Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ had big ideas for gutta-percha and soon realised that he would need more space; a location close to the city but with the potential for massive expansion, a site that could expand in time with his ideas and ideally outside the provisions of the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844 which restricted ‘harmful trades’ in the city. Cornhill was out of the question, as were Bishopsgate and Commercial Road. Liverpool was too far, he needed to be close to the port of London, ideally right next to the river, in order that the raw materials could be delivered and unloaded with the minimum of fuss and expense and the finished products shipped out in the same fashion.

      He’d often walk down from the Cornhill office to the bank of the Thames, watching the river in action. The steamboats, the coal barges, the wherries, the east coast barges to-ing and fro-ing, loading and unloading at the busy wharves. He’d watch ships leaving London sailing to who knows where, picturing the estuary opening up to the rest of the world. It was standing there one day among the cacophony of ships and men and shouting and clanging and the parping of horns and breathy exhalations of steam whistles that Stephen Winckworth Silver realised that to expand the business in the way he truly desired he should look east.

      Hiring a launch one day he took his board of directors and his sons down the river to show them a site he thought had great potential. It was a sunny, chilly winter morning as the boat passed the Tower and headed towards the rising sun, passing between the towering wharves and warehouses of Bermondsey and Wapping, passing the busy entrance to Greenland Dock, the shipyards of the Isle of Dogs, the naval victualling yards at Deptford, the old seamen’s hospital at Greenwich. As they passed around Bugsby’s Reach and the East India Dock basin the riverside became noticeably less congested and busy before the Woolwich dockyards came into view on the south bank of the river. Before long the only sound was the gwersh, gwersh of the engines, and the launch found itself alongside a stretch of marshy land on the north bank of the river.

      Stephen Winckworth Silver led the men onto the deck from the saloon in which they had been warming themselves. They looked around, a little confused and very cold, breath clouds being whipped away to mingle with the steam from the funnel. Stephen had seen many changes in his decades in business: London, Great Britain and indeed the world had been transformed in an unprecedented fashion and he’d been here, in London, for all of it, at the very heart of British advancement. He had, after all, clothed the Empire, and he wasn’t done yet.

      Stephen Winckworth Silver was nearly 60 years old now but the sparkle in his eyes was undimmed. His sons knew it, his fellow board members knew it, just as George Arrowsmith had spotted it nearly half a century earlier and even Emily at the Three Tuns before that.

      ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it’s a cold morning so I will not keep us out here long. I want you to look at the north bank of the river here and tell me what you see.’

      Their heads turned, looking left and right, trying to work out what it was they were supposed to be looking at.

      ‘There’s nothing there, father,’ replied Stephen William Silver. ‘It’s a river wall and marshes beyond.’

      ‘You are absolutely correct, Stephen,’ his father replied, ‘but on this land, on this marshy, boggy, unlovely, unloved land, lies the future of the company. That is what you are looking at.’

      The men all turned to look at him.

      ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced expansively, ‘S.W. Silver & Co badly requires new premises. Premises with space to expand and which have good access to transportation, both incoming and outgoing. Whereas in the past we have always looked for existing buildings, this time we are going to build our own, from nothing. Just here the new and largest works of S.W. Silver & Co are going to rise from these marshes and take the company into the future. These are exciting times, and this company is going to grasp the opportunity to not just capitalise on these times but to actively formulate them. Look again, gentlemen. I guarantee that within two years you will not recognise this stretch of river as the same which you see here today.’

      Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the distance, back towards the city, a steam tug let out a mournful whistle. As Stephen Winckworth Silver looked across the brown water of the Thames towards his vision of the future there was a blue flash of colour from behind him as a kingfisher swooped low past the launch and plunged into the river. It emerged again with something in its beak and flew off low over the reeds towards the marshland and disappeared over the wall.

Chapter Five

      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 СКАЧАТЬ