buildings, with which every right-minded visitor straightway falls in
love; they consist of schools and a church; to these may be added the
churchyard—I suppose we may say that a churchyard is built, when it is
full of tombs. This sacred area is separated from the church by the
road; it is surrounded by an iron railing, and within there is a little
coppice of lilac, laburnum, and other shrubs and trees which have grown
up between the tombs, so that in the spring and summer the monuments
become half-revealed and half-concealed; the sunshine, falling on them,
quivering and shifting through the light leaves and blossoms, glorifies
the memorials of these dead mariners. The schools are adorned with
wooden effigies of boy and girl—stiff and formal in their ancient garb;
the church is not without a quiet dignity of its own, such a dignity as
I have observed in the simple meeting-house of an American town. In some
unexplained manner it seems exactly the sort of church which should have
been built for captains, mates, quartermasters, and bo’s’uns of the
mercantile marine in the days when captains wore full wigs and
waistcoats down to their knees. The master boat-builder and master
craftsman, in all the arts and mysteries pertaining to ships and boats,
their provision and their gear, were also admitted within these holy
walls. The church seems to have been built only for persons of
authority; nothing under the rank of quartermaster would sit within
these dignified walls. You can see the tombs of former congregations;
they are solid piles of stone, signifying rank in the mercantile marine.
The tombs are in the churchyard around the church, and in the churchyard
on the other side of the road. As you look upon the old-fashioned
church, this Georgian church, time runs back; the ancient days return:
there stands in the pulpit the clergyman, in his full wig, reading his
learned and doctrinal discourse in a full, rich monotone; below him sit
the captains and the mates and the quartermasters, with them the master
craftsman, all with wigs; the three-cornered hat is hanging on the door
of the high pew; for better concentration of thought, the eyes of the
honest gentlemen are closed. The ladies, however, sit upright, conscious
of the Sunday best; besides, one might, in falling asleep, derange the
nice balance of the “head.” When the sermon is over they all walk home
in neighborly conversation to the Sunday dinner and the after-dinner
bottle of port. The tombs in the churchyard belong to the time when a
part of Wapping was occupied by this better class, which has long since
vanished, though one or two of the houses remain. Of the baser sort who
crowded all the lanes I have spoken already. They did not go to church;
always on Sunday the doors stood wide open to them if they would come
in, but they did not accept the invitation; they stayed outside; the
church received them three times—for the christening, for the wedding,
for the burial; whatever their lives have been, the church receives all
alike for the funeral service, and asks no questions. After this brief
term of yielding to all temptations, after their sprightly course along
the primrose path, they are promised, if in the coffin one can hear, a
sure and certain hope.
[Illustration: Coming Up the Lower Thames with the Tide.]
Here are Wapping Old Stairs. Come with me through the narrow court and
stand upon the stairs leading down to the river. They are now rickety
old steps and deserted. Time was when the sailors landed here when they
returned from a voyage; then their sweethearts ran down the steps to
meet them.
“Your Polly has never been faithless, she swears,
Since last year we parted on Wapping Old Stairs.”
And here, when Polly had spent all his money for him, Jack hugged her to
his manly bosom before going aboard again. Greeting and farewell took
place in the presence of a theater full of spectators. They were the
watermen who lay off the stairs by dozens waiting for a fare, at the
time when the Thames was the main highway of the City. The stairs were
noisy and full of life. Polly herself had plenty of repartee in reply to
the gentle badinage of the young watermen; her Tom had rivals among
them. When he came home the welcome began with a fight with one or other
of these rivals. The stairs are silent now; a boat or two, mostly
without any one in it, lies despondently alongside the stairs or in the
mud at low tide.
Sometimes the boats pushed off with intent to fish; the river was full
of fish, though there are now none left; there were all kinds of fish
that swim, including salmon; the fishery of the Thames is responsible
for more rules and ordinances than any other industry of London. The
boatmen were learned in the times and seasons of the fish. For instance,
they could tell by the look of the river when a shoal of roach was
coming up stream; at such times they took up passengers who would go
a-fishing, and landed them on the sterlings—the projecting piers of
London Bridge—where they stood angling for the fish all day long with
rod and line.
Next to the Wapping Old Stairs is Execution Dock. This was the place
where sailors were hanged and all criminals sentenced for offenses
committed on the water; they were hanged at low tide on the foreshore,
and they were kept hanging until three high tides had flowed over their
bodies—an example and an admonition to the sailors on board the passing
ships. Among the many hangings at this doleful spot is remembered one
which was more remarkable than the others. It was conducted with the
usual formalities; the prisoner was conveyed to the spot in a cart
beside his own coffin, while the ordinary sat beside him and exhorted
him. He wore the customary white nightcap and carried a prayer-book in
one hand, while a nosegay was stuck in his bosom; he preserved a stolid
indifference to the exhortations; he did not change color when the cart
arrived, but it was remembered afterward that he glanced round him
quickly; they carried him to the fatal beam and they hanged him up. Now,
if you come to think of it, as the spot had to be approached by a narrow
lane and by a narrow flight of steps, while the gallows stood in the mud
of the foreshore, the number of guards could not have been many. On this
occasion, no sooner was the man turned off than a boat’s company of
sailors, armed with bludgeons, appeared most unexpectedly, rushed upon
the constables, knocked down the hangman, hustled the chaplain,
overthrew the sheriff’s officers, cut down the man, carried him off,
threw him into a boat, and were away and in midstream, going down
swiftly with the current before the officers understood what was going
on.
When they picked themselves up they gazed stupidly at the gallows with
the rope still dangling—where was the man? He was in the boat and it was
already a good way down the river, and by that kind of accident which
often happened at that time when the arrangements of the executive were
upset, there was not a single wherry within sight or within hail.
Then the ordinary closed his book and pulled his cassock straight; the
hangman sadly removed the rope, the constables looked after the
vanishing boat, and there was nothing to be done but just to return home
again. As for the man, that hanging was never completed and those
rescuers were never discovered.
As an illustration of the solitude of this place, before its settlement
under Queen Elizabeth, one observes that there was a field called
Hangman’s Acre, situated more than a quarter of a mile from the river,
where in the year 1440 certain murderers and pirates were hanged in
chains upon a gallows set on rising ground, so that they should be seen
by the sailors in the ships going up and down the river. There was not
therefore at that time a single house to obstruct this admonitory
spectacle.
The “hamlet” of Shadwell is only a continuation of St. George’s or
Ratcliffe Highway; its churchyard is converted into a lovely garden, one
of the many gardens which were once burial grounds; the people sit about
in the shade or in the sun; along the south wall is a terrace commanding
a cheerful view of the London docks, with their shipping. There is a
fish-market here, the only public institution of Shadwell; there are old
houses, which we may look at and perhaps represent, but there is little
about its people that distinguishes them from the folk on either hand.
[Illustration: Off Shadwell.]
In the year 1671 the church was built; Shadwell was already a place with
a large population, and the church was built in order to minister to
their spiritual wants. What could be better? But you shall learn from
one example how the best intentions were frustrated and how the
riverside folk were suffered to go from bad to worse, despite the
creation of the parish and the erection of the church. The first rector
was a nephew of that great divine and philosopher, Bishop Butler. He was
so much delighted with the prospect of living and working among this
rude and ignorant folk, he was so filled and penetrated with the spirit
of humanity and the principles of his religion, that his first sermon
was on the text, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in
the tents of Kedar!” This good man, however, received permission from
the bishop to live in Norfolk Street, Strand, about three miles from his
church. And so, with a non-resident clergy, with no schools, with no
restraints of example or precept, with little interference from the law,
what wonder if the people reeled blindly down the slopes that lead to
death and destruction?
The name of Ratcliffe or Redcliff marks a spot where the low cliff
which formerly rose up from the marsh curved southward for a space and
then receded. It is a “hamlet” which at first offers little to
interest or to instruct. It consists of mean and dingy streets—there
is not a single street which is not mean and dirty; none of the houses
are old; none are picturesque in the least; they are rickety, dirty,
shabby, without one redeeming feature; there is a church, but it is
not stately like St. George’s-in-the-East, nor venerable like that of
Stepney; it is unlovely; there are “stairs” to the river and they are
rickety; there are warehouses which contain nothing and are tumbling
down; there are public houses which do not pretend to be bright and
attractive—low-browed, dirty dens, which reek of bad beer and bad gin.
Yet the place, when you linger in it and talk about it to the clergy
and the ladies who work for it, is full of interest. For it is a
quarter entirely occupied by the hand-to-mouth laborer; the people
live in tenements; it is thought luxury to have two rooms; there are
eight thousand of them, three quarters being Irish; in the whole
parish there is not a single person of what we call respectability,
except two or three clergymen and half a dozen ladies; there are no
good shops, there are no doctors or lawyers, there is not even a
newsvender, for nobody in Ratcliffe reads a newspaper. But the place
swarms with humanity; the children play by thousands in the gutters:
and on the door-steps the wives and mothers sit all day long and in
all weathers, carrying on a perpetual parliament of grievance. Here
once—I know not when—stood Ratcliffe Cross, and the site of the
cross—removed, I know not when—was one of the spots where, in 1837,
Queen Victoria was proclaimed. Why the young Queen should have been
proclaimed at Ratcliffe Cross I have never been able to discover. I
have asked the question of many persons and many books, but I can find
no answer. The oldest inhabitant knows nothing about it; none of the
books can tell me if the accession of the Queen’s predecessors was
also proclaimed by ancient custom at Ratcliffe Cross. Unfortunately,
it is now extremely difficult to find persons who remember the
accession of the Queen, not to speak of that of William IV.
Ratcliffe has other historical memories. Here stood the hall of the
Shipwrights’ Company. This was a very ancient body; it existed as the
fraternity of St. Simon and St. Jude from time immemorial; the
Shipwrights’ Company formerly had docks and building yards on the south
of the Thames; then they moved their hall to this place on the north
bank, and seem to have given up their building yards.
Here was a school, founded and maintained by the Coopers’ Company, where
Lancelot Andrewes, the learned bishop, was educated.
[Illustration: Ratcliffe-Cross Stairs.]
There is another historical note concerning Ratcliffe. It belongs to the
year 1553. It was in that year that Admiral Sir Hugh Willoughby embarked
on that voyage of discovery from which he was destined never to return.
He was sent out on a roving commission to “discover regions, dominions,
islands, and places unknown,” and he began by an attempt to discover the
northeast passage. Remember that geographers knew nothing in those days
of the extent of Siberia. Willoughby had three ships; their tonnage was,
respectively, 160 tons, 120, and 90. His crews consisted of 50, 35, and
27 men, respectively. With such tiny craft they put forth boldly to
brave unknown Arctic seas. It was from Ratcliffe Stairs that Willoughby
went on board on May 10, 1553. Half a mile down the river the flotilla
passed Greenwich Palace, where the young King, Edward VI, was residing.
It was within a few weeks of his death; consumption had laid him low.
When the ships passed the palace they “dressed” with flags and
streamers, they fired cannons of salute, they blew their trumpets. The
young King was brought out to see them pass. It was his last appearance
in public; on July 6th he was dead. As for Willoughby, he parted with
one of his ships, and after being tossed about off the coast of Lapland
he resolved to winter at the mouth of the river Argina. Here, in the
following spring, he was found with his companions, all dead and frozen.
A strange story of English enterprise to be connected with these forlorn
and ramshackle stairs.
Here is another story about Ratcliffe. In a street by the river, beside
the stairs, are two or three big ruinous warehouses, mostly deserted.
One of these has a double front, the left side representing a private
house, the right a warehouse. What was stored in the warehouse I know
not; the whole riverside is lined with warehouses and stores. The place
is now for a third time deserted, and stands with broken windows. It has
been deserted, so far as the original purpose was concerned, for many
years. Some thirty years ago a young medical man began to live and to
practise in Ratcliffe. He became presently aware that the death-rate
among the children was frightful. There was no hospital nearer than the
London Hospital in the Whitechapel Road, and that was two miles away;
there were no nurses to be obtained and there were no appliances; if a
child was taken ill it had to lie in the one room occupied by the whole
family, without ventilation, without proper food, without skilled care,
without medicines. Therefore in most cases of illness the child died.
He found this rickety old warehouse empty; he thought that he would do
what he could, being quite a poor man, to make a hospital for children.
He did so; with his slender funds he got a few beds and quickly filled
them. He was physician, surgeon, dispenser, druggist, everything; his
wife was nurse and everything else. Together these two devoted people
started their hospital. Well, it grew; it became known; money began to
come in; other doctors and nurses were taken on; all the rooms, there
were many, were filled; the children began to recover. Presently the
house became so prosperous that it was resolved to build a separate
Children’s Hospital, which was done, and you may see it—a noble place.
But for the founder this crown of his labors came too late. The work
killed him before the new hospital was completed; one of the wards, the
Heckford Ward, is named after the man who gave all his strength, all his
mind, all his knowledge, all his thoughts; who gave his life and his
death; who gave himself, wholly and ungrudgingly, to the children. His
patients recovered, but their physician died. He gave his own life to
stay the hand of death.
Then the house stood empty for a time; it was presently taken over by
the vicar of the parish and made into a playhouse for the little
children in the winter after school hours, from four to seven; I have
told you how the children swarm in the Ratcliffe streets. After seven
the house was converted into a club for the rough riverside lads, where
they could box and play single stick and subdue the devil in them, and
so presently could sit down and play games and listen to reading and
keep out of mischief. But the house is condemned; it is really too
ramshackle; it is empty again, and is now to be pulled down.
There is still another story whose scene is laid at Ratcliffe. There is
a house beside the church which is now the vicarage. It is a square,
solid house, built about the end of the seventeenth century. It is
remarkable for a dining-room whose walls are painted with Italian
landscapes. The story is that there lived here, early in the eighteenth
century, a merchant who rode into London every day, leaving his only
daughter behind. He desired to decorate his house with wall-paintings,
and engaged a young Italian to stay in the house and to paint all day.
Presently he made the not unusual discovery that the Italian and his
daughter had fallen in love with each other. He knew what was due to his
position as a City merchant, and did what was proper for the
occasion—that is to say, he ordered the young man to get out of the
house in half an hour. The artist obeyed, so far as to mount the stairs
to his own room. Here, however, he stopped, and when the angry parent
climbed the stairs after the expiration of the half hour to know why he
was not gone, he found the young lover, dead, hanging to the canopy of
the bed. His ghost was long believed to haunt the house, and was only
finally laid, after troops of servants had fled shrieking, when the wife
of the vicar sat up all night by herself in the haunted chamber, and
testified that she had neither seen nor heard anything, and was quite
willing to sleep in the room. That disgusted the ghost, who went away of
his own accord. I wish I could show you one room in the house. It was
the old powdering-room. When your wig had been properly curled and
combed you threw a towel or dressing-gown over your shoulders and sat in
this little room, with your back to the door. Now, the door had a
sliding panel, and the barber on the other side was provided with the
instrument which blew the white powder through the panel upon the wig.
The operation finished, you arose, slipped off the dressing-gown and
descended to your coach with all the dignity of a gold-laced hat, a wig
white as the driven snow, lace ruffles, a lace tie, and a black velvet
coat—if you were a merchant—with gold buttons, and white silk stockings.
A beautiful time it was for those who could afford the dignity and the
splendor which made it beautiful. For those who could not— Humph! Not
quite so beautiful a time.
After Ratcliffe we pass into Limehouse. It was at Limehouse Hole that
Rogue Riderhood lived.
The place is more marine than Wapping; the public houses have a look, an
air, a something that suggests the sea; the shops are conducted for the
wants of the merchantmen; the houses are old and picturesquely dirty;
the streets are narrow; one may walk about these streets for a whole
afternoon, and find something to observe in every one, either a shop
full of queer things or a public house full of strange men, or a house
that speaks of other days—of crimps, for instance, and of press gangs,
and of encounters in the streets; there are ancient docks used for the
repair of wooden sailing ships; there are places where they build
barges; a little inland you may see the famous church of Limehouse, with
its lofty steeple; it was only built in 1730. Before that time there was
no church at Limehouse; since that time nobody has gone to church at
Limehouse, speaking of the true natives, the riverside folk, not of
those who dwell respectably in the West India Dock Road. It is, however,
doubtless a great advantage and benefit to a sea-going population to
have a churchyard to be buried in.
[Illustration: Limehouse Basin and Church.]
At Limehouse the river suddenly bends to the south, and then again to
the north, making a loop within which lies a peninsula. This is a very
curious place. It occupies an area of a mile and a half from north to
south, and about a mile from east to west. The place was formerly a dead
level, lower than the river at high tide, and therefore a broad tidal
marsh; it was, in fact, part of the vast marsh of which I have already
spoken, now reclaimed, lying along the north bank of the river. This
marsh was dotted over with little eyots or islets, sometimes swept away
by the tide, then forming again, composed of rushes, living and dead,
the rank grasses of the marsh, and sticks and string and leaves carried
among the reeds to form a convenient and secure place where the wild
birds could make their nests. When the river wall was built the marsh
became a broad field of rich pasture, in which sheep were believed to
fatten better than in any other part of England. Until recently it had
no inhabitants; probably the air at night was malarious, and the sheep
wanted no one to look after them; the river wall was adorned with half a
dozen windmills; dead men, hanging in chains, preached silent sermons by
their dolorous example to the sailors of the passing craft; there was
instituted at some time or other before the seventeenth century a ferry
between its southern point and Greenwich, a road to meet the ferry
running north through the island. Pepys crossed once by this ferry in
order to attend a wedding. It was in the plague year, when one would
have thought weddings were not common and wedding festivities dangerous
things. But there was still marrying and giving in marriage. He was with
Sir George and Lady Carteret; they got across from Deptford in a boat,
but found that their coach, which ought to have met them, had not come
over by ferry, the tide having fallen too low. “I being in my new
colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons and gold broad-lace
round my hands, very rich and fine, ... so we were fain to stay there in
the unlucky Isle of Dogs, in a chill place, the morning cool, the wind
fresh, to our great discontent.” Why does he call the Isle of Dogs
unlucky?
In the middle of the island stood, all by itself, a little chapel.
Nothing is known about its origin. I am inclined to think that, like
many other chapels built on this river wall, on town walls, and on
bridges, it was intended to protect the wall by prayers and masses, sung
or said “with intention.” We have already found a hermitage by, or on,
the wall at Wapping, another place of prayer for the maintenance of this
important work.
[Illustration: The Thames Side at Limehouse.]
Why this peninsula was called the Isle of Dogs no one knows. One learned
antiquary says that the King kept his hounds there when he stayed at
Greenwich Palace. Perhaps. But the antiquary produces no proof that the
royal kennels were ever set up here, and the person who trusts a little
to common sense asks why the King should have sent his hounds across a
broad and rapid river by a dangerous ferry when he had the whole of
Greenwich Park and Black Heath in which to build his kennels. “Drowned
dogs,” suggests another, but doubtfully. No. I have never heard of
drowned dogs being washed ashore in any number, either here or
elsewhere. Drowned dogs, it is certain, were never an appreciable factor
in the flotsam and jetsam of the Thames. “Not the Isle of Dogs,” says
another, “but the Isle of Ducks. Ducks, you see, from the wild ducks
which formerly—” No; when the wall was built, which was probably in the
Roman time, the wild ducks vanished, and as no tradition of any kind can
be traced among the Saxons concerning the Roman occupation they never
heard of these ducks. For my own part, I have no suggestion to offer,
except a vague suspicion that, as Pepys thought, there was a tradition
of bad luck attaching in some form to the place, which was named
accordingly. If a man on the downward path is said to be going to the
dogs, a place considered as unlucky might very well have been called the
Isle of Dogs. Now a level marsh without any inhabitants and adorned by
gibbets and dangling dead bodies would certainly not be considered a
lucky place. You must not expect anything in the place of the least
antiquity. Yet a walk round the Isle of Dogs is full of interest. To
begin with, the streets are wide and clean; the houses are all small,
built for working-men; there are no houses of the better sort at all;
the children swarm, and are healthy, well fed, and rosy; the shops are
chiefly those of provisions and cheap clothing. All round the shore
there runs an unbroken succession of factories. These factories support
the thousands of working-men who form the population of the Isle of
Dogs. All kinds of things are made, stored, received, and distributed in
the factories of this industrial island; many of them are things which
require to be carried on outside a crowded town, such as oil storage,
oil, paint, color, and varnish, works; disinfectant fluid works,
boiler-makers, lubricating-oil works; there are foundries of brass and
iron, lead-smelting works, copper-depositing works, antimony and
gold-ore works. All kinds of things wanted for ships are made
here—cisterns and tanks, casks, steering-gear, tarpaulin, wire rope,
sails, oars, blocks, and masts; there are yards for building ships,
barges, and boats.