty years after his death in 1708, the Sir John Cass Foundation was formed to continue his work. Various John Cass institutions still remain in London, forming part of the London Metropolitan University, the John Cass School of Art in Whitechapel and the John Cass School of Education in Stratford.

  Throughout Hackney there were also the ‘dissenting academies’, which arrived in the late seventeenth century to provide a grammar school-type education to boys from dissenting religions, such as Calvinism and Unitarianism, who would not be admitted to Oxford or Cambridge – or subsequently to the mainstream clergy or education system as teachers and tutors. Dissenting academies were particularly important in the encouragement of independent thought in London during the eighteenth century and eventually in the formation of the Victorian Nonconformist movement. Many of the boys educated in these schools became ministers and missionaries who would go on to represent their churches throughout the world.

  The earliest of the academies were small, private establishments attached to the households of wealthy dissenters. Many were located around Newington Green, where ‘Protestant nonconformity and London commerce … featured strongly in local society’. Stoke Newington, a convenient three miles from London, had long been a favoured place for wealthy merchants to keep a country house. It had a small population, occupied locally in farming and market gardening. It was a pleasant and private place in which to found a small dissenting academy of ten or so pupils.

  These academies were dependent upon the tutor, usually well known in his field, and the patron who made the space and funds available. One of the most prominent of these academies was run by Thomas Rowe from 1678. In his book called The Nonconformist’s Memorial, Edmund Calamy wrote that Rowe had ‘a peculiar talent of winning youth to the love of virtue and learning, both by his pleasant conversation and by a familiar way of making difficult subjects easily intelligible’. As was typical of these small colleges, it closed when Rowe left for America, in 1686, eventually becoming Vice-President of Yale. Amongst his pupils were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Wesley (father of John) and Isaac Watts, who would return to Hackney and help design Abney Park with Lady Mary Abney (which was transformed into a non-denominational cemetery, in 1840). At the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, dissent became more tolerated, and the academies could grow.

  Hoxton College, another dissenting academy, had already existed in previous incarnations in Moorfields and Stepney before becoming established in Hoxton, in 1762. It adhered to Calvinist teachings and had a strong scientific curriculum. Several of the tutors were Fellows of the Royal Society, and the young William Godwin (1756–1836), later the radical writer and husband of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, was a student there.

  The Hackney academy, founded in 1786 and called New College, was also of particular note but did not last long. It occupied what had been Homerton Hall and provided a liberal and broad-ranging education regardless of religious belief. It had been founded in the London Coffee House on Cheapside one December evening, in 1785, when a group of thirty-seven Protestant City men decided to create a school which would focus on intellectual excellence. The college was an instant success, thriving in the atmosphere of religious tolerance which followed the Gordon Riots. It was, however, soon associated with radicalism and sedition. This was something the college seemed to encourage: they invited Thomas Paine as their after-dinner speaker only weeks after he was charged with seditious libel for Rights of Man. In 1794, William Stone, a governor of the college, was arrested on charges of high treason. He had allegedly been passing information to the French Republic. Although he was eventually acquitted, his trial sounded the death knell for the dissenters’ college. By 1796, it was closed, after a decade of huge success. Joseph Priestley – the theologian and philosopher, and the man responsible for the discovery of oxygen – had been a popular tutor. The critic William Hazlitt had been a pupil, amongst many other young men who went on to play significant roles in early nineteenth-century life in Britain. Hazlitt wrote to his father in 1793, recording his weekly expenses at the school, which included ‘a shilling for washing; two for fire; another shilling for tea and sugar; and now another for candles, letters etc.’. The closure of the school marked the beginning of Hackney’s slow decline from its eighteenth-century heyday. Today, the Jack Dunning Estate stands on the eighteen-acre site of New College.

  At the time of New College’s short reign, industry began to move in, attracting large numbers of unskilled migrant workers in need of accommodation. The River Lea had always been navigable, and at Hackney Wick there were wharves where goods came and went. In 1780, the Berger family arrived and began to manufacture and refine paint pigments. (Two centuries later, their business was absorbed into Crown Paints, in 1988.) Hackney saw the manufacture of silk, printed calico, boots and shoes, and finally the very first plastics, before the local industries died altogether under the crush of population.

  Nearby Bethnal Green remained rural for longer than Hackney. It was further out, around two and a half miles north-east of St Paul’s Cathedral, and for a long time it was part of Stepney. Dairy farms flourished there. In 1743, the hamlet was created a parish in its own right. Like Hackney, most of the origins of the hamlet were Tudor and rather grand, with impressive manor houses dotting the open fields. The south end of the parish sat partly on Hares Marsh and Foulmere, with a causeway known as Dog Row. Along the edges of Bethnal Green, cattle and carriages flooded into London from Essex, resulting in broken pavements and ‘heaps of filth … every 10 or 20 yards’. Old Bethnal Green Road had previously been known as Rogue Lane, and was still called Whore’s Lane as late as 1717. In 1756, Bethnal Green Road, just to the south, replaced it as the main thoroughfare.

  By the mid-eighteenth century, Bethnal Green was beginning to house a poorer sort of inhabitant. The large Tudor manor houses were being subdivided into tenements or let as private asylums. Then, from the 1760s, a building boom took hold and hundreds of small houses, with frontages anywhere between thirteen and nineteen feet, were thrown up using local bricks. They were to house the weavers of Spitalfields, who were gradually moving east and were mainly concentrated in the south-west part of the parish. In 1751, Bethnal Green village had only contained around 150 dwellings. By the early 1790s, the parish of Bethnal Green had gained around 3,500 new houses.

  Bethnal Green, detail of map by John Greenwood, 1827

  In the 1790s, boxing became a popular sporting feature of the area. The Jewish boxer Daniel Mendoza lived there when he became the English heavyweight champion, between 1792 and 1795. He lost the title, in 1795, to Byron’s boxing tutor, John Jackson. A charismatic and popular local figure, Mendoza ran a pub in Whitechapel, then turned to teaching boxing to supplement his income. York Hall, on Old Ford Road, is one of Britain’s most well-known boxing venues, continuing the tradition of the sport in the area. Mendoza’s thirty years in Bethnal Green represent its move from a solidly middle-class area,
to a working-class one, populated by people of English, French and Jewish origin. The wealthier residents retreated from this torrent of incomers, and from the pockmarked landscape which brick-making and building had created in what had been open countryside.

  From 1800, the construction of Globe Town to house weavers who worked from their own homes, rather than in the dying factory system, further changed the landscape of Bethnal Green. Thousands of poorer weavers came to occupy Globe Town in the last decades of the Georgian period, with up to 20,000 looms working in the area.

  Hackney and Bethnal Green were altered dramatically during the Georgian period. Such turbulence also created the two recurring themes of these neighbouring areas: violence and madness.

  ‘BEATING HER VERY BARBAROUSLY’: HACKNEY JUSTICE

  Many roads from the east passed through the large parishes of Hackney and Bethnal Green. Traffic was a fact of life. Much of it was cattle heading to Smithfield, or traders coming and going from the City. The long gaps between the hamlets meant the roads were dangerous at night, and the long distances between neighbours saw an early rise in crimes against property.

  Highway robbery rose dramatically after the Restoration. The reasons are straightforward: people were moving around more, carrying cash and wearing valuable accessories. The rise in business travel meant lone men were more likely to have money on them, not just for transactions, but for subsistence. In the early 1700s, banknotes were still relatively untrustworthy, and coins were king. The lonely roads of Hackney, where many came and went from East Anglia and the north, provided rich pickings for men who could arm themselves and had a taste for danger.

  Quaker Francis Trumble turned to highway robbery, in 1739, when he accosted Thomas Brown on a footpath through a cornfield in Hackney. First, he asked Brown the way to Newington, but then, after Brown had directed him and turned away, he finally summoned the courage to begin the hold-up. Trumble had a pair of pistols and demanded money from Brown, who handed over about ninepence. He also took Brown’s silver pocket watch. As Trumble took off towards Hackney village, Brown shouted for assistance. Villagers nearby began a chase that lasted over three-quarters of an hour. They included Edward Dixon, who was standing drinking outside a pub with a friend. He found Trumble hiding under a hedge at the edge of Hackney Downs. Trumble threatened to shoot, and took off again towards the Kingsland Road, ‘through an Orchard, into a large Field of Beans and Peas’. Dixon finally ran him down, at the head of what had become a ‘thick’ crowd. Trumble, cornered, threatened them again with his pistols but finally agreed to give himself up to the man ‘in his own hair’, the wigless Dixon. Dixon took him to a nearby ‘Publick house’ where he noted Trumble ‘behaved very well’, and turned him over to Justice Henry Norris.

  Norris was Henry Fielding’s counterpart in Hackney, serving as Justice for a long period and overseeing a period of substantial change in both the local area and the nature of London crime itself. Norris used The Mermaid Tavern in Mare Street as his base, although this wasn’t always to the liking of the landlord who, in 1738, refused to ‘store’ prisoners Norris wanted to commit for trial. The Mermaid still stands at 364 Mare Street, although it closed as a pub in 1944 and is now Mermaid Fabrics, a haberdashery.

  Norris committed Trumble for trial at the Old Bailey, where Dixon testified that when he had confiscated Trumble’s pistols, they had contained nothing but bullets and paper wadding, with no charge. His threats to shoot had been mere bluff. The Old Bailey heard how both Trumble’s parents had killed themselves – his mother by hanging, and his father by drowning himself. His father’s suicide, only weeks before Francis Trumble took to the road, appeared to have been the trigger for his crime. Witnesses testified that, in the weeks leading up to the robbery, Francis had been increasingly melancholy and distracted. He refused to answer the door when worried friends called at his house in Hackney, and he had a ‘wildness’ in his eyes. After his committal to Newgate, his fellow prisoners kept him on suicide watch, successfully defeating his attempts to cut his own throat and to hang himself. The court found him guilty, on the basis that he was conscious of the difference between right and wrong. On 18 July, he was sentenced to hang. Nine days later, he secured a royal pardon. What became of him after that is not known.

  Another, and more famous, highwayman associated with Hackney is Dick Turpin. His ties with Hackney’s Gregory Gang came as they were moving from deer poaching to housebreaking. As with highway robbery, housebreaking was a relatively unusual phenomenon outside central urban areas, but the rise of personal wealth and the appetite for new luxury goods meant that burglary had become highly profitable by the 1730s. The Gregory Gang operated all over London, staying away from Hackney, but eventually they were caught after one of their own members turned them in.

  John Wheeler could have been as young as fifteen when he became involved with the gang. He came from a notorious Hackney family: his father, also John Wheeler, was a scourge of the area who came up before Norris numerous times during the 1730s. The first time was in 1731, when his wife, Thomasin, made a complaint to Norris against him for ‘beating & abusing her being Sick & for denying to assist in the maintenance of her & her Children & threatning her Saying were no more pity to kill her than to kill a dog’. Norris granted a warrant for his arrest. Two years later, after being in and out of prison, Wheeler again threatened to murder his wife, and was again arrested. In 1735, Norris committed him to Newgate for ‘beating her very barbarously’. He was to be released ‘at his wife’s desire’.

  Norris recorded many instances of domestic violence. They are not all instances of husbands beating their wives and girlfriends. William and Mary Kingsland were a constant nuisance in the area, in the late 1730s. He beat her, she beat him, and they both assaulted other people on different occasions. Fights between women were common, and violent family rows make regular appearances in Norris’s notebook. His approach seems matter-of-fact, and though his entries are bald, they convey blame and painful details eloquently, such as ‘pulled by ye hair’, ‘punching him in the face with a Cartwhip’ and ‘beating her with a broomstick’. Just as now, it is impossible to impose any sort of measurement on the incidence of domestic violence in Georgian London, but Norris’s notes indicate that some justices took it seriously. From the scanty details surrounding the circumstances of those reporting the crimes, it appears they came predominantly from the lower social classes. However, Mary Wollstonecraft, who was born to a middle-class family in neighbouring Hoxton, took to lying outside her mother’s room as a teenager to prevent her father entering in a drunken and violent rage. This, like so many incidences of domestic violence, was hidden from the authorities.

  The 1730s and 1740s, when Henry Norris was active, saw a spike in London crime – a result of the demobilization of parts of the army and widespread unemployment. Highwaymen were often out-of-work or demobbed soldiers. Housebreaking was on the rise, and householders were taking desperate measures to protect their property. In October 1736, The Gentleman’s Magazine reported that Mr Jones, a florist near the Hackney turnpike, having been ‘several Times Robb’d of Valuable Flowers-Roots, had provided a Gun with Several Wires to the Trigger that when touch’d would go off, which unawares doing himself, it shatter’d his Shoulder to Pieces’.

  Hackney made early efforts to maintain public order: its night watch was instigated in 1617; and by 1630, there was a cage, a whipping post and a ducking stool installed in St Augustine’s churchyard. By the end of the seventeenth century, there was a watch house nearby and another at the end of the road to Cambridge Heath. In 1708, a fire station was also erected by the churchyard. In 1728, another watch house was opened in part of the Shoulder of Mutton at the end of Hackney Broadway, which is now the Cat and Mutton. Sixteen constables patrolled the streets at night. By 1740, the beats were well defined and the constables patrolled in pairs. Those watching the main roads to London were mounted. The watch was a serious business: each constable was equipped with a gun and bay
onet, and keen to use them.

  Hackney’s watchmen were initially paid through parish funds. But later, private subscriptions supplied most of the money. In 1738, the Turnpike Trust was set up to maintain the road to London; soon afterwards, it became clear that it would be necessary to light the road at night to deter criminals. By 1756, the roads towards London were lit by oil lamps. Hackney continued an impressive and committed night watch for the rest of the century. As the streets became built up, more foot patrols and more comprehensive street lighting were introduced.

  The parish was rightly proud of its efforts. Yet criminal corruption was flourishing only a stone’s throw away, in Bethnal Green. Joseph Merceron was born to parents of Huguenot extraction in Brick Lane, around 1764. He began his career as a clerk in a lottery office but was soon appointed a churchwarden of St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green. He then became, in rapid succession, a vestryman, a tax commissioner and a Justice of the Peace. Soon, he dominated the area through the taxation system, receiving backhanders for favourable assessments. He was a larger-than-life rough character, who encouraged dog fighting and bull-baiting. Merceron’s success illustrated the power of the parish over local affairs, and the dominance that one man, if determined enough, could achieve. The Vicar of St Matthew’s was his arch-enemy, but he disappeared in 1818, whilst Merceron was imprisoned for appropriating £1,000 of public funds. Another enemy of Merceron’s was John Wilmot, whose father had been a labourer who raised enough money to start building houses in Bethnal Green. Merceron died, in 1839, with a fortune of £300,000, ‘though he always appeared to be in poor circumstances’.

  In Merceron’s most successful period of corruption and extortion, Hackney and Bethnal Green were celebrating their success at maintaining public order. Hackney even petitioned against the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, providing evidence of over a century of efforts to control their own crime. They also said they had driven all the criminals into lawless Tottenham.