The Italian Boy (8 page)

In July 1830, Bishop and his family moved to a rented cottage in a semirural, semislum part of Bethnal Green—a neighborhood more impoverished than nearby Hoxton. Their landlady was Sarah Trueby, who lived nearby with her husband and grown-up son. The relocation suggests that the Bishops had come down in the world—for reasons unknown, though the proportion of his income that Bishop was spending on drink is likely to have been a factor. Despite a generous inheritance, the duchess’s allowance, the funds raised locally, the earnings from resurrection and from Sarah’s work as a seamstress and laundress, the Bishops and their children were reduced to living in one of the most squalid areas of east London.

*   *   *

Right on the border
of Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, Nova Scotia Gardens was a stretch of land just north of St. Leonard’s Church. Its level was slightly below that of the surrounding streets, and some referred to it as the Hackney Road Hollow. John Stow’s
Survey of London
(1603) mentions some houses recently built in the vicinity upon “the common soil—for it was a leystall” (dunghill). By 1750, according to contemporary maps, the area consisted largely of fields on the fringes of the Huguenot settlements of Spitalfields, to the south.

It is possible that these fields were at some point ploughed up for clay and mud to be made into bricks, which were baked in kilns built on the field itself; this had been the fate of many of the meadows of Bethnal Green during the eighteenth-century building boom.
²⁶
By the 1820s, the older horticultural and food-related names of surrounding streets (Crabtree Row, Birdcage Walk, Orange Street, Cock Lane, Bacon Street) were being joined by the martial, naval, and colonial designations of the rows of two-story, brick terraced housing springing up in the environs. The Gardens had become Nova Scotia Gardens and nearby were Virginia Row, Nelson Street, Gibraltar Walk, and Wellington Street.

The Gardens comprised a number of cottages that by 1831 were noticeably quaint; they were interconnected by narrow, zigzagging pathways. Nos. 2 and 3, both of which were owned by the Trueby family, formed a semidetached unit and were not inside the labyrinth of Nova Scotia Gardens but near Crabtree Row and the main entrance into the Gardens. Bishop’s house, No. 3, had a side gate, opening onto a path known locally as the Private Way, and the house was entered by a back door, close to a coal cellar. No. 2 opened directly onto the largest path, connecting the Gardens to Crabtree Row. A four-inch-thick brick wall separated the dwellings. Each cottage consisted of two upstairs rooms, a downstairs parlor, eight feet by seven, a smaller room housing the staircase, and a washhouse extension. The downstairs window overlooked the back garden. The roof of Nos. 2 and 3 was unusual in sloping sharply down from the front of the building to the back, and this may indicate that the cottages were built—like so much housing in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields—as homes for weavers: the lack of an overhanging front gable would allow light to pour into the upper rooms, which may once have contained looms. Each cottage had a thirty-foot-long, ten-foot-wide garden, divided from its neighbor by three-foot-high wooden palings, in which was a small gate. The generous size of these back gardens may reflect an earlier use as tenter grounds, to stretch and dry silk; a second theory is that the Gardens had once been allotments and that the cottages had developed from a colony of gardeners’ huts or summer houses.
²⁷

Nova Scotia Gardens in 1831. John Bishop’s cottage, No. 3, is on the right, abutting No. 2, where Thomas Williams lived for a few weeks.

At the end of each garden was a privy. The garden of No. 3 also contained a well to be shared with Nos. 1 and 2, though in fact the residents of many of the cottages could have reached it easily; it was halfway down the garden and consisted of a wooden barrel, one and a half feet in diameter, sunk into the soil.

The former dunghill and its surrounds had, during the 1664–65 plague, seen some of the highest mortality figures in the capital. In 1831, the area’s old reputation for poverty and despair was returning. The 1825 collapse of the English silk trade—the result of a surge in cheaper textile imports from France—proved calamitous, since weaving and cloth working had provided thousands of households in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields with an income. By 1829, wages among skilled workers in the silk trade, which employed an estimated fifteen thousand people, were half what they had been between 1815 and 1825. The governor of the Bethnal Green workhouse revealed that admissions had risen from 498 in 1821 to 1,160 in 1831.
²⁸
One eyewitness wrote of “the dwarfish and dwindled weavers of Spitalfields”; any man over five feet two inches was not a native of Spitalfields, he claimed. These men rarely made it to the age of sixty and proved too weak and broken by their fourteen-to-sixteen-hour workdays to say more than a few sentences at a public meeting convened to discuss the issue of free trade, which had opened English markets to foreign imports. At twenty, the commentator noted, Spitalfields men looked thirty; at forty, they looked sixty, with “squalor and misery etched into their faces.”
²⁹
Letters from Londoners concerned about conditions in this part of the East End—unpaved, undrained, unlit—were starting to appear in the newspapers. The
Morning Advertiser
printed a complaint about the filth outside the violin-string factory in Princes Street, just south of Nova Scotia Gardens—a mess (mainly consisting of cat offal) that was five feet wide and one foot deep—while “An Observer” wrote to the same paper to report the level of filth in Castle Street, two hundred yards from the Gardens and home to the Feathers, one of the local beerhouses patronized by John Bishop.
³⁰

In July 1831, one year after the Bishops arrived, the house adjoining theirs was leased by the Truebys to Thomas Williams. Williams was born Thomas Head in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, on 28 February 1803. Although Bridgnorth was a thriving town at the start of its long and lucrative association with the carpet-weaving industry, George and Mary Head, his parents, moved with their children to London, to Highgate, at some point in the second decade of the century, and from there to the less salubrious Smithfield district. Thomas tried and failed at more than one trade, having been apprenticed to a bricklayer, then taking up carpentry before turning to working as a porter for local glass manufacturers. As an adolescent, he had started to drink heavily and steal, despite coming from what appears to have been a comparatively stable and loving family. His mother was reportedly devoted to her son and watched with dismay his decline into crime.

He went by at least four different though similar names: his own, Thomas Williams, William Jones, and John Head—the name of a younger brother of his, born in 1805, who died in 1807. He also tampered with his date of birth, perhaps to take advantage of looking younger than his years in order to receive more lenient treatment from magistrates and constables. He gave his age as twenty in 1827—shaving off four years.
³¹
It was a well-known ruse for those who were under arrest or in prison to adopt combinations of common Christian and surnames; one lawyer counted fifteen prisoners at Newgate who were using the same combination of aliases. In this way, it was harder for police, magistrates, and judges to identify “known criminals” with any certainty, and a case could be lost if a jury felt that the accused had not been securely identified.
³²

Head/Williams was in and out of court from an early age. His luck finally ran out in February 1827, when he was found guilty at the Old Bailey court of the theft of a twenty-shilling copper bathtub from the kitchen of his parents’ landlord. He had attempted to sell the vessel at Pontifex’s copper and brass foundry in Shoe Lane and was convicted on the eyewitness evidence of a chimney sweep (who saw him leaving the house at the time of the theft) and of Henry Pontifex. He was sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia, though in the event he served four years in Millbank Penitentiary—the controversial “Panopticon” prison on the banks of the Thames.
³³

Head passed through Newgate on his way to Millbank, and the ledger book noting the physical description, “character,” and conviction of each prisoner shows that, as prisoner 489, he again gave his age as twenty, as he had at the Old Bailey. His trade was noted as bricklayer, his religion Church of England, and he was found to have two intertwined love hearts shot through with arrows tattooed on his right forearm and the characters T.H.N.A on his left forearm—“N.A.” presumably being his sweetheart. He was five feet four inches tall, had hazel eyes, was in good health (“stoutish” with a “fresh” complexion), and had a “good” character—which in prison parlance tended to mean tractable.
³⁴

Received at Millbank in the same month was one Thomas Williams of Eaton in Buckinghamshire, a twenty-two-year-old who had been sentenced to seven years for the theft of a looking glass. It is possible that Head borrowed the name and date of birth of this fellow convict, but Thomas Williams was also the name of a prolific East End body snatcher—he lived just off the Commercial Road—and in choosing to give this name upon his arrest at King’s College, Head may have been trying to fool the authorities into thinking that he was nothing more sinister than a regular resurrectionist.

Millbank Penitentiary had opened in 1816 but soon closed down and did not reopen until 1824: not only had its buildings proved substandard, sinking into the marshy site, but in 1823 there had been outbreaks of scurvy and dysentery that had affected almost every inmate. The rehabilitation of the prisoner was to be paramount at Millbank. It was intended that both male and female inmates would be taught a skill (this may be where Williams learned the glass trade) and subjected to an aggressively proselytizing form of religious instruction. There was also a new emphasis on seclusion, in order to bring the prisoner to a closer relationship with God and to minimize the chances of moral “contamination” from other villains; under “the separate system,” Millbank prisoners were allowed no contact with one another—a treatment that was said to result in soaring rates of insanity. Millbank pioneered the use of surveillance, and the building (the Panopticon comprised six pentagons abutting a central hexagon containing a chapel) was designed so that prisoners would be visible at all times. This failed to prevent outbreaks of rioting in 1826 and 1827 by a group of inmates who called themselves the Friends of the Oppressed. In March 1827, they hanged a warder’s pet cat as part of their campaign to get themselves transferred to the “hulks”—decommissioned warships moored in British waters as floating prisons and normally the most dreaded of all penal institutions—which may reflect how appalling conditions were felt to be at Millbank.
³⁵

In 1831, upon his early release from Millbank, Williams rented No. 2 Nova Scotia Gardens, which had a large fireplace that he intended to adapt as a furnace, in order to manufacture glass. But his new start lasted just a month. Williams failed to register his trade with Customs and Excise (under an act of 1825, glass manufacture required an annual license, costing twenty pounds; there had been a recent clampdown on unlicensed traders), who raided his home on 6 August, confiscated his equipment and large quantities of glass, cullet, and iron, and mounted a prosecution, which was still unheard at the time of his arrest for murder. Williams had walked in and found the confiscation in progress and called the excise officer “an opprobrious name.”
³⁶
Now without an income, he began to join his next-door neighbor, John Bishop, in supplying Subjects to the private anatomy schools. The new term was about to start at the hospital medical schools, and Bishop seems to have been happy to take on an apprentice. If Bishop had indeed been attached to the Spitalfields Gang, who were infamous for their feuds and fallings out, it could be that he had suddenly found himself without a partner; if there really had been some sort of crackdown on snatchers, many potential accomplices may have been in prison. Perhaps Bishop felt he could trust this new neighbor who was so down on his luck yet so enterprising, with new ideas on how to obtain bodies; perhaps the friendship was helped along by their both having grown up in Highgate. Whatever the case, Williams had so smitten Rhoda, Bishop’s seventeen-year-old half sister/stepdaughter, that on 26 September Williams married her at St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch.
³⁷
After the service, celebratory beers were drunk at the Birdcage pub, then there was a small family celebration in the back garden of No. 2, and Williams moved into No. 3 with his bride, John and Sarah Bishop, and their children. No. 2 would remain empty for three more weeks.