by Jan Bondeson
In 1838, London extended north as far as Camden Town and Islington, east as far as the West India Docks, south as far as Lambeth, Kennington and Walworth, and west as far as Chelsea and Kensington. From west to east, the Battersea, Vauxhall, Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Southwark and London bridges crossed the Thames. Peckham, Clapham and Tooting remained small villages situated just south of London.
In 1806, the Strand Building Company had decided to construct another bridge across the Thames. The Strand Bridge, as they initially decided to call it, would be situated midway between the Westminster and Blackfriars bridges, and the company hoped to recoup its investments through the income from bridge tolls. North Lambeth, on the southern side of the proposed bridge, was still very rural in the early 1800s. It contained a number of woollen cloth manufactories and breweries, as well as several small farms. On the southern bank of the Thames were a number of shipyards and timber yards. The Strand Building Company purchased 3 acres of land from Jesus College for the southern approach to the bridge. They decided on an attractive bridge design by John Rennie, with nine semi-elliptical river arches made of Cornish granite.
Following the Battle of Waterloo, the Strand Building Company became the Waterloo Bridge Company, and Rennie’s bridge became Waterloo Bridge. The bridge and its approaches cost in excess of £937,000 to construct. It was opened by the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington on 18 June 1817, with much pomp, on the second anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.18 The artist John Constable was present at the opening of Waterloo Bridge, and made several sketches, which he made use of to paint a monumental canvas of the opening ceremony, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1832. The great Italian neoclassical sculptor Antonio Canova was deeply impressed with Waterloo Bridge, calling it the noblest bridge in the world, and declaring that, for a foreigner, it was worth going to London solely to see it. A French art lover named M. Dupin called Waterloo Bridge a colossal monument, comparable with the efforts of the Pharaoh Sesostris and the Caesars. But in spite of these plaudits from the Continental aesthetes, there were soon worrying signs that Waterloo Bridge would not become a commercial success. The bridge did not lead to anywhere particularly interesting, since the Lambeth side was still largely undeveloped in 1817. Furthermore, impecunious Londoners could save their halfpenny toll by crossing the river on the nearby Westminster or Blackfriars bridges instead, since they were both toll-free.
A drawing showing the plan for the new Strand Bridge.
Waterloo Bridge and Somerset House. An engraving from an aquatint by T.S. Roberts.
When Waterloo Bridge was opened in 1817, work was already under way to transform North Lambeth into another London suburb south of the river. Waterloo Bridge Road, later called Waterloo Road, would run in a straight line from the new bridge to the junction with Westminster Bridge Road, Blackfriars Road and Borough Road at St George’s Circus. By 1838, Lambeth had been fully ‘developed’ and incorporated with London. The old farms, fields and rustic cottages were all gone, although a few of the factories, and many of the riverside shipyards and timber yards, had been allowed to remain.19 Not far away from Waterloo Bridge was a curious Thames-side edifice known as the Shot Tower or the Lambeth Lead Works, a tall and distinctive tower constructed in 1826 for the manufacture of lead shot through dropping molten lead from a great height.
The southern approaches to Waterloo Bridge were carried on a series of brick arches, along which was a terrace of houses and shops on each side: Wellington Terrace to the east and Southampton Terrace to the west. In the 1830s, rows of terraced houses in a main street were often given names of their own, and numbered independently; this was the case for ‘Wellington Terrace, Waterloo Road’. Wellington Terrace was first mentioned in the newspapers in May 1826. It consisted of twenty-five terraced houses, numbered from south to north. It may well have been constructed in 1823, since an authority on old London street tablets makes mention of a tablet inscribed ‘Wellington Terrace, 1823’ situated between what had become No. 35 and No. 37 Waterloo Road.20
North Lambeth in 1844, from Laurie’s Map of London.
The area around Waterloo Road in 1876, from McIntosh’s Plan of the Parish of Lambeth. This is the only London map to show the situation of Wellington Terrace.
The Feathers tavern, situated at the northern extremity of Wellington Terrace at No. 25, was really two public houses, the upper one in Waterloo Road itself, the lower in Commercial Street, far below the arches of the bridge. A forgotten Victorian novel, Albert Smith’s Christopher Tadpole, gives a lurid description of this strange part of London, a street above a street. The houses were all cellars, storeys under storeys of cellars, the lowest of which no one could fathom. From these subterraneous regions, inhabited only by dray horses and coal heavers, the wind rushed up frightful chasms from the unknown depths below, through the iron gratings in Waterloo Road. According to Smith, the neighbourhood was a seedy one, and prostitution abounded: ‘The streets adjoining are nearly all tenanted by the same fallen fair ones of creation; or, more properly, by persons who live on them, and with whom they live and lodge.’
The Feathers public house and Wellington Terrace, from Vol. 6 of Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford’s Old and New London (London ND).
Intent on self-destruction, a desperate woman leaps from Waterloo Bridge, from the Illustrated Police News, 13 June 1885.
A look at the relevant Post Office directories tends to put the lie to Smith’s statement, however, since most of the Wellington Terrace householders are listed as respectable tradesmen: bakers, cheesemongers, plumbers, tailors and fruiterers. Many, but not all, of the houses had shops on the ground floors. Albert Smith was right, however, that the area south of Waterloo Bridge was a seedy one: many of the streets leading into Waterloo Road were infested with prostitutes, bullies and brothels, Granby Street and the New Cut in particular. It was not for nothing that Waterloo Bridge became known as a ‘suicide bridge’ where desperate women jumped into the Thames to destroy themselves, inspiring Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Bridge of Sighs’.
The Frenchwoman Flora Tristan, who wrote a book after visiting London in the 1820s and 1830s, went across Waterloo Bridge one evening to titillate her Paris readers about this London black spot of vice, accompanied by two sturdy Frenchmen armed with canes. She was appalled to see that:
The neighbourhood is almost entirely inhabited by prostitutes and people who live off prostitution: it is courting danger to go there alone at night. It was a hot summer evening; in every window and doorway women were laughing and joking with their protectors. Half-dressed, some of them naked to the waist, they were a revolting sight, and the criminal, cynical expressions of their companions filled me with apprehension.21
Busy traffic on Waterloo Bridge, from a postcard stamped and posted in 1912.
The London lecher ‘Walter’, author of the pornographic book My Secret Life, went to Granby Street to meet a prostitute in 1845, and was equally impressed by the amount of vice going on in the streets leading off Waterloo Road.22
But enough of ‘Peelers’, enough of prostitutes, enough of bridges and Lambeth topography; the stage has been set, the acting company is waiting in the wings; let the Waterloo Road tragedy commence! There will be blood, there will be murder, there will be suspense – let us investigate one of the great mysteries of old London: the unsolved murder of the beautiful Eliza Grimwood back in 1838.
2
THE WATERLOO ROAD HORROR
It is the evening of Friday 26 May 1838.1 We are at the Strand Theatre, a fashionable establishment managed by the celebrated playwright Douglas William Jerrold, and situated at Nos 168–9 Strand. In spite of its narrow façade to the Strand, the theatre boasts a dress circle, a first circle, twelve private boxes and a capacious pit, giving it a capacity of not less than 1,500 souls. The theatre had been constructed as recently as 1832 and handsomely decorated in white, silver and gold. It was considerably enlarged in 1836. A reviewer called it an elegant little theatre, and
admired the performances laid on by Douglas Jerrold and his partner William John Hammond: plays based on the early novels of Charles Dickens, and various popular burlesques, melodramas and extravaganzas.2
It is not known what performance was playing at the Strand Theatre on 26 May 1838, but we know that on the night, the theatre was quite crowded.
Among the throng of people in the pits is our beautiful young heroine Eliza Grimwood, elegantly attired in a fawn-coloured dress, a dark shawl and a blue bonnet with a flower in it. She speaks to some female friends belonging to the better class of prostitute, just like herself. Many of them are at the theatre for prearranged meetings with various regular customers. About fifteen minutes before the play is to end, Eliza spies a dapperly dressed, foreign-looking young man, whom she was obviously planning to meet at the theatre; she taps her friend on the shoulder with her fan, and says something that sounds like, ‘I am going out with … He is here.’ After the performance has ended, Eliza goes to meet her gentleman friend, and they leave the theatre together. In spite of his foreign looks, the man speaks good English; he is well dressed in dark clothes and a wide-brimmed hat, and although it is a warm and dry summer evening, he is carrying a mackintosh across his arm. At the cab rank opposite the Spotted Dog public house, Eliza and the Foreigner take a cab across the bridge to her home at No. 12 Wellington Terrace, Waterloo Road; as he takes her hand, she gaily steps into the chariot of death. The Devil had beguiled her, and she did eat!
A rather grainy photograph of the Strand Theatre, taken before its demolition in 1905. In the Soup is playing.
As the old-fashioned hansom cab is slowly progressing across Hood’s Bridge of Sighs, Eliza and her young friend are speaking and laughing together; the cabman thinks them very jolly, as if they were old friends. The young man calls her ‘Lizzy’ and seems quite cheeky and familiar. The cabman hands over half a penny to the Waterloo Bridge toll-keeper – Date obolum Belisario! – and the vehicle proceeds across to the Lambeth side of the bridge. The passenger is the Devil, the driver a man without a face, the horse snorts sulphur and brimstone, and sinister sparks fly from the cab wheels. Yet Eliza seems to suspect nothing, keeping up a cheerful conversation with her companion as the cab rolls past the Feathers public house, and pulls to a halt outside No. 12 Wellington Terrace.
The Foreigner hastily walks out, as if perhaps he was keen to hide his face, but Eliza lingers for a while as she pays the cab fare. She strokes the cabman’s horse on the nose and says, ‘You have a nice horse,’ before rejoining her companion like she hasn’t a single worry or concern in the world.
Eliza Grimwood entering the cab with the Foreigner. A fanciful drawing from Famous Crimes Past and Present, Vol. V, No. 61.
Waterloo Bridge and the Shot Tower, from an old postcard.
Waterloo Bridge in 1827. An engraving from a drawing by Thomas Shepherd.
As Eliza and her companion enter No. 12 Wellington Terrace, a three-storey terraced house not far from Waterloo Bridge, we lose sight of them for a while, as they withdraw to Eliza’s bedroom to enjoy their guilty embrace. In the manner of an old-fashioned horror film, we are only allowed short glimpses of them inside the house; shadows flit around in the empty rooms, and they appear and disappear in a short and sinister danse macabre, as if Nosferatu had been at his fell work in Wellington Terrace that grim evening. The sum of 8 florins changes hands, and the Foreigner dons his mackintosh as if he is ready to leave, but just as Eliza is about to put her wages of sin away in an elegant cabinet, he suddenly and wordlessly pulls out a short bayonet and stabs her violently in the back of the neck.
She pitches forward, blood gushing from the wound, but the man grasps her round the neck from behind, preventing her from crying out. Avoiding her flailing arms, he cuts her throat with dreadful force, severing the windpipe and gullet, and making the blood spurt out from the carotid arteries. He holds on to her body for a minute or so, before carefully lowering it to the ground. He listens carefully for a while, to make sure he has not been detected. But all is silence, except that the murdered woman’s little spaniel dog, whose hearing is more acute than that of the other residents in the house, gives one or two barks before settling down. The murderer stands for a while, gloating at what he has just accomplished. He can see that Eliza’s dressing gown has been swept aside, exposing her stays and underskirts, as well as some naked flesh. His perverted bloodlust is reawakened by this sight, and he stabs her hard in the abdomen with his formidable weapon, ripping her hard one, two, three times.
A postcard stamped and posted in 1906, showing the terrace from No. 93 to No. 105 Waterloo Road, situated on the eastern side of the street, a few blocks south of Wellington Terrace.
Eliza Grimwood is murdered, from the New Newgate Chronicle (London 1863).
At long last, the diabolical surgery is over. After standing for a while looking at the murdered, mutilated woman in the blood-spattered room, as if he wants to remember every detail of this still life in blood, this masterpiece of horror, the murderer takes out a canvas bag from his pocket. He removes his bloody mackintosh, gloves and gaiters, wipes his face with a cloth, and puts all these garments in the bag, along with the bayonet. Admiring himself in the mirror, he is pleased to see that although the room is deluged in blood, not even his collar or cuffs are bloodstained. He makes a move to look at the murdered woman’s cabinet, planning to take back the eight florins he had given her for her company for the night. But as he is about to do so, he can see an elegant, well-filled little purse in another drawer. He opens it and sees that it is well stocked with gold guineas. It suits his sense of humour to take the purse and leave the eight large silver coins behind. Carefully side-stepping the large pool of blood on the floor, he opens the door to the hallway and noiselessly walks out. He opens the front door, closes it gingerly behind him, and then he is gone.
As the darkness of night envelops the murder house at No. 12 Wellington Terrace, and hides the horror within from the eyes of men, an invisible vortex of evil still envelops the rather mean-looking terraced house. Eliza’s little dog, the only creature awake on the premises, must have been able to smell the blood, and sense the disaster, but since the timid canine is locked inside the back kitchen, it is unable to make its presence known. The time measured by the ticking of the clock in Eliza’s parlour, and by the slow drip of her blood onto the floor, the night passes slowly in the house of horrors, the little dog in the back kitchen its sole inhabitant to sense the visitation of the grim spectre of Murder, and the hideous presence of Death.
3
THE LAMBETH MURDER
At six o’clock in the morning of Saturday 27 May 1838, the bricklayer William Hubbard, Eliza’s boyfriend and the householder at No. 12 Wellington Terrace, reluctantly crawled out of his shabby bed in a small first-floor bedroom. Bracing himself for a long day’s work at the building site, he donned his blue working jacket and a pair of rough corduroy trousers, grabbed his toolbox and trudged downstairs. Walking through the common hallway of the house, he was surprised to see a candlestick lying on the mat near the hall door. Hubbard walked up to the half-open door to the back parlour, which was used as a bedroom by Eliza. Since he was well aware that she was a prostitute, and unlikely to approve of him barging in when she was entertaining some customer, he called out ‘Eliza!’ but there was no response.
After waiting for a while, Hubbard walked into the room. Since it was still quite dark, it took some time for him to get his bearings. At first, he could only see what he thought was a bundle of clothes on the floor, inside which there was a small pinkish object like a crayfish. But as he bent down to touch it, he became aware that it was in fact part of Eliza’s knee that was only just showing between two folds of her voluminous skirts. Eliza was lying still on the floor, and her face was covered with a counterpane. Hubbard had barely realised that there was clearly something very wrong, when he perceived something sticky under his feet and looked down, to find that he was standing in a huge pool of blood.
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Hubbard discovers Eliza Grimwood’s body, from the Illustrated Police News of 18 November 1888.
Slipping and sliding in the blood, the distraught Hubbard made his way out of the room, staggered up to the front door and cried out, ‘Murder!’ But since there were very few people about this early on a Saturday morning, no person took any notice. Hubbard instead dashed upstairs and tore open the door of his lodger, the prostitute Mary Glover. She was in bed with her boyfriend, the commercial traveller William Best. As Hubbard came bursting into the room, Best hastily leapt out of bed, fearful that it was another boyfriend of Miss Glover’s, who had come to beat him up. But as Best was searching for his trousers in the darkened room, he could see that it was Hubbard, from whom Mary Glover rented her room.
The agitated bricklayer blurted out: ‘For God’s sake, come downstairs!’
‘What’s the matter?’ asked the bewildered Mr Best.
‘Poor Eliza has been murdered!’
Having recovered from this shock to the senses, Mr Best got dressed, grasped a candlestick and resolutely went downstairs. He entered Eliza’s bedroom and could confirm that she was indeed dead, lying in an immense pool of blood. The room was very much bloodstained, even the ceiling. As Best was examining the lifeless body, Hubbard, who was fearful of burglars, distractedly ran about the house to see if anything had been stolen. As he came lurching into the candlelit murder room and saw the state of it, he nearly had a fit, and Best ‘was fearful that he intended to lay violent hands on himself’.
The celebrities of the day: Hubbard and Eliza, from the Penny Satirist of 16 June 1838. It may be questioned whether these are real portrait drawings, however. ‘Eliza’ looks rather like a stock image of a ballet dancer, including the dancing shoes.
