The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  The Bishop laid the foundation stone for St Saviour’s new nave. The dust of Massinger, Fletcher, Shakespeare’s younger brother, prominent neighbours of the first Edward Sells and countless others was shovelled away with the old flooring to become hard core under the new buildings that were re-drawing the map of south London.

  Three years later the Bishop intervened in parish matters to stop funds for charities being raised by performances in the church. He did not even want the children from the parochial schools singing ‘sacred music’ there to raise money for their schools. Objections to ‘his Lordship’s interference’ were forthcoming from E. P. Sells, among others, but Edward Sells could not any longer voice his firmly held views since he had died in 1841, in retirement at Camberwell Grove.

  His voice speaks out to us in one other preserved document dating from some twenty years before. That was when the question of rebuilding the many-arched London Bridge was at last being seriously discussed, and as a prominent member of the Watermen’s Company, Edward Sells was called to give evidence at the enquiry: ‘I am a coal-merchant on Bankside,’ he said, ‘and have been acquainted with the navigation of the river Thames above bridge for upwards of forty years … From the nature of London Bridge the inconveniences are very great indeed; because there are only two arches, the centre arch and one besides that. [He is referring to the two arches slightly wider than the rest, which were constructed when the bridge was modified in the middle of the eighteenth century]. It is impossible at particular times of tide to pass through with any safety whatever; I myself have lost many hundred pounds, not through the negligence of my lightermen, but from the state of the Bridge …’ In fact more than money was lost. In the year of Edward Sells’s birth there had been a collison at the Bridge in which ten people drowned, and there were other fatalities through the years. He himself once had a narrow escape: ‘… I have been on board myself at the time accidents happened. I was on board a lighter about twelve or fourteen years ago [i.e. about 1806], she went into one of the small locks [arches] owing to not being able to make any other on account of the pressure of craft, and was sunk, and the whole of the coals lost, and the barge injured to a very considerable amount, almost so much as not to be worth repairing. I should suppose the loss not to be less than £200 in the lighter and cargo … I could state many other accidents which have happened to my own craft, but I was not actually on board; they were to the amount of many hundred pounds.’

  So we leave Edward Sells II in his role as life-long man of the river. In that he employed others but still worked on occasions alongside them, he was very much a figure of his own entrepreneurial times. Although, by the time he was old, when trousers had come in for general wear, and coats were waisted and skirted affairs on the way to becoming the Victorian frock-coat, I rather imagine that Edward Sells stayed all his life with the breeches, cutaway and neckcloth that had been the standard dress for active men of his generation. It was not till the third Sells, he of the beautiful handwriting, that the artisan mould was broken. As part of this evolution, Edward Perronet Sells was eventually to distance himself, and his own sons, from their Bankside origins.

  Chapter VIII

  ALL MODERN CONVENIENCES

  EDWARD PERRONET SELLS, born just before the French Revolution, grew to manhood while Britain was at war with Napoleon. The unregulated, unpoliced, oil-and moon-lit London of Georgian days was his heritage, with fields and hedgerows within easy reach. He married in his twenties, a young woman with another Huguenot name, which suggests a network of inherited relationships. His own eldest son first saw the light in the propitious year of the battle of Waterloo.

  He was to have eight or possibly nine more children, mostly boys, all of whom thrived. In the fullness of time several of these younger sons were despatched into the Victorian respectability of Holy Orders. (One assumes that their grandfather’s remarks, made not many years before, on the unchristian wealth of Anglican bishops, were carefully ignored.) Two of these young clergymen eventually went to minister to souls, and incidentally to acquire large tracts of land, in Australia, when it was ceasing to be a penal settlement and becoming a desirable colonial destination, thanks to the new steamships.

  Edward Perronet knew Southwark when it was a hub of the coaching business, its high street lined with inns. He was in middle life when the first railway line appeared, and lived to see this expand to a vast, countrywide network. The trains’ new speed seemed both to cause and symbolise the past’s unprecedented rapid retreat. The coach-routes, and all the paraphernalia that had attached to them, vanished like ghosts of a remote era. The villages round London were transformed not just into suburbs but into dense urban districts, unrecognisable from Edward Perronet’s youth.

  He retired from the family business in 1852, the year after he and his fellow coal-merchants had exhibited a huge block of Welsh anthracite at the Great Exhibition, that celebration of Britain’s breath-taking industrial and commercial dominance. He set up house in the comfort of suburban Bristol, where he probably had business connections through the Welsh coal-trade. He lived on for more than twenty years, dying in 1873 in a world now revolutionised by clean water, piped gas, antiseptics, anaesthesia, cheap public transport, the telegraph … No generation, before or since, has known such changes in physical habitat.

  In 1815, when Edward Perronet Sells II was born, Rennie’s long-planned Strand Bridge was well under construction. It ran ruler-straight from the side of Somerset House, across the river at the bend and through the plantations of Lambeth to St George’s Circus. In honour of the victory over Napoleon Bonaparte it was renamed ‘Waterloo Bridge’ when it was opened two years later, thus inadvertently bestowing the name of an obscure village near Brussels on the future site of an international railway station and on an entire, rather drab quarter of London.

  Another bridge, a cast-iron one further up river by the hamlet of Vauxhall, had been inaugurated the previous year: it too was designed to open up to building further countryside south of the river. The other iron bridge, however, Southwark Bridge, which dates from the same period, was intended rather to cut a carriage-route through the tortuous lanes behind Bankside. It took in a part of Bandy Leg Walk and created an artificial divide in a close-knit district. It was not popular in prospect: the river is particularly narrow at that point and those on the wharves, such as the Sells, felt that it would be an unnecessary obstruction to river traffic above the Pool. Nor, apparently, was it popular with either wheeled traffic or pedestrians, perhaps because it was a toll bridge. In Dickens’s Little Dorrit (published in 1857, but set some thirty years earlier, in the time when the Marshalsea off Borough High Street was still a debtors’ prison) it is described as being ‘as quiet after the roaring streets as though it had been in open country’. Little Dorrit goes there to be alone, away from the crowds in the prison where her father is confined, and it is here that her lovelorn admirer, the gaoler’s son, comes to find her: ‘She was absorbed in thought, and he wondered what she might be thinking about. There were piles of City roofs and chimneys, more free from smoke than on weekdays; and there were the distant masts and steeples …’

  Masts and steeples are abundantly on view in the several panoramas dating from the early nineteenth century, which was the great era of such lifelike fabrications. While the old Long Views had been just that, a view from a supposed fixed point like a bird’s-eye map, these later visions were inspired by the new possibility of balloon ascents. Regularly exhibited in a specially constructed building in Leicester Square, they were designed to be seen in the round, as celebrations of the unprecedented scope of London which was now opening out on all sides. Robert Blacker, the inventor of the genre – and of the term ‘panorama’ – created a wonderfully complete 360-degree sweep drawn from the roof of the Albion Mills by Blackfriars Bridge shortly before they burnt down. But, more scientist than artist, he restricted himself so authentically to what he could exactly see that the leadings and chimneys of the Mills loom dis
proportionately large in every sense. Other practitioners seem to have perceived that, just as with the old maps, some visual sleight-of-hand was needed to achieve an all-round clarity of recognisable street patterns and landmarks, and each artist tended to copy swathes of the town from earlier ones. Nevertheless such constructions give a wonderful impression of London’s concentrated busy-ness, complete with tiny individual figures engrossed in walking, riding, running, playing, fighting, loading boats.

  Unfortunately none of the panoramas gives a clear, face-on view of Bankside. Thomas Girtin’s 1801 version might, if we had the finished product, for he was the son of a brush maker in Bandy Leg Walk and his vantage point was ostensibly the roof of one of the Bankside glass manufacturers. However, all that survives is a tempting collection of water-colours and unfinished sketches. We see a Bankside shot-manufacturer’s tower, a gust of black smoke from a neighbouring chimney, boats moored, the Albion Mills standing roofless and skeletal: otherwise, there is just an impression of low, uneven roofs, in marked contrast to the high, classical, urban architecture that had by that time risen on the opposite shore.

  The ‘Rhinebeck’ panorama1 of 1810 creates an extraordinarily complete, microcosmic London, but here again Bankside does not much figure except for a distinctive glass-kiln belching smoke. There is also a problem of authenticity. The ships in the Pool of London, which is the central focus of this work, receive extremely detailed and skilled treatment, as do a few warehouses near the Tower. But elsewhere the buildings, including the water frontages of Bermondsey and Southwark, have clearly all been filled in by journeyman hands and show a regularity and symmetry they did not really have.

  Moving on a generation to Smith’s ‘Balloon View’ of the early 1840s, one finds something of the same drawing-by-rote in the repetitive blocks of streets, all with their identical roofs – though it could be argued that this sober homogeneity really did characterise the Georgian and Regency London that had grown up, before Victorian grandiosity began to rebuild parts of it. But here at least we get a look at a sliver of Bankside fairly close to, from the rear, as in the seventeenth-century views. Time has moved on here from the Rhinebeck vista. London Bridge has been rebuilt and St Saviour’s has been remodelled. On the east side of the Bridge the railway line has appeared, snaking in on a long viaduct from Greenwich: it is the harbinger of many more to come. Southwark and Waterloo Bridges are now in place, with their attached roads, scissoring up the old south-bank geography. On Bankside itself the ruins of the Bishop’s palace are quite extensive at this date. Exposed by a fire in 1814, they have not yet been re-submerged in nineteenth-century warehouses. The shore still has its moored boats, but there is apparently much more industry than before. This impression is confirmed by one of a series of articles2 in The Penny Magazine, a popular periodical of the time, which appeared the year before the Smith panorama:

  ‘Those dwellers and visitors to the “Great Metropolis” who cross Southwark Bridge from the City to the Borough can scarcely fail to have observed the array of tall chimneys which meets the eye on either side of its southern extremity; each one serving as a kind of beacon or guide-post to some larger manufacturing establishment beneath – here a brewery, there a saw-mill, farther on a hat factory, a distillery, a vinegar factory, and numerous others. Indeed, Southwark is as distinguishable at a distance for its numerous tall chimneys and the clouds of smoke emitted by them, as London is for its thickly-congregated church spires’ – and the rest of the article is devoted to describing the Barclay Perkins brewery, in the reverential tones often used by Victorian observers in evoking some particularly enormous and highly organised temple to capitalism and consumption. But the message is clear: the ancient town of Southwark had by now become the recognised industrial quarter of the supposedly more high-minded and august London on the opposite bank with its innumerable places of worship.

  This was the culmination of a process on Bankside which had been coming for many decades. In terms of more recent evolution, the most significant difference between the panorama of 1810 and that of the 1840s is to be found on the river. In the earlier view, the Pool is crowded with essentially the same sort of pot-bellied sailing vessels that we see in illustrations of Napoleonic battles. By the 1840s, however, all the ships, regardless of size, are slimmer, sleeker, more like the clippers that raced cargoes home on the India route. And there are also many, many more of them, moored in mid-stream several deep and crowding the new wet docks that have appeared. Trade has clearly been increasing exponentially, and the time when all foreign and dutiable goods had to pass through the congested ‘legal quays’ below London Bridge on the north bank is now a past era. However, the most significant thing about these vessels, if one looks at them carefully, is the number that now have tall black smoke stacks, sometimes in combination with sail, sometimes on their own.

  Steam power had come, and was gaining over sail year by year. The first steam-powered paddle boat, which had been built on the Clyde and journeyed round the coast of Britain, came up from Gravesend to Wapping in January 1815. Three years later a regular time-table between London and the estuary mouth had been established, something which had never been possible with sailing ships, which were always subject to winds and tides. The journey, however, was slow, at over five hours, and the unwieldy boats were often delayed by broken paddles. Laughed at by watermen and conventional skippers, these steamers were at first regarded as a bit of fun rather than a serious challenge to river ways. By 1822 only two hundred and twenty-seven steam voyages had been accomplished up or down the Thames in six months.

  Thirty years later, half that number took place every day. Steamships were arriving constantly from distant places and the face of the river had been transformed. Henry Mayhew, the great mid-Victorian social commentator, wrote: ‘The Thames is no longer the “silent highway”, since its silence is continually broken by the clatter of steam-boats. This change has materially affected the position and diminished the number of the London watermen.’

  At first, work for the watermen continued, since the steamers, like the sailing ships they were replacing, anchored in mid-Channel, and the ferries were still needed to take passengers and their baggage on and off. However, the wash created by the paddles caused trouble: people were afraid; there were many accidents, and also disastrous collisions between steam and sail. By the early 1840s – the very same time that the expansion of the railways was causing a rapid collapse in the coach trade – the steamers were becoming more efficient and manoeuvrable, and riverside piers were built. More and more of these appeared, as competing companies each tried to establish their own monopoly and poach other people’s customers. Mayhew noted: ‘Since the prevalence of steam packets as a means of locomotion along the Thames, the “stairs” … above bridge, are for the most part almost nominal stations for watermen. [These would have included the Bankside stairs that had for so long been location-markers under their ancient names – Goat stairs, Mason stairs and so on]. At London Bridge stairs (Middlesex side) there now lie but three boats, while before the steam era, or rather before the removal of old London Bridge, ten times that number of boats were to be “hailed” there.’

  Although the watermen were reluctant to admit it, in fact the development of steam had been one of several pressing reasons for removing the old bridge with its narrow arches. By the same token, it would have been impossible to cope with all the trade in goods that the steamers generated without this surplus being taken by the new wet docks, from St Katharine’s by the Tower down as far as the Isle of Dogs. Although the river of the mid-century was perceived as extraordinarily crowded, it was actually rather less chaotically full than it had been in the days when ‘all the trade of the country was laying out in the river’, as the Clerk to the Watermen’s Company remarked.

  As for the watermen, their business much diminished, their skills in ‘shooting’ the old bridge obsolete, they turned, over the space of a generation, from being the jolly, well-placed river-masters o
f tradition into figures of pity. Many were now only partially employed, taking occasional steam-passengers with luggage to the other bank of the river, and Mayhew noted ‘though they are civil and honest … they are very poor’. They could not afford to repair their ageing boats, and Parliament said that they needed stronger boats anyway against the steamboat washes. Some took to hanging around the new toll bridges up river, accosting pedestrians and offering to ferry them across for the same price as the money they would otherwise put in the turnstile – a mere penny or two. In the records of St Saviour’s parish, where so many watermen had always lived, destitute ones, or their widows, crop up frequently as examples of ‘absolute, wretched poverty’, reduced from a comfortable income to picking up discarded bread crusts in the gutters. In the very long term John Taylor, with his poetic diatribes against other forms of travel, had been right.

  Astute, too, had been the first Edward Sells, by shifting a hundred years earlier into a specialised form of lighterage. The lighterage business was unaffected by the changes, since ‘dumb’ lighters were anyway dependent on the tides to be moved – and thus on the skill of the lightermen – and ultimately it made little difference if the moving force were sail or steam. Traffic that was taken away from the lightermen by the new docks and railways was well compensated for by the overall increase in trade. As for coal-merchants, since their goods were the essential fuel that was powering all these changes, they had nothing to fear.

  This was in spite of the fact that the price of coal fell during the 1820s; and after 1831, when the government finally managed to dismantle the complex and archaic monopoly system of dues, taxes and protected employments that had gathered round the trade, it fell much more. The Sells’s Bankside neighbour William Horne, brother to Thomas, gave evidence on this to a government commission. As a scrupulous Quaker, he was in favour of abolishing the whole system under which prices were estimated according to volume by tiers of underpaid and therefore bribeable officials. The ‘chaldron’ measure was at last to be seen off into history and the sale of coal by weight came in. Horne declared, however, that ‘he was doing less business and had higher expenses than formerly’, and intimated that the fortunes that had been made by some eighteenth-century coal-merchants were now a thing of the past, which was probably true. He seemed to be suggesting that it was mainly loyalty to the family tradition that kept him in the trade. All the same, he had ‘about 12 laden lighters at his wharf on Bankside’ at any one time, and said that his net annual profit was about £4000, which was a very large income for that date: it is clear that the business was still a solidly prosperous one. The new railways and steamships, which altered the old pattern of delivery to London by sea from Tyneside, were themselves customers, and they also opened up trade in new directions. Horne exported a good deal of coal abroad, even as far as India, and this business in time came to the Charringtons, with whom Jones & Sells were later to join forces.