Security problems had become so grave that the annual ‘losses’ to crime in the late eighteenth century were thought to amount to over half a million pounds. This is an almost unbelievable amount when translated into today’s terms, but not so surprising when a conservative estimate suggests that upwards of a third of all workers on the river were operating as thieves or fencing stolen goods.
The West India, opened in 1802, was London’s first trading dock. It was soon expanded into the West India Import and Export Docks and the Millwall Docks, for the handling and processing of timber, sugar, fruits, rum and grains.
Next to open were the London Docks at Wapping in 1805. With their deep-water basins, secure walls and massive warehouses, a wide variety of cargo could be handled there, including wines and Guinness, dried fruits, drugs, spices and ivory.
St Katharine’s Dock, the dock closest to the City, was opened in 1828, with the Royal Foundation of St Katharine’s precinct being razed to the ground and the order moved out to Regent’s Park. This was the order which, through its unique protection of the queens of England, had actually survived Henry VHI’s dissolution of the monasteries, but it was powerless in the face of the march of trade and commerce. Much of the most valuable cargoes, including teas and essential oils, were handled at St Katharine’s, being brought up by barge from the lower docks.
As these new enterprises flourished they were quickly followed by developments in the East India Dock and by the Royals group. With their associated warehouse complexes, roads and canals, they formed a chain along both banks of the river, from the Tower right down to Blackwall and beyond. Then, in 1886, downstream on the Essex marshes, twenty-six miles from Tower Bridge, the Tilbury Docks were opened, with little hint of what an important, even devastating, role they would play in the lives of the dockland community in the second half of the next century.
With their precious stores of spices, silks and other luxury goods, gleaned from the far reaches of the Empire, the docks were built with as much thought for security as the great Tower itself had been back in the time of the Conqueror, though it was now almost overshadowed by its parvenu neighbours.
The buildings were a symbol of the prosperity of the few, for the poor they were a presence of wealth that was literally so near yet so very far away.
In London Labour and the London Poor, Henry Mayhew describes the docks of the 1850s as being the ‘real hell’, where men with ‘sweaty faces dyed blue from the cargoes of indigo’ and others ‘coughing and spluttering as they stacked the yellow bins of sulphur and lead-coloured copper-ore’ all battled to earn a living. He writes of the dark vaults that were the warehouses, where men inhaled ‘fumes of wine, the fungus smell of dry rot, and the stench of hides’, and of the coal-whippers, those who heaved the fuel, black with the choking dust ‘from the roots of their hair to the tips of their finger-nails’.
As one coal-whipper told Mayhew:
‘I have known the coal-dust to be that thick in a ship’s hold that I’ve been unable to see my mate, though he was only two feet from me.’
Even with such working conditions, people were still prepared to fight one another for the opportunity of even half a day’s casual labour. Life was brutal and often short for these workers, but trade prospered as the new docks brought more business into the port and to the associated trades and industries which serviced it. The economic and physical influence of the docks impacted ever deeper on the lives of the people of the East End.
It is difficult now to envisage the presence of the great fleets of ships packed so closely that a person could walk right across the river, moving from ship to ship as if on a bridge; and to imagine a time when the river was so busy it might take up to two months before a ship could discharge her cargo.
There was an irony that the communities which had grown up at the water’s edge were now being ripped apart by the coming of the docks, as homes, shops and workplaces were swept away by the new developments. Then, with the coming of the roads, canals and railways to service them, the topography of East London was transformed for ever – another foreshadowing of the future, when communities would disappear with the closure of the docks. But for now they were the very lifeblood of the East End, and the labour and services needed to keep trade going – from stevedore to carpenter, from rat-catcher to brothel-keeper, from pawnbroker to rope-maker – were provided by the cockneys in their riverside parishes.
These were to earn themselves the reputation of being the most unpleasant and licentious of all the neighbourhoods east of the City, as the previously isolated hamlets took on the new roles dictated by the pressures of speculation, trade and Empire.
*
The East End which, at the opening of the eighteenth century, had been a series of discrete, semi-rural settlements, separated by open spaces, where comfortably-off residents and visitors strolled through meadows, admiring the wild flowers, before stopping for a drink at a pleasant inn, had, at its close, been all but supplanted by a very different East End.
The labouring poor, with their daily grind of getting by in the best way they could in the overcrowded, vermin-ridden slums, packed into narrow, dung-slicked streets and foggy alleyways, all reeking of Dickensian deprivation, would leave far more of an impression on the popular imagination as denning images of the East End of London.
PART 2
Feeding the Imperial Powerhouse
Lines of imperial power have always flowed along rivers.
Simon Schama
[ 3 ]
With the financial and commercial dominance resulting from the Industrial Revolution, and with growing riches being accumulated from the expansion of Empire, London was experiencing a time of extraordinary boom. Urbanization was moving apace; growing numbers of immigrants were arriving from home and abroad; and, for some, there was unprecedented bounty.
Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, some of the well-to-do individuals who were benefiting from these transitions were still living in the East End alongside the labouring classes, who had to either find some sort of work or rely on outdoor poor relief. But the social structure was changing and London was becoming the socially segregated place it largely remains today.
As the prosperous flourished on the tide of wealth washing in from the Empire, carried aboard the ships moored in the docks on the Thames, the poor suffered as they competed for the privilege of unloading the goods and raw materials ready for processing in the sweatshops and factories of the East End. The remaining ranks of the increasingly rich were now choosing to move out to join their peers in the wealthy enclaves further west, abandoning the East End to progressive exploitation, overcrowding and impoverishment.
With the pressure coming from rising numbers of domestic and foreign immigrants, most of whom gravitated towards the cheapest places to live, the East End was fast living up to its reputation as the ‘City of Dreadful Night’, described by James Thomson in his disturbing poem about the slums, and in the stark engravings of Gustave Doré. It was becoming a place fit only for paupers, criminals and the despondent. The American author Jack London, who wrote of this divergence of fortune, called those who suffered without benefiting from England’s ‘industrial supremacy’ the ‘ghetto folk’.
As well as this widening gap – both physical and financial – between rich and poor, industrialization and urbanization were having their own impact on traditional ways of living. Some changes were arguably for the better: mass-production meant that more people could afford the new, factory-made goods; and the political climate was such that centuries-old inequalities of opportunity, privilege and obligation were again being questioned – just as they had been at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt. But, for the majority of the labouring classes, particularly the casuals, the negative effects of industrialization crushed any potential benefits underfoot. It was not solely the appalling living and working conditions – workers, whether urban or rural, had never exactly lived in fine style; it was the destruction of
traditional communities, and the subsequent loss of family structures and customary patterns of life, which were to be of revolutionary significance. Freed from feudal-rooted tyrannies that had so ordered their lives, workers were now in thrall to the vagaries of the clock, and of the market, with its ever more powerful mechanism swallowing them up like so much anonymous fodder to be chewed on and discarded once the goodness had been consumed. As industrialization surged forwards, the very nature of work itself changed: having left homes where their families had been settled for generations, workers found themselves alone and competing with machinery, and not always successfully. As Thomas Carlyle wrote:
The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.
The experience for many was of poor health, sickly children and insecurity – a brutal life. Edwin Chadwick, the health reformer, concluded in his 1842 report that the foul conditions in which people worked and lived produced
… a population short-lived, improvident, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratification.
When nothing, except possibly hardship, was guaranteed for the poorer among the working classes, it is no wonder they sought some kind of gratification.
As manufacturing expanded, it was ever more dependent on factory-based production, and availability of work was, ironically, more unreliable than ever. Labour-intensive trades were unable to compete with the more cost-effective – in financial terms, at least – machine production, and larger workshops were being moved out to the provinces, where there were cheaper rents, space for expansion and lower fuel costs. These changes accelerated the decline of traditional East End trades such as leather-processing and heavy engineering, and added to the already grave problems being endured by workers such as the hand-loom weavers of the silk industry. But the change which probably had most impact on the area, because of the effect it had on its own workers, and also because of the ramifications for all the ancillary trades and services, was the virtual collapse in the 1860s of Thames ship-building.
The Poplar shipyards had witnessed a tremendous period of boom at the beginning of the decade, with those involved in the direct workforce rising from fewer than 15,000 in 1861 to almost 30,000 by 1865. But this good fortune was to prove transitory. The distance from essential coal and iron supplies meant that fixed costs were always high, and an economic crisis in 1866 saw the industry facing other problems. As a result, the first of the ship-building companies collapsed. This was to be the initial domino in a long line of others that would, by the beginning of the following year, result in 30,000 jobless in the immediate Poplar area alone, marking the start of the terminal decline of the London-based industry.
Those who were still employed found themselves vying with a greatly swollen pool of labour, as two other major East End occupations of the time – house and railway construction – were also caught by the downturn.
What employment there was was often casual and in noxious industries, with workers receiving inadequate wages in an environment which damaged their health and destroyed their spirit. But 1866 was to prove a bad time for reasons other than unemployment. That autumn, a cholera epidemic killed almost 4,000 East Enders and left many more sick and ailing. When the costs of treatment – such as it was – and of burial were added to the rocketing bread prices, the result of a disastrous harvest, the financial burden on people already close to pauperism was catastrophic. Then the winter of 1866–7 brought weather so severe that the remaining river trades were brought practically to a halt. Rising appeals for assistance saw the crisis spreading, as the financial pinch was felt by East End householders, who were liable, through the rates, to meet the costs of parish relief for the needy.
The Boards of Guardians, who ran the workhouses and decided on entitlement and the rate of relief, faced with these escalating demands, attempted to encourage any workhouse inmates who were reasonably able-bodied to take part in schemes to send them to the colonies; moving the problem elsewhere was a sure way of getting them ‘off the parish’.
Men, women and children were shipped off, the majority to Canada, as cheap, unskilled labour. Most were never heard from again. The Guardians of East London were still not happy, however, as fewer than 1,000 individuals took up the places offered, leaving behind the vast majority still needing relief.
But there was one growth area in employment: as large-scale industry plummeted into serious decline, there was an opportunistic mopping up of those prepared to work in the sweated trades.
Sweating was a system of mass manufacture of cheap goods, which involved jobs being broken down into simple tasks, involving assembly or finishing of some kind, so that the cheapest, unskilled labour could be used. The Victorian invention of the sewing machine, the steam-powered sawmill and the band saw provided the means for middlemen – the sweaters – to supply their ill-paid workforce with supplies of garment and shoe parts, brush bristles and heads, card and paper for matchboxes and so on, which they would make up into finished products for the sweater to sell on to the wholesaler. This repetitive, labour-intensive production was carried out either in the workers’ or in the sweaters’ homes, typically in jam-packed, insanitary, ill-lit conditions, by a workforce which had little choice about whether the environment was acceptable.
Charities, philanthropists, social investigators and theorists, parliamentarians, popular novelists and thrill-seekers were all beginning to focus their attention on what was happening in east London. Drawn by stories of poverty and immorality, they looked into problems such as homelessness, but they also saw the place, with its inhabitants, as a problem in itself. In 1855, for instance, a Royal Commission, ostensibly concerned with housing and overcrowding, was most anxious about immorality among the poor, and its contribution to the ungovernable nature of the creatures evolving in the slums.
In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold described the inhabitants of east London as ‘those vast, miserable, unmanageable masses of sunken people’, as if there was no helping them by effecting change, or no separating them as individual human beings.
There were observably disgraceful conditions in which people were expected to survive, but, for those observing, there was also the worrying presence of an insubordinate and unmanageable underclass – the ‘roughs’, the casual labouring poor, the itinerants – whose squalid lives were so alien and hideous that they might as well have been living in a foreign country as on the boundary of the financial centre of the greatest empire ever known. While the Victorian City prospered, people less than a mile away were working as pure finders collecting buckets full of dog excrement from the streets to sell for use in the leather industry – and desperate girls and women were selling their bodies for pennies in the shadow of the massive blind walls of dock warehouses stuffed with riches from all over the world. It was said that so-called darkest Africa was more familiar to the middle and upper classes than were the East End slums on their doorsteps.
These people were to be pitied and dealt with, but were also to be feared. They were an immoral underclass living in hovel-infested courts, the breeding ground of savage criminals; and they were too close to us. The idea that they might turn nasty and actually spill out of their rookeries was terrifying. And the problem was spreading.
According to the 1851 census, getting on for half of the country’s population was now urbanized – a unique event in the history of the world – and all too many of them were gravitating towards the already heaving East End.
If the fuse was not to be blown, something had to be done, and Andrew Mearns, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, published in 1883, was right when he suggested that until the housing crisis was dealt with, the good works of all the missions, churches and philanthropists put together were pointless. With multiple occupancy of rooms, sanitation was at best inadequate and at worst non-existent. To exacerbate the problem, many were ousted from what meagre places they did inhabit as whole areas were cleared to make way
for extensions to the already massive brewery complexes, docks and railways, and for the roads to service them, the warehouses to hold the goods, offices to administer them and factories and their yards to process them.
If a person was unable to afford a bed, or could not find a place with one of the charities springing up throughout the East End, the options were stark. The casual ward of the workhouse was one choice, but a high price was exacted: humiliating questioning, sharing a communal bath and the requirement that a person undertook some pointless, back-breaking labour such as stone-breaking or turning a treadmill.
Common lodging houses, bad as they were, were cheap and certainly preferable to the workhouse or to ‘carrying the banner’ all night – walking the ill-lit, potentially violent streets, finding what shelter you could, while risking being charged as a vagrant or attacked by thieves too drunk to realize you had nothing. The very poorest and the unemployed, or unemployable, had no option but to live on the streets, scavenging what livelihood they could from the detritus of the surrounding slums, but the common lodging houses proliferated, patronized by those who could find the few pennies necessary. Any scrap of space was let to as many as could feasibly be fitted on to the bug-ridden straw and sacking-covered floorboards, and could share the communal bucket that served as their lavatory.
Many such lodgings were attached to pubs, providing a ready and willing market for the publican’s wares, and earned themselves, not entirely unfairly, the reputation of being the haunt of criminals. At that end of the social continuum, crime was not so much deviant behaviour as a means of making a living through a time-served apprenticeship.
After the 1848 cholera epidemic had cut its way with such catastrophic consequences through the squalid lodging houses and overcrowded courts, leaving the tenants of newer, healthier accommodation comparatively unscathed, public opinion was focused on the conditions in which some people were living. The time was right for Lord Ashley to describe to his peers how he had witnessed five families sharing a single, sorry room – one in each corner and the fifth in the middle – and to put his Lodging House Bill through Parliament.
My East End Page 5
