‘… We pass under Southwark Bridge, and watch yet another lot of waterside labourers at their daily task of unloading barges of coal, and then we turn off into the courts and alleys to see the homes in which many of these toilers live.
‘We are in the land of Shakespeare … Yet how very unromantic these parts are today! Poor, dilapidated dwellings are the houses in these courts – Moss Alley, Ladd’s Court, Bear Gardens and White Hind Alley – which abut on the banks of the river. Hard indeed are the lives of the poor families that dwell therein. From morning to night they hear the ceaseless hum of the great fan at the electric lighting works hard by. At first painful to listen to, it becomes music to them in time, so that they sing and work to its metrical movements.
‘The waterside labourer earns a precarious income. Half the year he is without work … When he gets any money he often spends it with absolute recklessness … In the winter months many of these poor families are on the verge of starvation, and it is a blessing to them that their children are supplied with free meals through the agency of various funds. But for these meals, many of the waterside labourers’ children would starve …’ He goes on to explain that many of the wives and young girls work too, particularly – in the vicinity of the old Skin Market behind Cardinal Cap Alley – as ‘pullers’, pulling the fur out of rabbit skins, in a haze of fluff that got into noses, throats and eyes. The fur was afterwards spun into fine wool and the skins went to the hatters. Meanwhile the boys were engaged in a different enterprise:
‘Along Bankside on a summer’s day there are always to be seen a number of boys wading in the mud, and trying to find such treasure as may have fallen into the river during the day or night. Here are a party of lads making their first attempt to swim. Every season a number of them terminate their youthful career in a muddy and watery grave.’8
A year or two after that volume was published, a little girl, Grace Golden, was born in a house on the other side of the river at Queenhithe, the old dock below St Paul’s. Although the family, who may have been of immigrant Jewish origin, were in relatively modest circumstances (Mr Golden was an electrician), Grace was sent to the fee-paying, academic City of London Girls School. She was good at drawing – she grew up to be an artist, with a scholarship to the Royal Society of Arts, and pictures by her have come to rest both in the Guildhall Library and in the Museum of London.
‘I tried my childish pencil’, she wrote, ‘on drawings of barges clustered amid stream; barges with furled reddish brown sails, and brightly painted houseboats with lace curtains coquettishly draped back to reveal the potted fern standing in the tiny window … [from the City side] the narrow alleys opening onto the Bankside looked like black caves, inviting me to explore them.’ Explore them she did, as soon as she was old enough to wander about on her own, among the cranes and the dust chutes that seem, by the early decades of the twentieth century, to have become a feature of that waterfront. Later in life she researched, wrote and eventually published a book, Old Bankside. While this is fervently anti-Catholic and historically not always reliable, it is written with such passionate feeling for the precise detail of place and for the persistence of the past that no one interested in London’s other shore can fail to warm to it. Hers is a lone voice, speaking for Bankside in an era when no one else seemed to care about it at all, indeed hardly to see it.
Chapter X
DOOM. AND REBIRTH
IN THE REAR mirror through which we view the past, the house at Cardinal’s Wharf enters a blind spot at the beginning of the twentieth century, for lack of documentation, just as it does in the early eighteenth century at the time of its rebuilding. Under British regulations detailed Census material may not be consulted till a hundred years have passed since its collection. The identities of all those who lived in the house in 1911 and in subsequent decennial years are lying quietly in an archive as I write, but neither I nor any other researcher can access them till the requisite term of years has elapsed.
So, at this point, the procession of individuals we have been able to call up fleetingly from the expended generations – the Sells and then the Gardeners, with their numerous children, the Holditches, the Tuckfields, the Rolfes, the afflicted Elliotts – ceases. For three decades, till other information pours in suddenly from other sources, there can be no speculation as to whether this girl might have managed to marry the white-collared lodger, or if that boy survived the slaughter of the 1914–18 war. The boys, girls, widows, clerks, factory-hands and wharf-labourers who may have passed through the house in those years simply do not figure on any reckoning. The street directories list only the commercial nature of premises, if any, or the permanent addresses of established, rate-paying citizens. They provide a useful indication of the increasingly dock-and-industrial, nature of Bankside in the early twentieth century, but nothing further. The Electoral Register, superceding the old rates lists, are by this time a significant source, but till after the First World War they list only men, plus a few widows and the like who were entitled to vote in local elections but not in Parliamentary ones. Of wives, children and other dependants or lodgers, of transitory inhabitants who did not bother to register, of occupations, ages, places of birth and any other personal details, there is no information to be had.
In 1903 the Rolfes, and their tenants the Elliotts, were still living in 49 Bankside, but by the following year they had all moved out, to be replaced by a Henry Hopkinson. The Electoral Register records him as the rate-paying tenant of a dwelling house, but at the same period, in the Commercial Directory, a Mrs Dean is recorded as keeping ‘coffee rooms’ at that address: presumably Hopkinson sub-let her the ground floor. The coffee rooms (the term of the period for a workmen’s café) did not apparently last long, but it is nice to think that the house at Cardinal’s Wharf recovered, briefly, something of the role it had had long ago as an inn, before its eighteenth-century rebuilding. At the same time the Waterman’s Arms, at number 60, was listed as being run by the ‘People’s Refreshment House Association Ltd’, which sounds like a well-intentioned Temperance initiative to turn an old pub into something more morally desirable. In any case, the building did not survive long after that, being first annexed by the London Electricity Company and then demolished as that enterprise continued to expand.
By 1907 no trade or occupant is listed for 49, which does not necessarily mean that there was no one temporarily perching in the panelled rooms of the by now shabby, disregarded house. Two years later one more lighterman was in occupation, the last in a long tradition, but he soon went again. The place may have been untenanted after that, for fewer and fewer people lived actually on Bankside as the years went by. Although the side lanes were still heavily populated, the waterfront consisted either of commercial premises such as the Isaacs’s, using several old houses together for offices and storage space, or, increasingly, of purpose-built wharf-houses that replaced them. Just after the First World War, if not earlier,1 the houses immediately to the east of 49, houses that had sheltered Hornes and Manns and, long ago, Shalletts and Oldners, and had replaced Henslowe’s timbered properties, were demolished. On part of their site a tall warehouse, with an ornate tiled frontage, was erected by Craig & Rose, paint manufacturers: its factory premises ran back alongside the whole length of the garden of 49. ‘Garden’ one could probably no longer describe it: it had been paved over for the old iron business, but it now had a brick wall looming fifty feet above it.
Isaacs’s had for some time been in the control of two of Moss’s sons, Moss II and Samuel, with residential addresses in the then-genteel areas of Brixton and South Lambeth. The third generation was to be located in Bayswater and still more exclusive places. Like the Sells long before them, the Isaacs clan had prospered through trade and moved up in the world. For the whole period of their occupancy of Bankside they had had a few people resident in one or more of the houses they owned, presumably either employees in the iron trade or caretakers. The favoured house for this presence was number 50,
and for many years a married couple called Mallison lived there. They continued there after the First World War, when an Edward and Ellen Kimpton were installed alongside in 49. This new presence probably signified the moment at which the Isaacs, who were still to own the house till the beginning of the 1930s, let it as a separate premises, without the wharf-space, for £60 a year. The tenants were Elliott, Hughes & Easter Ltd, gum-merchants according to the Commercial Directory. Did they sell glue, which was one of the by-products of the Bermondsey skin-trade?
The journalist and short-story writer, V. S. Pritchett, who was born in 1900 and lived almost until the end of the century, worked in a leather works near London Bridge from the age of fifteen to nineteen. He has left memorable evocations of the Southwark and Bermondsey of the period.2
‘There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung: this came from the leather which had been steeped a month in puer or dog dung before the process of tanning. There was also … the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory, and smoke blew down from an emery mill … From the occasional little slum houses [came] the sharp stink of London poverty. It was impossible to talk for the noise of dray horses striking the cobbles.’
The teenage Pritchett, just too young to be conscripted for war service, rather enjoyed his long hours in these busy streets near the river – eight in the morning till seven in the evening and till four every Saturday. For this he earned twelve shillings and sixpence a week, rising to eighteen and six by the time he left, and ate the same meal every day in ‘someone’s Dining Rooms, a good pull-up for carmen, near the Hop Exchange … steak and kidney pudding followed by date or fig pudding … the whole cost 8d. but went up to 10d. the following year.’
A few years later, number 49 Bankside harboured such a Dining Room, apparently run by the sub-tenants who were the successors to the Kimptons, a family called Morley. So, once more, as during the brief coffee-room time twenty years before, customers could sit and eat looking out onto the river and the far bank as others had in the seventeenth and sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the Dining Rooms did not last long in that economically depressed time (1926, when they figure in the Directory, was the year of the abortive General Strike) and by 1928 the house was apparently the work-address for two other exiguous trades, sign-writing and window-cleaning.
Just how poverty-stricken the residential aspect of the Bankside had become by the 1920s, even though commerce continued to flourish there, is clear from Grace Golden’s testimony, both in words and in pictures:
‘Samuel Isaacs and Sons, iron merchants, occupied number 52 for many years of the last century, until about 1924 [actually a few years later] when it was used as tenements. In the late thirties candles were still being used to light them.’
Since gas-light was initially regarded as something for commercial premises rather than domestic ones, it is likely the Sells, who were still in residence in that run of houses in the 1840s and early ’50s, had never bothered to install it, or at any rate not on the upper floors.
The state of the lanes leading down to Bankside was not helped by the revival, once again, of the plan to build a bridge across to St Paul’s. It was shelved at the outbreak of war in 1914 but the ground landlords of much of the property round there, by now the Bridge House Estate, went on hoping after the war that it would go ahead: they allowed the buildings that would be demolished for it to deteriorate. The young Grace Golden explored these lanes, at whose dark entries she had been gazing all her childhood from the house over the water at Queenhithe. The irregular small alleys of the Skin Market held for her the fascination of a strange country. She kept, and quoted many years later, the notes she had written on them at the time:
‘On one side, a row of two-storied, jerry-built houses, on the other, the crumbling brickwork of half-demolished dwellings … Cats and children are everywhere … A child with bare feet and matted hair crawls out of the open doorway up to the level of the alley. The gas-lit interior – there is no daylight except from the doorway – shows a broken brass bedstead and tumbled bedding. A woman pushes aside the torn lace curtain and rubs a broken window pane …
‘Down a tributary alleyway there are the pathetic remains of a few square yards of fenced-in garden. A shabby bassinet in front of the door which leads straight into the living room. Under and beside the window, fruit and vegetables are stacked against the wall – ready for selling the next day. A wheelbarrow almost closes the passageway.’
On Bankside itself, the evidence was of a slightly less needy existence: not that Grace made the distinction, since it still seemed to her to be located in another time and world from the one she knew on the City side:
‘On a summer evening at an open window on the river front, one might see a turquoise blue gramophone horn, wheezily playing “A Bird in a Gilded Cage”. Behind the horn can be seen the floral wallpaper, almost covered with velvet-framed photographs … We move onto a group of people around their doorstep. Grandmother in a white apron spreads herself over a broken-backed chair; Mother, the line of her corset dividing her torso into planes, squares herself on the doorstep; the children, their mouths and cheeks jammy with the last slice of bread and jam, scream at each other; Father is in the local.’
Other vestiges, too, of the domestic Bankside of Victorian days and earlier still lingered in Grace Golden’s youth. At the Falcon Dock, at the level of 79 Bankside, ‘fowls took their Sunday morning stroll down the slope to the water’s edge. And, on a hot summer weekday, carmen used to drive their steaming horses down to the river where the great beasts stood cooling their hooves in the lapping water.’
However, by the end of the 1920s, the City of London Electric Lighting Company acquired much of the planning-blighted land west of 52 Bankside. The bridge-scheme having been once again abandoned, the land became the site for a more extensive six-chimneyed Power Station, which took in also the old site of the gas works. City money cleared the slum lanes and re-housed the occupants in yet another large tenement block. With their clearance went much old geography, including Moss, Unicorn and White Hind Alleys and the last references to the ‘Pye’ or Pike Gardens, all perilously close to 49 Bankside. Only the vagaries of chance, the historical accident of the ownership of parcels of land going back over two centuries, kept that house and its immediate neighbours out of the clearance scheme. It was a close call, and one that was to be repeated several times in the middle decades of the twentieth century.
*
By 1931 the Isaacs still owned the run 49–52, but the lucrative old iron business was being consigned to the past: numbers 50, 51 and 52 were occupied by a firm of wharfingers (that is, general waterfront traders). The gum-merchants had given up their tenancy of 49, and no one seems to have been living there. The house, now one of the few remaining survivors in a changed landscape, had reached its nadir – the point in time at which it was not even thought to be worth finding a new tenant for it. I have been told that various cargoes from lighters, including mahogany, were stored there, ships’ wood within the wooden, shiplike interior. In the deep cellars a Bankside flood of 1928 (which was to be the last) had left a black sludge on the Tudor flagstones, which no one bothered to clean up. The river rats made a home there. At the top of the house, in the attic under the leaky slate roof where generations of servants had slept, and where the Elliotts and their crippled daughter had once made their home, pigeons got in through a broken window and whitened the wide old boards with their droppings. The house must have seemed destined, like one of Dickens’s sooty riverside dwellings of a hundred years earlier, to be pulled down any time, leaving only disturbed air and a fading memory.
But that year a young man called Robert E. Stevenson took to wandering along the river in the evenings. His name, with its echo of the author of Treasure Island, was propitious, for he was a script-writer and soon-to-be director attached to Gaumont British film studios. The cin
ema, which had become a mass industry in the 1920s and was now being given a further boost with the coming of talkies, was reaching its high noon of popularity. Southwark alone had over a dozen ‘picture houses’ by the 1930s, including a newly built one at the Elephant and Castle that was for a while the largest in Europe. Patient queues for films, almost any film, were a standard feature of the evening streets.
Robert Stevenson came upon 49 Bankside and had the vision to see, through the dirt and decay, that here was a house worth saving. Did he persuade one of the wharfingers to find the key and let him in to wander round its creaking, rat-rustling spaces? Did he take his then-wife, Cecilie, to see the place and manage to infect her with his own enthusiasm? He is long dead, I cannot ask him – but it is evident from documents collected up with the Deeds of the house that by the end of 1931 he was in negotiation with the by now extensive Isaacs clan, and legal wheels had begun to turn.
They needed to. Already, in 1922, after 49 had been let to Stephen Easter’s firm of gum-merchants, a tidying-up exercise had had to take place. The original old iron man, Moss Isaacs, had died in 1889, leaving his Bankside properties in equal shares to each of his six children. With the passage of another generation, these one-sixth parts had turned into one-fifteenths. Each of these individual portions must by then have been worth almost nothing, yet various of the descendants were in dispute with one another on the matter. The properties had finally been put into a family Trust, in charge of a solicitor – who then mislaid the Trust document. Statutary declarations concerning it had to be made in 1931, one of them in front of the British pro-Consul in Cannes, to which place one of Isaacs’s descendants had wandered. The family names, figuring on the copious documentation of 1931–32, are redolent of cosmopolitan, comfortably-off Anglo-Jewish society: Isaacs, Cohens, Levys, Bensusans and Hakims. They styled themselves ‘stockjobbers’, or simply ‘gentlemen’, variously of Pembridge Villas, Bayswater, mansion blocks in Earls Court and Maida Vale, and Khandala Marine Mansions of Bexhill on Sea with a pied-à-terre in Covent Garden. One or two injected an additional touch of inter-war rackety chic. A brother-in-law lived in the Villa Hakim, rue Puget, Nice, while Ernest David Isaacs, ‘late of the Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall’, was attributed to ‘the British Club, Alassio, in the Kingdom of Italy’.
The House by the Thames Page 21
