Field of Dust Read online

  ‘Don’t you be putting those hands o’ yours into the river unless you go tempting fate, young Flossie,’ she shouted, her voice full of concern as she pointed to the dirty brown liquid swishing around in the bowl. ‘This is what finished off those poor creatures what fell off the boat. Been this way since the Great Stink.’

  Annie had lived in The Creek for over fifty years and knew better than anyone about the river and its horrors.

  ‘What was the Great Stink?’ Lottie enquired innocently as they headed back together towards their houses.

  ‘That was what it became known as,’ Annie replied, propping herself up on her stick. ‘Happened about twenty years ago. We had the hottest summer I’ve ever known and the sewage on the riverbanks was cooking in the scorching sun. Result was a stench as disgusting as can ever be imagined. Whole city came to a standstill. Even the powers that be in Westminster covered their noses with their kerchiefs. They tried dousing Parliament’s curtains in a mixture of chloride and lime, but it didn’t help, so when everyone stopped working that was the last straw. Something had to be done about the filth, and quick.’

  ‘So what happened?’ Lottie asked excitedly.

  ‘That’s when they started building all the sewers and the big pumping stations up London way, my dearie. But all that did was push their muck down here. Terrible, it was. My Joseph declared he’d rather be on the high seas than this fetid river. Mind you, it was good news for our sons working at the cement mills. All those new sewers, bridges, canals, docks, piers and the like kept men in jobs. What’s more, Portland’s strength stole the show at the Great Exhibition.’

  Realising that they had been out longer than they should have been, Flossie motioned to Lottie to make their way back home. Waving goodbye to Annie, the girls heard Henry Luck and Albert Bull’s voices close by.

  ‘Tide’s gone out,’ Henry yelled as they raced past. ‘Reckon there’ll be stuff from the Alice washed up on Botany Bay. Marsh mud might have hardened a bit by now. Come on!’

  ‘Can’t, we’ll get into too much of a mess,’ Flossie shouted back. ‘Mam’ll murder us if we get our stockings ruined.’

  ‘You’ll miss all the fun, then,’ Henry added with a conspiratorial glint in his eye.

  As word of the adventure spread, children started appearing from front doors and back alleys. Some adults joined in too, no doubt hoping to find coins or jewellery. But it was when the Grants’ young lodgers tagged along as well that Flossie changed her mind. Her father had headed off to The Huggens and her mother was snoring in the chair, so even if she had to drag Lottie along with her, it was better than being stuck at home.

  As the girls skipped down Galley Hill, cement dust from White’s factory swirled round them in the breeze. A hum of excitement was coming from Botany Bay. Thirty or so people were already digging in the mud, some with spades, but most just with their hands.

  ‘Looks like we’re too late, they’ve beaten us to it,’ Albert grumbled, nodding in the direction of Arthur Larkin, who was waving something in the air.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blowed,’ said Henry, spitting on the shingle in annoyance as he watched Arthur wipe the runny mud off a pocket watch onto his sleeve.

  As far as the eye could see, the squelchy mud was slowly giving up its hidden treasures. Women plunged their finds into buckets of river water to check their worth. Flossie was relieved to see Jessie, but started to feel uneasy when a tussle over a brooch looked like it was about to turn nasty.

  Things got even worse when Susannah Lydon, a lunatic from the private Manor House asylum, staggered down the hill. Finding a muddy straw bonnet, no doubt once decorated with lace and silk flowers, she stuck the black, stodgy mess on her head and tied the ribbons under her chin. It was a comical sight as a mixture of mud and slime ran down her face and front. Beaming from ear to ear, she revealed teeth the same colour as the hat. Several of the young men were circling her, poking fun, and when she uncovered a purse with her boot, they were quick to snatch it off her. Throwing it between them, they mimicked and jeered as Susannah lurched helplessly at them.

  Just when it was becoming unruly, a blood-curdling scream stopped everyone in their tracks. Flossie grabbed hold of her sister and moved closer to Jessie. The scavenging halted and people gathered.

  ‘It’s an arm!’ shouted Patrick Murphy.

  It was true. Sticking out of the mud was someone’s hand and wrist. The smell hit Flossie before she’d had time to take it all in.

  ‘Reckon it’s a woman. Don’t look real. Pongs bloody real enough, though. Pass me a spade and I’ll dig the rest out.’

  Curiosity soon got the better of the crowd, most of them holding their noses as they stared at the body. Some grabbed sticks and prodded it, checking for jewellery, causing swarms of flies to hover overhead. Flossie covered her little sister’s eyes and dragged her away. It wasn’t something someone so young should have to witness.

  For once the scullery was empty. Thankfully, Mary had gone to bed. As Flossie was clearing the place up and warming some milk on the stove for her sister, her father returned, dried mud spattered all over his breeches.

  ‘I hear you got a bit of a shock, then,’ he said, lighting the oil lamps. After brushing off the worst of the grime, he sat himself down in the corner chair and beckoned the girls to sit on his lap. This was the time that they both loved. He smelt strongly of sweet beer and tobacco, which wasn’t unpleasant. Wrapping his sturdy arms around them, they each held a rough hand, Lottie inspecting the deep cracks filled with clay.

  ‘Our lodgers come in The Huggens talking about that poor woman’s body. No one had much idea about what to do with it. Luckily old Tom Handley’s still got his fishing boat, so we wrapped it up in a canvas and rowed it over to Tilbury Fort. It’s five shillings a body, you know. They’re laid out side by side waiting to be moved to Woolwich. More than a hundred, but there’s no hope of telling who they are.’

  The girls held on even more tightly. Their pa was a hero.

  ‘I think that should put an end to messing about with them poor lost souls, eh, girls, what do you reckon?’

  Lottie was already asleep. Flossie buried her head in her father’s jacket and closed her eyes. At last she felt safe. Little did she know that what she had witnessed would go down in history as the greatest loss of life of any shipping disaster on the River Thames.

  2

  Flossie had guessed right. She wasn’t able to join her best friend heading for the national school the next morning. Mary’s hangover meant she had to help with the washing. She envied Jessie, in her smart smock, making her way along the back alley. Truth was, with or without the washing, there often wasn’t tuppence to pay for a week’s schooling.

  Sighing as she spotted the meagre amount of laundry soap left on the draining board, Flossie prepared herself for a visit to Jenkins the grocer before the day’s work could start.

  ‘Get him to cut a pennyworth off the large block,’ Mary shouted as she stumbled around, collecting up discarded shirts and combinations. ‘Two ounces of Reckitt’s Paris Blue, too. Take a thruppenny bit off the table.’

  Everyone did their washing on a Monday. That way it would all be dried, pressed, aired, folded and put away long before Sunday, the day of rest and clean clothes. For washerwomen like Mary, washday had to carry over to Tuesday and even Wednesday if the rain was heavy. At least the sun’s trying to break through, Flossie thought to herself. Might dry this lot off by nightfall.

  Thankfully, with so many men in The Creek wearing flannel shirts in filthy working conditions, Mary didn’t have to look far for employment. The only way for parents to make ends meet when they had numerous mouths to feed was to offer board and lodgings, so most dwellings had three or four single young men sharing a room. It was not surprising that with them coming from far and wide in search of labouring work, the area had become a hotchpotch of religious worship, customs and a
ccents.

  But there were scant pickings to be had washing clothes, and every penny counted. It didn’t do to succumb to temptation and trespass onto another washerwoman’s ‘patch’. Mary found this out to her cost when she strayed too far touting for business and crossed Bessie Turner. Ever since, the two women had kept a constant eye on one another’s washing lines, and were rarely civil, particularly after Mary had paid a visit to The Huggens.

  John O’Connell, Edmond O’Leary and Joe Ollerenshaw, the young men living in the Grants’ front room, were only too happy to get their clothes washed for a thruppenny bit a week. Experience had taught them to pay Samuel for their rent and board, yet the money still seemed to end up quenching Mary’s thirst.

  ‘I get in arrears,’ she screamed at her husband one day after George Jenkins refused to give her milk and cheese on credit, ‘’cause you don’t give me enough for the housekeeping.’ Sam was used to being savaged in this way, but knew she’d spend all her time in The Huggens if he gave in to her wiles.

  A slab of lye soap now to hand, Flossie immersed the dirty washing in a half-barrel of hot water. The smell of wood ash and melting lard made her retch, but she did her best to stir and beat the clothing with a dolly stick made from rejected staves found in the cooper’s yard. Thankfully, leaving it to soak meant she had a chance to get her mother to drink a restorative mug of ginger beer.

  ‘Essential for extinguishing the fiery thirst brought on by a tendency to over-imbibe,’ was how Sylvester Lee, the local costermonger, had put it to Mary whilst tempting her to buy his home-made elixir. ‘Penny, with a farthing back on the bottle. Guaranteed to please.’

  Sylvester and his wife, Priscilla, lived in a caravan on the shore, selling an array of goods including jellied eels, pickled whelks, cough lozenges, peppermint water and ginger beer from an overladen donkey cart. He would tour the streets wearing a tall, dented black hat and a white neckerchief, playing a hurdy-gurdy, with a white-headed capuchin monkey that danced as it held out a child’s cap for money. Unfortunately the monkey was vicious and had bitten Maisy Turner badly. Flossie usually ran inside when she heard Sylvester’s melodious tunes approaching.

  Back in the yard, mother and daughter scrubbed collars and cuffs on a washboard, working together to drag the sodden clothes to the other half of the barrel for rinsing. Here they would be treated with a dose of blueing to disguise the grey, and potato gratings for starch. Half the morning would be over by the time they went into battle with the mangle. Turning the handle to force the garments through was exhausting and the rising steam made their matching auburn hair turn to frizz. Finally, Mary, with Flossie and Lottie passing up the pegs, hung everything out on a series of ropes that criss-crossed the yard. It was ill-advised to leave it out for too long, though; cement dust was always in the air and could soon turn the washing grey and stiff.

  By contrast to the weekly working-class washdays in The Creek, the custom of one huge wash every so many weeks still occurred in the big houses where the cement-mill owners lived. The middle classes took pride in having enough linen to manage without washing frequently. You were thought poor if you had a weekly washday. A visiting washerwoman would come in to undertake the ‘great wash’. The little interim ‘slop-washes’ of things that had to be laundered in between times would be done by the housemaids.

  Agnes Avery from Thorpeness was a housemaid at Hive House, owned by Mr and Mrs John Knight, who had three children. Mrs Knight also employed a cook and nursemaid, but no one to help Agnes with their great wash. Having a husband of standing, employing over six hundred men, it definitely didn’t do to be seen to be washing linen too frequently, so it was decided they could last six weeks before a washerwoman was needed.

  ‘I’ve got my hands full, slop-washing,’ Agnes admitted as she showed Mary the washroom and offered her the job. Mary’s mouth dropped open on seeing that the washroom was in its own building and not part of the scullery, and that the kitchens and butler’s pantry took up most of the basement. Agnes wondered what she would have made of the rest of the place, were she to be allowed upstairs.

  Hive House, parkland and orchard originally extended from the High Street down to the river. The house itself was three-storeyed with an imposing entrance hall, library, drawing room, dining room and ten bedrooms, all enclosed within walled gardens. It had its own carriage house and stables as well. Thomas Sturge had purchased the estate of eleven and a half acres and in 1853 built the Knight, Bevan & Sturge cement mill on part of the land. New streets of terraced houses were constructed close by to accommodate his workforce.

  ‘Luck of the Irish, me being in the fishmonger’s and meeting that Agnes Avery,’ Mary told Flossie, revelling in her news. ‘There we were, talking about the mackerel on the slab being caught in Suffolk, and, lo and behold, it turns out we both come from near there. Got me the job. So long as I remain temperate and mind me ‘P’s and ‘Q’s, I’ll get three whole shillings for two days’ work.’

  Flossie laughed at her mother’s mock posh accent and curtsey, but knew there was little chance of seeing any of the extra money.

  For weeks after the Princess Alice disaster, bodies were still being retrieved. A large number were found trapped inside the hull when its two halves were finally raised to the surface. Soldiers were sent to help dockers like James and Tom Luck deal with the dead – so many that much of Woolwich dockyard was needed to handle the emergency. Stories circulated about crowds of dazed and anxious people shuffling down lines of corpses, looking for loved ones. As soon as a body was identified, it was coffined and promptly buried. Long processions of army wagons could be seen carrying the dead to Woolwich cemetery. On the 21st September, 120 unidentified victims were buried there in a mass grave.

  At the inquest, people gave remarkable accounts of what had happened. One lucky survivor, who was standing on the bow of the paddle steamer as it was severed, told how it rose into the air before slowly sinking, miraculously enabling him to step across onto the deck of the collier. After thirty days of deliberations, during which a hundred witnesses were interviewed, the coroner delivered a verdict of death by misadventure.

  The post-mortem may have been over, but there were still rich pickings to be had downriver. As the tide ebbed and flowed, mud larks could be regularly seen making their way along the shoreline to Northfleet. These river-scavengers usually only worked the stretch from Vauxhall Bridge to Woolwich, but news of the Alice had brought them out in force. The children of The Creek were shocked to see such poor creatures silently wading up to their middles through the mud. They were all ages, from mere children to pitiable, decrepit old men and women, bent over double, crawling among the barges at the wharves and jetties clad in nothing more than rags, their emaciated bodies grimed with the foul soil of the river. Paddling and groping for small pieces of coal, bone, wood, rope and old iron – in fact anything of value to fill their baskets – their torn garments stiffened up like boards as they sorted through their paltry treasure on the riverbank.

  Henry Luck and Albert Bull were sitting on the landing stage, watching with a mixture of wonder and disgust when a creature raised itself up from the shallows beneath. Completely covered in mud and vile-smelling, it was just recognisable as a small, half-naked boy, who slithered alongside them with a toothless grin. Henry sat, transfixed, as Albert tried to make out what the boy was saying.

  ‘Me gets a penny fer a buckit of iron, ha’penny fer one pound of wet rope, free farvings if it be dry and one penny fer free pounds of bones,’ the child gabbled excitedly. ‘Copper nails be the best, four pennies a pound.’

  Mesmerised by the banter, they listened in awe to tales of boys leaving the riverbank only when the water was up to their armpits, scraping the mud from their trousers and then frequenting the cab-stands where a farthing or two could be made opening cab doors, or holding gentlemen’s horses. It seemed barely conceivable that a boy, who looked no older than them, could live o
n a couple of coppers a day (though, by all accounts, his present haul would bring in nearer eight). The child had never attended the ragged school, even though he was supposed to, and had spent seven days inside a house of correction for sweeping an empty coal barge and selling the pickings on for a penny a pot.

  He said he preferred it there to mud larking as he’d been given a coat and shoes to wear. Although he hadn’t had much to eat, ‘I never went to bed ’ungry as I oftens had to do at liberty. Might try it on again come winter,’ he added with a muddy grin, ‘so’s not to be obliged to go into the cold, wet mud of a morning.’

  But the best bit was saved till last. ‘When river’s icy, I be a pure-finder. I get eight pence a bucket. Don’t take me long to fill up, wiv the streets bein’ full of it, but I ’ave to sort it. Some places wonnit dry and limy-lookin’, uvvers more sticky.’

  Pure, the boy explained to a bewildered Albert, was dogs’ dung, and was sold to the numerous tanneries in Bermondsey due to its cleansing and purifying properties. Some pure-finders had ‘good connections’ and were granted permission to cleanse kennels. They made a fair living supplying to regular clients. Those who didn’t had to drag their buckets around the thirty tanning yards, touting their wares.

  Albert found a furry jelly bean stuck at the bottom of his pocket and offered it to the boy, who grinned, grabbed it and disappeared into the mist with the rest of his silent army, back to their haunts in the riverside alleys of London.

  Some weeks later, Sam took Flossie to Woolwich cemetery. They walked silently between the four rows of graves and headstones, some named, others marking groups of unidentified people from places like Barking and Erith. Nearby was the joint grave of the captain of the Princess Alice and three members of his family who had drowned with him on that terrible day. A large ornamental marble cross later stood as a memorial to the tragedy. It carried the inscription: Erected by a national sixpenny subscription to which more than 23,000 persons contributed.