The Cowkeeper's Wish: A Genealogical Journey

By Tracy Kasaboski and Kristen den Hartog

In the 1840s, a young cowkeeper and his wife arrive in London, England, having walked from coastal Wales with their cattle. They hope to escape poverty, but instead they plunge deeper into it, and the family, ensconced in one of London’s “black holes,” remains mired there for generations. The Cowkeeper’s Wish follows the couple’s descendants in and out of slum housing, bleak workhouses and insane asylums, through tragic deaths, marital strife and war. Nearly a hundred years later, their great-granddaughter finds herself in an altogether different London, in southern Ontario.

In The Cowkeeper’s Wish, Kristen den Hartog and Tracy Kasaboski trace their ancestors’ path to Canada, using a single family’s saga to give meaningful context to a fascinating period in history—Victorian and then Edwardian England, the First World War and the Depression. Beginning with little more than enthusiasm, a collection of yellowed photographs and a family tree, the sisters scoured archives and old newspapers, tracked down streets, pubs and factories that no longer exist, and searched out secrets buried in crumbling ledgers, building on the fragments that remained of family tales.

While this family story is distinct, it is also typical, and so all the more worth telling. As a working-class chronicle stitched into history, The Cowkeeper’s Wish offers a vibrant, absorbing look at the past that will captivate genealogy enthusiasts and readers of history alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Release date: Sep 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781771622035

Tracy Kasaboski

Tracy Kasaboski and her sister, Kristen den Hartog, co-authored The Occupied Garden: A Family Memoir of War-Torn Holland (McClelland and Stewart, 2008), which was selected as one of The Globe and Mail’s best books of the year. She lives in Deep River, ON.

Book preview

From London, England, to London, Ontario, through poverty, love and war. The Cowkeeper's Wish: A Genealogical Journey. By Tracy Kasaboski and Kristen den Hartog, authors of The Occupied Garden.

The Cowkeeper’s Wish

The

Cowkeeper’s Wish

 A Genealogical Journey 

Tracy Kasaboski & Kristen den Hartog

Douglas & McIntyre logo

Copyright © 2018 Tracy Kasaboski and Kristen den Hartog

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [e-mail].

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Photos courtesy of the authors’ family collection except where otherwise noted.

Edited by Derek Fairbridge

Text design by Carleton Wilson

Jacket design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

Printed in Canada

Government of Canada wordmark Canada Council for the Arts logo British Columbia Arts Council logo

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Kasaboski, Tracy, author

  The cowkeeper’s wish : a genealogical journey / by Tracy

Kasaboski and Kristen den Hartog.

Includes bibliographical references.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77162-202-8 (hardcover).--ISBN 978-1-77162-203-5 (HTML)

  1. Kasaboski, Tracy--Family.  2. Den Hartog, Kristen, 1965- --Family. 3. Deverill family. 4. Canada--Genealogy. I. Den Hartog, Kristen, 1965-, author. II. Title.

CS89.K38 2018    929.20971    C2018-902184-5

                    C2018-902185-3

For Mom, for inspiring our curiosity,

and in memory of Bill and Doris.

Don’t forget to remember. Joe Deverill, April 1923.

Contents

Prologue 13

Part One: In Darkest London—1840s–1913

Chapter 1 – Bits of Ragged Laundry and Wide-Eyed Dossers 21

Chapter 2 – When the Horse Is Down 43

Chapter 3 – Potter’s Rot 67

Chapter 4 – Tell Me When Your Mother Drops 95

Chapter 5 – Cracked Eggs 117

Chapter 6 – We Are Shadows 137

Chapter 7 – The Blaze of Day 163

Chapter 8 – Ready for the Call 189

Part Two: The Noise of War—1913–1919

Chapter 9 – Bang, Crash, Tinkle 213

Chapter 10 – You Made Life Cheery When You Called Me Dearie 253

Chapter 11 – A Person of Unsound Mind 279

Chapter 12 – Down-Hearted and Shivery 301

Chapter 13 – Make Your Motto Forward! and Stick to It Like Glue 319

Part Three: The Forest City—1907–1934

Chapter 14 – My Own Darling Wiffie 343

Chapter 15 – Don’t Forget to Remember 367

Chapter 16 – In the Sweet By and By 387

Chapter 17 – A Cosy Nest 407

Epilogue 421

From the Authors 429

Acknowledgements and Notes on Sources 433

Notes 435

St. Saviour, Southwark, depicted in Charles Booth Poverty Map, Sheet 9. Adapted from map detail courtesy of Charles Booth’s London, LSE Library.

Whitechapel depicted in Charles Booth Poverty Map, Sheet 5.

Adapted from map detail courtesy of Charles Booth’s London, LSE Library.

Prologue

There’s never a beginning to any family story, but it’s tempting, scrolling through census documents and church registers and adding names and dates to a chart, to continue backward in pursuit of one, as if it might be found. Each discovery – an entry on a census that reveals a missing sibling, a marriage certificate that records the maiden name of a wife – is like a small light illuminating an otherwise dark pathway, and the searcher is beckoned on, rarely stopping to peer into the gloaming where the real treasure lies.

As the searcher makes her journey into the past, tracing yet another generation or growing her tree by a branch, it may occur to her that what she has gathered are clues, and that the part that matters, the story, has yet to be told. For even the most ordinary family has its story, with twists and turns unapparent on the surface, and if she looks hard enough, and probes simple facts, forgotten lives emerge, becoming more vibrant with each new detail. When the broader scope of world history is allowed to permeate the tale, the backdrop gains colour and texture, until the searcher can almost smell the dank odour, taste the bitter brew, or feel the chill air of the past. Then she can claim to know something of the story, and can perhaps see the path that led from there to where she is now.

What follows is the result of a similar journey. This tale picks up its thread more than a century and a half ago when a cowkeeper from Wales tries to better his lot. It wends its way forward through workhouses and asylums and war, accompanied by brass-band musicians, suffragettes and philanthropists, coming at last to the cowkeeper’s great- granddaughter, an ocean and an era away.

Part One

In Darkest London

1840s–1913

These formal portraits of cowkeeper Benjamin Jones and his wife, Margaret Davies, likely taken in the 1860s when photography became affordable for the working class, disguise the fact that the couple lived amid grinding poverty. Most people owned Sunday best with threadbare sleeves and mending invisible to the camera’s eye.

Chapter 1

Bits of Ragged Laundry and Wide-Eyed Dossers

Sometime in the early 1840s, a young, as yet unmarried couple left coastal Wales with their dairy cows and set out for London, climbing into the Welsh hills and following pebbled paths and muddied cart tracks. It was a journey of some weeks, made to the tinny clank of cow bells and with the dust of the road thick on their boots. Benjamin Jones was twenty or so and Margaret Davies two years older. Each night they slept beneath the cart that carried their few possessions, and each morning they resumed the trek that surely seemed endless, but with every step they put distance between themselves and the hard rural existence they sought to escape. Ahead was London, with its promise of opportunity.

They settled on Red Cross Street in the Borough of Southwark. Directly to the north was the murky water of the Thames and beautiful St. Paul’s Cathedral on the opposite side; to the west, where the Thames curved and changed direction, was the bridge that led to Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace, newly renovated as the home for a young Queen Victoria. While physically close to these places, Benjamin and Margaret’s new neighbourhood, known simply as the Borough then, was a world away, and a startling change from Wales, too. But though the new life could not have felt less like the old, Red Cross Street housed many other Welsh migrants, all living in grinding poverty. Benjamin’s cows were kept in the yard, and later – so the crumbling land tax ledgers tell us – in sheds he rented in alleys that branched off Red Cross. Faraway Aberaeron, their village in Wales, had green open spaces, animals in their pastures, fishing boats on sparkling water, lush vegetation. In the Borough, if you touched a leaf, your finger came away dirty. Benjamin and Margaret had left Wales to escape poverty, but as countless newcomers to the city discovered, it was as much an urban as a rural disease. Here in the Borough, it was endemic.

The home on Red Cross Street sat on the dividing line between the parishes of St. Saviour’s and St. George the Martyr, in the heart of Charles Dickens’s London. As a child, Dickens himself had lived just steps south for a time, on Lant Street, so he knew the area first-hand. His Little Dorrit was married at St. George the Martyr Church, however fictitiously, and the infamous St. George’s Workhouse was said to be the model he’d used while writing Oliver Twist in the 1830s – though other workhouses made that same claim, as if it was something to boast about. Commonly referred to as the Mint Street workhouse, St. George’s sat near the bottom of Red Cross, its walls hugging the street, its rooms full of people who depended on England’s Poor Law system for their basic needs. Reformed in 1834, the system was structured so that each area, or union, was responsible for its own poor and was funded by taxes paid by members of the middle and upper classes, many of whom resented having to support people who couldn’t look after themselves. A few years before Benjamin and Margaret’s arrival in London, the laws were amended so that people in need couldn’t get direct hand-outs from the parish, but had to enter the local workhouse and perform manual labour in exchange for food, clothing and shelter. And there were plenty of people down and out in the Borough.

In dairyman Benjamin’s time, the area was still known as one of the city’s black holes – among the most ragged places in all of Ragged London, the nickname coined by contemporary journalist John Hollingshead. It has scores of streets that are rank and steaming with vice; streets where unwashed, drunken, fishy-eyed women hang by dozens out of the windows, beckoning to the passers-by. It has scores of streets filled with nothing but thieves, brown, unwholesome tramps’ lodging-houses, and smoky receptacles for stolen goods…The whole district is far below the level of high-water mark in the river, and the sewage in many places bubbles up through the floors. The courts and alleys branch off on either side at every step, leading into endless mazes of low, sooty passages, squares, and ‘rents.’

The Borough brimmed with the dead as well as the living. It held disused plague pits that had long ago been filled in and built on, as well as overstuffed hospital graveyards and church cemeteries. Just north of the Joneses’ house, the Cross Bones graveyard served as St. Saviour’s poor ground, where the cost of burials was a pittance or was entirely covered by the parish. Not even the poor wanted the shame of having their dead buried here, but frequently there was no alternative. For more than two hundred years, the spot had been a regular dumping ground for bodies no one claimed, or for the most destitute members of the parish who could afford nothing more. Long before that, the ground had been used for low women who frequented the neighbourhood. Cadavers were buried in layers until no more than eighteen inches of earth hid them from the surface. In time it was estimated that the small plot of land held some fifteen thousand bodies, though the cemetery was unconsecrated and there are no definitive records of who lies there. A high brick wall surrounded the graveyard, topped with shards of glass, but it didn’t deter the resurrection men. Unscrupulous sorts who visited at night, they quickly unearthed the newly buried corpses, carted them to hospitals close by and sold them for medical research. Eventually Cross Bones was closed to further burials, like many of London’s overcharged grounds. The final report on the subject stated that Cross Bones was crowded with dead, and many fragments of undecayed bones, some even entire, are mixed up with the earth of the mounds over the graves. While it was a convenient place for getting rid of the dead,…it bears no mark of ever having been set apart as a place of Christian sepulture. And yet it meant something to the people of the Borough, whose friends and relatives were buried there.

With the closing of Cross Bones and churchyard cemeteries, death, or at least its by-product, moved out of Benjamin and Margaret’s neighbourhood to cemeteries at the city’s edges, where there was still space to accommodate the growing number of bodies. The spectre of death would always hover, but life in the street carried on. The dairy couple had children who would go on to marry other Welsh migrants, and soon there were relatives up and down Red Cross Street, in one parish or the other, in pockets that seemed like tiny, transplanted Welsh villages, if not for the mayhem and the grime.

When the local inspector of nuisances, John Errington, did his rounds on Red Cross Street in autumn of 1855, he declared a number of houses north of Benjamin and Margaret’s unfit for human habitation. They were in a foul and filthy state, London’s Morning Post reported. The cess pool was full, and the soil was running about. The local doctor supported Errington’s charges and said that, inside and out, the houses were deplorable…The stench was so great as to be injurious to the health of the inhabitants. Farther south, Benjamin’s cowsheds did not escape Inspector Errington’s critical eye. Mr. Jones, cowkeeper of Red Cross Street, was also summoned under the same act, the paper stated, for allowing a quantity of dung and filthy matter to accumulate on his premises.

The cows Benjamin kept lived in cramped quarters, and as far as the local Medical Officer of Health was concerned, they did not belong in the city. The sheds throughout the area were makeshift and unclean, and Benjamin’s were obviously no exception. Though sanitary regulations grew stricter as the years went on, the cowkeepers were typically slow to improve – not just careless, the officer claimed, but often thoroughly ignorant. In many of his annual reports, he longed for the day that cows would no longer be kept in the city. Sure I am that the existence of many thousands of feet of almost stagnant foul liquid, slowly running from cow-sheds and piggeries, cannot be right in close neighbourhoods…The first dairy authority agrees that ‘Hot, close cow-houses are disgraceful affairs.’

But Benjamin carried on with his trade all of his working life. He knew the secret of milking quickly and thoroughly, and taught his sons to do the same, hoping in time to pass the business down, despite the public-health controversy. His family helped deliver the milk through the streets, carrying shoulder-yokes that held barrels, and later using horse and cart.

Like all cowkeepers, he did constant battle with chronic illnesses that affected his stock, pleuropneumonia and foot-and-mouth disease, as well as the dreaded rinderpest, an infectious disease that brought fever, sores, diarrhea and finally death to the animals on which he depended. In 1865, when Benjamin and Margaret’s children were beginning to make families of their own, this insidious affliction rushed so quickly through the whole of Britain that panic spread alongside the virus. Ten, then twenty, then fifty thousand cows perished. In the end, roughly 80 percent of the cattle in London alone died or were slaughtered due to rinderpest, though it was difficult to come up with an accurate figure because cowkeepers were reluctant to report problems among their herds, and were also swift to be rid of an animal that showed any sign of illness. While unscrupulous sorts had always diluted their milk, the practice became more common as supply dwindled, though the filth of the water brought with it the danger of cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever. Before long, and with somewhat dark humour, the water pump was nicknamed the cow with the iron tail. The Medical Officer of Health seethed about the rinderpest outbreak, but pointed out that it shouldn’t have surprised anyone. The cowsheds were surrounded by dung heaps, he said, and the cattle drank from ponds contaminated by the dung. Calves and cows were kept in a highly artificial state of existence, which left them weak and unable to resist disease. If cowkeeping was outlawed in the city, he said, there would be no need for slaughterhouses either, and he lamented the sight of droves of cattle moving toward these places through the busy streets. The animals were foot sore and weary, he said, exhibiting symptoms of suffering painful to behold.

Many of London’s cowkeepers never recovered from the tragedy; Benjamin did. Was he shrewd, or lucky? Or did the workhouse looming down the street motivate him? Scores in the neighbourhood entered that stable for human beings once they became desperate enough. Just that September, The Lancet medical journal had reported on the mischievous state of things in the Mint Street workhouse, which served as both home for the needy and infirmary for the ill. It was well known that if you didn’t enter the Mint Street workhouse with an illness of some kind, you’d probably catch one during your stay. There were fourteen sick wards scattered throughout the building, and lately there’d been one outbreak after another inside this manufactory of fever, just as the cows were dying outside. The pauper nurses, despite their brown checked uniforms, were not trained in nursing and worked for a trifling wage that included tea, meat and beer. In condemning the place, The Lancet wrote:

The tramp ward for the women is a miserable room, foul and dirty, with imperfect light and ventilation, the floor being simply bedded with straw. Into this open sty the women are passed in, often with little or no clothing; and there, in considerable numbers, they pass the night. There being no watercloset attached, a large can or tub is placed in the room. This is the sole accommodation which the apartment possesses. The master informed us that there is no matron to look after the women, and that the place was really a den of horrors…After a very limited term of occupancy of this place, the women were struck down with fever, the place proving a perfect fever bed…It is our duty to condemn this workhouse, which ought to be removed, and one built better adapted to fulfill its duties to the poor and sick of the neighbourhood.

But there it stood, year after year, a place of last resort for Benjamin and Margaret, and so, in that sense, an inspiration too. If a family entered, the mother and father were separated, and the children were sent on to a pauper school. Admission ledgers were full of harsh notations that never told the full story of families broken this way: Father in house, deserted by Mother, foundling left in the…public house, Boro Road. If he wanted to keep his clan from getting pulled into that Poor Law spiral, Benjamin needed to earn enough to support them. Whatever came, he and Margaret must defeat it. And against all odds, he seems to have withstood the industry’s challenges, for alongside Benjamin’s name on the scant family documents that surface – the birth and marriage records of his children, the cyclical census reports and finally his death certificate – are the words cowkeeper or dairyman or milkman.

In an 1860s photograph, Benjamin is burly and bearded, with dark, somewhat unkempt hair. He’s plumper than you’d imagine a poor man to be, and his face looks friendly enough as he gazes straight at the camera. He looks uncomfortable in his good clothes: a tight, shiny vest with straining buttons, an open frock coat that can’t possibly close around his stout body but may once have done so nicely, as on the day he married Margaret. Seated, he holds a cane between his legs, and a top hat rests, brim up, on the table beside him. In the companion photo, his wife looks similarly constrained by her outfit, a plain gown that spills to the floor. Her glossy hair is parted in the centre and pulled back from her broad face so that not a tendril escapes to soften her expression. She averts her eyes from the photographer’s lens and gives little more for posterity than her signature does: x for the mark of Margaret Jones nee Davies, conveying only that she couldn’t read or write. However elusive, she is the one who passed down Welsh lullabies carried from her own childhood.

Not long after the rinderpest disaster and the sumptuous Windsor Castle wedding of Queen Victoria’s son Crown Prince Edward to Alexandra of Denmark, Benjamin and Margaret’s daughter Mary wed David Evans in a rather more humble ceremony. The marriage occurred in September 1868 in the crumbling St. Saviour’s folly, an ancient, once-glorious church so badly restored that prominent architect Augustus Pugin had deemed it as vile a preaching place…as ever disgraced the 19th century. Yet many important family events took place there, from Margaret and Benjamin’s wedding in September 1846 on down. If they were like many of their class in the Borough and wider London, though, they didn’t attend regular services. An 1851 ecclesiastical census examining British worship habits had found the labouring classes to be by far the largest group that stayed away. Horace Mann, who undertook the study, mused that the poor, relegated to the free seats at the back of the church, cannot enter our religious structures without having pressed upon their notice some memento of their inferiority. Edward Miall, writing around the same time in the weekly newspaper The Nonconformist, said of churches like St. Saviour’s, Here in Great Britain we carry our class distinctions into the house of God…The poor man is made to feel that he is a poor man, the rich reminded that he is rich. St. Saviour’s loomed on the skyline of the Borough just as it dominated the community in its shadow, running soup kitchens, Sunday schools and missions, and distributing bread, coal and blankets for the poor at Christmas. But despite the church’s efforts at philanthropy, few of the working poor like Margaret and Benjamin were tempted out to Sunday morning service on the one day of the week they were able to sleep past dawn. If they’d been at the pub the night before, they were even less inclined to attend. Nor would they want to spend any part of the day in the poor seats when Sunday was the day to visit the barber and relax after a proper family meal. For dairymen like Benjamin, Sunday was little different from any other day, with cows to be fed and milked, and manure to be shovelled, the same tasks he likely performed on the day of daughter Mary’s wedding to David Evans.

Like his new in-laws, David had come from a farming family near Aberaeron and now found himself in the thick of the Borough. He arrived sometime around 1865, when London’s cows were dying, and worked as a brewer’s labourer rather than with Benjamin in the troubled, predominantly Welsh milk industry. The Barclay Perkins Brewery was a few blocks north of the family’s Red Cross home, facing the River Thames, between the Borough Market and the road to Southwark Bridge. It was a massive complex that filled the Borough with the smell of hops and steaming grains. Firms the size of Barclay Perkins employed a handful of educated, handsomely paid men who were the brewers, and hundreds of others like David who were the worker bees: the bottle washers and fillers, the dray men and coopers and cellarmen. The grounds were necessarily sprawling and included a wharf, where the beer was shipped for export, and a range of storehouses. There were water reservoirs, a cooperage, buildings where the casks were cleaned and inspected, and sheds to hold the empty casks. There were also brewhouses, and stables for the dray horses that delivered the beer. Sturdy porters hauled goods from a barge at the riverside to the malt warehouse. The men followed each other closely, carrying the sacks up several flights of stairs to the warehouse, and then dumping the contents into bins that were big enough to contain a house, chimney and all. David worked long hours, starting at dawn and continuing until the work was done, usually at least twelve hours later. On Saturdays, he put in a few hours in the afternoon. The work was physical rather than skilled labour, and the men doing it were brawny types whose pay included five or six pints of beer each day.

The aches and pains that came with the job were made bearable by the fact that, year in, year out, there was work at the brewery. Few other manufacturing industries offered such steady employment, but there was always a call for beer. Heading home each night, David passed the pubs that proved this very point, and he likely stopped in for some refreshment himself, the threadbare sleeves of his jacket rubbing a shine on the wood of the bar. These public houses were the centres of their communities, with colourful names like The Moulders Arms, Three Jolly Gardeners, and The World Turned Upside Down. Depending on each publican’s efforts, some were dingy, with sawdust on the floors and frosted windows. In others, flowers brightened the bar, and paper doilies danced from the rafters. The glow of these pubs spilled into the street like an invitation, and inside, on a cold night, the rooms were warm with the press of bodies. They were homes away from home, where women shelled peas into their aprons and men argued about the issues of the day. They’d gossip about each other, too, and the goings-on up and down Red Cross Street – the eccentric old lady with the evil black cat; the daft girl who’d married her uncle; and Benjamin Jones, charged for watering down his milk in the middle of a second rinderpest outbreak in the summer of 1877.

Once again, Inspector Errington caught him out. The heading in The Sanitary Record: A Journal of Public Health reads Flagrant Milk Adulteration, and the short piece that follows says that Errington received great complaints about the quality of Benjamin’s milk from the employees of Welch, Margetson & Co., a menswear factory he regularly supplied. Inspector Errington dutifully went to the establishment and lurked in the office until Benjamin arrived with his can of milk. Errington asked a workman to purchase some milk on his behalf, and once the deed was done he emerged from his hiding place, declared himself and told Benjamin that the sample would be taken to St. Thomas’ Hospital for testing. It was found to be 53 percent water. At the hearing, Benjamin denied responsibility. The defendant said that owing to the market being closed to beasts, the London Daily News reported, he was unable to purchase cows, and being short of milk on the day in question, he purchased three quarts off a man in the street, and believed it to be all right. It was certainly the case that no cattle were being brought in while the rinderpest still flourished, but what involvement Benjamin had in watering the milk, no one can say. The powers that be did not believe him, laid on a hefty fine and declared it a very bad case.

And yet on he went. By 1881, Benjamin Jones had been in the milk business in Southwark for close to forty years, and together he and his son-in-law David were the breadwinners of this burgeoning family. Covered with climbing hydrangea and Virginia creeper, their cramped, rickety house was like so many others in these old streets, a crooked cobbling of damp brick and clapboard, the windows soot stained and the chimney crumbling. In this residence were housed three generations: Benjamin and Margaret, Mary and David, their daughters Ellen, Jennie, Mary Anne and Elizabeth, and Mary’s newly widowed sister Maggie and her baby daughter Meg. David had developed chronic bronchitis, and sometimes his hacking cough kept them all awake at night. There was little privacy for anyone. But it was the same up and down Red Cross Street, where people spilled out of their close quarters on summer evenings to escape the heat and the sticky closeness.

And there was the fog, so thick that people stumbled over curbs, conveyances crashed, and boats ran aground in the river. By Victorian times, burning coal and the smoke of industry that permeated the Borough had turned ordinary fog into a toxic mixture of soot, sulphur and other airborne pollutants, prevalent enough that a pamphlet called London Fogs became a curious bestseller. Its author, the meteorologist Francis Albert Rollo Russell, described the fog in painstaking detail and warned of the long-term health effects of such a removable evil were it not eradicated. A London fog is brown, reddish-yellow, or greenish…and produces, when thick, a choking sensation. Instead of diminishing while the sun rises higher, it often increases in density, and some of the most lowering London fogs occur about midday or late in the afternoon. Sometimes the brown masses rise and interpose a thick curtain at a considerable elevation between earth and sky. A white cloth spread out on the ground rapidly turns dirty, and particles of soot attach themselves to every exposed object.

None of this was news to Benjamin and his ilk in the Borough. They sat on their front steps, or in the tiny enclosures between brick wall and garden fence, and in the yards behind their houses laundry formed an endless line from neighbour to neighbour, hanging in the dirty air. The smell was now of hops and cow dung, now of vinegar or the acrid burn of a foundry. This part of the city was home to numerous industries making everything from hats, soap and lead to tallow, beer and stove black. From across the River Thames, one couldn’t fail to notice the plethora of smoking chimneys. Some said Southwark was as distinguishable at a distance for these chimneys as London proper was for its church spires.

Of course Southwark had its own spires too. The four pinnacles of St. Saviour’s Church had been a Borough landmark for centuries, and when a bolt of lightning struck one of the pinnacles in 1870 and sent it hurtling down, The Graphic reported a terrible crash, and the fall of a ton or two of masonry through the roof, while splinters of stone varying from a pound to a hundredweight were scattered among the stalls of the marketplace below. The once-grand church that had already undergone a botched renovation now looked less dignified than ever. Stained with soot from passing trains, it was increasingly hemmed in by its surroundings – industrial warehouses, Borough Market and the railway lines, and the busy approach to London Bridge. But soon plans for a magnificent transformation began to take shape, spearheaded by an appeal to the community for donations. Were the church thrown open daily for public inspection, one man wrote in The Morning Post, sympathy would be invited and perhaps stimulated of a material kind. The efforts paid off. Rich and poor responded, with collections taken at Sunday services, and contributions made by Barclay Perkins Brewery and other area businesses. Perhaps even Benjamin was caught up in the spirit of renewal and contributed some of his milk money, feeling a twinge of pride knowing that the church’s sad and yet exquisite beauty would be restored.

The surrounding streets would wait much longer for significant change. In broader London, though, this was the beginning of a period of enormous transformation, a growth so substantial that the city buzzed with an energy all its own. By the early 1880s, the population had soared past five million, making London the largest city in the world by far – so large that even Londoners didn’t know it well, and mostly kept to their own neighbourhoods. Still, there was an awareness of the masses in all corners, and of a rumbling that hinted at social, political and technological change beyond imagining. As the city grew, so did the urge to define it; yet it was in constant flux, and so that much more difficult to characterize. In 1878, the raconteur Augustus Hare roamed the streets with his notebook to create Walks in London, which he claimed aimed at nothing original but offered a charming account of the city’s landmarks interspersed with amusing historical tidbits. It is very easy to live with eyes open, Hare wrote, but it is more usual, and a great deal more fashionable, to live with them shut. Scarcely any man in what is usually called ‘society’ has the slightest idea of what there is to be seen in his own great metropolis, because he never looks, or still more perhaps, because he never inquires.

George Robert Sims’s perambulations cut deeper. Sims, who dabbled in all sorts of writing, had a dramatist’s interest in crime and abject poverty, and the flair for describing it. In How the Poor Live, a series of articles published in the paper The Pictorial World in 1881, he gave many upper- and middle-class Londoners their first shocking glimpse of the city’s slums. He took with him on this painful journey the illustrator Frederick Barnard, who sketched sensational images of fat landlords wearing top hats and heavy gold chains, waifs in dark rooms strung with bits of ragged laundry, and wide-eyed dossers caught in a policeman’s torch beam. Of the Joneses’ and Evanses’ home turf, Sims wrote: "Scene after scene is the same. Rags, dirt, filth, wretchedness, the same figures, the same faces, the same old story of one room unfit for habitation yet inhabited by eight or nine people, the same complaint of ruinous rent absorbing three-fourths of the toiler’s weekly wage, the same shameful neglect by the owner of the property of all sanitary precautions, rotten floors, oozing walls, broken windows, crazy staircases, tileless roofs, and in and around the dwelling-place of hundreds of honest citizens the nameless abominations which could only be set forth were we contributing to the Lancet instead of The Pictorial World."

Sims’s horror aside, the streets he describes must have seemed ordinary to the families who lived there. Benjamin and Margaret were longtime residents of the Borough now, and David Evans had lived with them in Red Cross Street for two decades. His wife Mary and their daughters – Ellen, Jennie, Mary Anne and little Elizabeth – knew the Borough as home rather than a place awful enough to be worthy of Sims’s inquiries and Barnard’s sketches. There were highs and lows. Now and again, when someone important passed through in a flower-laden carriage, people flocked and sang and waved flags as the church bells pealed. When the dignitaries went back across the Thames, the Borough settled again, a city within a city. If you knew nothing different, it had everything you needed: St. George the Martyr and the looming St. Saviour’s Church, whose tower got lost in the fog; the High Street and its pharmacy full of coloured liquids in bottles of all sizes; the bustling Borough Market, where Mary and her girls shopped for fruit and vegetables and flowers. In and around Red Cross Street they could visit the butcher and the baker and the shoemaker, the fishmonger, the egg merchant, the rag merchant, the coffeehouse, the greengrocer, and the railway office, if they had anywhere to go. But they didn’t. Their whole life was here. And it was a busy life, with a house full of people, clothes to scrub, meals to prepare and cook, and always the water to heat and the dishes to wash, the mattresses to turn, the rugs to beat, the floor to sweep. The house had so many people that it took each of them, working in their various ways, to keep all of them going. But just a year after the 1881 census, which listed eleven people in one small house, the numbers began to dwindle.

It was distressing but not unusual that in a home containing three generations, a young one went first, seemingly setting off a chain of deaths over a few years. In March of 1882, when four-year-old Elizabeth came down with a severe case of whooping cough, her mother Mary might have tried a popular folk remedy: snipping a lock of Elizabeth’s hair, tucking it into a slice of bread and feeding it to a passing dog. People still set store by superstition and old wives’ tales, even with the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children right around the corner. It had been built more than a decade earlier by a rich man who’d lost his wife in childbirth. With its spacious wards and out-patient care, it was a godsend for such a poor community. In Elizabeth’s case, though, neither old nor new methods saved her. Records show she was admitted to the Evelina, and that Mary was there with her when she died.

Then in 1884, the matriarch, Margaret, died at home, and because she was alone at the time, a coroner’s visit was required. The inquest was little more than a meeting held at the pub, with simple questions asked of family and neighbours to determine that there’d been no foul play. In Margaret’s case, no evidence of the sort was found. Her death certificate states that she died suddenly, of heart disease, at the age of sixty-three years. A year later, in the gloom of March when the rains seemed endless, David Evans died at just forty-two. Widow of the deceased – Mary – present at death. Cause of death was again heart disease, and the bronchitis that had bothered him for years. Just like Elizabeth, he and Margaret had succumbed to ailments the purported cure-alls could not assuage, despite the claims on the important-looking tins and boxes displayed in the pharmacy: Clarke’s World Famed Blood Mixture cleansed the blood from scrofula, scurvy, and sores of all kinds…Its effects are marvelous. Holloway’s Pills purify the blood, act powerfully yet soothingly on the liver and stomach, giving tone, energy, and vigour to these great main springs of life. Whelpton’s Vegetable Purifying Pills cured disorders of the head, chest, liver, bowel, and kidneys, and should therefore be kept always at hand. And without Eno’s Fruit Salt for the prevention of diarrhea – so common in the deaths of children – the jeopardy of life is immensely increased. The family that had split the seams of this house was rapidly shrinking, but in a time and place of such unrelenting hardship, it was nothing unusual.

A month after David died, one April Friday at two in the morning, a fire broke out at an oil and colourman’s shop just north of their house, on Union Street. Such shops specialized in mixing paints, so the gunpowder and casks of oil kept onsite for that purpose quickly ignited and the fire spread rapidly. The shopman and his family, sleeping in the rooms above, were soon woken and trapped by the flames. Neighbours gathered in the street, blankets wrapped around their nightclothes. If Mary and her daughters were there, they’d have seen the horse-drawn fire engine arrive in short order, carrying firefighters with their Spartan helmets, axes holstered at their waists. But it was already too late to lean the ladders against the bricks – flames lashed out of the windows, and heat from the burning oil emanated from the building. When a woman appeared in a third-storey window, neighbours called to her to jump, but she disappeared from view. The smoke curled in the crisp spring air, and the crowd grew thicker, faces lighted by the glow of the fire. And then the woman reappeared. She pushed a feather mattress through the window to the ground, and the crowd called again to her to jump, but instead she lifted a small, startled girl, about five years old, up to the window ledge and dropped her to the mattress below. She slipped away and returned to the window with another girl, this one smaller than the last, crying and clinging to her, refusing to be dropped. But the woman threw the child out and someone held up their arms and caught her. Once more she returned, with the smallest girl yet, and dropped her to the mattress. The voices in the crowd were ragged now, screaming to the woman to save herself. They could see that she was losing strength and having trouble breathing. She tried to push herself from the window, but fell from the frame, and on the way down she struck her head on the shop sign below. She landed head-down, cracking her spine, and though she was rushed to hospital and did regain consciousness, she died soon after.

The woman’s name was Alice Ayres. She was sister-in-law to the oil and colourman who owned the shop, and nursemaid to the little girls she had released through the window one by one. Once the blaze was put out, the remains of Alice’s sister, the girls’ mother, were found inside, along with a son and the oil and colourman himself, holding a locked box of cash, terrified of losing everything he owned. The obvious horror of the family’s last moments affected the neighbourhood deeply, and captured the imagination of the larger population as well, fuelling a rumour that as Alice had lain in hospital, Queen Victoria had sent a lady-in-waiting to inquire about her worsening condition.

The event was a tragedy, but also appealed to the Victorian love of melodrama and sentiment. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper called Alice Ayres a humble heroine, and asserted that Such a woman, although only a poor domestic, deserves to be placed among the small but noble army of martyrs to duty. Mourners flocked to the memorial service at St. Saviour’s, so many that there was not even standing room left in the church. Those in the back strained to hear the words of the minister, who preached a sermon about heroism. Nearly a thousand coins were raised, and it was said that the money would go toward a memorial window for Alice Ayres when the church was restored to its original splendour. Overnight, she had gone from anonymity to working-class heroine, and in the years to come, White Cross Street, running parallel to Red Cross Street, would be renamed Ayres in her honour. She’d undergone a near canonization, with gilded poems and stories written about her selfless duty and devotion. To the growing number of social reformers, Alice Ayres was an irresistible example of what every woman of the lower class should strive to be: hard-working, loyal and self-sacrificing.

Hers was the kind of tale George Sims would tell, or the type you’d see dramatized at a magic lantern show, where projected images appeared by some mysterious combination of quicklime and flame. The beautiful pictures borne from a shaft of light were set to odes about righteousness. There were whole studios dedicated to producing these spectacles: models photographed on sets with elaborate backdrops, ladies who hand-painted the glass slides with tiny brushes and translucent colours, drawing angels floating beside a dying child’s bed, or Jesus in his robes, gazing mournfully upon a group of drunkards. Audiences sat rapt as they watched these illuminations, which seemed a marvel of technology: food for thought and a feast for the eyes all at once. Sometimes there were stunning special effects, such as day fading to night, or a train passing by in the background. The slides were popular with Sunday school children, who saw their favourite nursery rhymes or bible stories set to pictures. But they were big events for adults too. People crowded their church and community halls, sitting shoulder to shoulder and whispering among themselves that the lime and the gases combined could explode if the projectionist wasn’t careful. And then the gaslights were dimmed, and the show began.

The story I’m going to tell you

Is truth from beginning to end.

It didn’t come under my notice,

It was told me by a friend,

A relation, the wife of my brother,

And the saddest part that’s true

Appeared in the Daily Papers,

As dozens such stories do.

The biggest story played out on a much grander stage. In 1887, all England and the British dominion celebrated the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria. The accompanying revelry boosted the popularity of a queen who’d become reclusive with widowhood nearly 30 years earlier. In the days preceding the celebration, the papers published all sorts of articles about Victoria, chronicling her childhood, the zigzag of royal deaths that had led to her unexpected coronation at just eighteen, her marriage to her beloved German prince, Albert, their passel of children, and then Albert’s death – the queen’s crushing sorrow. In her astonishingly lengthy period of bereavement, the black-cloaked queen was fortunate to have so willing, affable and indefatigable a deputy at hand as the Prince of Wales, one paper reported, calling Edward the most popular man in England. In reality he was a self-indulgent charmer, a philanderer and a gambler, and a longtime source of worry for the queen. But his frivolous side was only one aspect of his character. While most among the elite regarded the poor as beings of a totally different order from themselves, Edward held more progressive convictions. In an 1883 speech opening the Royal College of Music, he asserted that music speaks in different tones, perhaps, but with equal force to the cultivated and the ignorant, to the peer and peasant…The time has come, he insisted, when class can no longer stand aloof from class; and that man does his duty best who works most earnestly in bridging over the gulf between different classes which it is the tendency of increased wealth and increased civilisation to widen. What would Benjamin, mucking out the cow stalls, have made of such a statement? Or of the fact that a few years before the jubilee, Edward had joined the Royal Commission on Housing of the Working Class? Removing his gentlemanly garb, he’d pulled on the disguise of a working man, and travelled with a couple of others to some of the city’s worst slums. The squalor he’d seen had stunned him. The conditions of the dwellings were perfectly disgraceful, he later told Parliament, urging measures of a drastic and thorough character. After decades of Victorian rule, with the queen approaching seventy years of age, people grew increasingly curious about what Edward’s reign might bring.

Foreign royalty and leaders came to join in the jubilee festivities, among them Victoria’s erratic grandson Prince Wilhelm, who would soon be the German Kaiser, as well as the King of Denmark and Willy of Greece, as Victoria called him. In her diary, she wrote that Willy was seated next to her at the sumptuous banquet held at Buckingham Palace – a large family dinner she called it, and in truth the genealogical maze was dizzying. Willy was the son of the Danish king, whose daughter Alexandra was married to Victoria’s son Edward; Alexandra’s sister had wed the Russian tsar, and their daughter had married another of Victoria’s sons. And on it went. The Supper Room at Buckingham Palace gleamed with gold plate as the gourmet delights emerged: turtle soup, chicken garnished with cocks’ combs and cocks’ kidneys, sliced foies gras with truffles, duckling with peas, haunch of venison, cream rice with cherry juice, and iced puffed pastries. The large table was covered with candles, and the jewels, silverware and crystal glittered at this private celebration for those with an immediate connection to the queen.

Outside, the decorated streets lay waiting for the grand procession, which would take Victoria from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey for the official ceremony. People wandered up and down the route in the twilight, taking in the sights, and knowing that the following day, the crush would be relentless. By morning the multitudes came from every part of the city, and from the towns and villages beyond. Mary Evans and her daughters, along with others from the Borough, may have made the trek across the Thames to the opulent surroundings of Westminster, where miles of terraced scaffolding had been laid out for the spectators, though it wasn’t enough to hold the thousands who came. They lined the streets behind neat rows of guards in red jackets; they gathered on balconies and rooftops. Some shimmied up statues to get a look at the queen rolling by in her open landau. In England’s long history, few monarchs had reached the fifty-year mark of their reign,