“Paid to Thomas Wright for 67 load of soyle laid on the graves in Tothill Fields, wherein 1200 Scotch prisoners, taken at the ffight at Worcester, were buried, and for other paines taken with his teame of horsse about amending the Sanctuary Highway when General Ireton was buried. XXXS.”
How many of the remaining two thousand eight hundred ever got home again? Chance once threw into my hands a tract which showed the hard treatment and the barbarities to which Monmouth’s convicts in Barbadoes were subjected: most of these were men of respectable family, to whom money might be sent for their exemption from work in the fields, or even for their redemption. But these other poor fellows were absolutely friendless and penniless. And they were going to the Guinea Coast, the Gold Coast, the white man’s grave! One hopes that the mortality on their arrival was swifter and more extensive than even the mortality in Tothill Fields, because death was certainly the best thing that could happen to them.
When these papers first appeared I received a letter of expostulation from a reader. He said that the streets of Westminster were not all so disreputable as I seemed to think. He said:
“Westminster only became a slum within this hundred years. The old Westminster workhouse had been the mansion of Sir John Pye. Sir Francis Burdett was born in Orchard Street, and Admiral Kempenfeldt who went down in the Royal George had his house there, and not so very long ago a pear tree bloomed annually in his garden. The father of Henry Boys, organist of St. John’s, about 1830 to 1840, was a bullion worker and carried on his business for many years and up to the thirties in Great St. Anne’s Lane. My grandmother was born, 1770, in Peter Street, at the corner of Duck Lane. She told me that all that neighbourhood was very respectable in her girlhood, Duck Lane being the only exception. She attributed the downfall of the locality to the cheap houses that were built at that time in New Peter Street. Towards the end of the century there was only one shop in Strutton Ground: all the rest being public-houses. My mother was born in 1802 in Marlborough House, Peter Street, then the premises of the Cudbear Company. She used to recall Brown’s Gardens in her young days, that were between St. Peter Street and the Horseferry Road. They were nursery gardens. Palmer’s village was a collection of houses for workmen, built about the beginning of this century or the end of last, between Emanuel Hospital and Brewer’s Green, and accessible through an archway leading from the latter.”
I am glad to print this protest. I have, however, given my authorities for what I have stated. It is quite possible that respectable streets and good houses existed side by side with the slums. There are always respectable streets and great houses in every neighborhood, just as among associations of the greatest villains there are always some with redeeming traits. Among the residents of Westminster our friend might have mentioned Lord Grey of Wilton, Cornelius Van Dur, Yeoman of the Guard to four sovereigns, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, and Dick Turpin.
Hear, however, further from Mr. William Bardell, writing in 1839.
“Another of the peculiarities which this district presents is the number of middle-men it contains: these generally possess themselves of a house or houses, with gardens, large or small as it may happen; here they erect, in open defiance of all building or sewers acts, a number of tenements of the most wretched description, and to which the only access is by a passage through one of the front houses; in process of time these become lanes, or courts, or alleys, or places, or buildings, or yards. These tenements are divided into separate rooms, and let weekly by the middle-man, who subsists upon his beneficial interest in the concern; and so numerous are the houses of this description in the district, that considerably more than one-half of the number proposed to be removed are let to weekly lodgers; but these places, most of them old, and very slightly built, frequently with boards held together by iron hoops, are so utterly destitute of every convenience, that the heretofore pleasant gardens of Tothill are most terrible nuisances.
“It is in these narrow streets, and in these close and insalubrious lanes, courts, and alleys, where squalid misery and poverty struggle with filth and wretchedness, where vice reigns unchecked, and in the atmosphere of which the worst diseases are generated and diffused. That uncleanness and impurity are an unerring index, pointing out the situation where the malignancy of epidemics more or less exists, is a truth known and admitted from the earliest ages.”
“Dr. Wright, the assiduous and highly-intelligent medical officer to the parish, stated before the same Committee, ‘that fever is exceedingly prevalent, and had been very general in the months of April and May.’ The Doctor had upwards of thirty cases of typhus fever in one court containing four houses; most of which cases it is probable would have terminated fatally had the sufferers not been removed from that locality; ‘that fever is propagated and continued in these miserable courts long after the ravages of epidemics have ceased in more open parts.’
“Mr. Cubitt also has stated, that ‘the ground between the Almonry and the western end of Palmer’s village is occupied by the worst possible description of inhabitants. The land is exceedingly badly drained, or rather not drained; and there being no proper outlets for the water, a great deal of bad air must pass off by evaporation from the quantity of stagnant water upon the surface and in the cesspools.’”