THE GRAPES INN, LIMEHOUSE
Photograph by T. W. Tyrrell
Beyond this room is the small one which served as Miss Abbey Potterson’s haven. “This haven,” Dickens says, “was divided from the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door with a leaden sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor; but over this half-door the bar’s snugness so gushed forth that, albeit customers drank there standing, in a dark and draughty passage where they were shouldered by other customers passing in and out, they always appeared to drink under an enchanting delusion that they were in the bar itself.”
The glass partition and the half-door, over which Gaffer Hexam is seen leaning in Marcus Stone’s picture in the book, is still there, but is not now used for the same purpose. It is the private entrance to the back of the modern public bar.
What Dickens said of the antiquity of the Fellowship-Porters is true of the Grapes Inn. “The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors, and doors of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it, and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters that, when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree in full umbrageous leaf.” Unfortunately, most of these oak panels and beams are now hidden from view by varnished match-boarding, but some of the panels and some of the beams remain exposed to confirm Dickens’s fanciful picture.
Miss Abbey Potterson, the mistress of this establishment, was “a tall, upright, well-favoured woman, though severe of countenance, and had more the air of a schoolmistress than mistress of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters.” Here she ruled supreme, and at the closing time she ordered one after the other to leave with such admonitions as “George Jones, your time is up! I told your wife you should be punctual,” and so all wished Miss Abbey good night and Miss Abbey wished good night to all. She knew how to manage the rough class of river-men who frequented her house, and was the more respected for it. “Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson,” Dickens tells us, “some waterside heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest, harboured muddled motions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster. But Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had been christened at Limehouse Church some sixty years and odd before.”
Without recording all the references in the book to the Fellowship-Porters, we note that, towards the end of it, John and Bella paid an official visit to the police station and visited afterwards the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters with Mr. Inspector for purposes of identification. During this visit, Mr. Inspector gives this very good character to the inn, “a better-kept house is not known to our men. What do I say? Half so well a kept house is not known to our men. Show the Force the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, and the Force—to a constable—will show you a piece of perfection.” This, no doubt, was Dickens’s own opinion, too.
The Grapes to-day serves the same purpose as did the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters in the story, and is of as good repute. It is the house of call of the watermen from the river in the day-time and from the road after work is done, and it seems to be conducted by the present hostess much as it was by Miss Abbey Potterson, not so rigidly perhaps, but with the same good-natured friendliness which is reflected in the attitude and behaviour of all the frequenters. There does not even seem the necessity for a Bob Glibbery; at any rate, we have not met his successor on the occasions of our visits there. Nor does his room down “towards the bed of the river,” where he was ordered to proceed to his supper, exist at the present time. That must have been somewhere contiguous to the secret smuggling arches which ran under the building from the river, now filled in.
