Читать книгу Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End - Charlie Connelly, Charlie Connelly - Страница 15

From all over, they came. The entry for Constance Street in the 1871 census recorded inhabitants who hailed from Warwickshire, Norfolk, Scotland, Wiltshire, Ireland, Dorset, Somerset and Devon. They were wire makers, cordwainers, machinists, shoemakers, telegraph engineers, waterproofers, boiler makers, coat makers, dressmakers, telegraph instrument makers, iron ship platers, dockers and stokers. These were the Silvertown pioneers, people like Stanfield Sutcliffe at No. 1, a wire drawer from Halifax, and his neighbour James Press, a Gloucestershire-born carpenter and his son John, a clerk at the telegraph works. Across the road from them were Joseph Taylor and his family, a shipwright from up the river in Rotherhithe, and his neighbour, James Parsons, a boiler stoker from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. All would have trudged through the muddy puddles of the unmade road to the Railway Tavern, its dark wooden fittings and brass fixtures reverberating with accents from just about every part of Britain. Across the road the trains would pass with the shriek of a whistle while the hisses, bangs and clanks of the india rubber works provided a constant backdrop to life in Silvertown where at night there were still mysterious flashes of light and strange noises on the marsh – but now their provenance was progress.

It was not generally a pleasant place to be, however. Silvertown’s remoteness made it difficult to keep order, the surrounding marshes and frequent fogs providing locals with little protection from those with malice in mind. And there were plenty of them, it seems.

‘In those days when the neighbourhood was full of disorderly characters, the policeman conspicuously absent, and the houses few and far between, it required some courage to walk the ill-lighted roads after dark,’ wrote Arthur Crouch, secretary of the Gutta Percha company, in a history of the area published at the turn of the twentieth century. Louisa Boyd, the sister of the first vicar of St Mark’s, would help her brother minister to the fledgeling community but made sure to carry a loaded revolver with her when walking the streets after dark.

In 1875 Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine had visited Silvertown, calling it ‘the dubious region between half-fluid and almost solid water’, and while marvelling at the scale and variety of production at the rubber works the writer also noted ‘near at hand, useful but odiferous gasworks, a shabby railway station’ and that ‘out of a chaos of mud and slime have sprung near lines of cottages, a grim hostelry called The Railway Hotel, huge wharves and the seven acres of now solid ground which form the cause and explanation of the whole curious development’.

The writer ends by noting how Silvertown is ‘perhaps the gloomiest and most uncomfortable spot in London on a chilly winter evening’.

Despite this less-than-glowing endorsement of the place, a couple of years later arrived the product for which Silvertown would arguably become best known: sugar.

When Henry Tate had in 1877 relocated from Liverpool to Silvertown to produce his revolutionary sugar cubes on the site of the old Campbell Johnstone shipyard next door to the Silver’s complex, he was followed four years later from Greenock in the west of Scotland by Abram Lyle & Co, another sugar-based operation producing golden syrup. Although the two men never met, in 1921 the two firms would combine to create Tate & Lyle, the largest sugar refinery in the world, a business whose black-tipped chimneys and towering works dominate Silvertown even today.

A year after Tate’s arrival, one of Britain’s worst ever maritime disasters washed up on its shores. On the evening of 3 September 1878 the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer, was returning from Rosherville in Kent with some 700 Londoners who’d enjoyed a warm late summer’s day out by the estuary, when it was rammed by a huge, ancient collier barge, the Bywell Castle, and sank within four minutes. Everyone aboard the Princess Alice ended up in the water; very few came out alive. The raw sewage pouring into the river from the outflow by Barking Creek and the industrial effluent oozing from the various establishments at Silvertown meant that even by Victorian standards the water along this stretch was disgustingly foul. Even those who could swim were overcome by the effluent around them: barely anyone stood a chance. The exact number of casualties isn’t known, but nearly everyone on board drowned: at a conservative estimate 550 lost their lives. If any good came out of the Princess Alice disaster it was an acceptance that the section of the Thames east of the City was far too busy, and this tragedy on a notoriously congested and dangerous stretch of river helped to rubber-stamp the construction of the Albert Dock on the marshland east of the Victoria Dock, about half a mile north-east of Silvertown.

It was the 1880 opening of the Albert Dock, immediately adjacent to the Victoria Dock, that sealed Silvertown’s unique character, for as soon as the sluices opened and the water gushed in to the giant expanse of the new dock, Silvertown became an island and its people became islanders. Opened on 24 June, the Albert Dock – one and three-quarter miles long and nearly 500 feet wide – contrived with its sister to cut Silvertown off completely from the rest of the country. You could no longer leave Silvertown without crossing water. You still can’t.