Georgian London: Into the Streets (8 page)

During the Georgian period, the Tower contained up to eleven lions at any one time. The male lions were regarded as the tamer, and Samuel Pepys records going to the Tower on 11 January 1660 to see ‘Crowly, who is now grown a very great lion and very tame
’. When young, all the lions were allowed out to play in the Tower grounds, much to the amusement of the visitors, who patted and played with them. The Duke of Sussex was particularly fond of a brother and sister who had been fostered by a goat, and he often went to see them. Also kept in the Tower were oddities such as cats and dogs born with more or fewer legs than they should have had. Ned Ward was unimpressed with such spectacle and thought:

… 
they should take as much care
to feed the poor human cripples who were born with all their legs, and have lost one half in the nation’s service … were it as uncommon a thing to see a soldier or a sailor with but one leg, as ’tis to see a dog or a cat with no more than two, no questions but they would live as well and be taken as much notice of as these are.

In 1704, John Strype produced his new edition of Stow’s
Survey of London
, and the menagerie was then said to contain six lions, two
leopards, three eagles, two Swedish owls (both called Hopkins), two ‘
Cats of the Mountains’ and a ‘Jackall
’. In 1728, when Gertrude Savile visited the menagerie, the lioness had given birth and the cubs had been taken away because: ‘
They say
if they did not take them from the lyoness, she would kill them upon any thing that frighted her … getting them from her she, to save it, took one in her mouth & gave it too kind a squeeze; kill’d it.’ Gertrude watched the surviving cubs being nursed in a room by the fire, and she also played with other adolescent lions in a room where they were free to run around.

In 1729, the cost of entry to the lions was threepence, a figure that rose to ninepence by the end of the century. Dead cats and dogs were used to supplement the feed of the big cats, and free entry could be had for anyone bringing one of either. In 1741, the guide to the Tower included an introduction to the lion Marco, his wife, Phillis, and their son, Nero. The lions roared with hunger at dawn, a sound which echoed throughout the east of the City and outside the wall. Their feed consisted of eight to nine pounds of raw beef daily, excluding any bones and any dogs or cats. On Sunday, the Tower was closed to visitors, and the keepers noted that the lions would often roar all day until someone came and paid them some attention.

There were also tigers. Dicka was recorded as a cub in 1741. Leopards such as Willa, ‘hunting-leopards’ (as cheetahs were known), lynx and ocelot were also recorded. Visitors agreed that the ocelot was the prettiest cat, but that the cheetah was the most affectionate. The cheetahs were led about the grounds on leashes in pairs for exercise and as a spectacle. In the same year, the first educational guidebook to the menagerie was introduced, aimed at children: ‘
The wild creatures that are shewn are all kept in strong dens, so that you need not be under any fear of danger from them.’ The guidebook also included information on the animals’ diets.

Lions, Tigers, Panthers and Leopards, are fed sheeps heads and plucks [offal] twice a day, of which a Lion eats four or five in a day; but Leopards, Panthers, and Tigers, are much fonder of raw dogs-flesh. They drink as often as they please. Usually several times in a day; each having a stone trough in his den
.

By the time the guidebook was published, exotic animals were no longer the creatures of myth and legend.
Surveys conducted
in London between the 1730s and 1750s by George Edwards and Eleazer Albin show that ownership of unusual pets was spread across the social classes, with around a third owned by the artisan classes, including Mr Bradbury the apothecary with his mongoose, Mr Scarlet the optician with his jerboa, and Mrs Kennon the midwife with her ring-tailed lemur and marmoset. It’s impossible to know if they flourished in their domestic settings, but some seem to have defied early deaths long enough to become treasured companions. Back in the menagerie in the 1750s, the big cat cubs survived into adulthood. However, the keeper of the King’s animals, John Ellys, made an arrangement that the surgeon John Hunter was to have first refusal on the bodies of all the menagerie animals, so that they might be dissected.

In about 1767, John Wesley visited the Tower with a flute player, requesting that the man play for the animals whilst he watched for any sign of a soul. Animals that did not show any such response included the dangerous grizzly bear, Old Martin, who was an old man by 1823 but still regarded his keepers as ‘
perfect strangers
’. Old Martin died in 1838, allegedly over a hundred years old, but he was probably Old Martin mark two or three. Other dangerous animals included the hyena and the jackals. The disconsolate solitary mongoose was made happy by the addition of a friend, and the two slept together, interlacing ‘
their limbs and tails in a singular fashion’ so that each could see over the other’s back, ‘and like that fall comfortably asleep
’.

The School of Monkeys lay in an outer yard near the Lion Tower. In 1753, the guidebook issued a warning about one of the baboons who had become expert in throwing missiles and would ‘
heave anything that happens to be within his reach with such Force as to split Stools, Bowls and other Wooden Utensils in a Hundred Pieces’. One young baboon was deemed unfit for polite company as ‘by his Motions when Women approach him, [he] appears to be lecherous to a surprising Degree
’. The monkeys were not a huge success, and were removed in 1810 for ‘
one of them having torn
a boy’s leg in a dangerous manner’.

There was usually an Indian elephant in the menagerie. They were largely judged to be inferior to a dog or a horse in understanding, yet
they were observed to play by spraying things with water from their trunks. Mr Cops, one of the better keepers at the Tower, was convinced of their ‘
wisdom’. Quite how they found out that elephants are ‘fond of wine, spirits and other intoxicating articles
’ is best consigned to the past, but the elephant rations contained a gallon of wine daily.

Kangaroos and emus wandered about freely in the grounds. The Royal Park at Windsor had quite a stock of roaming kangaroos, and they were breeding successfully at the Tower before 1820. An aside in an account of the Tower menagerie of this period notes that there were various parklands around England where kangaroos were present in some quantity.

My favourite account of an animal in the Tower is from the 1820s, when a zebra was recorded in the menagerie. Zebras are stubborn, and remain wild under all but the most confined circumstances. The Tower zebra had retained her character, suffering the indignities of her confined state with a tolerably good nature, provided she got her reward.

The subject of the present article
, which has now been about two years in the Menagerie, will suffer a boy to ride her about the yard, and is frequently allowed to run loose through the Tower, with a man by her side, whom she does not attempt to quit except to run to the Canteen, where she is occasionally indulged with a draught of ale, of which she is particularly fond.

The menagerie was much improved by Mr Cops, and during his tenure it became clear that it was no longer acceptable to house animals in such conditions as the Tower afforded. The menagerie housed 280 creatures by 1832. It was closed in 1835, when the animals formed the basis of the collection for London Zoo in Regent’s Park.

The City represents the heart of Old London, and it remained the hub of the growing metropolis. At the beginning of the Georgian era it was newly built and cleaner than it had ever been, full of ideas and urgency. And money. If the people were not sophisticated, displaying only commercial taste, they were solid and prosperous.

We now leave the tightly packed mercantile streets, smelling of fish, whale oil, animals and coffee, and head for the lawless urban sprawl outside the walls; the haunt of restless apprentices, homosexuals and forgers, writers, refugees and rebels. A place where anything might happen.

As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, London had ‘
got a great way
from the streame [of the Thames]’. Living outside the City rapidly became an attractive option for many, particularly merchants who wanted grand gardens rather than enclosed courtyards, artisans whose trades required space and freely running water, and those who could not afford to live in the Square Mile. However, from the moment the urban sprawl began to creep round the eastern walls of the Tower it became a place for poor immigrants and the marginalized.

The jagged arc of the City boundary begins in the east, beyond the Tower. Up against the Tower of London was the church of St Katharine and its associated hospital. In 1598, the historian John Stow described it as ‘
pestered with small tenements’ and wrote that there was a large number of ‘strangers
’ living there. St Katharine-by-the-Tower and St Botolph-without-Aldgate hold a significant amount of records for baptisms and burials of black members of the local community during the eighteenth century. Their entries are annotated with ‘Black’ or ‘Blackamoor’. In May 1827, St Katharine’s was pulled down so that the area might be redeveloped as part of the new London docks. More than a thousand small tenements were cleared to make way for the docks, displacing over 11,000 inhabitants with compensation only for freeholders.
The first of the docks was to sit immediately in the space the church had occupied for seven centuries.

Just north of St Katharine’s was ‘Rag Fair’, the nickname for Rosemary Lane ‘
where old clothes
and frippery are sold’. A later account reveals:

There is no expressing
the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me look on his with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man,
For
, says he,
I have actually cloathed him for fourteen pence
.

On 14 February 1756,
The Public Advertiser
recorded that Mary Jenkins, a second-hand clothes dealer in Rag Fair, had sold a pair of breeches to a woman ‘for sevenpence and a pint of beer’. In the pub, the purchaser found eleven Queen Anne gold guineas and a banknote dated 1729 sewn into the waistband. The woman was apparently illiterate, and she sold the banknote to another customer for a gallon of ‘twopenny purl’ (a powerful mixture of hot beer, sugar, ginger and gin) before being told that the note’s value was £30. Elsewhere:

Jews used to go
about the streets with bags full of wigs, crying out, ‘A dip for a penny.’ … It would happen that the man fished up a wig too big or too small, or a black-haired man got a red wig, or the reverse; or a most outrageous fit, in which no decent citizen or artisan could appear.

The Rag Fair would migrate to what became known as Petticoat Lane, where by the Victorian period there were ‘
between two and three miles
of old clothes … it is a vista of dinginess, but many-coloured dinginess, as regards female attire’.

Nearby, in Goodman’s Fields, house numbers were introduced to London in 1708. However, London continued to work on a system of large and elaborate signboards and descriptions, such as ‘At the Naked Boy and Three Crowns Against the New Church in The Strand’. To the north and west, the Huguenot refugees invaded the earlier textile-making settlement, sticking close to the charity of their mother church in Threadneedle Street and their soup kitchen, ‘La Soupe’. Where
Broadgate passes Liverpool Street Station and becomes Norton Folgate, the City’s jurisdiction ended; the area had been a place to find cheap lodgings since Christopher Marlowe took a room there. At the beginning of the period it was a scraggy patchwork settlement but by the end was occupied by more commercial buildings. It is still a discordantly odd area now, pummelled by heavy traffic, dotted with gritty nightclubs and cornershops where all the biscuits are out of date. To the west of Norton Folgate were the huge open spaces of Moorfields, perhaps the most symbolic of all of east London’s open spaces.

Through Aldgate and Bishopsgate passed the roads to Whitechapel and Shoreditch, taking rural traffic at the beginning of the period and suburban commuters at the end. Between them ran Houndsditch, just outside the City walls where ‘
dead dogges
were there laid or cast’ for centuries. Further west was Bethlem Hospital, crouched upon the southern edge of Moorfields. Commonly known as Bedlam, it was where the insane poor were housed. Moorfields itself played host to the City’s leisure time as well as her protests, and acted as a refuge during times of terror. On its western edge was Grub Street, where poor scribblers huddled in frozen garrets and broadsheets fluttered on washing lines, drying in the wind. ‘
On lines stretched
from tree to tree, slips of ballads fluttered in the breeze.’

At Cripplegate there were noisy coaching inns, such as the Catherine Wheel and the Bell, which catered for all classes of customers in their warren-like interiors. Clerkenwell played host to the artisan as goldsmiths, horologists and cabinetmakers set up workshops around the Green. Many were poorly paid pieceworkers, exempt from the apprenticeships enforced within the City. Holborn was where the richest merchants had moved a century earlier to build large houses strung out along the road. Behind them were courts and fields, mixed with large gardens that were getting ever smaller as the weight of population encroached. Most of the houses were by now subdivided into cheap tenements. Behind lay Chick Lane, a street of brothels and shops selling second-hand goods and clothes.

To the south-west Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Temple acted as London’s universities, full of bright and affluent young men away from home. In the late seventeenth century, it became a small town of
regular squares and passages with gardens opening on to the river, gulls wheeling overhead. Solidly middle class in both occupation and occupant, it was not immediately apparent that the Inns were busy haunts of prostitution and, sometimes, violence. Between Temple and the City was Alsatia, also known as the Liberty of Whitefriars, named after the white clothing of the Carmelites who had once inhabited the area. It was a ‘
dull, narrow, uninviting
lane sloping from Fleet Street to the river … a debtors’ sanctuary and thieves’ paradise, and for half a century its bullies and swindlers waged a ceaseless war with their proud and rackety neighbours of the Temple’. Close by was the Bridewell Prison. Originally a palace for Henry VIII, it had been given over to the correction of ‘disorderly women’, and soon Bridewell became London’s byword for prison.

These ragged margins of the City did not remain for long. The Georgian period saw them appear, flourish in their extraordinary ways and then die as London leached into the surrounding villages.

Moorfields is gone, much of it hidden beneath the vast Barbican complex whose myriad water features recall something of the marshy swamp concealed beneath. For Moorfields was a moor. It was boggy, and a danger to those who did not know their way around it in the late seventeenth century. It was so wet that Stow spoke of the necessity for ‘Cawswaies’ across it. The Moor Fields lay half in and half outside the City boundary. This marginality defined the area’s role in the London subconscious of the eighteenth century.

The idea that Moorfields was outside the accepted order of things was reinforced by the presence of Bethlem Hospital, the oldest hospital in the world to deal specifically with mental disturbance. It has lived in four places since it took in its first mentally ill patients in 1357: in a priory where Liverpool Street Station stands now, in Moorfields, then Southwark from 1815 and, finally, Beckenham. Whilst the priory with its individual cells had been useful for confining inmates separately, it was oversubscribed and in a poor state of repair.

Moorfields and the Artillery Ground, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

The new building, designed by Robert Hooke, was built at the southern edge of Moorfields. It was far more like a sanctuary than a prison, and Hooke’s plans showed a distinct care for space, light and recreational areas for the patients. Over the door were two sculptures by Caius Gabriel Cibber, of ‘Raving’ and ‘Melancholy Madness’, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. These sculptures signified the distinction made at the time between the insane ‘incurables’ and depressive ‘curables’. Those born with severe mental deficiency but largely passive natures were classed as ‘idiots’. ‘Moral insanity’ was an acceptable euphemism for syphilis or trauma resulting from distressing experiences as a street prostitute.

From its opening in 1676, tours of the new building could be had for a penny a time, and people came to watch the ‘ravers’. There was a resident apothecary, and physicians visited during the week. The men of the Monro family served as doctors at Bedlam during the Georgian period and improved care in over a century of attendance. They exchanged shackles for straitjackets, and fitted cork or India rubber flooring to cells. Numbers indicate there were above 200 patients, plus around 80 criminally insane prisoners who were kept separately. Exceptionally violent or criminally insane patients were still fettered, in some cases wearing only blanket tunics. If they continued to soil bedding, they were given only straw to sleep on. Almost every patient had a carer, but men were sometimes put in charge of female patients and there were accusations of abuse. In the middle of the century, the Monro regime made attempts to protect female inmates, particularly if they were ‘
Lewdly Given’, by confining them ‘to their Cells and no persons Suffered to come to them but in Company with one of the gallery Maids
’.

In 1751, St Luke’s mental hospital ‘for the Reception of Lunatics’ opened opposite Bedlam. It was run by William Battie, a progressive mental health practitioner and strong critic of the Monros. In 1758, he published his
Treatise on Madness
. ‘Madness,’ he began, ‘though at present a terrible and very frequent calamity, is perhaps as little understood as any that afflicted Mankind.’ He went on to attack the Monros and their madness monopoly at Bedlam. Battie, who invited medical students to come and see him work at St Luke’s, criticized the ‘few
select Physicians’ who ‘keep the cases as well as the patients to themselves’. His theories are free of the black and white approach the Monros had taken to madness. He believed ‘uneasiness is so interwoven in the frames of mortals’ that madness might come to affect anyone, not only the defective or morally flawed. John Monro responded instantly, with a publication priced at half that of Battie’s, and opening with:

Madness is a distemper
of such a nature, that very little of real use can be said concerning it … My own inclination would never have led me to appear in print; but it was thought necessary for me, in my situation, to say something in answer to the undeserved censures, which Dr. Battie has thrown upon my predecessors.

Monro tackles Battie’s rebukes ably, but the impact is somewhat lost when he extols the virtues of emetics as a cure for madness, using ipecacuanha to dislodge the ‘phlegm’ from the body. Only once the phlegm was removed could purges and bleeding drain the residual toxins the patient harboured.

In 1770, John Monro put a stop to Bedlam being used for the amusement of the paying public. Not everyone in Bedlam was an incoherent lunatic, though; some inmates were both lucid and persuasive, such as James Tilly Matthews. Matthews was admitted in 1797 and is believed to be the first fully documented case of paranoid schizophrenia. He was a Welsh tea merchant who became obsessed with the idea that a gang of espionage ‘
experts’ had set up a magnetic ‘Air Loom
’ at London Wall and were brainwashing the citizens of London, including major politicians. As a patient Matthews was charming, but he was detained for the rest of his life and died in 1815. His death coincided with the removal of Bedlam to Southwark, the same year the Parliamentary Committee was set up to investigate abuses of the madhouse system.

The constant presence of Bedlam, followed by St Luke’s, on the edge of Moorfields reinforced the area’s association with madness and marginality. It was also where the City of London’s crowds congregated, either as protagonists or spectators. It was a popular place for the apprentices to meet, bring their lovers, play football and other sports, and to gather in large numbers when they felt threatened or
put upon by the government, foreign workers, their masters or changes in commercial practice. In particular, the weavers of Spitalfields held protests there against cheap Irish labour encroaching on their business. The government was not above making its presence felt, and on 14 July 1709, Richard Steele recorded in the
Tatler
that the Artillery Company, which had its headquarters on the eastern side of Moorfields, had been observed ‘carrying out exercises through the northern part of the City near Moorfields … to the astonishment of the residents’. The government’s fear of crowds, and the need to assert a sometimes sinister authority, was followed up by the Riot Act of 1714, which declared any gathering of twelve or more people illegal and punishable by law.