The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  We know that the gentlemanly Oldner family lived near to 49. There was also, quite early in the century, an Edmund Shallett living nearby whose father, Arthur, had been a founder of the Baptist chapel and school in Zoar Street: references crop up elsewhere to ‘Shallett’s chapel’. In the 1740s the Shalletts acquired another house by renting it from William Oldner, nephew and heir of Sir Richard, and this house was to become 46 Bankside. Another family, who came to own several houses in that part of Bankside besides the one they lived in and remained there for much of the century, were the Astells or Astills, boat-builders. A further substantial inhabitant for a time was a John Cator, who was to be an executor for Henry Thrale, the brewery owner, and whose descendants were to lay out the Cator estate in Greenwich.

  These people were worlds away from the fashionably idle society of the newly built quarter of St James’s. But it is equally certain that they were far from being what their contemporary Daniel Defoe called ‘the mechanick part of mankind … the meer labouring people who depend on their hands.’ The popular history of our own egalitarian time has perpetrated a misleading two-nations or upstairs-downstairs view of past societies, as if to be rich or poor in eighteenth-century London were the only alternatives. But in reality, more than any Continental city at that time, London was characterised by a large and constantly increasing class of what Defoe called ‘the middling sort, who live well.’ These were not people with money behind them, but those in some sort of trade or who owned small-scale manufacturies – most enterprises were small then, by later standards, usually employing no more than half a dozen people. Although they probably did not get their hands dirty or callused, ‘the middling sort’ had to work hard and keep their wits about them to maintain the position to which they had risen.

  But their wives did not need to labour, either at some money-earning occupation of their own or at the heavy work within their own homes. In fact Continental visitors were surprised at what relatively easy lives such married women had compared with the French or German housewife. London was famous as a town of shops, so that by the eighteenth century the London housewife no longer needed to spin, brew or make her own bread, or candles, as her counterpart had done in previous generations. She would, however, have been likely to undergo numerous child-births (even the illustrious Mrs Thrale, in the big Bankside brewery later in the century, was almost constantly pregnant) and she would have had the children that survived round her feet a good deal. She would have stitched many of their clothes and would have taught them herself, at any rate while they were small. The upper-middle-class Victorian habit of segregating the children at the top of the house with a Nurse in charge lay far in the future, and servants in a house like 49 had too much physical labour to be able to baby-mind effectively as well. Of course the children of ‘the middling sort’ needed to acquire literacy, and manners and, unlike the offspring of humble people, the boys would not have been expected to join their fathers in the shop or workshop until they were of a suitable age to be formally apprenticed. It is no doubt significant of a general ease of living, as well as of the prudence of the self-made businessman, that the eighteenth-century English had the reputation of being kinder to their children than were their Continental counterparts and of taking more trouble with them.

  It is difficult to generalise because ‘the middling sort’ were such a large, catch-all group, ranging from prosperous craftsmen and master-watermen to well-to-do merchants, but essentially the people who lived in 49 when its handsome panelling was new were not needy. They could afford to keep a servant or two, although these were usually very young girls who might require a good deal of supervision and teaching by example. The employers could read and write and had the spare energy to take an interest in the world at large – the first daily newspaper started in 1702. They attended church or chapel; they had few but relatively expensive clothes of good cloth; they could entertain guests elegantly, if they wished, in their first-floor room with its view of St Paul’s. They weren’t, perhaps, quite gentlefolk (though the old appellation ‘gentleman’ for a member of the landed upper classes was being more and more widely applied to anyone who looked and sounded the part) but they might reasonably expect, if business continued to prosper, that their sons or grandsons might be gentlefolk. Meanwhile, it was reckoned that on an income of no more than £50 a year (which was about three to five times that of a labouring man) a small family could live, with care, in genteel comfort – though many ‘middling people’ had a considerably higher income than that.

  Our popular image of eighteenth-century interiors is largely derived from the surviving grand houses of the time, and should be treated with caution. It is nevertheless true that general levels of both comfort and gentility in London were steadily increasing. Just as, in the seventeenth century, pewter had replaced the old wooden trenchers and chairs had replaced the oak benches and stools, so now blue and white ‘Oriental’ pottery – much of it made along the river in Lambeth – became more widely used, and chairs became more comfortable with new paddings. Small ‘Turkey’ carpets now covered bare boards. It would seem from this – though I have not seen the point expressly made – that those age-old household nuisances, rats and fleas, had at last been banished from well-run homes, though constant vigilance was no doubt still required to protect the nice new furnishings. In addition to the heavy old cupboards, lacquered cabinets appeared, and cane work from India and small marquetry tables; silver tankards and bowls were more widely distributed, so were mirrors and prints. A clock became a standard feature of a comfortable home, as did tea-pots, tea-caddies and delicate cups for the new expensive habit of ‘taking tay’. Candles, earlier carried around in single candlesticks, could now be stuck in fixed wall-sconces, often with a mirror behind them to reflect more light.

  But sheer space in a family house was still quite restricted, as compared with later English middle-class norms: living rooms frequently contained beds that folded away for the day into cupboards or were tipped up and disguised as bookcases. In 49, the one or two servants may have slept in the attic, which at that date was a small room tucked away behind the cornice so as not to spoil the house’s ‘rational proportions’. (The present larger attic is a twentieth-century addition.) But there cannot have been anything of a subterranean ‘below-stairs’ life in this house in the eighteenth or much of the nineteenth century: its cellars, built long before for storage not for habitation, were penetrated by little air or daylight, and artificial light was not then a feasible option. I am not even sure that, in the eighteenth century, the cellar at the front had the narrow, gridded opening in the pavement above that appears in early twentieth-century photos. (This was covered in again by the 1950s.) It is most likely, given Bankside’s vulnerability to flooding up to the late nineteenth century, that the front cellar had no opening to daylight at all and therefore could never have functioned as the classic Georgian or Victorian kitchen.

  I believe that the kitchen was where it had probably been in the days of the inn: in the back room on the ground floor which opened onto the yard and garden. The front room, on the opposite side of the central lobby and stairs, may have served as a family dining room – although, within a generation or two, it had probably become a place of male resort, where the master of the house and his associates smoked and talked and where paperwork was done. In any case, it was customary in the eighteenth century for meals to be taken in the best room in the house, usually (as in 49) the first-floor front room, even when this room also served as a bedchamber.

  A business or trading household rose early to keep the apprentices or men in the workshop up to the mark. The master and his wife breakfasted on bread rolls and hot drinks: chocolate, coffee or tea. The habit of drinking small ale for breakfast as at other meals, which ran through all the preceding centuries, was dying out among the politer classes. Dinner, the main meal, had traditionally been eaten at midday and continued to be in working-class households, but in middle-class circles it was slipping
to two or even later as the main part of the day was used for more pressing matters. Supper was therefore a fairly light meal: bread and cheese and ale, perhaps, or apple pie maybe, with more tea. The sober Dissenting tendency on Bankside probably meant that ‘ardent spirits … mixed with hot water’ appeared less liberally there than elsewhere, though the idea of total abstinence from alcohol had not yet set in. A visiting Frenchman3 provided the following description of dinner ‘among the middling sort’, apparently regarding it as more succulent than the usual dinner across the Channel:

  ‘… they have ten or twelve sorts of common meats, which infallibly take their turns at their tables, and two dishes are their dinners: a pudding, for instance, and a piece of roast beef; another time they will have a piece of boil’d beef, and then they salt it some days beforehand, and besiege it with five or six heaps of cabbage, carrots, turnips, or some other herbs or roots, well pepper’d and salted, and swimming in butter: a leg of roast or boil’d mutton dish’d up with the same dainties, fowls, pigs, ox tripe, and tongues, rabbits, pidgeons, all well-moisten’d with butter, without larding …’

  The amount of meat consumed in England, rather than the Continental staple of bread, had long been a source of foreign comment. No wonder large numbers of farmers, small-holders and market gardeners from the country round made their entire living by providing for London tables, bringing their produce several times a week to markets such as the one in Borough High Street.

  The back room on the first floor of 49 would have been used for sleeping but perhaps also as an extra sitting room. There were two similar-sized rooms on the floor above. Off each of the two larger upstairs rooms was a small closet. This was not a cupboard nor, yet, a water closet, but the only form of private space in houses where the other rooms had multiple uses. This closet might contain a dressing table or a wash-stand, a wig-stand, a locked cabinet for jewellery or papers, perhaps a writing desk. There would be a chamber-pot kept there, or possibly a more comfortable close-stool (commode), for the only lavatory at 49 at this period, as in all but very grand houses, was a privy somewhere outside at the back. This would have had no water, but went down straight into a cess-pit, individual or shared with another house. Chamber-pots were often used in the main rooms as well as in the closets, called for as needed with a nonchalance we would today find hard to emulate. They were afterwards removed by the servant for emptying in the privy, carried down the same staircase up which the steaming roast dinner had recently been brought. Sluttish servants, according to the satirist Swift, thought nothing of answering the front door pot in hand, and were quite likely to deposit the contents in the street gutter if that saved a trip to the back regions.

  There were no drains on Bankside at this date, as we understand drains: only open ditches meant for rain water (though frequently sullied with other matter). Water for washing, cooking and drinking was mainly supplied through pipes from the ‘water engine’ at Bankend, towards London Bridge, which raised water from the river. It would have been an intermittent, unpressurised supply to the ground floor only, usually running into a lead cistern in the kitchen or yard. Many houses supplemented this with a rain-water cistern also, for in spite of the heaviness of water and the floors up which it had to be carried, foreigners commented on how much water the English used and how clean inside their houses were. No doubt this was all part of a concerted effort to counteract the dirt of London without: the greasy black mud in the mainly unpaved side streets, and the capital’s growing problem of soot from the burning of coal in open grates. But coal-dust was a problem indoors too; so were the stains left on walls and ceilings by the burning of the smelly, guttering tallow candles which were the standard form of light after dark. Beeswax candles were expensive luxuries, and domestic oil-lamps, with their superior light, still lay many decades in the future.

  The fact is that, for all its improved comfort and fine wood panelling and its air of elegance, in the eighteenth century 49 Bankside must have been, on winter nights, a place of icy draughts through the sash windows and shutters, with only oases of warmth in front of the fireplaces – so much less effective, foreigners complained, than sensible stoves. Yellow candle-light made only feeble pools amid the surrounding darkness, with no lamps even outside but those provided at doorways by individuals, or by the occasional shop-window lit with many candles to advertise its wares. In summer, the sulphurous scent of burning coal might have been less, though it still had to be used for cooking, but through the open windows would have come a medley of other smells: hot pies, raw fish, dead rabbits and live chickens hawked on the street, joints being carried to and from cook-shops, the coarse ‘black soap’ used for scrubbing, the household privy, the street gutter, the neighbour’s stable. In addition, there was the dank, watery scent of the ever-present river, and its muddy shore below the Bankside which was exposed at each low tide and onto which the open ditches poured their contents. Nearer St Saviour’s, where the old houses had not been rebuilt, in the ancient heart of what was commonly known as ‘the Clink Liberty’, St Mary Overie’s Dock was contaminated with slaughter-house refuse not far from the point where water was raised by the ‘engine’ to be piped to households. There was an early workhouse among the lanes, overlooking a burial ground, and, as the century went on, this area round the old Bishop’s palace acquired a reputation for poverty. No wonder Bankside itself, however neat its new houses and fine its view, never became truly fashionable.

  The English use of coal for domestic heating and cooking, and the prodigal way it was burnt in open grates, was a frequent source of comment among visitors from abroad. By the early eighteenth century coal had become a key commodity for London and was soon to become so for many other towns. Coal was to fuel the industrial revolution which, occurring earlier in Britain than anywhere else, was to carry the British into a position of power and influence unparalleled in the world. It was also to play a major role in the individual history of 49 Bankside.

  Up to the mid-sixteenth century London householders, like those everywhere else in the land, had burnt only wood. But the demand for wood was huge, and growing, since it was used to make practically everything, from buckets and tools to houses and the ships that were so important to England’s power and prosperity. Much was also burnt to make charcoal to fuel the gradually developing industries. The little coal that was extracted, mainly from open-cast sites, might be used in some of these, but in general the furnaces and kilns that made iron, tiles, bricks, pottery and glass, the ovens that refined sugar, made soap and saltpetre, dried malt and hops for brewing and baked bread – all were traditionally dependent on supplies of wood. By the time Elizabeth was on the throne it was obvious that the heritage of forests had dwindled alarmingly; prices of wood began to rise, and attention was turned to coal. The ‘sea-coal’ that had been brought by ship in small amounts from Newcastle to London since the thirteenth century now arrived in much larger quantities. At first used just for industry – it was made obligatory for glassworks in 1615 – it soon moved ‘from the forge into the kitchen and hall’.4 It was soft, brownish coal with a faintly sulphurous smell: wood was considered nicer, so the Palace of Westminster and other grand mansions went on burning logs. It was the mass of ordinary Londoners who took to coal.

  By the Civil War, when winter supplies were temporarily disrupted while the royalists held Newcastle and some of the poor were said to have died of cold, coal was recognised to be ‘absolutely necessary to the maintenance and support of [London] life’. After the Restoration it was the generally used domestic fuel even in wealthy households. It was also a valuable commodity, subject to City speculation. Unlike their Continental neighbours, the younger sons of great families in post-Restoration England did not hesitate to go into what later generations of the same families would stigmatise as ‘trade’. Many landed families in the north of England were delighted to exploit the seams of coal discovered on their land, while others bought into trading and mining ventures. ‘Coal-merchant’ was then a t
erm for a substantial stake-holder: it had none of the connotations of lower-class grime it was later to acquire when the description was appropriated by minor middle-men. Sir Edmund Berry-Godfrey, the one who was implicated in the ‘Popish Plot’ of 1678 and was later found murdered on Primrose Hill, dealt in coal and wood, supplying Whitehall customers. He owned a house and wharf near Charing Cross, where Northumberland Avenue now runs down to the Embankment. A hundred years later the great coal firm of Charringtons was established at the same address.

  Taxes on coal brought in important revenues for the Crown, and extra taxes were imposed for specific ends, such as rebuilding St Paul’s and other churches after the Fire and – later – the construction of bridges. These additional levies, plus the transport costs and the numerous middle-men, raised the cost of coal to London customers to five times the cost at the pit mouth. But at the same time the government tried to keep prices down by waging an interminable war on price-fixing cartels and other forms of corruption, such as short-measure, or hoarding by suppliers when bad weather or enemy action interrupted the trade from the coaling ports. Pepys recorded in 1667, when Rochester was blockaded by the Dutch and the colliers could not make it up the Thames to the Pool of London, ‘the want already of coals and the despair of having any’. The usual London price of about £1.10s. a chaldron (the unsatisfactorily imprecise heaped measure of between twenty-five and twenty-eight hundredweight that was then used) had gone up to £5.10s. It returned to base a few months later. Though the shortage was real, some people certainly made a good thing out of it. On a national level, the coal-industry was the equivalent of the petroleum-oil industry of our own day, with Tyneside and its fortunes as susceptible to outside interference as those of the Gulf States. Coal was ‘Newcastle gold’.