He did, however, have something to grumble about. A few years earlier the partnership between his nephew and Charringtons, which had been in existence since 1859, went through what seems to have been a very sticky patch. I know no more about this than what I have read in The Story of the Charringtons. According to this source, the capital with which the partnership was set up was to be provided jointly, £6000 from the brothers John and Thomas Charrington and £8000 from E. P. Sells & Company. Eight thousand would be the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds today: the agreed sum presumably reflects the fact that the Charringtons were bringing more to the merger in the form of wharf and railway-yard space. However, the figure turned out to be largely illusory. Thomas Charrington wrote later: ‘In the year 1866 – after repeated efforts by John Charrington to get a proper examination of the accounts, a balance sheet was drawn up, and it was ascertained that EP Sells & Company’s capital was £345.19s.7d, less than nothing at all, their nominal capital having consisted of one large debt, which proved to be bad, and there is no doubt that their estimate of profits prior to the partnership was utterly fallacious … The state of matters (above) … caused the retirement of Mr Dale from any part of the management of the business of the firm, Mr Surtees having retired by compulsion previously … Hardly any portion of EP Sells & Company’s connection exists now, the Southwark and Vauxhall and Grand Junction Water Companies (which formed the most important part of it) having been lost …’
The message seems clear. Even if Messrs. Dale and Surtees were considered to have been the chief villains (or incompetents) of the affair, Edward P. Sells II, with his genial large beard, did not have the business acumen and grip of his forebears. Perhaps matters were made worse by the Overend Gurney bank failure of the same year (1866), with its train of bankruptcies and knock-on effect on general prosperity.
However, John Charrington was in any case permanently at loggerheads with his exacting brother Thomas: he was prepared to renew the partnership with Sells. By and by an Edward Perronet III, who as a little boy had lived in number 49, was making his way into the business, and he evidently proved more able than his father. He was with Charringtons as the family became a household name, even as their distant relations the brewers were. The coal Charringtons naturally supplied the brewing Charringtons with fuel, writing them business letters which began ‘Dear Sir’ but ended ‘Your affectionate cousin’. They came to supply several other breweries, the new electricity company on Bankside, the London Hydraulic Power Company at the same location, several hospitals, the London School Board and Wandsworth Prison. The Sells family maintained a presence within Charringtons into the mid-twentieth century, the last in the business being Sir David Perronet Sells, son of Edward Perronet Sells IV and a stalwart of the Conservative party.
Their present-day direct descendants have careers in banking and the law. Without their help, and the surviving pieces of evidence which they have been able to pass to me, the old lightermen-coal-merchants would have been far more obscurely buried for me in the coal-dust and rubble of the lost Bankside. As for the coal-trade, in which seven generations of Sells prospered so usefully to themselves and to the country, that too is over: the thousands of coal-offices that still perched on the edge of railway yards forty years ago have gone without anyone really noticing it. Only the iron coal-hole covers to hidden cellars remain, all over London and other cities, diminishing in numbers as pavements are relaid but still a presence: tight-shut apertures to a buried past. In the whole of London today there is scarcely a single coal-merchant.
Chapter IX
IN WHICH INVISIBILITY SETTLES ON BANKSIDE
THE RAILWAY LINES that carried the Sells away from Bankside, to Camberwell, and then Bristol, and eventually to other socially salubrious addresses in developing west London and in the home counties, were by the 1860s becoming a much more intrusive presence.
In the 1830s London’s very first line had made its way in from Greenwich to the foot of London Bridge (subsequently extending itself in the other direction to Dover and the steam packets for the Continent), but this affected only the eastern side of the old Borough of Southwark. In the same decade a railway terminus for the London–Southampton line was opened at Nine Elms, in Battersea. Ten years later a long viaduct, like the one straddling Bermondsey, was constructed across Lambeth Marsh to extend the Nine Elms line to Waterloo station, newly built at the foot of the bridge from which it took its name. But early plans to carry the line further, over the river to the City, were for the moment shelved. The railways from south-eastern England remained, logically, south of the river. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway – the world’s earliest long-distance commuter line, and origin of all those day-trips to the seaside immortalised in Victorian songs – ended at Vauxhall.
But the magnetic pull of London north of the river eventually overcame geographical sense. In 1860 the Brighton line dared make its way, over the first railway bridge to cross the river within London, to a new station called Victoria: other companies were not slow to follow this cavalier example. Hungerford Railway Bridge, between Waterloo and a new station at Charing Cross, was completed in 1864. It took its name from old Hungerford market and stairs (the location, as it happened, of the blacking factory where Dickens had worked as a boy) but it formed part and parcel of the Embankment transformation which swept all these old places away. At just the same time the original Blackfriars Railway Bridge was constructed to take a branch of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway over the river to join up with the new Metropolitan Railway. The station was for some time at the south end of the bridge, on the site previously occupied by part of Rennie’s works in what had once been the grounds of Holland’s Leaguer. Another bridge belonging to a subsidiary of the same company was also built in the 1860s to a new City station in Cannon Street.
The road bridges that had spanned the river earlier in the century had been objects of pride and careful planning; now the railway companies threw bridges over the water wherever it suited them. One south-bank resident wrote to The Times about the Blackfriars rail bridge, in what must be one of the earliest complaints about advertising: ‘The entire invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the information on it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway Company.’1 To Dickens, the file of bridges across the increasingly soot-blackened townscape were more sinister objects. In his last novel,2 unfinished when he died in 1870, he spoke of them as spanning the dark waters of the Thames ‘as death spans life’. But then, for Dickens, the inexorable power of steam and that of mortality itself were always conflated.
The real blight that the new rail links bestowed on Southwark was not the bridges themselves but the viaducts built to connect them with the London, Chatham & Dover’s grandly rebuilt station at London Bridge. Soon Charing Cross and Waterloo too were connected to this hub, which swept St Thomas’s Hospital away from its ancient site. The result was that old Bankside, which also suffered the Metropolitan Board of Works’ divisive construction of Southwark Street in the mid-1860s, was now riven with railways trundling at rooftop level. The most damaging was the line that curved round from Blackfriars to London Bridge, carefully skirting the Anchor Brewery to avoid paying Barclay Perkins hefty compensation, but removing in its path the old Cure’s College almshouses and graveyard, and rumbling above the Borough Market and the remains of the Bishop’s palace to join the tracks from Cannon Street, before snaking round the south front of St Saviour’s church as if it would throttle it.
Antiquarian interest in what had come to be known as ‘Old London’ was well established by the 1860s, but its influential followers failed to protect Southwark’s venerable parish church. It was just as well the old pile had managed to get itself rebuilt a generation before: had it still been as ruinous as Edward Sells proclaimed it to be in 1836, the power of the railway interests would surely have swept it away entir
ely. It is perhaps a measure of how far Southwark had fallen socially thirty years later that greater efforts were not made to route the railway further from the church. But it is also the case that in this same decade the view of St Paul’s from Ludgate circus was defaced (for the next hundred and thirty years) by a railway viaduct, and that St Pancras old church very narrowly missed being demolished for the convenience of the Midland Railway’s coaling yards. Progress, it was believed, must not be thwarted. The coach-routes had all been dismantled, and many of the old inns along with them; the last of the turnpikes were following them into oblivion. The old, all-purpose hackney carriages were replaced by the purely urban hansom cabs, and soon, where cattle had recently been herded, horse trams would come.
As if to distract attention from what their lines were actually doing to the old Borough, the L, C & D Railway Company made much of the large new hotel they were building at London Bridge. They were under the optimistic impression that there was an urgent need for accommodation in Southwark much grander than was supplied by those of the High Street inns that still survived. The planned Terminus Hotel had a hundred and fifty bedrooms, with bathrooms and water closets on each of its five storeys, lifts, restaurants, a Ladies Only coffee room separated by the library from the general coffee room, and – in a separate block – smoking and billiard rooms, which may have been more suited to the real needs of the typical customer arriving at London Bridge.
Too close to the City and to London as a whole to be a necessary staging post, too much surrounded by rough streets to attract the politer class of visitor come to stay for several days in the capital, the hotel never really flourished. It had descended in use to railway offices long before a bomb demolished it in the Second World War. The conception and building of it were redolent of the last era in which it was still imagined that railways somehow had a beneficial effect on the districts through which they passed. The Builder, which had written effusively about the plans for it in the summer of 1861, wrote in November of the same year and in the same enthusiastic but vague tone about the ‘many changes’ scheduled for the Lambeth waterfront, which was a prolongation of Bankside:
‘… when the Main Drainage and embankment plans have been completed, rendering that which was in the memory of some few living a dreary and, in part, impassable marsh, dry and wholesome. The increased bridge and railway accommodation will also confer benefits … the locality will become more suitable for healthy dwelling and for the purposes of various descriptions of industry … wharfs [for] coal, stone, wood and many other materials crowd the once unprofitable land; shot and other factories … and matters too numerous in brief space to mention give employment to thousands.’ (One senses that the writer had no real idea what he was talking about.) ‘The main thoroughfares are swarming with life, omnibuses, cabs and carriages …’
Three years later, the South London Press, Southwark’s now-flourishing local paper, was extolling the newly opened Southwark Street (which cut a direct route from Borough High Street to Blackfriars Bridge Road) in similar if more focused terms. The Hop Exchange was then being erected, on what was predicted to become ‘one of the handsomest thorough fares in the metropolis … The frontage is of stone, with well-executed carvings, and the whole is being carried out by Mr Davies, builder of Union-street, at a cost of £10,000. A little distance further, on the right, we come to a building which, although plain in design, has a deal of interest attached to it, being the improved industrial dwellings for the working classes. This has been erected by a company, whose offices are at Carpenter’s Hall, London Wall, and is now fully occupied by mechanics and their families. Each floor is almost like a house itself, and is furnished with every convenience. It is hoped, while ground remains to be disposed of in this street, that more of these dwellings will be established, giving, as they do, so great a boon to the working classes, hundreds of whom, through the improvements in Southwark, and the requirements of the various railway schemes, were forced to leave their dwellings …’ And the rest of the column is about the numbers of warehouses, of similar dimensions to the industrial dwellings, newly built nearby.
Over the following twenty years many blocks of industrial tenements went up in Southwark, filling the censuses for the later decades of the nineteenth century with hosts of undifferentiated names and numbers. Most of them have now gone again, destroyed by bombs or by planners with other and different visions of socially desirable working class existence. One example of an early (1860s) block still stands, with its characteristic open stairs and iron balconies, cherished now again with paint and geraniums. It is just off Southwark Bridge Road in Redcross Street, not a stone’s throw from where the supposed dust of the medieval Single Women lie beneath the Cross Bones ground.
But whatever the good intentions of housing philanthropists such as George Peabody and Octavia Hill (who was responsible for the erection of some more attractive, cottage-type workers’ homes in the same street) there were many members of the Victorian working classes who did not earn steadily or respectably enough to aspire to the relatively high rents of Model housing. Or maybe they just preferred the old, familiar, individual courts, yards and alleys, even when these had trains lumbering overhead. They went on living their own lives on now-unregarded Bankside, in what seems to have become to official eyes little more than a series of spaces between ‘commodious modern blocks’ and ‘fine new warehouses’. These remnants of lanes that were old when Shakespeare, Henslowe and John Taylor were young was the space left to them.
These people were not newsworthy, nor the subject of any plans: they were just there, in their own busy world, as the working classes of Southwark had been for centuries. They were lighter-hands, wharf-hands, coal-porters, rabbit-skinners, street-sellers, char-women, public-house pot-men, labourers, boiler-stokers; they were minor wage-earners in the breweries, the hop warehouses, the foundries, the soap works, the hatters, the tanneries. Chronically short of money but not destitute, as distinct from the ‘wretchedly poor’ as they were from the respectable shop-keeping and clerking classes, they were much as they always had been. The only difference was that, by the mid-Victorian era, the immediate district of Bankside had been vacated by almost all those who had earlier provided an articulate, respectable, monied presence as counterweight and support: the Thrales, the Barclays, the Hornes, the Shalletts, the Potts, the Sells.
What had gone with them was a world of social cohesion, which had existed in spite of substantial class distances. It had been a world in which wholesale dealers in coals, potatoes or rice could see for themselves on their own doorsteps the hardships that a bitter winter could bring and were prepared to foregather in cold churches to make immediate plans for practical help – a world in which the coal-porters living in Cardinal Cap Alley and the Skin Market knew the current Mr Sells or Mr Horne as a neighbour and might rely on regular work from him. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1830s, Thomas Horne had tried without success to get a standard pay rate fixed for the porters so that they would not have to compete against one another when work was scarce. On the subject of this particularly illiterate and vulnerable class of worker, Henry Mayhew later wrote, ‘Of the kindness of masters to men, of discouragement of drunkenness, of persuasion of the men to care for the education of their children, I had the gratification of hearing frequently.’ But he adds that there was no general structure of provision for these labouring men, when their muscle-power declined through age and when the copious draughts of beer that they all believed to be ‘strengthening’ no longer had an effect.
After the middle of the century the masters, kindly or otherwise, even if still involved in Bankside industries, were more distant both geographically and socially. The old quarters of the metropolis were no longer a shared, familiar habitat: they were turning into ‘the slums’, into ‘darkest London’. When interest was shown in ‘the plight of the poor’ – which it increasingly was, as Victorian consciousness of the subject increased – it was the almost anthropological inter
est of the concerned outsider, writing as if bringing back despatches from another continent. ‘Missionary’ societies were set up by clergymen to take religion, but also practical help and advice, to the less fortunate classes: exactly the same principle that was being applied in the burgeoning British Empire.
The mantle of Dickens who, in his early novels, had specifically shed light on some of the more oppressed corners of London, was taken on by journalists such as Mayhew and Hollingshed. Henry Mayhew’s wonderfully comprehensive, deadpan articles were first written for the Morning Chronicle around 1850, and were published in book form some ten years later as London Labour and the London Poor. John Hollingshed’s articles appeared in the Morning Post that same year, 1861, when the winter was particularly hard, and were eventually turned into a book called Ragged London. More of an indignant polemicist than Mayhew (he was particularly strong on the moral evils of over-crowding), he too provides valuable detail on everyday lives that would otherwise have gone unrecorded. Here he is on the houses immediately behind 49 Bankside, where he was taken by a local clergyman, secretary of the South London Visiting Relief Association:
‘Some of the houses in the courts about the Skin Market … have been built within the last twenty years. There is Pleasant place, where the rooms are only about 3 yards wide, the back-yard about 3 foot square, and the windows not more than 2 foot and a half square. The court or passage in front is in exact proportion to these dimensions, and the houses stand in 3 parallel rows with their faces to each other’s backs … Each lets for about 4/- a week, and contains 2 of these confined rooms. In White Hind alley, near this place, there is a row of old black, rotten, wooden dwellings, chiefly rented by river thieves …’
The House by the Thames Page 18
