Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly
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in the 1871 census recorded inhabitants who hailed from Warwickshire, Norfolk, Scotland, Wiltshire, Ireland, Dorset, Somerset and Devon. They were wire makers, cordwainers, machinists, shoemakers, telegraph engineers, waterproofers, boiler makers, coat makers, dressmakers, telegraph instrument makers, iron ship platers, dockers and stokers. These were the Silvertown pioneers, people like Stanfield Sutcliffe at No. 1, a wire drawer from Halifax, and his neighbour James Press, a Gloucestershire-born carpenter and his son John, a clerk at the telegraph works. Across the road from them were Joseph Taylor and his family, a shipwright from up the river in Rotherhithe, and his neighbour, James Parsons, a boiler stoker from Trowbridge in Wiltshire. All would have trudged through the muddy puddles of the unmade road to the Railway Tavern, its dark wooden fittings and brass fixtures reverberating with accents from just about every part of Britain. Across the road the trains would pass with the shriek of a whistle while the hisses, bangs and clanks of the india rubber works provided a constant backdrop to life in Silvertown where at night there were still mysterious flashes of light and strange noises on the marsh – but now their provenance was progress.
It was not generally a pleasant place to be, however. Silvertown’s remoteness made it difficult to keep order, the surrounding marshes and frequent fogs providing locals with little protection from those with malice in mind. And there were plenty of them, it seems.
‘In those days when the neighbourhood was full of disorderly characters, the policeman conspicuously absent, and the houses few and far between, it required some courage to walk the ill-lighted roads after dark,’ wrote Arthur Crouch, secretary of the Gutta Percha company, in a history of the area published at the turn of the twentieth century. Louisa Boyd, the sister of the first vicar of St Mark’s, would help her brother minister to the fledgeling community but made sure to carry a loaded revolver with her when walking the streets after dark.
In 1875 Dickens’s All the Year Round magazine had visited Silvertown, calling it ‘the dubious region between half-fluid and almost solid water’, and while marvelling at the scale and variety of production at the rubber works the writer also noted ‘near at hand, useful but odiferous gasworks, a shabby railway station’ and that ‘out of a chaos of mud and slime have sprung near lines of cottages, a grim hostelry called The Railway Hotel, huge wharves and the seven acres of now solid ground which form the cause and explanation of the whole curious development’.
The writer ends by noting how Silvertown is ‘perhaps the gloomiest and most uncomfortable spot in London on a chilly winter evening’.
Despite this less-than-glowing endorsement of the place, a couple of years later arrived the product for which Silvertown would arguably become best known: sugar.
When Henry Tate had in 1877 relocated from Liverpool to Silvertown to produce his revolutionary sugar cubes on the site of the old Campbell Johnstone shipyard next door to the Silver’s complex, he was followed four years later from Greenock in the west of Scotland by Abram Lyle & Co, another sugar-based operation producing golden syrup. Although the two men never met, in 1921 the two firms would combine to create Tate & Lyle, the largest sugar refinery in the world, a business whose black-tipped chimneys and towering works dominate Silvertown even today.
A year after Tate’s arrival, one of Britain’s worst ever maritime disasters washed up on its shores. On the evening of 3 September 1878 the Princess Alice, a pleasure steamer, was returning from Rosherville in Kent with some 700 Londoners who’d enjoyed a warm late summer’s day out by the estuary, when it was rammed by a huge, ancient collier barge, the Bywell Castle, and sank within four minutes. Everyone aboard the Princess Alice ended up in the water; very few came out alive. The raw sewage pouring into the river from the outflow by Barking Creek and the industrial effluent oozing from the various establishments at Silvertown meant that even by Victorian standards the water along this stretch was disgustingly foul. Even those who could swim were overcome by the effluent around them: barely anyone stood a chance. The exact number of casualties isn’t known, but nearly everyone on board drowned: at a conservative estimate 550 lost their lives. If any good came out of the Princess Alice disaster it was an acceptance that the section of the Thames east of the City was far too busy, and this tragedy on a notoriously congested and dangerous stretch of river helped to rubber-stamp the construction of the Albert Dock on the marshland east of the Victoria Dock, about half a mile north-east of Silvertown.
It was the 1880 opening of the Albert Dock, immediately adjacent to the Victoria Dock, that sealed Silvertown’s unique character, for as soon as the sluices opened and the water gushed in to the giant expanse of the new dock, Silvertown became an island and its people became islanders. Opened on 24 June, the Albert Dock – one and three-quarter miles long and nearly 500 feet wide – contrived with its sister to cut Silvertown off completely from the rest of the country. You could no longer leave Silvertown without crossing water. You still can’t.
In barely thirty years a bare patch of marshy land known only to a few shepherds and cattlemen had become a thriving industrial heartland and the focus of the empire’s international trade. In their squalid little cottages on marshy land beneath the high-tide level the people who had flocked here, the industrial poor from across Britain, the Irishmen who had helped to dig the docks, the eastern Europeans fleeing persecution, were isolated, psychologically and physically, hemmed in on all sides by filthy, stinking water and living on a soggy island that squelched underfoot, while myriad smells and stenches filled their lungs from the chimneys and outflows. Curious green and yellow smogs settled over them, seeping through cracked window panes and around ill-fitting door frames into every home, so there was no escape from the relentless choking industry of Silvertown.
And the noise. The constant noise. The clanking of machinery, the hissing of pressurised steam, the whistling of trains, the factory hooters and sirens parping and screeching, the bells of the ships on the river, the thunderous roar of their foghorns, the inescapable, constant industrial tinnitus that never stopped, not even at night, because Silvertown was never, ever quiet. The furnaces raged, the boilers steamed, the people snaked along the muddy streets, passing in and out of the gates, feeding the monstrous, noisy, hungry beast with a never-ending stream of labour, while away from the factories and works and plants and muck and grease and soot they tried to make lives for themselves, tried to claim a piece of the oozing, damp land as their own, even if it was just two rooms lined with mildewed wallpaper and a couple of flames attempting to flicker in the grate above a few dusty pebbles of coal.
This was the lot of the Silvertonian as the nineteenth century ended. On Constance Street they came out of their houses straight onto the muddy street. When they looked one way, across the railway line, they saw the clanking premises and belching chimneys of the rubber works, the Tate sugar refinery and Keiller’s jam factory. When they looked the other way, across a patch of scrubland, there was the high dock wall and beyond it the cranes working the holds, dipping and rising, cranking and lifting; occasionally they’d see a giant ship easing into the dock, bright-coloured funnels against the blackened brickwork and smoky air. If they looked up they could usually see the sky but sometimes they could just see the yellowing smog and the smoke belching from the chimneys, pinning them in, sealing them further from the rest of the world, compressing their island, reminding them that their place was as a tiny cog in the giant, flame-fuelled, smoke-belching monster machine of Silvertown.
The speed of industrial growth outstripped everything, from basic sanitary amenities to ensuring safe workplaces, which meant that disease, injury and death were a constant threat and frequent reality. Two months before the Albert Dock had opened the Burt, Boulton & Hayward premises blew up. An enormous still containing 2,000 gallons of oil exploded: according to witnesses the reinforced steel roof of the still bulged like a balloon before it breached, and the explosion was heard for miles around. The blaze was so intense that fire crews came from as far afield as Rotherhithe and Southwark to assist. Crowds of onlookers gathered on the other side of the river at Woolwich and Charlton for what must have been a spectacular conflagration. As the Essex Newsman pointed out in its coverage, ‘creosote, tar, pitch, naphtha, benzoline etc rendered the place peculiarly liable to an accident’.