|
"LONDONERS OVER THE BORDER"
An extract from
"Household Words," a weekly journal conducted by Charles Dickens.
Issue No. 390, Saturday
September 12, 1857.
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.
Produced by Newham's Archives and Local Studies Library.
Back to previous
page |
|
