site of the Steelyard--_i.e._, almost under the railway arches which
lead to Cannon Street. It is not very much to look at. With one
exception, indeed, it is the ugliest church in the whole of London
City. It is a big oblong box, with round windows stuck in here and
there. Wren designed it, I believe, one evening after dinner, when he
had taken a glass or two more than his customary allowance of port or
mountain. It is the church of All Hallows the Great combined with All
Hallows the Less. Before the Fire it was a very beautiful church, with
a cloister running round its churchyard on the south, and to the east
looking out upon the lane that led to Cold Harbour House. This is the
church to which the Hanseatic merchants for three hundred years came
for worship. Very near the church, on the river bank, stood the
Waterman's Hall. To this church, therefore, came the 'prentices of the
watermen every Sunday. The Great Fire carried it away, with Steelyard,
cloister, church, Waterman's Hall, Cold Harbour House, and everything.
Then Wren, as I said, took a pencil and ruler one evening, and showed
how a square box could be constructed on the site. Now, let no man
judge by externals. If you can get into the church, you will be
rewarded by the sight of an eighteenth-century church left exactly as
it was in those days of grave and sober merchants, and of City
ceremonies and church services attended in state. On the north side,
against the middle of the wall, is planted what we now most
irreverently call a Three Decker. But we must not laugh, because of
all Three Deckers this is the most splendid. There is nothing in the
City more beautiful than the wood-carving which makes pulpit,
sounding-board, reading-desk, and clerk's desk in this church precious
and wonderful. The old pews, which, I rejoice to say, have never been
removed, are many of them richly and beautifully carved. The Pew of
State, reserved for the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs, is a miracle of
art. Across the very middle of the church is a screen in carved wood,
the most wonderful screen you ever saw, presented as a sign of
gratitude to their old church by the Hanseatic merchants. The east end
is decorated by a wooden table, richly carved, and the reredos is
designed by the great Christopher himself, no doubt for partial
expiation of his sin in making the church externally so hideous. It
consists of a marble panel, on which are engraved the Ten
Commandments. On the left hand stands Aaron in full pontificals, as
set forth in the Book of Leviticus or that of Numbers. On the right
hand, in more humble guise, stands Moses, facing the people, in his
hand a rod of gold. With this he points to the Commandments, which
contain among them the whole Rule of Life. The pews are not arranged
to face the east, but are gathered round the pulpit in the north, the
most desirable being those nearest the pulpit. In the outside pews,
close to the east end, sat the watermen's 'prentices. These young
villains, who were afterwards doubtless for the most part hanged,
spent their time during the service in carving their initials, with
rude pictures of ships, houses, and boats, with dates on the sloping
desks before them. There they still remain--because the pews are
unchanged--with the dates 1720, 1730, 1740, and so on. From father to
son they kept up this sacrilegious practice, hidden in the depths of
the high pews. There is, behind the church, a vestry with wainscoting
and more carved wood, and with portraits of bygone rectors, plans of
the parish, and notes on the old parish charities, which exist no
longer. Through the vestry window one looks out upon a little garden.
It is the churchyard. One sees how the old cloister ran. Formerly it
was full of tombs, and he who paced the cloister could meditate on
death. Now it is an open and cheerful place, all the old tombs cleared
away--which is loss, not gain--and in the month of May it is bright
with flowers. At first sight it seems as if it was so completely
hidden away that it could gladden no man's eyes. That is not so. In
the City Brewery there are certain windows which overlook this garden.
These are the windows of the rooms where dwells a chief
officer--Master Brewer, Master Taster, Master Chemist, I know not--of
the City Brewery, last of the many breweries which once stood along
the river bank. He, almost the only resident of the parish, can look
out, solitary and quiet, of the cool of an evening in early summer,
and rejoice in the beauty of this little garden blossoming, all for
his eyes alone, in a desert.
As one looks about this church the present fades away and the past
comes back. I see, once more, the Rector, what time George II. was
King, in full wig and black gown poring over his learned discourse.
Below him sleeps his clerk. In the Lord Mayor's pew, robed in garments
and chain of state, sleep my Lord Mayor and the worshipful the
Sheriffs; their footmen, all in blue and green and gold, are in the
aisle; the rich merchant of the parish clad in black velvet, with silk
stockings, silver buckles to their shoes, ruffles of the richest and
rarest lace at their throats, and neckties of the same hanging down
before their long silk waistcoats, sleep in their pews--it is a sleepy
time for the Church Service--beside their wives and children. The
wives are grand in hoop, and powder, and painted face. We know what is
meant by rank in the days of King George II. In this our parish church
we who are or have been wardens of our Company, aldermen who have
passed the chair, or aldermen who have yet to pass it, know what is
due to our position, and we bear ourselves accordingly. Our
inferiors--the clerks and the shopkeepers, the servants and the
'prentices--we treat, it is true, with kindliness, but with
condescension and with authority. On those rare occasions when a Peer
comes to our civic banquets we show him that we know what is due to
his rank. As for our life, it is centred in this parish; here are our
houses, here we live, here we carry on our business, and here we die.
Our poor are our servants when they are young and strong, and they are
our bedesmen when they grow old. Do not, I entreat you, believe in the
fiction that the Church neglected the poor during the last century.
The poor in the City parishes were not neglected; the boys were
thoroughly taught and conscientiously flogged, thieves were sent away
to be hanged, bad characters were turned out, the old were maintained,
the sick were looked after, the parish organization was complete, and
the parish charities were many and generous. Outside the City
precincts, if you please, where there were few churches and great
parishes, always increasing in population, the poor were neglected;
but in the City, never. But listen, the Rector has done. He finishes
his sermon with an admirable and appropriate quotation in Greek, which
I hope the congregation understands; he pronounces the prayer of
dismissal; the organ rolls, the clerk wakes up, the Lord Mayor and the
Sheriffs walk forth and get into their coaches, the footmen climb up
behind, the merchants and their families go out next, while all the
people stand in respect to their masters and betters, and those set in
authority over them. Then come out the people themselves, and last of
all the 'prentice boys come clattering down the aisle.
Let us awake. It is Sunday morning again, but the merchants are gone.
The eighteenth century is gone, the church is empty, the parish is
deserted; the streets are silent.
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep;
The river glideth at his own sweet will!
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep,
And all that mighty heart to lying still.
A RIVERSIDE PARISH
There are several riverside parishes east of London Bridge, not
counting the ancient towns of Deptford and Greenwich, which formerly
lay beyond London, and could not be reckoned as suburbs. The history
of all these parishes, till the present century, is the same. Once,
south-east and west of London, there stretched a broad marsh covered
with water at every spring-tide; here and there rose islets overgrown
with brambles, the haunt of wild fowl innumerable. In course of time,
the city having grown and stretching out long arms along the bank,
people began to build a broad and strong river-wall to keep out the
floods. This river-wall, which still remains, was gradually extended
until it reached the mouth of the river and ran quite round the low
coast of Essex. To the marshes succeeded a vast level, low-lying,
fertile region affording good pasture, excellent dairy farms, and
gardens of fruit and vegetables. The only inhabitants of this district
were the farmers and the farmhands. So things continued for a thousand
years, while the ships went up the river with wind and tide, and down
the river with wind and tide, and were moored below the Bridge, and
discharged their cargoes into lighters, which landed them on the quays
of London Port, between the Tower and the Bridge. As for the people
who did the work of the Port--the loading and the unloading--those
whom now we call the stevedores, coalers, dockers, lightermen, and
watermen, they lived in the narrow lanes and crowded courts above and
about Thames Street.
When the trade of London Port increased, these courts became more
crowded; some of them overflowed, and a colony outside the walls was
established in St. Katherine's Precinct beyond the Tower. Next to St.
Katherine's lay the fields called by Stow 'Wappin in the Wose,' or
Wash, where there were broken places in the wall, and the water poured
in so that it was as much a marsh as when there was no dyke at all.
Then the Commissioners of Sewers thought it would be a good plan to
encourage people to build along the wall, so that they would be
personally interested in its preservation. Thus arose the Hamlet of
Wapping, which, till far into the eighteenth century, consisted of
little more than a single long street, with a few cross lanes,
inhabited by sailor-folk. At this time--toward the end of the
sixteenth century--began that great and wonderful development of
London trade which has continued without any cessation of growth.
Gresham began it. He taught the citizens how to unite for the common
weal; he gave them a Bourse; he transferred the foreign trade of
Antwerp to the Thames. Then the service of the river grew apace; where
one lighter had sufficed there were now wanted ten; 'Wappin in the
Wose' became crowded Wapping; the long street stretched farther and
farther along the river beyond Shad's Well; beyond Ratcliff Cross,
where the 'red cliff' came down nearly to the river bank; beyond the
'Lime-house'; beyond the 'Poplar' Grove. The whole of that great city
of a million souls, now called East London, consisted, until the end
of the last century, of Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, still
preserving something of the old rusticity; of Mile End, Stepney and
Bow, and West Ham, hamlets set among fields, and market-gardens, and
of that long fringe of riverside streets and houses. In these rural
hamlets great merchants had their country-houses; the place was
fertile; the air was wholesome; nowhere could one see finer flowers or
finer plants; the merchant-captains--both those at sea and those
retired--had houses with garden-bowers and masts at Mile End Old Town.
Captain Cook left his wife and children there when he went sailing
round the world; here, because ground was cheap and plentiful, were
long rope-walks and tenter-grounds; here were roadside taverns and
gardens for the thirsty Londoner on a summer evening, here were placed
many almshouses, dotted about among the gardens, where the poor old
folks lengthened their days in peace and fresh air.
But Riverside London was a far different place, here lived none but
sailors, watermen, lightermen, and all those who had to do with ships
and shipping, with the wants and the pleasures of the sailors. Boat
builders had their yards along the bank; mastmakers, sail-makers,
rope-makers, block-makers; there were repairing docks dotted about all
down the river, each able to hold one ship at a time, like one or two
still remaining at Rotherhithe, there were ship-building yards of
considerable importance; all these places employed a vast number of
workmen--carpenters, caulkers, painters, riggers, carvers of
figure-heads, block-makers, stevedores, lightermen, watermen,
victuallers, tavern-keepers, and all the roguery and _ribauderie_ that
always gather round mercantile Jack ashore. A crowded suburb indeed it
was, and for the most part with no gentlefolk to give the people an
example of conduct, temperance, and religion--at best the
master-mariners, a decorous people, and the better class of tradesmen,
to lead the way to church. And as time went on the better class
vanished, until the riverside parishes became abandoned entirely to
mercantile Jack, and to those who live by loading and unloading,
repairing and building the ships, and by showing Jack ashore how
fastest and best to spend his money. There were churches--Wapping, St.
George in the East, Shadwell, and Lime-house--they are there to this
day; but Jack and his friends enter not their portals. Moreover, when
they were built the function of the clergyman was to perform with
dignity and reverence the services of the church; if people chose not
to come, and the law of attendance could not be enforced, so much the
worse for them. Though Jack kept out of church, there was some
religious life in the place, as is shown not only by the presence of
the church, but also by that of the chapel. Now, wherever there is a
chapel it indicates thought, independence, and a sensible elevation
above the reckless, senseless rabble. Some kinds of Nonconformity also
indicate a first step toward education and culture.
He who now stands on London Bridge and looks down the river, will see
a large number of steamers lying off the quays; there are barges,
river steamers, and boats, there are great ocean steamers working up
or down the river; but there is little to give the stranger even a
suspicion of the enormous trade that is carried on at the Port of
London. That port is now hidden behind the dock gates; the trade is
invisible unless one enters the docks and reckons up the ships and
their tonnage, the warehouses and their contents. But a hundred years
ago this trade was visible to any who chose to look at it, and the
ships in which the trade was carried on were visible as well.
Below the Bridge, the river, for more than a mile, pursues a straight
course with a uniform breadth. It then bends in a north-easterly
direction for a mile or so, when it turns southward, passing Deptford
and Greenwich. Now, a hundred years ago, for two miles and more below
the bridge, the ships lay moored side by side in double lines, with a
narrow channel between. There were no docks; all the loading and the
unloading had to be done by means of barges and lighters in the
stream. One can hardly realize this vast concourse of boats and barges
and ships; the thousands of men at work; the passage to and fro of the
barges laden to the water's edge, or returning empty to the ship's
side; the yeo-heave-oh! of the sailors hoisting up the casks and bales
and cases; the shouting, the turmoil, the quarrelling, the fighting,
the tumult upon the river, now so peaceful. But when we talk of a
riverside parish we must remember this great concourse, because it was
the cause of practices from which we suffer to the present day.
Of these things we may be perfectly certain. First, that without the
presence among a people of some higher life, some nobler standard,
than that of the senses, this people will sink rapidly and surely.
Next, that no class of persons, whether in the better or the worser
rank, can ever be trusted to be a law unto themselves. For which
reason we may continue to be grateful to our ancestors who caused to
be written in large letters of gold, for all the world to see once a
week, "THUS SAITH THE LORD, Thou shalt not steal," and the rest: the
lack of which reminder sometimes causes in Nonconformist circles, it
is whispered, a deplorable separation of faith and works. The third
maxim, axiom, or self-evident proposition is, that when people can
steal without fear of consequences they will steal. All through the
last century, and indeed far into this, the only influence brought to
bear upon the common people was that of authority. The master ruled
his servants; he watched over them; when they were young he had them
catechized and taught the sentiments proper to their station; he also
flogged them soundly; when they grew up he gave them wages and work;
he made them go to church regularly; he rewarded them for industry by
fraternal care; he sent them to the almshouse when they were old. At
church the sermons were not for the servants but for the masters; yet
the former were reminded every week of the Ten Commandments, which
were not only written out large for all to see, but were read out for
their instruction every Sunday morning. The decay of authority is one
of the distinguishing features of the present century.
But in Riverside London there were no masters, and there was no
authority for the great mass of the people. The sailor ashore had no
master; the men who worked on the lighters and on the ships had no
master except for the day; the ignoble horde of those who supplied the
coarse pleasures of the sailors had no masters; they were not made to
do anything but what they pleased; the church was not for them; their
children were not sent to school; their only masters were the fear of
the gallows, constantly before their eyes at Execution Dock and on the
shores of the Isle of Dogs, and their profound respect for the cat o'
nine tails. They knew no morality; they had no other restraint; they
all together slid, ran, fell, leaped, danced, and rolled swiftly and
easily adown the Primrose Path; they fell into a savagery the like of
which has never been known among English-folk since the days of their
conversion to the Christian faith. It is only by searching and poking
among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the
actual depths of the English savagery of the last century. And it is
not too much to say that for drunkenness, brutality, and ignorance,
the Englishman of the baser kind touched about the lowest depth ever
reached by civilized man during the last century. What he was in
Riverside London has been disclosed by Colquhoun, the Police
Magistrate. Here he was not only a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of
dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate--he was also, with his
fellows, engaged every day, and all day long, in a vast systematic
organized depredation. The people of the riverside were all, to a man,
river pirates; by day and by night they stole from the ships. There
were often as many as a thousand vessels lying in the river; there
were many hundreds of boats, barges, and lighters engaged upon their
cargoes, They practised their robberies in a thousand ingenious ways;
they weighed the anchors and stole them; they cut adrift lighters when
they were loaded, and when they had floated down the river they
pillaged what they could carry and left the rest to sink or swim; they
waited till night and then rowed of to half-laden lighters and helped
themselves. Sometimes they went on board the ships as stevedores and
tossed bales overboard to a confederate in a boat below; or they were
coopers who carried under their aprons bags which they filled with
sugar from the casks; or they took with them bladders for stealing the
rum. Some waded about in the mud at low tide to catch anything that
was thrown to them from the ships. Some obtained admission to the ship
as rat-catchers, and in that capacity were able to carry away plunder
previously concealed by their friends; some, called _scuffle-hunters_,
stood on the quays as porters, carrying bags under their long white
aprons in which to hide whatever they could pilfer. It was estimated
that, taking one year with another, the depredations from the shipping
in the Port of London amounted to nearly a quarter of a million
sterling every year. All this was carried on by the riverside people.
But, to make robbery successful, there must be accomplices,
receiving-houses, fences, a way to dispose of the goods. In this case
the thieves had as their accomplices the whole of the population of
the quarter where they lived. All the public-houses were secret
markets attended by grocers and other tradesmen where the booty was
sold by auction, and, to escape detection, fictitious bills and
accounts were given and received. The thieves were known among
themselves by fancy names, which at once indicated the special line of
each and showed the popularity of the calling; they were bold pirates,
night plunderers, light horsemen, heavy horsemen, mud-larks, game
lightermen, scuffle-hunters and gangsmen. Their thefts enabled them to
live in the coarse profusion of meat and drink, which was all they
wanted; yet they were always poor because their plunder was knocked
down for so little; they saved nothing; and they were always egged on
to new robberies by the men who sold them drinks, by the women who
took their money from them, and by the honest merchants who attended
the secret markets.
I dwell upon the past because the present is its natural legacy. When
you read of the efforts now being made to raise the living, or at
least to prevent them from sinking any lower, remember that they are
what the dead made them. We inherit more than the wealth of our
ancestors; we inherit the consequences of their misdeeds. It is a most
expensive thing to suffer the people to drop and sink; it is a sad
burden which we lay upon posterity if we do not continually spend our
utmost in lifting them up. Why, we have been the best part of two
thousand years in recovering the civilization which fell to pieces
when the Roman Empire decayed. We have not been fifty years in
dragging up the very poor whom we neglected and left to themselves,
the gallows, the cat, and the press-gang only a hundred years ago. And
how slow, how slow and sometimes hopeless, is the work!
The establishment of river police and the construction of docks have
cleared the river of all this gentry. Ships now enter the docks; there
discharge and receive; the labourers can carry away nothing through
the dock-gates. No apron allows a bag to be hidden; policemen stand at
the gates to search the men; the old game is gone--what is left is a
surviving spirit of lawlessness; the herding together; the
hand-to-mouth life; the love of drink as the chief attainable
pleasure; the absence of conscience and responsibility; and the old
brutality.
What the riverside then was may be learned by a small piece of
Rotherhithe in which the old things still linger. Small
repairing-docks, each capable of holding one vessel, are dotted along
the street; to each are its great dock-gates, keeping out the high
tide, and the quays and the shops and the caretaker's lodge; the ship
lies in the dock shored up by timbers on either side, and the workmen
are hammering, caulking, painting, and scraping the wooden hull; her
bowsprit and her figurehead stick out over the street, Between the
docks are small two-storied houses, half of them little shops trying
to sell something; the public-house is frequent, but the 'Humours' of
Ratcliff Highway are absent; mercantile Jack at Rotherhithe is mostly
Norwegian and has morals of his own. Such, however, as this little
village of Rotherhithe is, so were 'Wappin in the Wose,' Shadwell,
Ratcliff, and the 'Limehouse' a hundred years ago, with the addition
of street fighting and brawling all day long; the perpetual adoration
of rum, quarrels over stolen goods; quarrels over drunken drabs;
quarrels over all-fours; the scraping of fiddles from every
public-house, the noise of singing, feasting, and dancing, and a
never-ending, still-beginning debauch, all hushed and quiet--as birds
cower in the hedge at sight of the kestrel--when the press-gang swept
down the narrow streets and carried off the lads, unwilling to leave
the girls and the grog, and put them aboard His Majesty's tender to
meet what fate might bring.
The construction of the great docks has completely changed this
quarter. The Precinct of St. Katherine's by the Tower has almost
entirely disappeared, being covered by St. Katherine's Dock; the
London Dock has reduced Wapping to a strip covered with warehouses.
But the church remains, so frankly proclaiming itself of the
eighteenth century, with its great churchyard. The new Dock Basin,
Limehouse Basin, and the West India Docks, have sliced huge cantles
out of Shadwell, Limehouse, and Poplar; the little private docks and
boat-building yards have disappeared; here and there the dock remains,
with its river gates gone, an ancient barge reposing in its black mud;
here and there may be found a great building which was formerly a
warehouse when ship-building was still carried on. That branch of
industry was abandoned after 1868, when the shipwrights struck. Their
action transferred the ship-building of the country to the Clyde, and
threw out of work thousands of men who had been earning large wages in
the yards. Before this unlucky event Riverside London had been rough
and squalid, but there were in it plenty of people earning good
wages--skilled artisans, good craftsmen. Since then it has been next
door to starving. The effect of the shipwrights' strike may be
illustrated in the history of one couple.
The man, of Irish parentage, though born in Stepney, was a painter or
decorator of the saloons and cabins of the ships. He was a
highly-skilled workman of taste and dexterity; he could not only paint
but he could carve; he made about three pounds a week and lived in
comfort. The wife, a decent Yorkshire woman whose manners were very
much above those of the riverside folk, was a few years older than her
husband. They had no children. During the years of fatness they saved
nothing; the husband was not a drunkard, but, like most workmen, he
liked to cut a figure and to make a show. So he saved little or
nothing. When the yard was finally closed he had to cadge about for
work. Fifteen years later he was found in a single room of the meanest
tenement-house; his furniture was reduced to a bed, a table, and a
chair; all that they had was a little tea and no money--no money at
all. He was weak and ill, with trudging about in search of work; he
was lying exhausted on the bed while his wife sat crouched over the
little bit of fire. This was how they had lived for fifteen years--the
whole time on the verge of starvation. Well, they were taken away;
they were persuaded to leave their quarters and to try anther place,
where odd jobs were found for the man, and where the woman made
friends in private families, for whom she did a little sewing. But it
was too late for the man; his privations had destroyed his sleight of
hand, though he knew it not; the fine workman was gone. He took
painters' paralysis, and very often when work was offered his hand
would drop before he could begin it; then the long years of tramping
about had made him restless; from time to time he was fain to borrow a
few shillings and to go on the tramp again, pretending that he was in
search of work; he would stay away for a fortnight, marching about
from place to place, heartily enjoying the change and the social
evening at the public-houses where he put up. For, though no drunkard,
he loved to sit in a warm bar and to talk over the splendours of the
past. Then he died. No one, now looking at the neat old lady in the
clean white cap and apron who sits all day in the nursery crooning
over her work, would believe that she has gone through this ordeal by
famine, and served her fifteen years' term of starvation for the sins
of others.