Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Map of Holloway
Map of Campbell Road
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction to the Pimlico Edition
Introduction
1. The Rise of Campbell Bunk
Campbell Road, Holloway
It ‘never had a chance’
Cambell Road and the housing market
Settling down
‘The worst street in north London’
2. The dynamics of class: Campbell Road and the lumpenproletariat
Campbell Road’s class structure
The lumpenproletariat
London’s reserve army of labour
The casual labour market in Holloway
‘The unemployables’
The curse of Campbell Bunk
Rejecting wage labour
The lumpen economy of Campbell Bunk
The dynamics of class
Bringing things together
3. Collective identities
Support networks
Mutual consolations
Internal tensions
4. Ideology, politics and forms of struggle
The politics of Campbell Bunk
Collective self-defence
Crime as struggle
5. The family and social change
The Campbell Road ‘family’
Men and women
Parents, children and the state
6. Young men: accommodating traditions
Context
Walter spencer: The straight and narrow
Billy Tagg: A chapter of accidents
Harry James and the young thieves of Campbell Bunk
7. Young women and the new world outside
Work, culture and marriage
May Purslowe, Nancy Tiverton and the struggle with mothers
Jane Munby and the delinquent solution
Mavis Knight, Olive Tasker and a new world for women
8. The fall of Campbell Bunk
Moving out
The war
Slum clearance
Epitaph
Figures and table
Notes
Acknowledgements
Biblography
Index
Copyright
I hope this book is easier to read than it was to write. It was put together largely between 9 p.m. and 1 a.m. in the dark hours left by an over-demanding, full-time, non-related job and a young family which managed to expand by three children during the process. No book should be written like that: and if this one sometimes appears a little ragged at the edges it is but the faintest indication that I am, too.
Any number of people have prevented me from coming apart completely at the seams. First, most important and generous, have been ex-residents of Campbell Bunk, without whom this study would have been impossible: Mrs Lily Abbott, Mrs Ellen Bartlett, Mr Alfred Bartlett, Mrs Rose Bennett, Mrs Fran Callum, Mr Tom Callum, Mrs Myra Keen, Mrs Clara Munger, Mrs Marguerite Thacker, Mrs Eileen Rossehill, Mrs Violet Carpenter, Mrs Florrie Maggs, Mrs Lil Mundy, Mrs Cissie Pollard, Mrs Kitty Smith, Mrs Annie Vyce, Mr Charles Aldridge, Mr James Beales, Mr ‘Bob’ Burchnall, Mr John Blake, Mr John Barrett, Mr Henry Corke, Mr James Day, Mr James Green, Mr Wally Jerrams, Mr Arthur King, Mr Fred Lawrence, Mr George Sailing, Mr Lenny Sailing. In the text, these names have been changed to maintain confidentiality of personal information. A number of other people gave me information about the street, in particular Mrs Hilda Hewitt, Mrs Ada Watkins, Miss Dorothy Harmer, ex-PC G. M. Hoyle, ex-PS Stan Costen, ex-PS S. C. Caplen, ex-PC E. Abrams, ex-PC Ernest Creed, ex-PC Jones. And some others have helped with general information about Islington between the wars, especially Mr Louis Gillain, Mr Bill Salisbury, Mrs Lily and Mr Albert Deane, and Mr Ken Weller. Taped interviews, transcripts and letters will eventually be held at the London History Workshop Centre. The Nuffield Foundation gave me a generous grant to help with transcription facilities and an extensive computer analysis of the New Survey of London household survey cards at the London School of Economics. The grant could not have been administered without the kind assistance of Noel Parry at the Polytechnic of North London, and of José Parry, who carried out the research with dedication, skill and patience. I would like to thank the staff at a variety of research libraries and institutions, especially the Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, the British Library, the Greater London Record Office, and Islington Central Library; Mr William Stevenson, formerly Chief Environmental Health Officer to the London Borough of Islington, kindly loaned me photographs; and Rev. Short of St Mark’s, Moray Road, gave me access to marriage registers. The Greater London Council gave permission to reproduce photographs nos 12 and 13; the Guildhall Library the photograph of Brand Street (no. 11); and Syndication International the 1935 street party (no. 2); others were kindly supplied by people from Campbell Road. The manuscript was typed by Lesley Muggeridge, and was read by Sally Alexander, Anna Davin, and Ruth Richardson, who gave invaluable advice. Needless to say, I am entirely responsible for any sins of omission or commission in what follows.
There is one other group without whom this book could not have been attempted. One burden (and delight) which the historian who is unattached to a teaching institution and library facilities has to bear is the accumulation of a personal library. My last thanks go to the secondhand booksellers of south-east England, especially John Hodgkins, B. L. Coombes, and Nick Spurrier, who have provided me with many treasures over the past eight years.
Jerry White
Stamford Hill, N16
February 1985
1 Oral sources
2 Unpublished documents
3 Small-circulation publications
4 Official publications
5 Newspapers
6 Published sources (primary and secondary)
GL | Guildhall Library | |
GLRO | Greater London Record Office | |
IBE | Islington Borough Engineer’s Dept | |
ICL | Islington Central Library | |
ITH | Islington Town Hall | |
LSE | British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics | |
PNL | Polytechnic of North London |
Note: Bibliography lists only authorities cited in the text or footnotes. References are to first editions of published works except where otherwise specified.
Booth MSS: Booth Manuscripts (LSE)
Census MSS: Census Enumerators’ Record Books, 1871, 1881
ISBG: Records of the Islington Board of Guardians (GLRO)
ISBG/64: Minutes of the Board
ISBG/68–71: Arrears, Maintenance and Prosecution Committee (4 vols)
ISBG/253: Registers of Rough Examinations as to Settlement (11 vols)
ISBG/281: St John’s Road Workhouse Weekly Admissions Orders (59 vols)
ISBG/360: Weekly Statements of Relief (Form A) (23 vols)
IS/D: Deeds held at ICL
IS/ER: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Registers of Electors (ICL)
IS/RB: Vestry of St Mary Islington/Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Rate Books (ICL)
ISMB/CC: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Cleansing Committee, Minutes (ITH)
ISMB/PHC: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Public Health Committee, Minutes (ITH)
ISMB/SPC: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Special Committee, Minutes (including Housing and Public Health (Slum Areas) Joint Sub-Committee) (ITH)
ISMB/UE: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Special Committee re Unemployment, Minutes (ITH)
IS/OC: Metropolitan Borough of Islington: Overcrowding Survey 1938, House Survey Cards (to be deposited at ICL)
ISV/SC: Vestry of St Mary Islington: Sanitary Committee, Minutes (ITH)
ISV/SDP: Vestry of St Mary Islington: Surveyor’s Drainage Plans, Books 11–2, 13, 15, 21–2, 28–9, 43 (IBE)
LCC/PH/REG/1: Registers of Common Lodging Houses, vols 5–10, 13–14 (GLRO)
NSL MSS: New Survey of London Life and Labour, Manuscript Records (LSE)
NSL/PNL: Computer-based analysis of 263 household survey cards from NSL MSS, representing unskilled heads of households in Holloway (PNL)
ST ANNE’S/RM: St Anne’s Church, Tollington Park, Register of Marriages (at the Vicarage, Moray Road)
Tiley, GL (1975): George Leslie Tiley: ‘Memories of Islington Between the Years 1899 and the 1930s’ (MS in the possession of Mrs Sheila Leslie)
Heaven, E. F. (1934): Lennox Road Mission Hall 1874–1934: Diamond Jubilee Celebration Souvenir. (GL)
Holloway (1924): SUPERINTENDENT OF HOLLOWAY FREE MISSION: One Hundred Years Ago in Holloway, 1825–1925. (GL)
Hornsey Road (1921): ANON: One Hundred Years in Hornsey Road, 1821–1921: A Centenary Souvenir of Hornsey Road Wesleyan Mission. (GL)
IS/DIR: The Islington Directory (1863–1905). (ICL)
IS/KELLY: Kelly’s Highbury, Holloway and Tufnell Park Directory (1909–16). (ICL)
IS/LP (1937): ISLINGTON LABOUR PARTY: What Labour Has Done for Islington. (Bishopsgate Institute)
Islington MOH: Medical Officer of Health’s Annual [and Quarterly] Reports on the Health and Sanitary Condition of the Parish of St Mary, Islington (1856–99).
Medical Officer of Health’s Annual [some Quarterly] Reports on the Health and Sanitary Condition of the Metropolitan Borough of Islington (1900–38).
Kelly’s: The Post Office London Directory, County Suburbs (1919–23). The Post Office London Directory (1924–57).
LLP (1936): LONDON LABOUR PARTY: What Labour Has Done for London.
NCCM: New Court Congregational Magazine. (GLRO)
NCC/MS: New Court Chapel, Tollington Park: Manual (1892–1944). (GLRO)
NCM: New Court Magazine (1924–39). (GLRO)
Our Street (1943): [CHURCH OF ENGLAND TEMPERANCE SOCIETY]: Our Street. (ICL)
Census (1911): Census of England and Wales 1911: County of London.
Census (1921): Census of England and Wales 1921: County of London.
Census (1931): Census of England and Wales 1931: County of London. Census of England and Wales: Occupation Tables.
Census (1951): Census 1951 England and Wales: Report on Greater London and Five Other Conurbations.
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HMFI: Annual Reports of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops.
LACJE: The Annual Reports of the Advisory Council for Juvenile Employment.
LRACJE: The Annual Reports of the London Regional Advisory Council for Juvenile Employment.
ML (1924): MINISTRY OF LABOUR: Report on an Investigation into the Personal Circumstances and Industrial History of 10,000 Claimants to Unemployment Benefit, Nov. 5th to 10th, 1923.
ML (1926): MINISTRY OF LABOUR: Report on an Enquiry into the Personal Circumstances and Industrial History of 3331 Boys and 2701 Girls Registered for Employment at Employment Exchanges and Juvenile Employment Bureaux, June and July, 1925.
ML (1928): MINISTRY OF LABOUR: Report on an Investigation into the Personal Circumstances and Industrial History of 9748 Claimants to Unemployment Benefit, April 4th to 9th, 1927.
ML/LUI: MINISTRY OF LABOUR: Local Unemployment Index.
PP CTTEE ON MOTOR TRANSPORT: Report of a Committee on the Regulation of Wages and Conditions in the Road Motor Transport Industry (Goods), 1936–7, Cd 5440.
PP CTTEE ON STERILISATION: Report of the Committee on Sterilisation, 1933–4, Cd 4485.
PP CTTEE ON WHOLESALE FOOD MARKETS: Ministry of Food Departmental Committee on Wholesale Food Markets, 4th Report, 1921, Cd 1341.
PP EMPLOYMENT OF PRISONERS: Report of the Departmental Committee on the Employment of Prisoners: Part II Employment on Discharge, 1934–5, Cd 4897.
PP JUVENILE LABOUR: Memorandum on the Shortage, Surplus and Redistribution of Juvenile Labour based on the views of Local Juvenile Employment Committees, 1928–9, Cd 3327.
PP STREET TRADING: Report of the Committee Appointed to Consider the Question of the Regulation of Street Trading in the Metropolitan Police District, 1922, Cd 1624.
PP UNEMPLOYED ON RELIEF: Unemployed Persons in Receipt of Domiciliary Poor Law Relief. 1927, Cd 3006. 1928–9, Cd 3218. 1929–30, Cd 3433.
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IG: Islington Gazette
I&HP: Islington and Holloway Press
NLP: North London Press
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HOLLOWAY IS AN unexceptional London suburb.1 Only the association of its name with a notorious prison distinguishes it from the rest of that uneven ring of mid-Victorian London of which it is part. It dissolves imperceptibly into Kentish and Camden Towns in the west and Finsbury Park and Hornsey in the east, but it would not look out of place next to Shepherds Bush or Clapton; or even tucked in between Stockwell and Clapham North.
Today Holloway is unarguably an inner-city area. But sixty years ago it lay on the edge of two Londons. It faced out to the northern heights of Highgate and Hampstead and Muswell Hill, as well as to the social foothills of Tottenham, Harringay and Noel Park. But it also faced into the old city from which it had grown like green wood round the heart of an oak; to the Angel Islington, Clerkenwell, Hoxton and St Luke’s.
From the outside there was nothing exceptional about Campbell Road itself. It did not look like a typical London slum. Built originally for clerks and artisans, it continued to bear some marks of its first respectable pretensions. It was wide enough to balance the height of buildings on either side. It opened confidently from a premier shopping street, rather than hiding behind railway line or gasworks. The railings which kept private a dusty apology for a garden still clung to about half the houses. The street line was marred, for the discerning, by the kink to the left at the far end from Seven Sisters Road, an afterthought in the Victorian planning process; and by the chaotic horizontals of parapets and window openings, testifying to some anarchy during building. But there was nothing to the passer-by which marked Campbell Road apart from a thousand other streets in Holloway and neighbouring districts of North London dating from the 1860s and 1870s.
When first built, Holloway was itself a suburb and Campbell Road truly suburban. Yet the pace of building in the thirty years after 1860 was such that the area quickly lost its edge-of-town character. And for other reasons, Campbell Road lost it more quickly and completely than the rest of Holloway.
The relationship between Campbell Road, Holloway, and North London has its roots in the 1850s and 1860s. To unearth them is not merely of antiquarian concern, for patterns were laid down then which still shaped experience seventy and eighty years on – Campbell Road’s place in the housing market, a reputation, links with sister streets, ownership and settlement amongst certain families, even tensions which artificially divided the street against itself. Some of this legacy will be dealt with more fully later. But in this opening chapter we see how Campbell Road, a street much of a piece with the rest of Holloway’s suburban development, became transformed into Campbell Bunk – ‘the worst street in North London’.
Holloway was largely built between 1860 and 1880. But some important elements in its social makeup had already been established during the first half of the nineteenth century, on a haphazard foundation of scattered manorial hamlets and farms.
From Napoleonic times, Holloway’s social structure and geography were at once plebeian and bourgeois in character, as indeed they still are. Its plebeian antecedents were rooted in the Sunday morning amusements of Copenhagen House, a popular out-of-town drinking resort from 1780 till about 1820. Copenhagen Fields, in which the House stood, were a meeting place for London radicals and Jacobins, but more often the site of a free and easy popular culture, with its
Cricket-matches, foot-racing, boxing, wrestling, skittling, pigeon-shooting, games at fives and racquet, cock-fighting, and bull-baiting – the headquarters of what is generally known among the sporting fraternity as the ‘fancy’, with fustian-jackets, ‘Newgate-knockers’, and surly bull-dogs.3
It was around 1800, too, that the earliest of Holloway’s manufacturing districts – Belle Isle, in the south-west corner – was planted with tile kilns, varnish makers and horse slaughterers, well away from London sensibilities. And the first plebeian housing was run up a few years after in George Place (later George’s Road) and Eden Grove, near to where gallows had once stood at the Ring Cross.
Holloway’s bourgeois pedigree was almost as long but sited more to the north of lower-class Lower Holloway. Handsome villas stretched themselves along the Holloway Road from the 1800s, and the first middle-class speculative estates were put down 20 and 30 years later along Hornsey and Hanley Roads and Tollington Park. Middle-class building development was aided by the two-horse bus to London from the 1830s, helping conquer the rising ground so favoured by social climbers of the period; ‘The well-known salubrity of the air has long rendered the place the resort of valetudinarians from the metropolis.’4
By the 1840s, Holloway’s divided character had been consolidated with more ‘suburban gentility’5 in the north (Hornsey Road and Archway), more slums in the south (the Brand Street area, where in 1849 ‘19 houses out of 68 have produced a convict’),6 and open fields ‘as pleasant as most in the neighbourhood of London’ around and between them.7 The Irish influx to Islington spread north in this period.8 The 1850s were to see important urban developments, especially the Metropolitan Cattle Market (1855) on the site of Copenhagen House; Holloway Station on the Great Northern Railway from Kings Cross; wealthy villas in the western fields round Camden Road, lower-middle and skilled working-class terraces just north of Seven Sisters Road and in Lower Holloway; and an area of cheap and crowded tenement houses at Queen’s (later Queensland) Road, close to the Brand Street area. Holloway’s population more than doubled in the decade (see table 1).
It was also in the 1850s that much of the ground was laid for the speculative boom of the 1860s and 1870s. On surveyors’ drawing boards, on bankers’ balance sheets and in the calculating minds of a thousand petty investors, the fields of Holloway were already apportioned and dug and planted with brick. But it was a treacherous path which linked the fancy to its fulfilment; and none more so than in the strange case of Campbell Road.
Established by the local manor court in 1757, the title of the four fields later to form the Seven Sisters Road Estate passed by primogeniture and marriage settlement just five times in the following 94 years.9 The fields were held by minor aristocrats and Anglican clergy until 1851 when they became pawns in the game of speculative gain fuelled by London’s growth. Within five years they changed hands three times, and in 1856 part of the Estate was acquired by a group of five experienced gentlemen investors. These men were trustees of the St Pancras Benefit Building Society and directors of the St Pancras, Marylebone and Paddington Freehold Land Society.
Freehold Land Societies played a large part in the urban development of Holloway, as elsewhere.10 The St Pancras had been active in Holloway and other parts of London since the early 1850s, as had the Birkbeck and the National. Their purpose was to sell building plots on mortgage to society members. The society prescribed the type of dwellings to be built, including their elevations and annual rentals, and usually provided an infrastructure of roads and sewerage. Individual investors then either built on their plots, or leased them on to others who would build in their place.
The St Pancras’s Seven Sisters Road Estate comprised the southern (and eventually larger) portions of what later became Campbell Road and the west side of Fonthill Road, together with the Seven Sisters Road frontage between them. The Estate was divided into 134 building plots, and sold piecemeal to 89 members. No member had more than two plots and none of those was adjacent to one another, but some family holdings totalled four or six.
Plots in Campbell Road large enough for a single house were sold during 1857 and 1858 for about £32 on full building society mortgages.11 Yet for some reason – probably because the market was glutted and rents were low – building did not begin until 1865, and then only in the most anarchic fashion.12 By 1869, out of 84 plots in the Estate’s part of Campbell Road, just 56 had been built on. The best part of the road consisted of 24 houses built in 1867–8 by Charles Gilliatt, and offset to the north-west from the top of the Estate’s section of Campbell Road and adjoining Lennox Road. Only half the road was made up and a fraction of the pavement laid.13 Two years later, at the time of the 1871 Census, there was no change. There were to be vacant sites in Campbell Road until 1880.14
Just what went wrong is unclear. Fonthill Road was similarly affected, at least until 1869, and undoubtedly the extreme individualism of this type of development had a natural tendency to chaos. But whatever the cause, it was Campbell Road’s bad start which laid the ground for the development of Campbell Bunk. It struggled painfully into maturity and never recovered from its stunted first years.
But the condition of the road does not fully explain its later character. It might account for the difference in the roads immediately to the west – Palmerston Road and Pooles Park – which were neatly laid out and occupied during the same period. But Fonthill Road suffered the same muddy fate as Campbell Road without following its subsequent career. The reason lay in the market relations of which the Estate was part – especially in terms of its intended occupation.
Campbell Road was built for artisans and clerks (like R. Wilfer of Holloway in Our Mutual Friend (1865)) with sufficient means for its six rooms, scullery, outside WC and (in some cases) an attic for the skivvy. The street was wide enough to look comfortable; parapet walls hid the roofs from sight and iron railings guarded a small slip of ground before each front window. Fonthill Road was more showily petty-bourgeois (with balconies, parapet balustrades, blowsy stucco to the window heads, and arched doorways); it was able, at least for a time, to claim the tenants for whom it was designed, the smaller servant-keeping class of higher clerks, lower professionals and shopkeepers.
But the social structure of Holloway altered faster than bricklayers and carpenters could cover the ground. Between conception and completion the demand for houses in streets like Campbell Road changed from single-family occupation by clerks to proletarian tenants renting half a house or less. Property speculation supplied too much housing for the lower middle-class market which was already having second thoughts about Holloway and looking elsewhere for its suburban ideal. A local Wesleyan chapel complained that from the early 1870s ‘circumstances changed with dramatic suddenness. The district began to lose its suburban character and families moved further out.’15 But if the market for which the houses were built no longer existed, another was ready to take its place. This demand came especially from the workers needed to build Holloway and nearby suburbs; from railway workers, both uniformed servants and labouring navvies; and skilled workers in those London trades migrating for reasons of space from the inner city. Fonthill Road could still price such people out. Campbell Road, and streets similar to it, could not. But Campbell Road alone, through its disastrous beginnings, dropped rents low enough to let in anyone who wanted house room. In the class-rigid Victorian housing market caste was all. When one or two houses were let in lodgings, a street’s market potential withered relentlessly, and the top hats and white collars sooner or later crept quietly elsewhere.
This uneven beginning shows in the 1871 census, when out of Campbell Road’s 63 occupied houses, 26 were home to one household and the rest to two or more; 5 houses contained 18 persons each (three per room) or over. Of 158 occupied males, 23 were labourers and 54 worked in the building trades; but about 20 households kept a servant, and lower middle-class occupiers included barristers’ and solicitors’ clerks, a music teacher, law stationer, record keeper at Somerset House, and a writer at the Board of Trade.16
Through the 1870s, the pressure on middle-class tenants to move out was sustained by the perpetual bad condition of the road and by the growing supply of better housing around. ‘It was little better than an open sewer,’ remembered the local vicar; ‘People threw their slops and garbage out of the windows into the streets. . . .’17