ROUND THE HAUNTS OF HIS BOYHOOD
Proud of his Birthplace--Famous Residents at Blackwall--Memories of
Nelson's Flagship--Stealing a Body from a Gibbet--A Waterman who
Remembered Dickens.
Of many interesting days spent with Crooks in Poplar, one stands out as
the day on which he showed me some of the haunts of his boyhood.
Poplar is always picturesque with the glimpses it gives of ships' masts
rising out of the Docks above the roofs of houses. With Crooks as guide,
this rambling district of Dockland, foolishly imagined by many people to
be wholly a centre of squalor, becomes as romantic as a mediæval town.
It was not always grey and poor, as so many parts of it are to-day,
though even these are not without their quaint and pleasant places.
We wended through several of its grey streets, making for the river at
Blackwall. Everywhere women and children, as well as men, whom we passed
greeted Crooks cheerily.
"Can you wonder so many of our people take to drink?" And he pointed to
the shabby little houses, all let out in tenements, in the street where
he was born. "Look at the homes they are forced to live in! The men
can't invite their mates round, so they meet at 'The Spotted Dog' of an
evening. During the day the women often drift to the same place. The
boys and girls cannot do their courting in these overcrowded homes. They
make love in the streets, and soon they too begin to haunt the
public-houses."
He changed his tone when we entered the famous old High Street that runs
between the West India Docks and Blackwall. He pointed out the house
where he spent many years of his boyhood after his parents moved from
Shirbutt Street. The old home is associated with his errand-boy
experiences. In those days he finished work at midnight on Saturdays,
and knowing that his parents would be in bed, he often lingered in the
High Street into the early hours of Sunday, playing with other lads who,
like himself, had just finished work.
As we continued our way down the High Street together, he surprised me
by his wonderful knowledge of the neighbourhood. Here was a Poplar man
proud of Poplar. He told me that the now silent High Street was at one
time a sort of sailors' fair-ground, like the old Ratcliff Highway. It
was there, he said, that Poplar had its beginning, according to the
historian Stow. There shipwrights and other marine men built large
houses for themselves, with small ones around for seamen.
Not for these people alone were the houses built. Worthy citizens of
London lived down there. Sir John de Poultney, four times Lord Mayor,
lived in a quaint old house in Coldharbour, at Blackwall, that stood
until recently. This same house once formed the home of the discoverer,
Sebastian Cabot. It was there that Cabot made friends with Sir Thomas
Spert, Vice-Admiral of England, who also had a house at Poplar, and
promised Cabot a good ship of the Government's for a voyage of
discovery. And, later still, Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have been the
tenant, and of course legend credits him with having smoked one of his
earliest pipes there.
Gone are the old houses now, with the old traditions, the old gaiety,
the old mad enthusiasm for the sea. In his day the Blackwall seaman was
a dare-devil, efficient man, eagerly coveted by shipowners and captains
alike. Never did a ship sail from Blackwall during Crooks's schooldays
without most of the boys staying away from school, regardless of results
to their skins the next morning, in order to join in the farewell
cheering from the foreshore. The welcome home to the Blackwall ships was
something to remember. It was always a bitter disappointment to the
boys, since it robbed them of an opportunity of playing truant, if a
ship came home and docked during the night, having come up, as the old
tide-master used to say, and brought her own news.
Little remains to suggest the sea in Poplar High Street to-day. The old
highway has lost its old glory. The old folks have forsaken the old
homesteads. Of the few old buildings that remain, nearly every one has
been cut up into small shops and tenements. One or two general dealers
still pose as ships' outfitters, and an occasional shop remains as a
marine store, as though in a final feeble struggle to preserve the old
traditions.
Crooks recollected well the period that costermongers thronged this
riverside highway. They came about the time seamen were deserting it, so
that the street for some time lost nothing of its noise or bustle. The
day came when they, too, departed, seeking a more profitable field in
Chrisp Street, on the northern side of East India Dock Road, where to
this day they still hold carnival. That they carried away something of
the seafaring character of their former highway is borne out by the
nautical turn they give to some of their remarks.
"Here," cried a fish-dealer of their number the other day, holding aloft
a haddock, "wot price this 'ere 'addick?"
"Tuppence," suggested a woman bystander.
"Wot! tuppence! 'Ow would you like to get a ship, an' go out to sea an'
fish for 'addicks to sell for tuppence in foggy weather like this?"
As we passed down that portion of the High Street that skirts the
Recreation Ground, Crooks pointed out the quaint old church of St.
Matthias. He told me it was the oldest church in Poplar, built as a
chapel-of-ease to the mother church of East London, St. Dunstan's. Then
it was that all the parishes that now go to make up the teeming Tower
Hamlets were comprised in Stepney. As the Port of London in those days
was confined to the Pool and lower reaches and to the riverside hamlets
of the East End, that was why people born at sea were often entered as
having been born in the parish of Stepney.
St. Matthias' Church afterwards became the chapel of the old East India
Company. Poplar people sometimes call it that to this day. The Company's
almshouses were near, and the chapel ministered to the aged almoners
alone. According to tradition, the teak pillars in the church served as
masts in vessels of the Spanish Armada. Upon the ceiling is the
coat-of-arms of the original East India Company. Adjoining the church is
the picturesque vicarage, where Crooks pointed out the coat-of-arms
adopted by the United Company a hundred years later on the amalgamation
with the New East India Company.
This chapel contains a monument to the memory of George Green, who
stands out as Poplar's worthiest philanthropist. Schools, churches, and
charities in Poplar to-day testify to his generosity. He was one of the
owners of the famous Blackwall Shipbuilding Yard, that turned out some
of the sturdiest of the wooden walls of England. They were proud in the
shipyard of the _Venerable_ and the _Theseus_, the former Lord Duncan's
flagship at the battle of Camperdown, the latter at one time Nelson's
flagship, in the cockpit of which his arm was amputated.
The people of old Poplar had at times unpleasant things to tolerate.
Sometimes the pirates hung at Execution Dock, higher up the river, would
be brought down, still on their gibbets, and suspended for a long
period at a place near Blackwall Point, as a warning to all seafarers
entering the Port of London.
One of the old East India Company pensioners used to tell Crooks's
father how one of the bodies hanging on a gibbet was stolen during the
night, under romantic circumstances. An old waterman at the stairs was
startled at a late hour by a young and ladylike girl coming ashore in a
boat and asking him to lend a hand with her father, who, she said, was
dead drunk in the bottom of the skiff. A youth was with her, and the
waterman assisted them to carry the supposed drunken man to a carriage
which was waiting. Not until the pirate's body was missing in the
morning did the old waterman know the truth.
We reached the river ourselves from the Blackwall end of the High
Street, while Crooks was giving me these entertaining glimpses into the
past of his native Poplar. The sight of Blackwall Causeway and the river
crowded with craft instantly reminded him of the last mutiny in the
Thames, of which he has gruesome recollections, associated with bad
dreams as a lad, caused by the knowledge that dead seamen lay in the
building adjoining his home. It was here at Blackwall Point that the
crew of the Peruvian frigate mutinied in 1861. He relates graphically
how the eleven men who were shot dead on the ship were brought ashore
and laid in the mortuary next his mother's house by the casual ward.
The old watermen at the head of the Causeway, waiting to row people
across to the Greenwich side, welcomed Crooks with a cheerful word as we
approached. They were soon full of talk. The eldest told how he went to
sea as a boy in the famous wooden ships turned out of Blackwall Yard.
His aged companion remembered the stage coaches coming down from London
to Blackwall. He was proud also of a memory of Queen Victoria's visit to
the neighbourhood to see a Chinese junk.
The two ancient watermen soon overflowed with reminiscences. One
remembered his grandfather telling how King George the Fourth would come
down to see the ships built at Blackwall, and how on one occasion a
sailor who had come ashore and got drunk took a pint of ale to his
Majesty in a pewter and asked him to drink to the Army and Navy.
"Ah!" exclaimed the other, fetching a sigh; "but don't you remember that
old Yarmouth fisherman who used to bring his smack round here from the
Roads and sell herrings out of it on this very Causeway?"
"Remember! What do _you_ think? That was the old man who would never
keep farthings. In the evening, when he'd got a handful in the course of
the day's trade, he would pitch them in the river for the boys to find."
"Likely enough," interposed Crooks. "I mudlarked about here myself as a
lad."
The eldest of the ancient watermen would have it that this old boy from
Yarmouth was the original of Mr. Peggotty, and that it was at Blackwall
Dickens first made his acquaintance. He said he had often seen Dickens
himself about those parts.
We ventured a doubt.
"Why, bless my life!" he cried; "ain't I talked to him at the Causeway
here many a time?"
This, of course, was unanswerable, so we asked what Dickens did when
there.
The ancient waterman thought a moment.
"What did Dickens do?" he ruminated. "Now, let me see. What _did_
Dickens do? I know: Dickens used to go afloat!"
The other declared that Dickens did more than that: he would often go
into the fishing-smack.
We immediately assumed that it was the fishing-smack of the old Yarmouth
salt that was meant. We were wrong. It was another "Fishing Smack," one
of the quaint old taverns by the river still standing in Coldharbour.