York Stairs

Tags

Thames

In 1626, master mason Nicholas Stone was employed by George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, to build this ‘water gate’ to give York House easy access from the Thames. The design has variously been attributed to Balthazar Gerbier, Inigo Jones and Nicholas Stone himself.⁽¹⁾ Although it is frequently named York watergate, it is also known as York stairs. Watermen’s stairs⁽²⁾ were dotted all along the Thames to provide easy access from the boats to the land and vice versa, but were seldom graced with a fancy structure such as this above the actual steps.

John Tallis, in his Illustrated London, vol. 1 (1851-2) provides an elaborate description:

The York Stairs, or Buckingham Water-gate, at the end of Buckingham-street, the last relic of the gorgeous pile of York House, will furnish some conception of the surpassing beauty of the whole fabric. It is considered one of the most perfect and elaborate relics of Inigo Jones. We approach York Stairs from a small inclosed terrace, planted with lime trees, an agreeable promenade for the residents in the neighbourhood, who maintain the gate and terrace in good order, from the proceeds of a rate levied on their houses for that object. On the Thames front is a large archway, opening upon steps, that conduct to the water, with a window on either side. These, and four rusticated columns, sustain an entablature, surmounted by an arched pediment, and two couchant lions, bearing shields. In the centre of the pediment, within a scroll, are the arms of the house of Villiers. On the north side are three arches, flanked by pilasters, upholding an entablature, whereon are four balls. Over the key-stones of the arches are ornamental shields, with anchors, that in the centre [have] the arms of the Villiers family impaling those of Manners. Upon the frieze, the motto, Fidei coticula crux [the Cross is the Touchstone of Faith] is inscribed.

York Stairs from Tallis’s Illustrated London

Samuel Pepys, Secretary of the Admiralty, lived in Buckingham Street which runs from the gate to John Adam Street and hence towards the Strand. His house was very conveniently situated so close to the stairs when much of the 17th-century transport still went via the river as we can read in his Diary. The plaque on the left is attached to 14, Buckingham Street, but at number 12 a round plaque says that Pepys lived there from 1679 to 1688. See London Remembers for that one and lots of other Pepys plaques. When George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham was forced to sell York House in 1672 to developers for £30,000, he stipulated that his name should be commemorated and so the streets on the plot of land that was once York House became George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, Of Alley, and Buckingham Street. Some of these streets are still extant, though Of Alley has been renamed York Place [see LondonUnveiled for photograph of street sign and more info]. Duke Street is now John Adam Street and George Street is now York Buildings.

A video of where Pepys lived from 1679-1688, and the York Stairs water gate where he would have gone down to the River Thames. By Guy de la Bédoyère.

Lots of artists have, with varying degrees of success, depicted York Stairs. Two I particularly like are these:

John Wykeham Archer 1851 ©British Museum

Canaletto, The City of Westminster from near the York Water Gate (Source: Google Art Project)

The stairs now no longer provide the function they were designed for, as in the 1860s, the marshy shores of the Thames were enclosed by a retaining wall and many metres of river were turned into land with a sewer and an underground railway underneath and elaborate gardens above.

Construction of the Embankment (Source Wikipedia)

Section through Victoria Embankment (Source: Wikipedia)

Already in the seventeenth century, Christopher Wren, in his plan to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666 included “a commodious quay on the whole bank of the river from the Tower to Blackfriars” and John Evelyn “suggested another plan with the same view, and besides lessening the most considerable declivities, he proposed further to employ the rubbish in filling up the shore of the Thames to low-water mark in a straight line from the Tower to the Temple, and form an ample quay, if it could be done without increasing the rapidity of the stream.”⁽³⁾ But it took another two hundred years before the Metropolitan Board of Works could begin the work under the supervision of the principal engineer Joseph Bazalgette.

York Stairs is now a mere tourist attraction in a pretty garden, reminding us of the busy river life of bygone centuries.

(1) See Wikipedia
(2) See Wikipedia and Peter Finch, Access to the River Thames: Steps, stairs and landing places on the tidal Thames (2010), online here
(3) Walter Thornbury / Edward Walford, Old and New London, volume 3 (1878), pp. 322-323.

Collision with a steamer

Tags

Pimlico, Postman's Park, Thames

On the evening of 25 August, 1883, Ernest Bradley Benning and three of his friends, Henry Brooks, Frederick Palmer and Miss Simmonds, came down the Thames in a rowing boat, returning from Kew. Near Pimlico pier they collided with the paddle steamer Wedding Ring, belonging to the London Steamboat Co. This company had been established in 1834 as The Woolwich Steam Packet Company to provide a service between the City and Woolwich. In 1876, after several mergers, they became the London Steamboat Co. which ran a regular paddle steamer service on the Thames.

Plaque for Ernest Bradley Benning in Postman’s Park

The inquest into the accident was held on Tuesday 11 September in St. Martin’s Vestry Hall, where it emerged that Palmer was the only one who could swim. William Large, an engineer, was out on the river with his family and a young boy, John Corking, and when he saw what happened, he rowed over to help. When he got to the scene, he saw Benning holding onto an oar with one hand and onto Miss Simmonds with the other. Large got hold of Miss Simmonds and told her to hang onto the boat, but, according to another witness, at that moment Benning disppeared under water. Large managed to reach Brooks who was also told to hang on. Palmer had in the mean time been saved by a fishing boat, but they could no longer find Benning. When Large found that a further search was useless, he, with the help of Corking, pulled Brooks and Simmonds out of the water into his boat. Mr. Moss (the paper does not tell us who he is) gave his opinion that “the accident was due to the occupants of the small boat losing their presence of mind on seeing the steamer approach, and pulling the wrong steering-line”. Alfred George Pendrill, the captain of the steamer, and William French, first mate, both alleged that the accident could be attributed to “occupants of the boat, who caused it to capsize by standing up”. Benning’s body was found under Waterloo pier on Friday 7 September. The jury returned a verdict of accidental death and pronounced their admiration for Large and Corking in saving the lives of Brooks and Simmonds.

Vignette on a certificate of the London Steamboat Company (Source: scripophily.net)

According to one paper, Benning lived at 52 Blurton Street, Lower Clapton, but the 1881 census tells us something else. Charles Benning, 52 years old, a “classical printers reader”, lived at 14 Blurton Road, Hackney in 1881, with his wife Harriet (50), and their children Charles Barlas (25, shipping clerk), Frederick William (22, bookbinder), Ernest Bradley (19, apprentice printer), Margaret Ethel (17, bookbinder), and Albert (13, scholar). Also living at that address were Alice Marion (25, Charles jr.’s wife) and two grandchildren, Alice Marion Edith (5) and Charles Frederick Barlas (4). Our hero Ernest Bradley Benning had been baptised on 17 February 1862 as the son of Charles and Harriet in St. John’s, Islington. His father was at that time described as printer and living on Albert Road. The record does not give us Ernest’s date of birth, but if he was born just before he was baptised, he would have been only 21 at the time of the accident, but it was not unusual for parents to wait quite a while before having their children baptised, so he may indeed have been 22 years old as the newspaper alleged.

The plaque in Benning’s honour in Postman’s Park tells us that he was a compositor, which is a step up from the apprentice printer he was in the 1881 census and one of the newspapers that ran a report on the case alleged that he worked for ‘Messr. Spottiswoode’. That could be the firm of Eyre and Spottiswoode, the Queen’s Printers, set up by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, or Spottiswoode and Company under the leadership of William’s younger brother George Andrew. The two firms together formed the Spottiswoode Institute to provide education and amusement for their employees, such as a library, a choral society and – ironically – a rowing club.⁽¹⁾

Postman’s Park

This story has been put together from the reports on the accident and subsequent inquest in The Pall Mall Gazette of 8 September, 1883, and in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of 16 September 1883, supplemented by some genealogical and historical research.

(1) Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism: In Great Britain and Ireland, ed. L. Brake and M. Demoor (2009), p. 596.

You may also like to read the post on Ernest Bradley Benning’s grandfather, the law bookseller William Benning of 43 Fleet Street.

Fishmongers’ Hall

Tags

Alfred Turner, fish, Thames

This post is closely related to the previous one on Billingsgate fish market, because the Fishmongers’ Company has been responsible for the quality of produce on that market for centuries. The Company is one of the London guilds and has existed for at least 700 years. It used to be called the Stock Fishmongers’ Company, but it got its present name when it merged with the Salt Fishmongers’ Company in 1537.

In 1666, Fishmongers’ Hall was destroyed in the Great Fire, but because of its location so close to the river, the papers and valuables could easily be transported to safety. Although the Fire was an absolute disaster, it did give the Company the opportunity to rebuild the hall on a grander scale.

Fishmongers’ Hall from W. Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2

In 1828, another external event, albeit this time not as catastrophic as the Fire, gave the Company the opportunity to build a new Hall once again. The post-Fire building was by then in need of urgent repairs and when part of the site was needed for New London Bridge, the Company enlisted an architect to design them a new Hall. The building, designed by Henry Roberts with the assistance of Gilbert Scott and built by Thomas Cubitt, was completed in 1835 and has an arcaded gallery at the water’s edge. The wharf is now part of the walkway (Thames Path) and freely accessible.

The front of Fishmongers’ Hall on Upper Thames Street. Steel engraving from The History of London, ed. W.G. Fearnside, engraved by J. Woods, 1838

The lamps on Fishmongers’ Hall

Detail of the lamp

In the staircase niche on the Thames side of the Hall stand statues of a fisherman and a fishergirl. The marble girl was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901 and she was placed, with her male companion at Fishmongers’ Hall in 1902. The sculptor, Alfred Turner (1874-1940), had been given the commission in 1899 when the hall was being redecorated and he was paid 1200 guineas in total for the two statues. Alfred was the son of sculptor Charles Edward Halsey Turner and had entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1895. His most well-known works are the friezes at the Old Bailey and the horse with two men on top of the South Africa War Memorial at Delville Wood, France.⁽¹⁾

Statues by Alfred Turner

The Hall is not open to the public, but guided tours are possible, see here.

(1) Philip Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of the City of London (2003), p. 482; and Wikipedia.

Old Billingsgate Market

Tags

Billingsgate, fish, Thames, weathervane

This fish market started life as a general market where coal, salt and other goods were traded, but seems to have become an exclusive fish market in the 17th century. The second part of the name suggests that it all started as a watergate, possibly as early as Roman times and it was certainly used as a small port by the Saxons. Where the first part came from is not entirely certain. It may have been that a man named Billing, Byllins or even Blynes owned the land or the right of the watergate where the fish were brought on land. Another – albeit very unlikely – suggestion is that the name comes from Belin or Belinus, a mythical British king. Whatever the origin of the name, up to the 15th century, fish was brought further upstream to Queenhithe (hithe means small port), but that meant navigating under London Bridge and over time, Billingsgate, to the east of the bridge, became more popular.

Billingsgate from W. Thornbury, Old and New London, vol. 2, p. 48

In 1698/9, an Act of Parliament (10 & 11 William III, c.24) was passed to make Billingsgate “a free and open market for all sorts of fish whatsoever” as a reaction to extortionate practices by fishmongers who would not allow the itinerant fish sellers to buy their wares directly from the fishermen but only from them – at inflated prices of course. The Act installed quality controls, regulated the tolls that could be asked from fishermen offloading their cargo and also made sure that fish bought at the market could be sold elsewhere. For the protection of the English fishermen, no foreign vessel was allowed to offer fish to the market, with one exception: live eels could be sold by Dutch fishermen. Please note that the Act does not speak of fish caught by foreigners, just of fish brought on land by foreigners, which allowed for so-called carriers or hatch-boats to collect fish from any fishermen, for instance at Gravesend or Dover, and bring it to the market. In 1840 the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (volume 36) alleged that one third of fish brought to Billingsgate was actually caught by foreigners.

At first, the market stalls were individual wooden sheds or booths which stood haphazardly in the area of the dock, but by the middle of the 19th century, a grander scheme was envisioned. The first purpose-built building, designed by John Jay, was erected in the 1850 and stood between Lower Thames Street and the riverside. The building quickly proved to be too small and was replaced in 1876 by the arcaded market hall designed by the City Architect Sir Horace Jones.

Jones’s Billingsgate Fish Market from Illustrated London News, 30 Sept. 1876

Billingsgate Prize Puzzle from Punch

The ever increasing trade not only required a larger building, but also better access roads away from the City centre. In 1883, Punch already ridiculed the traffic congestion near the market by publishing a puzzle listing four problems of which numbers one and two sum up to problem nicely: 1. How to get into the market; 2. How to get out of the market. But it took until 1982 for the market to be moved to its present location in the Docklands area. The traders, especially the women, of the market were known for their coarse language and swearing; opprobrious and foul-mouth language is called ‘Billingsgate discourse’ according to Benjamin Martin’s Lingua Britannica Reformata of 1754. But the market also made a great subject for depiction by artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson.

Thomas Rowlandson, Procession of the Cod Company
©The Trustees of the British Museum

William Hogarth, The Shrimp Girl
©The National Gallery

Billingsgate came in for a lot of negative reactions from travellers. Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the market in 1857 and commented that it was “a dirty, evil-smelling, crowded precinct, thronged with people carrying fish on their heads, and lined with fish-shops and fish-stalls, and pervaded with a fishy odour. The footwalk was narrow, —as indeed was the whole street,— and filthy to travel upon”.⁽¹⁾ Warnings on what to wear were also in order, “Let the visitor beware how he enters the market in a good coat, for, as sure as he goes in in broad cloth, he will come out in scale armour. They are not polite at Billingsgate, as all the world knows, and ‘by your leave’ is only a preliminary to your hat being knocked off your head by a bushel of oysters or a basket of crabs”.⁽²⁾ Have a look here for more lively descriptions of the market.

Did you know that George Orwell worked at Billingsgate for a while? “When a porter is having trouble to get his barrow up, he shouts ‘Up the ‘ill!’ and you spring forward (there is fierce competition for the jobs, of course) and shove the barrow behind. The payment is ‘twopence an up’. They take on about one shover-up for four hundredweight, and the work knocks it out of your thighs and elbows, but you don’t get enough jobs to tire you out. Standing there from five till nearly midday, I never made more than 1/6d”.⁽³⁾ He used his knowledge in Keep the Aspidistra Flying where Gordon Comstock tries his hand at the barrow-pushing game, but he did not last long and had to fall back on the charity of his sister.⁽⁴⁾

Old Billingsgate Market, the 1877 building that is, has fortunately not fallen foul of the demolition hammer and is now a hospitality and events venue. The weathervanes on top of the building can still be admired. If you want to have a look at the new market at Canary Wharf, you will have to get up early as it is only open between 4am and 9.30am.⁽⁵⁾

Billingsgate weathervane

(1) Nathaniel Hawthorne , The English Note-Books, 15 Nov. 1857.
(2) Dr. Andrew Wynter, ‘The London Commissariat’, Quarterly Review, No. cxc, vol. xcv 1854.
(3) George Orwell, Diary, 19 Sept. to 8 Oct. 1931. Quote is taken from hoppicking.wordpress.com.
(4) George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, (London, Penguin Books), 2000, p. 54.
(5) Official site can be found here.

You may also like to read the post on the Billingsgate Christian Mission.

Hay’s Galleria

Tags

David Kemp, Hay's Wharf, insurance, Thames

Hay’s Galleria is named after Alexander Hay who started the Hay empire in 1651 with a lease on a brew-house on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge.⁽¹⁾ Five years later he branched out into pipe-boring. Water was an essential ingredient of beer, so Alexander had a vested interest in a good supply. The New River Company had been supplying fresh water into London via an aqueduct since 1613 and wooden pipes were used to transport that water. John Evelyn in his Sylva explained how these pipes were made from tree trunks with a hole bored through them lengthways.⁽²⁾ Hay had a small tidal creek next to his brew-house which later became Hay’s Dock, but which he probably initially used to store the trunks. The work place became known as Pipe-boarers’ Wharf.

Pipe-boring from John Evelyn, Sylva, 1670

In 1696, Alexander’s son Joseph, with some of his wharfinger neighbours, set up a fire insurance scheme to share the financial risk of a fire, an ever-present threat among the timber warehouses. They called it ‘Contributors for Insuring Houses, Chambers or Rooms from Loss by Fire, by Amicable Contribution’, and is Britain’s oldest mutual Fire Office with its own firemen and fire-engine. By 1720, it became known as the Hand-in-Hand Fire Office which later merged into Commercial Union, now Aviva.⁽³⁾
Somewhere in the early 18th century, in the time of Alexander Hay, grandson of the first Alexander, the wharf received its present name Hay’s Wharf. The Wharf continued to expand, but the Hay family gradually bowed out to Humpherys, Smiths and Magniacs, although the name of Hay’s Wharf was retained. In 1856, the enclosed dock was built by Sir William Cubitt. It became famous for the tea clippers that berthed there, bringing goods from all over the world. Hay’s pioneered cold storage which improved the quality of dairy produce, such as New Zealand butter, considerably. Butter formed a large part of Hay’s trade, but many other items came through the warehouses as well. Richard Church names “coffee-berries, orris-root, nine-and-twenty kinds of tea, geranium oil, and oil of pine”.⁽⁴⁾ The Wharf was rebuilt after the Southwark fire of 1861 and continued to expand and flourish until WWII.

Scene of the fire, Reynolds’s Miscellany 20 July 1861

After the war, trade declined, but the area has been given a new lease of life as an urban redevelopment area providing housing and office space. The Grade II dock itself was permanently closed at the river side and covered over with a floor and roof in the 1980s, resulting in a spectacular covered space, Hay’s Galleria, with a bronze sculpture in the centre. David Kemp’s ‘Navigators’ which was “inspired by the dockside neo-Victorian Architecture of Hays Galleria [… and] strongly prompted by Jules Verne’s stories” was unveiled in 1987.⁽⁵⁾ It is a 60ft bronze kinetic work that looks like the amalgamation of a Viking warrior ship, a dragon, a tea clipper, lots of steam boat funnels, various other marine bit and pieces and plenty of water. Kemp is an artist and sculptor who lives in Cornwall and makes “things out of things, big things, little things, old things and new things. I like to recycle things, and find new uses for things that have been thrown away. Some things say something about their surroundings, and other things become something else.”⁽⁶⁾

David Kemp, The Navigators

Hay’s Galleria

Hay’s Galleria information panel

(1) Most of the information on the early history of the wharf comes from Aytoun Ellis, Three Hundred Years on London River. The Hay’s Wharf Story 1651-1951 (1952).
(2) John Evelyn, Sylva, or, A discourse of forest-trees (1670), p. 175-176.
(3) The minutes of the first meeting do not show the name of Hay as one of the directors, see here.
(4) Richard Church, ‘Hay’s Wharf (A Passacaglia)’ as quoted in Three Hundred Years on London River, p. 6.
(5) http://www.davidkemp.uk.com/blog/steam-punk.html
(6) See David Kemp’s website for more information on his work.

St. Katherine Docks

Tags

Dickens, St. Katherine Dock, Thames

“Whither, O splendid ship” is the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s essay The Docks of London in which she describes the scenes a ship would see coming upriver into the Port of London: liners and steamers, decrepit warehouses, wall-paper and soap factories, cranes and rubbish barges.⁽¹⁾ All this hustle and bustle only increased over the centuries and more space was needed to accommodate the multitude of ships bringing in their wares from all over the world. Whole neighbourhoods were flattened to make way for new docks and warehouses, or as Joseph Conrad would say, “when the trade had grown too big for the river came the St. Katherine’s Docks and the London Docks, magnificent undertakings answering to the need of time.”⁽²⁾

St. Katherine Docks takes its name from St Katharine’s by the Tower (full name: Royal Hospital and Collegiate Church of St. Katharine by the Tower), which was a medieval church and hospital next to the Tower of London. It was founded in 1148 and grew into a village mainly filled with ‘the poor’, but the hospital and some 1250 houses had to be demolished in 1825 to make way for the new dock development. Where the poor went is anybody’s guess, nor did anybody think it necessary to give them compensation; that all went to the owners of the houses.

St. Katherine by the Tower
Source: Wikipedia

The docks were designed by Thomas Telford in the form of two linked basins, the East and West Docks, accessed via an entrance lock from the Thames and a central basin. Soil that was dug out for the dock went to Vauxhall Bridge Road where “a portion of the site formerly occupied by the Neathouse Gardens was raised to a level with Pimlico” and to the drained reservoirs of the Chelsea Waterworks Company west of Tothill Fields.⁽³⁾ The Docks were officially opened on 25 October 1828.

The Opening of the St. Katherine Docks, engraved by E. Duncan after W.J. Huggins. (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Conrad describes how a budding seaman had to make his way to St. Katherine Docks to be examined before he could become a second mate.

At that time the Marine Board examinations took place at the St. Katherine’s Dock House on Tower Hill, and he informed us that he had a special affection for the view of that historic locality, with the Gardens to the left, the front of the Mint to the right, the miserable tumble-down little houses farther away, a cabstand, boot-blacks squatting on the edge of the pavement and a pair of big policemen gazing with an air of superiority at the doors of the Black Horse public-house across the road. This was the part of the world, he said, his eyes first took notice of, on the finest day of his life. He had emerged from the main entrance of St. Katherine’s Dock House a full-fledged second mate after the hottest time of his life with Captain R-, the most dreaded of the three seamanship Examiners who at the time were responsible for the merchant service officers qualifying in the Port of London.⁽⁴⁾

Source: John Tallis, Illustrated London, vol. 2 (1851-1852)

June 1846 had been an exceedingly hot month as can be read in Alathea Hayter’s A sultry month. Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 and a report on the effects of the heat and an example of the disparate items that were offloaded onto the quays of St. Katherine Docks can be found in a report in the newspaper of the 18th of that month.

– The heat was so intense during the Fête Champêtre at Sion-house, on Tuesday, that many of the guests suffered severely from its effects, and looked as jaded on their return as if they had been haymaking instead of merry-making, or as post-horses on the evening of the Derby-day.
– A further arrival of Ice has taken place from the United States of America. A ship named the Ilizaide has arrived in the St. Katherine’s Docks from Boston with an entire cargo, 664 tons weight of the article. The article is in large blocks, and in an excellent state of preservation.⁽⁵⁾

The iconic Dickens Inn that stands on the dockside is a reconstructed wooden warehouse that may already have existed in the 1700s. The original building stood a bit further east than its present location and had been clad in brick to conform to the look of Telford’s warehouses. When that original site was needed for another redevelopment in the 1970s, the original timber structure was rediscovered and the building saved from demolition and moved to its present site.

Dickens Inn

The official website of the Docks can be found here and that of the Inn here.

(1) Virginia Woolf, ‘The Docks of London’ in The London Scene: Five Essays [1975], pp. 7-15.
(2) Joseph Conrad, ‘London’s River’ in The London Magazine, vol. 16 (1906), p. 488
(3) H.B. Wheatley, London Past and Present, vol. 3 (1891), pp. 426 and 523.
(4) Joseph Conrad, Chance (1914; rprt 2002), p.8.
(5) London Daily News, Thursday 18 June 1846.

A fatal boat accident at Kew

Tags

Brentford, Postman's Park, Thames

On Easter Monday, 22 April, 1889, a tragic accident happened in the early evening on the Thames near Kew. Two friends, Francis Moore and Joseph Geraty, had rented a boat from Pearce’s Tyrrel Dock. Moore later testified that he knew a little about boats, but that Geraty did not. When another boat came too close and Geraty, who was rowing, had to lift an oar out of the water to avoid a collision, the boat capsized. Two men in another boat, Herbert Peter Cazaly and his friend Henry Jefferies came to their rescue. Cazaly, who was a good swimmer, took off his coat and vest and jumped in, while Jefferies tried to get their boat closer to the upturned boat. Geraty, who could not swim, clung to Cazaly, while Moore was able to hang on to the upturned boat. Jefferies also jumped in the water and Sidney John Bridgeman, the Brentford ferryman and landlord of the (Bunch of) Grapes, who saw the commotion, took his boat over to help. He was able to pull Jefferies and Moore onto his boat, but Geraty and Cazaly were not close enough and before he could get to them, they had gone under and disappeared.
At the inquest, held on the 26th in the King’s Arms Hotel, Kew Green, Mr. Braxton Hicks, the Mid-Surrey coroner, heard the evidence of the police who related how they found the bodies of Cazaly and Geraty on Tuesday morning a little below the Brentford ferry on the Surrey side.

Ferry crossing at Brentford
Source: http://www.bhsproject.co.uk/pc_Ferry.shtml

Geraty had been a 24 year old printer, residing in Romney Street; his body was identified by his brother Thomas who was from Dublin. Cazaly’s body was identified by his brother, James Adolphus Cazaly who worked at the Empire Theatre. Herbert Peter, born in 1859, had been his younger brother by two years and had worked as a stationer’s clerk in Hatton garden. He had lived in the same house as his brother, his sister-in-law Rosalie and their widowed mother Charlotte in Hutton Street. Hutton Street lies between Dorset Rise and Whitefriars Street in the St. Bride area, parallel and just north of Tudor Street where Jefferies, who was a fine-art dealer, lived. The coroner, in summing up, referred to the carelessness and indifference of watermen in letting out small boats to persons who possessed no knowledge of rowing, and suggested that the matter should be taken up by the police authorities which one of the policeman promised to do. The jury returned a verdict of ‘Accidental death’, and commended the gallant action of the ferryman Bridgeman and of Jefferies. Cazaly was buried on the 26th in Abney Park Cemetery and would have been forgotten, but for the plaque in Postman’s Park which testifies to his heroic effort to save another human being.

Plaque for Herbert Peter Cazaly

Postman’s Park

This story has been put together from the reports on the inquest in The Daily News, The London Times and The Standard, supplemented by some genealogical and geographical research.

You may also like to read about Herbert Peter’s great-uncles, Thomas Cazaly, an engraver and stationer at 48 Tottenham Court Road, and William Cazaly, a linen draper at Red Lion Street.

Postscript: a friend went to Abney Park and tried to find Herbert Peter’s grave for me, but that was not so easy. With the help of John, the caretaker, – for which many thanks – the grave has been identified as number 72061, which lies in grid section J8, to the north of New Road. Unfortunately, the grave stones in that area are very overgrown, but John thinks (99% certain) that the pictures below are of the Cazaly gravestone. The front with the writing is almost inaccessible because of the trees and shrubs that have taken over, but the back of the stone can be seen in this first picture. I also added the photo of a small section of the front that my friend managed to photograph while clambering through the bushes and if anyone can work out what it says, I will be most grateful. To help anyone deciphering, the grave is supposed to contain, besides Herbert Peter, also Marian Jane, James Adolphus and Charlotte Cazaly.