The House by the Thames (23 page)

The head of Jones & Sells was now Edward Perronet II. A photograph exists of this gentleman, looking large and cheerful with a spade-shaped mid-Victorian beard, but it is not the kind of face one associates with the acumen and determination of the old lightermen Sells. In 1856 the family firm amalgamated with another to form Wright, Sells, Dale and Surtees, but three years later Mr Wright died and there was a further amalgamation with Charringtons. This firm had been prominent in opening up the trade in soft Welsh coal from the Rhondda; they were now on their way to becoming the dominant coal-merchants of the time. The amalgamation eventually created Charrington, Sells, Dale & Co., which traded under that name for the next sixty years, had its own railway waggons, and was immortalised by John Betjeman.

The firms with which the Sells had joined forces already possessed wharves suitable for unloading coal up river at Wandsworth, and also down river in Stepney and Shadwell in locations convenient for the Regent's Canal or for railway haulage. Although 49 Bankside was still listed as the business address of Charrington, Sells, Dale & Surtees in 1860, there must have been less and less reason for that as a location. In the early '60s the family occupying it may have been in the Sells's employ, since the eldest son and chief earner is listed as Wharf Clerk, but the Sells family's long association with the river was nearing its end. In 1865 an entire block, comprising numbers 49, 50, 51 and 52 Bankside, and the wharf-space and berthage rights that went with them, was let to Moss Isaacs, iron-merchant. More prosaically, this meant a dealer in scrap-metal, a lucrative trade but hardly a prestigious one. One must assume that Sophia, who was living in York Road, Montpelier, Bristol, with her brother, went on enjoying the income from 49, before being transported into the high Victorian grandeur of Arnos Vale Cemetery there in 1869.

Even without the amalgamations, there would have been a number of other reasons at that point for the family to move out of Bankside. London, as it grew larger, grew ever dirtier too. The time when it was still acceptable for the moneyed classes to live close by the works that produced their wealth – and much of the dirt – was rapidly passing: henceforth, industrialists would wish to live as gentry in the countryside round London and travel to and fro by train. One result of this was that the trains themselves were increasingly present in Southwark, and this did nothing to enhance life for those living near by. There was also the Bankside gas works, which was busy extending its terrain. In 1862 a fire at Price's oil stores nearby, which nearly reached the gas-holders, can have done nothing to reassure the occupants of houses in the area. The riverside, with so many warehouses now stuffed with combustible goods, seemed very vulnerable. The year before, there had been a major waterfront fire on the Bermondsey side, which consumed twenty warehouses full of jute, oil and wax and food stuffs, sending rivers of burning fat out among the lighters on the Thames.

But the exact timing of the Sells's retreat from Bankside, followed by its sale of the property there some years later, may have been influenced by another, more specific factor. The proposal for another bridge over the Thames right opposite St Paul's, which had been revived in the year of the Great Exhibition, was being put forward again with some fervour ten years later and plans were actually drawn up. It did not happen then – but, had it done so, the Sells might have had every reason to hope that the bridge or its approaches would sweep through the Bankside properties they owned, if not numbers 49–52, then numbers 54, 55 and 56 and the various back-lane tenements. This might have made them a nice profit in compensation for loss of wharfage rights, more in fact than ageing early-Georgian houses might realistically earn in rent. Perhaps, therefore, they held onto all this property to see what would happen, and only decided on a definitive sale when the bridge-plan was once again shelved. The sale of numbers 49–52 to the sitting tenant, Moss Isaacs, finally took place in 1873, and, though I have no direct evidence concerning numbers 54, 55 and 56, I suspect they were sold at the same time, since that was also the year of the first Edward Perronet's death and they had evidently been his personal property. Within a few years these three houses were gone, and a large new Crown Wharf building rose in their place.

The contract of sale by which 49 Bankside and its wharf-rights were finally disposed of to Moss Isaacs has come to rest in the house today. It is handwritten on parchment, decorated with seals. Clipped to it is a more modest document, a note written on beige paper headed from ‘49 Bankside, St Saviour's'. It is undated, but must presumably relate to the time of the sale. The Holditches seem to have been back living in the house, where their family had lodged intermittently over the decades. It rather looks as if they were the Sells's representatives on the site, helping to finalise negotiations:

Dear Mrs Sells,

I called at Mr Ellory's lodging and gave him your parcel and sent you by Hind's hand the twenty sovereigns and the receipts I had from him for the title papers and Sir Christofer's letter. The carved animals he said were not to be spoke of in the receipt. George has covered up the holes in the ceiling with four bits of wood so it don't show now and if Mr John looks in he won't see it. He should be glad you made that good use of the old things instead of his grumbles. Believe me I am glad of the ten sovs.

Your truly thankful

Jes Holditch

One longs to know more about the transaction referred to, and why the note, so informal and opaque, was treated as a document to be preserved. Mrs Sells I assume to be Elizabeth, the wife of Edward Perronet II, who had lived in the house herself and must have known about the carved animals. Where, in 49, were they? Could they possibly have decorated the cellar ceiling-beams, some of which may have been in the house before the 1710 rebuilding? If so, these things ‘not to be spoke of in the receipt' were relics of the Elizabethan inn, and the mysterious Mr Ellory or Sir Christofer had presumably realised their antiquarian value. George is, I think, George Alfred Holditch, son of Jessica who wrote the letter and of George the ex-cider merchant: a decade later young George was once more living in part of 49, as a rent collector. John is a name which crops up in later generations of Sells, but this Mr John appears to be the brother of the now-dead Sophia and therefore uncle of Edward Perronet II. (‘Mr John' was the usual polite way in which those slightly lower down the social scale distinguished a younger brother from the senior one. It did not imply youth, and indeed John Sells, born in 1796, would now be in his late seventies.) According to the contract of sale, Sophia had left him her interest in the house, of which he was now the vendor. As he too normally lived in Bristol, it was probably safe to assume that he would not be scrutinising the cellar ceiling minutely. Jes Holditch's words seem to suggest the slightly disgruntled family member, ever distrustful of what his siblings or nephews might do, living off some of the proceeds of the family's accumulated property and anxious to get the best price for it. He seems to have taken no active part in the coal-trade.

He did, however, have something to grumble about. A few years earlier the partnership between his nephew and Charringtons, which had been in existence since 1859, went through what seems to have been a very sticky patch. I know no more about this than what I have read in
The Story of the Charringtons
. According to this source, the capital with which the partnership was set up was to be provided jointly, £6000 from the brothers John and Thomas Charrington and £8000 from E. P. Sells & Company. Eight thousand would be the equivalent of several hundred thousand pounds today: the agreed sum presumably reflects the fact that the Charringtons were bringing more to the merger in the form of wharf and railway-yard space. However, the figure turned out to be largely illusory. Thomas Charrington wrote later: ‘In the year 1866 – after repeated efforts by John Charrington to get a proper examination of the accounts, a balance sheet was drawn up, and it was ascertained that EP Sells & Company's capital was £345.19s.7d, less than nothing at all, their nominal capital having consisted of one large debt, which proved to be bad, and there is no doubt that their estimate of profits prior to the partnership was utterly fallacious … The state of matters (above) … caused the retirement of Mr Dale from any part of the management of the business of the firm, Mr Surtees having retired by compulsion previously … Hardly any portion of EP Sells & Company's connection exists now, the Southwark and Vauxhall and Grand Junction Water Companies (which formed the most important part of it) having been lost …'

The message seems clear. Even if Messrs. Dale and Surtees were considered to have been the chief villains (or incompetents) of the affair, Edward P. Sells II, with his genial large beard, did not have the business acumen and grip of his forebears. Perhaps matters were made worse by the Overend Gurney bank failure of the same year (1866), with its train of bankruptcies and knock-on effect on general prosperity.

However, John Charrington was in any case permanently at loggerheads with his exacting brother Thomas: he was prepared to renew the partnership with Sells. By and by an Edward Perronet III, who as a little boy had lived in number 49, was making his way into the business, and he evidently proved more able than his father. He was with Charringtons as the family became a household name, even as their distant relations the brewers were. The coal Charringtons naturally supplied the brewing Charringtons with fuel, writing them business letters which began ‘Dear Sir' but ended ‘Your affectionate cousin'. They came to supply several other breweries, the new electricity company on Bankside, the London Hydraulic Power Company at the same location, several hospitals, the London School Board and Wandsworth Prison. The Sells family maintained a presence within Charringtons into the mid-twentieth century, the last in the business being Sir David Perronet Sells, son of Edward Perronet Sells IV and a stalwart of the Conservative party.

Their present-day direct descendants have careers in banking and the law. Without their help, and the surviving pieces of evidence which they have been able to pass to me, the old lightermen-coal-merchants would have been far more obscurely buried for me in the coal-dust and rubble of the lost Bankside. As for the coal-trade, in which seven generations of Sells prospered so usefully to themselves and to the country, that too is over: the thousands of coal-offices that still perched on the edge of railway yards forty years ago have gone without anyone really noticing it. Only the iron coal-hole covers to hidden cellars remain, all over London and other cities, diminishing in numbers as pavements are relaid but still a presence: tight-shut apertures to a buried past. In the whole of London today there is scarcely a single coal-merchant.

THE RAILWAY LINES
that carried the Sells away from Bankside, to Camberwell, and then Bristol, and eventually to other socially salubrious addresses in developing west London and in the home counties, were by the 1860s becoming a much more intrusive presence.

In the 1830s London's very first line had made its way in from Greenwich to the foot of London Bridge (subsequently extending itself in the other direction to Dover and the steam packets for the Continent), but this affected only the eastern side of the old Borough of Southwark. In the same decade a railway terminus for the London–Southampton line was opened at Nine Elms, in Battersea. Ten years later a long viaduct, like the one straddling Bermondsey, was constructed across Lambeth Marsh to extend the Nine Elms line to Waterloo station, newly built at the foot of the bridge from which it took its name. But early plans to carry the line further, over the river to the City, were for the moment shelved. The railways from south-eastern England remained, logically, south of the river. The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway – the world's earliest long-distance commuter line, and origin of all those day-trips to the seaside immortalised in Victorian songs – ended at Vauxhall.

But the magnetic pull of London north of the river eventually overcame geographical sense. In 1860 the Brighton line dared make its way, over the first railway bridge to cross the river within London, to a new station called Victoria: other companies were not slow to follow this cavalier example. Hungerford Railway Bridge, between Waterloo and a new station at Charing Cross, was completed in 1864. It took its name from old Hungerford market and stairs (the location, as it happened, of the blacking factory where Dickens had worked as a boy) but it formed part and parcel of the Embankment transformation which swept all these old places away. At just the same time the original Blackfriars Railway Bridge was constructed to take a branch of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway over the river to join up with the new Metropolitan Railway. The station was for some time at the south end of the bridge, on the site previously occupied by part of Rennie's works in what had once been the grounds of Holland's Leaguer. Another bridge belonging to a subsidiary of the same company was also built in the 1860s to a new City station in Cannon Street.

The road bridges that had spanned the river earlier in the century had been objects of pride and careful planning; now the railway companies threw bridges over the water wherever it suited them. One south-bank resident wrote to
The Times
about the Blackfriars rail bridge, in what must be one of the earliest complaints about advertising: ‘The entire invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and in conveying the information on it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway Company.'
¹
To Dickens, the file of bridges across the increasingly soot-blackened townscape were more sinister objects. In his last novel,
²
unfinished when he died in 1870, he spoke of them as spanning the dark waters of the Thames ‘as death spans life'. But then, for Dickens, the inexorable power of steam and that of mortality itself were always conflated.