The House by the Thames (28 page)

Isaacs's had for some time been in the control of two of Moss's sons, Moss II and Samuel, with residential addresses in the then-genteel areas of Brixton and South Lambeth. The third generation was to be located in Bayswater and still more exclusive places. Like the Sells long before them, the Isaacs clan had prospered through trade and moved up in the world. For the whole period of their occupancy of Bankside they had had a few people resident in one or more of the houses they owned, presumably either employees in the iron trade or caretakers. The favoured house for this presence was number 50, and for many years a married couple called Mallison lived there. They continued there after the First World War, when an Edward and Ellen Kimpton were installed alongside in 49. This new presence probably signified the moment at which the Isaacs, who were still to own the house till the beginning of the 1930s, let it as a separate premises, without the wharf-space, for £60 a year. The tenants were Elliott, Hughes & Easter Ltd, gum-merchants according to the Commercial Directory. Did they sell glue, which was one of the by-products of the Bermondsey skin-trade?

The journalist and short-story writer, V. S. Pritchett, who was born in 1900 and lived almost until the end of the century, worked in a leather works near London Bridge from the age of fifteen to nineteen. He has left memorable evocations of the Southwark and Bermondsey of the period.
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‘There was a daylight gloom in this district of London. One breathed the heavy, drugging beer smell of hops and there was another smell of boots and dog dung: this came from the leather which had been steeped a month in puer or dog dung before the process of tanning. There was also … the stinging smell of vinegar from a pickle factory, and smoke blew down from an emery mill … From the occasional little slum houses [came] the sharp stink of London poverty. It was impossible to talk for the noise of dray horses striking the cobbles.'

The teenage Pritchett, just too young to be conscripted for war service, rather enjoyed his long hours in these busy streets near the river – eight in the morning till seven in the evening and till four every Saturday. For this he earned twelve shillings and sixpence a week, rising to eighteen and six by the time he left, and ate the same meal every day in ‘someone's Dining Rooms, a good pull-up for carmen, near the Hop Exchange … steak and kidney pudding followed by date or fig pudding … the whole cost 8d. but went up to 10d. the following year.'

A few years later, number 49 Bankside harboured such a Dining Room, apparently run by the sub-tenants who were the successors to the Kimptons, a family called Morley. So, once more, as during the brief coffee-room time twenty years before, customers could sit and eat looking out onto the river and the far bank as others had in the seventeenth and sixteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the Dining Rooms did not last long in that economically depressed time (1926, when they figure in the Directory, was the year of the abortive General Strike) and by 1928 the house was apparently the work-address for two other exiguous trades, sign-writing and window-cleaning.

Just how poverty-stricken the residential aspect of the Bankside had become by the 1920s, even though commerce continued to flourish there, is clear from Grace Golden's testimony, both in words and in pictures:

‘Samuel Isaacs and Sons, iron merchants, occupied number 52 for many years of the last century, until about 1924 [actually a few years later] when it was used as tenements. In the late thirties candles were still being used to light them.'

Since gas-light was initially regarded as something for commercial premises rather than domestic ones, it is likely the Sells, who were still in residence in that run of houses in the 1840s and early '50s, had never bothered to install it, or at any rate not on the upper floors.

The state of the lanes leading down to Bankside was not helped by the revival, once again, of the plan to build a bridge across to St Paul's. It was shelved at the outbreak of war in 1914 but the ground landlords of much of the property round there, by now the Bridge House Estate, went on hoping after the war that it would go ahead: they allowed the buildings that would be demolished for it to deteriorate. The young Grace Golden explored these lanes, at whose dark entries she had been gazing all her childhood from the house over the water at Queenhithe. The irregular small alleys of the Skin Market held for her the fascination of a strange country. She kept, and quoted many years later, the notes she had written on them at the time:

‘On one side, a row of two-storied, jerry-built houses, on the other, the crumbling brickwork of half-demolished dwellings … Cats and children are everywhere … A child with bare feet and matted hair crawls out of the open doorway up to the level of the alley. The gas-lit interior – there is no daylight except from the doorway – shows a broken brass bedstead and tumbled bedding. A woman pushes aside the torn lace curtain and rubs a broken window pane …

‘Down a tributary alleyway there are the pathetic remains of a few square yards of fenced-in garden. A shabby bassinet in front of the door which leads straight into the living room. Under and beside the window, fruit and vegetables are stacked against the wall – ready for selling the next day. A wheelbarrow almost closes the passageway.'

On Bankside itself, the evidence was of a slightly less needy existence: not that Grace made the distinction, since it still seemed to her to be located in another time and world from the one she knew on the City side:

‘On a summer evening at an open window on the river front, one might see a turquoise blue gramophone horn, wheezily playing “A Bird in a Gilded Cage”. Behind the horn can be seen the floral wallpaper, almost covered with velvet-framed photographs … We move onto a group of people around their doorstep. Grandmother in a white apron spreads herself over a broken-backed chair; Mother, the line of her corset dividing her torso into planes, squares herself on the doorstep; the children, their mouths and cheeks jammy with the last slice of bread and jam, scream at each other; Father is in the local.'

Other vestiges, too, of the domestic Bankside of Victorian days and earlier still lingered in Grace Golden's youth. At the Falcon Dock, at the level of 79 Bankside, ‘fowls took their Sunday morning stroll down the slope to the water's edge. And, on a hot summer weekday, carmen used to drive their steaming horses down to the river where the great beasts stood cooling their hooves in the lapping water.'

However, by the end of the 1920s, the City of London Electric Lighting Company acquired much of the planning-blighted land west of 52 Bankside. The bridge-scheme having been once again abandoned, the land became the site for a more extensive six-chimneyed Power Station, which took in also the old site of the gas works. City money cleared the slum lanes and re-housed the occupants in yet another large tenement block. With their clearance went much old geography, including Moss, Unicorn and White Hind Alleys and the last references to the ‘Pye' or Pike Gardens, all perilously close to 49 Bankside. Only the vagaries of chance, the historical accident of the ownership of parcels of land going back over two centuries, kept that house and its immediate neighbours out of the clearance scheme. It was a close call, and one that was to be repeated several times in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

By 1931 the Isaacs still owned the run 49–52, but the lucrative old iron business was being consigned to the past: numbers 50, 51 and 52 were occupied by a firm of wharfingers (that is, general waterfront traders). The gum-merchants had given up their tenancy of 49, and no one seems to have been living there. The house, now one of the few remaining survivors in a changed landscape, had reached its nadir – the point in time at which it was not even thought to be worth finding a new tenant for it. I have been told that various cargoes from lighters, including mahogany, were stored there, ships' wood within the wooden, shiplike interior. In the deep cellars a Bankside flood of 1928 (which was to be the last) had left a black sludge on the Tudor flagstones, which no one bothered to clean up. The river rats made a home there. At the top of the house, in the attic under the leaky slate roof where generations of servants had slept, and where the Elliotts and their crippled daughter had once made their home, pigeons got in through a broken window and whitened the wide old boards with their droppings. The house must have seemed destined, like one of Dickens's sooty riverside dwellings of a hundred years earlier, to be pulled down any time, leaving only disturbed air and a fading memory.

But that year a young man called Robert E. Stevenson took to wandering along the river in the evenings. His name, with its echo of the author
of Treasure Island
, was propitious, for he was a script-writer and soon-to-be director attached to Gaumont British film studios. The cinema, which had become a mass industry in the 1920s and was now being given a further boost with the coming of talkies, was reaching its high noon of popularity. Southwark alone had over a dozen ‘picture houses' by the 1930s, including a newly built one at the Elephant and Castle that was for a while the largest in Europe. Patient queues for films, almost any film, were a standard feature of the evening streets.

Robert Stevenson came upon 49 Bankside and had the vision to see, through the dirt and decay, that here was a house worth saving. Did he persuade one of the wharfingers to find the key and let him in to wander round its creaking, rat-rustling spaces? Did he take his then-wife, Cecilie, to see the place and manage to infect her with his own enthusiasm? He is long dead, I cannot ask him – but it is evident from documents collected up with the Deeds of the house that by the end of 1931 he was in negotiation with the by now extensive Isaacs clan, and legal wheels had begun to turn.

They needed to. Already, in 1922, after 49 had been let to Stephen Easter's firm of gum-merchants, a tidying-up exercise had had to take place. The original old iron man, Moss Isaacs, had died in 1889, leaving his Bankside properties in equal shares to each of his six children. With the passage of another generation, these one-sixth parts had turned into one-fifteenths. Each of these individual portions must by then have been worth almost nothing, yet various of the descendants were in dispute with one another on the matter. The properties had finally been put into a family Trust, in charge of a solicitor – who then mislaid the Trust document. Statutary declarations concerning it had to be made in 1931, one of them in front of the British pro-Consul in Cannes, to which place one of Isaacs's descendants had wandered. The family names, figuring on the copious documentation of 1931–32, are redolent of cosmopolitan, comfortably-off Anglo-Jewish society: Isaacs, Cohens, Levys, Bensusans and Hakims. They styled themselves ‘stockjobbers', or simply ‘gentlemen', variously of Pembridge Villas, Bayswater, mansion blocks in Earls Court and Maida Vale, and Khandala Marine Mansions of Bexhill on Sea with a pied-à-terre in Covent Garden. One or two injected an additional touch of inter-war rackety chic. A brother-in-law lived in the Villa Hakim, rue Puget, Nice, while Ernest David Isaacs, ‘late of the Royal Automobile Club, Pall Mall', was attributed to ‘the British Club, Alassio, in the Kingdom of Italy'.

It is to be hoped that both these gentlemen had the acumen to settle in England by 1939.

It was Ernest who was finally given, by his quarrelsome cousins, the power to negotiate with Robert Stevenson (‘gentleman'), late of Fitzroy Square – then a fashionably bohemian address. Stevenson seems to have moved into Bankside anyway in the meantime. A lease on 49 and its waterfront was at last signed on 10th December 1932, making him ‘tenant for life' in consideration of a transfer premium of £600 and an annual rent of £2.10s for 999 years. Two days later the freehold was sold outright to him for £55 (altered in ink from £50), which was the equivalent of only twenty-two years of rent.

Since the freehold had originally been acquired by Moss Isaacs in 1873 for £1300, Robert Stevenson had either bought a heap of bricks from which almost all value had evaporated – or he had got a remarkable bargain.

Robert Stevenson had a new roof put on and enlarged the attic, creating space on the leads at the back of it for a roof-garden. He also cleared the long yard to turn it back into a garden again, and installed French windows in the ground-floor back room which he used as a dining room. As if in ghostly re-creation of a very distant time, he put a small fish pond at the end of the garden. (Subsequent claims that this pond is an actual vestige of the Pike Garden are not valid.) More prosaically, the house got its first bathroom, in the top-floor closet over Cardinal Cap Alley. The restoration was otherwise a matter of stripping out the inner layers the house had acquired during the nineteenth century. Vincent Sells's Regency fireplace was left in place in the first-floor front, but the wallpapered plaster board was taken away, exposing again the early Georgian wood panelling, here and in the stairwell. Victorian fireplaces, probably dating from the tenure of Edward Perronet Sells II or the Tuckfields who came after him, were removed, and Stevenson found to his delight that some original grates were intact behind.

He also removed the sagging crust of sodden and dried-out Victorian ceiling in the basement and discovered the timbers of the Tudor cellars holding the whole thing up. Many of the old beams had to be replaced, but of those that were still sturdy enough to remain several were indentifiable as ship's timbers: the re-use of these well-seasoned bones of old ships was common in past centuries. The idea of an ancient connection between the house and the sea appealed greatly to Stevenson, and it seems to have been during his occupation that a story became current about the house having once been the property of a smuggling sea-captain. A secret passage was said to run from the cellars down to the river, and there were tales of brandy casks. There is no evidence of any such passage having existed: perhaps Stevenson's workmen had lighted on one of the old drainage ditches? In any case, a captain with a line in smuggling would have lived down in Rotherhithe or Deptford, not on Bankside above the constantly observed Pool of London. But if Stevenson made things up, it was also his writer's imagination that led him to discern the house's quality. While living there he wrote an historical novel, his only venture into hard covers, I think, called
Darkness in the Land
.
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It still reads today as a creditable and well-researched pastiche of an account by a well-born young man of the late seventeenth century. We have the Plague of London, his escape to the country and then to the Dorset coast, an encounter with an ‘Aegyptian' (gipsy) princess, and his final escape from England with her to Massachusetts. A make-believe Introduction says that the author died in Boston in 1726.