The Jewel of Knightsbridge

by Harrod, Robin;

  In 1858 the Thames was ‘black with the filth and excrement of two million people, ebbing and flowing in the tide. The stench was so great that Members of Parliament were driven from the chamber.’ The Times called it ‘The Great Stink’, and Parliament was driven to act, resulting in Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s monumental engineering programme to construct London’s sewers.

  The usual daily amount of London sewerage discharged in about 1860 into the River Thames on the north side has been estimated as 7 million cu.ft, and on the south side, 9 million cu.ft, or a quantity equivalent to a surface of more than 36 acres in extent and 6ft in depth. When the tide rose above the orifices of the sewers, the whole drainage of the district was stopped until the tide receded again.

  Seabright Street, on the north side of Bethnal Green Road, was in the suburbs of the day. Most of the street was built in 1822 and consisted of two-storey terraced houses, with some three-storey tenements as well. When first built, many were occupied by the local silk weavers from Spitalfields. Just south of Bethnal Green Road was a large green space known as Weaver’s Green. It is still intact today. With the downturn in the silk trade and the expansion of the population into the area, it degenerated into a slum area and Charles moved away from here in the mid 1850s. He was still listed there on the electoral register until 1860 so must have kept an interest in the property.

  In the ensuing years, the west end of Bethnal Green Road was part of the haunt of Jack the Ripper.

  The 1851 census shows Charles and Elizabeth living in Seabright Street with the youngest three of their children and a 20-year-old servant, Jan Harrison. The whereabouts of the eldest child, Charles Digby, in 1851 remained a mystery for me until some time later; I eventually found him in the 1851 census with his name misspelt as Charles ‘Harrud’. This was a transcription error from the original written record that was spelt correctly, but written in such a way that it could be easily misspelt. He was a schoolboy, aged 10, boarding at Edwardstone School in Suffolk.

  I wondered what on earth the 10-year-old son of an East End grocer was doing in a small school in rural Suffolk. The 1851 census shows there were only six other pupils in the school, five boys and one girl, aged between 7 and 12. Four of them came from the London area, and there were two brothers from Weymouth. The schoolmaster was Mr John Smith, with his wife and his eldest daughter, the latter aged 21, given as the other teachers. Mr Smith’s own four children and a 14-year-old niece were also present.

  The choice of school is very unlikely to have been random. It may have been chosen after a recommendation by a friend or relative, but a private boarding school suggests the Harrod family trajectory was upwards. It was intriguing to find that Edwardstone is just 10 miles from Hartest in Suffolk, the centre of the William Harrod and Tamah Mason world. Many of the Digby family originally came from this area of south Suffolk and north Essex, so perhaps local family was the reason. It is not known how long Charles Digby stayed there, and I am not certain whether any of his brothers were sent there, though it is likely they were for a spell. No brothers were found there in the 1861 census, but a spell of three years or so at the school could easily be accommodated between the census dates.

  The school seems to have continued for some time in Edwardstone, and was most recently called Edwardstone House School, working as some sort of reformatory. There was also a local Edwardstone School, which caused some confusion. Following contact with a local historian, a poster for an exhibition of old photographs held at the parish hall featured a lovely ‘Dickensian’ photograph of Victorian children at ‘Edwardstone School’. Every pupil looked like the ‘artful dodger’. Sadly, this lovely photograph proved to be of the local village school.

  Having built up his business over the course of twenty years at Cable Street and his other premises, a move was in the pipeline. The premises in Cable Street remained in Harrod’s name until 1856 and may have been used for a short while after that, but a foothold had been gradually established in West London from about 1849 onwards, and this was to lead to a momentous change of direction and situation.

  Though Charles Henry Harrod and his family were living in Bethnal Green in 1851, and the shop in Cable Street was going strong for a few years beyond that, Charles had already sown the seeds of his future in west London, in the Brompton Road.

  One of the customers of his Eastcheap wholesale grocery was Philip Henry Burden, who since at least 1851 ran a grocery business in Kensington. They had probably become friends. Burden is thought to have found himself in some financial difficulty, and his shop at 8 Middle Queen Buildings, Brompton, was becoming a problem. Charles Henry began to help him by paying the rent, presumably in return for some of the profits. Sometime after Charles Henry started the relationship with Burden, and prior to 1853 or 1854 when he took over the premises, there was a gradual handover of the shop. The Harrod family meantime lived in Bethnal Green, and the shop in Cable Street continued until 1856.

  The Sussex Express reported in a review feature in September 1905 that Charles Henry had needed capital of £500 to take over the premises in 1854 (something like £50,000 today). He could only have found this from the profits earned in Cable Street. Perhaps they had saved some of the £300 bequest left to Elizabeth by her father and received in 1844. The move was timely, with the Great Exhibition of 1851 opening up the area to a wider audience.

  Burden was, until recently, a mysterious character. Apart from an entry in the 1851 Post Office and 1853 Watkins Directories, listing him as a grocer at the Brompton address, there was not a single trace of him in the conventional British records. There was a Philip Henry Burden, born in the first quarter of 1851 in Kensington, who may have been his son, and a Frederick Burden, who appears in the 1851 census listed as an assistant draper at the same premises as William Neale, a master bootmaker.

  One family source, Charles Henry’s third son, Henry Digby Harrod, wrote a letter some years later which stated that Burden left England and went abroad. The miracle of the Internet has now, with the help of a distant Australian relative called David Burden, revealed all. The story now goes as follows.

  Frederick Burden and his brother, Philip Henry, were born in Ledbury, Herefordshire; the latter in August 1824. Their father, John, was a draper. Several of the family moved to London, including an uncle who became a grocer in North London. Philip Henry set up his grocer’s shop in Brompton. On the night of the 1851 census, by chance he was not at home; he was a visitor with the Goode family in Islington. By then, he was married to Mary Jones, and had a 2-month-old son, also called Philip Henry. Back at Philip’s house in Brompton was his brother Frederick, a visitor to his house next door to William Neale. All was now explained.

  Philip Henry Burden continued working at 8 Middle Queens Buildings until at least 1854. His son had been born there in 1851, as was his second son, Frederick Britten, born in 1852 and his daughter, Annie, born in 1854.

  Soon after Annie’s birth Philip and his family emigrated to South Australia. Once there, Philip worked as secretary to the Adelaide Advertiser and Chronicle Company, but died soon after in 1864, aged only 39, with ‘congestion of the lungs’ (probably meaning pneumonia). His widow Mary, obviously not one to let the grass grow under her skirt, married a widower, John Barrow, in 1865. He was the editor and one of the owners of the same newspaper. Philip and Mary’s son, Frederick, later became editor of the newspaper.

  So, the story of the handover of the Brompton shop is substantially correct. Charles Henry Harrod obviously started the connection in 1849, but it was not until 1854 that he actually took over the premises, and it would have been in the first half of 1854 that his family moved into the rooms behind the shop. It is interesting to note that Harrods has celebrated its anniversaries dated from the year 1849, which they have designated as the start of Harrods – they were perhaps a tad premature. An 1854 street directory confirms Charles’s listing in Brompton Road as ‘Grocers & Tea dealers: Harrod, C.H.’.

  The only sadness for Charles a
nd Elizabeth at this exciting time would have been the death of their youngest son, Joseph Digby, at 8 Middle Queens Buildings on 10 June 1854, aged 7 years. According to his death certificate, Joseph died from ‘scarlatina’ and ‘albuminuria’, present for four weeks.

  Scarlatina, or scarlet fever, was an extremely dangerous childhood infection in those days. The cause was not known at the time, though now we know it is produced by a reaction to a streptococcal bacterial infection, usually in the throat. It exists mostly in a much milder form these days, causing a rash and minor symptoms. It is normally treated with antibiotics. In 1854 it was a more serious disease and there were no antibiotics. Death was quite common. The cause of death was often kidney failure, caused by glomerulonephritis, an inflammation of the kidney, and this took its toll over some weeks or months. Albuminuria is the name for the presence of protein in the urine caused by the kidney failure. In Joseph’s case, it had taken four weeks from the onset of the illness. Like his sister, who died young, and most children who died in the nineteenth century, Joseph died at home. He is buried with his father and mother in Brompton Cemetery.

  At this time, and for some years afterwards, the Brompton Road was not conspicuously salubrious. Queen’s Gardens, a narrow lane two doors away from the shop, contained a few little cottages and a large wood yard, and North Street behind was said to be ‘a mass of filth from one end to the other’. The shops on the Brompton Road were single-storey extensions tacked on to the fronts of the original houses which were built between 1781 and 1783. A rather sanitised artists’ impression of the shop frontage and interior in 1849, produced by Harrods in 1949 for publicity surrounding their centenary, paints a more refined picture with clean streets and handsome carriages.

  The move west has been ascribed to several factors. Charles probably saw the likelihood of a better life for his family in this part of London, and he had the vision to see potential in the site, and so had offered to buy Burden out of his lease. The fashionable parts of London were beginning to spread westwards, and in 1851 the Great Exhibition, with its Crystal Palace, was built in Hyde Park and opened by Queen Victoria. It drew much attention and enormous crowds to the area. By 1854 the Exhibition had closed and the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham Hill in South London, and reconstructed in what was, in effect, a 200-acre Victorian theme park.

  In the early days, Charles Henry’s initial customers must have been the small and poor community of locals, somewhat removed from fashionable London. In the three decades prior to 1850, the road west from Hyde Park Corner lay through the unsavoury Knightsbridge village, possessing none of the fine buildings now present, and on to a thoroughly rural Kensington. Knightsbridge was named after a bridge which crossed the River Westbourne at a point where Albert Gate and the French Embassy now stand. There was danger in the maze of dirty back streets along the route, and highway robberies in the district were common.

  The area was gradually changing from semi-rural hamlet to built-up suburb, initially mostly by ribbon development and then by backfilling of those properties. Alongside Burden’s shop in the 1851 census there were two cobblers, an apothecary and a draper, as well as some professional men. As the neighbourhood changed, Harrod’s new residential neighbours, with their new money, learnt of his store and his willingness to sell what was wanted. Harrod had acquired experience in tea imports, so this principal part of the shop was a natural extension of his existing talents. Over time the grocery line expanded into glassware, linens and objets d’art.

  This part of my story has relied heavily on British History Online for much of the history and details of the area, and a lot of the description which follows comes from this source.

  The property was a small house at 8 Middle Queen’s Buildings; this was renamed 105 Brompton Road a decade later. Even the name ‘Brompton Road’ did not exist before 1863. Until 1835 it extended only as far as the junction with Thurloe Place (opposite the Brompton Oratory); after this, Fulham Road began. It now denotes the portion of the old highway from London to Fulham stretching south-westwards from Knightsbridge as far as Pelham Street, beyond which it becomes Fulham Road.

  There was always a lot of traffic on the old turnpike road which linked London not only with Little Chelsea and Fulham, but also (via Putney Bridge) with parts of Surrey. Putney Bridge, then known as Fulham Bridge until it was rebuilt in 1886, had replaced a ferry in 1729 and was the only crossing of the Thames between London Bridge and Kingston.

  The area beyond Knightsbridge was surrounded by gardens and open fields and ‘Brompton’, the term now used loosely for the general area, then applied most precisely to the village which lay westwards. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the village of Brompton was renowned for its wholesome, clean air and flourishing markets and nursery gardens. Brompton Park Nursery (where the V&A now stands), was occupied by Henry Wise, Queen Anne’s celebrated gardener and a well-known property owner. Brompton, like much of Kensington, was excellent nursery ground and it was intensively cultivated. Gradually over the ensuing decades, the occasional cottages became more frequent and, more particularly, numerous hostelries were added.

  The early nineteenth century saw a huge change in London’s landscape. An increase in building developments led to the transformation of Brompton from a prosperous rural parish to a busy metropolitan borough. The first property boom took place between 1760 and 1770. From about 1764 terraced houses with large front gardens were built along present-day Brompton Road in the area including and surrounding Harrods. This newly developed part of Brompton Road came to be known as ‘New Brompton’, to distinguish it from the original village further west, which became ‘Old Brompton’. The original Brompton Lane became known as Old Brompton Road.

  Road widening after 1862 opened up the area further but restricted the size of the front gardens on Brompton Road, making those properties less desirable as residential properties and so more commercial activity followed. After 1864 Tattersalls, the famous racehorse auctioneers, removed from Hyde Park Corner to a large site behind Nos 38–58 Brompton Road, which was behind the houses opposite Harrods. It was the start of a friendship between the Tattersall and Harrod families. These were the days of hansom cabs and delivery carts rattling noisily over narrow streets, the days of beaver hats (made of felted beaver fur, these were very fashionable and the soft, yet resilient material could be easily combed to make a variety of hat shapes, including the familiar top hat) and billycocks (a felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler), and skin-tight trousers and near-crinolines.

  It was about this time that the Crimean War began; the Great Exhibition moved from Hyde Park to Sydenham; the Houses of Parliament were in the course of construction; Cheltenham Ladies College opened its doors to pupils and the first pillar boxes appeared on Britain’s streets, courtesy of Rowland Hill. It must have also been about this time that Charles Henry decided to commission photographs of himself and his wife. They were in their prime at around 55 and 45 respectively, and look suitably serious.

  The family moved into the house at the back of the shop in 1854, and as said earlier, soon after that they lost their fourth son, Joseph Digby. The remaining children, Charles, William and Henry, were aged 13, 11 and 9 years old respectively, and although I do not know if Charles was yet back from his school in Suffolk, it is likely that all three of them were living in the house in Brompton Road most of the time.

  Part of a letter from the third son, Henry Digby, written fifty years later and mentioned earlier, throws some light on this time:

  I can recollect my father took over the business from a Mr Burden who went to some other country as near as I know 1853 or 1854 and carried it on in conjunction with his Wholesale Business which he had in Eastcheap at the time. We all moved into the house at the back of the shop – I went to school close bye and helped in the shop on and off till about 1858 when I went away in the country to live.

  Although I cannot be sure of all his dates and facts, as some proved wrong late
r, his suggestion that he went into the country to live might indicate a spell at Edwardstone School, like his brother.

  The shop in 1854 consisted of three rooms, and Charles Henry employed two assistants and a messenger boy. The frontage of the shop was between 30–40ft and the shop sold mainly groceries and hardware goods, with a turnover of £20 a week. Charles Henry spent his time consolidating his ownership of the shop and appears to have made very few changes apart from some extension of the range of goods on offer.

  Viewed through the retrospectroscope, it seems as if he was slow to expand the shop’s activities in response to the gradually changing nature of his clientele. Perhaps he had only limited ambitions, but the purchase of the business may have left him short of capital and playing safe was the order of the day. After all, he had had the initial vision to make the purchase and the move, and the speed of change only looks slow in comparison to what was yet to come.

  Over the following years, his growing children started to spend some time working with him. Charles Digby, the eldest, probably left school in 1857 when he was about 16, and was sent off to work in a wholesale grocery business in the City, probably at the Eastcheap site that Charles Henry had been running. Tim Dale states, in Harrods: A Palace in Knightsbridge, that he worked with a company called Read, Warren & Harrison. I have found no trace of them, although 38 Eastcheap was taken over by a Bristow, Warren & Harrison after 1856.

  Charles was certainly back and working in Brompton Road by 1861, when the census has him listed as a ‘commercial clerk’. It is likely he came back at the end of 1860 when his mother Elizabeth died, in the November of that year, at just 50 years old. Her death certificate states she died of ‘Capillary Bronchitis – three weeks’. That diagnosis is quite an old-fashioned term, not used today, although the description is accurate. Often called ‘bronchiolitis’ in children, it is usually caused by a virus and causes severe breathing difficulties when the smaller tubes in the lungs get clogged with mucous. In severe cases, pneumonia follows and is the cause of death. The fact that she was ill for three weeks suggests she had never recovered from the original acute illness and would have gradually faded. Elizabeth was buried alongside her young son, Joseph, in Brompton Cemetery.