Tag: Regan

Pickle Herring Street, Bermondsey

Linda Swinburne

In 1891, Elizabeth Regan (blog of 19 August ) and James Waddington are living with their three children in Pickle Herring Street, Bermondsey which has now disappeared but was right next to Tower Bridge.

Many people know the current walkway beside the Thames, between London Bridge and Tower Bridge. About halfway along is the museum ship HMS Belfast. In the 1980s, before the walkway was created, this part of the riverfront was called Symonds Wharf. There was also a flight of river-stairs called Pickle Herring Stairs along with a causeway very close to this spot.

In the days when large cargo ships moored alongside this piece of riverfront, there was also a street running behind the warehouses that lined the river which extended east from these stairs and eventually passed under the approach road to Tower Bridge. Much of that land is now a park called Potter’s Fields. Now used by tourists to stand and admire views of Tower Bridge and the Tower of London and the site of The Greater London Authority Headquarters, City Hall.

The old thoroughfare was called Pickle Herring Street.

Potters Fields is so called because of the Dutch potters who came to work here having fled religious persecution in Holland. It was the site of the earliest Delftware kilns in England, established around 1618 and the area became famous for producing a particular variety of Delftware called ‘Pickle Herring pottery’. The theory that the Dutch fondness for pickled herrings gave the street and the nearby river stairs their name is sometimes proposed but likely to be unfounded. The precise origin is not known, but is much older.

I find the street fascinating. If for no other reason than it was right next to Tower Bridge where thousands and thousands of tourists now tread with no-one knowing (or probably caring) that once not so long ago people lived there packed into cramped and horrid conditions carving out a meagre living in the Docks.

I have found out quite a lot about the street though.  A publication called Old and New London, published in 1878 describes the area as follows,

“From about the middle of Tooley Street, on the north side, to St. Saviour’s Dock, the whole line of street – called in one part Pickle Herring Street, and in another Shad Thames – exhibits an uninterrupted series of wharves, warehouses, mills and factories, on both sides of the narrow and crowded roadway. The buildings on the northern side are contiguous to the river, and in the gateways and openings in these we witness the busy scenes and the mazes of the shipping which pertain to such a spot. “

The following early 19th century map extract shows the area prior to the construction of Tower Bridge. Note Horsleydown Old Stairs. This is where Tower Bridge would be built later in the 19th century.

There was also a Pickle Herring Stairs roughly where St. Olave’s Wharf is shown in the 1940 map shown below. It is interesting to note that Pickle Herring street was directly opposite Traitor’s Gate of the Tower of London. I struggle to imagine how much money a person would need to live in such a prime location today. 

1940 map showing Pickle Herring Street

The following two photographs from 1947 and 2015 respectively show how the area has changed in so little a time really. The 1947 photo immediately below is looking East towards Shad Thames now a site for high end restaurants and even higher end flats and apartments,

Pickle Herring Street looking East towards Shad Thames

and this photograph looking west shows what is now the site of the seat of London Government, City Hall built on Potter’s Field.

Pickle Herring Street, 2015

When the south bank of the Thames was redeveloped in the 1980s, a new river-wall, from London Bridge to Tower Bridge was built and anything pre-1980 was cleared away. All reference to Pickle Herring Street was lost.

There is mention of Picked Herring Wharf in the novelist and historian Walter Besant’s book East London, 1901 together with this illustration which shows the bridges in the Wharf which can also be seen on the 1947 photograph above:

Additionally, the artist and illustrator Gustav Doré visited the area in about 1872 and produced this illustration of the Wharf:

Pickled herrings are an age-old method of preserving a very well-known fish. They are also known as rollmops. Pickled herring fillets, usually served these days rolled up with onions or gherkins inside and bought in a jar or other container of vinegar. They are well-known and eaten in Britain as well as being even more popular in Europe and particularly Scandinavia. The idea of a pickled herring in London is known to go back to the days of the Domesday Book in 1086 where Herrings and Southwark are mentioned together in a reference for the ‘Guildable Manor of Southwark’. This manor extended from the southern end of London Bridge, along the riverside, almost as far as Hay’s Wharf Dock nearer to London Bridge.

This mention is related to lands held by Odo the Bishop of Bayeux. Along with several pieces of land in England, there is a reference to ‘Oxted and Walkingstead, in Tandridge Hundred, land of Count Eustace’. Under this entry, it says ‘The Count holds Walkingstead himself … To this manor belong 15 dwellings in Southwark and in London, at 6s, and 2000 herrings’. The mention of the ‘six shillings’ and also the herrings probably indicates that taxes had been levied and were payable partly in money and the rest in herrings. Because fresh fish would not have kept, it is likely that the Herrings would have been pickled before being handed over in payment.

Pickle Herring Stairs could be the place where the herrings were landed, pickled and used as a kind of currency.

Who knows? But it’s an intriguing story.

A Bermondsey Life …

Linda Swinburne

Elizabeth Regan (about 1859 – 1921)

Elizabeth was the youngest of the nine children I have so far found of Jeremiah Regan and Bridget Monahan who are one set of my maternal 3 x great grandparents. So, Elizabeth Regan was my maternal 3 x great Aunt.

Elizabeth had quite a life; she married three times, was widowed twice, separated from her second husband (it seems) may have left a child in the Workhouse and died in the Workhouse infirmiary.

A studio portrait of Elizabeth taken in, I suspect, the 1880s or 1890s

Elizabeth was born in Bermondsey in about 1859. She lived with her family until she married a John Butler Thomas in St Mary Magdalene Church, Bermondsey in March 1879.

John was 23 and working as a Lighterman on the river Thames. John came from Bermondsey too but in 1871 he had been working as a servant in a house in Bloomsbury, London.

John’s Father was a Lawyer rather than the more usual Labourers and Dock Workers that I’ve found in my research.

In 1870, John’s elder sister, Alice, had married one of Elizabeth Regan’s elder brothers, Timothy. So unusually, two sets of siblings from two separate families had married each other.

Witnesses at the Wedding were Cornelius Regan (another one of Elizabeth’s brothers) and Alice Regan, John’s sister, Alice Butler Thomas, who had married Elizabeth’s brother, Timothy Regan.

Elizabeth may well have met John through her brother’s marriage with John’s sister. Timothy Regan was also a Thames Lighterman and may have recommended John for employment in the Docks which was very much an industry where relatives were often brought in by existing employees to work there.

But tragedy was to strike Elizabeth and John less than a year into their marriage when, on 24th January 1880, on his 24th birthday, John Butler Thomas was killed in an accident while working on the Thames.

The Death Certificate explains that he “Drowned by falling from a barge. Under the water for four hours”. The accident was reported in the Lloyds of London Newspaper the next day, 

The outlined paragraph shown in the newspaper above, says the following,

“LIGHTERMAN DROWNED ON HIS BIRTHDAY.  

A sad birthday fatality was reported to the Southwark Coroner by Mr Mummery, Officer for St Olave’s.  It appears that John Butler Thomas, living at 25 Thomas Street, a Lighterman by trade, was married but a few months since. Yesterday was his 24th birthday and it was intended to celebrate the event in a suitable manner in the course of the evening. Thomas, however, did not live to see the close of the day.  He left home as usual early in the morning and went to St George’s Terrace where he was to take charge of a barge belonging to Mr Tarnley. In attempting to push the barge from the river side to mid-stream, he slipped and fell into the water.  Efforts were made to rescue him but his body was not recovered for two hours when life was found to be extinct”

It makes me sad to think of this very ordinary family planning to celebrate John’s birthday only for him to die at work. It is particularly poignant since, three months after John died, Elizabeth gave birth to their daughter, Elizabeth, born in May 1880. 

After John’s death and daughter Elizabeth’s birth, Elizabeth Regan’s life seems to take a bit of a complicated turn.

By the time of the 1881 Census, taken on 3 April that year, so less than a year after Elizabeth had given birth to hers and John’s daughter, Elizabeth is living in lodgings and sharing them with two other women.  All three women describe themselves as Charwomen. The others are much older than Elizabeth. Elizabeth is described as the Head and the other two as lodgers. They all say they are Widows. There are, additionally, two other families living at the same address which made a total of thirteen people living in, what I suspect were, very cramped and unsanitary conditions.

I can find no trace of John and Elizabeth’s little daughter on the census for that year but I can find her death in 1887 aged just 7.

Elizabeth Butler Thomas’s Death Certificate aged just 7

Elizabeth Butler Thomas died from Potts Disease which is, apparently, a form of TB that occurs outside the lungs, usually in the vertebrae. TB can affect several tissues outside the lungs including the spine, so this was apparently a kind of tuberculous arthritis of the intervertebral joints. Little Elizabeth died in the St Olave’s Poor Law Union Infirmiary in Bermondsey

The Death Certificate says that the death of Elizabeth Butler Thomas (called Elizabeth Thomas on her death certificate) was registered by her mother who was present when the child died.  

But in the intervening time following Elizabeth Butler Thomas’s birth and death, Elizabeth Regan had in fact remarried and was now Elizabeth Waddington.

In the 19th century, it was very difficult for women to forge a successful single life. If they were widowed, women would be under pressure to remarry to have an income and someone to provide money for them to survive. Likewise, men who were widowed would need to remarry to have someone to look after their children. Although it was also common for widowed men with dependent children to distribute the children amongst relatives who would frequently, take them in.

So, in May 1882, Elizabeth had married a James Waddington, a Widower from Yorkshire, who was a Bricklayer. Their Marriage is in the same church as the one in which Elizabeth had married John Butler Thomas just three years earlier.

Elizabeth and James Waddington went on to have three children together (James’s children from his first marriage were taken in by relatives and never came to live with him and Elizabeth). I have no way of knowing whether Elizabeth and John Butler Thomas’s daughter lived with Elizabeth and her new husband. The fact that little Elizabeth died in the Workhouse infirmiary does not necessarily imply that she was living there, although she may have been. Many poor families used the Workhouse infirmary when they were ill because they could not afford to see a doctor.

In 1891, Elizabeth and James are living as a family with their three children in Bermondsey.

By the time of the 1901 census though, Elizabeth and James are living separately. James has gone back to Yorkhire where he came from originally and their eldest child has gone with him. Elizabeth is living with their two younger daughters and is again working as a Charwoman in Bermondsey.

Elizabeth is using the surname of Morris. This appears to pre-empt her third marriage to a William Morris in 1914 some 13 years later although on the 1911 Census, Elizabeth has reverted to Waddington. On that census, Elizabeth is living alone (both her girls married in 1909 – strangely, to two boys who lived next door to each other) and she is still working as a Charwoman.

Elizabeth married for the third time to William Morris, in October 1914, just a few months after the outbreak of WW1, at the Bermondsey Register Office. Elizabeth was 55. Her third husband was a Dock Worker but at the time of their marriage was serving as a Private in the 9th Cavalry Reserve Regiment and he was 11 years younger than her.

Elizabeth died in 1921 aged 61 from what appears to have been Acute Renal Failure, again in Bermondsey Workhouse Infirmary as had two of her brothers and her youngest daughter.

Her third husband, William Morris had pre-deceased her but I’m not sure exactly when. A niece of Elizabeth’s registered her death.

What a life Elizabeth had. Twists and turns amongst the poverty of south London. Three husbands, four children, disease, poverty, tragedy and the Workhouse. Tough times.