The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  There were also, included in the fittings, a number of window blinds, evidently designed to shut out the industrial views Bankside now enjoyed. Behind these, reinforced after dusk by heavy, lined curtains, the inhabitants could live in a protected cocoon. As a French visitor of the period remarked, English houses were by then ‘like chimneys turned inside out’ – covered in soot on the outside, but warm, clean and comfortable within.

  Both the industries of Bankside and the comfort these earned for their proprietors continued to increase the amount of filth flowing into the Thames. In the 1840s the problem was exacerbated by a prohibition on any new cess-pits and further attempts to get existing ones linked to sewers. This was when the working-class houses in the Skin Market, which was now reduced to a narrow lane off Cardinal Cap Alley, were linked up to the Moss Alley drain and hence to the Boar’s Head sluice. There was also the public health reformer Edwin Chadwick’s disastrous attempt to ‘cleanse’ the sewers by flushing them through, which simply drove more filth out into the river. Discussion of a sensible drainage plan was further impeded by an old-fashioned fixed idea that waste was valuable manure and must somehow continue to produce wealth, as it had when the night-soil men sold cartloads to farmers of Kent and Middlesex. Not until another serious cholera epidemic in 1848–9 was the problem really faced. The Builder finally declared of Thames water in 1851:

  ‘Our tea is infused in it; our viandes cooked; our toddy mixed; our milk watered with it; our beer brewed in it, and every liquid element commingles with the filthy exuvicae of the foul and every more foully increasing tide: we lave in it; the body linen of the multitude is steeped therein, and when wrung out the desiccated essences of poison envelope the breathing pores of the wearers.’

  While this condemnation may have been a little far-reaching (the specific nature of the cholera bacillus was then unknown), you do begin to wonder how the Sells managed, collectively, to rear such large, healthy families. Perhaps, like their neighbours Horne and Mann, they installed a cistern filter: perhaps Edward Perronet Sells’s children were of stout constitution and developed an early toleration of impurities, bolstered by a good diet. For the burial registers of St Saviour’s parish show the marked difference that had now appeared in the mortality rates of different social classes. In the registers for 1831, the year of the first cholera epidemic, a trickle of people of all ages, including many babies and young children, died in Bear Lane, Moss Alley, White Hart Lane and two in Cardinal Cap Alley itself, whereas none of the names of the more prosperous families, including the Sells, figure in the record.5

  It is, however, a fact that the departure from Bankside of Vincent Sells, the bachelor uncle, appears to have taken place in 1831 or very soon after. Evidently, even though 49 had been nicely done up and modernised, something induced him to move out. The house was then let to George Holditch, who I believe acted as confidential clerk to Jones & Sells. Vincent remained in the firm, in partnership with his brother Edward Perronet, and he continued to show interest and support for the long-drawn-out cause of St Saviour’s restoration, but when he inherited 49 outright, on his father’s death in Camberwell ten years later, he did not move back in.

  He had not gone far, only to the newly built, rather grand Trinity Square, one of the developments that were filling up the fields south of St George’s church going towards the still-countrified cross-roads at Newington – transformed today as the Elephant and Castle. I know this because Trinity Square is the address that appears on Vincent’s death certificate. Although he was only forty-eight, he survived his father by less than a year, succumbing in April 1842 to what was recorded as ‘pneumonia’, a term then widely used to cover any chest complaint including the dreaded, unmentionable tuberculosis. So probably it was not the cholera scare that had driven him from Bankside ten years before but a chronic weakness in the lungs: I can well imagine the doctors of the time telling him he would be better off away from the river fogs in a nice, new district. Oddly, when his Will was proved, he was stated to have died on Bankside, but there is presumably a confusion here with his business address. His collection of ‘plate’ and ‘all my books’ he left to his brother Edward Perronet. Number 49 he left jointly to his nephew, Edward Perronet II, and to ‘my friend George Ware’ for them to hold in Trust. The beneficiary of the Trust was to be his unmarried sister, Sophia Elizabeth, four years older than him, who was to get the rent from it.

  As for the health-risks of Bankside, these were real, as later years were to prove. The figures eventually produced by John Snow, who was Chadwick’s associate and a far more astute observer, finally spelt out how crucial to health the water supply was. In the cholera epidemic of 1849 the death rates in Lambeth and Southwark were similar. But in the 1854 outbreak Lambeth deaths were very much fewer. In the intervening years Southwark had gone on being supplied by the infamous Southwark & Vauxhall Waterworks, to which the Sells sold coal and about which George Cruikshank had already been drawing scary cartoons over twenty years before. Lambeth, however, had now begun to get water from Thames Ditton, above the Teddington Lock, far from the murky tides down river.

  However, during the 1830s and ’40s, Vincent’s brother, Edward Perronet, continued robustly to live on Bankside with his own large family. In the Census for 1841, when they were at number 54 with the counting house (and no doubt extra living space too) next door in 55, the household included nine children, ranging in ages from mid-twenties to three, plus two female servants. And by 1851 number 49 was once more back in Sells occupation, for the eldest son, Edward Perronet II (Vincent’s nephew) was now in his mid-thirties and living there with his wife, a small son and daughter, and the usual complement of two servants. It is to be hoped that he duly paid his aunt Sophia her rent.

  Southwark, following the rest of London, finally received a modern drainage system in the late 1860s, under the auspices of the Metropolitan Board of Works (founded 1855). This was also the point at which the Borough had to relinquish the last of its old claims to being a separate town and became administratively one with the capital.6 But as a footnote to this whole saga of sewage and water, there is a question in my mind that I have not been able to resolve. Information on exactly how the drainage was sorted out on Bankside is not easy to come by. So far, neither the copious Metropolitan Board of Works archives, nor the scant and little-recorded ones in the possession of Southwark Council, have provided much material on this. The accounts of the great works of Joseph Bazalgette all tend to concentrate on his most celebrated and revolutionary plan, that for London north of the river. This involved new cross-town interceptor sewers at several levels, the lowest of which ran right along the Thames, much of it under the new and specially built Embankment, to carry all the waste eastwards in the direction of the sea. This changed for ever the aspect of the north bank of the river above Blackfriars Bridge, sweeping away old wharves and water-stairs on that side and confirming the districts west of Charing Cross as the beaux quartiers. The Embankment was, incidentally, funded in part from a new tax on coal arriving in London, as many other grand public building works had been before. Fortunately the Prime Minister Gladstone’s appalling proposal, that the Embankment Gardens should be covered in tall, government-owned blocks which could be let at expensive rents to enable the government to do without income tax, was not taken up.

  It was recognised that the lower-lying south bank was going to be harder to drain, geographically, and I suspect it was also felt that south London did not matter as much. Since Southwark and Bermondsey were now the major district of wharves and industry, no great riverfront works could be undertaken on that side without upsetting the whole organisation of London’s trade. Only a small stretch of embankment was ever built there, the Albert Embankment in Lambeth, west of the Archbishop’s Palace: it provided, incidentally, a new site for St Thomas’s Hospital, which had been displaced by the railway. After some Parliamentary dispute, the eventual plan for south London was like that for the north, on a modified and (one would t
hink) less satisfactory pattern, making use of some existing old watercourses. A high-level sewer ran eastwards from Clapham to Deptford Creek, with a line in from Dulwich (the old Effra stream). A low-level sewer, which already existed in part as the Earl Sewer, ran from Putney High Street to Deptford, where a pumping station was installed to take the waste further on its way. But since this low-level sewer was well inland from the Thames, it is hard to see how it dealt with the problem of the riverside areas of Southwark and Bermondsey, which had established drains straight into the Thames. Can some attempt have been made to reverse the flow in the old conduits, such as the one that discharged at Boar’s Head sluice, so as to have them discharge southwards into the interceptor sewer? Such an idea was not unknown: it was used when drainage was laid in Chicago and the old sewers needed to be diverted from the lake. But if anything like this came to pass on Bankside, the record itself seems to have drained away into some archival pit from which I have not managed to retrieve it.

  Before the drainage works were completed, or the Albert Embankment opened, the Sells had left Bankside.

  In 1852 Edward Perronet Sells was sixty-four. Through the 1840s he had been the rate-payer on three Bankside properties, numbers 54, 55 and 56, and also on ‘a wharf, warehouse and stabling’, but by the Census of 1851 these had been let to other people working in the coal-trade. His eldest son, Edward Perronet II, then aged thirty-six, was established in the business and living in number 49 with his wife, servants and his own two small children. Most of the other eight or nine offspring were launched on life in various ways; even the youngest, Arthur, was now fourteen. Like his own father, the first Edward Perronet Sells had concerned himself with Vestry business, taking his turn as churchwarden or commissioner for this or that parish charity, and in 1852 he signalled his final departure into a comfortable retirement in Bristol by resigning as Treasurer of St Saviour’s National Schools. These then still occupied part of the plot of the old Cross Bones graveyard, which was not finally closed for burial till the following year. Edward Perronet had held the post of Treasurer ‘honourably and beneficially to the School for 25 years’. The school committee presented him with a testimonial to say so, mentioning his ‘devotion to the cause of education in general’ and his ‘uniform kindness’. In return the committee offered gratitude and ‘their earnest Prayer for his health and happiness’, a prayer that evidently bore fruit as he lived to the age of eighty-five. The testimonial, which is the size of a modern poster, contains nine different kinds of typeface, elaborated further with decorative flourishes, as if it were a sample-sheet for apprentice printers, and must have brought joy to the heart of a man whose own handwriting was so exquisite. Clearly he prized it, for it remains in the family to this day.

  The head of Jones & Sells was now Edward Perronet II. A photograph exists of this gentleman, looking large and cheerful with a spade-shaped mid-Victorian beard, but it is not the kind of face one associates with the acumen and determination of the old lightermen Sells. In 1856 the family firm amalgamated with another to form Wright, Sells, Dale and Surtees, but three years later Mr Wright died and there was a further amalgamation with Charringtons. This firm had been prominent in opening up the trade in soft Welsh coal from the Rhondda; they were now on their way to becoming the dominant coal-merchants of the time. The amalgamation eventually created Charrington, Sells, Dale & Co., which traded under that name for the next sixty years, had its own railway waggons, and was immortalised by John Betjeman.

  … Charrington, Sells, Dale and Co.,

  Nuts and nuggets in the window, trucks along the lines below.

  The firms with which the Sells had joined forces already possessed wharves suitable for unloading coal up river at Wandsworth, and also down river in Stepney and Shadwell in locations convenient for the Regent’s Canal or for railway haulage. Although 49 Bankside was still listed as the business address of Charrington, Sells, Dale & Surtees in 1860, there must have been less and less reason for that as a location. In the early ’60s the family occupying it may have been in the Sells’s employ, since the eldest son and chief earner is listed as Wharf Clerk, but the Sells family’s long association with the river was nearing its end. In 1865 an entire block, comprising numbers 49, 50, 51 and 52 Bankside, and the wharf-space and berthage rights that went with them, was let to Moss Isaacs, iron-merchant. More prosaically, this meant a dealer in scrap-metal, a lucrative trade but hardly a prestigious one. One must assume that Sophia, who was living in York Road, Montpelier, Bristol, with her brother, went on enjoying the income from 49, before being transported into the high Victorian grandeur of Arnos Vale Cemetery there in 1869.

  Even without the amalgamations, there would have been a number of other reasons at that point for the family to move out of Bankside. London, as it grew larger, grew ever dirtier too. The time when it was still acceptable for the moneyed classes to live close by the works that produced their wealth – and much of the dirt – was rapidly passing: henceforth, industrialists would wish to live as gentry in the countryside round London and travel to and fro by train. One result of this was that the trains themselves were increasingly present in Southwark, and this did nothing to enhance life for those living near by. There was also the Bankside gas works, which was busy extending its terrain. In 1862 a fire at Price’s oil stores nearby, which nearly reached the gas-holders, can have done nothing to reassure the occupants of houses in the area. The riverside, with so many warehouses now stuffed with combustible goods, seemed very vulnerable. The year before, there had been a major waterfront fire on the Bermondsey side, which consumed twenty warehouses full of jute, oil and wax and food stuffs, sending rivers of burning fat out among the lighters on the Thames.

  But the exact timing of the Sells’s retreat from Bankside, followed by its sale of the property there some years later, may have been influenced by another, more specific factor. The proposal for another bridge over the Thames right opposite St Paul’s, which had been revived in the year of the Great Exhibition, was being put forward again with some fervour ten years later and plans were actually drawn up. It did not happen then – but, had it done so, the Sells might have had every reason to hope that the bridge or its approaches would sweep through the Bankside properties they owned, if not numbers 49–52, then numbers 54, 55 and 56 and the various back-lane tenements. This might have made them a nice profit in compensation for loss of wharfage rights, more in fact than ageing early-Georgian houses might realistically earn in rent. Perhaps, therefore, they held onto all this property to see what would happen, and only decided on a definitive sale when the bridge-plan was once again shelved. The sale of numbers 49–52 to the sitting tenant, Moss Isaacs, finally took place in 1873, and, though I have no direct evidence concerning numbers 54, 55 and 56, I suspect they were sold at the same time, since that was also the year of the first Edward Perronet’s death and they had evidently been his personal property. Within a few years these three houses were gone, and a large new Crown Wharf building rose in their place.

  The contract of sale by which 49 Bankside and its wharf-rights were finally disposed of to Moss Isaacs has come to rest in the house today. It is handwritten on parchment, decorated with seals. Clipped to it is a more modest document, a note written on beige paper headed from ‘49 Bankside, St Saviour’s’. It is undated, but must presumably relate to the time of the sale. The Holditches seem to have been back living in the house, where their family had lodged intermittently over the decades. It rather looks as if they were the Sells’s representatives on the site, helping to finalise negotiations:

  Dear Mrs Sells,

  I called at Mr Ellory’s lodging and gave him your parcel and sent you by Hind’s hand the twenty sovereigns and the receipts I had from him for the title papers and Sir Christofer’s letter. The carved animals he said were not to be spoke of in the receipt. George has covered up the holes in the ceiling with four bits of wood so it don’t show now and if Mr John looks in he won’t see it. He should be glad you made that
good use of the old things instead of his grumbles. Believe me I am glad of the ten sovs.

  Your truly thankful

  Jes Holditch

  One longs to know more about the transaction referred to, and why the note, so informal and opaque, was treated as a document to be preserved. Mrs Sells I assume to be Elizabeth, the wife of Edward Perronet II, who had lived in the house herself and must have known about the carved animals. Where, in 49, were they? Could they possibly have decorated the cellar ceiling-beams, some of which may have been in the house before the 1710 rebuilding? If so, these things ‘not to be spoke of in the receipt’ were relics of the Elizabethan inn, and the mysterious Mr Ellory or Sir Christofer had presumably realised their antiquarian value. George is, I think, George Alfred Holditch, son of Jessica who wrote the letter and of George the ex-cider merchant: a decade later young George was once more living in part of 49, as a rent collector. John is a name which crops up in later generations of Sells, but this Mr John appears to be the brother of the now-dead Sophia and therefore uncle of Edward Perronet II. (‘Mr John’ was the usual polite way in which those slightly lower down the social scale distinguished a younger brother from the senior one. It did not imply youth, and indeed John Sells, born in 1796, would now be in his late seventies.) According to the contract of sale, Sophia had left him her interest in the house, of which he was now the vendor. As he too normally lived in Bristol, it was probably safe to assume that he would not be scrutinising the cellar ceiling minutely. Jes Holditch’s words seem to suggest the slightly disgruntled family member, ever distrustful of what his siblings or nephews might do, living off some of the proceeds of the family’s accumulated property and anxious to get the best price for it. He seems to have taken no active part in the coal-trade.