The House by the Thames Read online

  Southwark was sown with small cemeteries. Many of these, such as the one near Deadman’s Place by the Anchor Brewery, were attached to Nonconformist chapels and meeting houses and, as such, were not consecrated ground and had no particular status. The increasing pressure on space in the district meant that most of them were to disappear beneath builders’ yards, workshops or rows of small tenements over the next century; one must suppose those that were interred there had also disappeared from human memory and that their remains were no longer anyone’s business. Their lives of chapel-going virtue and internecine battles over the True Interpretation of the Scriptures remain profoundly forgotten today, so much so that when bodies are discovered in the course of building works, the local press breaks out in stories about pits from the Great Plague. In fact, when such discoveries are plotted on old maps, it becomes apparent that what have been unearthed are simply the massed bones of a congregation of Quakers, Methodists, Particular Baptists or whatever, just where you would expect them to be, for these little yards beside chapels were intensively used.

  There were also pauper graveyards attached to workhouses, which tended to be sold off summarily when the workhouse was removed to a new site – presumably any surviving relatives of the paupers were not thought likely to complain. This happened in 1808, when St Saviour’s ‘spacious and convenient’ workhouse that had been built in the grounds of Finch’s Grotto barely thirty years before was sold to Mr Harris the hat maker for use as a works – part of that graveyard survives as a triangle of greenery on the west side of the bend in Southwark Bridge Road. Similarly, the ancient ground attached to Cure’s College almshouses not far from Borough High Street was eventually swept away by a railway viaduct.

  However, the parish of St Saviour’s, represented by the Vestry, did concern itself with its own graveyards in current use: these were St Saviour’s churchyard and the medieval Cross Bones ground which had, since 1673, been used as an overflow ground for the more humble of its parishioners. I suspect that a good many of the older remains had earlier been disinterred and perhaps stacked in a makeshift bone-house, and that this was the origin of the picturesque name. By the late eighteenth century this ground, which had once been isolated in the fields, found itself on the corner of Red Cross Street and Queen Street – which, after about 1780, was extended and became Union Street, to mark the Poor Law Union of St Saviour’s parish with St George’s to the south of it.

  In December 1788 the Vestry was concerned about security of burials. The increasing needs of medical schools for dead bodies, for the burgeoning science of anatomy, was leading to the era of the ‘Resurrection men’. These were rumoured to come with picks and shovels at dead of night, and what with both St Thomas’s and Guy’s Hospitals only a few minutes away … The Vestry proposed offering a reward of five guineas for information leading to the conviction of ‘Person or Persons who shall hereafter Dig up, take and Carry away any Corps interred in any or either of the Burying Grounds of this parish’. They offered a similar reward for information regarding burglaries, but one may assume that the whole body-snatching phenomenon, which lasted for two or three decades and which we now regard with an incredulous disgust tainted by humour, was seen as a crime of particular horror. Had post-mortems been generally acceptable, surgeons would not have had to resort to criminal sources: as it was, the dissection of the body and the dispersal of its parts was believed to inhibit the true resurrection on the Day of Judgement. Evidently the reward offered did not bring enough results, for in 1790 the Parish Commissioner of Estates6 – effectively, the holder of the purse-strings – ‘took a View of the Cross Bones Burying Ground in Red Cross Street, and [found] the Walls on the West and South sides thereof very insufficient for preventing Persons from Stealing the Bodies interr’d there’. Better walls were to be built, topped by broken glass.

  Two years later, in 1792, the Boys’ Free School, which had been founded in two houses in the Borough about a hundred years before, moved to premises specially built for it on part of the Cross Bones ground. The cover of the pamphlet published to celebrate the opening of this depicts a rather elegant little building with arched windows like a piece of early industrial architecture. A closed carriage with a crest on it stands near by and a well-clad lady and a young girl seem about to get into it: presumably they are two of the charity school’s valued patrons. What can be seen of the remaining graveyard over the (rebuilt) wall suggests that it was by then heavily overgrown.

  A decade later, when the parish’s lease of the workhouse site was soon to expire, one of the many possibilities discussed in Vestry meetings was the use of the rest of this graveyard to build a new workhouse. However, the general feeling was against this: ‘The Committee conceive it essentially necessary that the Cross Bones Burial Ground should not be converted to any other purpose … the parish is bound to use any other endeavour to retain a spot so sacred to the remains of the departed.’ Anglican departed were clearly more highly regarded than the Dissenting sort. But in spite of these parish endeavours it was reported the following year (1803) that the Cross Bones ground had again been the target of grave-robbers, and that ‘Mr Cooper the Sexton has suffered the keys, at times, to go out of his Hands.’ A door was to be blocked up and a new sexton appointed – Mr Cooper had, in any case, recently died. One wonders if his grave remained undisturbed.

  By a quirk of chance, or by the persistence of folk memory when so much other passionately lived history has sunk into oblivion, the dispute over the use of the Cross Bones yard has been revived at intervals ever since. The ground was shut for burial, along with most of Southwark’s remaining small graveyards, in the early 1850s, when Parliament was attempting to shift all London burials to more salubrious, out-of-town sites such as Highgate, Nunhead and Kensal Green. Thirty years later, Reginald Brabazon (later Earl of Meath), the Chairman of the Metropolitan Public Garden, Playground and Boulevard Association, wrote to The Times objecting to a parish plan to sell the ground off for the building of Model Workmen’s Dwellings, such as were then going up in many parts of Southwark. At that time the Boys’ School, to which had been added in the 1820s a similar building for girls, was still in place on the Union Street frontage. ‘The wardens [from the parish of St Saviour’s Newcomen charity] are quite prepared to let or sell this ground for this or any other purpose, so as to enable them to obtain funds for the payment of the stipend of the rector of this parish; and the Home Secretary, on the 30th of October 1882, granted a licence to assist this design.’ This would be illegal, he went on to say, because the ground had almost certainly been consecrated.

  Evidently the might of Brabazon together with his Association saw off St Saviour’s wardens for, in the early twentieth century, another newspaper report7 raised the alarm about a fresh scheme for the same site. The school had by now been moved to a new building across the street, and the old ground had apparently been used as a pitch for stalls, Punch and Judy shows and the like. Any remaining gravestones must by then have disappeared, for when an attempt to dig a foundation trench revealed bones, these apparently came as a surprise. But now that they had been discovered again the popular consciousness proved tenacious. By then, vestiges of medieval archways, Elizabethan inns and the debtors’ prisons that Dickens had known had almost all been swept away. Huge tenement blocks and soaring warehouses had replaced much domestic-scale architecture, and ‘Old Southwark’ had become the stuff of myth. People needed to feel they were still in touch with it.

  Once again nothing solid was built; the place simply became a works’ storage yard. Another entire lifetime passed. Manufacturing businesses left the Borough. The millennium arrived. Shortly afterwards, London Underground, which had recently completed a new tube line through Southwark’s ancient earth, tried to build an office block on the Cross Bones ground. Once again the attempt was obstructed – ‘I think it’s immoral to develop a graveyard for profit,’ the campaign leader told the local newspaper.8 She went on, with questionable accuracy as to detail
but making a basic, irrefutable point: ‘As well as being a burial site for paupers and prostitutes, it was also the resting place for the community of St Saviour’s. There are lots of ordinary people buried here. People who just did normal jobs and helped build up the Borough.’

  The paupers and prostitutes were clearly irresistible, since that is what we currently want history to be about. A torchlit vigil was held. The Deputy Mayor, a man of West Indian origin, weighed in: ‘These [people] deserve to be treated with a bit of respect. They probably got little enough in their lifetime.’ There, at the moment of writing, the matter for the moment rests.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the Cross Bones ground had escaped becoming the site for a new workhouse, expensive proposals and counter-proposals as to the best way of disposing of the poor continued for years, sometimes acrimoniously. Finally an old wooden building ‘such as many of the poor live in’ was rented at Newington Butts, where the Elephant and Castle meeting of the ways was taking shape. Child paupers were to be farmed out to individual women living in the countryside round London. Among those at the heart of this debate, I came across the name of Edward Sells, an ‘ordinary man doing a normal job’ and helping to build up the Borough.

  Browsing my way through the Vestry minutes for the last decade of the eighteenth century – luckily one of the volumes that the London Metropolitan archive does not regard as too dilapidated to be looked at – my aim had not been specific. I wanted to get a general feel for the times and for the successive preoccupations of Southwark citizens. I had no particular reason to expect to find Edward Sells II – but there, suddenly, he was. Or rather, a ‘William Sells’ appears, just once, but in the next list of local inhabitants ‘blessed with a competence’ (i.e. with a respectable income) the name becomes ‘Edward Sells’ and William is never heard of again. He could have been an otherwise unrecorded brother or cousin – William crops up as a name in subsequent Sells generations. But a more likely explanation is that the Vestry Clerk simply wrote ‘William’ by mistake on the first appearance of a man he would soon come to know well.

  It was a charitable impulse that first drew Edward Sells into Vestry circles, which was to say local governmental circles. The reason that comfortably-off local inhabitants were being canvassed was that the winter that marked the turn of the century was excessively cold. Once again the Thames froze solid above old London Bridge, as it had done a number of times since the days of John Taylor a hundred and eighty years before: another of the famous Frost Fairs was held on the icy expanse. But the Fairs, which were such a cheerful diversion to the many middle-class Londoners whose businesses did not depend on the river, brought no joy to the numerous watermen, lightermen, waterfront traders and dock-side porters, whose trades were at a standstill. Still worse off were the really poor, who just scraped by at the best of times and to whom any winter rise in the price of necessities was disastrous. The narrow alleys of old Southwark sheltered many of these.

  On 3rd December 1799, and again on the 5th, general meetings were held in the Vestry of St Saviour’s church – actually in the one-time St John’s chapel. I don’t imagine there was a fireplace to allow the assembled company to warm themselves. This was long before the days of central-heating boilers installed in crypts and iron pipes behind wrought-iron grids, and St Saviour’s, like all other churches in winter, was bitterly cold – and apparently damp too, from its age and its situation at river level. Two years later the Vestry was ‘considering the propriety of attempting to Warm the Church … by stoves’, but when it was found that the stoves would cost about £800 to install it was unanimously decided that ‘any attempt to warm this Church … is impracticable’, and there the matter rested for very many years. Still, a generation later, there were complaints by the master of the parish Free School that parents were reluctant to send their children to the unheated church on winter Sundays, especially to the two services in one day that were then regarded as appropriate, and that ‘good attendance cannot be expected in such a cold and comfortless place’.

  Presumably, when sallying forth through the hard-packed snow to a Vestry meeting, prudent men put on, over their already heavy coats, waistcoats and breeches, those caped and many-collared great-coats that were also used for travelling on the outside of coaches. They cannot have been under any Scrooge-like illusions as to the problems experienced by those with no good broadcloth coats and no warm supper waiting for them at home. Their own working lives, taking them out and about the warehouses and wharves of Southwark must have made them well acquainted with the lives of their poorer neighbours, a number of whom they would have employed at times as labour.

  So, as Christmas 1799 approached, the meetings were held ‘to take into Consideration the Most effectual means of affording relief to the Poor in the Parish during the Continuance of the Very high Price of Bread, Flour and Fuel … An earnest attempt to appeal to the benevolent and well-disposed.’ That autumn’s harvest had also been bad, for bread was said to be nearly double the price it had been the year before. A drive for donations was launched; plans were laid for a soup kitchen selling ‘good Meat Soup at one penny per quart’, and for the purchase of potatoes to be sold to the poor at a reduced price. Also, ‘it would much increase the comforts of the poor if from the proposed Subscriptions, or by means of a Loan from any Inhabitants, a supply of good coals could be procured on the best terms, to be retailed at wholesale price under the direction of the Committee.’

  Although this charity was being organised under the auspices of the Anglican Church, of which all those dwelling in the area were technically parishioners, the Committee for the First Clink Division was headed by Robert Barclay, who was a Quaker. Dignified by the addition of ‘Esq.’ to his name (most of St Saviour’s worthies at that time are simply ‘Mr’), Barclay the brewery owner was clearly the most prominent citizen on Bankside. The list included several other recognisable Bankside names, including Anthony Horne who was another Quaker, and also Edward Sells who was present at the meeting.

  One is aware that both Horne and Sells, as coal-merchants, stood to benefit from the fact that ships bringing fresh coal to London could not make it up or down the frozen Thames. Stocks held in their warehouses and barges were therefore potentially very valuable, since retail prices could be raised and raised as the shortage continued. One hopes that Horne and Sells’s presence on the Committee means that they felt a higher social obligation than the profit motive. It may indeed have been through their good offices that the cut-price coal reached the shivering poor that year. At the same time, the basic assumption of the meeting was clearly that, for their own good, the poor must pay something for their soup, potatoes and coal. It was also piously hoped, by some of those present, that handouts of soup would do them good in a less immediate way – by teaching them how to support life ‘at less expense and in a better manner than their ignorance of useful cookery enables them to do at present’. There speaks the voice of thrift: the organisers of this charity were not the rich, ignorant themselves of soup-making. There was also anxiety that, while helping ‘the Industrious Poor’, they must take care not to encourage the unindustrious, undesirable sort – a preoccupation that was to become familiar in Victorian Poor Law circles.

  The amount of money raised over the next two months was remarkable, for a parish with very few really wealthy people and many needy. Potatoes were got cheap, at £5.10s. a ton, from a Borough market dealer. By mid-February forty-three tons of them had been distributed and fifty more tons were planned for March and April – over £500 worth. Distribution of rice (brought, thanks to imperial trade, from the other side of the world, and doubtless grown by people almost as poor as the eventual recipients) was on a similar scale. This was in an era in which £30 a year – or about twelve shillings a week – was cited as an acceptable minimum figure on which a working man with a wife and several children might live respectably; many families habitually got by on much less. For such a large fund to have been collec
ted there must have been a vein of considerable energy and decency running through the minor bourgeoisie of Bankside. They probably had useful contacts too in the City, the river’s wealthier opposite shore.

  The hard winter passed; warm days at last returned, with eggs and early vegetables once more for sale in the Borough market (hotly defended by the Vestry against a competing market which had been set up in St George’s Fields). In the streets watercresses were hawked, and caged song-birds and bunches of country flowers, bringing a whiff of the pastures of Camberwell and Peckham Rye to the now-enclosed lanes of Bankside. But Edward Sells did not relinquish local activity. He had evidently acquired a taste for it, and it is clear too that the Vestry were pleased with their latest recruit. By the middle of 1800 he had been elected a churchwarden.

  After that, for over thirty years, his name crops up regularly, in minutes, on committees, as warden of this or treasurer of that. During the same period he held office at various times in the Watermen’s new and elegant little Hall near the Monument. He also became a well-known figure in the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street, through which, after 1807, all dealing had to be done. He consolidated and expanded the family business by entering into a partnership with a long-established Bankside neighbour: Johnstone’s London Commercial Guide and Street Directory for 1817 lists the business as Jones & Sells, coal-merchants. At that time the office was in number 56 Bankside. Sells and his wife were living in 55, while 49 was temporarily let to another coal-merchant, Thomas Fuce, who had a wharf further up, near Falcon stairs. (By the mid-1820s number 49 was back in Sells family occupancy.) At 47 the Hornes had their business, while the Sells’s neighbours at 54 were two brothers called Holditch, who traded in coal as well as cider, and were later to work for the Sells enterprise. Altogether, the Directory for that year lists twenty-five separate coal-merchants on Bankside, which was clearly the centre of the London trade.