Events in
Local
History
Londoners:
Over The Border
An Article from a
Journal conducted by Charles Dickens
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Events in |
Londoners:
Over The Border |
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1857 |
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"LONDONERS
OVER THE BORDER" An
extract from "Household Words," a weekly journal. London
does not end at the limits assigned to it by those acts of parliament which take
thought for the health of Londoners. More suburbs shoot up, while official ink
is drying. Really, there is no limit to London; but the law must needs assign
bounds; and, by the law, there is one suburb on the border of the Essex marshes
which is quite cut off from the comforts of the Metropolitan Buildings Act; - in
fact, it lies just without its boundaries, and therefore is chosen as a place of
refuge for offensive trade establishments turned out of town, - those of
oil-boilers, gut-spinners, varnish-makers, printers' ink-makers and the like.
Being cut off from the support of the Metropolis Local Managing Act, this
outskirt is free to possess new streets of houses without drains, roads, gas or
pavement. It forms part of the parish of West Ham, and consists of two new
towns; Hallsville, called into existence some ten years since by the Messrs.
Mare and Company's ship-building yard, and half depopulated by the recent
bankruptcy of that firm; and Canning Town, very recently created by the works in
progress at the Victoria Docks. Hallsville and Canning Town are immediately
adjacent to the Barking Road station of the Eastern Counties Line. That station
is connected by a junction with the North of London Railway, and is to be
reached by a sixpenny ride from Fenchurch Street, Camden Town, or any of the
intermediate stations. Any Londoner may, in dry summer weather, at the cost of
very little time and money, go out, as we have done, to see this patch of the
land over the border. If he should go
out in wet weather, or in winter, for that purpose, he will doubt whether it be
land that he has come to see. It is a district, at such times, most safely to be
explored on stilts. The clergyman of the parish says, that he once lost his
shoes in the mud while visiting Hallsville, and did not know that they were gone
till some time afterwards; so thickly were his feet encased in knobs of mud. The
parish doctor tells us that he means, next winter, to wear fishing boots that
shall reach to his thighs. The Inspector of schools, when he goes to Hallsville
in the winter, puts on shooting boots as a particular precaution. He may need a
coracle sometimes. The whole of the ground on which Hallsville and Canning Town
are built is seven feet below high-water mark. Bow Creek borders both colonies,
and its water, at high tide, is dammed out from them by very ancient banks of
earth. The embankment is attributed to Danes, Saxons or Romans. When we first
visited the place, the water in the creek was actually, to the stature of a man,
higher than the ground on which we walked. Our second
visit was paid at the time of low-water, on one of Nature's baking days. From
the slight elevation of the railway station or the bridge over the creek, the
district, on such a day, seems more inviting than repulsive. The wide plain of
valuable pasturage - for the marshes that give ague to men, give grass to beasts
- is dry to the foot and green to the eye. There are pleasant belts of trees,
with here a spire, there a church-tower, upon the horizon; and in the
foreground, groups of cattle feed as Cuyp used to paint them feeding. There are
a good many tall smoking chimneys that mark out the line of the creek, and there
is a forest of masts to tell of the adjacent Thames and of the docks; but, to
the eye, the broad green Essex plain is master of the situation. Such a plain
suggests a feeling of repose. Hallsville and Canning Town seem to be enviable
townlets, their small houses appearing, in the hot season, to be the happy homes
of men who pasture flocks and herds safe from the wear and worry of the world. But let us go
down into either townlet. It does not, in the smallest degree, matter which. The
houses are built in rows; but, there being no roads, the ways are so unformed
that the parish will not take charge of them. We get, then, upon a narrow path
of gravel raised about two feet above the grass - such paths enable men to walk
about not more than midleg deep about the place in rainy weather - and we come
to a row of houses built with their backs to a stagnant ditch. We turn aside to
see the ditch, and find that it is a cesspool, so charged with corruption, that
not a trace of vegetable matter grows on its surface - bubbling and seething
with the constant rise of the foul products of decomposition, that the pool
pours up into the air. The filth of each house passes through a short pipe
straight into this ditch, and stays there. Upon its surface, to our great
wonder, a few consumptive-looking ducks are swimming, very dirty; very much like
the human dwellers in fould alleys as to their depressed and haggard
physiognomy, and to be weighed by ounces, not pounds. Some of them may be
ducklings, but they look like the most ancient ravens. Perhaps this
row of houses is a poor back settlement - a slum of Hallsville. We go on, and
are abruptly stopped by another ditch-full of stagnating corruption, bubbling as
the last bubbled; while at a little distance, is another row of houses built so
that they may pour all their solid and liquid filth into it in the most
convenient way, and receive it back as air, with the least possible dilution.
Near those houses we find a plank by which the ditch is crossed. There is a path
across a patch of green, and the path is, in one place, made up of planks rotted
with wet, now dried into the soil on which they float in spongy weather. The
planks tell a tale, so does the bloated and corrupt body of a drowned dog that
lies baking in the middle of that patch of green. We smell the marsh, dry as it
is. As we go on exploring, we find the same system of building everywhere. Rows of small
houses, which may have cost for their construction eighty pounds a-piece, are
built designedly and systematically with their backs to the marsh ditches;
which, with one exception, are all stopped up at their outlet; and, in many
parts of their course also, if there were an outlet, or if it could be said that
they had any course at all. Two or three yards of clay pipe "drain"
each house into the open cesspool under its back windows, when it does not
happen that the house is so built as to overhang it. We feel a qualm in calling
houses built when they are laid like bank boxes upon the soil. In winter time
every block becomes now and then an island, and you may hear a sick man, in an
upper room, complain of water trickling down over his bed. Then the flood cleans
the ditches, lifting all their filth into itself, and spreading it over the
land. No wonder that the stench of the marsh in Hallsville and Canning Town of
nights, is horrible. A fetid mist covers the ground. If you are walking out and
meet a man, you only see him from the middle upwards, the foul ground mist
covering his legs. So says the parish surgeon, an intelligent man and a
gentleman, by whom the day-work and the night-work of a wide district of this
character has not been done without cost to his health. He was himself for a
time invalided by fever, upon which ague followed. Ague, of course, is one of
the most prevalent diseases of the district: fever abounds. When an epidemic
comes into the place, it becomes serious in its form, and stays for months.
Disease comes upon human bodies saturated with the influences of such air as
this breathed day and night, as a spark upon touchwood. A case or two of
small-pox caused, in spite of vaccination, an epidemic of confluent small-pox,
which remained three or four months upon the spot. "I have had twenty cases
of it in one day," the doctor said. The clergyman of the parish - whose
church is beyond the reach of the Hallsville people, but who is himself familiar
to their eyes - told us that during a half-year, when the population of Plaistow
proper and of Hallsville were equal, he counted the burials in each. There were
sixteen deaths in Plaistow, and in Hallsville seventy two. Let us not
abstain from recording the zeal of the clergyman of this parish, in it, there
are places four miles distant from each other, together with thousands of almost
untaught parishioners. At a time which his incumbency was worth only one hundred
and eighty pounds a-year, in aid of which he had but another seventy pounds
a-year of private means, he for two years and a-half paid at the rate of one
hundred a-year for a curate's help, and struggled, by a pinch in his own
household, to relieve part of the pinch among the poor. He was obliged, after a
long fight, to abandon his endeavour; for he was outrunning his income, making
Lent to extend considerably over forty days. Those are the clergy who support
the church; and there is only one way in which such men usually ask the church
to support them in turn; - by giving nothing to themselves, only more succour to
the poor. Thus, in the present case, appeal is made on behalf of the ignorance
of Hallsville and Canning Town, inhabited by dock-labourers and men employed in
neighbouring works and manufactories, who live surrounded by all circumstances
of degradation. The church is far from them; churchmen are asked to bring is
nearer and in the best way, by establishing a mission. Thus comes into life a
plea on behalf of the Plaistow and Victoria Dock Mission. We allude to that in
passing; our concern here being with the bodily condition of the people. Though there is
no church near Hallsville or Canning Town, there is a small dissenting chapel,
to the door of which we were attracted by a large placard touching the election
of a local BOARD OF HEALTH. The Board of Health shone in such mighty capitals,
and the details as to the manner of voting and the qualifications of the voters
were described with such circumlocution on so large a poster, that we lost the
smell of the place out of our noses for quarter of a minute. Then it came back
again. We walked on a few steps and were beside another pestilential ditch,
bubbling as if there were a miraculous draught of fishes just below. A row of
houses was arranged with little back yards dipping into it; and, in one of the
back-yards, three ghostly little children lying on the ground, hung with their
faces over it, breathing the poison of the bubbles as it rose, and fishing about
with their hands in the filth for something - perhaps for something nice to eat.
We went to the
old national school, a small wooden lean-to, built at the side of the last house
in an unfinished row. The poor in Rotherhithe, and here too, describe any line
of very crazy cottages as Rabbit-hutch Row. The old Hallsville school is
certainly a sort of rabbit-hutch; and not a large hutch either. When it was
first knocked up, there were but thirty houses in this part of the marsh, and
accommodation was required for but eleven scholars. The new town grew rapidly
and there were no means of building a new school; so that, at last, one might
see the mistress on a wet day, with her umbrella up, teaching a hundred children
in the dripping hutch. We are told that there have been one hundred and seventy
scholars crammed into it; although, if it were a fowl-house, nobody would
suppose it able to accommodate that number of fowls. By fortune, a long-room,
built by a publican as an American bowling-alley for dock-labourers and sailors,
was bowled down as an alley and set up again as a new national school. It is
spacious and clean. The sky-lights open and secure sufficient ventilation. There
is a ditchfull of filth sleeping at full length (we must not say running) along
one side of the building, and it branches into another ditch of the same
character that stinks immediately under the back window; which, therefore, is a
closed shutter and no window at all. Over the two ditches, at the place where
they meet, a wooden house is built; it seems by its form to have been
constructed as a pleasure-house on the grounds of the publican who speculated in
the bowling-green. But now it is a home. The white blind was down at the window.
Was there a death as well as deadly air inside? Of course the
ditches were inevitable to the school; for there is no escaping them in
Hallsville or Canning Town. The local Board of Health appears, from the answers
made to inquiries, to care more about Stratford, where its members live, than
about colonies out in the marsh. On the occasion of our first visit, however,
the board had been active; for we learnt that a ton of deodorising matter had
been recently scattered about the vilest pools. The stench, when we paid our
second visit, was unmitigated. Two years ago,
when application was made by more than a tenth of the rate-payers of the parish
of West Ham for an inquiry into the sanitary condition of the district, with a
view to bringing it under the conditions of the Public Health Act, Mr. Alfred
Dickens was the civil engineer sent by the General Board of Health as an
inspector. His report and the evidence at his inquiry is before us as we write,
and it dwells very much upon the state of Canning Town and Hallsville. We learn
from this report that the area of the ditches in the parish amounted to not less
than one hundred and forty acres, according to a surveyor's report upwards of
thirty-five years old, and that area has been increased by side-cuttings at the
railway and new cuttings of open sewer. Disease had cost the parish six hundred
pounds in the year previous to the inquiry. There was then, of course, as now,
no drainage or paving in Canning Town; the roads in winter were impassable; but
the inhabitants were paying (for what they did not get) an eighteen-penny rate
under the Commissioners' Act, not for works done in accordance with it, but
"for the expenses of the act." Also, although the parish did not take
charge of their roads, they were paying a highway rate for the parishioners
elsewhere. One horrible detail in Mr. Dickens's report has, happily, to be
omitted from our sketch. Two years ago, there was in Hallsville and Canning Town
no water supply. Good water is now laid on. In all other respects, the old
offences against civilised life cleave to the district. The local Board of
Health which the inhabitants sought and obtained, whatever it may have done for
Stratford, seems to have done nothing for Hallsville, unless it be considered
something to indulge it with an odd pinch of deodorising powder. Canning Town is
the child of the Victoria Docks. The condition of this place and of its
neighbour prevents the steadier class of mechanics from residing in it. They go
from their work to Stratford or to Plaistow. Many select such a dwelling-place
because they are already debased below the point of enmity to filth; poorer
labourers live there, because they cannot afford to go further, and there become
debased. The Dock Company is surely, to a very great extent, answerable for the
condition of the town they are creating. Not a few of the houses in it are built
by poor and ignorant men who have saved a hundred pounds, and are deluded by the
prospect of a fatally cheap building investment. But who was it that named one
row of these houses Montesquieu Place? We should like to see in Canning Town
some of the engineering works suggested by a place where on one spot you may
pass out of Arkwright Street into Brunel Street and turn your back upon Graves
Terrace. Was it an undertaker who had made his money in these parts, and spent
it in a profitable investment upon houses that would further freshen up his
trade, who built Graves Terrace in Canning Town? Not to be
unjust to the district, let us own that we found one ditch behind a row of
houses covered with green matter; thus proving that it was not poisonous to
organic matter to the last degree. In one there was an agitation which suggested
that its course was open, and we found this to be the one ditch that has, at
certain hours, a flow. It has tidal communication with the river Lea. We
understood that a few of the best houses, five or six perhaps, are drained into
this ditch, when it is at some distance from their windows, and thus have what
is, in those parts, to be considered decent drainage. We need hardly
say, that the level of the marsh ought to be no obstacle to the proper drainage
of a town built over it. If it be worth while to put a pump over a coalmine,
certainly it is worth while to put one over the place by the river-side to which
the sewage of a little town may fall, until the great out-fall question is
decided. |
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This article from local history was originally transcribed from an online source once freely available 'on the web' which has now ceased to hold the item. © Lal Cook. |
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