Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly
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It wasn’t until Stephen’s twilight years that he really forgave her for marrying again, either.
Four years after the death of his father, Elizabeth married again. So much for it being just the two of them now, he thought. After Stephen’s funeral she had thrown herself into the running of the Three Tuns and barely mentioned her late husband ever again. On the day of the funeral itself there appeared in the Hampshire Gazette a notice she’d placed, informing ‘her late husband’s friends and the public in general that she continues the business of the Three Tuns inn and solicits the continuance of their favours to which every attention will be paid’, and asking that everyone to whom her husband was indebted at the time of his death should send their accounts immediately.
And that was it. There was barely a mention of his father ever again. Indeed, so busy was Elizabeth with the running of the inn that he saw her but rarely. Emily prepared his meals and he’d help her with some of the chores when he wasn’t at school – the laundry and the pot-washing, and he’d occasionally go into the centre of Winchester on errands – but shortly after his mother’s marriage Emily left the Three Tuns when she herself was married, to a sailor, and moved to Portsmouth.
Stephen’s mother’s second husband was a man called John Hayter, who had also been widowed. He was kind to Stephen but he wasn’t his father. Every time John smiled at him Stephen would clamp his eyes shut as if every vaguely paternal act from somebody else, every tiny kindness, took his real father further away from him. His memories were faint enough and he struggled to hold on to them. He remembered a shape rather than a person; the features of his face had dissipated among the wispy caverns of Stephen’s memory. He wanted to cling on to what he had of his father, especially his name, and John Hayter, for all his good intentions, was gradually erasing all of it.
In 1803, when Stephen was 13 years old, John and his mother had a baby boy. Suddenly the household revolved around little George Hayter and Stephen missed both his father and Emily. Within a year Stephen Winckworth Silver had completed his schooling, packed his bag and set off for London with a letter of introduction in his pocket to a clothier named Arrowsmith who he’d been told by a friend’s father might take him on as an apprentice.
It took him three days to reach London. He hadn’t realised that St John’s Wood was quite a way out from the centre, but finally he reached the Arrowsmith premises. He didn’t present an appealing prospect in clothes dusty and rumpled from the journey, but when Arrowsmith saw the letter of introduction and recognised the clear innate intelligence in the boy’s eyes and conversation, he was taken on and permitted to sleep in an attic room.
Stephen Winckworth Silver worked hard. He worked long hours and made himself indispensable to his employer. When his apprenticeship was completed he began to make suggestions for improving and expanding the business, suggestions so effective that he was eventually made a partner, and by 1830 he’d outgrown Arrowsmith’s and set out on his own.
In the early days of the company he would often go and stand outside the building he’d taken on Cornhill and just look at the sign: S.W. Silver & Co. His name and his father’s name. It was the memory of his father that spurred him on, and when he saw that sign for the first time he’d nearly wept. At last, his father had some permanence. If Stephen had his way, the name would become immortal yet.
Before long the business had expanded to workshops in Bishopsgate and on the Commercial Road, and, with the increase in transatlantic travel creating a market for high-quality clothing for the traveller, a shop was opened in Liverpool, close to the port from where the steamers departed for America. By this time Stephen had moved to a fine house on Abbey Road which he shared with his wife Frances, whom he’d married in 1812, and their children, including his son Stephen William Silver, named for his late father and brother, who he hoped would go on to succeed him in business and keep the name alive. Indeed, even his initials fitted the firm. Which was no coincidence.
Stephen Winckworth Silver had a mind that never rested. There were always other lines to be explored, new markets to develop, new industries to investigate. When gutta-percha, a hard-wearing latex from the sap of a Malaysian tree, became popular in the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen was quick to take note of its waterproof qualities. His waterproof clothing coated in the substance was one of S.W. Silver & Co’s most popular lines, so much so that Stephen opened a small waterproofing works in Greenwich, on the south side of the Thames and at the terminus of the new railway link from London Bridge.
Stephen 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