Jacob’s Island

During a recent walk around Bermondsey I found myself in Jacob Street, named after what had been in Victorian times one of London’s most appalling slums (or ‘rookeries’ as they were then called). On researching ‘Jacob’s Island, as it was known, I was inevitably struck by the stark contrast between the place then – what Dickens called ‘the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London -, and the trendy loft apartments of Shad Thames which have now replaced it.

By the mid-19th century, with the arrival of industrialisation, docks and immigrant housing, parts of

Jacob's Island 1830

Bermondsey, especially along the riverside, had become notorious slums. The area around St. Saviour's Dock, known as Jacob’s Island (occupying an area roughly within present-day Mill Street, Bermondsey Wall West, George Row and Wolseley Street), was one of the worst in London. It was immortalised in Dickens’ Oliver Twist as the place where his villain Bill Sykes meets his end - in the mud of 'Folly Ditch' which surrounded it.

Originally the location of the medieval St Saviour’s Mill, owned by the Cluniac monks of Bermondsey Abbey, Jacob’s Island during the 17th and 18th centuries was a good place to live. Trade flourished, with most employment based around the timber and boat-building industries. But things started to change from about 1830 with the arrival of various noxious industries. These were to radically change the character of this corner of south London. By 1849 there was a population of 7,286, many of whom were blighted by sickness. An article in the Morning Chronicle says it all: “[The] air is thickly charged with deadly gas. The inhabitants themselves show in their faces the poisonous influence of the mephitic air they breathe. Either their skins are white, like parchment, telling of the impaired digestion, the languid circulation, and the coldness of the skin peculiar persons suffering from chronic poisoning, or else their cheeks are flushed hectically, and their eyes are glassy, showing the wasting fever and general decline of the bodily functions”.

Booth's 'Poverty Map' of Bermondsey

By the latter part of the century, when Charles Booth was carrying out his famous social survey of London life ‘Life and Labour of the People in London’, in which he drew a series of maps coloured street-by-street to indicate the levels of poverty, this part of Bermondsey had a concentration of ‘very poor’ households in chronic want (shown in dark blue) and ‘poor’ households – i.e. those existing on between 18 and 21 shillings (lighter blue).

London had many ‘rookeries’ in Victorian times (most famously St Giles and Saffron Hill) but Jacob’s Island was in a class of its own! Indeed, the best description of what the place was like in those days is provided by Dickens himself:

“Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look

Folly Ditch at Mill Lane c.1840

 upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.”

19th c. engraving of Folly Ditch

Other commentators of the age held a similar view of the place. The 19th century social researcher Henry Mayhew described Jacob's Island as a "pest island" with "literally the smell of a graveyard". He describes the water being in parts "as red as blood" as a result of pollutant tanning agents from the leather dressers in the area.

And this proved to be the biggest problem for the residents of Jacob’s Island - the poor state of the water supply. The writer Thomas Beames noted that the reservoirs remained stagnant until they were moved by the tide – something that only happened two or three times a week. With drains from houses discharging directly into the ditches, and the water also harbouring masses of rotting weed, animal carcasses and dead fish, Beames’ description of the ditches comes as no surprise: “[They are] the common sewer of the neighbourhood”, “the only source from which the wretched inhabitants can get the water which they drink – with which they wash - and with which they cook their victuals.” In the summer children were even seen bathing in the dirty water.

Jacob Street today

Once the origins of cholera were understood (there had been two major outbreaks on the island in 1849 and 1854, leading to this area being nicknamed the ‘Capital of Cholera’ and ‘Venice of Drains’!) the Jacob’s Island ditches were filled in during the 1850s. A decade later, many of its fetid buildings were destroyed in a huge fire that raged for 2 weeks in 1861.

1839 etching of Bill Sikes by G. Cruikshank

Any remaining properties were pulled down during the course of the 1860s, with New Concordia Wharf – now swish apartments - a rare survivor (the film Oliver! was filmed there in 1968).

New Concordia Wharf

Following extensive slum clearance, the area that had once been Jacob’s Island was eventually replaced by mills and new warehouses. Much of this industrial architecture was destroyed in the Blitz, with riverside Bermondsey being a prime target for Luftwaffe bombers. What remained after the war has either since disappeared or been converted for new uses, such as luxury apartments or upmarket offices, leaving hardly any visible evidence of the squalid world of Jacob’s Island that Dickens knew.

References:

Lost London: an A-Z of forgotten landmarks and traditions Richard Guard (2012)

Website: https://www.archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/digging-jacobs-island.htm

Website: https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2017/11/20/shad-thames-and-jacobs-island-the-venice-of-drains/

London’s watch houses

On a recent walk around Bermondsey and Rotherhithe I came across some interesting small buildings, situated next to churches but too small, I realised, to be rectories. They turned out to be watch-houses, several of which survive in London from the 18^th century. An early form of local police-station (there was no proper force until 1829), they were deliberately built close to church graveyards as a first line of defence against body-snatchers, known as the Resurrection Men. Body-snatching, illegal but widespread, reached its peak in the 1820s and most of London’s watch-houses date from this period.

In the history of European medicine, Italy was always way ahead of other countries. Its medical students had been using corpses for dissection since the 14^th century. In England, by contrast, records show that Henry VIII only allowed the guild of barber-surgeons four bodies a year from the Tyburn gallows for this purpose.

It wasn’t until the 18^th century that anatomy schools began to spring up, such as Guy’s and St Thomas’s. By this time some corpses were available legally for teaching purposes, but only those of criminals who had been condemned by a court to death and dissection.

Fortunately for the medical profession, the Georgian period was a golden era for capital punishment. You could be put to death for the theft of as little as five shillings. At one time, there were over 200 individual offences carrying the death penalty. Very handy for those in the market for fresh cadavers!

But as the 18^th century drew to a close, fewer capital punishments were being handed down to criminals, with many more being sentenced to transportation to Australia for their sins. As the supply of corpses began to dry up, body-snatching became a lucrative ‘trade’. Newly-buried bodies would be dug out of graves in the dead of the night and sold on to surgeons.

And they were able to do this almost with impunity. The punishment for stealing corpses was not particularly severe – either a fine or a very short spell in prison – as it was classed not as a felony but as a mere Common Law misdemeanour. However, they were very careful only to remove the bodies from the graves; any valuables or jewellery they found were left behind as stealing goods was a felony that could lead them to the gallows!

The ‘Resurrection Men’, as they came to be known, tended to congregate in the pubs around Smithfield, as they were close to the hospitals. One of these was the Rising Sun (still trading) in Cloth Fair, near St Bart’s. Another was The Fortune of War (demolished 1910), which had been officially declared as a place ‘for the reception of drowned persons’ by the Royal Humane Society. The landlord had a special room lined with benches for the cadavers so that surgeons from St Bartholomew’s could come and look over the corpses before making their choices!

Over time, the resurrection business grew more sophisticated. Freakish or unusual bodies could command higher prices, children under three feet tall were priced by the inch, and there was a separate trade in teeth. In one case it emerged that the surgeon client had been prepared to pay “for each adult corpse, if not green or putrid, two guineas and a crown”. A one-time resurrectionist described in his diary of 1811 how he and his associates would often take five bodies a night from assorted cemeteries and sometimes many more small corpses.

Some gangs became particularly notorious. 

The Borough Gang, employed by the eminent physician

Sir Astley Cooper to supply bodies for his students, would hang around funeral processions to identify potential targets. Given that a corpse was only deemed to be in ‘useable’ condition for a matter of days, it was important to work quickly, meaning that bodies were often dug out during the night following burial. The earth was then replaced and the grave restored to its original appearance. Body-snatchers were even known to break into houses where a body was being prepared for burial…

Naturally, the general public were extremely perturbed by this situation. When body-snatching was at its height, it was not uncommon for relatives to place markers in their loved-ones graves to check for any disturbance. Some even rigged booby traps! Soon it was decided that the only way to counteract this growing menace was to mount round-the-clock surveillance to catch the perpetrators in the act. And so the building of watch-houses across London began in earnest. Most (but not all) were in the vicinity of churchyards and manned by teams of local householders and/or appointed officials.

Below are some examples of watch-houses I have come across recently:

(Left) Watch-house on corner of Bermondsey St and Abbey St, built to protect the graves of St Mary Magdalen. Now a café.

(Below) Grade II-listed Rotherhithe watch-house adjoining the churchyard of St Mary’s, built 1821. Administered by a beadle, a constable and 14 watchmen, operating in shifts during the day and night. There is a cell in the basement for holding suspects.

(Below left) Adjacent to St Matthew’s, this is the only one of Bethnal Green’s two watch-houses to survive. Built 1754, it was later enlarged to the rear to accommodate a fire engine. A permanent watchman was appointed in 1792 and paid ten shillings and sixpence a week. A reward of two guineas was paid for apprehending body-snatchers and the watchman was provided with a blunderbuss and permission to fire from an upper window, once a rattle had been sounded three times. The churchwarden who lives there today still holds this right under the terms of his lease, and the blunderbuss and rattle are still in existence.  In 1965, the watch-house gained notoriety when fascist leader Oswald Mosley stood on its steps to give his last open-air public speech.

In the end, however, it wasn’t the success or otherwise of the watch-houses that led to the demise of the grave-robbers. It was the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act which legalised the use of corpses of paupers and people who had died ‘friendless’ (i.e. no-one came to collect their body) to be used for dissection. This effectively put the body-snatchers out of business overnight, although documentary evidence exists to suggest that the practice in fact continued into the 20^th century.

References:

Georgian London: Into the Streets Lucy Inglis (2014)

A History of London in 100 Places David Long (2014)

http://russiadock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-rotherhithe-village-watch-house-of.html

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2011/04/25/the-spitalfields-nobody-knows/

http://www.exploringsouthwark.co.uk/the-watch-house/4588722135