The House by the Thames (22 page)

A salient feature of number 44 is the amount of strong and no doubt rather elegant brasswork that had been added: brass holders for stair-treads, brass doorknobs and finger plates, shutter fixings, bell pulls, brackets for mahogany flap-down tables in the closets, brass candle-holders in the first-floor ‘Music Room'. In what is listed as the Dining Parlour there was ‘a composition figure on a pedestal, with brass sconce and glass shade' – presumably a lamp. The production of brass, though of ancient origins, had greatly increased in the early nineteenth century. Much of the newly accessible, decorative ‘Benares ware' – bowls, trays, boxes and so forth – that graced middle-class homes, bringing to them a resonance of the Indian Empire, was really made in Birmingham. Other brass artefacts were actually exported to India: a fine 1860s iron and brass turnstile, bearing the trade-plate of a foundry in Bear Lane, Southwark, still functions at the entrance to a museum in Bombay.

However, what these London foundries mainly thrived on was the production of workaday small objects for which there was now a mass demand: the pipes, nuts, bolts and joints on which depended the new steamships, railway engines and mechanised workshops, the new gas industry – and also the accessories for the new plumbing. Number 44 could boast two lead-lined sinks, each with a ‘valve sink hole' and ‘brass cock' (tap), one of them in a closet set aside for china. Presumably this was for convenience in dealing with the perpetual drift of grime and discolouring fog that was by then London's famous blight – ‘Fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city … Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes …'
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Also on the ground floor, in a Dressing Room that seems to have been conveniently located between the Drawing Room and the Dining Parlour, was ‘a large oval brass washstand with solid marble basin and plug, brass cock … A corner Mahogany cupboard with water closet.' This was the only one in the house. The long era of chamber-pots kept in the sideboard for gentlemen to relieve themselves at table was evidently giving way to a greater decorum. Whether Mr Mann's wife and his three adult daughters, not to mention the younger children, used this water closet as a general rule, or whether the habit of ladies retreating to china vessels in the privacy of their bedrooms was still engrained in polite circles, only the extremely old, recollecting their own grandparents, may now be able to tell us.

The kitchen of 44, which I think was in a back-addition down a few steps, and was now closed off by the classic green baize door, had its own old-style tap and cistern, with a ‘filter stone' in it – which was no doubt rather necessary. There was ‘an excellent stout kitchen range', then a fairly new improvement on the old kitchen fire with iron hooks above it. There was also an iron heating stove in one of the upper rooms. The Hornes had evidently turned an eye to Europe. By way of a reminder of the essential underpinning of all this middle-class comfort, the downstairs Dressing Room was further equipped with ‘an excellent iron safe', and there was a ‘plate cupboard' (silver cupboard) in one of the upstairs back rooms ‘fitted up … in the most complete and secure manna lined with iron and studded all over the front with iron screws, three excellently well-finished patent locks, a large iron bolt to go into the floor.' No doubt one of the nearby Southwark iron foundries had supplied these needs.

There were also, included in the fittings, a number of window blinds, evidently designed to shut out the industrial views Bankside now enjoyed. Behind these, reinforced after dusk by heavy, lined curtains, the inhabitants could live in a protected cocoon. As a French visitor of the period remarked, English houses were by then ‘like chimneys turned inside out' – covered in soot on the outside, but warm, clean and comfortable within.

Both the industries of Bankside and the comfort these earned for their proprietors continued to increase the amount of filth flowing into the Thames. In the 1840s the problem was exacerbated by a prohibition on any new cess-pits and further attempts to get existing ones linked to sewers. This was when the working-class houses in the Skin Market, which was now reduced to a narrow lane off Cardinal Cap Alley, were linked up to the Moss Alley drain and hence to the Boar's Head sluice. There was also the public health reformer Edwin Chadwick's disastrous attempt to ‘cleanse' the sewers by flushing them through, which simply drove more filth out into the river. Discussion of a sensible drainage plan was further impeded by an old-fashioned fixed idea that waste was valuable manure and must somehow continue to produce wealth, as it had when the night-soil men sold cartloads to farmers of Kent and Middlesex. Not until another serious cholera epidemic in 1848–9 was the problem really faced.
The Builder
finally declared of Thames water in 1851:

‘Our tea is infused in it; our viandes cooked; our toddy mixed; our milk watered with it; our beer brewed in it, and every liquid element commingles with the filthy exuvicae of the foul and every more foully increasing tide: we lave in it; the body linen of the multitude is steeped therein, and when wrung out the desiccated essences of poison envelope the breathing pores of the wearers.'

While this condemnation may have been a little far-reaching (the specific nature of the cholera bacillus was then unknown), you do begin to wonder how the Sells managed, collectively, to rear such large, healthy families. Perhaps, like their neighbours Horne and Mann, they installed a cistern filter: perhaps Edward Perronet Sells's children were of stout constitution and developed an early toleration of impurities, bolstered by a good diet. For the burial registers of St Saviour's parish show the marked difference that had now appeared in the mortality rates of different social classes. In the registers for 1831, the year of the first cholera epidemic, a trickle of people of all ages, including many babies and young children, died in Bear Lane, Moss Alley, White Hart Lane and two in Cardinal Cap Alley itself, whereas none of the names of the more prosperous families, including the Sells, figure in the record.
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It is, however, a fact that the departure from Bankside of Vincent Sells, the bachelor uncle, appears to have taken place in 1831 or very soon after. Evidently, even though 49 had been nicely done up and modernised, something induced him to move out. The house was then let to George Holditch, who I believe acted as confidential clerk to Jones & Sells. Vincent remained in the firm, in partnership with his brother Edward Perronet, and he continued to show interest and support for the long-drawn-out cause of St Saviour's restoration, but when he inherited 49 outright, on his father's death in Camberwell ten years later, he did not move back in.

He had not gone far, only to the newly built, rather grand Trinity Square, one of the developments that were filling up the fields south of St George's church going towards the still-countrified cross-roads at Newington – transformed today as the Elephant and Castle. I know this because Trinity Square is the address that appears on Vincent's death certificate. Although he was only forty-eight, he survived his father by less than a year, succumbing in April 1842 to what was recorded as ‘pneumonia', a term then widely used to cover any chest complaint including the dreaded, unmentionable tuberculosis. So probably it was not the cholera scare that had driven him from Bankside ten years before but a chronic weakness in the lungs: I can well imagine the doctors of the time telling him he would be better off away from the river fogs in a nice, new district. Oddly, when his Will was proved, he was stated to have died on Bankside, but there is presumably a confusion here with his business address. His collection of ‘plate' and ‘all my books' he left to his brother Edward Perronet. Number 49 he left jointly to his nephew, Edward Perronet II, and to ‘my friend George Ware' for them to hold in Trust. The beneficiary of the Trust was to be his unmarried sister, Sophia Elizabeth, four years older than him, who was to get the rent from it.

As for the health-risks of Bankside, these were real, as later years were to prove. The figures eventually produced by John Snow, who was Chadwick's associate and a far more astute observer, finally spelt out how crucial to health the water supply was. In the cholera epidemic of 1849 the death rates in Lambeth and Southwark were similar. But in the 1854 outbreak Lambeth deaths were very much fewer. In the intervening years Southwark had gone on being supplied by the infamous Southwark & Vauxhall Waterworks, to which the Sells sold coal and about which George Cruikshank had already been drawing scary cartoons over twenty years before. Lambeth, however, had now begun to get water from Thames Ditton, above the Teddington Lock, far from the murky tides down river.

However, during the 1830s and '40s, Vincent's brother, Edward Perronet, continued robustly to live on Bankside with his own large family. In the Census for 1841, when they were at number 54 with the counting house (and no doubt extra living space too) next door in 55, the household included nine children, ranging in ages from mid-twenties to three, plus two female servants. And by 1851 number 49 was once more back in Sells occupation, for the eldest son, Edward Perronet II (Vincent's nephew) was now in his mid-thirties and living there with his wife, a small son and daughter, and the usual complement of two servants. It is to be hoped that he duly paid his aunt Sophia her rent.

Southwark, following the rest of London, finally received a modern drainage system in the late 1860s, under the auspices of the Metropolitan Board of Works (founded 1855). This was also the point at which the Borough had to relinquish the last of its old claims to being a separate town and became administratively one with the capital.
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But as a footnote to this whole saga of sewage and water, there is a question in my mind that I have not been able to resolve. Information on exactly how the drainage was sorted out on Bankside is not easy to come by. So far, neither the copious Metropolitan Board of Works archives, nor the scant and little-recorded ones in the possession of Southwark Council, have provided much material on this. The accounts of the great works of Joseph Bazalgette all tend to concentrate on his most celebrated and revolutionary plan, that for London north of the river. This involved new cross-town interceptor sewers at several levels, the lowest of which ran right along the Thames, much of it under the new and specially built Embankment, to carry all the waste eastwards in the direction of the sea. This changed for ever the aspect of the north bank of the river above Blackfriars Bridge, sweeping away old wharves and water-stairs on that side and confirming the districts west of Charing Cross as the
beaux quartiers
. The Embankment was, incidentally, funded in part from a new tax on coal arriving in London, as many other grand public building works had been before. Fortunately the Prime Minister Gladstone's appalling proposal, that the Embankment Gardens should be covered in tall, government-owned blocks which could be let at expensive rents to enable the government to do without income tax, was not taken up.

It was recognised that the lower-lying south bank was going to be harder to drain, geographically, and I suspect it was also felt that south London did not matter as much. Since Southwark and Bermondsey were now the major district of wharves and industry, no great riverfront works could be undertaken on that side without upsetting the whole organisation of London's trade. Only a small stretch of embankment was ever built there, the Albert Embankment in Lambeth, west of the Archbishop's Palace: it provided, incidentally, a new site for St Thomas's Hospital, which had been displaced by the railway. After some Parliamentary dispute, the eventual plan for south London was like that for the north, on a modified and (one would think) less satisfactory pattern, making use of some existing old watercourses. A high-level sewer ran eastwards from Clapham to Deptford Creek, with a line in from Dulwich (the old Effra stream). A low-level sewer, which already existed in part as the Earl Sewer, ran from Putney High Street to Deptford, where a pumping station was installed to take the waste further on its way. But since this low-level sewer was well inland from the Thames, it is hard to see how it dealt with the problem of the riverside areas of Southwark and Bermondsey, which had established drains straight into the Thames. Can some attempt have been made to reverse the flow in the old conduits, such as the one that discharged at Boar's Head sluice, so as to have them discharge southwards into the interceptor sewer? Such an idea was not unknown: it was used when drainage was laid in Chicago and the old sewers needed to be diverted from the lake. But if anything like this came to pass on Bankside, the record itself seems to have drained away into some archival pit from which I have not managed to retrieve it.

Before the drainage works were completed, or the Albert Embankment opened, the Sells had left Bankside.

In 1852 Edward Perronet Sells was sixty-four. Through the 1840s he had been the rate-payer on three Bankside properties, numbers 54, 55 and 56, and also on ‘a wharf, warehouse and stabling', but by the Census of 1851 these had been let to other people working in the coal-trade. His eldest son, Edward Perronet II, then aged thirty-six, was established in the business and living in number 49 with his wife, servants and his own two small children. Most of the other eight or nine offspring were launched on life in various ways; even the youngest, Arthur, was now fourteen. Like his own father, the first Edward Perronet Sells had concerned himself with Vestry business, taking his turn as churchwarden or commissioner for this or that parish charity, and in 1852 he signalled his final departure into a comfortable retirement in Bristol by resigning as Treasurer of St Saviour's National Schools. These then still occupied part of the plot of the old Cross Bones graveyard, which was not finally closed for burial till the following year. Edward Perronet had held the post of Treasurer ‘honourably and beneficially to the School for 25 years'. The school committee presented him with a testimonial to say so, mentioning his ‘devotion to the cause of education in general' and his ‘uniform kindness'. In return the committee offered gratitude and ‘their earnest Prayer for his health and happiness', a prayer that evidently bore fruit as he lived to the age of eighty-five. The testimonial, which is the size of a modern poster, contains nine different kinds of typeface, elaborated further with decorative flourishes, as if it were a sample-sheet for apprentice printers, and must have brought joy to the heart of a man whose own handwriting was so exquisite. Clearly he prized it, for it remains in the family to this day.