Читать книгу Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End - Charlie Connelly, Charlie Connelly - Страница 12

Half a century after the death of Stephen Silver and a little over half a century before the Brunner Mond explosion of 1917, Constance Street didn’t exist and Silvertown didn’t exist. Indeed, until well into the 1850s the north bank of the Thames between Bow Creek and Barking Creek was almost entirely deserted, a misty, marshy expanse of boggy land with a couple of ancient trackways occasionally used by shepherds and cattlemen the only hint as to any human presence at all. The area didn’t even have a name: when Stephen Winckworth Silver first took an interest the stretch of riverside land was referred to merely as part of Plaistow Marshes, ‘opposite Woolwich’ or sometimes, colloquially, as ‘Land’s End’.

That is, when it was referred to at all. It was a place as mysterious as it was anonymous, the source of whispered, wide-eyed tales of strange, moving nocturnal lights that hovered above the ground and unearthly sounds that could come from no human, and rumours of dark, wild beasts with fire in their eyes that roamed the marshes at night.

This was never a benevolent place. In 1667, as London to the west recovered from the dual traumas of plague and fire, Sir Alan Apsley was stationed on the north bank opposite Woolwich with his regiment in case of Dutch invasion. The invasion never came but Apsley complained of the constant ‘fevers and agues’ endured by his men and strange lights and noises at night that had the crew speculating openly about the Devil himself stalking the empty wastes. Given the twin disasters that had befallen the capital over the previous two years it was no wonder they felt a malevolence lurking in the marsh.

By the start of the nineteenth century there was just one building between the creeks, a rambling pile known as ‘The Devil’s House’ that dated back to the early eighteenth century. Far from being the domicile of the scourge of Apsley’s sailors the house’s name apparently derived from the man who built it, believed to be a Dutchman named Duval about whom we know nothing, let alone why he chose such a bleak location to build what was, by all accounts, a fairly grand property in its day (it was even used as a landmark in navigation guides to the River Thames). By 1769 Duval’s pile had become a ‘house of entertainment’, its remote location allowing perhaps entertainment that was not entirely moral or scrupulous. Either way, in hindsight the building was as mysterious, enigmatic and sinister as its surroundings.

But all that was to change. As the nineteenth century got into its stride, science and industry were on the march and it would take more than a few mysterious lights and noises to keep those twin facets of progress from the boggy land opposite Woolwich. A decade before Samuel Winckworth Silver’s arrival it would also take, in the first instance, another remarkable man to impose his will upon the place.

One night in 1810, when George Parker Bidder, the son of a stonemason from Moretonhampstead in Devon, was five years old he was in bed listening to two of his older brothers arguing over the value of a pig. Each had made his own calculation, based on the weight of the animal, and each was utterly convinced the other was wrong. The discussion grew more and more heated and, irritated by the commotion which was preventing him getting to sleep, young George hopped out of bed, went to the top of the stairs, called down the correct figure, asked them to be quiet and went back to bed.

This was the first recorded instance of a rare numerical gift that led to Bidder senior taking George on the road as the ‘Amazing Calculating Boy’. George, it seemed, had a precocious natural talent for mathematics, extraordinary in any youngster but especially so for a boy of the most rudimentary schooling from the wilds of Devon. As his father realised when testing young George, the youngster could perform mind-bending mathematical calculations on demand in his head, and all while still in short trousers. Such was George’s fame that he was even brought before Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who was both enchanted and astounded by George’s charms and mathematical abilities.

After a brief flirtation with a degree course at Edinburgh University, at the age of 18 George joined the Ordnance Survey and subsequently drifted into engineering. He then rekindled a friendship with the railway pioneer George Stephenson that had first flared in Scotland and joined him in 1834 in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway. Three years later Bidder was instrumental in the founding of the Blackwall Railway, work which took him to the brink of the nameless marsh east of Bow Creek for the first time. One day, as the railway works clanked and hammered away behind him, Bidder must have looked out across Bow Creek and the tufty, boggy wasteland beyond to see Woolwich in the distance, and had an idea.