The House by the Thames (26 page)

It is for this same year that I know what this section of Bankside actually looked like, by putting together the small elevation drawings from Flood Prevention plans, as described in Chapter IV. These form a complete single snapshot of a moment when Bankside was into its relentless evolution from pretty residential terrace to working waterfront, but still retained much of the physical structure of its previous life. By this date, some large warehouses have appeared up river of Cardinal's Wharf, at the coal-wharves then in the possession of Hinton & Horne, and at Queen's Wharf, which was the point at which the western end of Bankside veered away from the river to run behind the riverside buildings rather than in front of them.

After this warehouse, coming eastwards, are some more coal-wharves, with Mason stairs alongside, and then an oddly asymmetric house with an archway in it leading into White Hind Alley. Because of its position and also its roofline, I believe that there may be concealed within it parts of the Tudor ‘Fish House', once the entrance to the Great Pike Garden, which survived intact till the late eighteenth century. Across its façade at second-floor level runs the legend ‘Meredith's Velocipedes'. The modern bicycle would not be invented till the 1890s. The earliest velocipede was constructed, as the name implies, to be propelled along by the feet touching the ground, but it soon evolved into the pedal-driven ‘penny-farthing'. By 1880 go-ahead young men were beginning to charge precipitously about on these machines and enthusiastic cycling clubs had been formed. Next door is the long-established Waterman's Arms (‘Meux
& Co's Entire – Wine and Spirit Merchant'), a Georgian building which had replaced a much older ale-house from former times. I think it was probably in the Waterman's Arms that the Bankside coal-porters had traditionally been allocated jobs and received their pay – partly in beer – though this bad old practice, with its cartel of powerful publicans, was dying out by 1880. This public house, and the velocipede merchant alongside, are approximately where the Millennium footbridge stands today.

Next come the two early Victorian warehouses of Crown Wharf, four-storey blocks with ornate iron wall-cranes, one marked ‘Henry Sykes Engineers' and the other ‘Mitford Slate'. Then comes Moss Alley and then a third, more recently built block. This covers the ground which, a few years before, was still occupied by numbers 54, 55 and 56 Bankside, where several generations of Sells intermittently lived. East of that, however, the old houses are still intact. Here are 50, 51 and 52, with ‘Moss Isaacs Iron Wharf' running across them and Cardinal Cap Alley going through the archway, then number 49. This now has the distinction of being the only house along this run whose front does not bear some lettering – testimony to the take-over by industry and commerce. Nos.48 and 47, where curates had lodged, are now ‘British Lion Wharf, PR Leeuw & Co'. Numbers 46 and 45 are ‘Imperial Wharf', while 44, the house William Horne did up for his own use with indoor plumbing and brass accessories, and where the Reverend Mann lived, is now ‘Cantler & Co., Licensed Lighterman'. Next door is the long-established ‘Sutton, Sail Maker'. Then comes the stoneyard and more new warehouses, but further short runs of old terraces still survive between Southwark and London Bridges.

Clearly, the intention was that all these trade names should be visible across the river, and to boats on its surface. Another of those circular effects of time is present here, summoning from the distant past Stow's waterfront houses of dubious repute that ‘had signs on their front, towards the Thames, not hanged out but painted on walls.'

So, by the last two decades of the century, Bankside was simply the works-yard of the great commercial city on the opposite bank and apparently all but invisible to anyone who did not have business there. Books with names like
Living London, Wonderful London and London: Heart of the Empire
, which were beginning to be published, scarcely mentioned London's oldest embanked shore, then or for most of the next century. Only the exceptional commentator had the vision, and the deep-seated knowledge of London, to see beyond ‘coils of rusty chain, and bits of rusty machinery … cranes for the hoisting of things in or out of the barges … planks lying in position for the wheelbarrows'. But such a one was Walter Besant,
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he who also mourned the transformation of the countryside south of Southwark within his own lifetime from a world of beauty into crowded urban sprawl. From the vantage point of the platform on the water belonging to the Anchor pub by Southwark Bridge, he evokes the sunset scene looking up river:

‘Blackfriars Bridge, standing out with sharp, clear lines, as if cut out of black cardboard; above it, the dazzling golden light of the western sky; and below it, the broad bosom of the river at the flood.' There would be fifty or sixty – ‘or a hundred' – barges moored, in tiers running half way across the river, some laden, some with sails furled: ‘all were painted gaily with streaks of red, blue, yellow and green'.

He characterises the Anchor and one or two other public houses along the river as being ‘of a quiet kind' and remarks that after eight o'clock at night all the activity on the quays ceases – ‘It is generally unknown who are the private residents of Bankside: if a man wished for perfect retirement, a place where his friends would never think of looking for him … he could not do better than to take one of these houses – there are not many – and live in it.'

Upon this, his story, which is a novel, takes off into a happy evocation of whom these private residents might be. He imagines finding ‘quite the cleanest and most respectable house on Bankside – it was even provided with a Virginia creeper, now rapidly becoming green with its first shoots of spring'. There he takes lodgings: his landlord wears ‘an immaculate frockcoat', works in a lawyers' office and lives with his brother, who is an impoverished poet. The brothers tell him: ‘ “You have done well, Sir, in coming to the Bank Side. Here we breathe. Here we catch the pure breeze fresh from the German ocean” … [The North Sea is what is meant. The use of the older term, already out of date by then, is indicative of the brothers' old-fashioned ways.] “If this place were generally known, those who now live in Eaton or in Berkeley Square would gladly exchange with us who live upon the Bank … As for ourselves, we are, I believe, the oldest Family of Bank Side.” ' They recount that they have been there for the last hundred years, and that their grandfather had run the place as an academy. They still hold meetings for ‘The Society of Bankside', in which four eccentric but educated old gentlemen gather for ‘Exchange of Thought'. According to another lodger, there is no society in the neighbourhood any longer in the generally accepted sense of the term – ‘ “There is a clergyman or two – and there are, I suppose, a few doctors – sixpenny doctors.”' The first-floor front room in which these antique exchanges of thought are held is furnished with Georgian furniture, family portraits and punch glasses – ‘Nothing had been changed in the room for sixty years at least.' The new lodger is put into the best bedroom, which has a four-poster bed and a candle for lighting.
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This is, you may say, a romantic evocation, but it is nevertheless a plausible one. Moreover, Besant had the insight, unlike most of his contemporaries, to see beyond the grimy wharves not only the lost past but a possible future to come. In his novel, he lends this visionary imagination to a young girl, Althea, daughter of the house, who takes him on what we would now recognise as a ‘history trail' through the old lanes behind Bankside. She evokes for him Paris Garden, the Falcon, Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, Maiden Lane, scents of flowering honeysuckle and ‘ “fish quite, quite fresh, dipped in oil rather turned and then imperfectly fried” '. With a nice sense of both the transience and the permanence of things, she assures him, ‘ “We are ghosts of the future.”' He, for his part, begins happily to envisage a future in which just such ‘strong and beautiful girls' organise ‘West Enders or Americans' into street walks, recounting to them history in return for a fee.

It was to be forty years before another young writer found his own ancient hideout on Bankside for real, but it happened. Sixty-odd years more and Besant's dream of eager tourists following a guide has become a fact too.

In 1891 number 49 was lived in by another lighterman; he is marked as ‘employed' rather than as an employer of men himself. He was married, with five children aged from ten down to two. No servant. The whole family were Southwark-born. In 50 was a ‘master spectacle-maker', apparently living on his own: a number of the houses that remained seem under-tenanted by this date, no doubt because many of the rooms were occupied by wharf offices. In number 48 was a husband, wife and eighteen-year-old son, all of German origin. Germans, along with Italians and with Russian Jews, were the economic migrants to Britain of that era, the prototypes of many waves to come.

By 1901 number 49 had finally come right down in the world. No longer a one-family house, it figured in the Census of that year as the dwelling place of thirteen people divided into three households. The social distinction that had, in the past, separated the houses actually on Bankside from the tenements in the side lanes was now almost obliterated. Next door in 50 the head of the house was a ‘waterfront labourer', and in 51 a ‘coalman – domestic', i.e. a deliverer of sacks; 52 housed Moss Isaacs's foreman in the old iron business.

The Waterman's Arms some fifty yards upstream still stood, but on one side of it the velocipede merchant and on the other an early Victorian warehouse had both gone, replaced by the new premises of the City of London Electric Lighting Company. The presence of the Phoenix Gas Company already near at hand made this part of Bankside a natural site for the newer utility. Half a dozen years later the expanding electricity plant, together with that of the Hydraulic Power Company, would finally sweep away the old house that was associated with Sir Christopher Wren.

The principal householder in 49 now was Henry Rolfe, a heating-furnace worker of fifty-five. He had with him a wife, not in employment, and two sons, both apparently gas-fitters. A daughter of twenty-three was down as a bookbinder, a classic Southwark trade. Her younger sister was a ‘shirt-maker' and the fourteen-year-old girl a ‘stationery hand'. Florence, at ten, did not work: she may have attended St Saviour's parish school, which was still near the old graveyard. (The eighteenth-century buildings were finally pulled down, and a new school built over the road, in 1908.) Or she may have gone to St Peter's school, which was established close to her home in Emerson Street off Bankside, between Pond Yard and the Bear Garden. The same year, elementary education for all, which had theoretically been compulsory since 1888, was made free, and so at last near-universal, up to the age of eleven or twelve.

The number of adult children at home, and their skilled or semi-skilled trades, would have meant that the Rolfes probably had adequate money coming into the household. The middle-aged parents would have been enjoying their best years, with the expense and strain of bringing up a family almost over and the possible hardship of old age yet to come. Old-age pensions only began to be introduced in 1908 – which probably came too late for the ‘heads' of the other two households that were somehow accommodated within 49.

The bare facts of the Census are redolent of much. The Warren household, probably occupying only one room, consisted of a widowed mother of sixty-two, born in Southwark, apparently without occupation, and her daughter of twenty-five who is down as a ‘pastry-cook'. There were many food-preparation factories along the river by then, including Sainsbury's rising empire in Stamford Street above Blackfriars Bridge, the large works of Peak Frean, the biscuit-manufacturers, and a nearby jam-factory where women and girls worked with their clothes, skin and hair in a state of perpetual sugary stickiness. If Edith Warren was employed in somesuch place and was the sole support of her mother, how could she ever escape into the alternative labours of marriage, even if the chance came?