About Shadwell

A Court in Shadwell

Some time ago I told how my maternal Grandfather was born in Shadwell in the East End of London. Shadwell was one of the poorest parts. It was made up of many nationalities - English, Chinese, Lascar, Irish, Jewish, German etc. etc. It was by the docks and life would have been full of sights and smells of  tar, spices, beer, sugar, sweat, the great unwashed ~ very tough indeed.

I decided to write some more about it. The name in Anglo Saxon was Schadewelle and means a shallow well or spring. There has been habitation there since Roman times and maybe long before. Nearby is Wapping named for Waeppa's people and maybe the well is where they went to get their water. There were actually two springs famous for their fine water. One used to issue from what is now the churchyard wall and the other was in Sun Tavern Fields.

In Tudor times there was a scattering of small cottages set back from the river with a line of wharves along the waters edge. By the time of Oliver Cromwell the place has changed completely. It had become densely populated and something of a "new town". People flocked in to work on the river and in the expanding navy. One historian said Shadwell was "one of the great nurseries of navigation and breeders of seamen in England, without which England would not be England".

By 1650 there were over seven hundred buildings. Close to the river were the town houses, small three-storey dwellings with one room on each floor. The rest of the buildings were only two storey. Most were timber-framed a few were brick. Shadwell was a place of work and a self-contained town. It even had its own water supply by 1680. The properties consisted of warehouses, sheds, rope-yards, anchorsmiths,  timber yards, breweries and blacksmiths. By 1681 there was a market building, some fifty-five shops, some of which were workshops. There were also forty-four alehouses in what was a comparatively small area and here are some of the names:-

The Queen's Head Tavern, The Brewer's Arms, The Noah's Ark, The Whalebone, The Swan With Two Necks, The Three Mariners, The Frying Pan, The Trumpeter On Horseback, The Gate, The Gilded Helmet, The Boatswain, The Five Bells, The Lighter, TheTwo Sawyers and The Anchor.

Somewhere up to 4000 people were squeezed in the area around St. Paul's Church. There were watermen, boat builders, lightermen, shipsmakers  carpenters, riggers, ropemakers, sugar makers, sackmakers, tailors  - all of them poor. My own great-grandfather was a ship's carpenter.

Several families might share the same property. Children were without shoes to their feet and were working from when they were just toddlers especially in the occupations carried out at home like sack making and tailoring. Infant mortality was extremely high. Thousands of children did not live to see their fifth birthday.

Sack making in a Shadwell home

There was a childrens' hospital at Shadwell where one of my Grandfather's sisters died at the age of eight. Outbreaks of cholera were common and the air hung thick with fumes from the sugar factories. Even adults could  often not be expected to live much longer than their middle forties, they were old before their time.

Waiting for admission to the Childrens' Hospital, Shadwell.

There were rowdy fights and often the women were as bad as the men. Alcohol was very cheap and people used it to drown their miseries. Shadwell was also noted for its opium dens and Charles Dickens visited them to get material for his books. The first charity school was founded in 1712  and, apart from the church, there were three chapels, Presbyterian, Calvinist and Wesleyan. Wesley preached in Shadwell on several occasions. There was also a strong Quaker influence in the area.

Captain Cook lived at Upper Shadwell when he was a young married man and his eldest child was baptized in the church.

In 1720 the Randolph family of Shadwell produced a baby daughter. She was christened Jane. Her father was Isham Randolph who was a seaman and a colonial agent from Virginia. When Jane was still a child the family moved permanently to America and settled in Virginia. The family had a farm there which they named "Shadwell" after their London roots. Jane grew to womanhood, married and had eight children. She was then widowed at the age of thirty-seven and she hadto struggle hard to raise her family and keep things going. She must have been a strong woman, she succeeded and one of her sons, Thomas Jefferson, became president of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this little bit of East End history.