The House by the Thames (11 page)

A business or trading household rose early to keep the apprentices or men in the workshop up to the mark. The master and his wife breakfasted on bread rolls and hot drinks: chocolate, coffee or tea. The habit of drinking small ale for breakfast as at other meals, which ran through all the preceding centuries, was dying out among the politer classes. Dinner, the main meal, had traditionally been eaten at midday and continued to be in working-class households, but in middle-class circles it was slipping to two or even later as the main part of the day was used for more pressing matters. Supper was therefore a fairly light meal: bread and cheese and ale, perhaps, or apple pie maybe, with more tea. The sober Dissenting tendency on Bankside probably meant that ‘ardent spirits … mixed with hot water' appeared less liberally there than elsewhere, though the idea of total abstinence from alcohol had not yet set in. A visiting Frenchman
³
provided the following description of dinner ‘among the middling sort', apparently regarding it as more succulent than the usual dinner across the Channel:

‘… they have ten or twelve sorts of common meats, which infallibly take their turns at their tables, and two dishes are their dinners: a pudding, for instance, and a piece of roast beef; another time they will have a piece of boil'd beef, and then they salt it some days beforehand, and besiege it with five or six heaps of cabbage, carrots, turnips, or some other herbs or roots, well pepper'd and salted, and swimming in butter: a leg of roast or boil'd mutton dish'd up with the same dainties, fowls, pigs, ox tripe, and tongues, rabbits, pidgeons, all well-moisten'd with butter, without larding …'

The amount of meat consumed in England, rather than the Continental staple of bread, had long been a source of foreign comment. No wonder large numbers of farmers, small-holders and market gardeners from the country round made their entire living by providing for London tables, bringing their produce several times a week to markets such as the one in Borough High Street.

The back room on the first floor of 49 would have been used for sleeping but perhaps also as an extra sitting room. There were two similar-sized rooms on the floor above. Off each of the two larger upstairs rooms was a small closet. This was not a cupboard nor, yet, a water closet, but the only form of private space in houses where the other rooms had multiple uses. This closet might contain a dressing table or a wash-stand, a wig-stand, a locked cabinet for jewellery or papers, perhaps a writing desk. There would be a chamber-pot kept there, or possibly a more comfortable close-stool (commode), for the only lavatory at 49 at this period, as in all but very grand houses, was a privy somewhere outside at the back. This would have had no water, but went down straight into a cess-pit, individual or shared with another house. Chamber-pots were often used in the main rooms as well as in the closets, called for as needed with a nonchalance we would today find hard to emulate. They were afterwards removed by the servant for emptying in the privy, carried down the same staircase up which the steaming roast dinner had recently been brought. Sluttish servants, according to the satirist Swift, thought nothing of answering the front door pot in hand, and were quite likely to deposit the contents in the street gutter if that saved a trip to the back regions.

There were no drains on Bankside at this date, as we understand drains: only open ditches meant for rain water (though frequently sullied with other matter). Water for washing, cooking and drinking was mainly supplied through pipes from the ‘water engine' at Bankend, towards London Bridge, which raised water from the river. It would have been an intermittent, unpressurised supply to the ground floor only, usually running into a lead cistern in the kitchen or yard. Many houses supplemented this with a rain-water cistern also, for in spite of the heaviness of water and the floors up which it had to be carried, foreigners commented on how much water the English used and how clean inside their houses were. No doubt this was all part of a concerted effort to counteract the dirt of London without: the greasy black mud in the mainly unpaved side streets, and the capital's growing problem of soot from the burning of coal in open grates. But coal-dust was a problem indoors too; so were the stains left on walls and ceilings by the burning of the smelly, guttering tallow candles which were the standard form of light after dark. Beeswax candles were expensive luxuries, and domestic oil-lamps, with their superior light, still lay many decades in the future.

The fact is that, for all its improved comfort and fine wood panelling and its air of elegance, in the eighteenth century 49 Bankside must have been, on winter nights, a place of icy draughts through the sash windows and shutters, with only oases of warmth in front of the fireplaces – so much less effective, foreigners complained, than sensible stoves. Yellow candle-light made only feeble pools amid the surrounding darkness, with no lamps even outside but those provided at doorways by individuals, or by the occasional shop-window lit with many candles to advertise its wares. In summer, the sulphurous scent of burning coal might have been less, though it still had to be used for cooking, but through the open windows would have come a medley of other smells: hot pies, raw fish, dead rabbits and live chickens hawked on the street, joints being carried to and from cook-shops, the coarse ‘black soap' used for scrubbing, the household privy, the street gutter, the neighbour's stable. In addition, there was the dank, watery scent of the ever-present river, and its muddy shore below the Bankside which was exposed at each low tide and onto which the open ditches poured their contents. Nearer St Saviour's, where the old houses had not been rebuilt, in the ancient heart of what was commonly known as ‘the Clink Liberty', St Mary Overie's Dock was contaminated with slaughter-house refuse not far from the point where water was raised by the ‘engine' to be piped to households. There was an early workhouse among the lanes, overlooking a burial ground, and, as the century went on, this area round the old Bishop's palace acquired a reputation for poverty. No wonder Bankside itself, however neat its new houses and fine its view, never became truly fashionable.

The English use of coal for domestic heating and cooking, and the prodigal way it was burnt in open grates, was a frequent source of comment among visitors from abroad. By the early eighteenth century coal had become a key commodity for London and was soon to become so for many other towns. Coal was to fuel the industrial revolution which, occurring earlier in Britain than anywhere else, was to carry the British into a position of power and influence unparalleled in the world. It was also to play a major role in the individual history of 49 Bankside.

Up to the mid-sixteenth century London householders, like those everywhere else in the land, had burnt only wood. But the demand for wood was huge, and growing, since it was used to make practically everything, from buckets and tools to houses and the ships that were so important to England's power and prosperity. Much was also burnt to make charcoal to fuel the gradually developing industries. The little coal that was extracted, mainly from open-cast sites, might be used in some of these, but in general the furnaces and kilns that made iron, tiles, bricks, pottery and glass, the ovens that refined sugar, made soap and saltpetre, dried malt and hops for brewing and baked bread – all were traditionally dependent on supplies of wood. By the time Elizabeth was on the throne it was obvious that the heritage of forests had dwindled alarmingly; prices of wood began to rise, and attention was turned to coal. The ‘sea-coal' that had been brought by ship in small amounts from Newcastle to London since the thirteenth century now arrived in much larger quantities. At first used just for industry – it was made obligatory for glassworks in 1615 – it soon moved ‘from the forge into the kitchen and hall'.
⁴
It was soft, brownish coal with a faintly sulphurous smell: wood was considered nicer, so the Palace of Westminster and other grand mansions went on burning logs. It was the mass of ordinary Londoners who took to coal.

By the Civil War, when winter supplies were temporarily disrupted while the royalists held Newcastle and some of the poor were said to have died of cold, coal was recognised to be ‘absolutely necessary to the maintenance and support of [London] life'. After the Restoration it was the generally used domestic fuel even in wealthy households. It was also a valuable commodity, subject to City speculation. Unlike their Continental neighbours, the younger sons of great families in post-Restoration England did not hesitate to go into what later generations of the same families would stigmatise as ‘trade'. Many landed families in the north of England were delighted to exploit the seams of coal discovered on their land, while others bought into trading and mining ventures. ‘Coal-merchant' was then a term for a substantial stake-holder: it had none of the connotations of lower-class grime it was later to acquire when the description was appropriated by minor middle-men. Sir Edmund Berry-Godfrey, the one who was implicated in the ‘Popish Plot' of 1678 and was later found murdered on Primrose Hill, dealt in coal and wood, supplying Whitehall customers. He owned a house and wharf near Charing Cross, where Northumberland Avenue now runs down to the Embankment. A hundred years later the great coal firm of Charringtons was established at the same address.

Taxes on coal brought in important revenues for the Crown, and extra taxes were imposed for specific ends, such as rebuilding St Paul's and other churches after the Fire and – later – the construction of bridges. These additional levies, plus the transport costs and the numerous middle-men, raised the cost of coal to London customers to five times the cost at the pit mouth. But at the same time the government tried to keep prices down by waging an interminable war on price-fixing cartels and other forms of corruption, such as short-measure, or hoarding by suppliers when bad weather or enemy action interrupted the trade from the coaling ports. Pepys recorded in 1667, when Rochester was blockaded by the Dutch and the colliers could not make it up the Thames to the Pool of London, ‘the want already of coals and the despair of having any'. The usual London price of about £1.10s. a chaldron (the unsatisfactorily imprecise heaped measure of between twenty-five and twenty-eight hundredweight that was then used) had gone up to £5.10s. It returned to base a few months later. Though the shortage was real, some people certainly made a good thing out of it. On a national level, the coal-industry was the equivalent of the petroleum-oil industry of our own day, with Tyneside and its fortunes as susceptible to outside interference as those of the Gulf States. Coal was ‘Newcastle gold'.

Coal-burning, however, was pollutant. It was to be the origin, by the nineteenth century, of those famous London fogs which were to take on a life of their own in the imaginations of people across the world. The fogs had not yet appeared in the later part of the seventeenth century, but the dirt of coal was becoming evident. John Evelyn devoted a whole short book to the subject (
Fumifugium
, 1661), declaring passionately:

‘The weary Traveller, at many miles distance, sooner smells, than sees the City to which he repairs. This is that pernicious Smoake which sullyes all her Glory, superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plates Gildings, and Furniture, and corroding the very Iron-bars and hardiest stones with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphure … It is this horrid Smoake which obscures our Churches, and makes our Palaces look old, which fouls our Clothes, and corrupts the waters, so that the very Rain, and refreshing Dews which fall in the several seasons, precipitate this impure Vapour, which, with its black and tenacious quality, spots and contaminates whatsoever is expos'd to it …' He also maintained, possibly with reason, for he was an expert gardener, that the fall-out of soot damaged flower buds and killed bees. The proof of this was that in a recent year, when Newcastle was blockaded and coal consumption in London dropped right down – ‘Divers Gardens and Orchards planted even in the very heart of London … were observed to bear such plentiful and infinite quantities of Fruits, as they never produced the like either before or since' – a claim that provides a telling glimpse into a metropolis that still had plantations near its centre. Smuts, he said, also got onto clothes laid out to dry and onto the ‘Hands, Faces and Linnen of our fair ladies'. Soot was bad for the health too, probably leading to ‘Consumptions, Phthisicks, and Indisposition of the Lungs … There is under Heaven such a Coughing and Snuffing to be heard, as in the London Churches and Assemblies of People, where the Barking and the Spitting is incessant and most importunate.'

But Evelyn felt that coal-burning home hearths were less to blame than the chimneys of ‘Brewers, Diers, Lime-burners, Salt, and Sope-boylers'. In this opposition to industries within cities, he was more than two hundred years in advance of his time. He singled out for particular dislike ‘a Lime-kiln on the Bankside near the Falcon', which, he said, sent smoke in clouds towards St Paul's, creating a fog ‘thick and dark'. Since the south bank lime-kilns were down river in Bermondsey, I suspect that what he may actually have been looking at was the ironworks that were to provide St Paul's railings. A glassworks with a large, cone-shaped brick kiln was also to appear on Bankside near the Falcon Inn, but not for another twenty years.

As well as advocating the planting of more trees everywhere to supply England's various needs, Evelyn also believed that locating sweet-smelling plantations up river in Lambeth might ‘purify' the London air, driving away the smoke and infection with it – an early example of the preoccupation with air-borne ills that was long to characterise the British social reformer. And Evelyn's complaints came near the beginning of the rise of King Coal. The ‘sooty crust or furr' was, by the following century, getting relentlessly worse. It was still firmly adhering to London surfaces two hundred years after that, and remains engrained today in the memory of Londoners who were alive and aware before the 1960s.