Tag: Upper Holloway

Who lived in 1880s Holloway? Milkmen, posties and the police it seems

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On Wednesday this week I began a slightly different blog series, which, while it will still focus on London in the nineteenth century will not always use the metropolitan police courts for its primary sources material. Today I’m using Charles Booth’s poverty maps and notebooks from the late 1880s and early 1890 to explore the roads around Tufnell Park (where I was born in the 1960s) to see what sort of a district it was at the time.

The previous blog was a reminder that while modern Upper Holloway is a densely populated urban sprawl, in the 1880s open green space still existed and drovers still brought flocks of sheep through the streets to the Metropolitan Meat Market at Caledonian Road.  A friend also pointed out that sheep herding continued in Finchley (where I later grew up) right up to the middle of the last century, the 1950s although the last recorded incident of sheep ‘rustling’ was in 1839.

My family lived in St George’s Avenue in the early 1960s, moving there just before or during the Second World War from a property not that far away. I can’t find Booth’s notebook entries for St George’s Avenue but we do have them for nearby street like Lady Margaret Road. Booth coloured Lady Margaret Road pink, meaning it was ‘fairly comfortable’ with ‘good ordinary earnings’. It was a better off street to some of those around it, notably Fulbrook Road (which was ‘not quite so good, used to be rough’ and Brecknock Road which had elements that were purple (meaning some residents were poor).

The people living in Warrender Road in 3 storey sub-letted houses were paying £34 to £40 rent per annum and were mostly milkmen, police and postmen. The two storied houses in Brecknock Road had seven rooms, so clearly houses of multiple occupation are not a ‘modern’ thing at all. It cost more to live in Southcote Road and Lady Margaret Road (£40-45 in the former, £52 in the latter) and so we’d expect the residents there to be clerks and better paid artisans and shop workers. For comparison £52 in 1889 would equate to about £4,250 today.

This area of North London was the setting for George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of Nobody (serialized in Punch in 1888-9, later published as a book in 1892). The fictionalized diary is kept by Charles Pooter, a London clerk, and records his misadventures in social climbing and reflects a contemporary view of the sort of people that were buying and renting property in the expanding Northern suburbs of London.  Pooter and his wife end son lived at ‘The Laurels’ (pictured, right below). It is very funny and well worth your time if you haven’t read it.

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Going east from Lady Margaret Road, Booth’s enumerators noted that while the people living in Celia Road, Corinne Road and Hugo Road were all ‘mostly comfortable’ the property they were living in was ‘all badly built’. Despite the houses being ‘not 10 years old’ they were ‘cracking above the windows’, had ‘very small backs’ and would ‘probably go down in character’. This might reflect rapid expansion in the area with builders and developers keen to cash in on the growth of London’s population and the desire to move out of the East End and centre.

He went on to comment that while the north west end of Upper Holloway was pink and the south red, suggesting comfortable living and some relative affluence, the north east was light and dark blue, revealing poverty. Moreover he reflected that ‘the best people are leaving’. Adding that if good new small houses for rent were built then the area could maintain its ‘pink’ status (like Stamford Hill) but if not there was a risk that it would only attract the poorer elements and ‘go rapidly down’.

Today the street layouts around Lady Margaret Road remain almost identical to the 1880s so in my final blog of the first trio I will head off to the area on foot to see what it looks like today. Hopefully you’ll see the results on Sunday or Monday of next week.

Sheep rustling in Holloway; a reminder of our rural past

The new Metropolitan Cattle Market, Copenhagen Fields

Today I am starting a new blog series which will look at the smaller events (and some larger ones) associated with London’s streets and the people that lived in them in the past.

I am going to start with Tufnell Park Road in north London because it very close to where I was born and my family lived. Today it is a very urban, built up area, with some fairly well heeled residents living alongside rougher areas of relative deprivation. In that respect then Tufnell Park and Holloway is quite like a lot of the capital in the 21st century.

In May 1867 Richard Allcock was walking along Kentish Town Road at about 10 or 11 at night when he saw a man approaching, driving a ‘drove’ of lambs towards him. He knew the man, John (or ‘Jack’) Read as a fellow drover from the Highgate area. He counted 30 lambs and recognized as a breed native to the Isle of Wight.

He hailed his colleague who replied with a cheery,  ‘holloa Dick, is that you? Will you have a glass of ale?’ Allcock happily agreed and the pair enjoyed a few beers at a nearby public house.

On the following Thursday Allcock ran into Read again, this time at the Metropolitan Cattle Market at Copenhagen Fields by Caledonian Road. The market had moved there just a dozen years earlier from Smithfield as the City authorities attempted to ‘improve’ the built up centre of London. This, and the fact that Allcock later stated that flocks of lambs were regularly graved in Tufnell Park reminds us that, in the mid Victorian period, the area was very far from being as urban as it is today.

At market Allcock was speaking to another drover about his conversation with Jack when he came over and took his mate to one side. ‘Don’t say anything to anyone that you saw me on Monday night’, he said. If Allcock was puzzled it all soon became clear. On the night in question the lambs, part of a larger flock of 71 belonging to John Fuller, had vanished. Police sergeant David Older (16Y) had arrested Read following a tip off.

Read denied stealing them and said he was in bed by 5 o’clock that night, and didn’t get up again that day. Allcock’s evidence undermined that because he’d been drinking with him between 10 and 11. The police were sure they had their man but he wasn’t acting alone. Read himself came close to admitting his crime but muttered that he was ‘not going to take this all alone’.

His solicitor asked for bail when he appeared before the magistrate at Clerkenwell but Mr Cooke refused. Apparently Read had previous for stealing livestock and the police were reluctant to see him at liberty. Off to prison he went while the investigation continued.

Looking at George W. Bacon’s map of London for 1888 Tufnell Park Road is much less built up that it is today. There is a cricket ground and considerable open space on the north side, in Upper Holloway, although there are buildings along most of the street. By the early 1900s the cricket ground is surrounded by housing and other property; all the green space has gone and a railway (the Tottenham and Hampstead Junction) runs across its northern edge.

In Charles Booth’s 1889/90 map of the northern suburbs Tufnell Park Road is solidly red in colour, marking it out as a comfortable middle class area with, as one might expect for a major thoroughfare, plenty of commercial property. Tufnell Park Road looks then, like a respectable street in a mixed working-class area but the situation does vary across Holloway, something I’ll pick in more detail by looking at Booth’s notebooks in the next blog.

[from Daily News, Thursday, June 6, 1867]

A lady’s ‘companion’ undergoes a most unpleasant visit to an estate agent

In May 1879 Miss Lowrie was asked to wait in an estate agent’s office while her older lady friend undertook a familial visit to her brother. What happened next resulted in a very public and embarrassing appearance for all the parties before the sitting magistrate at Bow Street.

Miss Lowrie was ‘companion to Mrs. Oldfield’ of Upper Holloway. This probably meant that she acted as a paid (or possibly unpaid) ‘friend’, somewhere between a family member and a domestic servant. Young ladies like Miss Lowrie (we have no recorded Christian name) were sometimes distant relatives but certainly members of the ‘respectable’ middle classes.

Mrs Oldfield was visiting her brother, Mr Pace of Messrs. Morton and Pace, auctioneers and estate agents and went upstairs to see him while the younger woman waited in the office of his partner, George Morton.

Morton was friendly and offered her a chair before showing her pictures of his wife and child. However, he soon began to be a little too ‘friendly’.

‘As she was looking at them he put his arm around her waist and kissed her. She struggled to free herself; but he laid hold of her indecently and forced her on a chair’.

When Mrs Oldfield came downstairs Miss Lorie left with her, saying nothing until the pair were safely back inside the lady’s brougham. When she heard what had happened the elder woman was furious and wanted to turn the coach around but her companion was adamant they should not. One imagines she was mortified by the whole experience and simply wanted to go home.

However, she was later persuaded to take out a summons against Mr Morton, which brought the whole affair before the Bow Street Police Court.

Mr Stallard, defending, suggested that it was odd that no one had heard anything of the struggle that Miss Lowrie said had lasted over five minutes. Nor was the young woman’s clothing disarranged. He argued that the incident had been ‘grossly-exaggerated’ and that if ‘she had screamed out there at least three clerks who must have heard her and who would have come to her assistance’.

Miss Lowrie responded that the door to the clerks’ room had been firmly closed by the defendant and that she had not cried out but tried to fight him off instead. Her necktie had been ‘dissarranged’ (and Mrs Oldfield testified to this) and Morton had been responsible, having undone it while he held her down. Morton’s brief tried to argue that his client was merely helping her re-tie it after it had accidentally become undone, but this seemed unlikely to the court.

Stallard said the clerks were happy to back up the agent’s version of events but sadly none had made it to Bow Street. Mr Howard, the magistrate was unimpressed. He told the defence that they could easily have made them come, by issuing a subpoena. Their absence  spoke volumes.

Addressing the accused Mr Howard said that ‘it was at least a most improper and impertinent assault, especially from a man who exhibited  a picture of his own wife and child to the lady’. He fined the estate agent £5 with the threat of gaol if he didn’t pay. The fine was paid and all the parties left the court. One is bound to wonder what the ‘office’ atmosphere was likely on the following Monday morning.

 

[from The Standard , Monday, May 26, 1879]