The House by the Thames Read online

  His move to Bankside was a shrewd one, for it was during those middle years of the century that the coal-wharves had begun to shift there: the Rocque map of 1746 marks several. Both Edmund Shallett and another prominent neighbour, Edmund Smith, had interests in the coal business. They were apparently part-owners of a mine, but I do not know if they traded in coal themselves. They were business associates of Thomas Horne, of the Sussex Quaker family who had set themselves up as coal-merchants a generation before and had prospered greatly. Thomas began trading on Bankside in 1762, and two years later bought one of the houses near number 49 that had earlier belonged to the Oldner family, and then to Ralph Thrale the brewer. Ten years later he, Shallett and Smith, together with a baronet and a lady from Greenwich, were sued for compensation because their miners in Northumberland had broken through a coal face to an adjacent mine and taken its coal – a not uncommon occurrence in those days when mines were an unsurveyed labyrinth. They paid out the then very considerable sum of £600, which indicates the substantial world these people inhabited.

  Edward Sells’s concern with the coal-trade was, as yet, at a more literally hands-on level, but he had in fact embarked, as soon as he had settled on Bankside, on what was to become the family business, handed down through the generations. I know this since, by a fluke, a piece of testimony to it survived into the mid-twentieth century. In 1755 he and a Matthew Arnold, who seems to have been another lighterman, put their confident signatures to the market sale note for an entire shipload of coals, which the ship-master was selling them for £30.10s., at 30s.6d. the chaldron. I rather think this must have been Sells’s first real venture into the marketing business. Why, otherwise, should this solitary bit of paperwork, without lasting practical importance, have been preserved in the family as a token of his life’s endeavour long after he himself was gone?

  In October 1763, when he was about forty and twin children of his were baptised in St Saviour’s, he was still giving his occupation as ‘lighterman’, rather than ‘coal-merchant’ as he styled himself in later life. The babies must have been conceived in the depth of a cold spell that had occurred the previous winter, when all river-traffic was at a standstill. Edward Sells’s wife was called Martha. I do not know when they were married, but logic would suggest that the twins were their first children, since the boy and girl were christened Edward and Martha after both their parents.

  Forty was then rather an advanced age for an ordinary man to become a father for the first time. I cannot help wondering if there had been an earlier wife who died in childbirth, an earlier small Edward who did not survive: one of those irrecoverable domestic griefs that our ancestors had stoically to contain? (Even Mrs Thrale, living by then in some state in the big house attached to the brewery at Bankend where Dr Johnson was soon to be a frequent vistor, lost child after child.) I came across the twins’ christening in the St Saviour’s baptism records for the 1760s and ’70s. These are not quite complete and in places illegible, so I may have missed other Sells births, or indeed Sells burial entries with the poignantly commonplace inscription ‘Inf’ alongside that indicates a child. But had such events been numerous in the Sells’s household I would have found some: a few other Bankside names crop up in those tattered papers quite regularly. What I do know is that the twins lived, for it was this second Edward who was to follow in his father’s footsteps and consolidate the family fortunes.

  The market sale note, from a few years before the twins’ birth, I have seen reproduced in a privately printed book on the origins of the coal-trade that was published in 1931.1 Extracts from the lease that Edward Sells took on his first house on Bankside (see below) are to be found quoted in another privately commissioned company history that came my way, that of the Charringtons, written c.1950. It was clear to me from these two books that, when they were being researched, a substantial archive concerning many interwoven coal-dealing families existed in the bosom of the huge firm of Charringtons, who had eventually absorbed them all. In 1952 Charringtons employed two thousand five hundred people, and the book’s author could express confident thanks to ‘those who preserved the records through the years, for the interest and perhaps the edification of their descendants today. May my successor, writing in the year 2000, be equally fortunate.’

  Alas. When I, as a ‘successor’, went looking for this same archive, believing that such a prestigious firm would surely have ensured its future reputation, whatever decline in the coal-trade may have supervened, I found precisely – nothing. The firm no longer exists, and it was not one of the many former enterprises with a head-office in the City which bestowed its papers on the Guildhall archive collection. I followed the trail as far as I was able, but it began to be clear that at some point in the 1970s, as Charringtons was finally swallowed up by an international consortium of oil interests, everything – eighteenth-century house deeds, bills of sale, letter books, ledgers, early photographs and goodness knows what other evidence of a great commercial empire in an epic era of trade – must simply have been dumped into a skip.

  All this history was probably disposed of into a landfill site near the Thames mouth, the very place past which so many coal-boats had once come. With it had disappeared the last remaining physical evidence of the first Sells on Bankside.

  So I cannot quote in full the description from the lease of Edward Sells’s original home there, but only those parts of it I have seen reproduced. It was apparently described as a ‘wharf’ (a river frontage with berthing rights), shed, back yard and house at Mason stairs’, which would indicate a house a few doors up river from number 49. It had been formerly occupied by another lighterman. Sells signed up for fourteen years at an annual rent of £10, payable quarterly; though in fact it would seem from the rates record that he then renewed the lease for another seven years after that. What appears to be the same house, by then numbered 54, crops up in a Land Valuation record in the early 1800s, fifty years later, as ‘a house, rooms and shed next the River’, by then valued at £22 a year. Clearly, with its rights over the quay, and with one of the many river water-stairs opposite, it was just the place for a man carrying on a river trade.

  A brief extract from the fixtures and fittings mentioned in the 1754 lease gives some idea of the level of simple comfort the Sells enjoyed, including a water supply. It was evidently a two-storey house, probably plus attic. The upper floor seems to be described first:

  ‘In the one pair of stairs back-room, a Closet, one shelf, one row of pins [i.e. clothes hooks], two Windows and two Bars, one Chimney board and Wainscot up to the Ceiling.’ (So, a house with a good deal of wood panelling in it, like 49.)

  … ‘In the back Parlor a Beaufet [‘buffet’ = dresser] with five shelves for Pewter … in the Wash-house forward One leaden Cistern, A Leaden Pump and Sink lined with Lead … In the backyard the pavement with Newcastle stone, a door to the Necessary house in the shed over the Wharf.’2

  The geography is not quite clear: the ‘backyard’ must have been at the side rather than right behind the house, if it gave access directly to the quay, but there can be no mistaking the nature of the ‘Necessary house in the shed over the Wharf’. Evidently, a number of the Bankside houses at this date, instead of the usual privy over a cess-pit somewhere at the back, made use of latrines straight over the river: convenience, indeed, if by then of a rather old-fashioned sort. The Holland’s Leaguer house, the one-time brothel a little upstream near Paris Garden stairs, which was finally pulled down in the 1760s when Blackfriars Bridge was built, is said to have had its own latrines over the river in the previous century, augmented by a system for pumping water up to turn them into water closets – a revolutionary luxury in Stuart times.

  In the mid-eighteenth-century the water closet was still a rare object mainly confined to the London houses of the very wealthy, but ideas about the best way of disposing of human waste were gradually changing. This shift is discernible in the reports of Town Hall sessions on problems arising in the local sewers; thes
e were not intended to be sewers in our sense of the word but were, rather, open ditches to act as storm drains. On Bankside, they ran down at intervals into the Thames through sluices with ancient names. There were four of these between London Bridge and Paris Garden stairs (one, Boars Head Sluice, emerged under Moss Alley, just up river from number 49). There was continual trouble about their blocking and requiring to be cleared, usually by the proprietors of the adjoining properties who owned that section of the quay. Elsewhere in Southwark the parish ‘scavengers’ or ‘rakers’ were supposed to clear out and dredge the wayside ditches that were the remnants of the medieval land-drainage system, but it is clear that since time immemorial local householders had been erecting latrines over them. What is significant is that complaints about these ‘boghouses’ in St Saviour’s parish become numerous only around the middle of the eighteenth century, as if it was only then that public opinion began to find such practices unacceptable.

  The earliest complaint I have found was in 1743. Thomas Stonor was told to stop up the ‘Six Brick Drains of his Boghouses at the Back of his several Tenants in the Bear Gardens, Maid Lane’ – but after about 1760 such complaints become a feature of every session. Constructing actual brick drains was clearly taking far too much of a liberty: most of the boghouses appear to have been more flimsy structures in people’s vegetable gardens where these abutted conveniently onto ditches, as in Bandy Leg Walk and Gravel Lane. There were also complaints about animal manure, reminding one how rural Southwark still was at this date: ‘We amorse Thomas Tiller of the parish of St Saviour’s in Southwark … for suffering his hog soil to run into the common sewer on the back of Mr Astill’s premises on the Bankside’ (1761). That was to cost Mr Tiller the not inconsiderable sum of £5, or £10 if the ditch were not scoured within a reasonable time. Taking one’s neighbours to the justices in the Town Hall on such matters was probably a last resort.

  In May 1775 a watermen’s regatta was held on the Thames with flags and bands – perhaps a riposte to the new bridges. A couple of months before, Edward Sells and his growing family had moved five doors eastwards. This house is now easy to pinpoint in the records because, for the first time, Cardinal Cap Alley is listed alongside separately from Bankside: some small houses had been built down it. The Sells’s new home, which we will now refer to as 49, was bigger than the old one, less of a workplace and more of a comfortable family abode. The head of the house may have used the ground-floor front room, with the door that opened conveniently straight onto the quay, as an office where work-visitors could call without disturbing the rest of the household, but any shed or store would have been at the back of the yard with direct access via the alley.

  Evidence from his Will near the end of the century suggests that he leased the house at first from a neighbour, and then bought the freehold two years later. He was clearly prospering, and no doubt employing others on the river, as his income now put him into the category of those liable not only for the Poor Rate but also for the Land Tax.

  Later evidence indicates that, as the years went by, numbers 54, 55 and 56 were also bought by the Sells family, and that eventually they owned numbers 50, 51 and 52 as well. (For whatever reason, they never seem to have owned 53, an old house, I think, and later a shop.) Sometimes in subsequent generations different members of the family would use one or more of these properties as their home, sometimes also as their office, or exclusively as an office for a while. At periods this or that house would appear to be tenanted by one or another family closely associated with the Sells’s business, and then revert to occupation again by a Sells son, grandson or nephew. One can thus pursue through the rates books, London Directories (after 1790) and Censuses (after 1840) a cat’s cradle of interlocking relationships and house-occupancy, including also properties in the hands of other families such as the Hornes and the Joneses, who entered into various partnerships with the Sells. There were other neighbours too who made items essential for the coal-barge business, such as oars, masts and sails. The web of connections along this part of Bankside between trades, owners, occupiers, employers and employees seems to have been both socially egalitarian and extremely complex.

  We, however, shall stay as far as possible with number 49 at Cardinal Cap Wharf.

  The same year that his father bought 49, Edward Sells II, he who had been baptised with his sister in 1763, entered the waterman’s trade in his turn at the age of fourteen. As was usual in such families, he was bound apprentice to his own father. The year before, a Thomas Arnold of St Saviour’s parish had also been apprenticed: my guess is that he was the son or nephew of the Matthew Arnold who had clubbed together with Sells to buy the first ship-load of coal. These boys and their fellows must have had a rewarding childhood, growing up with boats on their doorstep, learning to row skiffs as soon as they had the strength, aware of the skilled and excitingly hazardous nature of river work long before they were allowed to participate in it in any formal way.

  But Bankside, and Southwark generally, in the years when the second Edward Sells was doing his apprenticeship, was not quite the same place where his father had set up twenty-odd years before. At long last London Bridge was losing its supremacy as the only river crossing. With the building of two bridges up river between 1750 and 1770, one linking Westminster to Lambeth and the other going from Blackfriars to the old Paris Garden stretch, the whole geography of the Surrey shore was altered. A transformation that was before slow and piecemeal was now accelerated: it would culminate in Southwark at last becoming urbanised.

  But did this change indicate greater ‘civilisation’, as our ancestors would have put it, or a social decline? This question tends to lead to generalisations about the course of London life during the eighteenth century, and these are notoriously unreliable. Two conflicting views seem to have been handed down to us, depending on the viewpoints of different witnesses at the time but also on the perspectives of those looking back from the vantage point of later generations.

  On the one hand, there is the substantial figure of Hogarth: his pictures, whether showing a dissolute moneyed class devoid of any social conscience, or a brutalised and poverty-stricken underclass perpetually drunk on gin at a ha’penny a glass, have tended to loom large in our mental picture. There is also the poignant image of the retired sea-captain Thomas Coram, establishing his foundling hospital in the 1740s because he was so shocked by discarded babies he saw lying on waste ground or even in the streets. There were complaints at the time that London was growing too fast, drawing in from all over England young men and girls, prey to all kinds of moral temptations: these uprooted people, it was said, crowded into unhealthy and inadequate lodgings ‘often separated from Vice only by a deal or lathe and plaster partition’.3 The working classes had become ‘insubordinate’; the town was dangerous, and the main routes leading to and from it, what with highwaymen and footpads, were even worse … Southwark Fair, on St George’s Fields, was just the sort of rowdy gathering that should be suppressed …

  But the reality was that Southwark Fair, like the Borough Market which was also thought objectionable, had been a feature of Southwark since the Middle Ages. It was also a fact that people had been seeking their fortunes in London for centuries, and that its inexorably growing population had always owed more to this immigration than to a high birth rate. Though London did double its population between 1710 and 1820, and remained the largest city in the world, its actual growth rate was far less than that of some northern cities, which developed over the same period from tiny market towns into industrial centres never before seen, and imposed an entirely new way of life on the masses who poured into them from country districts. There had been people in London living in squalid conditions, vulnerable to vice, since the days of the Flemish women on Bankside and doubtless long before: abandoned babies were nothing new, nor were drunkenness and violence, nor were the deaths from starvation in hard winters. The fact that these social ills now began to be commented on as something that might and shou
ld be remedied was in itself a sign of changing ideas, and of an increasing number of people with essentially altruistic views about the way society should be run. The Gin Acts of 1751 and ’53, imposing taxes and limiting sales, were an early attempt by the governing classes to regulate public behaviour by means other than harsh punishment. They were the beginning of a whole raft of rules and provisions that the following century would bring. Successive generations brought new consciousness to bear on old problems, and formed the habit of congratulating themselves on society’s progress compared with the situation in ‘the bad old days’ – whenever these were currently deemed to have been. This tendency to patronise and pity our ancestors has continued to the present day.

  There is, however, another possible view of eighteenth-century London. This is of a city in which wages were high in comparison with those in major foreign cities and life generally less primitive, with a great many things to buy. To many visiting foreigners London seemed an orderly, pleasant place, where, it was commented, people were mild-tempered, beggars did not cringe, and working men did not go in fear of their masters. After the mid-century, when gin-consumption had been successfully reduced, a number of home-grown complaints actually centred on the new working-class appetite for tea and sugar (‘luxurious tastes’), the amount of meat eaten by this supposedly ‘degraded’ class, and the fact that fine wheaten bread had now, in London and its surrounding area, largely replaced the traditional rye. The new cheap calico, as an alternative to the traditional woollen and linen cloths, now made it possible for all but the poorest women to dress in a more ‘cleanly’ way: this too came in for criticism on the grounds that ‘you can’t tell the maid from the mistress’.