The House by the Thames (12 page)

No wonder the Londoners of the eighteenth century took to cleaning their houses with so much water. They could do little about the outside bricks, but they could at least take a pride in keeping their interiors nice – interiors that were furnished now with the very comforts and elegances that England's growing manufacturing wealth was helping to fund. The dirt and the money had a common source.

At one end of the early-capitalist chain that was now taking shape were the merchants operating from the City, who either owned mines themselves or bought and sold whole ship-loads of coal as these made their (sometimes perilous) journey round the East Anglian coast. And at the other end were the street hawkers, who peddled coal to those with only one hearth and no storage space, selling it by the half-bushel – a measure of volume roughly equivalent to four one-gallon petrol cans. But who came in between?

There were of course the masters of the collier-ships from Tyneside, who took their cut. So did the various factors whose job it was to market the coal wholesale once it arrived in the Thames, and the ‘coal-meters' who watched over the stuff as it was weighed out. But at this stage, rather than being unloaded straight onto a wharf, where space was at a premium, much of the cargo would be unloaded downstream into a lighter, one of the all-purpose Thames cargo-boats, which could then deliver it to where it was wanted by retailers.
⁵

In 1729 a pamphlet row broke out about monopolies in the coal-industry, and a cabal of ship-owners and factors combining to manipulate prices. One of these factors was a Quaker called Benjamin Horne, of a family whom we shall meet again on Bankside. The lynchpin of the association was said to be the owner of a tavern in Billingsgate where all agreements were negotiated: then and for a long time to come, tavern keepers were inextricably bound up with the coal-market and with the hiring of the men who heaved the sacks around. The ship-owners and factors retorted that they were simply protecting themselves against a similar combination of lightermen to whom back-handers had to be given, since ‘two Parts in three of all the Coals that are brought to London, are brought by the artful Management of about fifteen Lightermen'. A further pamphlet disagreed with this, since ‘… there are about eight hundred Lytermen who keep Lyters and Barges … above three hundred of these make it their business to load and carry coal'.
⁶

The result of this airing of grievances was a new Act, allowing anyone who traded in coal to maintain his
own
lighters, barges and wharves, provided always that the crews were accredited watermen. This was a key moment in which the coal traders and the men of the river tacitly recognised that their futures were bound up together. Ostensibly, the benefit was to the coal-traders, who would have their own lightermen under their control, but in the long run the real beneficiaries were the lightermen, for the Act provided the opportunity for them to specialise. It was, after all, hardly desirable to put a load of wheat-flour into a barge previously used for coal. In 1730 a number of lightermen formed their own Society of Owners of Coalcraft. A future member was to become the owner of 49 Bankside.

When the watermen joined forces with the lightermen in 1700 they had, as well as their proud and antique tradition of abusive wit, newly licensed cap badges, and a new scale of fares. A proportion of them were now allowed to work on Sundays. It had also been agreed that no more watermen should be ‘pressed' into service on the King's ships, as had happened to John Taylor in youth and to men more recently in the wars with the Dutch. Watermen technically counted as ‘skilled labour', earning their living by their own physical exertions, subject like any other working-class journeymen to the vagaries of chance and season. But such was their status, their responsibilities and their potential earnings that they were generally regarded as a special group. Defoe recorded that some of them were ‘very substantial fellows [who] maintain their families very well'. Their lifestyle, that is, approximated more to that of ‘the middling sort'. So why did they decide to make common cause with the carriers of goods, whom they had always rather despised?

The answer lies in the increasing competition of road traffic and in particular hackney carriages, as London was growing so far beyond its earlier, readily walkable limits. Roads outside the town were getting much better, and regular coach and carrier services were being established on long-distance runs. At least a dozen inns in Southwark itself, as well as many in the City, were now departure and arrival points for these services, which were gradually but surely eroding the old pattern of travelling down river and round the coast to reach other parts of the British Isles. Owners of private coaches, too, wanted to be driven from home all the way to their destinations. But over the whole stretch of river between London Bridge and Putney there was no river-crossing, except by boat. The Falcon Inn on Bankside had chaises and horses for hire once that side of the river was reached by ferry, but that was not the same as setting off in your own turn-out. There was one large, flat-bottomed ferry between Westminster and Lambeth which could take horses and even a coach (its memory survives in Horseferry Road) but it had room for only one coach at a time.

So the most immediate perceived threat to the watermen's livelihood was the prospect of extra bridges across the Thames. As yet London Bridge still stood alone, choked with houses and traffic and dangerous to get through by water, but other bridges were taking shape on drawing boards. The need for one at Westminster had been mooted soon after the Restoration: the idea had been rejected by the City Corporation and the Watermen's Company banding together, but the spread of London into Westminster and St James's meant that it was soon revived. In the 1690s Parliament debated the matter, and it was observed that Paris, which London had now overtaken in both extent and population, had several bridges. It was also ominously noted by one MP that in Paris ‘there is no use for watermen at all'.

Westminster Bridge was eventually opened in 1750, Blackfriars Bridge in 1769. During the same period London Bridge was denuded of its houses and widened. It is a measure of the power the watermen still enjoyed that some of the money from coal-taxes that was devoted to bridges went towards compensating them for loss of trade.

For the long slow decline of the trade was under way. Many freemen of the Watermen's Company, who had served out their apprenticeships and were not stupid, began to see that the future on London's river lay less with passenger traffic than with goods. They also saw that the goods business itself could be extended. You needed to develop your own particular line and build up your contacts … Then take orders, get three months' credit, and become a buyer and seller in your own right … A Woodmongers and Coal-Sellers Company had existed near London Bridge since the fourteenth century, but now the lightermen, combined into one Company with the Watermen, virtually cut the old Sellers Company out and were said to have complete control of the river coal-traffic.

In 1747 another of those prolific eighteenth-century pamphleteers that were the newspaper columnists of their time wrote: ‘Coal-Merchants now begin to multiply apace. If a footman had been … a Runner to a Coal-Owner to distribute Bills, and collect straggling Debts, why in a short time he commences Beau, puts on trimmed Cloaths, and sets himself up for a
Coal-Merchant
.'

If an essentially unskilled footman might chance his luck in the then-glamorous trade, how much better placed was a man of the river, with all his special knowledge? One of those who, in the mid-eighteenth century, turned to the coal trade and succeeded admirably, was a young waterman called Edward Sells – the first. His son, grandsons and great-grandsons were to trade on Bankside for the next hundred years. Their name is preserved even today in the discreet but long-lasting immortality of a twentieth-century poem by John Betjeman:

AT FIRST, SELLS
was a mere name to me on the nineteenth-century Census returns for Bankside. The earliest usable Census return dates from 1841, and is a less than satisfactory research tool since it does not number houses or necessarily distinguish separate households. But the individual names and ages (these last rounded down to the nearest multiple of five) are pregnant with potential meaning. Indeed, this is a common experience of researchers who study the Census returns: you begin to feel the weight of all those spent, packed-away lives pressing in on you, as if innumerable stilled voices were yearning wordlessly for recognition. Almost any one of the names, you believe, might be rescued from the oblivion of time and brought forward in some recognisable shape and substance if you devoted time itself – enough time – to delving away in further archives, combing parish records and ancient rate books, speculatively ordering up birth and marriage certificates, browsing among probated Wills, running an eye down the meticulously handwritten accounts of long-extinct charities, bingeing on local newspapers full of ancient quarrels … But how much time? Many years of a current life, you begin to realise, could be expended on the excavation of a handful of these past lives: ultimately the desire to re-confer humanity and personality on the lost runs the risk of compromising life in the present.

But with the Sells family I was lucky. Almost as soon as I began going through the eighteenth-century rate books for St Saviour's parish – the earliest extant is the record of those living comfortably enough to pay the Poor Rate in 1748 – I realised that the Sells had been present on Bankside long before Censuses were taken. They did not appear in 1748, though Edmund Shallett of the prominent Dissenting family did, and so did the Astell family of barge-builders and oar-makers, whose large timber yard is later recorded as covering part of the land behind Bankside that had once been the Queen's Pike Garden. However, in the record for 1760 we first find Edward Sells, living next door to Shallett in a house recently vacated by John Cator, who had simply moved a few doors along Bankside. I think, from the conjectural evidence of a later drawing of a run of Bankside houses, that Shallett's was probably one of the surviving timbered and gabled constructions of Elizabethan date. Maybe it had once been one of Dekker's ‘continuous' ale-houses, like the equally venerable Falcon Inn a little further west. Rateable values were loosely based on the number of people a house might theoretically accommodate, so Shallett's house must have been quite big as it was assessed, in those years, at £12 per annum, resulting in a Poor Rate in 1755 of £3.18s., whereas most of the adjacent houses, including the abode of Cator and then Sells, were assessed at this period for only £2 or £3 per annum, resulting in a rate of about 13s. (Similar houses in newer districts north of the river were valued more highly.)

It would be satisfying if the house next door to Mr Shallett's, where Edward Sells was then living, was the one that later bore the number 49, but I rather think it was several doors further west. It is difficult to be sure since, as the years passed, the quantity of houses documented along Bankside increased, due to apparent in-filling and the construction of side alleys (‘rents') of smaller dwellings. But working backwards from about 1780, when numbers were allocated to houses, and using the names of certain longstanding occupiers as fixed points, I believe that in his early years on Bankside young Edward Sells rented a house that later became number 54. It has long since been obliterated, first by a warehouse, then by the original, many-chimneyed power station, and today by the green grass and silver birches that surround the re-invented Power Station/Tate Modern – as if the willows of boggy Paris Garden had been born again.

So what else could I discover about the first Edward Sells, he who came to Bankside in the days when some of the ‘Pye Garden' was still an orchard, and fields and hedgerows were only minutes away to the south-west, but when great changes, of which he himself was a harbinger, were already on their way?

As a member of the Honourable Company of Watermen and Lightermen he is still traceable through that Company's records, preserved in London's Guildhall. He first appears there in 1738 when he was bound apprentice. Apprenticeship, which was for seven years, normally happened at the age of fourteen or fifteen, which argues a birth date of 1723 or '24. The family lived in one of the Westminster parishes: the father was called Thomas, but there is no record of him being in the trade himself, so this apprenticeship of the son may have marked the first step for the family on the social ladder up out of the labouring classes. The conditions in which he served his apprenticeship, however, were hardly very uplifting, for his master, Samuel Price, lighterman and – yes – coal-merchant, traded near Dowgate Dock on the north bank of the Thames where the polluted Walbrook flowed through a conduit into the river. This dock, approximately opposite the point on the Surrey side at which Bankside gave way to Clink Street, where Southwark Bridge now stands, was a narrow entry for barges. It was then still the principal location for the coal-trade wharves, and was also one of the places where the night-soil men, who carted the contents of London's countless privies, were allowed to discharge their loads into the long-suffering river. The theory was that the sluggish outfall of the Walbrook, in combination with the twice-daily ebb of the tide, would carry everything away, eventually out to sea. Such notions of the river's hygienic power were to persist for another hundred and twenty years, eventually culminating in the crisis of the Great Stink of 1858 and the long-overdue introduction of a main drainage system.