The Fields Beneath (15 page)

But in Bennett’s era the keynote of the district was still selectness: otherwise his little book would hardly have been written, or not at any rate with his note of quiet pride. He was pleased, for instance, that the residential building of recent years had resulted in a proportion of public houses to private ones ‘more equitable than it formerly was.’ Also, ‘Besides the chapel of ease to the parish church, there is a meeting house of the Independents, which was opened in 1807, and another of the Wesleyan methodists opened in 1817 … The village is watched throughout the year, and lighted from the 1st day of September to the last of May, pursuant to an act of Parliament obtained in 1817.’ He speaks of highway robbery as a thing of the rustic past: this was another epoch. And yet people looking back to Bennett’s time a generation later were, in turn, to remark how tame Kentish Town had become since those days. In 1820, the often-flooded road (Water Lane) between Camden Town junction and the start of Kentish Town proper, was still unpaved and unlighted and mostly unbuilt. The Regent’s Canal, which crosses under the road at that point, was opened that year, and presumably the coal merchants and the small industries, many of them connected with the building trade, which soon clustered themselves round its wharves did nothing to improve the immediate neighbourhood. A canal was not then, or for more than a hundred years, considered a social amenity, but an industrial one. A correspondent to a local newspaper in the 1860s, looking back to these years, recalls that this stretch of roadway was felt to be dangerous at night. The inhabitants at the southern end of Kentish Town (the Jeffreys Street area) used to fix bells to their shutters to act as a warning if anyone should try to tamper with the fastenings. There were no police then, only ‘old Lorimer, the Constable … and of course there was a sense of insecurity then’. A rural kind of insecurity. There was still a duckpond on one corner, and a village cricket ground on the edge of what later became Hawley Road. But Bennett wasn’t interested in ducks (unless confined within the ‘model farm’ then attached to Bateman’s Folly, which he notes approvingly) and probably considered the chickens which then still stalked and pecked in every side lane as something Kentish Town could well do without. Here he is on the area’s developing amenities:

The inhabitants of both villages had contributed to it by public subscription, and

These schools then occupied a plot of land on the eastern side of Royal College Street (named for the Royal Veterinary College in Camden Town), near the top, just above the fork with St Pancras Way. Later, in 1849, they moved to a new building in what became Islip Street further up the town – part of which remains to this day, with its bell on top, as a Church of England primary school. The old school building in Royal College Street became a laundry for many years, but the site passed in due course to the Board of Education and a board school was established there in the 1870s. It was rebuilt and enlarged in 1908, and is there today as Richard of Chichester Roman Catholic secondary school – a circumstance which would doubtless have shaken the original subscribers of Kentish and Camden Town, through whom the site was acquired in those anti-Papist days.

Bennett mentions a ‘Dispensary for the Relief of the Sick Poor’, a ‘Ladies Working Society’ for making clothes for the poor, a newly established Auxiliary Bible Society and a Religious Tract Society; both these last were presumably dedicated to the dissemination of those great avalanches of moral print which deluged the nineteenth century, drifting down into every odd corner, silting up behind items of furniture or wedged into the draughty gap between floor boards – so that even today, when a house is demolished in an area like this one, grimy tracts issue from between the house’s joists, just as broken tea-seats and clay pipe bowls surface perennially in its gardens. The establishment of tract-producing organisations in 1821 was a sign of the deluge to come, and presumably it would fall to Bennett to do much of their printing. But his favourite local charity was ‘The Lady’s Society, for the relief of the industrious female poor of Kentish-town and Camden-town,
*
during their lying in’ – a charity which, as he says, ‘must more particularly obtain the most powerful advocacy in the breast of every mother’. The prevailing note of Victorian charitable enterprise, genuinely compassionate yet intolerably patronising by twentieth-century standards, is already audible in his writings. It is clear too that the institutionalisation of social organisation, mainly through the Church of England and various non-conformist sects, was already, in the early nineteenth century, superseding older,
ad hoc
village organisation.

All in all, with plenty of people like Bennett around, and others with more substantial resources living up at Green Street and The Grove, Kentish Town does not sound a bad place to have been poor in during the early nineteenth century, even if you did get tracts along with your baby clothes and your hot soup. Despite a succession of bickering Poor Law officials, your lot was likely to have been far more fortunate than that of similar families in places that had never had much of a middle-class population, like Somers Town, or quarters like Spitalfields and Whitechapel from which the wealthier citizens had moved away.

But it should not be supposed that an oppressive Victorian earnestness had wholly overtaken Kentish Town even before Victoria came to the throne. It still retained, until the middle of the century, enough of those characteristics of a ‘village retreat’ – superficially – to attract the sort of talented, mildly bohemian society that either cannot afford or does not want to live in a more imposing district. Lady Hamilton is said to have lived for a while in a house near the Castle, where – one hopes – Nelson’s garden-loving uncles made her feel welcome. Mrs Serras, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Cumberland, was living in a house in Trafalgar Place (opposite present day Sainsburys) during the protracted law suit which she instigated against her natural father in order to claim her rights. One can see that Kentish Town would be just the place for people who required a fundamentally quiet and respectable life without actually being ‘respectable’ in the most conventional terms. Doubtless, a number of the summer lodgings to let there came in discreetly useful for ladies wishing, for natural reasons, to be out of the public eye for a little while, and not all those allegedly there for the sake of their ‘consumption’ were actually suffering from anything as lethal and permanent.

John Keats, that archetypal and genuine consumptive, lived for a while in a house in the then newly built Mortimer Terrace off the Highgate Road (named after Farmer Mortimer) where Leigh Hunt also lodged. The house is still there, hemmed in by railway arches. Later in life, Leigh Hunt lived in another house on Highgate Hill ‘the corner of Bromwich Walk’ – that is, near a footpath which ran across what is now the Holly Lodge Estate. It has several times been claimed that Shelley lived in Kentish Town, but this is not true. What
is
true, however, is that in 1824 when Byron’s funeral cortege passed in the rain through Kentish Town, Mary Shelley and her friend Mrs Williams, both recently widowed, watched it from the windows of the lodgings they then had in Trafalgar Place and marvelled bleakly on the effects of time and chance and on the premature deaths of their own husbands. Mary Shelley, incidentally, was not impressed by Kentish Town’s famous healthy atmosphere: she considered it an ‘odious swamp’.

A number of artists and engravers lived in Kentish Town during these years – the sort of names which, though well enough known in their day and eulogised on their passing, were not, in the final analysis ‘known to the man in the street of the next generation’ – that is, not in the blue plaque class. One, Burford, even had a special circular building there – the Rotunda painting rooms, where he painted the Diorama exhibited in a similar though more opulent building in Regent’s Park. The Rotunda stood behind the National Schools, and later became an organ factory. Another artist, an engraver called Grignion who lived for many years in Grove Terrace, was, as his name suggests, a French
émigré
, one of those who had taken the north-west passage from Somers Town, where they first settled, just as Irish immigrants were to do a couple of generations later. Another French immigrant – or so I assume – was a gentleman called the Baron de Beranger, who lived in a place called ‘Target Cottage’, which I have not been able to locate but which must have been up the Highgate Road – Green Street end of the village: it has a rural sound to it, and so do the goings on there in 1827. The Baron had a running feud with his neighbour, George Mason, who claimed that the Baron’s ducks used to cross the ditch that separated their two properties and eat his cabbages. One morning, he took out a shot gun and shot twenty-seven ducks and ducklings – the Baron was particularly outraged at the massacre of the ‘innocent’ ducklings, and perturbed because his children had also been running around while Mr Mason had been taking his pot shots. To this, Mr Mason said that yes, indeed, the Baron’s children had been annoying him too. He also threatened to shoot the Baron if he suffered any more trespass. For this threat, he was brought to court, where the judge opined that he was quite unfitted to be trusted with a gun and bound him over to keep the peace – which perhaps he did, as no more is recorded on this subject. It might be thought that this was one of the last examples of such country-style feuds in Kentish Town before the encroaching houses drove ducks, cabbages and fowling pieces further off, but not a bit of it. Full forty years later two people in adjoining houses in Leighton Road, right in the centre of the built-up area, had a bitter quarrel which centred on the unruly behaviour of a set of chickens (see page 159).

Similar violent goings-on involving animals – dogs – between people otherwise leading a peaceful and law-abiding existence, occurred in the second decade of the century in Mansfield Road (now Holmes Road) between two tenants there: a Mr Cummings, aged about sixty, and a Mr Holmes aged about forty, whom I take to be the son of the Richard Holmes who laid out the land in houses. Holmes assaulted Cummings, and Cummings was finally awarded £100 damages by a sympathetic jury who would have liked to have given still more. The going rate for crimes of violence had increased considerably since the days of the manor courts in the fifteenth century. It was commented ambiguously in court that ‘the parties were both persons of respectability’.

The same, however, could not be said for a Captain Borthwick, who in 1818 was residing at Village House, the ‘very pleasantly situate house’ by the Assembly House which J. F. King noted as having been earlier the home of a Captain Finch (see page 111). The coincidence of professions and rank does suggest a connection between the two men, but it is a little surprising that in his notes King makes no mention of Captain Borthwick, as one would have expected the scandal of his behaviour to have rocked the village. According to a contemporary newspaper report he

Evidently then as now gullible families were prepared to go to any dubious lengths to see their progeny shine on the stage. Not everyone will be surprised to hear that, the agreement having been signed by both parties, ‘it was afterwards discovered that Mr Borthwick had no pupils, as a teacher of music, and that his respectability did not answer the expectation of Mrs Jones (the girl’s mother). Nor does it come as a great shock to learn that ‘his ultimate designs upon the young lady were of an improper nature.’

The ‘taking in pupils’ ploy was temptingly easy in those days: anyone and everyone could claim to be running a school. It was as simple as setting up a laundry business – that other, more lower-class expedient of people who found themselves in possession of some accommodation but without any visible means of support. All you had to do was have a few brochures printed and put up a brass plate. The Dickens family tried it on at one time in Camden Town, just as the Brontës did in their Yorkshire vicarage, and at neither of these ‘schools’ did any pupil ever present themselves. The first Census records for Kentish Town, dating from a little later in the century (1841) have literally dozens of ‘schools’ recorded, some of them with a respectable number of pupils in quite spacious villas but some in ridiculously tiny quarters – houses, or even parts of houses, in narrow terraces. Some of them cannot have been schools in any more than name – really no more than establishments for boarding out, at minimal cost, children with vaguely middle class connections whom no one particularly wanted: the many Jane Eyres and Smikes of that period of no birth control and a high maternal death-rate.

The places J. F. King mentions as schools were clearly among the largest and better known of the district, but even among these it is evident that eccentricity and private school keeping tended, then as now, to go hand in hand. Near the Gordon House Academy (see page 100) was ‘a French Academy kept by a gentleman of the name of Jollie, who, on the breaking out of the French Revolution in the year 1789, introduced the manual exercise and had his pupils regularly drilled and dressed in uniform, all conducted in military order according to French nationality.’ Whether it was the Old Regime that was to be defended by these boy soldiers or the new one to be advanced, is not clear. This was probably the same place which, in the next century, was known as ‘St John’s Park House School’ (it was originally next to St John’s Farm) and which was still in the hands of the French: its owner was a lady called Henrietta Koene. She is buried in Highgate cemetery and her gravestone bears the words: ‘“Encore un peu de temps et je vous reverrai.” St Jean xvi:16.’