The Victorians by A.N. Wilson

Author:A.N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446493205
Publisher: Random House

24

The Side of the Angels

ON LOW SUNDAY, 1873, a new curate arrived in Wapping, to serve at the mission church, St Peter’s, London Docks. He was Lincoln Stanhope Wainwright, the son of an old military family (his father was ADC to Lt General Sir Willoughby Cotton), educated at Marlborough and Wadham College, Oxford, and now aged twenty-six. He was to spend the remaining fifty-six years of his life in this slum parish. He never took a holiday. He hardly ever thereafter slept a night out of Wapping. He led a life which, compared with the comfortable world into which he had been born, was one of extraordinary austerity. He slept on a straw mattress in an uncarpeted room. ‘One cannot understand poverty unless one knows what it is to be poor,’ he used to say.1

His vicar, Charles Lowder, emphasized how very poor the parishioners were:

There were a large number of small tradespeople, costermongers, persons engaged about the docks, lightermen, watermen, coalwhippers, dock labourers, shipwrights, coopers &c., the poorer of whom in the winter, or when the easterly winds prevented the shipping from getting up Channel, were for weeks, sometimes months, without work, and unable to support their families; their clothes, their furniture, their bedding, all pawned, they lay on bare beds, or on the floor, only kept warm by being huddled together in one closed, unventilated room.2

Drink was an obvious narcotic to numb the hell of Wapping life. Children grew up with drunken parents, ‘with brothers and sisters already deep in sin, and abroad thieves and prostitutes a little older than themselves’.3 The pubs of the parish doubled as brothels for the sailors – Greeks, Malays, Lascars, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Austrians – who crowded the cobbled streets, and ‘there were frequent fights between foreign and English sailors about the girls with whom they were keeping company’.

No one who came to this exotic part of London could fail to be impressed by the fact that this squalid, wicked and poverty-stricken square mile yet ‘contains one of the main supplies of London’s wealth and commerce, as well as one of its most curious sights, the London Docks. The extensive basins, in which may be seen the largest ships in the world; the immense warehouses which contain the treasures of every quarter of the globe – wool, cotton, tea, coffee, tobacco, skins, ivory; the miles of vaults filled with wines and spirits; the thousands of persons employed – clerks, customs officers, artisans, labourers, lightermen, and sailors – make the Docks a world of itself, as well as a cosmopolitan rendezvous and emporium.’4

When Wainwright arrived as Lowder’s curate, he was shown into St Peter’s church and ‘it was far beyond what, ritualist as I was, I had been accustomed to’.5 The first generation of the Oxford Movement or High Church revival – Newman, Pusey, Keble – had been concerned primarily with doctrine: much of that doctrine, such as the impossibility of reducing the number of Anglican bishoprics in Ireland since Anglicanism was the one true Church, now seems esoteric to us.

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