The Victorian City Read online

Shoreditch. Crystal Palaces.

  Islington. Whitechapel.

  Bow. Wapping.

  Stratford. Greenwich.

  Superintendent White, of the Gravesend Police and

  Fire Brigade and others.

  Pensioners and Friends

  London Fire Engine Establishment.

  Junior Firemen.

  Senior Firemen.

  Sub Engineers.

  Engineers (two abreast).

  The Ward Beadle of Cordwainers’ Ward.

  The Undertaker.

  Two Mutes.

  The Pallbearers:

  Mr. Swanton, engineer.

  Mr. Fogo, foreman.

  Mr. Bridges, foreman.

  Mr. Gerrard, engineer.

  Mr. Henderson, foreman.

  Mr Staples, foreman.

  A plume of feathers.

  THE HEARSE.

  The Chief Mourners:

  Mr. James F. Braidwood

  Mr. Frank Braidwood

  Mr. Lithgow Braidwood

  Mr. Charles Jackson

  Fifteen Mourning Coaches

  Containing the relatives, friends, and committees of the

  London fire engine establishments.

  Private carriage of the Duke of Sutherland.

  Private carriage of the Earl of Caithness.

  Private carriage of Dr. Cumming [the officiating clergyman].

  And other private carriages.

  Most unusually, in an age when sending an empty carriage was considered to be a significant mark of respect, the Duke of Sutherland and the Earl of Caithness were actually present.

  The procession moved slowly through an ‘immense multitude’ that had gathered in homage to Braidwood; ‘in the front of the Royal Exchange, and all round this space the roofs and windows were thronged. As the procession slowly approached, the troops with arms reversed, and the bands slowly pealing forth the Dead March, the mass of spectators, as if by an involuntary movement, all uncovered [their heads], and along the rest of the route this silent token of respect was everywhere observed.’ The crowd was so thick that, despite an escort of mounted police, the cortège took three hours to cover the four miles to the cemetery in Stoke Newington, with thousands of silent onlookers lining the route the entire way.

  At Abney Park, the body of James Braidwood, aged sixty-one, was laid to rest beside his stepson, also a fireman, who had died on duty six years earlier. Braidwood Street, off Tooley Street, today continues to commemorate both the worst fire London had seen since the Great Fire of 1666, and the heroic service rendered the city by the founder of the modern fire brigade.

  5.

  THE WORLD’S MARKET

  Saturdays were Covent Garden market’s biggest day, when the costermongers stocked up with produce to sell over the coming week, up to 5,000 of them heading for the market with donkey carts, with shallow trays or with head-baskets.46 By the 1850s, London’s main produce market had long overspilled its bounds, covering not just the Piazza it was designed to occupy, but spreading over an area ‘From Long Acre to the Strand...from Bow-street to Bedford-street’, for several hundred yards in either direction: ‘along each approach to the market...nothing is to be seen, on all sides, but vegetables; the pavement is covered with heaps of them waiting to be carted; the flagstones are stained green with the leaves trodden underfoot...sacks full of apples and potatoes, and bundles of brocoli [sic] and rhubarb are left...upon almost every doorstep; the steps of Covent Garden Theatre are covered with fruit and vegetables; the road is blocked up with mountains of cabbages and turnips.’

  This description came a quarter of a century after the new market had first been planned. In 1678, the Dukes of Bedford, who owned the land, had been granted a 250-year lease for a market, and for nearly two centuries what had been called a market had been merely a collection of wooden sheds and stalls. In the early 1820s, with the lease due to expire, the Bedford Estate received permission to build permanent structures in the centre of the Piazza, expanding beyond the original square itself, and soon sellers operated in a landscape of half-built premises. By 1858, there was a central structure of wrought iron. The old Piazza Hotel, which had backed on to Covent Garden theatre, and had long served as the entrance to the pit and box seats in the theatre, had been demolished. In its stead Floral Hall, a building to house the flower sellers, was being constructed in the style of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace. (In a neatly circular fashion, Floral Hall once again serves not the market but the theatre, providing the Royal Opera House’s box office and refreshment bars. One section of the Piazza’s central structure was rescued when the market was demolished in the 1970s, and in the early twenty-first century was re-erected in the Borough market.)

  Before dawn the traffic converged on the streets surrounding the main markets. The waggoners were recognizable by their countrymen’s smocks, with velveteen breeches and leggings, or their gaiters, made of canvas, linen, wool or leather, tied below the knee and again at the ankle, or buttoned or buckled on, all designed to prevent the roads’ endless mud from making a pair of stockings unwearable after a single outing (see Plate 1, top row right, and bottom row third from right). Carts were an ongoing problem: slow to arrive, cumbersome to turn, difficult to leave while their drivers took their goods into the market. As a result queues up to a mile long were not unusual. In the late 1840s, one enterprising boy carved out a job for himself by offering a solution. Like many homeless street children, Bob had haunted the market, running errands and fetching and carrying for stallholders in return for food, or a penny. Winning their trust, he promoted himself to the self-created position of ‘market-groom’: now when the carts had been driven as close to the market as possible, the waggoners were met by Bob, who held their whips as a sign of authority and then kept watch, preventing the donkeys and horses from wandering off, or straggling into the roadway, or entangling themselves with other carts. He also stopped the street children from pilfering from the carts, as well as ensuring that the animals themselves didn’t pilfer, by munching the produce of the cart in front of them.

  Business, in summer, started before three o’clock, when ‘the crowd, the bustle, the hum’ of the morning really began. There were three official market days at Covent Garden – Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays – but for most of the century the market was in operation every morning. The market traders who walked in from the country wore smocks covered by a thick blue or green apron; if their job were of a particularly messy or unpleasant type – skinning rabbits, for example – this apron was in turn covered by a piece of sacking tied on top. In the main square were the flower, fruit and vegetable sellers. Potatoes and ‘coarser produce’ were on one side, with more delicate fruit and vegetables set apart, and potted plants also given their own section. Cut flowers were displayed separately, where ‘walls’ (wallflowers), daffodils, roses, pinks, carnations and more could be found in season. The size of the market and the variety of colour were dazzling. When Tom Pinch and his sister come up from the country in Martin Chuzzlewit, they stroll through the market in a daze, ‘snuffing up the perfume of the fruits and flowers, wondering at the magnificence of the pineapples and melons; catching glimpses down side avenues, of rows and rows of old women, seated on inverted baskets, shelling peas; looking...at the fat bundles of asparagus with which the dainty shops were fortified as with a breastwork’.

  Fruit and vegetables were the main focus, while around the sides subsidiary sellers set up, selling to other traders: horse-chestnut leaves to put under exotic fruit displays; ribbons and paper to make up bouquets; or tissue paper ‘for the tops of strawberry-pottles’, those conical wicker baskets shaped like witches’ hats, without which, it appeared, no strawberry could be sold. (See illustration on p. 22: the couple at top right carry two pottles.) On the railings at the edge of the Piazza hung many more baskets for sale, usually watched over by Irishwomen ‘smoking short pipes’ and calling out, ‘Want a baskit, yer honour?’ In the 1840s, these women wore loose gowns lo
oped and pinned up out of the dirt, showing their thick underskirts and boots; on their heads were velveteen or straw bonnets, with net caps underneath. Men and women alike wore luridly coloured silk ‘kingsman’ kerchiefs around their necks.

  Many other sellers had no fixed pitches, but walked around selling from trays or baskets: ‘One has seedcake [for birds], another...combs, others old caps, or pig’s feet.’ Dodging among them, essential to keep the goods moving in and equally essential to purchasers to get the goods back out, were the market porters, identifiable by their porters’ knots: a piece of fabric strapped across the forehead and hanging down over the nape of the neck, ending in a knot that secured the edge of their baskets or crates as they carried them on their backs, to distribute the weight. Some modified the fantail hats worn by workers in particularly dirty occupations, padding the fantails to provide a two-for-the-price-of-one porters’ knot and dust protection.

  Covent Garden was known for its luxury imports. Other markets had their own specialities. Like Covent Garden, Billingsgate fish market on the riverside, between London Bridge and the Tower, had first been established in the seventeenth century, although fish had been sold less formally on the site even earlier. Yet, unlike Covent Garden, at mid-century Billingsgate was still nothing but a ‘collection of sheds and stalls – like a dilapidated railway station’, and even the sheds were a fairly recent addition. Despite being the world’s largest fish market, Billingsgate had been held in the open street for the previous two centuries, moving indoors only in 1849.

  In the early part of the century, the market sold the local catch: in 1810, 400 boats fished the river between Deptford and London Bridge, providing Thames roach, plaice, smelts, flounder, salmon, eel, dace and dab. But by 1828, the run-off from the new gasworks near by, combined with ever more factory effluent, had destroyed the fisheries, and instead fishing boats from downriver or from coastal waters were pulled up the Thames by tugboats, with particularly delicate fish, such as turbot, brought in alive in tanks on deck. Rowboats then ferried the fish from the boats to the market. By 1850, Dutch fishing boats supplied the market with eels, while other vessels continued to bring catches from the North Sea, but the system had otherwise been modernized. The fishing boats stayed in their home waters, discharging their catch on to the faster clippers, which brought them upriver. Fish that went off quickly, like mackerel, were dropped off at the railway stations, to be put on the mail trains; having arrived by 6 a.m., they could be processed through the market to reach the fishmongers’ shops within sixteen hours of being caught.

  By 4 a.m. daily the Billingsgate workers had assembled. Here the porters wore jerseys, old-fashioned breeches, porters’ fantails and thigh-high boots as they prepared for the auctions. The auctioneers themselves wore frock coats and waistcoats, street clothes, to indicate they were middle class – Dickens called them ‘almost fashionable’ – but, as a nod to practicality, over their coats they tied heavy aprons. For much of the century these were made of flannel or coarse wool, usually serge – in Our Mutual Friend, set in the 1850s, the fishmonger’s men ‘cleanse their fingers on their woollen aprons’. It was only later that canvas replaced wool, while many at Billingsgate switched to oilskin.

  Many of the auctioneers met at the start of the day at Billingsgate’s most famous tavern, the Darkhouse, to compare notes on quality and discuss prices over coffee or ‘the favourite morning beverage...gin mingled with milk’. At five the bell rang to announce the opening of the market, when buyers immediately headed towards their favourite stalls. Now everything was a blur of action: ‘Baskets full of turbot...skim through the air...Stand on one side! a shoal of fresh herrings will swallow you up else.’ Crowds gathered by each auctioneer as the porter set out plaice, sole, haddock, skate, cod, ling and ‘maids’ (ray) in doubles – oblong baskets ‘tapering at the bottom, and containing from three to four dozen of fish’ each – while sprats were sold by the tindal – a thousand bushes – or in offals, which held ‘mostly small and broken’ fish, to be sold off cheaply. No examination was permitted, the porter hefting each double on to his shoulder as all over the market bidding began by Dutch auction, with the auctioneer setting a high opening price, then dropping down by increments until someone made an offer. Each type of fish was sold first to the ‘high’ salesmen, who bought in bulk and then sold on to middlemen, known as bummarees, at whose stands the doubles and tindals were broken up and the contents sold off in smaller quantities to individual shopkeepers or to costermongers.

  The other great market, Smithfield, was, for the first half of the century, a running sore in the City. Dickens could hardly bear it, but neither could he bear to leave it alone. This market appears again and again in his journalism, and in his novels. On market mornings, he wrote, ‘The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire...the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices...the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market...rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.’

  Smithfield cattle market had been held in the heart of the City since 1638. For five or six centuries even before that, a horse and livestock market had convened on the same spot, half a mile north-east of St Paul’s and a few hundred yards from the old redoubt of the City, the Barbican. By mid-century over 2,500 cattle and nearly 15,500 sheep traversed the traffic-choked streets twice weekly, before their purchasers drove them back out once more; on Friday, horses were sold; and three times a week there was a hay market. The streets leading to all the City markets were narrow and difficult to navigate: Newgate market near by had only two access roads, one just ten feet wide, one slightly less. Add the animals to the traffic and the streets became chaotic. One American resident in London said he avoided the spot on market days, because he loathed the ‘fiendish brutality of their drivers’, with calves ‘piled into a cart...and transported twenty or thirty miles, – their heads being suffered to hang out of the cart at each end, and to beat against the frame at every jolt of the vehicle’.

  Smithfield itself was merely a city square measuring three acres. (In 1824, Thomas Carlyle, seeing it for the first time, was so overwhelmed by the heaving mass of animals, stench and noise that he estimated the ground it covered was ten times its actual size.) Owing to the large number of animals to be compressed into this small space, extreme cruelty was routine. ‘To get the bullocks into their allotted stands, an incessant punishing and torturing of the miserable animals [occurs] – a sticking of prongs into the tender part of their feet, and a twisting of their tails to make the whole spine teem with pain.’ All around were animals bellowing in agony as drovers ‘raved, shouted, screamed, swore, whooped, whistled, danced like savages; and, brandishing their cudgels, laid about them most remorselessly...in a deep red glare of burning torches...and to the smell of singeing and burning’. Cattle were tied to the rails ‘so tightly, the swelled tongue protruded’, before being hocked: ‘tremendous blows were inflicted on its hind legs till it was completely hobbled’. For lack of space many more were pressed into ring-droves, circles where they stood nose to nose, wedged against the next ring-drove, driven into this unnatural formation, and kept there, by sharp goads. The goads were used so freely, were so savagely stuck into the animals, that good tanners rejected hides from Smithfield cattle, referring to them contemptuously as ‘Smithfield Cullanders’, that is, colanders, or sieves.

  By the time Dickens wrote this, it was news to no one: there had been parliamentary inquiries about the horrors of Smithfield in 1828, in 1849 and in 1850, but nothing could move the obdurate Corporation of the City of London. Smithfield made a lot of money for the City, on average £10,000 per annum in fees from the sellers. As the obvious solution to the problem was to move the ma
rket to a less crowded part of London, which meant outside the City, they stalled as long as possible.

  The population at large, however, could not close its eyes to the problem simply by avoiding Smithfield. The animals were driven in and out of the market through city streets clogged with ‘coaches, carts, waggons, omnibuses, gigs, chaises, phaetons, cabs, trucks, dogs, boys, whooping, roarings, and ten thousand other distractions’. By the time they were sold, they had been twenty-four hours without water or food, and it was scarcely surprising that the beasts ran amok regularly.

  In Dombey and Son, small Florence Dombey and her nurse are walking towards the City Road on a market day when ‘a thundering alarm of “Mad Bull!”’ was heard, causing ‘a wild confusion...of people running up and down, and shouting, and wheels running over them, and boys fighting, and mad bulls coming up’. That was Dickens in fiction. A decade later, in the 1850s, he watched in reality when, in St John Street, in Clerkenwell, the same shout of ‘Mad bull! mad bull!’ was heard: ‘Women were screaming and rushing into shops, children scrambling out of the road, men hiding themselves in doorways, boys in ecstasies of rapture, drovers as mad as the bull tearing after him, sheep getting under the wheels of hackney-coaches, dogs half choking themselves with worrying the wool off their backs, pigs obstinately connecting themselves with a hearse and funeral, other oxen looking into public-houses.’ The owner pelted along behind the animal until he finally found his bull in ‘a back parlour...into which he had violently intruded through a tripe-shop’. This sounds more like fiction than the fiction itself, but similar reports routinely appeared in the journals.

  Non-cattle-market days were no quieter. Friday afternoons were costermongers’ day at Smithfield, when the costers purchased the tools of their trade: 200 donkeys were sold on a concourse about eighty feet long while a smaller area held ponies. Barrows and carts were offered for sale, as were spare parts – wheels, springs, axles, seats, trays, or just old iron for running repairs. Harnesses, bridles and saddles were hung from posts or spread on sacking on the ground, as were smaller necessities, such as whips, lamps, curry-combs and feed-bags. Even at this much smaller market, Smithfield was ill suited for the number of people who attended. The concourse itself was paved, but the surrounding selling areas became so churned up and mixed with animal dung that the policemen on duty habitually wore thigh-high fishermen’s or sewermen’s boots; the costers accepted that their trousers would be ‘black and sodden with wet dirt’.