Georgian London: Into the Streets (34 page)

The fireworks were presided over by some of the most skilled technicians of the day, and included ‘turbillons, mortars, Air balloons, Porcupine quills, pyramids and Sun & Stars’. There were rockets too. Rainbow, who was by this time the headmistress of the next-door school for girls, complained about them falling into their garden.

Miss Trusler’s cooking was taken very seriously. A print still exists of her sitting at a table wearing a mob cap, sleeves rolled up, a cup of brandy in one hand and a cake in front of her. She is young and jolly and round at the edges, the perfect cook for a pleasure garden. It seems she took her trade very seriously. Breakfast was revived as a big event, and she kept her own cows for ‘the finest Butter, Cream and new Milk’. Her fruit was her own, ‘having great Quantities in the Garden’ and her ‘rich seed and Plum Cakes [could be] sent to any part of the Town at 2s 6d each’. Later, she would go off on her own to take over the Gold Lamp in Boyle Street, near Savile Row, where she specialized in sweet stuff, including, as her advertisement proclaimed ‘a Dish called Trifle which is exceeding good’.

In 1762, the Iroquois Indians who had come to London to complain to George III that their land had been ‘taken by some Persons from New York’, were brought to the gardens for dinner. The young Oliver Goldsmith came up to them to say hello and handed over a
gift he had brought with him, an unrecorded ‘trifle’. The men were so pleased with this gift that they embraced him suddenly, transferring much of their coppery face-paint on to a surprised Goldsmith.

By now, the New Road had become a highway traversed not only by cattle but also by coaches and wagons. Marylebone was becoming built up, obscuring the views of the distant villages and compromising the gardens’ rural qualities. Pressure on land began to make the eight acres and ramshackle old tavern look ripe for development. Perhaps this was why they were refused a Public Musick Licence in 1773. In the same year, a City surveyor searching for wells found a natural spring in the gardens, and they were marketed as a ‘spa’. Sadly, they just weren’t ‘country’ enough any more. On 2 April 1777,
The Public Advertiser
carried the advertisement for the sale of the gardens and their assets. Marylebone Pleasure Gardens stumbled on for a short while, but were soon consumed by Marylebone High Street.

The consumption of Marylebone’s open space by building didn’t happen overnight, or by magic. For many years, construction workers dominated the area. As the century went on, these workers were increasingly of Irish extraction. Their sedan chair business was dying and construction was the obvious trade, as the Irishmen liked to work together in groups. One of the most interesting contrasts provided by Marylebone is the area where the poor Irish lived in the east, in the elbow of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. They earned their living in Marylebone but were still close to the employment opportunities of the sedan chair business in Mayfair and St James’s, and also the hay business in the meadows to the north. Geographically, it was perfect.

The Irish population was tolerated as a necessary, if grating, evil. One commentator noted that ‘
the turbulent
and barbarous habits of the lower orders of the people of Ireland, their abject poverty, and their sufferings have long been a subject of unavoiding complaint’. The Irish rapidly spread out from St Giles’s to occupy temporary
dwellings closer to their work: ‘
The extensive waste
which Tyburnia now covers was occupied with the most wretched huts, filled with squatters of the lowest of the community, whose habitual amusement on a Sunday morning was that of dog fights.’

As the Georgian period came to a close, the parish of Marylebone and its workhouse had become as burdened as St Giles’s was with the ‘lower Irish’. The Calmel Buildings, near Portman Square, were little more than a shanty town; the Marylebone Vestry Minutes reported that it was ‘such a scene of filth and wretchedness as cannot be conceived’. Soon after this, the Calmel Society was founded to help alleviate the suffering there. Montagu Burgoyne, the Secretary, surveyed 24 houses in the Calmel Buildings and found 700 people living in them. In his report to the Mendicity Committee, published in 1816, he commented, ‘neither in town nor in the country have I ever met with so many poor among whom there is so much distress, so much profligacy, and so much ignorance’.

Burgoyne was reporting at the height of the building of the Regent’s Canal, upon which many of the men worked. The canal was designed to run ‘over the top’ of London from the end of the Grand Junction Canal, at Paddington, to Limehouse Basin. That way, freight could be transported around the city by water. The building of the canal was a grim time for Paddington. It ‘
had then an evil reputation
. To walk in the fields there through which the canal flowed was not very pleasant and certainly not safe.’ The Paddington Basin area has been redeveloped in recent years, with new flats overlooking the canal, but it has taken a long time to shake off the earlier associations with industry and poverty.

New roads and waterways were detrimental to Marylebone, but commerce and the transport of goods has been an essential part of London since the beginning. The River Thames is the defining feature of the city. We will go there now, to find the lightermen and sailors who lived their lives on the water, as well as the thieves and widows of London’s ‘nautical hamlets’.

In 1717, George I requested a pageant be arranged on the Thames, for his entertainment. He ‘
took Water at Whitehall in an open Barge’ which rode the tide to Chelsea in great splendour. It was eight o’clock in the evening. Other barges and boats accompanied them, including a barge full of musicians, who played Handel’s specially written
Water Music
for the first time. The King enjoyed it so much that he requested it to be played three times, exhausting the musicians. He and his company dined at Chelsea around midnight, and returned to the water at two, when they were rowed back to Westminster, once again to the sound of ‘the finest Symphonies
’.

The Thames has always played a large role in London’s ceremonies, but its real value to the city was economic. London has no clearly defined harbour. In the Pool of London, bounded roughly by Wapping and London Bridge, goods from all over the world were unloaded for sale or re-export. In theory, all had to be declared between sunrise and sunset at the legal quays, which were twenty wharves between London Bridge and the Tower. These had been appointed by Elizabeth I, in 1558, for the collection of the appropriate duties and taxes. By the eighteenth century, these wharves were severely congested, leading to the creation of ‘sufferance wharves’ on the south bank, which were allowed to take in goods on ‘sufferance’. By the 1760s, the system was totally overwhelmed. The Pool had official capacity for no more than 545 ships but it regularly held around almost 2,000, with goods spoiling aboard because they couldn’t be unloaded. ‘
In fact, the whole river
, from the bridge, for a vast way, is covered with a double forest of masts, with a narrow avenue in mid-channel.’ At times, even this channel closed, presenting young boys aboard with the challenge of getting from one bank of the Thames to the other by clambering across unbroken decking.

Many associate Britain’s Age of Sail with the heyday of the navy,
but Britain’s naval might was nothing compared to her greed for the new and luxurious. War interrupted these supplies but Port of London Authority statistics still show that, between 1700 and 1770, commerce doubled. From 1770 to 1790, it doubled again. In 1792, London logged imports at £17,898,000 and exports, many of which were the same goods, re-exported westward, at £23,674,000. London consumed a massive 65 per cent of the incoming goods.

Old Westminster Bridge, showing Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey in the background, 1754

These days, the river traffic is relatively dull, with only the odd police speedboat to liven things up. In the eighteenth century, the huge 1,000-ton ships of the East India Company drew into the Thames, tired, wormy and barnacled, with crews of Englishmen, tanned like leather, and exotic, agile Indians, known as Lascars. London had very few docks which could hold a ship of this size, so they were usually unloaded into smaller vessels downriver. Queenhithe, in the City, could hold something small, Puddle Dock something even smaller, and Small Profit Dock only the tiniest of seagoing craft. They were docks in the loosest sense, little more than inlets allowing vessels to get out of the river traffic.
In Rotherhithe
, the deep old
Howland Wet (later Greenland) Dock was kitted out to deal with blubber and other whale products.

Processing whale carcasses was a filthy business. The first stages were often done at sea, but also in processing facilities at the edges of the Greenland Dock. First, the whalebone cutters removed the baleen. Then, the head was opened carefully to extract the spermaceti, or fine wax, which sits in a reservoir at the front of the skull. It was a valuable product for cosmetics such as lip balm and moisturizers. To obtain it, a man with a bucket scooped it out of the hole carefully. As the level dropped, he would climb inside the whale’s head. When the wax had been safely extracted, the blubber was stripped away with huge, scythe-like knives and then rendered down to produce the lamp oil which lit most London homes. The innards were dumped into the water after the ambergris was removed from the lower intestine. Ambergris is a waxy secretion which initially smells faecal, but over time this fades. It was used as a fixative for perfumes and fetched a high price. With the move from whalebone to steel for corsetry, and whale oil to gas for lighting, Greenland Dock was given over to timber in the nineteenth century, which no doubt pleased the neighbours.

With deep, convenient docks scarce, ships queued near the wharves. Here they were unloaded by lightermen, whose nimble craft drew up alongside the behemoths. The lighters, laden with goods, then negotiated the trip to the wharf. Porters, with their lethal billhooks, brought the cargo ashore and carried the goods up the nearest set of stairs. London’s river stairs have particularly evocative names, which always refer to a visible landmark nearby – so that sailors could navigate by them. Often, this was a riverside pub, as in the case of the Cricketers’ Stairs, Popham’s Parlour Stairs and Golden Anchor Stairs.

Edging the river were hundreds of warehouses into which the goods were taken and accounted for. Eager buyers strained for a first glimpse of the tea bundles, sacks of coffee or bales of whalebone from which they made their living. Opportunistic children lounged nearby, waiting for the sighting of a particular vessel, before bolting back to one of the City coffee houses where they were paid for news
of the new arrival. The customs officials clambered over shipments to make sure they didn’t miss anything, trying to keep hold of their documents and a handy writing instrument: Ned Ward remembered one customs official with a pen twisted into his ponytail for safekeeping. They didn’t only check the exteriors of the boxes; shipments were liable to be thoroughly searched for smuggled goods. Sailors’ wives gathered to welcome their husbands home and extract wages from their hands as the ‘garblers’ began to sort the goods. These were then inspected by the all-important warehousemen. Warehousemen were respected by everyone: they saved time, and therefore money, with their speedy identification of commodities and their no-nonsense allocation of grades. These jobs were often hereditary, leading to London’s rough-and-tumble East End warehousemen becoming connoisseurs of such goods as rum, cinnamon (which came tied in bales consisting of bundles of sticks up to twelve inches long), ginger and pimento. Apprentices in tea warehouses carried small books called ‘chop-books’ with the Chinese characters for the different types of tea written against their English translation, helping them to decipher the marks chalked or burned on to the sides of the crates.Skirting the edges were the river thieves: the ‘Pirates’, the ‘Night-Plunderers’, the ‘Light and the Heavy Horsemen’ (small jobs and big jobs), and the ‘Scuffle-Hunters’, who were gangs of children who crept aboard, created a diversion and then tipped goods overboard to be retrieved at low tide. In 1796, the levels of such theft were thought to be around half a million pounds a year, and a Parliamentary Commission looked into ‘
the best mode of providing sufficient accommodation for the increased trade and shipping of the Port’. It led to the formation of the Thames River Police, based in Wapping High Street, in 1798: ‘A RIVER POLICE, for securing Commercial Property against the unexampled Depredations to which it has been Subject, and for improving the Morals of the Maritime Labourers
.’ Reformer Patrick Colquhoun was in charge, and the force was initially composed of fifty officers funded by the West India Committee. They policed around 33,000 river workers, of whom a third Colquhoun guessed to be ‘on the game’.

The Thames River Police succeeded mainly because their officers
were well salaried and prohibited from other work. In the first year it was estimated they had prevented the theft of goods worth around £122,000. They were an unqualified success, although deeply unpopular amongst the river workers.

In addition, new and more easily regulated docks were built to the east. First, in 1802, the West India Docks opened on the site of what is now Canary Wharf. The West India Docks covered thirty acres and was guarded by a wall twenty feet high. Their official capacity of 600 vessels equalled that of the Pool. Loading and unloading was more orderly, and the losses from theft immediately reduced.

The eighteenth century marks the high point for the river in the commercial life of London. And it wasn’t only the ships coming in and out of the Pool which created revenue.
Industrial mills
were built alongside the river, and one of the main focuses along the south bank was engineering, with over 300 businesses by 1820. Both trade and industry were reliant on London’s great waterway, as were all those who earned their living upon it. These people were some of London’s most resilient and roughest characters. Yet they were not poor, and rarely without hope, for who knew what the next tide might bring?

London’s watermen were a special breed: mainly Londoners, and mainly resident on the South Bank or Wapping. They were rough and hardy, working in all weathers in their small, exposed craft. The Thames is a turbulent river with a fast current. Their black boats criss-crossed on the water, ferrying people to and from work and social engagements. Like hackney carriages and sedan chairs, they were regulated; watermen were required to wear badges and numbers. Proud of their Englishness and their long heritage, the watermen formed a little guild near Garlickhythe. They worked largely to the west of London Bridge, where they plied the river stairs and shores for trade.

The pleasantest way
of moving from one end of the town to the other in summer time, is by water, on that spacious gentle stream, the Thames, on which you travel two miles for six-pence, if you have two watermen, and for three-pence if you have but one: and to any village up or down the river, you go with company for a trifle.

Henry Mayhew described the Thames watermen as ‘slightly-informed, or uninformed, and not unprosperous men’. Becoming a waterman was a decent option for someone with limited academic potential but substantial physical strength; it was a strenuous job requiring relatively little capital to start out with. It was also dangerous, the rapids at London Bridge being a particular hazard. One poor waterman froze to death, in 1771, after his taxi became caught in the Thames ice. He cried out ‘
piteously’ to large passing craft but no one could reach him. The papers reported ‘a waterman … had his boat jammed in between the ice and could not get on shore, and no waterman dare venture to his assistance. He was almost speechless last night and it is thought he cannot survive long.’ A week later, the papers reported, ‘the Body of Jacob Urwin the Waterman who was unfortunately drowned last week at London Bridge was drove up with the Tide on a shoal of Ice, and brought ashore at Monsoon Dock
’.

The watermen waited at the various river stairs for custom, where they queued (much as black taxis do now on a taxi rank). Pitched and violent battles with unlicensed boatmen often made the news, and concerns over safety made them the minicabs of their day. Thames watermen were known for being cheeky and rowdy: ‘
On the river
a curious habit was to assail all passing boats with a torrent of abuse. This was called river wit.’ They were also renowned for their rather smelly diet of ‘
broil’d red herring’ and ‘bread and cheese and onions
’.

Working in potentially dangerous conditions every day made the watermen highly aware of the river’s ‘moods’. They were also superstitious, and nothing brought that out more than ‘strange tides’. The Port of London has two high tides a day, and a history of odd behaviour. On 22 March 1662, the Thames reached high water three times in four hours, and this was recorded three further times during the
eighteenth century. But repeated high tides were not as alarming as the phenomenon of long ‘dead waters’ which were experienced in the 1760s and 1770s. During this period, the few minutes of dead water, when the tide turns, became extended for up to an hour and a half. The watermen placed objects such as buckets in the water and made them spin to illustrate the stillness of the current. For men so familiar with the water, such things were a bad omen. Dead waters still occur occasionally and remain an eerie time on the river.

If life was not easy as a waterman, some light relief was provided by rowing races. Gentlemen sponsored teams of professional watermen to row in races, sometimes against apprentices, who regularly hired cutters on a Sunday to row up to Richmond and Kew with their girlfriends. These land-based apprentices were a constant niggle for the watermen – who were banned from working on Sunday – so races between the two factions were always fraught with tension.

On 1 August 1716, a notice was posted upon London Bridge, announcing that:

This being the day
of his Majesty’s happy accession to the throne, there will be given by Mr Doggett an Orange Colour Livery with a Badge representing Liberty to be rowed for by six watermen that are out of their time within the year past. It will be continued annually on the same day forever.