"Not with their property, but with their lives"

While researching smuggling for The Ghost and Miss Moore, there's one problem I run into again and again: the bulk of the records of the customs service were lost in the 1814 London Customs House fire. To me the greatest loss is that every revenue officer was required to keep notebooks detailing his daily activities and submit them to his superior officer. There are almost none extent from before 1814 because of this fire.

"The fatal Conflagration of the Custom House, on the Morning of the 12th February 1814"
(British Museum)

The fire was discovered by the porter at 6AM. By 7 the fire engines had arrived, and by 8 the flames were so high they had given up on saving the Customs House and began trying to save the surrounding buildings.

[A] report was circulated that many barrels of gunpowder were deposited in the vaults, and that consequently an explosion might soon be expected. This report had nearly a magical effect. All withdrew to a distance, both firemen and spectators. At half-past nine the report which had been circulated was confirmed not to have been an idle one. The explosion of about two barrels and a half of gunpowder was tremendous. The shock was distinctly felt on the Royal Exchange, and by persons who came to London by the Whitechapel Road; it was felt four miles in that direction. Many of the buckets were carried as far as Billingsgate; and one man was hurt or killed by two bricks falling on his head. The concussion spread devastation around the neighbourhood breaking many windows in Cannon Street, East Cheap and the adjoining streets, and exciting in the breasts of the inhabitants apprehensions of the complete destruction of that quarter of the City.

[...]The explosion of the gunpowder carried the burnt papers, ships registers, and a variety of matter, as far as Dalston, Shacklewell, Homerton, Hackney, and all the adjoining villages in the direction of the wind. A bundle of signed debentures is said to have been picked up by a gentleman at as great a distance from the scene of destruction as Spital Square.

(From the British Fire Service's contemporary accounts on their website, which are definitely worth reading all the way through. I couldn't find any citations of whose accounts they are, though, and they are clearly a composite of several authors' work since there are two different stories about Colonel Kelly's "(late of the Guards)" actions. He was the housekeeper's brother and one writer claims he "hurried to his sister and found her in such a senseless state from the fright, that it was with extreme difficulty he could drag her out almost naked."  In the other, he was paralyzed with fear in his burning room when the porter found him, and then ran to a window from which he was "saved by a ladder with the greatest difficulty and shockingly burnt in the face and hands," while the porter went and got his sister and the servants. While I am not by any means criticizing the guy for freaking out while his room was on fire, if I were the porter I might be annoyed by that face-saving story, although I'd feel guilty about being annoyed since Colonel Kelly died a few days later of his injuries.)

It later turned out that there were only about 10 or 12 pounds of gunpowder stored in that nearby building, for use by the volunteers, but rumors that there were barrels and barrels spread quickly and kept many of the firemen from wanting to get very near the fire, with the result that it spread fast and far.

The flames soon communicated to the houses in Thames Street opposite the Custom House, and embraced, in a short time, warehouses in Globe Yard, and the whole of the tenements extending from Beer Street to Water Lane from which it required the utmost activity of the inmates to escape, not with their property but with their lives.

The flames didn't get under control until around 3PM, by which time the Customs House was ashes.

The Customs House before the fire, by Rowlandson, 1808. (Wikimedia Commons)

Some of the amazing non-archival things lost in the fire:

The actual loss to government by the sudden destruction of the Custom House cannot be calculated; books, bonds, debentures, pearls, coral, valuable property of every description and securities of all kinds have been consumed.[...]The private property lost within the buildings is very considerable: several gentlemen had left large sums of money in their desks, ready to make payments on the following day. One individual has lost upwards of six thousand pounds in bank notes, which will be irrecoverable, as the memorandum of the numbers was in the desk with the notes and met the same fate. 

A very fine collection of pictures was also lost, which the Commissioners had permitted a gentleman to leave in deposit till it would be convenient for him to pay the duties, amounting to one thousand five hundred pounds. A genteel young man, in appearance, was stopped by some police officers, in Thames Street and, on searching him, his pockets and breeches were found to be stuffed with coral beads, silk handkerchiefs, and other valuables of small bulk. It appeared that his boldness in venturing nearer than even the firemen dared to do, had enabled him to obtain this booty.

Fortunately a new Customs House was already being built, the Napoleonic Wars (and resulting embargoes) and increased trade having vastly increased the work of the Customs. The new building was completed in haste...which may or may not have led to the design flaws that caused a huge part of the floor of the Long Room to collapse and fall into the King's Warehouse below in 1825, leading to major repairs, a new, much more classically Neoclassical facade, and the ruin of David Laing's career as an architect. But that's another story! (Which you can read a bit more about here, along with looking at many more engravings and drawings of the Custom House through the years.)

Do you have a favorite disaster, natural or otherwise? Tell me about it!

Places Too Big for The Usual Rules of Biography

How does one describe the River Thames? In a few words or phrases or a neat timeline to summarize the people who settled nearby? Hardly; it’s far too ancient and complex for that. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: The Biography devotes almost 500 pages to a subject he clearly adores. It seduces the reader like a novel, despite its trailing illustrations, bibliography, and index. Like its subject, it’s too big to be confined by the usual rules.

Topics include: The Mirror of History, Father Thames, Issuing Forth, Beginnings, The Sacred River, Elemental and Equal, The Working River, The River of Trade, The Natural River, A Stream of Pleasure, The Healing Spring, The River of Art, Shadows and Depths, The River of Death, and The River’s End.

From these topics pour detail after detail, anecdote after anecdote, all of them ordered by subject, not by year.

For example, the great East India docks were built in 1790 over a drowned forest. (Now, there’s an image!) Salmon tasted marvelous from the Thames in 1746, yet by the 1950s there were no fish throughout a 48-mile stretch of the Thames. They returned by the 21st century, together with the largest spawning ground for sole in England. These visions of fish splashing through the water compete with accounts of Victorian boating holidays for humans – ah, the rigid dress code! – and medieval river pageants.

People strut and slink their way the book’s pages. Watermen were honored in the 17th century but hunt for recognition in the 19th. Riverside dwellers cast offerings into the river’s waters: Bronze and Iron Age weapons, deliberately mutilated statues of pagan gods, and pilgrim’s badges. And, of course, the poets who celebrated the Thames: Spenser, Gower, Chaucer, More, Milton, Pope, Blake, Dunbar, Denham, Herrick, and more.

Every time I pick up Thames: The Biography, I find something new to ponder. The native dialect of the Thames River Valley, for example, that Alfred the Great spoke may be the foundation of today’s English. Pubs, waterworks, and chapels were all traditionally associated with bridges. The oldest Thames bridge still in existence today dates to 1250 – and still looks gorgeous.

Ackroyd's Thames: The Biography is a book that makes the Thames River come alive, across all the ages that the river has flowed to the sea. Yet even though Peter Ackroyd has made those waters incredibly vivid to me – and his notes have inspired me to research them further – I’d still like to visit some of the sights he describes. Perhaps the riverside gardens that Henry VIII and Elizabeth I’s aristocrats loved or the 1715 Frost Fair when the Thames froze over and all London came out to celebrate the marvel.

What books which bring an era or place vividly alive to you?

A Foggy Day in High Summer

Yesterday I escaped from the summer heat and spent time with Johnny Depp. His celluloid double, that is. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides at the local cinema. Johnny Depp was, of course, delightful and the rest of the scenery was engaging.

To my fascination, the opening scenes were shot in London and I found myself trying to pick up small pointers for historical flavor. (Are there any lengths an author won’t go to justify playing hooky?) Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp’s character, made fools of the judicial system in a very interesting courtroom and dined with King George in a lavishly decorated palace. After that, he led a cavalry troop on a hair-raising chase through London’s streets, before finally dumping a wagonload of fiery coals across their feet to escape.

Coals? That many? In the late seventeeth or early eighteenth century? My historian’s nose pricked up. Just how common were coal-fired stoves close to the royal palace at that time? And come to think of it, I’ve often been fascinated by how many London-set movies have a generic grey sky. But Pirates 4 takes place earlier than London’s more notorious fogs in the Victorian and twentieth centuries. How smoggy were those urban skies in 1700?

Where could I find the answer? Emily Cockayne’s fabulous Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600-1700. Anyone who is remotely curious about the five senses in Elizabeth, Restoration and Georgian England should read this book. The chapters’ titles describe her topics: ugly, itchy, mouldy, noisy, grotty, busy, dirty, gloomy, and ‘such things as these…disturb human life.’

Ever wondered what the flower sellers sounded like? Or how the oyster sellers cried their wares? What Bath looked like before the big urban renewal, which made it such a fancy spa town? Or how did people take out all their various forms of trash? Emily Cockayne answers these questions with period engravings and wonderful prose, based on delving into the top diarists from the era and modern researchers.

Coal was a dirty fuel, originally used only as a last resort by the poorest. It created more smoke than timber and its waste stuck more readily to the sides of chimneys. Yet it was far cheaper and the price dropped twenty-fold from 1580-1680. The results were appalling, given how it spoiled books, furniture and painting. Foreign visitors described Westminster’s tapestries ‘so wretched and tarnished with smoke that neither gold nor silver, colours nor figures can be recognized.’

A wise housekeeper even put the kitchen far away from the main house, simply because of the coal smoke’s stench. King James I loathed tobacco smoking and compared it to a kitchen long before coal fires were widely popular, saying both were soiled and infected ‘with an unctuous and oylie kind of soot.’

Smog was definitely a seventeenth century problem. One goldsmith working in London’s Fleet Street engulfed all passers-by whenever he fired up his forge. Cities passed ordinances demanding that brick kilns be located far from the city center, since their choking fires smelled exactly like carrion. The prevailing west winds kept foul odors away from towns’ west ends and made these areas the most attractive.

But London’s air was always considered particularly blighted. In In 1676, Robert Hooke noted a mass of smoke more than twenty miles long and a half mile high over the city. Mid-morning gloom forced more than one traveler to write their letters by candlelight. Chemists sold special concoctions to reduce coughing in churches so the other congregants could hear the service.

The Pirates 4 movie makers clearly knew what they were doing when they gave Captain Jack Sparrow a wagon full of coal and cloaked him in cloudy skies.

What movies have you seen in the guise of historical research? Any surprising historical tidbits?

PS – If you have the chance to see Pirates 4, keep an eye out for the Society Lady.

Visiting Mayfair--and some news

I came back from a quick visit to London last week. I packed a lot into a very short time, including a visit to the Regency Town House in Brighton--I blogged about it last week at the Riskies, where today I'm blogging about my newest favorite place in London, the excellent and fabulous Fan Museum in Greenwich.

But while I was there I blatantly played tourist by going on a London Walk of Mayfair--something I've never done before. A couple of other Americans talked the entire time about some poor woman in their town whose ears must have been burning and I took (mostly dreadful) photos. The walk was pretty good, but obviously previous walkers were fascinated by London real estate so a lot of the information given was about house prices (ridiculously high).

Mayfair was originally the site of a fifteen-day May Fair, renowned for its rowdiness and finally banned in 1708. Architect/developer Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the area and by the mid-eighteenth century completed the site, which included paved alleys, a duckpond (aaw!) and a two-storey market topped with a theater. (Now I'm kicking myself because I think that building still stands and is a pub and I didn't photograph it).

So in the center of the grand Georgian houses we associate with Mayfair there's a charming area of picturesque alleys, shops and restaurants, Shepherd Market (according to our guide, it's a busy red light area at night). I do enjoy a bit of sleaze and narrow alleys...

I really loved the frontage of this shop that sold statues and I wished I'd used this setting in The Rules of Gentility when Philomena and Inigo go shopping together. Next time I'm going back to look inside...

But yes, the grand houses. This was the area where Caroline Lamb and Florence Nightingale lived (although not together or at the same time, although their houses have gone--either knocked down by the Blitz or developers) and many other big names. Handel lived next door to Jimmi Hendrix (although not concurrently) and the BeeGees also get a blue plaque (honest).

Here's Beau Brummell's house (left) and the house of the Duke of Clarence, Mrs. Jordan and their ten offspring (right). The blue plaque at the Duke's house, however, celebrates a more respectable resident whose name I can't remember.

Here's Berkeley Square and one of its venerable plane trees (two hundred years old). And on the right, the London home of American president John Adams.

Here's an interesting factoid about the shift of the fashionable from Soho to Mayfair. After the rich and famous moved to the new development (which was pretty much in the country then, thus achieving the Georgian ideal of the pleasures of the town with the salubrious effects of the countryside), Soho became a lower class, artisan area. William Blake set up shop there. So did several thousand French emigres, mostly weavers, which I thought was really interesting, because I wrote something one time where the heroine lived in the ground floor of a Soho house which resonated to the thud of a loom above. My critique group said, as one woman, huh? But I was right; something, sometime, had lodged in my brain and come out at exactly the right moment.

And now the big news... remember, you heard it here first unless you came from the Riskies...

I've sold a two-book deal to HarperCollins, Immortal Jane, and the first is about Jane Austen joining forces with sexy vampires against a French occupation of Bath (and you should have heard me cackle when I wrote the proposal). My working title is... yep, Blood Bath (I really, really hope they let me keep it). It's scheduled to come out next summer so I'd better get busy.

So since I'm supposed to end a blog with a question, have you ever taken a walking tour in London? Or any other city? What did you think?