The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  It does not seem to say much for Progress that the Mills’ blackened, roofless walls stood for eighteen years before they were pulled down. Albion Terrace was erected on the front of the site, using some of the façade, with Rennie’s workshops at the back. During part of the time the Mills stood ruinous, William Blake was living not far away in what was still – just – known as Lambeth Marsh. There, in ‘lovely Lambeth’ that ‘mourned Jerusalem’, his visionary view of the world around him began to cohere. He passed by the shell of the Mills every time he walked into the City, and one may believe that it was this sight, rather than any general acquaintance with England’s new manufacturing towns, that was the inspiration for his ‘dark satanic mills’.7

  By the end of the century, the growing perception that Progress came at a price was being voiced by a number of Southwark inhabitants, notably by Concannen and Morgan, the authors of The History and Antiquities of the Parish of St Saviour’s, Southwark. Their comments on Potts Vinegar Manufactory show this ambivalence. Vinegar, which uses the waste matter from brewing, had long been made in the Borough, but in 1790 two families already in the trade combined to open a much bigger works near the south-west end of the Anchor Brewery: ‘The alterations made by these gentlemen can hardly come under the denomination of an improvement only, a total change having taken place by entire new erections and apparatus for the purposes of manufacture, which is now deemed to be the most extensive and convenient of the kind in England.’

  They also noted that near St Saviour’s Church, where the Bishop’s palace had once had a riverside view, were now a range of buildings right on the waterfront: Fell’s Flower Wharf, Keen and Smither’s Coal Wharf, Lingard and Sadler’s Mustard Manufactory, Calvert’s Corn Wharf, and several more including a dyeworks. The Mustard works in fact had built a gantry over narrow Clink Street to the remains of the old palace, which had been built into the walls of their warehouse. Some twenty years later a fire destroyed the warehouse, exposing the surviving late-medieval and Tudor stonework to the gaze of local people, who were just beginning to develop a greater interest in relics of the past. Without this providential fire, all vestiges of the palace would probably have been swept away in further rebuilding. As to Bankside itself, Concannen gives up on detail, but his message is clear:

  ‘This spot presents us with so great a variation from the ancient situation which history relates it to have been in, that we are almost at a loss how to introduce the subject …’ He then launches into the praise for the brewery and for ‘Thrale’s intire’ quoted earlier.

  He is, however, at his most eloquent on the subject of street paving, that issue of the time which provided for endless arguments in Vestry meetings about cost, need and rate-payers’ money. Some efforts had been made by Parliament to get Southwark properly paved and lighted in the 1760s, but the Paving Act that specifically related to the Clink Liberty (the parish of St Saviour’s) did not come in till 1786. It is not clear how well implemented it was:

  ‘Before the passing of this act of Parliament the Clink liberty merited all that opprobrium with which even those who were acquainted with it beheld it. It was supplied with something like light, watched by subscription; the variety and ill state of the pavement and the inconvenience it was to passengers is almost inconceivable; it is now improving, and though the progress is far from rapid, it is yet considerable and the benefit resulting to Society is evident …’ While some of the new lamps (which would have been oil-lamps) were ‘numerous, and tolerably brilliant’, others were ‘dismal and dirty’ . There are obscure but meaning-laden references to ‘duty’ and ‘the business of everyone attended to by no one’ and the passage ends with the pious hope that ‘future writers [will] record improvements’.

  Whose duty was it to see that these matters were attended to? It was that of specially appointed commissioners, ‘gentlemen being inhabitants of, or householders within the said Manor’, and their names are given. Among the obvious prominent citizens such as Robert Barclay, John Perkins, James Harris (a hat maker, who was to become the local MP), Thomas Prickett of the Falcon Iron Foundry, Samuel Rush (who was one of the proprietors of the large vinegar works) and Thomas Horne of the wealthy coaling family, I recognise several other Bankside citizens including a hop-factor. Also there is Edward Sells.

  This is the first time a Sells appears as a member of the Southwark establishment. The name, a few years on, becomes a familiar one in the records of local affairs. In reality this Edward Sells, the first on Bankside, had died in 1791 or ’92: Concannen’s record, of a few years later, does mention in an apologetic footnote ‘several of these are now dead’, which makes one think that at that point the paving committee was going through one of its less efficient phases. But by the end of the decade his son, the boy who had been born in 1763 and apprenticed in 1777, the year the new workhouse was built, was to become a moving spirit in the district.

  Chapter VII

  THE WORLD OF EDWARD SELLS II

  EDWARD SELLS II became a Freeman of the Watermen’s Company in 1785 at the age of twenty-two. He joined his father in the coal-business: Edward Sells I was then in his early sixties and would be dead seven years later. The trade was flourishing as the domestic and the industrial demands of the capital grew and grew. In 1705 a few hundred coaling ships, many of them small, had been enough to service London’s needs. In 1805, London received 4,856 cargoes of coal, containing about 1,350,000 tons. Fifteen years later there were to be 5,884 cargoes, accounting for nearly 1,700,000 tons, rising to over two million in 1830 and two-and-a-half million by 1840.1

  Much of the increase after 1805 arrived in town not from round the coasts and up the Thames from the east, but from the west, via the new canal system. Canals had begun to be built in the north of England from the 1760s, expressly to shift coal from mining areas into Manchester and other growing industrial centres. Gradually these short, locally owned waterways were extended, linking up with one another and with the Humber, Mersey and Severn rivers. The Oxford Canal, which was completed in 1790, brought the whole network nearer to the south of England. Over the next ten years what became the Grand Union Canal was constructed: branching off the Oxford Canal, it finally made an efficient link between the coal-producing north and west of England and the Thames at London. The new Paddington Basin and Regent’s Canal link round the north side of London carried some of the increased coal-trade, but much of it joined the river at the Grand Union junction at Brentford and came down river. So, whether it arrived by canal barge from upstream, or by lighter via the Pool of London in the traditional way, great quantities of this black wealth continued to pass through the wharves of Bankside.

  Edward Sells II married within a year or two of attaining man’s estate, as a Waterman and a coal-merchant. His eldest child, Edward Perronet Sells, was born in 1788. His wife was one year older than him and was called Sophia Gardiner Briggs. She apparently came on her mother’s side of Huguenot or possibly Swiss Protestant stock, which is said to be how the elegant Perronet was inserted into the traditional family name and continued in the family down the generations. Caution, however, is recommended, for here we are in the unreliable area of website genealogy. A posting by an Australian Sells, who from internal evidence is a direct descendant of the Sells of Bankside, nevertheless ignores the long coal-trading history of the family and the even longer connection with the Thames. He states that Sophia Briggs was the grand-daughter of Henry Briggs, chaplain to George II, great-grand-daughter of one of King William’s physicians, and descended from aristocracy on her mother’s side.

  Admittedly the Sells enterprise had done well, in the thirty-odd years since the lighterman had set up in a small way with his first shipment that cost £30.10s. But what I know of Edward Sells II’s subsequent life suggests that, whatever his prosperity, he went on regarding himself as a hands-on riverman. He had no scholarly education beyond the age of fourteen, when his apprenticeship began. I think it most unlikely that soon after emerging from this appre
nticeship, and still in his early twenties, he would have been in a position to marry a girl of relatively upper-class origins.

  The names Briggs and Perronet clearly were connected in some way, since a John Perronet Briggs was born in 1792 in Walworth, which was then a fast-developing suburban area immediately to the south of Southwark.2 He was four years younger than Edward Perronet Sells; his father worked for the Post Office, sent him to school in Epping (which was on a coach route from Southwark) and encouraged his artistic talent. He eventually became a successful Victorian painter of portraits and historical scenes, and a member of the Royal Academy. Possibly it is with him that a close family link might exist?

  There is, however, a further scrap of evidence which, like a clock striking thirteen, tends to cast doubt on the whole idea that the Perronet name came in via an advantageous marriage in the 1780s. Edward Sells I’s market sale note of 1755 was made out by someone other than the two signatories, someone with a decorative hand. Among the little flourishes added is a clear letter ‘P’ tucked into the upper part of the Greek E for Edward. So it is possible that the Perronet addition to the name long pre-dated the third Edward Sells, though he was to be the first one to use it habitually – no doubt to differentiate himself locally from his father, and also to add a touch of class. Perronet is not an uncommon Huguenot name. An eighteenth-century Edward Perronet, son of an Anglican clergyman, became a fiery Dissenting minister and an associate of the Wesleys – he wrote the rousing hymn All hail the power of Jesu’s name, Let angels prostrate fall – but I doubt if he was a Sells connection. As to whether Sophia Briggs’s maternal grandmother was really descended from a family who owned a castle in Switzerland, as the website mentioned above also claims, I have no idea. As the nineteenth century progressed, many thriving, upwardly mobile Victorian families must have cherished romanticised versions of their mainly modest origins.

  After Edward Perronet in 1788, other children followed: Sophia, named after her mother, in 1790, Vincent in ’94 and John in ’96. I know that all these, plus at least one other, survived to a good age, and there may have been more whom I have not located. The time when babies and young children of all classes died very readily was passing; the nineteenth century was to see larger families than ever before, or since. From the mid-eighteenth century a number of progressive doctors had been advocating what we would still regard today as sensible principles for the rearing of babies. The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the wisdom of Nature and the nobility of simple instincts would hardly have gained a wide currency had not the feeling of the times in any case been moving in that direction.

  ‘… The Mother who has only a few rags to cover her Child loosely, and little more than her own Breast to feed it, sees it healthy and very soon able to shift for itself; while the puny Insect, the Heir and Hope of a rich Family, lies languishing under a Load of Finery, that overpowers his Limbs, abhorring and rejecting the Dainties he is cramm’d with, till he dies a Victim to … mistaken Care and Tenderness …’

  The doctor writing this, who was probably Richard Meade, honorary physician to Coram’s Founding Hospital,3 advocated ‘laying aside all those Swathes, Bandages, Stays and Contrivances, that are most ridiculously used to close and keep the Head in its Place, and support the Body … Shoes and Stockings are very needless Incumbrances, besides that they keep the legs wet and nasty, if they are not chang’d every hour … Some imagine that clean Linnen and fresh Cloathes draw and rob [babies] of their nourishing juices … I think they cannot be changed too often, and would have them clean every day … Children [should] be kept clean and sweet, tumbled and toss’d about a good deal, and carried out every day in all Weathers.’

  Breast feeding had not been much in vogue among the comfortably off classes for a long time, but this same doctor was in favour of breast milk alone for the first three months, preferably from the child’s own mother, then a gradual introduction of ‘light broth made from beef juice, and bread pap ‘without sugar or spice’. ‘– I earnestly recommend it to every Father to have his child nursed under his own Eye … Nor suffer it to be made one of the Mysteries … from which the Men are to be excluded.’ Rather charmingly, he also referred to a baby as a delightful ‘rattle’ – that is, plaything – for a father.

  This doctor and his wife had successfully reared their own children. Edward Sells II was evidently another successful parent and he himself cannot have been brought up to grand ideas. I like to imagine him sitting after work opposite his wife Sophia in the airy first-floor parlour of 49 Bankside, appreciatively watching her feed a procession of healthy babies, each clad in clean flannel and cotton: little Edward, little Sophia, Vincent, John and perhaps several more.

  In the year of John’s birth Jenner’s discovery of how to vaccinate against smallpox was publicised. It is probable that the Sells availed themselves of this, since Southwark at that time had a well-known medical practitioner who was a fervent advocate of vaccination. This was Dr Lettsom, he who had also recommended walks on London’s bridges to combat ‘foul airs’.4 Anglican, but strongly influenced in boyhood by Quaker principles, he had married money and used his good fortune over the years to found philanthropic enterprises – soup kitchens, a dispensary, a lying-in hospital, schools for the blind and the deaf (the latter an entirely new venture) and even a Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate for ‘the scrofulous poor’. (The future Prince Regent and his circle were colonising Brighton and making sea-bathing fashionable for the first time, and Margate had long been accessible from London down the river Thames.) In 1779 Lettsom had moved to a handsome house standing in its own park on Grove Hill, Camberwell, two to three miles from the river. Pigot’s New Commercial Directory for 1823–24, a few years after his death, described the area in glowing terms:

  ‘The Grove, which is one of the principal ornaments of the neighbourhood, is a delightfully embowered walk, nearly half a mile in length, having a gradual ascent from Peckham Road. The view from the summit is extensive, rural and picturesque … The air around here is genial and invigorating: Dr Lettsom, the celebrated physician and botanist, used to designate this place and its immediate neighbourhood as the Montpelier of England.’

  The area round the Grove was then being developed, though sparsely and with high-class houses. Through subsequent decades it retained its status as a good address, and it was to there that Edward Sells II eventually retired in gentlemanly comfort before his death in 1841. But while Pigot was lauding the rurality of Camberwell, its lower-lying meadows were already sprinkled with ‘stock jobbers’ villas’. By and by whole streets of close-packed houses were to follow, eventually driving the stock-jobbers themselves, with their dreams of country living, to more distant fields. Bankside with its orchards and drying grounds was, for hundreds of years, a semi-built suburb. But Camberwell, so remote till the new bridges began to span the Thames, then became accessible by a network of new, inter-connecting roads and subject to the pressures of the exploding metropolis. The new omnibuses ran back and forth to the City. By the later part of the nineteenth century the whole district was built up, an embodiment of the phrase ‘urban sprawl’, becoming more crowded and insalubrious as rows of smaller houses were squeezed in between the existing streets.

  Such a transformation of a landscape, from open country to dense-packed town well within the span of one lifetime, calls into question the very meaning of the word ‘place’, and with it personal identity. In 1800 London, though huge by the world standard of the time, had fewer than one million inhabitants. By the mid-century the figure stood at over two million and was rising in proportion: by the end of the century it would be over six-and-a-half million. The idea of change and progress as a Good Thing, or at any rate a necessary one, was rooted in the Victorian mind, but a note of bemused regret for a lost world becomes frequent in writings towards the century’s end:

  ‘The expansion of London during the Nineteenth Century is in itself a fact unparalleled in the history of cities … I have before me a map
of the year 1834, only sixty-four years ago … It is difficult, now that the whole country south of London has been covered with villas, roads, streets, and shops, to understand how wonderful for loveliness it was until the builder seized upon it. When the ground rose out of the great Lambeth and Bermondsey Marsh … it opened out into one wild heath after another … as far south as Banstead Downs … Villages were scattered about, each with its venerable church and its peaceful churchyard; along the high roads to Dover, Southampton and Portsmouth bumped and rolled, all day and all night, the stage coaches and the waggons; the wayside inns were crowded with those who halted to drink, those who halted to dine, and those who halted to sleep … All this beauty is gone; we have destroyed it: all this beauty has gone forever; it cannot be replaced.’5

  Let us reel time rapidly back again, before 1834, before 1800, back to the young manhood of the second Edward Sells.

  Even if loveliness had already been driven from the immediate vicinity of Bankside by the late eighteenth century, memories of former days were preserved with the phrase ‘in the Bishop’s Park’, which was still used to describe plots of land immediately south of Bankside which were being gradually filled with houses. The last of the oak and apple trees that had stood in the Park and its orchards must have been cut down in these years. The local worthies were still preoccupied with errant hogs and dung-filled ditches. They also had a new, though equally earthy concern: grave-robbing.