Part 5

There are two squares lying north of this street; in one of them is the Swedish church, where, on a Sunday morning, you may see rows of light-haired, blue-eyed mariners listening to the sermon in their own tongue. In a corner, if you look about, you may come upon the quaintest little Jewish settlement you can possibly imagine; it is an almshouse, with a synagogue and all complete; if you are lucky you will find one of the old bedesmen to show you the place. St. George’s Street, also, rejoices in a large public garden; no street ever wanted one so badly; it is made out of the great churchyard, where dead sailors and dead bargemen and dead roysterers lie by the hundred thousand. And one must never forget Jamrack’s. This world-wide merchant imports wild beasts; in his place—call it not shop or warehouse—you will find pumas and wildcats of all kinds, jackals, foxes, wolves, and wolverines. It is a veritable Ark of Noah.

In the very heart of Wapping stands a group of early eighteenth century buildings, with which every right-minded visitor straightway falls in love; they consist of schools and a church; to these may be added the churchyard—I suppose we may say that a churchyard is built, when it is full of tombs. This sacred area is separated from the church by the road; it is surrounded by an iron railing, and within there is a little coppice of lilac, laburnum, and other shrubs and trees which have grown up between the tombs, so that in the spring and summer the monuments become half-revealed and half-concealed; the sunshine, falling on them, quivering and shifting through the light leaves and blossoms, glorifies the memorials of these dead mariners. The schools are adorned with wooden effigies of boy and girl—stiff and formal in their ancient garb; the church is not without a quiet dignity of its own, such a dignity as I have observed in the simple meeting-house of an American town. In some unexplained manner it seems exactly the sort of church which should have been built for captains, mates, quartermasters, and bo’s’uns of the mercantile marine in the days when captains wore full wigs and waistcoats down to their knees. The master boat-builder and master craftsman, in all the arts and mysteries pertaining to ships and boats, their provision and their gear, were also admitted within these holy walls. The church seems to have been built only for persons of authority; nothing under the rank of quartermaster would sit within these dignified walls. You can see the tombs of former congregations; they are solid piles of stone, signifying rank in the mercantile marine. The tombs are in the churchyard around the church, and in the churchyard on the other side of the road. As you look upon the old-fashioned church, this Georgian church, time runs back; the ancient days return: there stands in the pulpit the clergyman, in his full wig, reading his learned and doctrinal discourse in a full, rich monotone; below him sit the captains and the mates and the quartermasters, with them the master craftsman, all with wigs; the three-cornered hat is hanging on the door of the high pew; for better concentration of thought, the eyes of the honest gentlemen are closed. The ladies, however, sit upright, conscious of the Sunday best; besides, one might, in falling asleep, derange the nice balance of the “head.” When the sermon is over they all walk home in neighborly conversation to the Sunday dinner and the after-dinner bottle of port. The tombs in the churchyard belong to the time when a part of Wapping was occupied by this better class, which has long since vanished, though one or two of the houses remain. Of the baser sort who crowded all the lanes I have spoken already. They did not go to church; always on Sunday the doors stood wide open to them if they would come in, but they did not accept the invitation; they stayed outside; the church received them three times—for the christening, for the wedding, for the burial; whatever their lives have been, the church receives all alike for the funeral service, and asks no questions. After this brief term of yielding to all temptations, after their sprightly course along the primrose path, they are promised, if in the coffin one can hear, a sure and certain hope.

Here are Wapping Old Stairs. Come with me through the narrow court and stand upon the stairs leading down to the river. They are now rickety old steps and deserted. Time was when the sailors landed here when they returned from a voyage; then their sweethearts ran down the steps to meet them.

“Your Polly has never been faithless, she swears, Since last year we parted on Wapping Old Stairs.”

And here, when Polly had spent all his money for him, Jack hugged her to his manly bosom before going aboard again. Greeting and farewell took place in the presence of a theater full of spectators. They were the watermen who lay off the stairs by dozens waiting for a fare, at the time when the Thames was the main highway of the City. The stairs were noisy and full of life. Polly herself had plenty of repartee in reply to the gentle badinage of the young watermen; her Tom had rivals among them. When he came home the welcome began with a fight with one or other of these rivals. The stairs are silent now; a boat or two, mostly without any one in it, lies despondently alongside the stairs or in the mud at low tide.

Sometimes the boats pushed off with intent to fish; the river was full of fish, though there are now none left; there were all kinds of fish that swim, including salmon; the fishery of the Thames is responsible for more rules and ordinances than any other industry of London. The boatmen were learned in the times and seasons of the fish. For instance, they could tell by the look of the river when a shoal of roach was coming up stream; at such times they took up passengers who would go a-fishing, and landed them on the sterlings—the projecting piers of London Bridge—where they stood angling for the fish all day long with rod and line.

Next to the Wapping Old Stairs is Execution Dock. This was the place where sailors were hanged and all criminals sentenced for offenses committed on the water; they were hanged at low tide on the foreshore, and they were kept hanging until three high tides had flowed over their bodies—an example and an admonition to the sailors on board the passing ships. Among the many hangings at this doleful spot is remembered one which was more remarkable than the others. It was conducted with the usual formalities; the prisoner was conveyed to the spot in a cart beside his own coffin, while the ordinary sat beside him and exhorted him. He wore the customary white nightcap and carried a prayer-book in one hand, while a nosegay was stuck in his bosom; he preserved a stolid indifference to the exhortations; he did not change color when the cart arrived, but it was remembered afterward that he glanced round him quickly; they carried him to the fatal beam and they hanged him up. Now, if you come to think of it, as the spot had to be approached by a narrow lane and by a narrow flight of steps, while the gallows stood in the mud of the foreshore, the number of guards could not have been many. On this occasion, no sooner was the man turned off than a boat’s company of sailors, armed with bludgeons, appeared most unexpectedly, rushed upon the constables, knocked down the hangman, hustled the chaplain, overthrew the sheriff’s officers, cut down the man, carried him off, threw him into a boat, and were away and in midstream, going down swiftly with the current before the officers understood what was going on.

When they picked themselves up they gazed stupidly at the gallows with the rope still dangling—where was the man? He was in the boat and it was already a good way down the river, and by that kind of accident which often happened at that time when the arrangements of the executive were upset, there was not a single wherry within sight or within hail.

Then the ordinary closed his book and pulled his cassock straight; the hangman sadly removed the rope, the constables looked after the vanishing boat, and there was nothing to be done but just to return home again. As for the man, that hanging was never completed and those rescuers were never discovered.

As an illustration of the solitude of this place, before its settlement under Queen Elizabeth, one observes that there was a field called Hangman’s Acre, situated more than a quarter of a mile from the river, where in the year 1440 certain murderers and pirates were hanged in chains upon a gallows set on rising ground, so that they should be seen by the sailors in the ships going up and down the river. There was not therefore at that time a single house to obstruct this admonitory spectacle.

The “hamlet” of Shadwell is only a continuation of St. George’s or Ratcliffe Highway; its churchyard is converted into a lovely garden, one of the many gardens which were once burial grounds; the people sit about in the shade or in the sun; along the south wall is a terrace commanding a cheerful view of the London docks, with their shipping. There is a fish-market here, the only public institution of Shadwell; there are old houses, which we may look at and perhaps represent, but there is little about its people that distinguishes them from the folk on either hand.

In the year 1671 the church was built; Shadwell was already a place with a large population, and the church was built in order to minister to their spiritual wants. What could be better? But you shall learn from one example how the best intentions were frustrated and how the riverside folk were suffered to go from bad to worse, despite the creation of the parish and the erection of the church. The first rector was a nephew of that great divine and philosopher, Bishop Butler. He was so much delighted with the prospect of living and working among this rude and ignorant folk, he was so filled and penetrated with the spirit of humanity and the principles of his religion, that his first sermon was on the text, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!” This good man, however, received permission from the bishop to live in Norfolk Street, Strand, about three miles from his church. And so, with a non-resident clergy, with no schools, with no restraints of example or precept, with little interference from the law, what wonder if the people reeled blindly down the slopes that lead to death and destruction?

The name of Ratcliffe or Redcliff marks a spot where the low cliff which formerly rose up from the marsh curved southward for a space and then receded. It is a “hamlet” which at first offers little to interest or to instruct. It consists of mean and dingy streets—there is not a single street which is not mean and dirty; none of the houses are old; none are picturesque in the least; they are rickety, dirty, shabby, without one redeeming feature; there is a church, but it is not stately like St. George’s-in-the-East, nor venerable like that of Stepney; it is unlovely; there are “stairs” to the river and they are rickety; there are warehouses which contain nothing and are tumbling down; there are public houses which do not pretend to be bright and attractive—low-browed, dirty dens, which reek of bad beer and bad gin. Yet the place, when you linger in it and talk about it to the clergy and the ladies who work for it, is full of interest. For it is a quarter entirely occupied by the hand-to-mouth laborer; the people live in tenements; it is thought luxury to have two rooms; there are eight thousand of them, three quarters being Irish; in the whole parish there is not a single person of what we call respectability, except two or three clergymen and half a dozen ladies; there are no good shops, there are no doctors or lawyers, there is not even a newsvender, for nobody in Ratcliffe reads a newspaper. But the place swarms with humanity; the children play by thousands in the gutters: and on the door-steps the wives and mothers sit all day long and in all weathers, carrying on a perpetual parliament of grievance. Here once—I know not when—stood Ratcliffe Cross, and the site of the cross—removed, I know not when—was one of the spots where, in 1837, Queen Victoria was proclaimed. Why the young Queen should have been proclaimed at Ratcliffe Cross I have never been able to discover. I have asked the question of many persons and many books, but I can find no answer. The oldest inhabitant knows nothing about it; none of the books can tell me if the accession of the Queen’s predecessors was also proclaimed by ancient custom at Ratcliffe Cross. Unfortunately, it is now extremely difficult to find persons who remember the accession of the Queen, not to speak of that of William IV.

Ratcliffe has other historical memories. Here stood the hall of the Shipwrights’ Company. This was a very ancient body; it existed as the fraternity of St. Simon and St. Jude from time immemorial; the Shipwrights’ Company formerly had docks and building yards on the south of the Thames; then they moved their hall to this place on the north bank, and seem to have given up their building yards.

Here was a school, founded and maintained by the Coopers’ Company, where Lancelot Andrewes, the learned bishop, was educated.

There is another historical note concerning Ratcliffe. It belongs to the year 1553. It was in that year that Admiral Sir Hugh Willoughby embarked on that voyage of discovery from which he was destined never to return. He was sent out on a roving commission to “discover regions, dominions, islands, and places unknown,” and he began by an attempt to discover the northeast passage. Remember that geographers knew nothing in those days of the extent of Siberia. Willoughby had three ships; their tonnage was, respectively, 160 tons, 120, and 90. His crews consisted of 50, 35, and 27 men, respectively. With such tiny craft they put forth boldly to brave unknown Arctic seas. It was from Ratcliffe Stairs that Willoughby went on board on May 10, 1553. Half a mile down the river the flotilla passed Greenwich Palace, where the young King, Edward VI, was residing. It was within a few weeks of his death; consumption had laid him low. When the ships passed the palace they “dressed” with flags and streamers, they fired cannons of salute, they blew their trumpets. The young King was brought out to see them pass. It was his last appearance in public; on July 6th he was dead. As for Willoughby, he parted with one of his ships, and after being tossed about off the coast of Lapland he resolved to winter at the mouth of the river Argina. Here, in the following spring, he was found with his companions, all dead and frozen. A strange story of English enterprise to be connected with these forlorn and ramshackle stairs.

Here is another story about Ratcliffe. In a street by the river, beside the stairs, are two or three big ruinous warehouses, mostly deserted. One of these has a double front, the left side representing a private house, the right a warehouse. What was stored in the warehouse I know not; the whole riverside is lined with warehouses and stores. The place is now for a third time deserted, and stands with broken windows. It has been deserted, so far as the original purpose was concerned, for many years. Some thirty years ago a young medical man began to live and to practise in Ratcliffe. He became presently aware that the death-rate among the children was frightful. There was no hospital nearer than the London Hospital in the Whitechapel Road, and that was two miles away; there were no nurses to be obtained and there were no appliances; if a child was taken ill it had to lie in the one room occupied by the whole family, without ventilation, without proper food, without skilled care, without medicines. Therefore in most cases of illness the child died.

He found this rickety old warehouse empty; he thought that he would do what he could, being quite a poor man, to make a hospital for children. He did so; with his slender funds he got a few beds and quickly filled them. He was physician, surgeon, dispenser, druggist, everything; his wife was nurse and everything else. Together these two devoted people started their hospital. Well, it grew; it became known; money began to come in; other doctors and nurses were taken on; all the rooms, there were many, were filled; the children began to recover. Presently the house became so prosperous that it was resolved to build a separate Children’s Hospital, which was done, and you may see it—a noble place. But for the founder this crown of his labors came too late. The work killed him before the new hospital was completed; one of the wards, the Heckford Ward, is named after the man who gave all his strength, all his mind, all his knowledge, all his thoughts; who gave his life and his death; who gave himself, wholly and ungrudgingly, to the children. His patients recovered, but their physician died. He gave his own life to stay the hand of death.

Then the house stood empty for a time; it was presently taken over by the vicar of the parish and made into a playhouse for the little children in the winter after school hours, from four to seven; I have told you how the children swarm in the Ratcliffe streets. After seven the house was converted into a club for the rough riverside lads, where they could box and play single stick and subdue the devil in them, and so presently could sit down and play games and listen to reading and keep out of mischief. But the house is condemned; it is really too ramshackle; it is empty again, and is now to be pulled down.

There is still another story whose scene is laid at Ratcliffe. There is a house beside the church which is now the vicarage. It is a square, solid house, built about the end of the seventeenth century. It is remarkable for a dining-room whose walls are painted with Italian landscapes. The story is that there lived here, early in the eighteenth century, a merchant who rode into London every day, leaving his only daughter behind. He desired to decorate his house with wall-paintings, and engaged a young Italian to stay in the house and to paint all day. Presently he made the not unusual discovery that the Italian and his daughter had fallen in love with each other. He knew what was due to his position as a City merchant, and did what was proper for the occasion—that is to say, he ordered the young man to get out of the house in half an hour. The artist obeyed, so far as to mount the stairs to his own room. Here, however, he stopped, and when the angry parent climbed the stairs after the expiration of the half hour to know why he was not gone, he found the young lover, dead, hanging to the canopy of the bed. His ghost was long believed to haunt the house, and was only finally laid, after troops of servants had fled shrieking, when the wife of the vicar sat up all night by herself in the haunted chamber, and testified that she had neither seen nor heard anything, and was quite willing to sleep in the room. That disgusted the ghost, who went away of his own accord. I wish I could show you one room in the house. It was the old powdering-room. When your wig had been properly curled and combed you threw a towel or dressing-gown over your shoulders and sat in this little room, with your back to the door. Now, the door had a sliding panel, and the barber on the other side was provided with the instrument which blew the white powder through the panel upon the wig. The operation finished, you arose, slipped off the dressing-gown and descended to your coach with all the dignity of a gold-laced hat, a wig white as the driven snow, lace ruffles, a lace tie, and a black velvet coat—if you were a merchant—with gold buttons, and white silk stockings. A beautiful time it was for those who could afford the dignity and the splendor which made it beautiful. For those who could not— Humph! Not quite so beautiful a time.

After Ratcliffe we pass into Limehouse. It was at Limehouse Hole that Rogue Riderhood lived.

The place is more marine than Wapping; the public houses have a look, an air, a something that suggests the sea; the shops are conducted for the wants of the merchantmen; the houses are old and picturesquely dirty; the streets are narrow; one may walk about these streets for a whole afternoon, and find something to observe in every one, either a shop full of queer things or a public house full of strange men, or a house that speaks of other days—of crimps, for instance, and of press gangs, and of encounters in the streets; there are ancient docks used for the repair of wooden sailing ships; there are places where they build barges; a little inland you may see the famous church of Limehouse, with its lofty steeple; it was only built in 1730. Before that time there was no church at Limehouse; since that time nobody has gone to church at Limehouse, speaking of the true natives, the riverside folk, not of those who dwell respectably in the West India Dock Road. It is, however, doubtless a great advantage and benefit to a sea-going population to have a churchyard to be buried in.

At Limehouse the river suddenly bends to the south, and then again to the north, making a loop within which lies a peninsula. This is a very curious place. It occupies an area of a mile and a half from north to south, and about a mile from east to west. The place was formerly a dead level, lower than the river at high tide, and therefore a broad tidal marsh; it was, in fact, part of the vast marsh of which I have already spoken, now reclaimed, lying along the north bank of the river. This marsh was dotted over with little eyots or islets, sometimes swept away by the tide, then forming again, composed of rushes, living and dead, the rank grasses of the marsh, and sticks and string and leaves carried among the reeds to form a convenient and secure place where the wild birds could make their nests. When the river wall was built the marsh became a broad field of rich pasture, in which sheep were believed to fatten better than in any other part of England. Until recently it had no inhabitants; probably the air at night was malarious, and the sheep wanted no one to look after them; the river wall was adorned with half a dozen windmills; dead men, hanging in chains, preached silent sermons by their dolorous example to the sailors of the passing craft; there was instituted at some time or other before the seventeenth century a ferry between its southern point and Greenwich, a road to meet the ferry running north through the island. Pepys crossed once by this ferry in order to attend a wedding. It was in the plague year, when one would have thought weddings were not common and wedding festivities dangerous things. But there was still marrying and giving in marriage. He was with Sir George and Lady Carteret; they got across from Deptford in a boat, but found that their coach, which ought to have met them, had not come over by ferry, the tide having fallen too low. “I being in my new colored silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons and gold broad-lace round my hands, very rich and fine, ... so we were fain to stay there in the unlucky Isle of Dogs, in a chill place, the morning cool, the wind fresh, to our great discontent.” Why does he call the Isle of Dogs unlucky?