St. George's-in-the-East
From: "The Copartnership Herald", Vol. II, no. 24 (February 1933)
Some acquaintance with the
early history of this neighbourhood, which is not
particularly attractive in these days to the chance
visitor, will, it is hoped, at least remove the
impression which may exist in his mind that its past is
interesting only on account of part of the notorious
thoroughfare, Ratcliff Highway, now St. George’s
Street, which passes through it. The unsavoury reputation
arose in the middle of the nineteenth century, when
foreign sailors from every country, Greeks, Malays,
Lascars, Dutch, Scandinavians, Portuguese, Spanish and
French could be met everywhere, and many taverns, dancing
saloons and so-called boarding-houses harboured the
lowest types of humanity of almost every nation. Of the
tales that have been told of the life of those times,
some are undoubtedly true and some are exaggerated, if
not altogether fictitious, but by their repetition they
have been multiplied many times. Thus, the name of
Ratcliff Highway became a byword not only for poverty and
misery, but for the coarse, the brutal, and the vicious.
It is not surprising, when the state of the Metropolis at
that time is considered, that the respectable
inhabitants, the business men and the workpeople accepted
the social conditions as being incidental and commonplace
occurrences. But there was another phase of life to be
found there. The Rev. Harry Jones, who had been rector of
St. George’s since 1873, writing an introduction to
a small volume published in 1880, said that he could
"but heartily hope that this little book will join
yet closer together with the tie of honest home and
municipal interests those of whose life and surroundings
it speaks, and will tend to deepen an impression that the
East of London is not a region so barren of righteous
influences and healthy life as some have occasionally
fancied it to be."
Speaking of
misrepresentations, the compiler of An East-end
Chronicle says: "But we East-enders owe many a
grudge to the journalists and novelists and
conversationalists who have written and talked about us
without really knowing us. However, things are mending...
and in years to come, when many illusions have been
dispelled, those who know us now only by hearsay, or as
the result of some hasty visit, will admit that we are
not many of us thieves or most of us heathens, but after
all, men and women very like the men and women elsewhere,
good, bad and indifferent, a few of us heroes and a few
of us villains, and nearly all of us toilers and moilers,
doing our work and taking our play, trying to do our
duty, and hoping to get our reward."
On 14 May 1729, in the second year of the reign of
George II, the Royal Assent was given to "An Act for
making the Hamlet of Wapping Stepney in the Parish of St.
Dunstan Stebonheath, a Distinct Parish, and for providing
a Maintenance for the Minister of the New Church
there."
The church was dedicated to St. George as a delicate
compliment to the King, and the new parish thereby became
designated that of St. George, Middlesex. To distinguish
it from other places of the same name in the Metropolis,
it was soon called St. George’s-in-the-East. The
boundaries of the contiguous parishes of Whitechapel,
Wapping, and Shadwell and the hamlets of Ratcliff and
Mile End Old Town having been already established, the
area consisting of about 224 acres surrounded by those
districts was included in St. George’s parish.
The hamlet, properly speaking, of Wapping Stepney was
originally close to the river, and after the formation of
the parishes of Wapping and Shadwell it became possessed
of a frontage to the Thames of some fifty-three feet,
represented to-day by Foundry Wharf, which forms part of
the Commercial Gas Company’s Works at Wapping. This
frontage was occasioned by the outflow there of an
ancient watercourse, the responsibility for which, with
the upkeep of its banks, either of the two neighbouring
parishes were wary to avoid. On the other hand, the manor
of Stepney was perhaps desirous to preserve in its
keeping the means of draining the marsh that lay inland
almost as far as the Highway.
At the time of its formation, the parish was largely
unbuilt upon, especially on the north, where fields lay
stretched away to the winding White Horse Lane, which
nearly a century later formed approximately the line of
Commercial Road. This explains the apparently irregular
boundary on this side, where it borders that of the
hamlet of Mile End Old Town. It crosses the Commercial
Road, includes the George Tavern, and then abruptly
recrosses, and, after passing through the church of SS.
Mary and Michael, continues south of the Road until it
comes into contact, in Harding Street, with the hamlet of
Ratcliff.
The conduct of parochial affairs was by the Act of
Parliament entrusted to a Vestry consisting of such
parishioners as paid two shillings a month or upwards to
the poor, and it may be found interesting, perhaps
amusing, to refer to a few of the duties which were first
performed. Mr. Crowcher and Mr. Tatlocks having been
elected churchwardens, a committee was formed to allot
the seats in the church. Accommodation was assigned to
144 heads of families, eleven of these being captains of
merchant vessels, and subsequently a further 151 families
were seated. For the office of Parish Clerk the number of
applicants was reduced to three: a schoolmaster, a barber
and periwig maker, and a tobacco-cutter. After the
question had been put whether it was the pleasure of the
Vestry that the successful candidate should be obliged to
abandon his normal occupation, room for the factotum was
made by the decision that the barber and periwig maker,
one Sam Bright, should be Parish Clerk and nothing else.
To Mr. Sam Bright we are indebted for the information
relative to the parish contained in a book published soon
after his entry into office. In furnishing particulars
relative to the parish he mentions, among others:
"Remarkable Places and Things are half of
Wellclose-square, and one moiety of the Danish Church
therein: Princes Square and therein the Swedes
Church, an Anabaptist Meeting the Corner of Penitent
Street in Virginia Street and another in
Meeting-house-yard, in Broad Street near Old Gravel
Lane."
This does not appear to be very exciting, but it
affords a glimpse of there being a number of Danish and
Swedish, people who had settled in the neighbourhood.
These were principally engaged in the timber trade, but
another thriving business was that of the importation of
hemp and tar - the crude distillation of pine-wood -
shipped from ports of Northern Europe for the manufacture
of rope. This industry became the principal one in St.
George’s in the second half of the eighteenth
century, but rope walks were common throughout all the
riverside districts.
Ten years before the parish came into
being, Mr. Henry Raine,brewer, built at his expense in
the old hamlet a charity school for fifty boys and fifty
girls, and gave forty guineas a year towards the support
of it. The children were clothed and the boys were
taught to read, write and cast accounts; the girls were
taught to read, sew and mark. From 1719 to 1736 Mr.
Raine, who had personally superintended the school, by
his will made in the latter year, endowed it. In the same
year he erected another school, called the Asylum - a
name which did not then have unpleasant associations. In
this building provision was made for forty girls,
"chosing out of the most deserving of those brought
up in the old school, and who have continued therein two
years." They were to be maintained, clothed and
educated. After four years’ training, the girls were
to go into domestic service, and at the age of twenty-two
were to be entitled, subject to certain qualifications,
to become candidates for the marriage portion of £100,
for which six of them might draw lots on every 1st
May and 28th December, The unsuccessful
candidates, if they continued unmarried, might draw again
from time to time, till they obtained a prize.
Mr. Raine left most of his property to his two
nephews, exhorting them to purchase £4,000 Stock to make
a permanent provision for these marriage portions.
"I doubt not," he says, "but my nephews
will cheerfully purchase the stock if they had seen, as I
have, six poor innocent maidens come trembling to draw
the prize, and for the fortunate maid that got it burst
into tears with excess of joy." It has been pointed
out that one’s feelings and sympathies may be quite
as deeply stirred by the sight of the five "poor
innocent maidens" who are unfortunate enough to draw
blanks. To which remark may be added the observation that
instances of envy, hatred and malice are more likely to
arise from gifts bestowed by capricious fortune than from
those that are the reward of merit.
By an Act of Parliament in 1780 the trustees of the
endowments were incorporated by the name of "The
Governors and Trustees of the Raine’s
Charities." Forty years previously the Court of
Chancery decreed that the money for the provision of
marriage portions should be set apart, but in course of
years it came to be disregarded and no particular fund
was kept for this purpose. The management of this branch
of the Charity does not appear to have been successful.
Marriage portions continued to be given, but the number
applying for them was not large, and instead of six
candidates at each half-yearly drawing of the lots, only
on one occasion in the twenty-three years prior to 1875
had there been more than three candidates and frequently,
if not generally, only one. All the endowments of the
benevolent founder are now applied to the fine school
built in Arbour Square which bears the name of the Henry
Raine Foundation.
Mr. Raine lived, and carried on business in premises
afterwards known as the Star Brewery, which were acquired
nearly a century ago by the East London Gas Company and
afterwards transferred to the Ratcliff Company. They were
the nucleus of the Wapping Gas Works.
Our friend the Parish Clerk computed the number of
houses in the newly formed parish "as upwards of
2,000," but probably his pride of place led him to
err, for twenty-three years later, in 1756, there appear
to have been only 1,946 houses, but in a few years the
marshland south of Pennington Street was wholly built
over.
A contemporary writer, referring to the houses that
were here erected, said, "Those and others are
almost without exception mere hovels, when compared to
the habitations within the city of London," but he
admitted that "exceedingly useful, opulent and
worthy members of society are scattered through the
streets and lanes" of the parish.
In 1800 the work of constructing the
London Dock was begun. In Wapping eleven acres of
land were taken and 120 houses pulled down, and in St.
George’s the whole, or part of twenty-four streets,
thirty-three courts, yards, alleys and lanes were
demolished. Most of these houses were of a mean and
wretched description, and the loss of them was a distinct
gain to the neighbourhood.
North of the Highway the development of the land for
building purposes more than made good the number of
houses demolished. Huge sugar refineries arose of which
the parish ultimately contained more than any other in
the Tower Hamlets until the collapse of the industry in
1880.
About the year 1820 St. George’s-in-the-East was
at the height of its prosperity, and wealthy merchants
and traders resided in the parish. On Sunday mornings a
line of carriages was drawn up outside the church gates
waiting to take the owners home. Wellclose Square was the
most fashionable quarter, and there the Danish Ambassador
resided. The annual church rate would yield over £700,
and funds were so plentiful that the Vestry could spend
£4,400 improving and extending the churchyard and
beautifying the church and repairing the organ. The times
were changing. The prospect of work at the London Docks
caused a large influx of unskilled labour, and the
intermittent employment of the dock labourer and the low
rate of pay - 5d. per hour - brought poverty.
The population grew dense and misery spread with the
outbreaks of cholera in 1849, 1855, and in 1866. On the
latter occasion this parish suffered more than any other
part of the East of London.
In the meantime, the prosperous merchants and
tradesmen, who had formerly been compelled through the
lack of travelling facilities to reside on or near their
business premises, had with the coining of railways moved
into the suburbs and attended daily, and the houses that
they once occupied were let out in tenements.
Over the parish in our days hangs an atmosphere of
depression that things should be as they are, which is
broken only for some rare moments, such as when the mean
streets have a certain wistfulness in the softening grey
haze of a late autumnal afternoon. Then the lofty tower
of St. George’s Church, which has seen two centuries
of life’s vicissitudes, hushes red in the kindly
glow of the sun in the west, telling worker and the
workless of the departure of another day.
by Sydney Maddocks
Reprinted with permission of David Rich, Tower Hamlets History On Line.
