The House by the Thames (35 page)

 

 

 

 

Chapter III

1
London and the Country Carbonaded
, Donald Lupton, 1632.

2
By tradition spelt thus to this day, but sometimes in the intervening centuries called ‘St Saviour's Dock', although great confusion can be caused since there was another creek to which that name was applied, down river in Bermondsey.

3
The Description of Britain 1577–87
, William Harrison.

4
Robert Crawley, 1550.

5
Horatio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador, 1617.

6
I am indebted to the theatre director Gregory Doran for pointing this out.

Chapter IV

1
Widely varying estimates based on different pieces of evidence have been made for London's population c.1700, but if one includes all the outlying districts counted ‘within the Bills of Mortality', five to six hundred thousand seems about right.

2
I am indebted for this point to Peter Guillery, whose seminal book
The Small House in Eighteenth Century London
appeared while this book was in preparation.

3
Accounts of St Saviour's
, M. Concanen and A. Morgan, 1795.

Chapter V

1
I am indebted to Dan Cruickshank for this and several other salient points.

2
I suspect that exploration might, even today, uncover within what is now London further surviving houses whose basic structure is older than their apparent Georgian origins. A house of similar date to number 49, also built at right-angles to Bankside, with a fine central staircase and a handsome doorway on its west side, used to be number 74, also known as Honduras Wharf. It figured, like 49, in the LCC
Survey of London
volume for the district (1950) as being worthy of note. This, however, did not save it from being swept away a few years later in a development scheme.

3
Mémoires Faites par un Voyageur en Angleterre
, Henri Misson, 1698.

4
William Harrison, ibid.

5
Eventually the lighter became a sail-less or ‘dumb' barge, which could be manoeuvred with the tides by the use of a special long oar in the hands of a skilled lighterman, but earlier the word was applied to the barges equipped with sails that were the workhorses of the river.

6
Quoted in
The Story of the Charringtons
, Elspet Fraser-Stephen, 1952.

Chapter VI

1
Charrington, Gardner, Locket and Co. Ltd – Two Hundred Years in the Coal Trade
.

2
The Story of the Charringtons
, ibid.

3
Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century
, James Peller Malcolm, 1810.

4
J. R. Hammond.

5
Later the site of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, the domed building that is now the Imperial War Museum.

6
It was to finish its days in the twentieth century as a wellknown centre of boxing – The Ring.

7
I am indebted for this insight to Peter Ackroyd.

Chapter VII

1
Figures from Henry Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor
, collected 1850–60.

2
Not the obscure village of Walworth in County Durham, as another current website misleadingly suggests.

3
Letters to the Foundling Hospital: Tracts on Nursing Children 1721–54
.

4
Hints Designed to Promote Beneficence, Temperance and Medical Science
, Dr Lettsom, published in 1801 and re-published in 1816 after his death.

5
South London
, Walter Besant, 1898.

6
Southwark Vestry's organisation was untypical, in that the parish benefited from several substantial charities set up in past centuries (i.e. ‘Cure's Gift') which were used to finance almshouses and charity schools. Therefore its various parochial functions tended to be cloaked in names such as ‘Commissioner', ‘Warden', ‘Keeper of the Estates', etc.

7
Newspaper cuttings, not all of them attributed, in the collection of Southwark's history archive.

8
Zanna Milford, to the
South London Press
.

9
An oil painting probably by Thomas Miles Richardson senior.

10
Vestry meetings in St Saviour's parish could be attended by any parishioner who wanted to, and the vestrymen were appointed by a general vote. The parish had had a ‘closed vestry' – a self-perpetuating clique – up to 1730, when they had been forced by Parliament into the ‘open vestry' system.

11
In a collection of papers relating to St Saviour's made by two successive nineteenth-century worthies, which is now in the British Library.

Chapter VIII

1
Called thus because it was discovered in the 1950s, rolled up and filthy, in an attic in Rhinebeck, New York State – taken there originally, no doubt, by someone carrying the old world to the new.

2
Days in the Factories, or the Manufacturing Industry of Great Britain Described
, George Dodd, 1843. He was assistant engineer to the Rennie family, the bridge-builders.

3
Quoted by Lynda Nead in
Victorian Babylon
, 2000.

4
Dickens, the famous opening to
Bleak House
.

5
They cannot, at that date, have been buried elsewhere. Nunhead Cemetery, which was to become the great out-of-town resting place for people south of the river, did not open till 1840.

6
Till it became two LCC boroughs in 1900 it was administered, with some difficulty, from the City.

Chapter IX

1
Quoted by John Pudney in
Crossing London's River
, 1972.

2
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
.

3
Our Mutual Friend
.

4
A Rebours
, J. K. Huysman, 1883.

5
Walter Besant, journalist and man of letters, founder of the Society of Authors, 1836–1901.

6
The Bell of St Paul's
, 1889.

7
A new diocese had been formed, and the church was therefore given the status of a cathedral in 1905.

8
Arthur B. Moss, a contributor to
Living London
, first edited by George R. Sims, 1901–02. There were numerous subsequent editions.

Chapter X

1
No Directories or Electoral Registers appeared during the two world wars.

2
The old Borough of Southwark had been split down its central High Street into two LCC boroughs.

3
Heinemann, 1938.

4
Unattributed cutting from Anna Lee's own file, dated October 1936.

5
Oddly, the official war-damage map of the time marked the other houses as mildly damaged and number 49 as so damaged as probably to be fit only for demolition, when the reality was the other way round. But the survey was carried out at speed.

6
From a collection of incomplete cuttings in Southwark's history archive.

7
He was eventually to become editor of the
Telegraph
and to receive a knighthood.

Chapter XI

1
Leonard Reilly and Geoff Marshall.

2
James A. Jones, 1935.

3
Figures from the files of Southwark's history archive.

4
The reference is to Shelley's well-known poem about an ancient Egyptian statue, with an inscription referring to enormous power, standing fractured and tumbled in an empty desert.

5
The street – originally Thames Street – was named in belated recognition of one of Southwark's Elizabethan benefactors, William Emerson, whose memorial is still in St Saviour's church. He ‘lived and died an honest man' until the age of ninety-two, extremely old for that time. Beneath a miniature effigy of him in death are the words
ut sum sic eris
– ‘As I now am so shall you be'.

6
From an unattributed cutting in the possession of the house's present occupants.

7
Quoted by Frances Spalding in
The Tate: A History
, 1998.

I AM PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL
to certain people without whom this book could hardly have been written in the way it has. Chief among them are the present owners of 49 Bankside, who have shown unstinting kindness, cooperation and interest in the project and have welcomed me, and others connected with me, into their home on numerous occasions. I also owe a considerable debt of gratitude to various present-day members of the Sells family, especially to Andrew Sells, who generously loaned me privately printed material I would have had great difficulty in finding elsewhere and shared with me his informed interest in his forebears.