Docklands History Group meeting Wednesday 5th February 2008 Maritime Mile End in the 18th Century By Derek Morris The following is a transcript written by Derek Morris of his talk given to the Docklands History Group In the middle of the 18th century John Henniker, James Gordon, Zephaniah Eade, Laurence Sulivan, Nathaniel Phillips and The Henley family, Peter Mellish, Gilbert Slater, John Spiker, Camden, Calvert and King were amongst the leading merchants of their day and all lived and had their businesses in Wapping, Whitechapel and Mile End Old Town. Mile End Old Town cannot be understood without relating its activities and families to life in the riverside parishes of Wapping, Ratcliff and Shadwell as well as St George-in-the-East and I would like to emphasise that I am presenting a revised view of the eastern parishes of London in the 18th century based on the recent research of Ken Cozens and myself. 1 should first explain how I have become so deeply involved in the commercial and social history of the area. My grandfather and uncles were dockers. I read geology at Queen Mary/ College and lived in Bethnal Green in an 18th century merchant’s house - St Margaret’s House This led to an early interest in the history of the area but it was not until about 20 years ago that I discovered that in the 1760s my forebears lived on the north side of the Mile End Road and that on the other side of the road lived Captain James Cook. 2 SO HOW HAVE THE EASTERN PARISHES BEEN PERCEIVED AND WHAT HAS CHANGED IN RECENT YEARS? I realise that the Museum of Docklands is not a Museum of Wapping but the material on display begins with a quote of John Stow from 1602 of the ““filthy straight passage”, a brief mention of some of the locally based skills in instruments and map making, a picture of sailors in a tavern and finally a note on the infamous Ratcliff murders of 1811. So I ask myself whether these four snapshots provide a balanced view of the life of Wapping and conclude that they do not. Hence the importance of the men listed above who were part of the many vibrant business enterprises based in the river side parishes on the north bank of the Thames in the eighteenth century. Ken Cozens from the Greenwich Maritime Institute has made the first detailed study of Camden, Calvert and King from Wapping and the current London, Sugar and Slavery Exhibition contains portraits of two of them but does not link them to Wapping or describe their much broader and world-wide trading interests. In 1939 Llewellyn Smith wrote of Stepney being the home of “merchants and mariners" but few researchers until recently have tried to investigate whom these men and women were, their origins and their trades, hence the importance of the work of Ken Cozens and myself. Even last year Professor John Gascoigne of the University of New South Wales in his otherwise excellent book Captain Cook: Voyager between Worlds misleadingly wrote that “The Cook’s first home was at Shadwell under the shadow of St Paul’s and within walking distance of the Thames. Thereafter, from 1763 until Cook’s death, they lived in Mile End, an area which was, in the nineteenth century to be cleared of its houses as London docks expanded to cope with ever-increasing volume of trade”. Thirty years ago it was difficult when reading the literature to find anything positive about the area until Dr Leonard Schwarz in his Ph D and subsequent articles and books showed that in the 1790s, even in the poorest London parishes, such as Wapping, you could expect that at least 25% of the tax payers would be of the middling sort, managing businesses, running shops and providing other services. But there was little research on the trades and industries of the area. Another important discovery over twenty years ago was the papers of the Henleys of Wapping, a shipowning family 1770-1830, whose records are now in the National Maritime Museum, and form the largest collection of papers for any shipping family in the 18th century. My discovery of Cook and other sea captains and merchants in MEOT has led to over 20 articles on the links between the merchants of Stepney and Trinity House, the East India Company, and then to my book Mile End Old Town, 1740-1780 A Social History of an Early Modern London Suburb, first published in 2003. The new extended edition came out last year with a new chapter on Captain Cook and his links to Mile End Old Town and his neighbours. It can be bought at the Tower Hamlet Local History Library 277 Bancroft Road, London El 4DQ. Fortunately Professor Michael Port, University of London, appreciated my efforts and wrote that it was “ a remarkably thorough and lively account” which “presents a markedly different picture from that traditional one of East London still presented in a dismissive paragraph even in well-reputed histories. He presents convincingly a picture of an East London hamlet becoming a suburb sustained by the strong middle-class element essential in its development”. Having completed the book I realised that the merchants in MEOT could only be understood in relation to the river side parishes so for the last three years 1 have been working on the parishes of Wapping, St George-in-the-East and Whitechapel in the 18th century, leaving Ratcliff and Shadwell for the future. I would now like to explain how 1 went about my research as it may help others. We need to have similar studies of the parishes on the south bank of the Thames in order that we can then compare them with Wapping and with other parishes. 1. I begin by compiling a database of all the land taxpayers whose rent is £10 year or greater. Essentially this identifies the men and women who form the “middling sort” with incomes of between £60 and £200 a year. 2. I then look at all the wills in PROB 11, which are online at The National Archives at Kew. This provides valuable information on family and other networks and the table indicates the abundance of the information available. AREA 1701-1750 1751-1800 WESTMINSTER 4962 6304 SOUTHWARK 3011 3097 GREENWICH 892 1373 WHITECHAPEL 1121 1307 DEPTFORD 1341 1221 STEPNEY 3630 1205 HACKNEY 449 1011 CHELSEA 438 912 SHADWELL 830 811 WAPPING 1959 780 SOHO 93 519 HAMPSTEAD 211 505 BARKING 332 451 SPITALFIELDS 457 445 STRATFORD 224 341 MILE END 58 203 RATCLIFF 154 49 3. I then look at the indexes to the SUN Fire Office which are available for London from 1775 - 1787 on microfiche and online via A2A and INA for 1806-1836. The latter is the Place in the Sun project and currently there are over 400,000 names online together with trades, addresses, ships and pictures. Currently the team are working back towards 1800 but remember this is a finding aid and an examination of a policy may reveal additional information. As an example 1 recently found that Messrs Perry, Wells and Green of Blackwall in December 1802 took out £5000 of insurance with the SUN Fire Office on an EIC ship for Henry Benham. In addition they had a further £15,000 insured with three other companies - thus spreading the risk. Jean Sutton’s book “Lords of the East: The East India Company ships, 1600-1874” showed that in the 1770s, a sixteenth share in a large East Indiaman cost £1000 so prices gradually increasing. Since 1986 another team of volunteers at the Guildhall have been indexing over 600 trades insured with the SUN from 1710 onwards. Their interests includes artists, brewers and distillers, furniture, instrument makers, metal workers, the shipping industry, textiles, and covers England, Scotland and Wales. These indexes are on cards, which have been copied to the Museum of London, the V and A, the National Maritime Museum and the Tower of London. Access to these cards is by appointment only. I must emphasise the importance of my cooperation with Ken Cozens whose MA thesis tackled the Camden, Calvert and King trading network based in Wapping, and who has continued to research international merchant networks. We have found that by exchanging information we have opened up and challenged the few known conventional facts about the eastern parishes and improved our understanding of figures such as Fitzhugh, who had global connections via his Wapping contacts. In fact we believe that without a fuller understanding of these shipping ‘networks’ future studies in many ways will be incomplete. I would also like to mention our cooperation with and the work on 18th century German merchant networks based in London of Dr Margrit Schulte Beerbuhl, of the German Historical Institute and Heinrich-Heine-Universitat Dusseldorf. In December 2007 she organised a meeting in London on “Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660-1914”. Her new book is entitled “Migration and Trade” is the result of a conference two years ago. 3 MERCHANT NETWORKS London merchants played a major part in the building of this country’s infrastructure and their part in providing the necessary government finance and revenue enabled Britain to forge a global maritime empire. The archives are vast but recent research on the merchants of the river side parish of Wapping has demonstrated the importance of family based networks in supplying the Royal Navy with the wide range of supplies that were needed to keep the fighting ships at sea.