Savage (8 page)

As dusk approached, the report went on, shops closed down to avoid looting and then, as darkness fell, crowds of up to 10,000, many waving tricolour flags, fought with police around Parliament, in the Strand and in Charing Cross Road. Pitched battles with stave-wielding policemen around Temple Bar were described as ‘frightful: the combatants, amounting to hundreds, were engaged hand to hand, and man to man, and now and then a paving stone might be seen flying in the air … The blood flowed in streams from many a luckless head.' In one mêlée, the reporter said, several lives were lost.

The conflagrations did not all take place in the cities. In 1830 the countryside from Kent to Wiltshire was battered by the mythical hordes of Captain Swing. Threshing machines were destroyed, hayricks and farm buildings burned to the ground, and squadrons of dragoons sent to quell minor uprisings. Hundreds were arrested, but the man who signed the letters forewarning of attacks or taking credit for them – Captain Swing himself – was never apprehended.

This, then, was civilisation: tumultuous towns, impoverished masses and a rich élite. It is not without some irony for this story that when the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville visited Manchester he wrote, ‘Civilisation works its miracles and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.'

*   *   *

The British people had their own idea of what constituted a savage. Foreign explorers, warriors and merchants had been bringing home exotic trophies ever since they had first ventured from their home shores. Their reasons for doing so were manifold, ranging from enslavement through scientific, philosophical and religious motives, to public amusement and commercial exploitation.

Human ‘freaks' and animals were treated with equal vigour, as fairground showmen and London theatre promoters sought to make a financial killing. In 1636 Sir Edmund Verney told his son,

A merchant of lundon wrote to a factor of his beyoand sea, desired him by the next shipp to send him 2 or 3 Apes; he forgot the r, and then it was 203 Apes. His factor has sent him fower scoare, and sayes hee shall have the rest by the next shipp, conceiving the merchant had sent for two hundred and three apes; if yorself or frends will buy any to breede on, you could never have had such a chance as now.

Five decades later a rhinoceros that had been brought from Africa was giving two-shilling rides at the Belle Sauvage Inn on Ludgate Hill, and earning for its owner a massive £15 a day.

So it was with human specimens. In 1501 three Eskimos were landed at Bristol, and in later years Henry VIII had a private viewing of a Brazilian chieftain. Once the North American continent was opened up, a succession of indigenous visitors included three Cherokee chiefs, who in 1762 were overwhelmed by a crowd of 10,000 sightseers in Vauxhall Gardens.

In the years that followed, the pace of the living exhibitions arriving in the country picked up: Sartje the Hottentot Venus displayed herself in Piccadilly; Tono Maria, the Venus of South America, appeared in Bond Street; a troupe of Laplanders with reindeer attracted 58,000 spectators. As the empire expanded, so did the variety of exhibits: Eskimos, Zulus, Bushmen, Aborigines all graced the stage of nineteenth-century Britain.

They came, though, in a period when the public's attitude had undergone a cynical change. The century before, Britain had been influenced by the French philosophers, like Rousseau, who had extolled the virtue of the Noble Savage – the innocent native, free from original sin, the noble naïveté from which civilisation had sprouted. Now there was a gloating, preening approach to the imported ‘savages', an attitude that said, ‘Look how far we have come from these basest of instincts.'

Science stepped in too. Systematic research – the measuring of heads and brains and limbs, the development of ethnology and anthropology – was conducted on specimens brought from abroad. There can be no doubt that this was a period of greatly increased scientific understanding and knowledge, and the showmen now claimed that their exhibitions were in the interests of scientific advancement.

It is important to remember, too, that in 1830 when Jemmy and his compatriots arrived in Britain slavery still existed. There had been a ferocious clamour for its abolition, and in 1806 the slave trade was made illegal, but slavery itself survived legally in British colonies for a further three years.

FitzRoy, of course, as a man of reasonable wealth and aristocratic background, had no need of the commercial gains to be made from his Fuegian captives. There would be no degrading public exhibitions for the surviving three and no attempt to make money from them. His objectives were, if naïve, certainly logical. He would have them educated in ‘English, and the plainer truths of Christianity, as the first objective; and the use of common tools, a slight acquaintance with husbandry, gardening and mechanism, as the second'. This would allow them to return to their homeland and educate their fellow countrymen. The nomadic lifestyle would give way to agricultural settlements, the Fuegians would become Christians and open to business with traders from Britain. As a bonus they would act with kindness towards the many sailors shipwrecked on the shores of Tierra del Fuego, who were usually butchered by Indians.

There were precedents for FitzRoy's actions. We have already seen the fate of the first convert from Sierra Leone. If FitzRoy had been reading the
Morning Advertiser
on 29 November, just days before the Fuegians were due to join him, he would have seen a court report from the Mansion House that might have served as a warning. Under the headline ‘
A REVOLTED MISSIONARY
', it related the case of Pierre, another young man from Sierra Leone. Pierre had been brought to England years ago by a Quaker woman. He had turned out to be a good scholar and a likeable person, and the Society of Friends had funded a proper school education for him. Then he was sent back to his homeland to preach Christian values to his countrymen. Unfortunately he ‘underwent a very sudden and important change, and rather than attending to the duties of his situation, he took a fancy to rum-drinking…'. He gave up preaching and became a sailor. Pierre went before the mast to China, but the ready supply of liquor was too much temptation for him. On a voyage to England he tried to visit his old benefactors, but ‘happened, on his way to the Quakers, to meet a messmate, and to get drunk, so that when he made his appearance, it was some time before he was recognised as the coloured Quaker'. His patrons forgave him, thinking that ‘kindness and advice might still reclaim him'. They gave him more money, but he got drunk again. Finally he was charged before the Lord Mayor, who severely admonished him.

In conclusion Pierre announced ‘he would go before the mast, or do anything of that kind with all his heart, but he did not like preaching and flogging mixed. – (Laughter). There was a ship in which he could get employment at once. This was agreed to and the Missionary departed.'

*   *   *

The Fuegians found FitzRoy waiting for them at the coach office in Piccadilly. He had had his own personal carriage prepared and whisked them away through the West End and onwards to the East and Walthamstow. This vision they caught of the capital city was fleeting, but the city's gigantic size, its noise and its bustle, were startling: FitzRoy comments that they ‘seemed bewildered by the multitude of new objects'. Outside Charing Cross, York Minster gave a shocking cry: “Look!” he said, fixing his eyes on the lion upon Northumberland House, which he certainly thought alive, and walking there. I never saw him show such sudden emotion at any other time.'

The journey to Walthamstow was otherwise brief and uneventful, and when they arrived at the house of the new schoolmaster there was relief all around: the Fuegians loved their new rooms, and the schoolmaster and wife were ‘pleased to find the future inmates of their house very well disposed, quiet, and cleanly people; instead of fierce and dirty savages'.

Chapter 7

‘Walthamstow Gtr London

Wilcumestowe c. 1075, Wilcumestou 1086

“Place where guests are welcome”

or “holy place of a woman called Wilcume”'

Dictionary of English Place Names

Today Walthamstow is a thirty-minute trip by Underground from the West End of London. Exit up the ramp and a few yards on there's a big, modern pub – the Goose and Granite. If you turn left here, to run the gauntlet of estate agents, kebab shops and McDonald's, you will reach the high street, with its lengthy market lined with greasy-spoon cafés, charity bargain stores, KFC, Pizza Hut and tandoori restaurants. Everywhere the debris of fast food and market commerce is trodden underfoot, the smell of burning fat is in the air and you will hear raised voices and car radios. This is the hub of Walthamstow, a bustling, slightly grimy working-class suburb of London's Essex periphery.

Or take a different route from the station. Cross Hoe Street into St Mary's Road, walk up this quiet little avenue, past Hair Routes Unisex Salon and Pete's Fish Bar and Indian Takeaway, past neat terraced houses with grey wheelie-bins in their front gardens and eventually you will come to the tight little alleyway of Church Path. But this is more than an alleyway: it is a thread to the past, for as you walk along it you are transported back to 1830. On the left are small ivy-clad houses with blue, black and red doors, and to the right is a large brick building, Walthamstow's old workhouse.

When the passage opens out, you will find a village preserved against the vagaries of the passing years, a time capsule at the edge of metropolitan London. Footpaths radiate from the dull sandstone walls of St Mary's church, to the Squire and the Monoux almshouses, the infants' school and overgrown graveyards where cracked tombstones vie with the weeds. On the corner of Church Lane and Orford Road sits a fifteenth-century wattle-and-daub house. Around the corner the National School, founded in 1819, faces the workhouse, built almost ninety years earlier. Some of the buildings have changed their use – the National School has become a Spiritualist Church, the Georgian infants' school is a Welcome Centre, the workhouse a museum – the Monoux almshouses have been rebuilt since being bombed in 1941, the footpaths are now illuminated by electric light, and the housing of a later age now swamps the border. In essence, though, what exists here in this tiny village is the Walthamstow of 1830, and of Jemmy, Fuegia and York.

The journey the Fuegians made with FitzRoy that first day would have been less straightforward. Walthamstow sat just seven miles to the north-east of the capital city, but it was a pleasant contrast to the smog-ridden metropolis. On the east of the river Lea, this was a handsome parish in Epping Forest, noted for the richness of its woodland and the stunning views of the City of London across the marshes. In the early eighteenth century the only real route into Walthamstow would have been through Stratford and along Leyton Road over the Bow Bridge. Here at this major gateway from London into Essex – where dogs' right forefoot claws were removed to stop them chasing the King's deer – highwaymen and footpads still stalked the roads and the woods. However, as rich merchants and bankers began to make Walthamstow their home, there was a growing demand for improved communications. In 1757 an Act of Parliament allowed for the building of a new bridge over the Lea, and for ‘making, repairing and widening roads from thence into the great roads at Snaresbrook in the county of Essex, and at Clapton in the county of Middlesex'.

As a result, on 13 May 1758, a major route from Hackney to Epping Forest was opened, which was improved in 1819 with the construction of a new metal bridge with a 70-foot span. The engineer James McAdam commended the road as one of the best in the vicinity of London. ‘Its general form is upon the most approved principles…' he wrote, adding that it was ‘in a very good state: better means have been adopted for draining this road than any other road in the metropolis…' It was almost certainly along this road that FitzRoy and the Fuegians entered Walthamstow for the first time.

They would have experienced a sudden break with the city, a sharp leap from the urban to the rural. There had been a settlement at Walthamstow since before the Roman Empire. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman remains have all been unearthed here. Boudicca led the Iceni in the surrounding forests. In 1830 it maintained its rural setting, and though London was looming on the horizon, it had yet to expand into this rustic vacuum. The Eastern Counties Railway did not reach this far until the 1840s when it brought with it the essential elements of modernity: gas-lighting, sewers and a water supply. But for the moment the village had a tranquil beauty amid fields, hills and woods. The census of 1831 tells us that 4,258 people were living here in a mixed community that included agricultural labourers, journeymen, artisans, shopkeepers, chandlers, clerks and merchants.

There were also many well-to-do families in Walthamstow, with their attendant entourages of servants. In 1831 more than one in ten of the local population was employed in domestic service, and directories show a profusion of luxury services for the wealthy, with lace menders, hairdressers, perfumers, straw-hat vendors, stay and umbrella makers, music teachers and piano tuners. The village was at a convenient travelling distance from London but, nevertheless, a handsome escape from its smog.

The wealthy were a blend of landed gentry and men who had made small and large fortunes in the City, the law courts, commerce or enterprise. Joseph Wigram, who had found the Fuegians their place in Walthamstow, was the son of Sir Robert Wigram, one of the richest merchants in the country. He had come to England from Wexford in Ireland in 1762 and, after apprenticing with a surgeon, became an entrepreneur of the highest order, owning twenty-one East Indiamen. He had also been the major shareholder in the Blackwall yard of shipbuilders, a partner in Reid's Brewery, now Watney, Combe, Reid, the chairman of the East India Docks and an MP. He died in November 1830.