Georgian London: Into the Streets (36 page)

Going to sea was a hard decision, but for young men of decent families it could lead, like the army, to social improvement. It could also be a miserable and perilous life, and some never got that far: ‘
Fishermen off Poplar
caught a shark on New Year’s Day, 1787, and inside it found a watch and chain and a cornelian seal. Apparently the watch had been bought by a man in Whitechapel for his son’s first sea voyage. The boy fell overboard almost immediately and was never seen again.’

Samuel Johnson said most men would rather go to prison than to sea, as the food and company were both better in prison, and ‘
being in a ship
is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned’. Press gangs operated throughout London, particularly in the river areas and on the bridges, snapping up ‘
persons who had not any
visible method of livelihood’. They were looking for the aimless and friendless.

Apart from the shipwrights and male workers on the docks, the area contained the largest population of women living alone in London. Wives, widows, girlfriends and whores lived in tenements, no doubt feeling pestered, harassed and lonely by turns. Mixed-race children, fathered by foreign sailors, roamed the streets along with their white siblings. Women didn’t always stay ashore; a letter to Samuel Pepys detailed how the navy ships were ‘
pestered with women
’.

It wasn’t only the navy ships but also the merchant boats that allowed women aboard. Henry Teonge was, in 1675, the chaplain on
Assistance
when he wrote, ‘You would have wondered to see here a man and a woman creep into a hammock, the woman’s legs to the hams hanging over the sides or out at the end of it.’ Complaints continued regularly throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and opinion was deeply divided. Admiral Thomas Hardy, of Nelson-kissing fame,
stated, ‘
I consider it right
that women should be admitted into ships; when I was at sea, I always admitted them.’ Others, though, considered it gross indecency.

Admiral Edward Hawker, an overzealous reformer, wrote in 1821 that the sailors and their women go below decks and

… 
in sight and hearing
of each other, shamelessly and unblushingly couple like dogs … In a case that has lately occurred, the captain and his wife were actually on the quarterdeck on a Sunday morning while seventy-eight prostitutes were undergoing an inspection of the first lieutenant to ascertain that their dress was clean.

The first lieutenant wasn’t checking out the girls’ latest fashions; ‘clean dress’ was Admiral Hawker’s euphemism for inspecting the women for venereal disease. William Robinson, who served in the Royal Navy, wrote about their condition in the early nineteenth century, coming to the conclusion that: ‘
Of all the human race
, these poor creatures are the most pitiable; the ill-usage and the degradation they are driven to submit to are indescribable.’ These women lived mainly in small dwellings strung out between the river and Ratcliff Highway, now known just as The Highway. Those who worked as prostitutes kept an eye out for ships arriving. They didn’t have to look far, as ‘
between the houses
and the water, in all this long tract of street, are frequent docks, and small building yards. The passenger is often surprised with the sight of the prow of a ship rising over the street, and the hulls of new ones appearing at a number of openings.’

As Ratcliff became rapidly more built up, it became associated with the vagaries of seamen and their variable fortunes. ‘The Wapping Landlady’, looking to make a quick turn on the ‘tars just come ashore’, either through girls or drink, was a London icon famous enough for Francis Hayman to feature her in his canvasses for Vauxhall Gardens. Ratcliff Highway was

A long narrow street
, well-paved, and handsomely flagged on both sides, winding along the banks of the Thames, as far as the end of Limehouse, an extent of near two miles; and inhabited by multitudes of sea-faring men, alternate occupants of sea and land: their floating tenements lie before them.

The area was rough and the general quality of the inhabitants poor. But poverty cannot explain everything. Mention a famous East End killer and no doubt Jack the Ripper’s name will come up, but he wasn’t the first. The Ratcliff Highway murders, committed within a fortnight in 1811, terrified London.

On 7 December, just before midnight, 24-year-old draper Timothy Marr was shutting up his shop at 29 Ratcliff Highway. He had been a sailor with the East India Company for four years during his teens, but had returned to London and was making his way running his own business.

Living above the shop with him were his wife, Celia, their three-and-a-half-month-old baby, the apprentice James Gowan and their serving girl, Margaret Jewell. Timothy Marr sent Margaret off to get them some oysters for a midnight snack, and to pay their bill at the baker’s around the corner. Margaret found both shops closed. Nipping back to the shop, she saw her boss still inside, working. She decided to try another shop for the oysters. That decision saved her life.

She returned, again empty-handed, at twenty past midnight. The shop and house were in darkness so she pulled the bell. No answer. She tried again; inside, there was a scuffle and the baby cried. Suddenly anxious, Margaret attempted to kick the door in, only desisting when she was heckled by a passing drunk. She stopped and sat on the step, frightened and cold. When the watch arrived at around one, she told parish watchman George Olney what had happened. George had already passed by while Margaret was on her second oyster run. By this time, the shutters were closed, so he tried them and found they weren’t locked. Someone was in the shop, and he shouted through that they hadn’t locked their shutters. A voice he hadn’t recognized called back that they knew, and it was fine.

John Murray was a pawnbroker and the Marrs’ neighbour. He
had heard the same noise inside the house as Margaret, but hadn’t acted upon it. He came out to speak with the watchman. Worried, he then went to the back of the house and let himself in through the back door, which wasn’t locked. He carried a candle and called out as he went.

Inside, John found the body of James Gowan the apprentice. His skull had been smashed in with a heavy object, his face was destroyed. Near him lay Celia Marr. She was face down on the floor and blood was still pouring from the bloody mess where her face had been. John Murray cried murder, bringing in other neighbours. The body of Timothy Marr was found in another room, his head smashed to pieces. Someone then remembered the baby: it was found in its cot, skull broken on the left side. Worse than that, the baby’s throat had been cut so deeply the head was almost severed.

The shout went up, and brought Charles Horton from the Thames Police Office. He searched the scene himself, going through the victims’ pockets and finding more than five pounds on Timothy Marr. In the Marrs’ bedroom he found, leaning against a chair, a shipwright’s maul, or heavy hammer, with the letters ‘JP’ stamped into the head. They later discovered that this belonged to an ‘Old Swede’, John Peterson, who lodged at the nearby Pear Tree. There was also over £150 in the chest of drawers: either Margaret’s attempted break-in had alerted the murderer, or money had not been the motive.

John Harriott, the magistrate in charge, had bills printed looking for information. For the next fortnight, the authorities investigated every avenue, with no results. Then, on 19 December, at the King’s Arms (in what is now Garnet Street) the publican John Williamson, Elizabeth his wife and the barmaid, Bridget Harrington, were found dead. A watchman had found their lodger, John Turner, shinning down knotted sheets from an upper floor and shouting murder after having disturbed a large man rooting through the dead Williamson’s things. They forced the cellar trapdoor and found the bodies. John Williamson’s body was hanging from the cellar stairs, his skull shattered and his throat cut. Their fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Kitty Stillwell, alone survived out of the Williamson family. She had been sleeping in an obscure back bedroom and escaped notice.

The following morning, the Home Secretary appointed a Bow Street magistrate to come and sort things out. Several arrests were made, but they had little idea who they were chasing. One of the arrestees was James Williams, a sailor who had been drinking at the King’s Arms and was acquainted in a roundabout way with Timothy Marr through the East India Company. It was never clear whether the two had sailed together. He also lodged at the Pear Tree, and so could have taken John Peterson’s maul. Williams did not fit the lodger’s description, but circumstantial evidence was against him. Williams was never tried, or even questioned for a second time after his arrest; he hanged himself in his cell on the morning of Christmas Eve.

On New Year’s Eve, Williams’ body was drawn through the streets on a wagon. The driver of a hackney coach leaned over and struck the corpse about the head three times with his whip, but there was no other disorder from the 10,000-strong crowd. The fury of the people was directed not only at a murderer – for murder was not uncommon in Wapping and Ratcliff – but at someone who would enter a private home. At St George’s East burial ground, where the Marrs had recently been interred, the body had a stake driven through the heart and was buried kneeling in the grave. James Williams remained there until he was dug up during the laying of the gas mains, decades later, and reburied elsewhere.

By the end of the Georgian period, the glory of London’s water trade was over. Wapping, Rotherhithe and Deptford, which had been a lively, if rough, riverside sprawl began to decline into urban slums. The river was becoming increasingly polluted, and the last salmon was caught in this stretch of the Thames in 1833. The wooden ships which had been built in Deptford and Greenwich had run their course and were returned to London to be broken up. By 1815, steamships were on the Thames; and by 1830, iron ships were dominating the waterways. Henry Castle, born to a ship-building family in 1808, was living in Rotherhithe in the 1830s when he realized
more wooden ships were being decommissioned than built. He set up a ship-breaking business in Rotherhithe and also on Baltic Wharf, Millbank.

The yards were littered with the hulks of wooden ships being stripped down and recycled, often into garden furniture. A catalogue of their furniture later featured at the Great Exhibition of 1851, available for same-day delivery. Some ships were burned on the foreshore and the metal remnants scavenged for scrap afterwards. Legend has it that Turner’s
Fighting Temeraire
was being towed to Castle’s yard in his famous picture, mastless and damaged. Castle was keen to collect figureheads from old ships. In perhaps one of the most telling stories of the move from sail to steam, from Georgian to Victorian, the navy found that figureheads, absent from iron ships, had been a source of morale and inspiration for sailors, who wanted them preserved. The naval authorities found themselves in an awkward position, forced to deal with a new breed of ‘salvage’ dealers who knew the value of a 15-foot-high wooden woman. Castle’s yard perhaps best represents the sweeping away of an age: Georgian London’s sea-going stock might become Victorian London’s deckchairs.

This area was particularly affected in the years leading up to Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1832, London’s first cholera epidemic hit Wapping. In 1831, cholera was spreading across Europe, and was particularly prevalent in the Baltic. Ships arriving in London were made to wait out a ten-day quarantine at Standgate Creek, in Deptford, but the precautions were not enough. Cholera arrived in Newcastle in the winter, and soon the Tyne colliers, whose vessels went up and down the east coast free of quarantine restrictions, brought it to London. One man, John Potts, arrived on a vessel named
Mould
, and was waiting to take another vessel,
Dirt
, back. He died quickly in Shadwell workhouse with cholera-like symptoms. A twenty-inch section of his bowels was removed for inspection, and the Central Board of Health pronounced that he had died, not from cholera, but ‘
spontaneous gangrene
of the bowels’. In February, three women who picked coals on the shore in Limehouse died of the disease. Their desiccated bodies had turned blue just before death, a sure
sign of Asiatic cholera, or
Cholera morbus
. The whole of London was thrown into a panic.

A cholera hospital was set up on HMS
Dover
, at Hermitage Pier, Wapping. Bodies from the ship were buried deep in the Woolwich scrubland, but the disease could not be contained. Cholera is spread through contact with contaminated faecal matter. Given the sheer scale on which sufferers evacuated water from their bodies, maintaining clean conditions was almost impossible. There is no accurate figure for the total number of deaths, but it was estimated between 2,000 and 3,000, of which almost half were in the nautical hamlets of east London. Cholera would revisit the city in the Broad Street epidemic of 1854, when a leaking cesspit contaminated with cholera polluted the water supply. A doctor, John Snow, began to understand how it was spreading, and progress was finally made on tackling the disease.

As cholera swept Limehouse and Wapping, the old industries faded from the river, and new ones took over. The Thames Tunnel, running between Rotherhithe and Wapping, was bored beneath the river. It took a long time to complete, and work went on in fits and starts from 1825. Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard Kingdom, finally succeeded in getting the tunnel open in 1834, following an earlier failed attempt by Richard Trevithick. It took years and lives to build, eventually opening in the Victorian era, when it was a huge attraction and proved that underwater tunnels could be built. (It is now part of the London overground system, after lying empty for years.) Further rapid innovations in engineering were evident in the area, and Deptford hosted London’s first railway station, opening in February 1836. The line was soon extended to London Bridge, linking the ancient with the modern along the arterial heart of London.