Our intention will be to add any interesting links, books, information, and much more to this blog, so that we can further the information available on London genealogy. We hope you enjoy reading this blog.
Please do email us if you would like us to talk about anything in particular, we welcome submissions from anyone who loves London family history.
One of the most fascinating areas of London is the often overlooked area under the capital, including the Underground system itself. A book that recently helped this interest of ours was: Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets
We suspect that a particular interest for many readers will be when the author delves into the long-lost tube stations of bygone days. A lot of these stations closed when lines were changed, or when they were no longer required (like the old station, British Museum, which was closed because Holborn was seen as more convenient for passengers).
Do have a read of this book, but meanwhile, here’s a fascinating film from BBC News about St Mary’s in East London: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10612599 and, also take a look at the London’s Abandoned Tube Stations website, here.
Whatever your interest in London – it remains one of the most fascinating cities of the world…
We recently invited friends of Family Grows on Trees to write about their London genealogy. Here is the first article from one of our readers, Dianne Bartlam. Dianne has written about the intriguing area of Whitechapel and two brothers: John and Jeremiah Desmond. Whitechapel is a built-up inner city district in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London, England. It is notably best known for being the location of the infamous Jack the Ripper murders in the late 1880s. The murderer was never identified, although rumours suggest over 100 names.
Whitechapel
© and by Dianne Bartlam
This is a glimpse into the life of two brothers who were born into an Irish immigrant family in Whitechapel in the 1860’s. Their names were John and Jeremiah Desmond, John was born in 1863 and Jeremiah was born in 1867 and their parents were Timothy and Honora Desmond (nee Connor), both originated in Cork, Ireland and migrated to London.
Whitechapel, Wapping, Aldgate, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Limehouse, Bow, Bromley-by-Bow, Poplar, Shadwell and Stepney are collectively known as the East End of London. An area of London that has comparisons with the streets of London with all the problems of poverty and overcrowding as portrayed by Charles Dickens in his near to life novels.
Walking along Whitechapel High Street from Aldgate Church to the old Whitechapel Church, is like walking along the main street of any old fashioned country town anywhere in England. Once you leave the main high street and walk down one of the narrow streets springing off the main high street you would have been enveloped in the poverty and wretchedness that was Whitechapel in the later part of the nineteenth century.
There would be children on the pavements in areas of poverty such as Whitechapel, children that were not taken in by the ragged and other charity schools lived their lives in the streets. They ate and played on the streets in all weathers and sometimes they slept on the streets. Their mothers and fathers in their meagre homes or rooms nearby.
During the Victorian era the population of some of the major English cities including the East End of London was swelled by poor immigrants from Ireland in the mid 1850’s and Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1880’s. Most of these poor immigrants were crammed into squalid tenements with 7-8 occupants per room and were employed in factory work with very low incomes.
Whitechapel became increasingly overcrowded. Work and housing conditions dipped and a significant economic underclass developed leading to a steady rise in social tensions. Racism, crime, social disturbance and deprivation fed public perceptions that Whitechapel was a notorious den of immorality. Robbery, violence and alcohol dependency were common.
Overpopulation combined with very poor health conditions was exacerbated by poor drainage and inadequate sanitation, created an environment in which diseases like typhoid fever and cholera, also venereal diseases spread by prostitution claimed many lives and starvation and death were daily realities.
Many children and teenagers were destitute and living hand to mouth on the streets. If they came before the courts for petty crime, begging, being in bad company or were sentenced to transportation by the courts they were at risk of becoming inmates at Industrial schools.
Industrial Schools were homes for boys who were destitute and in need of care and protection. One such Industrial School was the St Nicholas’ Industrial School which was certified for 250 boys and run by the Sisters of Mercy and lay staff in the former home of Elizabeth Fry. They would train the boys and teach them a trade such as shoe making. Many of the inmates of Industrial Schools were transported to Canada, Australia and other colonies becoming British Home Children.
Jeremiah Desmond was an inmate at this Industrial School on the 1881 census, aged 14. His parents, Timothy and Honora were not to be seen on this census or any following census. They were possibly deceased or homeless leaving the two brothers destitute. John Desmond, elder brother of Jeremiah was on the census in a boy’s voluntary at 28 Commercial Street, Whitechapel. The refuge was around from about 1855 and in 1867 it was incorporated as an industrial school. On the 12th Oct 1883 it was transferred to Leytonstone.
Although it is not unknown whether John and Jeremiah had any formal education apart from attending industrial school, there was some education available in Whitechapel in the time when John and Jeremiah were growing up.
There was the George Yard Ragged School, Whitechapel, conducted by the Rev. Mr. Thornton, and personally superintended by Mr. Holland, who turned part of an old distillery into one of the most useful and active institutions of this kind in London.
They have four hundred children of all ages and of both sexes who they encourage to consider the school as their home. They provide a meal of rice or bread or soup. They took eight poor children into the house and endeavoured to train them into honest working boys.
The managers of the school were anxious make some kind of rough sleeping-loft for the children to prevent them from having to go back out into the black courts and alleys, knowing the conditions that often awaited them. The local houses presented every aspect of filth and wretchedness known to man: the broken windows are plastered with paper that rises and falls when the doors of the rooms are opened: the ashes lie in front of the houses; the drainage is thrown out of the windows to swell the heap and the public toilet against the pump in a corner of the court.
There may be as many families as there are rooms, cellars, and cupboards in a single house; forty people, perhaps, huddled together in a small dwelling; and if there is not a mixture of different families in one room it is due to the ceaseless vigilance of the sanitary officer, in carrying out the Lodging-Houses Act.
The rents of the wretched apartments often included the hire of furniture consisting of an aged round table, a couple of bare wooden chairs, a fender and poker, a turn-up bedstead, with a bag of straw for a bed and a very dirty scanty coverlet.
The fate of Timothy and Honora Desmond is unknown as they have not been traced since the 1871 census or on death data. They could be deceased but during the latter part of the nineteenth century there was extensive homelessness in Whitechapel and unless the homeless were in a workhouse or similar organization on census night they would be missing from the census data. It is probably due to their deaths or homelessness that Jeremiah and John Desmond were destitute.
Jeremiah Desmond has not been traced since the 1881 census when he was at the St Nicholas Industrial School, aged 14 and his fate is currently unknown.
John Desmond married Annie Elizabeth Mundy on the 1st Sep 1889 at St Mary and St Michael’s Church, St George in the East, Mile End, close to Whitechapel. They settled in Whitechapel and lived in Rutland Street, near the Royal London Hospital for a number of years before moving their family away from Whitechapel to the relative calm of Mile End.
Employment in the area consisted mainly of the dock labour and men not working in the docks were probably thieves, costermongers, stall-keepers, professional beggars, rag-dealers, brokers and small tradesmen. Children after an education on the streets or the ragged schools, may be sent to match or brush factories where cheap and juvenile labour is in high demand.
Women may find it necessary to support the poor household but there is little employment available apart from ill-paid needlework or domestic servitude in low gin-shops or lower coffee-houses.
The endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution.
There was a temporary refuge for females in Boar’s Head Yard, Petticoat Lane in May of 1860. The young women using the refuge were mainly active prostitutes with some in danger of becoming prostitutes and nearly all were from the local area. The refuge had some success in returning the young women to useful lives which did not revolve around prostitution.
The refuge was in some way self-supporting as the inmates earned money by washing, mangling, and needlework. Thereby the cost of maintaining the young women was kept down to about four shillings a week.
In October 1888 the Metropolitan Police estimated that there were 1,200 prostitutes “of very low class” resident in Whitechapel and about 62 brothels. Reference is specifically made to them in Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, especially to dwellings called Blackwall Buildings belonging to Blackwall Railway.
Prostitutes were amongst the eleven Whitechapel Murder victims (1888–91), five of which have been said to have definitely been committed by the legendary serial killer known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. The murders caused widespread fear in the Whitechapel district and throughout the country. It brought particular attention of social reformers to the squalor and vice of the area. The murders remain unsolved
Additional Sources:
One of our friends has written some good suggestions on London books to read. We’ll try and make this a regular feature. Thank you to Joseph Griffiths.
“Here are some more recommendations from me, but this time with a theme of London.
St Pancras Station (Wonders of the World)
London’s Dead
Necropolis: London and Its Dead
See Joseph’s blog “Thoughts from a Victorian Gentleman”, here.
As there was such a high number of plague victims buried in the church and its yard, it is likely that this caused the damp problems in 1711. The parishioners petitioned the Church Commissioners for a grant to rebuild. Initially refused because it was not a new foundation, they were eventually allocated £8,000 and a new church was built in 1730-34, designed by the architect Henry Flitcroft in the Palladian style.
As London grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, so did the population of the parish – over 30,000 by the 1831 census. The parish included within its boundaries two neighbourhoods notorious for poverty and squalour: the Rookery between the church and Great Russell Street, and Seven Dials. These neighbourhoods became a centre for prostitution and crime and the name St Giles became likewise associated with the underworld.
St Giles was also the last church on the route between Newgate Prison and the gallows at Tyburn, and the churchwardens paid for the condemned to have a drink (popularly named “St Giles’ Bowl”) at the next door pub, the Angel, before they went to be hanged, a custom that had started in the early 15th century.
The area is described in Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz.
The architects Sir Arthur Blomfield and William Butterfield made some alterations in 1875 and 1896.
St Giles escaped severe bombing in the Second World War, losing most of the Victorian glass. The church underwent a major restoration in 1952–53.
Thanks to Wikipedia.
St Giles in the Fields, Holborn, is a church in the London Borough of Camden (formerly St Pancras) in the West End. It is close to the Centre Point office tower and the Tottenham Court Road tube station.
The first recorded church on this site was a chapel of the parish of Holborn attached to a monastery and leper hospital founded by Matilda of Scotland, the wife of Henry I, in 1101. At that time, it stood well outside the boundaries of the city of London, though on the main road to Tyburn and Oxford. This chapel probably came to function as the church of the small village that grew up to provide services to the hospital.
The hospital was supported by the Crown and administered by the City for its first two hundred years. Beginning in 1299, on the order of Edward I, it was administered by the Order of Saint Lazarus, one of the chivalric orders to survive the era of the Crusades. The fourteenth century was a turbulent one for the hospital, with frequent accusations from the City authorities that the members of the Order of Saint Lazarus, known as Lazar brothers, put the affairs of the monastery ahead of caring for the lepers.
During the fourteenth century, the king, on several occasions, interfered by appointing a new head of the hospital.
In 1391, Richard II sold the hospital, chapel, and lands to the Cistercian abbey of St. Mary de Graces, just by the Tower of London. This was an action opposed by both the Lazars, who, true to their origins as a military order, used force to express their displeasure with Richard II, and by the authorities of the City of London, who withheld rent money in protest. The property at the time included 8 acres (32,000 m2) of farmland; a survey-enumerated eight horses, twelve oxen, two cows, 156 pigs, sixty geese, and 186 domestic fowl. The grant was revoked in 1402 and the property returned to the Lazars Lepers were cared-for at this location until the mid sixteenth century, when the disease abated, and the monastery, instead, began to care for indigents.
During the reign of Henry V, in 1414, the village was the headquarters of Sir John Oldcastle’s abortive Lollard rebellion and the site of Oldcastle’s execution in 1417.The monastery was dissolved in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII, with the lands (excluding the church) eventually being granted to Lord Lisle in 1548. However, the chapel survived as a local parish church. The first Rector of St Giles was appointed in 1547, and the phrase, ‘in the fields’, was added to the church’s name. An illustration from this time shows the church with a round tower and dome. A spire replaced this structure in 1617.
The early church fell into disrepair and a Gothic brick structure was built between 1623 and 1630, mostly paid for by Alice Dudley, wife of Robert Dudley. The new building was consecrated by William Laud, Bishop of London. An illuminated manuscript listing the subscribers to the rebuilding, is still kept in the church.
The first victims of the 1665 Great Plague were buried in St. Giles’s churchyard and by the end of the plague year there were 3,216 listed plague deaths in this church’s parish, which had fewer than 2,000 households. Other notable burials of the period include twelve Roman Catholic martyrs (killed on the testimony of Titus Oates), who were later beatified, and are buried near the church’s north wall.
It’s list time!
The so-called Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London were the first commercial cemeteries constructed around the outskirts of the great city. They are all of special historical value and are also on the English Heritage lists.
Marriott announced September 21 that its landmark hotel at St Pancras station in London will open in May 2011, after two years of delays.
The St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, housed in one of London’s most stunning Victorian Gothic buildings, has taken more than ten years to reconstruct, with its doors remaining firmly closed as the renovated St Pancras opened its doors to Eurostar traffic in 2007.
It will finally reopen exactly 138 years after the original hotel on the site, the Midland Grand Hotel, opened its doors in 1873, with Marriott saying that the magnificent interior has been restored to its former glory.
Exciting news indeed! Read more of this article here….
As the station grew it became increasingly ramshackle. The original 1848 station became known as the ‘Central Station’ as other platforms were added. The new platform sets were known by nicknames- the two platforms added for suburban services in 1878 were the ‘Cyprus Station’, whilst the six built in 1885 for use by trains on the Windsor line became the ‘Kartoum Station’. Each of these stations-within-a-station had its own booking office, Taxi stand and public entrances from the street, as well as often poorly marked and confusing access to the rest of the station. By 1899 Waterloo had 16 platform roads but only 10 platform numbers due to way platforms in different sections of the station or on different levels sometimes duplicated the number of a platform elsewhere.
A little-used railway line even crossed the main concourse on the level and passed through an archway in the station building to connect to the South Eastern Railway’s smaller station, now Waterloo East, whose tracks lie perpendicular to those of Waterloo. Passengers were, not surprisingly, confused by the layout and by the two adjacent stations called ‘Waterloo’. By 1897 there were also three separate (and separately-owned) Underground stations named ‘Waterloo’ under or close by the station, as well as the adjacent Necropolis Company station.
This complexity and confusion became the butt of jokes by writers and music hall comics for many years in the late 19th century. In Jerome K. Jerome’s book Three Men in a Boat no one at Waterloo knows the wanted train’s platform, departure time or destination.
In 1899 the L&SWR decided that only totally rebuilding would improve the situation. The relevant legal powers were granted that year and extensive groundwork and slum clearance were carried out until 1904, which was when construction on the terminus proper began. The new station was opened in stages, the first 5 new platforms opening in 1910. Construction continued sporadically throughout the First World War but the new station finally opened in 1922 with 21 platforms and a concourse nearly 800 feet (250 m) long. The architecture of the new station included a large stained glass window depicting the L&SWR’s company crest over the main road entrance, surrounded by a frieze listing the counties served by the railway (the latter survives today). These features were retained in the design despite the fact that by the time the station opened the 1921 Railway Act had been passed which spelt the end of the L&SWR as an independent concern.[8] The main pedestrian entrance, the Victory Arch (known as Exit 5) is a memorial to company staff who were killed during the two world wars. Damage to the station in World War II required considerable repair but entailed no significant changes to the layout.
A past curiosity of Waterloo was that a spur led to the adjoining dedicated station of the London Necropolis Company from which funeral trains, at one time daily, ran to Brookwood Cemetery bearing coffins at 2/6 each. This station was destroyed during World War II.
Ownership of Waterloo underwent a succession, broadly typical of many British stations. Under the 1923 Grouping it passed to the Southern Railway (SR), then in the 1948 nationalisation to British Railways and following the privatisation of British Rail ownership and management passed to Railtrack in April 1994 and finally in 2002 to Network Rail.
Platforms 20 and 21 were lost to the Waterloo International railway station site, which from 1994 until 13 November 2007 was the London terminus of Eurostar international trains. Construction necessitated the removal of decorative masonry forming two arches from that side of the station, bearing the legend “Southern Railway”. This was re-erected at the private Fawley Hill Museum of Sir William McAlpine, whose company built Waterloo International. Waterloo International closed when the Eurostar service transferred to the new St Pancras railway station with the opening of the second phase of “HS1″, High Speed route 1, also known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link or CTRL. Ownership of the former Waterloo International terminal then passed to BRB (Residuary) Ltd.
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Sir John Betjeman, CBE (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was an English poet, writer and broadcaster who described himself in Who’s Who as a “poet and hack”. He was a founding member of the Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. Starting his career as a journalist, he ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate to date and a much-loved figure on British television.
Betjeman had a special fondness for Victorian architecture and was a founding member of Victorian Society. He lead the campaign to save Holy Trinity, Sloane Street in London when it was threatened with demolition in the early 1970s. He fought a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to save the Propylaeum, known commonly as the Euston Arch, London.
He is considered instrumental in helping to save the famous façade of St. Pancras railway station, London and was commemorated when it reopened as an international and domestic terminus in November 2007. He was said to have called the plan to demolish St. Pancras a “criminal folly.”
About the station itself he wrote: “What [the Londoner] sees in his mind’s eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow’s train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street.”
The newly reopened St. Pancras now features a statue of Betjeman in the station at platform level.
Betjeman was also a great supporter of Metro-land and had a whole TV series about it (interlaced with his poetry) The Metro-land is the suburban areas that were built to the north west of London in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex in the early part of the 20th century, and were served by the Metropolitan Railway, an independent company until absorbed by the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) in 1933.