The House by the Thames
Page 26
The rising young film star Anna Lee, at home in number 49. The house in its brief ‘art deco’ mode (1936).
Anna in film star mode. St Paul’s can be seen from the window.
Bankside, looking towards Southwark Bridge. May 7th 1946. 2.25p.m. Semi-ruinous after the London blitz.
1946: Bankside across the river. Over the next few years the many-chimneyed power station was to be replaced by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s modern ‘cathedral’ of industry.
Bankside in 1970, by Trevor Chamberlain. The infrastructure was still, just, in place, though commerce by then was rapidly disappearing.
Notes
Chapter III
1 London and the Country Carbonaded, Donald Lupton, 1632.
2 By tradition spelt thus to this day, but sometimes in the intervening centuries called ‘St Saviour’s Dock’, although great confusion can be caused since there was another creek to which that name was applied, down river in Bermondsey.
3 The Description of Britain 1577–87, William Harrison.
4 Robert Crawley, 1550.
5 Horatio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, 1617.
6 I am indebted to the theatre director Gregory Doran for pointing this out.
Chapter IV
1 Widely varying estimates based on different pieces of evidence have been made for London’s population c.1700, but if one includes all the outlying districts counted ‘within the Bills of Mortality’, five to six hundred thousand seems about right.
2 I am indebted for this point to Peter Guillery, whose seminal book The Small House in Eighteenth Century London appeared while this book was in preparation.
3 Accounts of St Saviour’s, M. Concanen and A. Morgan, 1795.
Chapter V
1 I am indebted to Dan Cruickshank for this and several other salient points.
2 I suspect that exploration might, even today, uncover within what is now London further surviving houses whose basic structure is older than their apparent Georgian origins. A house of similar date to number 49, also built at right-angles to Bankside, with a fine central staircase and a handsome doorway on its west side, used to be number 74, also known as Honduras Wharf. It figured, like 49, in the LCC Survey of London volume for the district (1950) as being worthy of note. This, however, did not save it from being swept away a few years later in a development scheme.
3 Mémoires Faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre, Henri Misson, 1698.
4 William Harrison, ibid.
5 Eventually the lighter became a sail-less or ‘dumb’ barge, which could be manoeuvred with the tides by the use of a special long oar in the hands of a skilled lighterman, but earlier the word was applied to the barges equipped with sails that were the workhorses of the river.
6 Quoted in The Story of the Charringtons, Elspet Fraser-Stephen, 1952.
Chapter VI
1 Charrington, Gardner, Locket and Co. Ltd – Two Hundred Years in the Coal Trade.
2 The Story of the Charringtons, ibid.
3 Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, James Peller Malcolm, 1810.
4 J. R. Hammond.
5 Later the site of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the domed building that is now the Imperial War Museum.
6 It was to finish its days in the twentieth century as a wellknown centre of boxing – The Ring.
7 I am indebted for this insight to Peter Ackroyd.
Chapter VII
1 Figures from Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, collected 1850–60.
2 Not the obscure village of Walworth in County Durham, as another current website misleadingly suggests.
3 Letters to the Foundling Hospital: Tracts on Nursing Children 1721–54.
4 Hints Designed to Promote Beneficence, Temperance and Medical Science, Dr Lettsom, published in 1801 and re-published in 1816 after his death.
5 South London, Walter Besant, 1898.
6 Southwark Vestry’s organisation was untypical, in that the parish benefited from several substantial charities set up in past centuries (i.e. ‘Cure’s Gift’) which were used to finance almshouses and charity schools. Therefore its various parochial functions tended to be cloaked in names such as ‘Commissioner’, ‘Warden’, ‘Keeper of the Estates’, etc.
7 Newspaper cuttings, not all of them attributed, in the collection of Southwark’s history archive.
8 Zanna Milford, to the South London Press.
9 An oil painting probably by Thomas Miles Richardson senior.
10 Vestry meetings in St Saviour’s parish could be attended by any parishioner who wanted to, and the vestrymen were appointed by a general vote. The parish had had a ‘closed vestry’ – a self-perpetuating clique – up to 1730, when they had been forced by Parliament into the ‘open vestry’ system.
11 In a collection of papers relating to St Saviour’s made by two successive nineteenth-century worthies, which is now in the British Library.
Chapter VIII
1 Called thus because it was discovered in the 1950s, rolled up and filthy, in an attic in Rhinebeck, New York State – taken there originally, no doubt, by someone carrying the old world to the new.
2 Days in the Factories, or the Manufacturing Industry of Great Britain Described, George Dodd, 1843. He was assistant engineer to the Rennie family, the bridge-builders.
3 Quoted by Lynda Nead in Victorian Babylon, 2000.
4 Dickens, the famous opening to Bleak House.
5 They cannot, at that date, have been buried elsewhere. Nunhead Cemetery, which was to become the great out-of-town resting place for people south of the river, did not open till 1840.
6 Till it became two LCC boroughs in 1900 it was administered, with some difficulty, from the City.
Chapter IX
1 Quoted by John Pudney in Crossing London’s River, 1972.
2 The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
3 Our Mutual Friend.
4 A Rebours, J. K. Huysman, 1883.
5 Walter Besant, journalist and man of letters, founder of the Society of Authors, 1836–1901.
6 The Bell of St Paul’s, 1889.
7 A new diocese had been formed, and the church was therefore given the status of a cathedral in 1905.
8 Arthur B. Moss, a contributor to Living London, first edited by George R. Sims, 1901–02. There were numerous subsequent editions.
Chapter X
1 No Directories or Electoral Registers appeared during the two world wars.
2 The old Borough of Southwark had been split down its central High Street into two LCC boroughs.
3 Heinemann, 1938.
4 Unattributed cutting from Anna Lee’s own file, dated October 1936.
5 Oddly, the official war-damage map of the time marked the other houses as mildly damaged and number 49 as so damaged as probably to be fit only for demolition, when the reality was the other way round. But the survey was carried out at speed.
6 From a collection of incomplete cuttings in Southwark’s history archive.
7 He was eventually to become editor of the Telegraph and to receive a knighthood.
Chapter XI
1 Leonard Reilly and Geoff Marshall.
2 James A. Jones, 1935.
3 Figures from the files of Southwark’s history archive.
4 The reference is to Shelley’s well-known poem about an ancient Egyptian statue, with an inscription referring to enormous power, standing fractured and tumbled in an empty desert.
5 The street – originally Thames Street – was named in belated recognition of one of Southwark’s Elizabethan benefactors, William Emerson, whose memorial is still in St Saviour’s church. He ‘lived and died an honest man’ until the age of ninety-two, extremely old for that time. Beneath a miniature effigy of him in death are the words ut sum sic eris – ‘As I now am so shall you be’.
6 From an unattributed cutting in the possession of the house’s present occupants.
7 Quoted by Frances Spalding in Th
e Tate: A History, 1998.
Acknowledgements
I AM PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL to certain people without whom this book could hardly have been written in the way it has. Chief among them are the present owners of 49 Bankside, who have shown unstinting kindness, cooperation and interest in the project and have welcomed me, and others connected with me, into their home on numerous occasions. I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to various present-day members of the Sells family, especially to Andrew Sells, who generously loaned me privately printed material I would have had great difficulty in finding elsewhere and shared with me his informed interest in his forebears.
Several other previous occupants of the house in the middle decades of the twentieth century have generously shared their memories of the house with me, especially Dan Black but also Peregrine Worsthorne, June Plaat and Hubert Montagu-Pollock. Also the late Anna Lee and her sister Ruth Wood. My thanks, too, to Anna Lee’s son, Jeffrey Byron, who helped to organise my meeting with her at what turned out to be only a few months before her death.
All the staff of Southwark Local History Library have provided courteous and friendly help, but I would particularly mention the Archivist Stephen Humphrey, whose very extensive knowledge of the area and its history has been placed at my disposal. The staff of the Guildhall Library, particularly John Fisher and Jeremy Smith in the Prints and Maps section, have also been extremely helpful and understanding. My thanks too to the Museum of London, especially to Mark Bills, Julia Cochrane and Emma Shapley. My thanks also, as often before with earlier books, to the well-informed staff of the London Library, to the Metropolitan Archives and to the Family History Centre.
At different stages in the book’s preparation, a number of individuals have been helpful with recommendations, contact addresses, suggestions, advice on sources, reminiscences, references, the loan of material and other forms of support and encouragement. These include Adam Bakker, Peter Barber, Paul Barker, Colin Brewer, Roger Cazalet, Dan Cruickshank, Sara Davies, Nicholas Deakin, Richard Dennis, Tony Flower, David Goreham, Nicholas Hale, Simon Jenkins, Thomas Kirby, Nick Lacey, Richard Lansdown, Fred Manson, Nicholas and Elizabeth Monck, Adam Pollock, Mike Shaw, Gene Simons, Gavin Stamp, Colin Thubron, Nicholas Tindall, Al and Martha Vogeler. Also Douglas Matthews, champion indexer. My gratitude to all of the above, for their time and interest – and also, especially, to two architects: Jon Finney, who took an interest in my self-compiled panorama of Bankside in 1880, and Chris Oliver, who took a great deal of trouble revamping my drawings to his own professional standards and lettering them.
Particular thanks, also, to Colin Mabberley, in his capacity as Grace Golden’s executor; to Alan Runagall, the present owner of Trevor Chamberlain’s painting Bankside 1970; and to Cordelia Stamp, the copyright holder of Albert Pile’s work.
Permission to quote freely from his poem Parliament Hill Fields was given to me almost thirty years ago by the late Sir John Betjeman, in a personal communication. My gratitude now, as then: my only regret is that he is no longer here to be amused by the discovery that he had himself visited the long-term home of the family whose name formed one of his childhood memories.
Bibliography and Sources
Printed works
For a book such as this there are two essential published works which provide the starting point for all other research. These are the Bankside volume (Vol. XXII) of the admirable Survey of London, published by the LCC in 1950, and the relevant Surrey volume (Vol. 4, part 1) of the extensive Victoria County History, published in 1912. In addition, there are the invaluable series of old maps reproduced by the London Topographical Society, namely:
The A–Z of Elizabethan London, Introductory Notes by John Fisher, 1979
The A–Z of Georgian London, Introductory Notes by Ralph Hyde, 1982
The A–Z of Regency London, Introduction by Paul Laxton, 1985
The A–Z of Victorian London, Introductory Notes by Ralph Hyde, 1987
It would be difficult to cite every book which, over the years, has nourished my view of London, but here follows a fairly comprehensive, if heterogenous, list of those works that have contributed to the present book. All are published in London except where another provenance is given. Where they have been produced by organisations that are not essentially publishers, their names are given.
Ackroyd, Peter, Dickens’ London, an Imaginative Vision, 1987
—— Blake, 1995
Acorn, George, One of the Multitude, 1911
Anon., Grey & Martin – City Lead Works, GLIAS Newsletter No.79, 1982
Anon., Southwark Past and Present, Southwark Borough Council, 1932
Anon., Tracts on Nursing Children, 1721–53
Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, edited by John Buchanan-Brown, 2000
Barker, Felix and Hyde, Ralph, London as it Might Have Been, 1982
—— and Jackson, Peter, London: Two hundred years of a city and its people, 1974
Besant, Walter, The Bell of St Paul’s, 1889
—— South London, 1898
—— London South of the Thames, 1912
Bodger, Charlotte G., Southwark and its Story, 1881
Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People of London, 1902–03
Boulton, Jeremy, Neighbourhood and Society in a London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, 1987
Bowers, Robert W., Sketches of Southwark Old and New, 1905
Burford, E. J., London: The Synfulle Citie, 1990
Capp, Bernard, The World of John Taylor, the Water-Poet, Oxford, 1994
Carlin, Martha, Medieval Southwark, Hambledon Press, 1996
Carson, Neil, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge, 1998
Clayton, Antony, Subterranean City; Beneath the Streets of London, 2000
Concannen, M. Junior. and Morgan, A., The History and Antiquities of the Parish of St Saviour’s, Southwark, 1795
Croad, Stephen, Liquid History, the Thames Through Time, 2003
Cruickshank, Dan and Burton, Neil, Life in the Georgian City, 1990
—— and Wyld, Peter, London: The Art of Georgian Building, 1975
Darlington, Ida and Howgego, James, Printed Maps of London c.1553–1850, 1964
Darwin, Bernard (as told to), Two Hundred Years in the Coal-Trade, privately published, 1931
de Maré, Eric, The London Doré Saw: A Victorian Evocation, 1973
Defoe, Daniel, Journal of the Plague Year, 1722
Dickens, Charles, Little Dorrit, 1857
—— Our Mutual Friend, 1865
Dodd, George, Days in the Factories, or the Manufactury Industry of Great Britain Described, 1843
Dyos, H. J., Victorian Suburb, Leicester 1974
Earle, Peter, The Making of the English Middle Classes: Business, Society and Family Life in London 1660–1730, 1989
—— A City Full of People: Men and Women of London, 1650–1750, 1994
Evelyn, John, Fumifugium, 1661
—— Diary, edited by E. S. de Beer, Oxford, 1959
Fletcher, Geoffrey, London’s River, 1966
Foakes, R. A., editor, Henslowe’s Diary, Cambridge, 2002
Fraser-Stephens, Elspet, The Story of the Charringtons: Two Centuries in the London Coal Trade, privately published, 1952
Geijer, Eric Gustaf, Impressions of England 1809–1810, introduced by Anton Blanck, 1932
George, Dorothy M., London Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1925
Gilbey, Elizabeth W., Wages in Eighteenth Century England, Cambridge, Mass., 1934
Glanville, Philippa, London in Maps, 1972
Golden, Grace, Old Bankside, 1951
Guillery, Peter, The Small House in Eighteenth Century London, New Haven, 2004
Hall, P. G., The Industries of London since 1861, 1962
Halliday, Stephen, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis, Stroud, Glos., 1999
Halton, Edward, A New View of London, 1708
Harrison, Shir
ley and Evemy, Sally, Southwark: Who Was Who, London Borough of Southwark, 2001
Harrison, William, The Description of Britain 1557–1587, edited by Ernest Rhys, 1876
Hayward, A., editor, Dr Johnson’s Mrs Thrale, 1910
Hollinshed, John, Ragged London, 1861
Humphrey, Stephen, Southwark, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe in Old Photographs, Stroud, Glos., 1995, a Second Selection 1997
—— Southwark, the Twentieth Century, Stroud, Glos., 1999
—— The Cuming Family, and the Cuming Museum, London Borough of Southwark, 2001
Inwood, Stephen, A History of London, 1998
Jackson, Peter, London Bridge, 1971
—— Introducing Tallis’s London Street Views 1838–40, London Topographical Society, 1969
Jephson, H., The Sanitary Evolution of London, London County Council, 1907
Jones, Jennifer, Southwark: a History of Bankside, Bermondsey and ‘The Borough’, South Thames Training and Enterprise Council 1996
Lambton, Lucinda, Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight, 1995
Layton, Walter T., The Early Years of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, 1920
Lettsom, Dr, Hints Designed to Promote Beneficence, Temperance and Medical Science, 1801, edition with introduction by John Cookley, 1816
Luckin, Bill, Pollution and Control: a social history of the Thames in the nineteenth century, Bristol, 1986
Malcolm, James Peller, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century, 1810
Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor, Vols 1–4 (especially Vol. 3), 1861–62
Misson, Henri, Mémoires Faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre, 1698
Montague, C. J., Sixty Years in Waifdom, 1904
Morton, H. V., The Nights of London, 1926
Mould, R. W., Southwark Men of Mark, Borough of Southwark Libraries, 1903
Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth Century London, New Haven, 2000
Nef, J. W., The Rise of the British Coal Industry, 1932