The House by the Thames (27 page)

The case of the Elliott family seems rather bleak too. I happen to know that they occupied the top floor, that is, the attic, since the Electoral Register for 1901–02, uniquely, gives this kind of information, along with the fact that George Elliott was a registered sub-tenant of Rolfe's and paid him four shillings and ninepence a week. They would have had a fine view over the river, but the reason that attics were traditionally the realm of the poor was that they were hot in summer, cold in winter, and you had to go down several flights to reach a tap or a lavatory. George Elliott had been in the hat-making business, that time-honoured Southwark profession for which the nineteenth century had provided a huge mass market. The bowler hat, designed to withstand wet weather, was invented in Southwark, and Dickens had claimed that ‘a smell of hat-making' always hung around the Blackfriars Bridge Road. But, at sixty-five, George Elliott was now retired: his wife was in her sixties also. The third member of the family was a daughter of twenty-five down as a ‘sweet-stuff maker', which would seem to indicate a trade carried on at home: probably she supplied a small local shop or street-seller. Poorly paid piecework of this kind was done in innumerable London garrets and basements at this date – creating everything from match-boxes to ginger-beer, clay pipes, ornamental lace doilies and dolls' eyes. Mayhew noted that ‘Treacle and sugar are the groundwork of the manufacture of all kinds of sweet-stuff. “Hard-bake”, “almond toffy”, “halfpenny lollipops”, “black balls”, and the cheaper “bulls eyes”, and “squibs”, are all made of treacle.' All Marion Elliott would have needed to start in business, besides a few penny-worth of ingredients, was a stove to cook on and a sturdy saucepan. The family must have lived, eaten, slept and woken each morning in the cloying smell of boiled sugar.

The reason I am fairly sure Marion made her sweets at home is that the Census notes her as being ‘crippled from childhood'. In an era when lameness from a dislocated hip or a club foot was too common to cause much comment, ‘cripple' indicated a far more severe handicap. She may scarcely have been able to walk at all; she may have been incontinent. The unsuitability of an attic home for someone in this condition is all too obvious. But at least, it seems, she was earning something for herself and her elderly parents. She had something to do all day, from her chair by whatever stove had been installed under number 49's old roof slates.

There was as yet no educational provision for those who could not get to the ordinary schools on their own legs. ‘Cripple parlours', which were sheltered training workshops for youngsters, would not be inaugurated for another fourteen years, though, when they were, one was opened in the nearby Union Street. But by the turn of the century a few influential people were concerned about the subject. John Grooms of the London City Mission, founder of orphanages, had a home for crippled girls in Clerkenwell as early as 1880: he had them taught to make artificial flowers, that classically pure alternative to a life of degradation. Dr Barnardo too encountered many disabled children among his destitute charges – and he had had a handicapped child born in his own family. In the 1890s a thoughtful London clergyman called Howatt, who was associated with the Ragged School movement, called attention to the isolation of working-class child cripples and advocated a ‘visiting friend' system, since ‘their parents, in the struggle to keep a roof overhead, have generally to be out at work most of the day, and normally healthy children naturally do not care to remain long with a sufferer'.

What Marion Elliott's twenty-five years of life had been within four walls, long before wireless or television, when companionship and the activity of the streets were a crucial parts of most people's lives, strains the imagination. How many more years remained to her? An obscurity, even denser than that which will cover almost all of us, envelops such vanished individual lives. Were there elder, healthy brothers and sisters who, before they left home, brought a little animation into her existence? Did the other occupants of the house befriend her, or did the fine class distinctions of lower-class life and the need to preserve privacies within an overcrowded space preclude this? Did she perhaps benefit, while a child, from a rare charity outing or two, such as one reads of in this account of a ‘Fresh Air Scheme' for the sickly, run by the Ragged School Union? In this instance the day out was in Folkestone, and the point of departure London Bridge:

‘A livery stableman lent a large brake and a pair of greys to take [the children] to the station; women stood at their doors waving farewells; a publican – an ex-pugilist – who contributed to the fund, and put all the fines for broken glasses into the treasury, was active in lifting the children into the brake.' Greengrocers donated fruit; gas workers raised their caps and waved and cheered from the tops of gas-holders. It sounds as if it was happening right in the Bankside area. The day seems to have been a success, but it is a little daunting to find that the narrator (C. J. Montague, in his memoir
Sixty Years in Waifdom
, 1904) regarded its ‘greatest value' as lying in the lesson in Christianity and humility it offered to the able-bodied working classes.

By the turn of the century, Bankside was almost entirely working class. It does not figure on Charles Booth's famous ‘poverty map' as one of the poorest parts of the district, for obviously it housed a sprinkling of respectably paid warehouse clerks, book-keepers and the like, but here is how the waterfront seemed to a commentator writing in a popular partwork in the early 1900s:

‘It is a fine morning in June. We are standing on London Bridge at a very early hour … on Surrey side … We glide off to our right, by the side of St Saviour's Cathedral
⁷
through Clink Street, and we find ourselves on Bankside. Here, for a while, we watch the wayside labourers at work. We see them loading a barge with grain. Some of the younger men are of Herculean proportions, and have almost the strength of a Samson. The sacks they carry on their backs weigh, on average, two hundredweight and a half. These men heave them with perfect ease, and run along a narrow wooden plank that bends under their weight. The older men, who have to keep pace with the younger ones in life's terrible struggle, groan and gasp under their heavy burdens, but still stagger bravely on …' There is, he explains, no other work they can do.

‘We walk on and watch other barges being loaded, but with very different cargo, some of them with heavy bars of iron, others with crates of bottles, others with barrels of grease and fat.

‘… We pass under Southwark Bridge, and watch yet another lot of waterside labourers at their daily task of unloading barges of coal, and then we turn off into the courts and alleys to see the homes in which many of these toilers live.

‘We are in the land of Shakespeare … Yet how very unromantic these parts are today! Poor, dilapidated dwellings are the houses in these courts – Moss Alley, Ladd's Court, Bear Gardens and White Hind Alley – which abut on the banks of the river. Hard indeed are the lives of the poor families that dwell therein. From morning to night they hear the ceaseless hum of the great fan at the electric lighting works hard by. At first painful to listen to, it becomes music to them in time, so that they sing and work to its metrical movements.

‘The waterside labourer earns a precarious income. Half the year he is without work … When he gets any money he often spends it with absolute recklessness … In the winter months many of these poor families are on the verge of starvation, and it is a blessing to them that their children are supplied with free meals through the agency of various funds. But for these meals, many of the waterside labourers' children would starve …' He goes on to explain that many of the wives and young girls work too, particularly – in the vicinity of the old Skin Market behind Cardinal Cap Alley – as ‘pullers', pulling the fur out of rabbit skins, in a haze of fluff that got into noses, throats and eyes. The fur was afterwards spun into fine wool and the skins went to the hatters. Meanwhile the boys were engaged in a different enterprise:

‘Along Bankside on a summer's day there are always to be seen a number of boys wading in the mud, and trying to find such treasure as may have fallen into the river during the day or night. Here are a party of lads making their first attempt to swim. Every season a number of them terminate their youthful career in a muddy and watery grave.'
⁸

A year or two after that volume was published, a little girl, Grace Golden, was born in a house on the other side of the river at Queenhithe, the old dock below St Paul's. Although the family, who may have been of immigrant Jewish origin, were in relatively modest circumstances (Mr Golden was an electrician), Grace was sent to the fee-paying, academic City of London Girls School. She was good at drawing – she grew up to be an artist, with a scholarship to the Royal Society of Arts, and pictures by her have come to rest both in the Guildhall Library and in the Museum of London.

‘I tried my childish pencil', she wrote, ‘on drawings of barges clustered amid stream; barges with furled reddish brown sails, and brightly painted houseboats with lace curtains coquettishly draped back to reveal the potted fern standing in the tiny window … [from the City side] the narrow alleys opening onto the Bankside looked like black caves, inviting me to explore them.' Explore them she did, as soon as she was old enough to wander about on her own, among the cranes and the dust chutes that seem, by the early decades of the twentieth century, to have become a feature of that waterfront. Later in life she researched, wrote and eventually published a book,
Old Bankside
. While this is fervently anti-Catholic and historically not always reliable, it is written with such passionate feeling for the precise detail of place and for the persistence of the past that no one interested in London's other shore can fail to warm to it. Hers is a lone voice, speaking for Bankside in an era when no one else seemed to care about it at all, indeed hardly to see it.

IN THE REAR
mirror through which we view the past, the house at Cardinal's Wharf enters a blind spot at the beginning of the twentieth century, for lack of documentation, just as it does in the early eighteenth century at the time of its rebuilding. Under British regulations detailed Census material may not be consulted till a hundred years have passed since its collection. The identities of all those who lived in the house in 1911 and in subsequent decennial years are lying quietly in an archive as I write, but neither I nor any other researcher can access them till the requisite term of years has elapsed.

So, at this point, the procession of individuals we have been able to call up fleetingly from the expended generations – the Sells and then the Gardeners, with their numerous children, the Holditches, the Tuckfields, the Rolfes, the afflicted Elliotts – ceases. For three decades, till other information pours in suddenly from other sources, there can be no speculation as to whether this girl might have managed to marry the white-collared lodger, or if that boy survived the slaughter of the 1914–18 war. The boys, girls, widows, clerks, factory-hands and wharf-labourers who
may
have passed through the house in those years simply do not figure on any reckoning. The street directories list only the commercial nature of premises, if any, or the permanent addresses of established, rate-paying citizens. They provide a useful indication of the increasingly dock-and-industrial, nature of Bankside in the early twentieth century, but nothing further. The Electoral Register, superceding the old rates lists, are by this time a significant source, but till after the First World War they list only men, plus a few widows and the like who were entitled to vote in local elections but not in Parliamentary ones. Of wives, children and other dependants or lodgers, of transitory inhabitants who did not bother to register, of occupations, ages, places of birth and any other personal details, there is no information to be had.

In 1903 the Rolfes, and their tenants the Elliotts, were still living in 49 Bankside, but by the following year they had all moved out, to be replaced by a Henry Hopkinson. The Electoral Register records him as the rate-paying tenant of a dwelling house, but at the same period, in the Commercial Directory, a Mrs Dean is recorded as keeping ‘coffee rooms' at that address: presumably Hopkinson sub-let her the ground floor. The coffee rooms (the term of the period for a workmen's café) did not apparently last long, but it is nice to think that the house at Cardinal's Wharf recovered, briefly, something of the role it had had long ago as an inn, before its eighteenth-century rebuilding. At the same time the Waterman's Arms, at number 60, was listed as being run by the ‘People's Refreshment House Association Ltd', which sounds like a well-intentioned Temperance initiative to turn an old pub into something more morally desirable. In any case, the building did not survive long after that, being first annexed by the London Electricity Company and then demolished as that enterprise continued to expand.

By 1907 no trade or occupant is listed for 49, which does not necessarily mean that there was no one temporarily perching in the panelled rooms of the by now shabby, disregarded house. Two years later one more lighterman was in occupation, the last in a long tradition, but he soon went again. The place may have been untenanted after that, for fewer and fewer people lived actually on Bankside as the years went by. Although the side lanes were still heavily populated, the waterfront consisted either of commercial premises such as the Isaacs's, using several old houses together for offices and storage space, or, increasingly, of purpose-built wharf-houses that replaced them. Just after the First World War, if not earlier,
¹
the houses immediately to the east of 49, houses that had sheltered Hornes and Manns and, long ago, Shalletts and Oldners, and had replaced Henslowe's timbered properties, were demolished. On part of their site a tall warehouse, with an ornate tiled frontage, was erected by Craig & Rose, paint manufacturers: its factory premises ran back alongside the whole length of the garden of 49. ‘Garden' one could probably no longer describe it: it had been paved over for the old iron business, but it now had a brick wall looming fifty feet above it.