London 1808–1870 [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520329201

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History of London

LONDON 1808-1870: THE INFERNAL WEN

Also by Francis Sheppard Local Government in St Marylebone 1688-1835

History of London

LONDON 1808-1870: THE INFERNAL WEN

Francis Sheppard

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles 1971

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles Copyright © 1971 by Francis Sheppard ISBN: 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 1 8 4 7 - 8 LC:

71-142067

Printed in Great Britain

To my wife Elizabeth

Contents Preface Introduction

xiii XV

i

i

The People and Government of London

2

The London Money Market

3

The Growth of London before the Railways

4

The Transport Revolution

117

5

Industry and Commerce

158

6

Church, School and State

202

7

Public Health

247

8

The Radical Politics of London

297

9

Living in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London

345

46 83

Appendix: The Distribution of Occupations and Social Classes in London in 1851

387

Bibliography

391

Index

405

List of Illustrations Between Pages 1

Waterloo Bridge from Westminster Stairs. Oil painting by Charles Deane, 1821. London Museum

2

The Pool of London. Oil painting by Thomas Luny, c. 1801-10. London Museum

3

Detail from T . Faden's map of The Country Twenty-Five Miles Round London, 1800. Greater London Council collection

4

The Royal Mail leaving the General Post Office, St Martin's le Grand. London Museum

5

Traffic on London Bridge. Engraving by Gustave Dorè, 1872. London Museum

6

Westminster Bridge and the burning of the Houses of Parliament. Oil painting by Thomas Luny, 1835. London Museum

7

Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. Oil painting by John Anderson, 1872. London Museum

8

Detail from Froggett's Survey of the Country Thirty Miles Round London, 1833. Greater London Council colhction

9

Cremorne Gardens. Oil painting by Phoebus Levin, 1864. London Museum

10

A summer day in Hyde Park. Oil painting by John Ritchie, 1858. London Museum

11

A coffee stall. Oil painting by C. Hunt. London Museum

12

Street scene on a Sunday morning. London Museum

13

Pall Mall. Lithograph by Thomas Shorter Boys, 1842. London Museum

36-37

84-85

148-149

x

List of Illustrations

14

Jacob's Island, Bermondsey. Watercolour by J . L . Stewart, 1887. London Museum

15

Kensington Park Gardens, Notting Hill. Lithograph by T . Allom, 1853. London Museum

16

Peabody Square Model Dwellings, Blackfriars Road. London Museum

17

Crossing sweepers. London Museum

18

Searching the sewers. London Museum

19

Interior of an omnibus. Engraved from a painting by W. M . Egley, 1859. London Transport collection

20

T h e organ in the court. Engraving by Gustave Dorè, 1872. London Museum

21

Shillibeer's Omnibus. From a contemporary oil painting. London Transport collection

22

Knifeboard Omnibus. London Transport collection

23

Omnibus driver and conductor, 1877. London Transport collection

24

Applicants for admission to the casual ward. Oil painting by Sir Luke Fildes. Royal Holloway College

25

Brewery in Golden Lane. Mezzotint, 1807. London Museum

26

Entrance to the Regent's Canal at Limehouse. Watercolour by T . H. Shepherd, 1828. London Museum

27

Cubitt's yard, Pimlico. Watercolour. London Museum

28

T h e West India Docks. Lithograph by William Parrott. Port of London Authority collection

29

Unloading a collier. Drawing by J . A . Atkinson. National Maritime Museum

30

London and Greenwich Railway. Watercolour by R . B. Schnebbelie, c. 1840. London Museum

31

Detail from Cassell's Map of London, c. 1874-8.

32

London and Croydon Railway. Lithograph of 1838. London Museum

33

Building the Stationary Engine House, Camden Town. Lithograph by J . Bourne, 1837. London Museum

228-229

276-277

324-325

List of Illustrations 34

Building the Metropolitan Railway in Praed Street, Paddington, c. 1866. London Transport collection

35

Building Kensington High Street Metropolitan Railway Station, c. 1867. London Transport collection

36

Paddington Station. Oil painting by W. P. Frith. Royal Holloway College

37

Building St Pancras Station. From The Illustrated London News, 1868. London Transport collection

38

Baker Street Metropolitan Railway Station, 1863. London Transport collection

39

Metropolitan Railway near Farringdon Street. From The Illustrated Times, 1868. London Transport collection

40

Site clearance for the building of Queen Victoria Street and the District Railway, c. 1869. London Transport collection

41

Building the District Railway near Somerset House, c. 1869. London Transport collection

42

Workmen's Train arriving at Victoria, 1865. From The Illustrated London News. London Transport collection

43

Metropolitan Railway Workmen's Train. Engraving by Gustave Dorè, 1872. London Museum

44

Crank labour at Surrey House of Correction. Engraving in Mayhew and Binny's Criminal Prisons of London, 1862. London Museum

45

The Prison hulks off Woolwich. Engraving in Mayhew and Binny's Criminal Prisons of London, 1862. London Museum

46

Oakum Room at Coldbath Fields Prison. Engraving in Mayhew and Binny's Criminal Prisons of London, 1862. London Museum

47

Tread-wheel, Coldbath Fields Prison. Engraving in Mayhew and Binny's Criminal Prisons of London, 1862. London Museum

48

Holborn Viaduct. Watercolour by Hayward, 1869. London Museum

49

Building the Abbey Mills Main Drainage Pumping Station, West Ham, c. 1867. London Museum

xi 364-365

380-381

List of Figures 1

Growth and decline of population in various districts of London

9

2

Rates of increase and decrease of population in 1 8 0 1 - 1 1

11

3

Rates of increase and decrease of population in 1831-41

13

4

Rates of increase and decrease of population in 1861-71

15

5

London at the end of the eighteenth century. Based on T . Faden's map of The Country Twenty-Five Miles Round London, 1800

86

London in the 1830s. Based on Froggett's Survey of the Country Thirty Miles Round London, 1833

86

6 7

London in the 1870s. Based on Cassell's map of London, e. 1874-8 87

8

Estates in Central London. Reproduced by permission of the Greater London Council from Fig. 8.8 of Greater London Development Plan Report of Studies 90-1

9

London Railways in 1852. Based on a map in A History of London Transport, vol. 1, 1963, by T . C. Barker and Michael Robbins

127

Railways in Central London opened between 1852 and 1875. Based on a map in A History of London Transport, vol. 1,1963, by T . C. Barker and Michael Robbins

140

Railways in Outer London opened between 1852 and 1875. Based on a map in A History of London Transport, vol. 1,1963, by T . C. Barker and Michael Robbins

142

10

11

Preface HIS IS not a work of original research, for my personal circumstances have precluded my undertaking such a task. It is merely an attempt to describe some of the more important aspects of the history of London between 1808 and 1870, largely from those sources which have been available to me on loan from the London Library and from the Members' Library at County Hall. I am immensely grateful to the staff of these two libraries for their help. In adding yet another book to the already vast literature on the history of London I can only plead that nobody else has hitherto ventured to cover the whole of my chosen field, at least for very many years past. There are two causes for this absence of any recent attempt at synthesis. On the one hand there is the sheer size and complexity of the subject, and on the other there is the constantly increasing specialization of historical studies. In 1801 about one in ten of all the peoples of England and Wales lived in London, and in 1871 nearly one in every seven. To try to describe this vast urban complex as a whole is evidently not a suitable subject for university research students, nor has such a venture attracted anyone else. The result of this situation has been a constant and growing stream of theses (mostly unpublished), monographs and learned articles, all dealing with particular aspects of nineteenth-century London, many of them of the highest quality, but none of them attempting to take in the whole gigantic landscape at one glance. And this in its turn has resulted in the significance of London and its place in the life of the nation being neglected by those scholars with wider horizons who attempt to synthesize the whole field of English nineteenth-century history. I hope that someone better qualified than I will soon perform this task of synthesis more skilfully than I have been able to do here. In the meantime I wish to express my gratitude to all those writers who have covered some part of my field, and on whose work I have drawn so heavily: particularly to Professor H. J . Dyos, of the University of Leicester, a true pioneer who has opened up so many new avenues of research, and who has given me friendship as well as help; to Sir John Summerson on architecture; to

xiv

Preface

Professor Lynn Lees on the Irish; to J. R. Kellett on the impact of railways; to Professor P. G. Hall on the industries of London; to Sidney and Beatrice Webb on local government, the poor law and trade unionism; to W. T. C. King on the London discount market; to Professor T. C. Barker and Michael Robbins on transport; to Royston Lambert, Professor S. E. Finer and R. A. Lewis on public health; to E. P. Thompson on the working class; and to very many others, including my own colleagues, Peter Bezodis and Marie Draper. I am also most grateful to Brian Spencer of the London Museum for very generous help with the illustrations; to Michael Robbins for expert assistance with the railway maps; and to Marie Draper for making the index. FRANCIS

SHEPPARD

Henley on Thames

Introduction

E

ARLY ON a summer morning in the year 1802 the Dover coach rattled briskly over Westminster Bridge on its way out of London to the coast. Upon the roof of the coach sat a young man, gazing at the view. It was a beautiful day, and he was much moved by what he saw. By the time he reached Dover he had composed a sonnet. Earth has not any thing to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky, All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; 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 is lying still! Wordsworth lived for almost another half century. He spent most of this time among the valleys, rocks and hills of his home in far-away Westmorland, and only rarely came to the capital. One of his last visits, in 1845, was to take up his appointment as Poet Laureate; but he never wrote in praise of London again. Nor was this surprising, for within the space of only two generations the view from the bridge (and from many other places in London too) had changed greatly. The air had become laden with the smoke of steam vessels, gasworks and the furnaces of a host of industrial establishments, and the snort and hiss of railway locomotives at the new terminus at Waterloo Station could constantly be heard. Downstream the noble prospect towards the City and the dome of St Paul's had been ruthlessly sundered by the

xvi

Introduction

brick and iron of Charing Cross railway bridge. Beneath Westminster Bridge itself still flowed the perennial river, no longer gliding 'at his own sweet will', but controlled and restricted by the great granite wall of the Victoria Embankment, along which clattered an endless procession of carriages, buses, cabs and carts, and beneath which there now extended an underground railway and two giant tunnels, one for gas and water pipes and telegraph wires, and the other for sewage. Upstream, too, the change was as great - to the left a vast new hospital, to the right a new Palace of Westminster, more embankments, more bridges. Nothing within sight lay 'open unto the fields', and even the sooty parapet of Westminster Bridge itself was new - iron in place of stone. London had been transformed. When at last another poet did comment about London, he expressed himself in prose instead of verse. 'London and our other great commercial cities,' said William Morris in 1883, 'are mere masses of sordidness, filth and squalor, embroidered with patches of pompous and vulgar hideousness.' Whole counties, he continued, 'and the heavens that hang over them, [have] disappeared beneath a crust of unutterable grime'; the disease was spreading all over the country, 'and every little market town seizes the opportunity to imitate, as far as it can, the majesty of the hell of London and Manchester'.1 Earth, he seemed to be saying, had not anything to show more foul than London and the great new industrial cities of England. During the first seventy years of the nineteenth century London had changed more rapidly than at any other time in all her long history. This was the great age of the Industrial Revolution, when Britain was leading the world towards a new form of culture, lurching and bumping at first like a primitive aeroplane, but gradually gathering speed and climbing uncertainly upwards into the unknown regions of a new dimension. The familiar customs of field and village and centuries of mainly rural life receded ever farther away; precedent was no longer a guide, and in the mastery of the new element many people suffered, mentally as well as physically, and many died. London was at the very hub of this great human experiment, and her position in it was therefore unique. For centuries she had been the capital city, the greatest port, the greatest manufacturing centre and the greatest centre of population in the kingdom, or indeed in the whole world, with the exception, perhaps, of one or two of the teeming cities of India and China. Compared with other European capitals, for instance, the popula1

William Morris, Architecture, Industry and Wealth, 1902 edn, p. 172.

Introduction

xvii

tion of London in 1810 was almost double that of Paris, while in 1821 it was four times that of Vienna and more than six times as great as that of Berlin. In Britain London's population in 1801 was more than eleven times as great as that of the second city, Liverpool. Her 958,863 inhabitants amounted to more than one-tenth of all the peoples of England and Wales, over three-quarters of whom still lived either in the country or in small towns with a population of under 20,000 each. In terms of size and numbers, London's supremacy was complete and overwhelming. Seventy years later the position was very different. In 1871 the proportion of people living in the country or in small towns with a population of under 20,000 had fallen to little more than half the total population of England and Wales, and well over a quarter of the total population lived in large cities (including London) of over 100,000 inhabitants. But whereas in 1801 there were no towns except London with a population of over 100,000, by 1871 there were no fewer than "sixteen such provincial towns, and all but three of them were in the Midlands or the north. A tremendous movement of economic power, hitherto concentrated upon London but elsewhere widely diffused throughout the whole country, had taken place, and the centre of gravity of the whole nation had shifted northward. London, formerly the hub of the nation's attention and the nation's industry, had now become almost isolated in the still preponderantly agricultural south. For several decades the rate of growth among the great new northern towns had been much greater than in London. Between 1821 and 1831 the population of London had grown by 20 per cent, but Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Sheffield had all grown by over 40 per cent, and Bradford by 65 per cent. It was in these areas that the full force of the Industrial Revolution had made itself felt, and it was at Stockton and Darlington and Liverpool and Manchester, and not in London, that the earliest railways were built. Later in the century it was in the north, too, where the process of urbanization had advanced with such devastating speed, that many of the first tentative steps towards the solution of the ensuing social problems were taken - at Liverpool the first medical officer of health (1847), at Salford the first public library (1845), at Birkenhead a municipal park, free for all classes. This was the great age of provincial civic pre-eminence, the age of the Manchester Free Trade School, of Leeds Town Hall and in the 1870s of Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham. London, therefore, commanded a smaller share of public attention than hitherto. The City Corporation, B

xviii

Introduction

alone among all the great municipal corporations, was not reformed in the 1830s, and London was excluded from the Public Health Act of 1848. There was no focus for metropolitan civic pride and loyalty. Yet as always, London continued to grow - not at the vulgar upstart rate of the new northern towns, but evenly and inexorably, never, in any one decade between 1801 and 1871, at less than 16 per cent and never at more than 21 per cent. And so by 1871 her population had reached the enormous figure of over three and a quarter million. She was still more than six times as large as the second city, Liverpool, and the proportion of her population in relation to that of all the rest of England and Wales had actually risen from just over one-tenth in 1801 to almost one-seventh in 1871. In this new age of urban civilization more than a dozen great cities might share the economic power and the social problems which had hitherto belonged exclusively to the capital, but in size and wealth London still remained supreme. On the other hand, London's importance as the capital of the kingdom and the seat of government declined - temporarily. George IV could celebrate his coronation and in his West End improvements indulge his passion for building (mostly at other people's expense) with the extravagance of a Renaissance Pope, but in an age when more and more people thought that society should be little more than a collection of private contractual relationships freely entered into by each individual, the stature of the capital city was inevitably reduced. T o dismantle the often archaic economic regulations of the past and to let the nation's wealth 'fructify in the pockets of the people' became one of the principal aims of government. In 1833 the total number of civilian officials employed by the state was only 21,305, of whom over 15,000 were in the customs and excise departments; the Home Office establishment was 29. The dangers of centralization became a popular bogey. 'One of the principal things they had to dread,' Sir Edward Sugden told the House of Commons during the debates on the Reform Bill in 1832, 'was the giving too much power to the Metropolis. They ought not to lessen the influence of the Metropolis - indeed they could not do that if they would; but at least let them take care how they made the fate of the country depend on the will of the Metropolis.' Up in the gallery views of this kind were often heard and recorded by the young Dickens, who was then a parliamentary reporter, and years later, in Our Mutual Friend, his Mr Podsnap was to say much the same. 'Centralization. No. . . . Never with my consent. Not English.' After reaching its climax, with most unfortunate results for London,

Introduction

xix

around 1850, this feeling that the overbearing metropolis must be kept in its place gradually subsided. But even when the anti-centralization campaign was most vociferous, far more powerful forces had already been exerting themselves, largely unnoticed, in the opposite direction. The new urban age presented problems which demanded government attention, and while Parliament was still busying itself with the abolition of customs duties or the usury laws or the Navigation Acts it was also laying the foundations of a far more formidable new system of state paternalism. Factory or sanitary legislation, the reform of the prisons or the poor law, mounting concern with education, all occupied much parliamentary time in the middle of the nineteenth century, and all required administrators and inspectors for the enforcement of the new state action. By 1870 the power of London as the seat of government was increasing once again, and has continued to increase ever since. Tension, the tension of opposing forces whose conflict achieves a precarious and constantly shifting equilibrium, is always present in some form in the life-history of any city. But in a capital city the strains and stresses are more complex than elsewhere. There is the usual tension between town and country, here enlarged to become the dislike and mutual suspicion prevalent between the metropolis and the whole of the rest of the nation, between London, the 'Great Wen', and 'the provinces', as everywhere else is patronizingly called, almost as if they were dependent colonies, to be controlled and managed solely in the interests of the capital. But in a capital city there is also an inner tension only to be found there the tension between the government itself and the town in which it is situated. This, as much as mere superiority of size or wealth, is what distinguishes the history of London from all other English cities. For centuries the great City Corporation, embattled within the strong bulwarks of its ancient walls, and the sovereign power a mile away at Westminster had eyed each other with suspicion and apprehension, the one fearful for its wealth and privileges, the other for its often tenuous authority and physical safety. And now, by 1800, London had long ago burst beyond its ancient bastions and erupted over the surrounding country in hundreds of acres of bricks and mortar. 'What can be stable with these enormous cities ?' exclaimed the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, as he looked fearfully out of the window of his house. 'One insurrection in London and all is lost.' But this never happened. There were one or two small insurrections, but London was never 'lost', as were, at least once, the metropolitan cities

XX

Introduction

of almost every other country in Europe. London did not become a centre of effective revolutionary activity. Paradoxically, it was her enormous size as much as anything else which precluded the emergence of such a force. Politically, London never overawed the rest of the nation during the nineteenth century, and the accession of the middle classes to power and the rise of working-class consciousness and organization were both achieved without violence on the Continental scale. It was in some degree through this striking absence of metropolitan political pre-eminence in nineteenth-century England that the social and economic problems engendered by the Industrial Revolution were not resolved in a revolutionary context - a legacy which, for good or ill, still exerts its influence to this day.

1 The People and Government of London HE COLOSSAL growth of London is the central fact in the history of the capital in the nineteenth century. We have already seen that in terms of overall numbers the process was continuous, the rate of increase per decade fluctuating in the years 1801 to 1871 between a minimum of 16 per cent and a maximum of 21 per cent. This growth formed part of the enormous increase of population in the whole of England and Wales, where the total number of people rose from 8,892,536 in 1801 to 22,712,266 in 1871. Whether this growth was due primarily to an increase in the birth rate or to a decrease in the death rate, or to a combination of both, and what were the causes of these movements, are matters which are still being studied and discussed by historians.1 Prior to, and even for some years after, the Act of 1836 for the registration of births, marriages and deaths, evidence is scanty and often unreliable. There were two elements in the growth of London's population natural increase (i.e. excess of births over deaths within the existing community), and migration into London from outside. During the years 1856-70 the excess of births over deaths in London fluctuated between 24,000 and 41,000 per year, and between 1865 and 1870 the birth rate in London exceeded the average rate for the whole of England. There was therefore a very large element of natural increase in the overall growth of 1

See G. Talbot Griffith, Population Problems in the Age of Malthus, 1967 edn.

2

London 1808-1870:

The Infernal Wen

London's population amounting to 254,000 in 1851-61 and to 332,000 in 1861-71. 1 But London in the nineteenth century was by far the largest national centre of attraction for migrants and it has been calculated that in the decade 1841-51 (the first for which census evidence of birthplace is available) some 330,000 new immigrants came to the capital, representing no less than 17 per cent of the total population of London in 1841. In the 1850s and 1860s some 286,000 and 331,000 more immigrants arrived, equivalent to 12 per cent of the total population of the capital in both 1851 and 1861. Emigration out of London to other parts of England and Wales has been estimated at 116,000 and 160,000 respectively, and in addition an unknown number of emigrants left for Scotland, Ireland and abroad. London was in fact the hub of enormous and continuous movements of population.2 In the first half of the nineteenth century most of the migrants to London came from south and east England. Many of them came from the extrametropolitan parts of Middlesex and Surrey, and from Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire and Berkshire. Beyond this inner belt there was, in the words of Professor Redford, 'a considerable influx from all the southern and south-eastern counties, the north-western boundary of active movement running from Gloucestershire through Warwickshire to Leicestershire. The counties to the north-west of this line sent a relatively small proportion of people to London; but the attractive force of the capital city was felt in every part of the United Kingdom.'3 By the 1860s this pull was increasing significantly as far away as Dorset, Somerset and Devon, and many migrants were settling not in London itself but in the outer suburbs situated in Surrey and Middlesex.4 What this enormous upheaval meant in terms of individual human suffering can never be measured. Charles Dickens, whose parents removed from Chatham to Bayham Street, Camden Town, in 1822 when he was aged ten, always remembered his early Kentish childhood with 'deep, almost despairing nostalgia'. Years later he remembered how he had 1

Annual Summary of Births, Deaths and Causes of Death in London and other large Cities, published by the Registrar General, 1871, table 7 ; Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Registrar General, 1872, table 1 2 ; H. A. Shannon, 'Migration and the Growth of London, 1841-1891', Economic History Review, First Series vol. 5 , 1 9 3 5 , pp. 79-86. 2 Shannon, pp. 79-86. 3 Arthur Redford, Labour Migration in England 1800-1850, 1964 edn, pp. 184-5. 4 D. Friedlander and R. J . Roshier, 'A Study of Internal Migration in England and Wales, Part I', Population Studies, vol. 19, 1965-6, pp. 239-79.

The People and Government of London

3

'thought in the little back garret in Bayham Street, of all I had lost in Chatham', and soon he was to be exposed to the full rigours of a migrant's struggle for existence in London when he began to work a twelve-hour day at Warren's boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, Strand, for a wage of 6s. a week.1 At this same time another migrant, William Lovett, later to achieve fame in the Chartist movement, was experiencing the tribulations which he subsequently recorded in his autobiography. Lovett was a native of Cornwall, where he was born in 1800, a short while after the death of his father. After being apprenticed in the decaying trade of rope-making he had resolved to go to London, and here he arrived in 1821, on board a small trading vessel, with 305. in his pocket, 'knowing no one, nor being known to any'. He put up at a public house near the wharf where the Cornish vessels unloaded, and early the next morning he set out in search of work. But there was none to be had in the rope-yards, and after a fortnight he resolved 'to accept any kind of honest employment, rather than go home again without any'. One evening he met three fellow-Cornishmen, carpenters by trade, at his lodgings. 'They were, however, strangers to me, but coming from the same county, we soon became acquainted.' They agreed that although he was not a carpenter he should join them in their search for work, and that if they were successful he should do the roughest part of it and pay them half-a-crown each weekly in exchange for the benefit of their instruction. Two of his companions soon found jobs, but the third was not so successful. 'We generally got up at five o'clock and walked about enquiring at different shops and buildings till about nine; we then bought one penny loaf and divided it between us; then walked about again till four or five in the afternoon, when we finished our day's work with another divided loaf; and very early retired to bed footsore and hungry.' At last Lovett found work in Drury Lane, laying floors, but he became separated from his companion, whom the foreman refused to engage and from whom Lovett had hoped to learn the trade. Somehow he managed to keep the job and save 505., but even then his troubles were not over, for he subsequently encountered the active hostility of the trade societies towards the employment of men who had not been apprenticed, and it was only after several years of struggle that he was eventually admitted to membership of the cabinet-makers' society.2 1

Christopher Hibbert, The Making of Charles Dickens, 1967, pp. 30, 38, 52. William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, 1876, pp. 1-33. 2

4

London 1808-1870:

The Infernal Wen

Unskilled migrants did not have difficulties with the trade societies, but they were probably often near to starvation, as is shown by the case of a casual labourer at the Commercial Docks, recorded by Henry Mayhew around 1850. This man was the son of a small farmer in Dorset. ' I was left destitute, and I had to shift for myself - that's nine years ago, I think.' At first he had worked as a railway navvy, frequently shifting his quarters, but at last he had drifted to London, where he had got a job portering for a cousin, a grocer by trade. I've had my 155. a week in portering in London for my cousin; but sometimes I came down to 10s., and sometimes to 5s. My cousin died suddenly, and I was very hard up after that. I made nothing at portering some weeks. I had no one to help me; and in the spring of last year - and very cold it often was - I've walked after 10, 1 1 , or 12 at night, many a mile to lie down and sleep in any bye-place . . . I've thought of drowning myself, and of hanging myself, but somehow a penny or two came in to stop that.1 For the young migrant up from the country, with little money and nowhere to go to but the squalid common lodging-houses which proliferated in the most overcrowded districts of London, the moment of arrival was the most critical, and could determine the whole future course of his life. More of rustic innocence and honest purpose [wrote Lord Shaftesbury in 1847], both in males and females, has suffered shipwreck in these lodging-hooses than from any other perils that try the skill and courage of young adventurers. . . . The astonishment and perplexities of a young person on his arrival here, full of good intentions to live honestly, would be almost ludicrous, were they not the prelude to such mournful results. He alights - and is instantly directed, for the best accommodation, to Duck Lane, St Giles's, Saffron Hill, Spitalfields, or Whitechapel. He reaches the indicated region through tight avenues of glittering fish & rotten vegetables, with doorways or alleys gaping on either side - which, if they be not choked with squalid garments or sickly children, lead the eye through an almost interminable vista of filth and distress. . . . The pavement, where there is any, rugged and broken, is bespattered with dirt of every hue, ancient enough to rank with the fossils, but offensive as the most recent 1

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. Ill, 1861 edn, p. 310.

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5

deposits. The houses, small, low, and mournful, present no one part, in windows, door-posts, or brickwork, that seems fitted to stand for another week - rags and hurdles stuff up the panes, and defend the passages blackened with use and by the damps arising from the undrained and ill-ventilated recesses. Yet each one affects to smile with promise, and invites the country-bumpkin to the comfort and repose of 'Lodgings for single men'. 1 The census of 1861 records that there were over 250,000 domestic servants in London, of whom five-sixths were women. The census books show that very many of them were migrants, and although their condition of life must have varied enormously, it sometimes possessed considerable advantages. The diary of William Tayler, the son of an Oxfordshire farmer who by 1837 had taken service as a footman in the house of a wealthy widow living in Great Cumberland Street, St Marylebone, shows that he enjoyed comfortable quarters, ample good food and a regular wage of £42 a year. He also had enough free time to excurse about London to see his friends and relations, several of whom had also migrated to the capital, and even, probably, to revisit his country home at Grafton. He at least did not suffer either hunger or unemployment, but he was not able to live with his wife (also a native of Oxfordshire) and three young children, whom he lodged nearby and to whom he could only pay surreptitious visits, often on Sundays when he was supposed to be at church. Even so he was fortunate, for he himself recorded that 'It's surpriseing to see the number of servants that are walking about the streets out of place.' According to his own entirely unreliable calculations there were at least 1,520 high-class servants out of work in May 1837, 'and if I had reckoned servants of all work - that is, tradespeoples' servants - it would of amounted to many hundreds more. I am sertain I have underrated this number . . . London and every other tound is over run with servants.'2 Of the estimated 330,000 new migrants who arrived in London in the decade 1 8 4 1 - 5 1 , some 8,000 were Scots, 26,000 came from abroad, and 46,000 from Ireland.3 Irish migrants had been coming to London for centuries, but in the 1820s and 1830s their numbers mounted rapidly. The census of 1841 showed that the total number of Irish-born inhabitants of London was 82,291, or 3 per cent of the entire population of the 1

Quarterly Review, vol. 82, 1847, pp. 142-52. Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837, ed. Dorothy Wise and Ann Cox-Johnson, in St Marylebone Society Publications, 1962, p. 33 and passim. 3 Shannon, p. 81. 2

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capital. In the years of the great famine, 1846-8, when the potato crop failed in Ireland, starvation drove many more abroad, and by 1851 there were some 109,000 Irish-born living in London. This was equivalent to 4-6 per cent of the whole metropolitan population, its highest recorded proportion. But the size of the Irish colonies was in reality larger still, for these figures exclude the children born in England of Irish parents. Professor Lynn Lees has calculated that if these children and other relatives are included, the total number of Irish in London in 1851 was 156,000, and in 1861, 178,000. The principal centres of Irish settlement in London were in Holborn, St Giles in the Fields, Whitechapel and St Olave's, Southwark where migrants amounted to between 9 and 15 per cent of the total population of each district. These were the ancient centres of the Irish colonies, and here the newcomers congregated too, living together in the increasingly overcrowded courts and alleys often referred to as 'rookeries'. One of the most notorious of these rookeries, in St Giles's, within the area bounded by Bainbridge, Dyott and High Streets, was known (from the religion of its inhabitants) as the Holy Land, or sometimes as Little Dublin, and there were other concentrations nearby, in Seven Dials and off the east side of Drury Lane. In Whitechapel the main settlement was between Rosemary Lane (Royal Mint Street) and East Smithfield, and in St Olave's, to the east of London Bridge beside the river, where over half the people of one district were Irish-born in 1851. In the suburbs, too, there were a few colonies, notably in north Camberwell and north Kensington, where local conditions created a small market for unskilled labour.1 Of all the nineteenth-century immigrants the Irish were the most socially cohesive. Few of them had any love for England, they were nearly all Catholics, and they were generally poor, unskilled and often destitute. So they stuck together - at first, at any rate - mostly in the increasingly overcrowded central areas, where the chief markets for casual labour were to be found. They supplied much of the unskilled labour-force for the building of the railways, the docks and for the building industry in general. Others entered the 'sweated' trades, such as tailoring and shoemaking, while the more enterprising set up on their own account as street traders, where the forced necessity of living cheap enabled some of them to undercut even the Jews. Orange-selling was their particular speciality, and Henry Mayhew 1

I am greatly indebted to Professor Lynn Lees for lending me a copy of her Harvard University thesis, 'Social Change and Social Stability among the London Irish, 1830-1870', 1969, from which this information is taken.

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records an Irishwoman who took to this activity as saying that when her husband, a labourer, was out of work 'We don't live, we starruve. We git a few 'taties and sometimes a plaice. Today I've not taken 3d. as yet, Sir, and it's past three. . . . We live accordingly for there's ii. 3d. a week rent. . . . I don't know what will become of us if times don't turn.' Indeed, of all the immigrants who came to London it was probably the Irish who suffered most severely, and it was only in the 1860s and 1870s, when the scale of the Irish invasion had greatly declined, that they were able to begin to assimilate themselves to their new environment. Today no trace of their original concentrations in Holborn and the East End survives.1 Where did the English, Welsh and Scottish immigrants settle when they came to London ? Much would depend upon the trade (if any) of each individual migrant. Unskilled labourers would pick up work wherever they could, often gravitating to the centre, where the principal markets for casual labour were to be found. Specialists would naturally tend to go to the established centres of their own particular craft, which were usually in the inner areas. Furniture-makers, for instance, might go to Tottenham Court Road or Shoreditch, printers to Clerkenwell, shipwrights to Poplar and hatters to Southwark. But building operatives and the multitudes engaged in the service industries might find work in the newer suburbs. The physical growth of London was not simply a process of outward expansion. It was also accretive round the nuclei of ancient villages and hamlets, such as Hammersmith or Notting Hill Gate or Brixton, which generated an economic life of their own. Nineteenth-century Post Office Directories suggest that many suburbs originally had a much more independent occupational structure before the outward march of the urban frontier placed them in a position of greater dependence, and (with the exception of the Irish) many migrants from outside London evidently came direct to the suburbs without first settling in the inner areas. Often they seem to have settled in the outskirts nearest to their place of origin. William Tayler, for instance, had several relatives, including a butcher and a shoe-maker, at Turnham Green on the western extremity of London, where Oxfordshire migrants might naturally settle, and the census enumerators' books for 1841, 1851 and 1861 suggest many examples of such direct suburban settlement. In addition to these migrations into London there was also incessant 1

John A. Jackson, 'The Irish', London, Aspects of Change, ed. Ruth Glass, 1964, pp. 293-308; John A. Jackson, 'The Irish in East London', East London Papers, vol. 6, 1963, pp. 105-19.

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internal movement from one part of the capital to another. Amidst the illimitably complex pattern of internal migration revealed by the census books, two social gradients, to quote Dr H. J . Dyos's phrase, may be discerned, 'one leading upwards and outwards; the other leading downwards, if not inwards'. The upward and outward movement had been going on since the seventeenth century, but with greatly increased momentum during the early nineteenth century. By the middle of the century the old central areas of London were no longer acceptable as places to live in, at least for those who had any choice in the matter. The railways, although largely excluded from the City and the West End, nevertheless generated a vast amount of additional road traffic, and as leases fell in more and more space was devoted to the warehouses and offices which were needed for the rapid expansion of the metropolitan business centre. Land values were rising, and commercial users had longer purses than private residents. Mortality rates in the central areas were high, too, particularly during the cholera epidemic of 1848-9. All this was in marked contrast with the cleaner, quieter, healthier and less congested suburbs. By the 1850s the outward movement had attained a scale large enough to produce a substantial fall in the population of the City itself, and of the Strand and Clerkenwell districts. In the 1860s this process had extended to the much wider area shown on Fig. 4, while the outer suburbs showed large increases of population, ranging upwards from 25 per cent growth to 175 per cent in Battersea, where the number of inhabitants rose from 19,600 in 1861 to 54,016 in 1871. As the scale of the nineteenth-century outward migration mounted, the social differentiation of the various parts of London became more pronounced. This process was of course already of great antiquity, some of its chief causes being inherent in the topography of London. For at least two centuries the world of fashion had naturally gravitated to the districts adjacent to the royal court at Westminster, Whitehall or St James's. T o the east the port of London and the waterside had equally naturally become a great centre for commerce and industry. Once established, social divisions of this kind tend to gather cumulative momentum, and in the early nineteenth century the building of Regent Street marked the final detachment of London's principal shopping centre from the business centre of exchange in the City, and its establishment in the West End. 1 Similarly the railway companies' desire to obtain access to the docks produced a maze of lines in east London, debasing the existing residential 1

John R. Kellett, The Impact ofRailways on Victorian Cities, 1969, pp. 299-300.

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i Growth and decline of population in various districts of London

development which they traversed; while to the west the railways were largely excluded, apart from the underground, the termini at Charing Cross, Victoria and Paddington only penetrating the peripheries of the residential districts. The westward drift of all those numerous classes able to afford to indulge their mounting social aspirations became more marked than ever, while the depopulated centre of exchange in the City formed a convenient buffer zone separating the teeming areas of the

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East End from the respectable shopping and residential districts to the west. The census books of 1851 and 1861 for a single street in Kensington, chosen at random, illustrate this process. At Royal Crescent, a range of forty-four four-storey, single-fronted houses with basements, they show a merchant and his family moving from St Paneras to Kensington, a clerk in the Court of Exchequer from Camberwell to Woolwich to Kensington, an 'owner of houses and land' from Islington to Edmonton to Kensington, a tea dealer from Bow to Kensington, and a member of the Stock Exchange from Deptford to Rotherhithe to Kensington. In north London the railways provided a social frontier analogous to that of the City in the centre. To the north of Euston Road the approach lines to the three termini at Euston, St Paneras and King's Cross created a twilight zone of smoky marshalling yards and smelly gasworks which permanently divided Regent's Park and St Marylebone from Pentonville and Islington. To the south of the Thames the pattern was more complicated. The river itself, the disorderly commercial development along the waterside and the low-lying land beyond, had all provided obstacles to urban growth, but with the building of new bridges and turnpike roads in the early nineteenth century rapid development soon ensued. For the railways south London had the great advantages of close proximity to both the City and the West End, and, at any rate at first, of comparatively unimpeded access to convenient termini for the discharge of goods and traffic across the river. But the area which the railways served, extending from Kent round through Surrey and Sussex to Hampshire, was comparatively small, and contained no large manufacturing towns. Fierce competition between rival companies ensued, particularly in the 1860s and 1870s, and as in so many other places much of S.outh London was debased by a complex network of approach lines. The inner areas of Southwark, Bermondsey and north Lambeth, upon which the railways converged, suffered worst. In the mostly flat low area extending from Camberwell through Brixton to Battersea the social differentiation between one district and another was less clear-cut than to the north of the river, and only the hilly outer districts, such as Norwood, Dulwich and Sydenham, acquired a social milieu comparable with parts of Kensington or Paddington. Nevertheless some degree of social polarization between east and west, comparable to that north of the Thames, is discernible in south London, for the docks and commerce of the waterside exerted the same influence in Rotherhithe and

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Deptford as they did in Limehouse and Poplar; and in south-east London only Greenwich village and Blackheath were able to resist the westward movement of the prosperous and the aspiring. In all these 'upward and outward' migrations within London the railways exerted an enormous influence. This influence was exerted far more by their mere existence than by the travelling facilities which they provided. In the 1850s only some 27,000 commuters (at the most) arrived daily in London by rail, compared with the 244,000 who daily entered the City on foot or by omnibus, and Dr Kellett states that long after the introduction of cheap workmen's fares around i860 there were still, at the end of the century, only about 250,000 rail commuters out of a population of some six and a half millions. It was only, in fact, after about 1880 that the railways, to quote Dr Kellett again, 'began to make a marked impression, in London, at any rate, upon the Victorian suburbs, influencing their social composition and their direction and rates of growth. . . .' 1 But in the central areas their impact had already made itself felt by the end of the 1860s, when they had penetrated as far as they were ever allowed into the heart of London, to Victoria (i860), Charing Cross (1864), Broad Street (1865), Cannon Street and Farringdon Street (1866), and to Liverpool Street in 1874; this was the period of the building of much of the underground as well. We have already seen how this tremendous incursion, allied with other less immediately apparent causes, had prompted the exodus from the centre of many of the residents who could afford to leave. But there were others who could not afford this escape. Many working men, particularly the unskilled, had to live near their work. Often they were engaged on a daily or even an hourly basis, and catching the foreman's eye might mean, for themselves and their families, the difference between hunger or worse and at least a bare subsistence. Much of the demand for labour of this kind was concentrated in or near the ancient heart of London, at the docks, the wholesale food markets, the railway termini, and all the miscellaneous centres of commercial exchange. For them there was no alternative but to 'stay put' wherever work was to be found. The poor of the central districts were the Londoners who moved downwards in the great internal migrations of the nineteenth century. Between 1859 and 1867 alone, nearly 37,000 of the 'labouring classes' were displaced from their homes by enforced demolitions for new railway construction, and Dr Dyos estimates that between 1853 and 1901 some 76,000 1

Kellett, pp. 18, 95, 365.

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were evicted. Dr Kellett thinks the total for the period 1840 to 1900 was over 120,000, and in addition there were other evictions for new streets and docks.1 After each displacement the evicted packed themselves into some adjacent street, more overcrowded than before and paying a higher rent. Two examples, taken from the census enumerators' books, show that at the time of the building of Waterloo Station the number of inhabitants in Lambeth Square, a small cul-de-sac of thirty-five houses only a stone'sthrow from the new terminus, rose from 351 in 1841 to 454 in 1851, while in the same period the numbers in Hilliard's Court, St George's in the East, adjacent to new docks and railways, rose from 1 1 2 to 185. A third example, taken from a private census, shows that between 1841 and 1847 the number of people living in the twenty-seven houses in Church Lane, in the heart of the rookery in St Giles in the Fields, rose from 655 to some 1,095, largely through the nearby demolitions for the formation of New Oxford Street, though here the influx of more Irish migrants during the famine years also doubtless contributed.2 The poor are displaced [said The Times in 1861], but they are not removed. They are shovelled out of one side of the parish, only to render more overcrowded the stifling apartments in another part. . . . But the dock and wharf labourer, the porter and the costermonger cannot remove. You may pull down their wretched homes; they must find others, and make their new dwellings more crowded and wretched than their old ones. The tailor, shoemaker and other workmen are in much the same position. It is mockery to speak of the suburbs to them.3 Thus at the very moment when the railways were beginning to provide liberation by offering the means of domestic refuge at hitherto undreamed of distances from the place of work, and when the overall population of the central areas was beginning to decline, the forces of social compression, of which the railways themselves were one, were simultaneously producing dark pockets of deepening squalor and degradation. These conditions reflected themselves in the mortality rates of the central districts, which are referred to below. In the whole of London the 1 Kellett, pp. 327-8; H. J. Dyos, 'Railways and Housing in Victorian London' Journal of Transport History, vol. II, 1955, p. 14. 2 Horace Mann, 'Statement of the Mortality prevailing in Church Lane', Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. XI, 1848, pp. 19-24. 3 Kellett, p. 330, quoting The Times, 2 March 1861.

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death rate fell from 25-2 per thousand in 1840-9 to 23-6 in 1850-9, only to rise again to 24-3 in 1860-9, the figures for all England being 22-5, 22-2 and 22*4 respectively.1 These were the yeais of Edwin Chadwick's work on the sanitary administration of London and of the Metropolitan Board of Works' construction of London's sewage disposal system, which might have been expected to produce a greater fall in the mortality rate. But the figures have to be offset against the constantly rising average density of the population in the whole of London, which increased from 26 per acre in 1841 to nearly 44 in 1871. In these years, too, little progress was made in the prevention or cure of the principal causes of death. After the introduction of vaccination in 1796 deaths from smallpox, had, it is true, been greatly reduced, but there was no corresponding advance in the prevention or treatment either of consumption and diseases of the lung, which were the commonest cause of death in the mid-nineteenth century, or of measles, whooping cough and scarlatina. Recent research by Professor Thomas McKeown and Dr R. G. Record suggests that such decline of mortality as did take place may probably be attributable to generally rising standards of living, notably in the matter of diet, to improvements in personal hygiene and in the quality and quantity of the water supply, and in the case of certain diseases to a favourable shift in the relationship between the infectious agent and the human host.2 And although the expectation of life of a male infant born in London in 1841 was only 35 years compared with 40 for the whole of England and Wales, yet at least this compared favourably with Manchester, where he might expect to live for only 25 years, or Liverpool (24), or with a dozen other large provincial towns.3 Contemporaries were much disturbed by the high rate of mortality among men aged over 25. At the ages of 35 to 45 the male mortality in all England was 1-346 per cent; in the Eastern counties it was only 1-035, but in London it was 1 7 1 4 , a rate only exceeded in the north-western urban complex. This high rate was attributed largely to consumption and diseases of the lung brought about by the conditions of work in which many 1

Thirty-Third Annual Report of the Registrar General, 1872, tables 2, 51. Thomas McKeown and R. G. Record, 'Reasons for the Decline of Mortality in England and Wales during the Nineteenth Century', Population Studies, vol. 16,19623, pp. 94-122. 3 D. V. Glass, 'Some Indicators between Urban and Rural Mortality in England and Wales and Scotland', Population Studies, vol. 17, 1963-4, pp. 263-7; P P-, 1875, v °lxviii, part II (Command 1155-1), Supplement to the Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Registrar General, p. cxxxvi, table 31. 2

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men were employed. Much of this labour took place in the overcrowded central area, where old-established centres of small-scale industry tended to persist, and it was here that the mortality rates were highest. In general, districts with low population densities had low mortality rates. Taking the years 1840 to 1870 as a whole, the mortality in the western and northern districts was below the average for the whole of London, while in the central and eastern districts it exceeded the rate for all London. In the southern districts it exceeded the average in the 1840s and 1850s, but fell below it in the 1860s. There were, of course, many local variations. In Hackney for instance, where in the 1860s there were still only 32 persons to the acre, the death rate was only 20 per 1,000 living compared with the average for all London of 24-3. In Lewisham, where both the density and the mortality were still extremely low, the mortality had nevertheless risen from 17 in the 1840s to 19 in the 1860s because the sanitary improvements had not kept pace with the very rapid increases of population there. But in the inner areas the position was very different. Here densities of around 200 to the acre were common, and in the parish of St Anne, Soho, there were as many as 325 in 1871. In St Giles in the Fields, where the density hovered around 220 to the acre, the annual mortality rose from 26 per 1,000 in the 1840s to 28 in the 1850s and 29 in the 1860s. In Church Lane, St Giles's, within the Irish rookery, 310 out of every 1,000 children born in the 1840s died before reaching the age of one, and of every 1,000 children aged one, 457 died before reaching the age of two. In Holborn and Finsbury, where the density was over 230 to the acre, total deaths stood at 28 per 1,000 in the 1860s, while in Whitechapel and St George's in the East, with densities of 205 and 225 respectively, mortality reached 30 per 1,000. In these and other compressed areas, life was nasty, brutish and short.1 The social and occupational structures of the people of London in 1851 are tabulated in the appendix on page 387. How Londoners lived and worked are subjects which will gradually emerge later in this book, but a few points may be briefly touched upon here. The tables contained in the census of 1861 reveal an extraordinary range of occupations, only to be 1

P.P., 1875, vol. xviii, part II, p. xlv and table 56; Horace Mann, pp. 19-24; R. Price-Williams, 'The Population of London, 1801-81', Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. X L V I I I , 1885, table C; Thirty-Third,-Annual Report ofthe Registrar General, 1872, table 51.

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found in a capital city. There were 26,000 people engaged in the general or local government of the country, 21,000 in the defence of the country, 61,000 in the learned professions or engaged in literature, art or science, and 29,000 'persons of rank or property' - all pre-eminently metropolitan concerns.1 In the 'domestic' class there were 23,000 in what would now be called the hotel and catering industry, plus 251,000 domestic servants. The 'commercial' class contained 59,000 engaged in buying, selling, keeping or lending money, houses or goods of various kinds, and 112,000 in the conveyance of men, animals, goods or messages. Persons engaged in art and mechanic productions covered an enormous field and numbered 207,000. Workers and dealers in textile fabrics and dress numbered 287,000, the food and drink trade and manufacture 8o,ooo, workers and dealers in minerals 62,000, and general labourers 56,000. The largest class of all comprised 'Persons engaged in the Domestic Offices or Duties of Wives, Mothers, Mistresses of Families, Children, Relatives', 1,409,000. There was no staple manufacturing industry in London, and the industrial structure was predominantly small in scale as well as infinitely varied in scope. Clothing, furniture-making, precision instrument-making, printing, tanning, currying, engineering and shipbuilding were all strongly represented in London, and of course building, the labour force of which numbered some 91,000 men and women in 1861. But despite the size and variety of her manufactures London was essentially a centre of service industries, and Professor Hall has recently demonstrated that in 1861 Greater London contained almost a quarter of all the workers in the whole of England and Wales engaged in the provision of services of one kind or another.2 Over three-fifths of all employed persons in Greater London in 1861 were concerned with supplying services for other Londoners, or for people living outside London who had personal or commercial dealings there. Some of these service workers have already been noted. Besides the civil servants and men of the two armed forces they included 13,000 lawyers, 9,000 physicians, surgeons and druggists, 3,000 ministers of religion, 6,000 artists and 18,000 teachers (of whom 14,000 were women), plus 2,000 teachers of music. Within the commercial class there were 22,000 clerks. Carriers on the roads (omnibus workers, livery stablekeepers, cabmen and carters) and carriers on the sea and rivers (including dock labourers), each with 29,000, far outnumbered railway employees, with only 8,000, and the 1 2

These and the following figures are given to the nearest thousand. P. G. Hall, The Industries of London since 1861, 1962, p. 21.

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messengers and porters, with 32,000, were more numerous still. There were 11,000 persons 'engaged about Animals' (mostly grooms and farriers). The food and drink trades, catering and the enormous armies of domestic servants and general labourers have already been mentioned. Not surprisingly, some 30,000 Londoners defied the census enumerators' attempts to classify them, and were entered as 'Persons of no stated Rank, Profession, or Occupation', but it is perhaps a little surprising to find that even in the great urban complex of 1861 London still numbered over 3,000 farm labourers and 32 shepherds among her inhabitants. What administrative machinery existed for the management of this enormous concentration of population ? At the opening of the nineteenth century the term 'local government' was not yet known, for government implies order, and in London order was still conspicuously absent, at least outside the City. Within the six hundred acres of the City itself and its adjacent liberties, stretching from the Temple on the west to the Tower on the east, the ancient City Corporation reigned supreme, its existence confirmed by innumerable royal charters extending over seven centuries. It possessed wide, indefinite powers, it commanded a large and constantly increasing revenue, and in addition to possessing every known franchise and immunity within its own territories its jurisdiction extended into the surrounding counties as well. The Corporation had purchased the Shrievalty of Middlesex; it had peculiar rights in the Bailiwick of Southwark; it had a monopoly of markets (though often infringed) within a radius of seven miles; it collected coal duties over a radius of twelve miles, and it even governed the river Thames for some eighty miles from Staines to the Medway, including the whole port of London. This extraordinary power, allied to the great wealth of many of its citizens, gave the City of London its unique independence. Although it had for centuries been the capital city of the kingdom, neither the royal palaces nor the offices of government nor the Houses of Parliament nor the royal courts of justice had ever been situated within its boundaries. Hence the centuries of bargaining between the City and the Court, privileges and immunities being constantly exchanged for money and support, until at last, with the Revolution of 1688, nothing more was left for the City to acquire. Thereafter the government ceased to attempt to intervene in the City's affairs, while the City, now replete with privilege, adopted a posture of strict defence of its established rights.

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The Lord Mayor presided over the bafflingly complex internal organization of the Corporation. Beneath him stood the two Sheriffs and the four principal Courts - the Court of Aldermen, twenty-six strong and elected for life; the Court of Common Council, to which, in addition to the Aldermen, some two hundred common citizens were annually elected by the freemen ratepayers of the wards; the Court of Common Hall, comprising the Mayor, Aldermen and some twelve thousand liverymen of the City Companies; and lastly the Court of Wardmote, the foundation of the whole structure, and held separately in each of the twenty-six wards. Every ratepayer, whether a freeman of the City or not, could attend the Wardmote, and here they elected the ward officers (clerks, beadles and constables), the Common Councillors of the ward, and whenever a vacancy occurred, the Alderman of the ward.1 The Lord Mayor and the two Sheriffs were elected annually by the Court of Common Hall from the twenty-six members of the Court of Aldermen. The Aldermen were almost always rich and elderly, a fortune of twenty or thirty thousand pounds being deemed the minimum requisite for membership. They acted as Justices of the Peace for the City, the four Members of Parliament were almost always chosen from their ranks, and at their weekly meetings they discharged a varied assortment of business. The Court of Aldermen was, in theory, the supreme executive of the City, but by the early nineteenth century its ancient pre-eminence was being increasingly challenged by the Court of Common Council. Most of the Councilmen were retail tradesmen or ambitious attorneys, and in the second half of the eighteenth century they had gradually taken over most of the legislative and administrative business of the Corporation. This process had often brought them into conflict with the Aldermen, particularly in political affairs, where the Councilmen held more radical views, but by the 1830s the Court of Common Council had become, in the words of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 'the supreme organ of administration, itself wielding the whole power of government, and reducing the Lord Mayor and Aldermen to a mere magistracy'.2 The Court of Common Council was in its turn frequently criticized and denounced by the third of the four principal Courts, the Court of Common Hall, of which all the City liverymen were members. It was in this large unwieldy body that the City's Members of Parliament as well as the Lord 1

S. and B . Webb, English Local Government: The Manor and the Borough, 1908, pp.

569-792

Webb, pp. 637, 658-68.

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Mayor and Sheriffs were chosen, and through this concern with national affairs the Court of Common Hall regarded itself as the political spokesman of the City. In the early nineteenth century its resolutions and addresses were almost always critical of the government (except during the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1832) but they exercised little influence in Parliament, and the Common Hall's attempts to control the Court of Common Council were no more successful.1 Separate from the Corporation, but nevertheless very closely associated with it, were the eighty-nine City Companies or Gilds, most of them very ancient. Admission to the freedom of the Companies was by birth, apprenticeship or purchase, no active connection with the craft or 'mystery' of the Company being required, and any freeman of a Company could acquire the freedom of the City on payment of a further fee; except for honorary freedoms conferred as a mark of distinction this was indeed the way in which all freemen of the City were recruited. Admission to the livery ofa Company, the next stage in the hierarchy, was granted to such freemen as a Company might determine, on payment of yet another fee, but even then a liveryman had no share in the administration of his Company, which was entirely managed by the Court of the Company, a close body recruited by cooption from the livery. Many of the Companies were enormously wealthy, with increasingly valuable freehold properties within the City itself or in the suburbs. They conducted their affairs in complete secrecy, and in 1876 it could still be said of them that 'their real funds, which ought to have been expended under founders' wills, have been spent in dining festivities, making merry, sometimes in donations to charities or public objects, in paying large salaries, and dividing surplus property amongst members of the mystery'. The companies' 'magnificent entertainments are so many social bribes to secure friends to cover their mismanagement and abuse of the great trusts in their hands'. It was, indeed, in substantial measure through the Companies' numerous liverymen, and the lavish hospitality which they dispensed, that the City Corporation was able to exercise its all-pervasive political influence throughout the nineteenth century.2 The City of London was, in fact, in the Webbs' phrase, a democracy of ratepayers, a tightly knit community in which every resident householder could take an active part in municipal administration. Even in the Court of Wardmote, the oldest of the four principal Courts, but which had now 1

Webb, The Manor and the Borough, pp. 616-25. Webb, pp. 579-80; 'The Government of London', Journal of the Statistical Society, vol. X L I X , 1876, pp. 101-3. 2

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lost most of its ancient importance, the twenty-six wards were subdivided into 169 precincts, each with its own offices to be annually filled. There were constant meetings, mostly to transact the most pettifogging business, constant door-step gossiping and constant convivialities. Every elected representative must have known personally almost every member of his electorate. The shopkeepers and tradesmen who formed the bulk of the City's residents were both proud of and completely content with these ancient arrangements. There was no demand for municipal reform. Yet there was another side to this happy scene of municipal democracy. There were the sewers, or rather the almost total lack of them, and the hundred and fifty slaughterhouses, many of them underground. There was Smithfield cattle market, a vile nuisance which the Corporation for years refused to remove or reform, and the City's prisons, among the worst in the whole kingdom. It might be argued that all these things were the City's own affair, but there were others too, equally discreditable, which had ramifications far beyond the sacred square mile of the City's boundaries the repeated opposition to the establishment of new markets in the new suburbs, the neglect of the conservancy of the river, the failure to protect property in the Port of London, and, even more surprising for such a commercially minded community, the lack of any attempt before the end of the eighteenth century to enlarge the dock accommodation in the Port. The City shopkeepers were, in fact, often selfish and petty-minded. 'Counter transactions in small coins,' said a critic in 1854, 'have no tendency to give a man an enlarged view, or habits of viewing in a large sense any interests which he may be delegated to promote.' 1 It was through this lack of 'an enlarged view' that the City had ever since the seventeenth century refused to accept any responsibility for the new suburbs which were growing up all around it. By 1 8 1 1 only about one-tenth of the people of the metropolis lived in the tight little municipal island in the centre. For all that the City cared, the remaining nine-tenths could be left to sink or swim as best they could. These nine-tenths consisted in 1 8 1 1 of just over one million people. The built-up area had by now extended, in varying degrees of completeness, into over ninety administrative parishes or precincts situated outside the City and within the three counties of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent. The million inhabitants of these suburbs amounted to about onetenth of the whole population of England and Wales. Until 1855, when the population of this vast amorphous area had 1

Quoted in Webb, The Manor and the Borough, p. 692.

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increased to well over two million, there was no administrative authority (except, after 1829, that of the Metropolitan Police) concerned with the whole district. At county level there were three separate benches of magistrates for Middlesex, Surrey and Kent, as well as that of Westminster, while at parish or precinct level there was every conceivable variety of local assembly, ranging from such ancient oddities as the tiny Liberty of the Old Artillery Ground near Bishopsgate, with a population of 1,428 in 1801, to the great and powerful select vestry of St George's, Hanover Square, which managed the affairs of a parish with over 60,000 inhabitants. All these local assemblies, regardless of differences in size, wealth or constitution, discharged substantially the same functions. The Justices of the Peace did, it is true, exercise some degree of supervision over the vestries in such matters as the appointment of the unpaid parish constables, overseers of the poor and surveyors of the highways, and the inspection of the parish accounts. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century this supervision had become more nominal than real, particularly in the larger parishes, where much of the daily work was now done by paid officials. In the eighteenth century many of the Justices had been notorious for their 'trading' activities, and although after about 1780 there appears to have been some improvement in the quality of the membership of the bench, it was still possible for a man like Joseph Merceron, for many years the'boss'of Bethnal Green, to become a Justice, and during William Mainwaring's chairmanship of the Middlesex Quarter Sessions from 1781 to 1816 widespread corruption was prevalent. In practice the parishes were therefore left largely to their own devices in the discharge of their affairs, the most important of which were the paving, lighting and cleansing of the streets, the relief of the poor and the maintenance of the peace. The diverse constitutions of the parish vestries reflected this absence of supervision. Many of them were still, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of the 'open' variety, where all male ratepayers were entitled to attend. These open vestries usually survived in the little parishes within the City, and in the still largely rural out-parishes such as St Paneras, where the volume of business remained small. But in the great new suburbs 'close' or 'select' vestries were more common, and here membership and power were restricted to a group of from thirty to a hundred of the 'principal inhabitants', who filled vacancies by nomination. Some of these close vestries owed their existence to immemorial custom, or to a bishop's faculty issued when the parish had been established, or to an Act of Parliament. By 1800 about a quarter of the two hundred

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metropolitan parishes had select vestries. Many of them were in the more fashionable western parts of London, such as St Marylebone and the Westminster parishes of St Paul's, Covent Garden, St James's and St George's, Hanover Square, where the exclusion of almost all the inhabitants from participation in parochial affairs was in marked contrast with the democratic franchise of the Westminster parliamentary constituency. Yet the situation was in reality even more confused, for by the early nineteenth century the majority of these metropolitan local authorities had obtained their own individual Acts of Parliament and were acting under the various powers which these Acts had conferred. In 1759, for instance, the trustees of the Liberty of Norton Folgate, another tiny enclave near Bishopsgate, had obtained an Act for the better lighting, cleansing and watching of the extraparochial part of the Liberty. In 1778 a paving Act had been obtained, but the fifty commissioners nominated in this Act were quite separate from the trustees under the Act of 1759. The latter, in 1810, found it necessary to promote a second lighting Act, to which they tacked on powers for the supervision of the workhouse. Drainage, of course, was outside the purview of either the trustees or the commissioners, and a mercer living in the liberty in 1805 recalled how water used to stand three or four feet deep in the cellars of the houses, so that 'the Servants used to be obliged to punt themselves along in a washingtub, from the Cellar stairs to the Beer Barrels, to draw Beer daily for the Use of the Family'. 1 Norton Folgate was not at all unusual in having two separate authorities to manage its affairs. In the rapidly growing parish of Lambeth, where the open vestry obtained a local Act in 1810, there were also nine separate local trusts for the lighting of different parts of the parish, while the affairs of St Mary, Newington, where there was also an open vestry, were in the hands of thirteen trusts. Sometimes the area of jurisdiction of trusts of this kind was coterminous with that of the parish in which they were situated; sometimes, as in the case of Southwark, it extended over several parishes, but more usually it extended over only part of a parish - a hamlet, perhaps, or a single estate or a square. Within the parish of St James's, Westminster, the aristocratic inhabitants of St James's Square had their own Act for the embellishment of the garden of the square. They were exempt from payment of the parish scavenging rate; instead they levied a private rate of their own and even employed their own watchmen. Naturally, the parish vestry disliked this 'contracting out' from their authority and, in 1

Survey of London, vol. xxvii, 1957, pp. 18-19.

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general, the more powerful and efficient the vestry, the fewer the number of local statutory trusts with special privileges. In the well-run parish of St Marylebone the select vestry was for many years successful in resisting all attempts to establish any privileged statutory position within its bounds, and was only defeated at last by the Crown itself at the time of the formation of Regent Street and Regent's Park. But at the opposite extreme stood the neighbouring parish of St Paneras, whose extraordinary administrative arrangements provide the most startling example of what laissez-faire in the suburbs of London could produce in the early nineteenth century. During the last twenty-five years of the eighteenth century the population of St Paneras had leaped from some 600 to 31,779, and by 1821 to 71,838, of whom Charles Dickens's family, precariously solvent and living in Somers Town for a year or two after leaving the Marshalsea prison, was perhaps a typical example. The parish vestry was of the open variety commonly found in rural areas, but now several hundred and sometimes even a thousand angry and vociferous ratepayers would crowd into the meetings held in the little medieval parish church which still stands beside the railway lines outside St Paneras Station. There was no committee of management, no paid staff and no local Act of Parliament. Everything was decided, or left undecided, in public meetings, the results of elections to the parish offices of churchwarden and overseer were frequently contested, and in one year there were even two rival sets of churchwardens, elected by rival vestry meetings. Everywhere inefficiency and recrimination prevailed. But at last, in about 1802, a self-appointed reformer, Thomas Rhodes, cowkeeper, brickmaker and great-uncle of Cecil Rhodes, appeared, determined to abolish the open vestry. He persuaded the vestry, already suspicious of his intentions, to agree to a parliamentary Bill which would permit the appointment of salaried officials. But then he surreptitiously added clauses which would have excluded the open vestry from any part in the relief of the poor, and substituted a Committee of Guardians, 'elected in perpetuity and self-continuing'. The vestry discovered Mr Rhodes's machinations and the Bill was withdrawn. But Mr Rhodes then produced a report on the scandalous condition of the workhouse - the paupers were half-naked, although three thousand yards of linen had been bought for their use, £200 had been spent in one year on beer for the nurses who sat up with the sick, and at least one-third of the whole of the expenditure at the workhouse was either fraudulent or illegal. So the vestry had to agree to a Bill, passed in 1804, authorizing the appointment of elected Directors of the Poor. But the Directors, once established, immediately promoted

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another Bill by which they were to remain in office for life and with power to co-opt their successors. The furious fulminations of the vestry were useless: the Bill passed, and for some years the Directors relieved the poor in splendid independence and at ever rising cost. At last the vestry roused itself again and promoted a Bill for the abolition of the Directors. But the Directors replied with a Bill to extinguish the open vestry, and as open vestries were not favourably regarded by Parliament at this time, it was Mr Rhodes and the Directors who proved successful. In 1819 an Act was passed abolishing the open vestry and conferring all the powers of both the vestry and the Directors upon a select vestry of persons named in the Act and with power to fill vacancies by co-option.1 Meanwhile the population of the parish was continuing to grow by leaps and bounds - 103,548 by 1831,129,763 by 1841 - new estates were being laid out - the Foundling, the Calthorpe, the Doughty, the Southampton and the Bedford, to name only a few - and in the absence of any effective parochial authority, local Acts of Parliament proliferated in corresponding numbers. Eventually there were no fewer than eighteen separate paving trusts within the four square miles of this one parish. In the East End of London these conditions were matched, in Bethnal Green, by the rule of Joseph Merceron, originally a clerk to a lottery officekeeper, who for over thirty years corrupted and dominated the affairs of the parish. He became chairman of the watch board and the paving trust, treasurer of the parish funds, a commissioner of sewers and even a Justice of the Peace. By controlling the beer shops (of which he owned eleven and received rent from eleven more) he was always able to assemble several hundred weavers and artisans at the meetings of the open vestry, where he could 'instigate his creatures to riot and clamour, even within the walls of the church'. Whomever he nominated the vestry was sure to approve, for 'the will and opinion of the major part of the parish were subservient to Mr Merceron's views and interests for a long course of years'. But in 1809 his supremacy was challenged by a new rector. Merceron was prosecuted for fraudulently appropriating £925 of parish money to his own use, and corruptly licensing his turbulent public houses; he was convicted, fined and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment. But when he emerged from gaol he reasserted his old power. His son-in-law was elected vestry clerk, and he himself was re-elected a commissioner of the Court of Requests. With old age perhaps advancing he seems not to have 1

S. and B. Webb, English Local Government: The Parish and the County, 1906, pp. 207-11.

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opposed the establishment in 1823 of a quasi-select vestry, of which he and another Merceron, probably his son, soon became the leading members. He became treasurer of the watch board and the paving trust, of which he had previously been chairman, and when in 1830 another parliamentary committee investigated the affairs of Bethnal Green, all the old accusations of secrecy, jobbery and corruption were made once again. In the anarchical conditions of early nineteenth-century suburban London the Mercerons proved indestructible, and their grip on the affairs of Bethnal Green was not finally relaxed until their death.1 In addition to the vestries and the statutory trusts there were also the turnpike trusts. They too had been established by local Acts of Parliament, either for the formation of new trunk roads, like the Marylebone Road, or more commonly for the upkeep of existing roads which the local vestries had proved incompetent to maintain. Oxford Street, for instance, until 1721 the joint responsibility of the four bordering parishes, had been handed over to a trust which repaired the surface, but, typically, the cleansing of the surface remained the duty of the parishes. Each Turnpike Act nominated a hundred or more trustees, with power to co-opt to fill vacancies, and the cost of their works was met by tolls paid by the users of the road. By the early nineteenth century there were over fifty such trusts in the vicinity of London. 2 Then, too, there were the metropolitan commissioners of sewers, eight in number. Until the early nineteenth century, when it acquired its malodorous significance, the word sewer meant a channel for the removal of surface water, and this was the sole function of all the commissioners of sewers, who were appointed by the Crown under the Sewers Act of 1532. In the new suburbs of London the survival of these archaic bodies was to prove a disaster for public health in the mid-nineteenth century. The Westminster commission, in 1834, had some 250 members, but the average attendance at meetings was only eleven. 'The gentlemen come in and walk out again: they are not men of business; perhaps they do not stop two minutes.' For some thirty years this commission had been controlled by two families of contractors to whom almost all the contracts for sewers were given. On average some £30,000, raised by the sewers rate, were spent each year, but until 1817 the Westminster commission did not even possess a plan of its own drains. Until about 1 8 1 1 the connection of 1

Webb, The Parish and the County, pp. 79-90. F. H. W. Sheppard, Local Government in St Marylebone 1688-1835. A Study of the Vestry and the Turnpike Trusts, 1958, pp. 59, 217. 2

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bog-houses or houses of office with the street sewers was in theory forbidden in London, and sometimes actually prevented. Even in a large part of the City, including Cheapside, there was in 1844 no underground drainage; 'its nightsoil is kept in poisonous pools, of which the inhabitants pump out the contents into the open channels of the street in the night, or have them removed by nightmen'. In the same year it could still be said that 'it is not to the present day a recognized purpose of several of the principal Boards of Commissioners to protect the public health, by the covering of the sewers, from the noisome effluvia of a city's drainage, but only to effect the mechanical transmission of the superfluous fluids to the Thames.'1 This parlous state of public administration in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century arose from the indifference displayed during the whole of the eighteenth century by King and Parliament towards the actions of the various local governing authorities throughout the country. So the obligation of each individual to render unpaid service to the community - the foundation of English local administration from time immemorial - survived, and indeed in rural areas was still perhaps adequate to the needs of the times. But in London there were many parishes like St Pancras which could no longer depend for the paving, lighting and cleansing of their streets, for the relief of the poor, and above all for the maintenance of order upon the unpaid, amateur, compulsory labours of their surveyors of the highways, overseers of the poor and constables. The local Act of Parliament provided a temporary remedy for situations of this kind, and by the end of the eighteenth century the obligation of personal service had in general been superseded in the suburbs of London by the obligation to pay a rate from which contractors or salaried staff could be employed to perform the old irksome tasks. The condition of many parishes had been greatly improved in consequence, but this new system of local administration had equally severe limitations. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was to prove quite inadequate to deal with the problems of an urban community between one and two million strong. There were the problems of public health, ignored in all eighteenth-century local Acts, and the endless but now more insistent problem of pauperism. There was the constitutional problem of finding a compromise between the rowdy direct democracy of the open vestries and the self-perpetuating 1

Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. V I I 1844, pp. 157-8,164; S. and B. Webb English Local Government: Statutory Authorities for Special Purposes, 1922, pp. 81-2, 105 n.

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exclusiveness of the select vestries, for except in the City the idea of representation by election had not yet been applied to local government in London. These problems gave rise to another one - how to reconcile the gradually mounting intervention of the State in local affairs with the pretensions of the existing local authorities, so long accustomed to independence and therefore so resentful of any interference ? And lastly, and perhaps most important of all, there was the problem of law and order. Yet despite this formidable agenda there was no demand for municipal reform in London until the mid-i820s. Nobody quite knew how to deal with the suburbs, their unincorporated and unco-ordinated urban vastness presenting a unique and baffling problem in the life of the nation. Few people at Westminster cared much about their difficulties anyway, and fewer still in Whitehall, and so such trifling improvements in their administration as were made depended upon the equally unco-ordinated tinkerings of private Members of Parliament. First there was Michael Angelo Taylor, son of the distinguished architect Sir Robert Taylor, to whom, presumably, he owed his ambitious combination of Christian names. After sitting in the House of Commons for thirty years without ever holding any office, Michael Angelo Taylor began to draw attention to the defective paving and lighting of the streets of London. For three years he laboured to establish one board of paving commissioners for all the streets within five miles of the centre of London. The vestries at once raised a tremendous hubbub, of course, in which every sort of well-founded objection and ill-founded prejudice was levelled at Michael Angelo's proposal, and at last in 1817 he had to be satisfied with a much less ambitious Act by which the existing laws were consolidated; no overall control was imposed on the activities of the multifarious boards and vestries.1 Next came William Sturges Bourne, a knowledgeable barrister, unimpressive in manner and ineffective in speech. He, too, had sat in the Commons for many years before becoming chairman, in 1817, of a Select Committee on the Poor Laws. As a member of the aristocratic select vestry of St George's, Hanover Square, he had been much concerned at the way in which in neighbouring disorderly open vestries, such as that of St Pancras, the many small ratepayers could outvote the large property owners. Parliament at the time of Peterloo did not view these primitive parochial democracies with favour either, and he was therefore successful in the promotion of two Acts, one of which restored by a system of plural 1

D

Sheppard, pp. 185-7.

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voting in open vestries the influence hitherto enjoyed by the substantial men of property. This Act applied compulsorily to all vestries outside the City of London and Southwark which were not already governed by their own Acts or peculiar customs. Most of the suburban parishes did already possess such local Acts, and were therefore unaffected, while in those parishes where it did apply the Act often led to disorderly polls in which the complicated graduated scale of voting always proved cumbrous and often unworkable. Sturges Bourne's second Act, passed in 1819, permitted any parish to elect a committee annually to manage the relief of the poor. It was quickly adopted in several metropolitan parishes with open vestries like Clapham, Lambeth and Rotherhithe, where at first it proved very successful in reducing the amount spent on poor relief. But at best it was only a makeshift arrangement; the parish committees could only deal with poor relief, they could be and after a while often were abolished by the open vestries which had appointed them, and above all the committees were commonly (and quite wrongly) referred to as select vestries - a term which within a few years was to be widely regarded in London as synonymous with exclusiveness, secrecy and corruption. Of much greater lasting importance than Sturges Bourne's efforts was the Act promoted in 1826 by Lord Lowther for the amalgamation of all the turnpike trusts in the vicinity of London to the north of the Thames. Fourteen separate trusts were superseded by a new body of Commissioners appointed by the government, over which Lord Lowther himself presided for thirty years. A staff of salaried officers headed by James McAdam, the son of the inventor of the macadamized road, was appointed, many toll gates were removed, the tolls were reduced, and in a short while the general standard of the roads was greatly improved.1 After the dangerous post-war years of crisis, cautious administrative reforms of this kind had at last become possible, and by 1829 it was even possible for John Cam Hobhouse, one of the radical Members for Westminster, to mount a frontal assault on the secrecy and exclusiveness of the close vestries. The agitation of which he made himself the parliamentary spokesman coincided with the Reform Bill crisis of 1830-2, and will be discussed later in this chapter. But 1829 was also the year of the establishment of the Metropolitan Police, and it is now necessary to look back at the antecedents of this event. In 1828, the year before the new police first went out on the beat, 1

Sheppard, pp. 217, 223-5.

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London was protected by some 5,500 men, of whom about nine-tenths were under the control of the City authorities and the parish vestries. In the City there was a small 'general police' of some fifty men under the immediate superintendence of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, but there were also over a thousand beadles, constables and watchmen distributed among the twenty-six wards, so that each ward had virtually 'an independent establishment of its own'. In the suburbs there were the unpaid parish constables and the paid beadles and watchmen, some 3,500 in all, directed by over seventy vestries and trusts.1 The constables were chosen by the Justices; they were usually petty tradesmen, and they gave their reluctant service for one year, unless they were able to hire a substitute. In times of emergency 'special constables' were often sworn in to supplement the parish constables. The beadles, decked out, frequently, in an impressive gold-laced livery, were the masters of the parish watch-house, from which they sallied forth by day to drive away beggars, prostitutes and wandering animals. But in the hours of daylight Londoners were to a large extent expected to protect themselves, and it was only at night that the watchmen, far more numerous than the beadles, came on duty. They were badly paid; often they were old or corrupt, and many of them slept or wenched in the wooden watch-boxes which were provided on each beat. They were a totally inadequate force for the prevention of crime; there was no uniformity of organization, and concerted action of any kind between the different parish vestries was quite impossible. Government participation in the routine maintenance of order in London - as distinct from the use of troops in times of emergency - dated back to the early 1750s, when Henry Fielding, one of the Justices for Middlesex, had obtained a small grant of public money which had enabled him to recruit and pay half-a-dozen 'thief-takers' attached to his office in Bow Street. After the Gordon Riots of 1780 William Pitt had in 1785 introduced a Bill which in many respects foreshadowed Sir Robert Peel's Act of 1829. But his proposals had evoked widespread opposition, particularly from the City Fathers, who had claimed that they would involve 'the entire subversion of the Chartered Rights of the greatest City in the World', and the Bill had been abandoned. In 1792, however, an Act sponsored by a private Member of Parliament had established seven new Public Offices on the lines started by Fielding at the Bow Street Office. At each office there were to be three salaried or stipendiary Justices of the Peace, 1

Leon Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Lam and its Administration from 1750, vol. II, 1956, pp. 176-81.

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with six paid constables acting under their orders. Even this measure, from which the City was excluded in order to avoid its inevitable opposition, was regarded as merely a temporary experiment; it was only enacted for three years, and was not made permanent until 1812. In 1798 Patrick Colquhoun, the most able of the new stipendiary magistrates and author of a comprehensive Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, was able to put some of the theories which he had there advanced into practice by the formation of a Marine Police Establishment for the protection of property in the Port of London. Part of the cost was paid for out of public funds and part by the West India merchants, who had been the chief sufferers in this paradise for pilferers.1 The efficient policing of the river was achieved because, firstly, crime had reached such a scale as almost to threaten the commercial prosperity of the nation (then at war), and, secondly, because there existed, in the West India merchants, a powerful interest capable of exerting pressure on the government to act and capable, also, of paying from their own pockets for most of the cost of the action which they advocated. Thirdly, too, it may be conjectured that the government proved unusually sympathetic because crime in the port was reducing its own revenues from the customs dues. But elsewhere in London none of these conditions prevailed - even the scale of crime had become so familiar as to excite no undue alarm and consequently the degree of government intervention remained minimal. In 1828 the government's contribution to the protection of London was still based on the Public or Police Offices, now nine in number, at each of which there were up to twelve paid constables acting under the orders of the stipendiary magistrates. AtBowStreet the eight constables had evolved into the famous Runners, the crack force of the whole metropolis, whose members ranged all over the country and often achieved spectacular successes. They were increasingly employed by private individuals, and were well paid for their services - one Runner, John Sayer, left £30,000 but their day-to-day duties were neglected in consequence. 'Why, Sir Richard Birnie,' exclaimed John Townsend (another successful Runner, who left £20,000) on being ordered by the chief magistrate at Bow Street to execute a routine warrant, 'I beg leave to tell you that I think it would lessen me a great deal if I were to execute a warrant upon a barber . . . after forty-six years service, during which period I have had the honour of taking Earls, Marquises, and Dukes. No, no, Sir Richard . . . don't let 1

Radzinowicz, vol. II, p. 365.

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me be degraded by executing the warrant.' The Bow Street Runners more nearly resembled a disreputable private detective agency than a branch of a modern police force; they accepted rewards, they often kept information about a crime to themselves in the hope of turning it to their own advantage later, and their honesty was often suspect. Much more valuable were the various patrols attached to Bow Street, consisting of some 270 men, some mounted, whose main task was to guard the principal roads leading out of London up to a distance of some twenty miles. The total number of constables paid for out of government funds in 1828 was 427, including 86 at the Thames Police Office, and the cost was about £35,000. All such other protection as London enjoyed was provided by the City and the parishes, by the private subscriptions of individual inhabitants who employed their own watchmen, or in the port, by the subscription of the new dock companies.2 This protection did not amount to much, particularly in the eastern parts of London. In the 1820s the tradesmen of Bethnal Green were so terrorized by a band of thieves that they frequently had to put up their shutters to protect their shops. This gang, sometimes several hundred in number, lurked by dayinthe abandoned brickfields, muddy and otherwise deserted, where they cooked their stolen food, and from which they would emerge to ambush the huge herds of cattle being driven along the main highways to Smithfield Market. The drover would be knocked on the head and the fiercest beast removed to their lair until night-fall. Then they would sally out through the unlit darkening streets, shouting and hallooing and driving the terrified bullock before them. Noise, confusion and alarm would ensue, and anyone whom they met would be assaulted and robbed. Within the space of a single fortnight in 1828 over fifty people were attacked, and one of the gang had been seen with 'nearly half-a-hat-full of watches'. Similarly in Spitalfields, a few years earlier, a crowd of two to three hundred men, motivated, probably, by economic grievance or personal grudge, had driven a bullock into a silk warehouse which contained goods worth over £100,000. The proprietor's own men had poured scalding water over the attackers; then they fired blanks, and eventually ball shot. 'A desperate contest' had ensued, which would have ended in favour of the attackers had not a posse of constables from the nearest Public Office arrived. Seven workmen were severely wounded, while 'the poor bullock was driven in so 1 2

Quoted in Radzinowicz, vol. II, p. 268. Radzinowicz, vol. II, pp. 177 n., 189 n., 5 1 1 - 2 8 .

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desperate a manner, and goaded so cruelly, that it ran mad; and after having tossed several peaceable persons, fell down dead'.1 Conditions of this kind were tolerated because all Englishmen were convinced that they possessed a birthright of personal freedom from arbitrary authority of all kinds, and that they must maintain this birthright whenever it was attacked. Freedom of speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and the right to trial by jury would all be threatened by a government system of police, and this is why all governments from the 1750s onwards preferred to evade the problem. Committees of the House of Commons were repeatedly appointed to investigate 'the State of the Nightly Watch in London'. They repeatedly reported, as for instance in 1812, that the 'mode of watching [is] generally bad, and the men employed, both in number and ability, wholly inefficient for the purpose', and 'neither the Magistracy or the Government have at present any connection whatever with the state of the Watch, and no control or superintendence over it'. Yet no action was taken, even after the notorious Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, which Robert Southey described as 'events which, by the depth and expansion of horror attending them, had risen to the dignity of a national interest'. Tories, Whigs and Radicals in Parliament, and even the unrepresented common people outside Parliament, were all united in at least one conviction, that an improved police would subvert their ancient liberties. Even the very word 'police' was of foreign origin, hardly known in England before the middle of the eighteenth century. When Robert Peel (not yet a baronet) became Home Secretary in 1822 the office which he held, with one short break, until 1830 - London had in the past seven years experienced numerous political as well as criminal disorders, and the use of troops to restore the peace had become almost a matter of routine. But what might happen if the troops were to mutiny, as had nearly happened in a battalion of the Guards ? The Duke of Wellington, in 1820, thought that 'either a police in London or a military corps which should be of a different description from the regular military force' was needed, and this, therefore, was one of the first questions to which Peel turned in 1822, when he successfully moved for the establishment of another select committee on the police of the metropolis.2 This Committee's report embodied the last, classic statement of the national antipathy for the whole idea of police. 'It is difficult to reconcile an effective system of police' - so ran the report - 'with that perfect 1 2

Annual Register, 1818, p. 266; 1826, pp. 140-1. Norman Gash, Mr Secretary Peel, 1961, pp. 312-13.

The People and Government of London

35

freedom of action and exemption from interference, which are the great privileges and blessings of society in this country; and Your Committee think that the forfeiture of such advantages would be too great a sacrifice for improvements in police, or facilities in detection of crime, however desirable in themselves if abstractedly considered.'1 Yet within seven years Peel was able to dissipate these ancient fears and prejudices, at any rate within the walls of Parliament. There was as yet no important political group which championed police reform, but criminal law reform had already been supported with some success for a number of years by a few M.P.s, led by Sir Samuel Romilly. Baffled over the police, Peel turned to this complementary problem, and by a dozen new Acts he consolidated, simplified and above all mitigated a mass of obsolete and now unenforceable legislation. Parliament became accustomed to accepting the measures of cautious reform which he sponsored, and in 1828 he was able to secure the appointment of yet another committee to look at 'the State of the Police of the Metropolis'. By this time he had realized that to be successful he must exclude the City, with which, so he had privately confessed in 1826, he would 'be afraid to meddle'.2 This, perhaps, was why the committee's principal conclusion, that 'the time is now come when determined efforts ought to be made to effect a decisive change', met with hardly any opposition. When Peel introduced his Metropolitan Police Bill in April 1829, Parliament was engrossed in the Catholic Emancipation question. The Bill was debated briefly, even perfunctorily, and there were only two petitions against it one from the parish of Hackney, where the watch was exceptionally efficient, and the other from the Commissioners for paving, lighting and watching the estate of the Skinners' Company in St Pancras. In the Commons one member and in the Lords one peer objected to the exclusion of the City, but to the former Peel replied that 'the state of the nightly police there was much superior to that in Westminster', and to the latter the Duke of Wellington did not even bother to reply. On 19 June 1829 the Bill received the royal assent.3 The Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 proved to be a turning-point in one of the great historic processes of the nineteenth century - the elimination of riot and disorder as an endemic feature of British life. Within a few 1

P.P., 1882, vol. iv, Report of Select Committee on Police of the Metropolis, p. 1 1 . Gash, p. 492. 3 Journals of the House of Commons, 1829, pp. 3 1 1 , 338; Hansard, new series, vol. 2 1 1829, cols. 1488, 1752. 2

56

London 1808-1870: The Infernal Wen

years the Metropolitan Police had established their authority over the streets of London, and while Nottingham Castle, the centre of Bristol and the hay and corn-ricks of Southern England blazed away during the Reform Bill crisis, order never quite broke down in the capital - a fact of far more than merely metropolitan significance. During the Chartist and other disorders of the 1830s and 1840s troops had still to be used in the provinces, but they no longer had any active role in London, where in moments of emergency the policeman's baton was less likely to provoke another Peterloo than the firearms of the army or the sabres of the yeomanry. Soon the services of the Metropolitan Police were frequently being sought for in less orderly parts of the country; its officers went to establish and train new provincial forces on metropolitan lines, and detachments of men - 2,246 between 1830 and 1838 - were temporarily posted to the provinces for the preservation of the peace in times of crisis. Between 1830 and 1850 nearly every established government in Europe was overthrown by revolution, and without the Metropolitan Police 'the tale of England's development', might also, in Professor Reddaway's words, 'have been either republican or reactionary'.1 But this success was not gained without cost. The Act of 1829 established a new police office with authority over the whole metropolitan area (except the City) within a range of between four and seven miles of Charing Cross. Two magistrates (or commissioners, as they were soon called) were to preside over this new office; they were to establish and administer a police force consisting of 'a sufficient number of fit and able men', who were to be sworn in as constables and who were to have the same common-law rights as the old parish constables. But the commissioners themselves were to be appointed by the Home Secretary, and everything that they did was to be under his immediate superintendence. What the Act did, in effect, was to transfer one of the principal functions hitherto discharged by the London local authorities to the central government. It isolated and dealt successfully with one aspect of local government reform because the need for action there could no longer be delayed, but by so doing it greatly retarded the reform of all other aspects of metropolitan local administration. Even this was only achieved by by-passing the main source of opposition - the City Corporation. The Act was therefore a landmark in the history of administration as 1

T . F. Reddaway, 'London in the Nineteenth Century: The Origins of the Metropolitan Police', The Nineteenth Century and After, vol. 147,1950, p. 105; F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists, 1959, p. 105.

i Waterloo Bridge from Westminster Stairs, 1821

2 The Pool of London, c. 1 8 0 1 - 1 0

(1over leaf) 3 London in 1800

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