The House by the Thames (18 page)

Although this charity was being organised under the auspices of the Anglican Church, of which all those dwelling in the area were technically parishioners, the Committee for the First Clink Division was headed by Robert Barclay, who was a Quaker. Dignified by the addition of ‘Esq.' to his name (most of St Saviour's worthies at that time are simply ‘Mr'), Barclay the brewery owner was clearly the most prominent citizen on Bankside. The list included several other recognisable Bankside names, including Anthony Horne who was another Quaker, and also Edward Sells who was present at the meeting.

One is aware that both Horne and Sells, as coal-merchants, stood to benefit from the fact that ships bringing fresh coal to London could not make it up or down the frozen Thames. Stocks held in their warehouses and barges were therefore potentially very valuable, since retail prices could be raised and raised as the shortage continued. One hopes that Horne and Sells's presence on the Committee means that they felt a higher social obligation than the profit motive. It may indeed have been through their good offices that the cut-price coal reached the shivering poor that year. At the same time, the basic assumption of the meeting was clearly that, for their own good, the poor must pay
something
for their soup, potatoes and coal. It was also piously hoped, by some of those present, that handouts of soup would do them good in a less immediate way – by teaching them how to support life ‘at less expense and in a better manner than their ignorance of useful cookery enables them to do at present'. There speaks the voice of thrift: the organisers of this charity were not the rich, ignorant themselves of soup-making. There was also anxiety that, while helping ‘the Industrious Poor', they must take care not to encourage the unindustrious, undesirable sort – a preoccupation that was to become familiar in Victorian Poor Law circles.

The amount of money raised over the next two months was remarkable, for a parish with very few really wealthy people and many needy. Potatoes were got cheap, at £5.10s. a ton, from a Borough market dealer. By mid-February forty-three tons of them had been distributed and fifty more tons were planned for March and April – over £500 worth. Distribution of rice (brought, thanks to imperial trade, from the other side of the world, and doubtless grown by people almost as poor as the eventual recipients) was on a similar scale. This was in an era in which £30 a year – or about twelve shillings a week – was cited as an acceptable minimum figure on which a working man with a wife and several children might live respectably; many families habitually got by on much less. For such a large fund to have been collected there must have been a vein of considerable energy and decency running through the minor bourgeoisie of Bankside. They probably had useful contacts too in the City, the river's wealthier opposite shore.

The hard winter passed; warm days at last returned, with eggs and early vegetables once more for sale in the Borough market (hotly defended by the Vestry against a competing market which had been set up in St George's Fields). In the streets watercresses were hawked, and caged song-birds and bunches of country flowers, bringing a whiff of the pastures of Camberwell and Peckham Rye to the now-enclosed lanes of Bankside. But Edward Sells did not relinquish local activity. He had evidently acquired a taste for it, and it is clear too that the Vestry were pleased with their latest recruit. By the middle of 1800 he had been elected a churchwarden.

After that, for over thirty years, his name crops up regularly, in minutes, on committees, as warden of this or treasurer of that. During the same period he held office at various times in the Watermen's new and elegant little Hall near the Monument. He also became a well-known figure in the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street, through which, after 1807, all dealing had to be done. He consolidated and expanded the family business by entering into a partnership with a long-established Bankside neighbour:
Johnstone's London Commercial Guide and Street Directory
for 1817 lists the business as Jones & Sells, coal-merchants. At that time the office was in number 56 Bankside. Sells and his wife were living in 55, while 49 was temporarily let to another coal-merchant, Thomas Fuce, who had a wharf further up, near Falcon stairs. (By the mid-1820s number 49 was back in Sells family occupancy.) At 47 the Hornes had their business, while the Sells's neighbours at 54 were two brothers called Holditch, who traded in coal as well as cider, and were later to work for the Sells enterprise. Altogether, the Directory for that year lists twenty-five separate coal-merchants on Bankside, which was clearly the centre of the London trade.

Yet it would be a mistake to imagine Bankside piled with coal. The middle-class inhabitants who resided there and continued to do so fifteen and twenty years later, including several of the St Saviour's clergy, would hardly have lived surrounded by mounds of nutty slack. Some owner-occupiers did have attached to their property what a land valuation of the period described as ‘warehouse and yard': Thomas Horne did at 47, as did his father Anthony at 44. There was another Horne wharf up by the Falcon. What with these, and the laden lighters moored off the Bankside, the whole place probably did smell of coal, that tarry, not unpleasant pungency that has now gone from our cities. But other ‘brass plate' coal-merchants, including the Sells, seem to have had their discharging depots elsewhere, since most Bankside addresses were not in themselves storehouses but were used as places for the paperwork of negotiations with shipmasters, customers and the lowlier carters who actually delivered the stuff.

A view
⁹
of about 1820, from the windows of a house on Bankside opposite St Paul's, shows what is probably the quay in front of Wyatt's stone-yard a few doors down river from number 49. There are sail-boats meandering in the background, ferries tied up, an ancient-looking wooden pulley on the quay, a few blocks of stone, and some iron rollers. Two men are fiddling with chains on the pulley, another is measuring something. Two barges will soon arrive, each with a crowd of well-dressed people on them, and alongside them is a racing boat manned by a team of red-clad oarsmen. Can this be Doggett's race, an annual competition for young watermen which had been inaugurated a hundred years before? The measuring man also wears a red cap, and his red jacket is lying near by. A small child – probably, from his hair, a boy, although he wears a dress and a pinafore – is busy with his own play as he kneels beside a block of stone. Although the river is animated, the atmosphere seems almost to belong to a sylvan, pre-industrial world rather than to one in which already the first steamship had made its appearance on London's river. Looking at it, one can believe that, on a fine Sunday morning when the Bankside workshops were idle, London did then still appear, as it had to Wordsworth twenty years before, ‘Open unto the fields and to the sky – All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.'

Vestry minutes make odd reading: subjects arise in them, become obsessive for a season or two and then give way to others. High-minded and sometimes genuinely far-sighted perceptions are expressed alongside others of relentless pettiness (‘This will put up the rates …'). Often it is only when a sudden row explodes that it becomes apparent that what has not been stated in previous minutes is as significant as what has been. There are periodic scandals over the years: this collector of Church rates has died while omitting to hand over the money first; at another time money has been misused to buy port for the Vicar; someone else has published ‘very Slanderous and False representations reflecting on the conduct of your Commissioner of Parish Estates' – but the overall picture is that things did in the end get done.

Edward Sells seems to have played a key role for several years in the on-going fuss about the workhouse, whose lease was soon to expire. Should a new one be built? Should an old house be re-used and, if so, where? Could some money from the Newcomen bequest for binding apprentices be used for the workhouse? (Answer from legal advice, No.) Should the existing building be purchased from the trustees of the Winchester Park estate, and if so for how much? … No, no, the trustees were asking too much. It would be better to try to renew the lease. But the suggested rent was also considered too much: the Park estate was being ‘unreasonable' … The problem was the one encountered by local authorities in every era, including the present one: a district with a large number of poor people has many calls upon its funds and relatively few monied rate-payers to meet them, whereas a wealthy district, which could easily afford a high rate, doesn't need one.

A specially appointed sub-committee of four, including Edward Sells, found that, by renting, ‘It is … demonstrable that in 72 years the Parish would have paid the Lessors the Amount the Freehold would have cost.' Apparently it was not envisaged, in 1805, that the new century would bring such changes to the physical fabric of London and to social structures that long-term predictions about what would be good value were meaningless. This, too, is a problem of every era.

However, by the next meeting the Committee had evidently reflected further, for they had decided that the rent demanded by the Park estate could be accepted after all – ‘This brought on a debate of considerable length when the Vestry found it necessary to adjourn to a more extensive and roomy part of the Church, when the matter was reason'd and fully argued, till the Question was loudly called for and again read by the Clerk and a show of Hands was made.'
¹⁰
The verdict was not clear, so they resorted to the Parliamentary system of Yeahs and Nays filing through different doors; however, it was still claimed that ‘several persons gave their votes without clearly understanding'. A subsequent vote went against the proposition, and the various options were looked at all over again.

Two years later Sells was an auditor, with the others, of the parish accounts. He was also one of four people responsible for a more fundamental report on the workhouse issue. This stated that the workhouse, essentially, was costing too much. The Master, Mr Hey, to whom the running of the place was sub-contracted, was allowed ‘a considerable sum' in tea and sugar for the inmates, while claiming ‘rags and grease that are the property of the parish'. It was also pointed out that, since Mr Hey was running his own manufacturing business (nature unspecified) in the workhouse, he had an interest in hanging onto healthy, able-bodied inmates. ‘… Your Committee are of the opinion that if any great reduction of the rates is ever to be effected it must be from an increase in the virtues of the poor.'

It is not clear whether this comment was over-optimistic or, rather, ironic. It was, however, followed up by the radical suggestion that the workhouse should be broken up, with the old and the young separated out from the ‘profligate and vicious', and that more out-relief for the deserving poor would be a better system. (This humane perception seems to have prevailed till it was overturned by governmental edict in the Poor Law Act of 1834, when St Saviour's formed a Union with Christchurch parish and shared their workhouse off Upper Ground. Later again, a huge Union House shared with St George's parish was built.)

The young children were to be boarded out in small groups in Norwood and Mile End, and Sells became one of the four new voluntary Guardians responsible for their well-being. It is evident from subsequent reports over the years that the quartet took their duties seriously and made regular trips by chaise to see their charges. Indeed, in 1809 they had written expressly of the need for parish officials to ensure they visited ‘at least eight times in the year … We would appeal to their feelings as parents, whether they would think this too often to visit their own children under similar circumstances.'

Edward Sells had brought up a number of children, of which the eldest were now grown: it was that same year that Edward Perronet, aged twenty-one, became a Freeman of the Watermen's Company as his father and grandfather had before him. I do not know where he, John, Vincent and others received their schooling, but the Sells family were of the class who, while not of course aspiring to the classical education on offer at schools such as Winchester or Rugby, often sent their boys to board at the small academies that were by then sprinkled round London's rural fringes. As for younger children, Edward Sells had lived at close quarters with his own in a modest-sized house and obviously knew what he was talking about. The following year, he and his fellows reported of one foster household:

‘All the nurse children want shoes and linnen which the Nurse says has been promised for some time by the officers – the woman is very deaf … She is assisted in her care of the children by a hearty young woman who was brought up in the Parish house and is apprenticed to her … she is able, and the children are clean.' There followed a catalogue of things required, including shifts, shirts, pin cloths [baby's napkins], bonnets and bed-linen. But it was concluded that the situation in Norwood was generally good, and that the parish was to be congratulated on the state of ‘these helpless children of indigence'. The one household at Mile End, however – Mile End was then at the stage of ribbon-development out from London – was much less satisfactory; the children were ‘very confin'd' in a small house and it was doubtful whether the nurse should go on being employed.

Ten years later most of Southwark's boarded-out poor children were being taught to read and write by their nurses, and one nurse was specially commended for having her children ‘looking more like tradesmen's children than paupers'. Since it had been noticed on a previous visit that the children ‘were accustomed to ramble about the Common', it had been agreed that to keep them occupied the bigger ones should be sent to a local school at the cost of one penny each per week. This had worked well, in that several had now learned their catechism and one had ‘whole chapters of the Bible by heart'. (The Bible was the main reading matter provided at these early National Schools, like the one in the Cross Bones yard in Southwark.) The only inconvenience of the penny-a-week school in Norwood was that the children had caught ringworm from other children from poor families who were not so carefully looked after as the boarded-out children.