Markets 
While significant numbers of Londoners were moving out of the centre in search of a better life, many more remained in the working-class districts at the heart of London: Greenwich, Deptford, Battersea, Rotherhithe and the legendary East End. The railways were not only encouraging the daily commute from the suburbs, they were also bringing in poorer people unable to make a living in the Home Counties. In the capital they would seek employment among the sprawling, overcrowded mass of markets, pubs, shops, docks and factories.
Markets London has a rich history of markets, with many dating back to the Middle Ages. Even now, Billingsgate, Smithfield, Spitalfields and Covent Garden cling on in the face of competition, while others have fallen by the wayside. Watney Street market at the heart of the East End once had more than 100 shops selling cheese, meat, fruit, shoes and clothing. One of them was distinguished by a cast-iron sign reading – ‘J Sainsbury Ltd’ – part of a growing enterprise which would become the largest grocery retailer in Britain by the 1920s. There were also dozens of stalls and wandering hawkers catering for the relatively poor population living between Commercial Road and the London Docks. This lent a disreputable air to the district in the eyes of the more well-to-do inhabitants. ‘It is well known [that] for many years past Watney Street has been the happy hunting ground of every class of street hawker, and the sights to be witnessed in the neighbourhood during every Sunday was disgraceful in the extreme,’ read one newspaper report. ‘Persons attempting to pass to Christ Church to public worship were subjected to every conceivable annoyance and insult.’ Following a series of complaints from the local ratepayers about this ‘nuisance’, the parish vestry ordered that from 29 September 1888, there would be a ban on ‘any stall, costers' barrows, goods for sale, or any other matter’ on the street between 12 midnight and 7 a.m. Monday to Saturday and all day Sunday. The headline in the East London Advertiser of 6 October conjured up images of the clearing away of rampant criminality with the headline: ‘A Raid on the Watney Street Market’.37
Although the report did not mention it, the image of the market had hardly been helped by a fatal stabbing three months earlier. Henry Talbot, aged twenty, was a master butcher who ran a stall with the help of his sixteen-year-old brother John. Both lived with their father in nearby Sheridan Street. On Thursday 12 July, John was sent away for lunch but was told not to be long. The boy returned nearly two hours later at around 4 p.m.
‘I thought I told you to make haste,’ said Henry, with some annoyance.
‘I have been to dinner and had to wait in the coffee shop,’ John replied.
The fraternal bickering continued until John finally told his brother, ‘Hold your tongue.’ At this, Henry lost his temper and attempted to headbutt the boy. Both men were holding butcher’s knives in their hands, and the brief clash ended with a blade buried in Henry’s left breast a few inches below the nipple. ‘Now I’ve got it,’ Henry moaned. As blood poured from the wound he began to walk towards the London Hospital but only got to the top of Watney Street before collapsing. His last words to his brother, as he was put into a cab, were: ‘It was not your fault – go back and look after the stall.’ Half an hour later he was dead, the blade having pierced his heart.
John gave himself up to police the next morning. He told detectives: ‘We had some words, which I thought was a lark. He butted me with his head and hit me with his fist. He ran on my knife which I was holding. It was all an accident.’ Daniel Day, who was sitting in the next stall, agreed; he testified that Henry had run on to the knife trying to ‘buck’ his brother in the face. After the inquest jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure, the charge of manslaughter was thrown out by the magistrate and John was discharged.38
Watney Street is now much changed – the market steadily declined through the mid-twentieth century, Sainsbury’s moved out and a large proportion of stalls packed up never to return. The street is now lined with ugly blocks of flats, although there are plans to ‘regenerate’ the area and restore some of its lost character.
Butchers were also a major feature of Clare market, which was sited between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand to the west of the new Royal Courts of Justice, which were officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1882. The market had thrived since the seventeenth century but by the late nineteenth had been reduced to a grim collection of:
… streets and lanes, where the shops are tenanted by butchers, greengrocers, etc. and where the roadways are crowded with costermongers’ carts, and the kerbs and kennels with stalls where nearly everything is vended. Here herrings or mackerel, as the season may be, are sold at marvellously low prices; while the vegetables equally cheap, are fresh and excellent in quality. The din and bustle lasts till midnight and it is a strange phase of life to study the faces and listen to the conversation of people bargain-hunting in this market.
Twenty years later it was barely hanging on to existence and was replaced by the London School of Economics.39
George Best was a sixty-year-old waiter living in Stanhope Street, one of those narrow thoroughfares which formed Clare Market. Having finished work on the evening of Thursday 27 September, and already inflamed by drink, he began hurling ‘vulgar and filthy language’ at his neighbour’s wife, Alice Dowden, who was standing at the window of No.6 with her two children. She called her husband William, a twenty-four-year-old market porter, to defend her honour with the result that the two men were soon at each other’s throats. The fight ended with Best falling backwards and cracking his head on the kerbstone. He was put on a barrow but was already dead from a brain haemorrhage by the time that he arrived at the nearby King’s College Hospital. Dowden was charged with causing the death but the witness evidence was contradictory – some alleged he punched Best in the face, others said he threw up his arm in self-defence and that the death was an accident. Again the verdict of the inquest jury was crucial: death by misadventure, and the case was dismissed by Bow Street magistrates the following week. ‘The language and action of the deceased quite justified the prisoner in pushing him on one side,’ reported one newspaper. ‘The decision was received with applause, which was quickly suppressed by the usher.’40
Pubs London in 1888 was a city of more than 10,000 public houses, each one an oasis of light and warmth amidst the fog, smog and darkness. The pub was an extra living room, a community meeting place or just somewhere to escape from the wife, work or cold. ‘This form of amusement seems to be the favourite one with families,’ wrote one journalist, ‘for in house after house there are little groups comprising a grey-haired old lady with a glass of neat gin, a buxom young woman with a baby and ditto, and a burly young fellow with a big pewter.’ The pub, open for business between 5 a.m. and midnight, was an ‘Elysian field for the tired toiler’ and ‘the centre of attraction for the masses’. It was not a place for the distinguished lady or gentleman, who believed that combining the masses and alcohol led inevitably to ‘ruffianism’. There were more than 7,000 arrests for drunkenness and more than 16,500 arrests of ‘drunk and disorderly characters’ in London in 1888.41 Occasionally, as in the case of Robert Marjoram in Stratford, these petty rows and scuffles ended in death.
On Christmas Eve, 1888, a large group of friends were drinking at the Queen’s Head in Tanner Street, Bermondsey. As the name of the road suggests, the leather trade was important for the parish. Bermondsey was a working-class area, populated by casual labourers, dockers and street sellers, for whom a drink at the end of the week was just reward. But what was a man to do when money was tight? One solution was to join his friends for a ‘Yorkshire Round’. Everybody would put what money they had into a hat and the total would be used to pay for all the drinks. It was Christmas, after all, and good will to all men. The job of collecting the coins fell to John Kellar, a thirty-three-year-old labourer, but Alexander McKie disputed how much was in the hat and Kellar claimed that he had not paid his fair share. Despite the best efforts of the landlady to calm the situation down by offering Kellar a free drink, he pulled off his coat and demanded to fight McKie for 5s.
‘You could not hit me or give me a black eye in a twelvemonth,’ taunted Kellar.
‘You seem to have a spite against me but for what I don’t know,’ replied McKie. ‘I don’t want a black eye and I don’t want to fight.’
Kellar walked out into the passage, turned and shouted, ‘If you are a man, come out and don’t act like a cur.’ That was it for McKie, and he followed Kellar outside.
The fight was to last two rounds. After taking off their upper clothing, they shook hands and squared up for the duel. The first round ended with both men grappling each other and falling to the floor. The second ended abruptly when Kellar fell over trying to land a punch. His head hit the pavement and he was knocked unconscious. He was taken to hospital in a cab but died four days later on Friday 28 December from a fractured skull.
McKie, aged twenty-three, was committed for trial for manslaughter at the Old Bailey on the basis that in trying to ward off the blow he had caused Kellar to fall. But the prosecution openly admitted that Kellar was the aggressor throughout and the judge, Mr Justice Denman, said he thought ‘it would be a pity to brand the prisoner as a felon for the rest of his life’. The jury quickly found him not guilty.42
In another case, the fatal fight was to be over just one shilling rather than five. On the night of Saturday 30 June, William Walker, a twenty-four-year-old labourer, and Robert Hodges, a thirty-seven-year-old ‘hawker’ or street seller, were having a drink together at the Cooper’s Arms in Sun Street, Finsbury. Walker owed Hodges money and it was decided they should settle their argument with a ‘fair stand up fight’ outside the pub. This one went three rounds before Hodges threw Walker to the ground by grabbing his legs, lifting him off his feet and throwing him backwards as if he was tossing a caber. Hodges then flung himself on top of his rival as if it were an exhibition wrestling match. Walker had to be carried home to Alexander Chambers, the lodging house-cum-beer shop in Horse Shoe Lane where both he and Hodges were staying. Despite its location not far from Finsbury Square, lodging houses were generally miserable places that catered for those who had just enough money to avoid sleeping rough. The noble-sounding name was a common feature of these properties, although the illusion could hardly have lasted long once a man passed through the front door. Walker spent the next three days in bed, his occasional vomiting the sign of a serious head injury. He died shortly after being taken to the infirmary on Tuesday 3 July. The post-mortem revealed a fractured skull.
Hodges stood trial at the Old Bailey for manslaughter and hardly helped his case by confessing that he could not remember the fight because he was so drunk. While two witnesses testified that Walker’s death was caused by the fall, rather than any direct blow, others said that hugging a man and throwing him to the ground was not the stuff of a fair fight. Hodges was convicted and sentenced to three months’ hard labour.43
Coincidentally, Sun Street would have a minor part in the police investigation into the Whitechapel murders. On 9 September 1889, a Mr E. Callaghan, formerly resident at No.27, made a statement about one of his lodgers named Mr G. Wentworth Bell Smith. This gentleman, who claimed to have been raising money for a Canadian society, stayed out late most nights and wore a pair of rubber boots which dampened the sound of his footsteps. In August 1888, at around the time of the murder of the prostitute Martha Tabram, he returned home at 4 a.m. with some story about having his watch stolen in Bishopsgate Street. Marks of blood were found on his bed and a few days later he left the house, claiming that he was returning to Toronto. However, there were reports that he had been seen getting into a tramcar in September. Mr Callaghan added: ‘We all regarded him as a lunatic and with delusions regarding “women of the streets” who he frequently said ought to be all drowned … the writing of Bell Smith is in every way similar to that sent to the police and signed Jack the Ripper.’ This theory, like many, many others, was investigated and discarded.44
While the consumption of alcohol had declined slightly since the height of the 1870s, in 1888 the English were still guzzling down an average of 1 gallon of spirits, 40 gallons of wine and 30 gallons of beer per year.45 Perhaps the type of people most notorious for heavy drinking in London were sailors, who saw fit to celebrate their brief stay on dry land by dousing themselves with hard liquor. On 28 May, John Shorting, a forty-two-year-old seaman from Jarrow in the north-east of England, was in Greenwich with the steamship James Joicy. His first port of call was the Hatcliffe Arms, where he made the acquaintance of two women keen to be bought a drink. Next was the Ship & Billet a few yards down Woolwich Road. About an hour before closing, the barman refused to serve him any more alcohol, as he was plainly drunk enough already. Shorting was staggering towards the exit when a local boy, nineteen-year-old Jeremiah Duggan, took objection to something Shorting said to his female acquaintances and punched him in the face. When Shorting got up he was again punched to the ground, whereupon one of the women poured a pot of ale over his head. Shorting was dead by the time he arrived at the infirmary.
Although committed for trial on a murder charge, Duggan ended up on trial for the lesser offence of manslaughter. It was said that there was no quarrel between the two men and that the blow was unprovoked. But while a number of witnesses described one or two blows to the head, another described it as ‘a quick shove’. The doctor admitted the fatal brain haemorrhage could in fact have been caused by excessive drinking alone. A not guilty verdict was the inevitable result.46
It was not just men involved in petty life and death struggles in the pubs and taverns of London. Women too were at the mercy of the devil’s nectar because of its quality as a powerful eraser of memories, whether of the drudgery and violence of domestic circumstances or the degradations of life on the streets. Brawls between women were not that uncommon and provided an entertainment of a kind for the male observers. The socialite Margot Tennant (who later married future Prime Minister Herbert Asquith) became directly involved in one such ‘catfight’ at the Peggy Bedford pub in Whitechapel during one of her philanthropic visits to the East End in the late 1880s. Noting that it was ‘hot, smelly and draughty’ and ‘crowded with sullen and sad-looking people’, she had only to wait a few minutes before a row broke out. A merry cad tried to pluck the flower from the hat of her new-found acquaintance Phoebe, an employee at the nearby packing factory. The situation quickly deteriorated:
Provoked by this, a younger man began jostling him, at which all the others pressed forward. The barman shouted ineffectually to them to stop; they merely cursed him and said that they were backing Phoebe. A woman, more drunk than the others, swore at being disturbed and said that Phoebe was a blasted something that I could not understand. Suddenly I saw her hitting out like a prize-fighter, and the men formed a ring around them.
Rather than abandon her friend, the young Miss Tennant surged into the middle of the scrum to break it up, only to find herself caught between two women slinging their fists wildly at each other. ‘Women fight very awkwardly and I was battered about between the two. I turned and cursed the men standing round for laughing and doing nothing and, before I could separate the combatants, I had given and received heavy blows.’47
A similar scene in Bow, east London, in 1888, had more disastrous consequences for those involved. On the night of 21 April the coal merchant William Cook was driving down Fairfield Road when he saw a crowd of people outside the Caledonian Arms pub. At the centre of it were two women fighting. One of them clearly had the upper hand, landing several blows to the face of the other before dragging her by the hair down on to the flagstones. The impact left a savage cut to the centre of the victim’s forehead, prompting one of the onlookers to shout, ‘My God! The woman is killed.’ Mr Cook, seeing that others were attending to the injured lady, followed the attacker in his trap as she calmly walked off. For half an hour or more he shadowed her without seeing a single police officer to raise the alarm, until she finally ran into a house. Fortunately he was able to get her name from a few boys hanging around in the street. Sarah Ann Ward was a seventeen-year-old factory worker and described as tall but slightly built – although according to one report she was known as the ‘champion woman fighter of Old Ford’.
Ward had gone to the Caledonian Arms with four young men that evening. They had seemed a happy group, and offered a drink to shoemaker William Astell and his friend Arthur Wood, a plumber. This seemed to rile Mr Astell’s wife Annie, who had an old quarrel with Ward and clearly did not approve of her and her companions. ‘If you’ve not got enough to pay for a glass then I’ll buy one,’ she told her husband. ‘We don’t want to drink with them, have you not had enough of them?’ At this the atmosphere turned sour and abuse was hurled back and forth until Ward started trying to goad Astell into a fight. In an attempt to keep the peace, landlord Thomas Gillett ordered Ward to leave and then advised Mrs Astell to go home via the back door. Her husband drained his drink and followed a few seconds later.
‘When I got out I found that my wife had been struck,’ he recalled. ‘I accused Ward of striking her. She turned round and said, “Yes you bugger, and I will strike you”, which she did on my left eye. I made a blow at her in retaliation, and as I did so someone knocked me senseless to the ground. When I recovered I found my wife standing up against the window.’
Mr Astell was too groggy to note his wife’s injuries that night but saw her the next day in hospital. She was conscious, but her skull was fractured and the damage to her brain would lead to her death three days later on 25 April.
The inquest returned a verdict of manslaughter and Ward went on trial a month later at the Old Bailey. As in the previous cases, the evidence was contradictory. Richard Wilson, a plasterer, claimed Mrs Astell was actually willing to fight and had left the pub rolling up her sleeves for battle. Two witnesses said Mrs Astell fell over her husband’s legs during the fight of her own accord. The jury didn’t find it an easy decision but after two and a half hours’ deliberation in their room they found Ward not guilty.48
Fairfield Road would feature in newspaper reports for different reasons three months later when 1,400 ‘matchgirls’ went on strike at the Bryant & May factory. It had begun on 2 July in response to the sacking of at least one worker for refusing to follow instructions, and continued until 18 July when the company agreed to their demands. These included the abolition of all fines and deductions from wages, the provision of a breakfast room, the formation of an official union and the taking back of the ringleaders. This resounding victory was achieved with the support of the press, a sympathetic public and socialists like Annie Besant, who had published an article condemning the way the company paid out dividends at 20 per cent while its workers earned from as little as 4s 6d a week. The success of the matchgirls demonstrated what could be achieved by organised protest and set the mood for the Great Dock Strike of 1889, which inspired the spread of trade unions throughout the country.49