The Fields Beneath (23 page)

Several new churches were built to minister to the supposedly urgent spiritual needs of the greatly-increasing population: rather fortunately however, as it has turned out, the scheme enthusiastically submitted by Canon Dale (the vicar of St Pancras) for
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new Church of England churches in the old parish was firmly opposed by both vestry and parishioners on the grounds of expense. The churches that did get built mostly stand today forlorn and quiet, their expensively rough-hewn stone darkened by a hundred years of soot, houses in which God Himself can no longer afford to live. In their day, they were crowded, particularly the non-conformist
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ones where popular preachers (including Spurgeon) promised their pleasantly titillated congregation hell-fire and damnation – but it should not be supposed that ‘everyone went to church then', either in Kentish Town or anywhere else. Universal church-going is one of those golden age myths: ‘everyone' never went to church. It was mainly indulged in – often indeed to excess – by middle-class families such as the Pikes, by the more respectable working class with middle-class aspirations, and by the not-quite-so-respectable who went for what they could get out of it in the way of Sunday School prizes and boots for the children. But as social institutions and foci for local life the importance of the churches in newly urbanised areas like Kentish Town would be hard to overestimate, and charitably-minded clergymen were among the most prominent and powerful of local figures. Two ragged schools were opened in Kentish Town in the late 1860s, one in Reeds Place near the Rotunda Organ factory and another off Hawley Road. A mission hall was presently opened in Warden Road – Lyndhurst Hall, a mission-to-the-slums administered from the new church at the corner of Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, a fact which tells one much about what was happening in Kentish Town at this time. Soup kitchens and free dispensaries were opened in Leighton Road and in Holmes Road, supported by voluntary contributions – the buildings still stand, now under the aegis of the all-benevolent Council. Bags of coal were distributed. Penny readings were held in the church schools, which were almost invariably described by the local press as having been ‘a great success despite the inclement weather'. Ladies, from Baroness Burdett-Coutts downwards (both socially and geographically) held perpetual sales of work at which the proceeds of their ample leisure hours were sold to raise money. ‘Berlin woolwork' was the most favoured form of pastime, and there were shops in Kentish Town devoted to selling solely the materials for that, at three-pence farthing the dozen skeins.

The management of St Pancras workhouse (down by the Old Church) and its local relieving stations, where grudging handouts were made to people who were not workhouse inmates, was the subject of continual dissension through the 1850s and 1860s. In 1868 a running battle was going on between Harding, the Medical Officer to the Board, and Chapple, a relieving officer of ‘over-bearing manner'. It was said in the vestry meeting that Mr Harding was kind to the poor but that ‘some considered him too meddling'. It is not clear whether he won his battle with the Relieving Officer, or whether the same quarrel was still continuing two years later. In the January of 1870 a girl of nineteen with a baby in her arms walked about the streets all one bitter December day, because an old man in the relieving office at Grafton Hall (west Kentish Town) told her when she came in the morning that the officer was not there and told her the same thing again in the late afternoon: in neither case was it true. The girl finally collapsed on the doorstep of the house belonging to Mr Flemming, a prominent non-conformist minister in the district. Mrs Flemming sustained her with bread and butter and sympathy; the muddle was sorted out, and mother and child were admitted to the workhouse. But the baby afterwards died of bronchitis said to have been contracted that cold day. The report of the inquest continued: ‘The Coroner said the worst of it was that a sturdy beggar, who knew how to go about it, could get anything he wanted, but a poor girl was turned aside.'

How had the antique machinery of local government – the vestry – coped with the enormous change and growth in the borough during the first half of the nineteenth century? The answer, not surprisingly, is ‘very badly'. The subject of local government in St Pancras, and its major task, the administration of the Poor Law, would require a book on its own to do it justice, and it constitutes in any case part of the history of St Pancras parish as a whole rather than of Kentish Town. Very briefly, the traditional method of local government in each parish had been by open vestry, a sort of parish council presided over by the vicar and churchwardens but which every parishioner had the right to attend. By the eighteenth century, with the slow but steady influx of people into areas like St Pancras and the adjacent parish of St Marylebone, and in particular the appearance of a substantial number of middle-class people who liked to run matters their own way, this form of homespun democracy was beginning to seem too cumbersome and disorganised. In Marylebone in 1768 a handful of local landowners managed to persuade Parliament to pass a Local Act converting the Open Vestry to a Select Vestry consisting mainly of themselves. St Pancras then attempted to follow suit, but met with greater difficulty. At the turn of the century a twenty-year fight ensued, led by Thomas Rhodes, the farmer of the southern end of the parish whose lands extended into Marylebone also, and who served at various times as a churchwarden and as an Overseer of the Poor. As the duties and responsibilities of the vestry, particularly towards the poor, increased in proportion with the population, he became a powerful local figure. When the Select Vestry was finally introduced in 1819 he naturally became one of its first members, along with the Duke of Bedford, the Lords Camden, Somers, Mansfield, Dartmouth, Southampton and prominent local citizens. He did not finally die till 1856, when he was ninety-three, and the parish had been transformed out of all recognition from the area he had known as a boy and young man.

Of the change to Select Vestry, Walter E. Brown, who was cemetery clerk to the vestry right at the end of the nineteenth century, just before it became the Borough Council, has written:

These quarrels, then and later, centred mainly on provisions for the poor and the poor rate levied to pay for these. By the Act of 1819 the Directors of the Poor became subservient to, and were elected by, the vestry: in practice, they were often the very same clique. The 1820s saw a number of petitions to Parliament from irate ratepayers, who resented the fact that they were asked to do nothing but indeed pay the rates, and in 1832 with the New Vestries Act the system was modified: in future the ratepayers were to choose and elect the vestry rather than the vestry being self-selecting and thus self-perpetuating. But there again in practice very much the same names cropped up. Two years later, the Directors of the Poor became the Poor Law Commissioners and there some new blood must have come in, for the late 1830s were marked by a series of expensive legal proceedings, the result of the Commissioners trying to have things their own way and the vestry ‘protecting the interests of the rate-payers' (i.e. refusing to raise the poor rate). At one point two rival sets of Poor Law officials were in existence, both approved of by an unwise vicar trying vainly to keep the peace! Guerilla warfare continued, matters not helped by the fact that the workhouse built for 500 near the Old Church during the early years of the century was now accommodating over 1,000 and the whole poor relief system was cracking at the seams. Something of a climax was reached in 1852, when the vestry took the keys of the workhouse away and wanted to dismiss the Master. The Poor Law Commissioners claimed they had no right to do this, and the vestry fought back with handbills and posters proclaiming ‘Invasion by the Poor Law Commissioners of the Rights and Privileges of the Vestry and Ratepayers'. The Commissioners finally backed down, but the rows went on.

In 1855 the Local Management of the Metropolis Act changed matters considerably, even if it did not put an end to endemic wrangles between those responsible for levying money and those responsible for spending it, or to running complaints about the state of the workhouse, whose surroundings (Agar Town and St Pancras Cemetery) had become very insalubrious. By the time of the Act the internal affairs of St Pancras parish were so disorganised that special mention of it as a notorious case was made in Parliament by Sir Benjamin Hall, who drafted the Act, which paved the way – to use the metaphor that seems apt – for a lot of physical tidying up in Kentish Town. The sixteen inefficient local paving boards were superseded. Regular strings of gas lamps began to replace the old, intermittent naphtha flares along the main streets; a lot more sewers got laid – so much so that when, some ten years later, it was revealed at a vestry meeting that the parish had not actually got the power to prevent a builder building houses without drainage, at least one vestryman was surprised to hear it. (The road in question was Chester Road, off York Rise, part of the northern end of the district then rapidly developing and filling up with railway porters, drivers, ticket collectors and their families.) But old-style corruption did not disappear just like that. Instructive is a newspaper report of a Ratepayers' Association Meeting which took place in September 1867:

This Joseph Salter was a significant figure in the area for many years – one of those Thomas Rhodes-like characters with a finger in every local pie. Only, as Rhodes typified his own generation by being a farmer-turned-builder, Salter typified his by being an insurance office agent, auctioneer, rent-collector and ultimately estate agent with a special line in valuations for railway compensation. He set up shop in New Chapel Place in 1854, just as the building explosion in Kentish Town was really getting under way: a few years later, as his family rapidly expanded, he moved his business premises up the street to Holmes Place, which later became 311 Kentish Town Road. The business remained there, as ‘Salter Rex', till 1975, when new offices were built nearby. It is still the chief estate agent in Kentish Town.

Joseph Salter was at various times auditor to the vestry, Chairman of the Board of Works (he opposed the Metropolitan Improvement Rate in 1866) and a Poor Law Commissioner who was re-elected as a Guardian when the Gaythorne-Hardy Act of 1867 finally severed the long and acrimonious partnership of the Poor Law administrators and the vestry. Another Salter, Jonathan, whom I believe to have been Joseph's brother and owner of a prosperous drapers in Camden Town, was similarly a vestryman and a Poor Law Guardian and was eventually presented with a gold watch in return for fifty years service. (A fact which gives pause for thought, when you consider the vicissitudes both vestry and Poor Law had gone through in that period.) Jonathan Salter's attitude to his duties can best be summed up by the fact that, when the matter of distributing new clothing to children in the workhouse came up, he ‘wished the new style of clothing to be given to the best conducted children'. Joseph, however, as a father of twelve, seems to have been of a rather more charitable turn of mind, provided his own interests were not at stake: it was his suggestion that, at Christmas 1867, ‘some small toys should be supplied to the [workhouse] children … the Master was authorised to expend £2 in their purchase.' At all events he had inspired sufficient respect and gratitude by the time he died in 1876 to have a granite fountain and drinking trough erected in his memory at the corner of College Gardens – a scrap of green space at the junction of Royal College Street and St Pancras Way, which the vestry had earlier managed to preserve from being turned into roadway.

The horses for whom the drinking trough was a kindly thought have long vanished, except for the occasional scrap-iron dealer's cart, and the trough is dry, but the fountain still works on one side and is an amenity for the drunks, tramps and other isolated misfits sometimes to be seen in the gardens, sheltering under the reverberating railway bridge that spans it.