Something markedly different for today’s Today in London History podcast. We take a close look at The Times for June 25, 1817. Take a look at the London it reveals.
London calling.
London Walks connecting.
London Walks here with your daily London fix.
Story time. History time.
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What’d you do this morning?
Well, I read the papers.
Ah, so the Age of Guttenberg isn’t over.
Well, before you jump to conclusions maybe you better ask what papers I read.
All right, what did you read?
Glad you asked. The Times for today, June 25th, 1817.
Why’d you do that? Were there any big stories?
I did it because I felt like it. And, no, as far as I could see there weren’t any big stories. But big stories aren’t the whole story. I just had a hankering to see what life was like in London 205 years ago today.
Ok, what was it like?
Pull up a chair. Get comfortable.
First of all, the paper itself, The Times. It was just four pages long. It was all words. There were no images.
The first page was wall-to-wall advertisements. Ditto the fourth page. As for the two inside page, the first half of the second page was also all ads. The rest of the second page was given over to Parliamentary Intelligence. (I know, sounds like a contradiction in terms, but that’s how they headlined it.) The only page that was ad-free was the third page. So a total of about almost 250 ads. All of them in the shape of what used to be called classified ads.
Now I’ll get to the “news” items – such as they were – in just a minute.
But first those ads, they bear looking at. They tell us a great deal about the London of June 25th, 1817. Classifying them, so speak, they fall into five rough categories. A lot of them were property ads. Houses and businesses that were for sale. Out of many, this one jumped out at me. Because it’s in my neck of the woods. I live in West Hampstead. Our next-door neighbour to the west is an area called Kilburn. Today it’s thought of being pretty central as London goes, I mean, after all, it’s just north of Paddington and Maida Vale. Here’s the ad, see if you see what caught my eye.
Kilburn – To be Disposed of, the lease of a modern house, situate in the most pleasant part of Kilburn; consisting of two sitting rooms, four bedrooms, kitchen and back kitchen, coal and wine cellar, stable and chaise house, with hay loft and man’s room over; also a cow house, dairy, pigstie and outhouses, with a good garden of about half an acre, well-stocked and completely enclosed. A good field of about four acres may be had with it.” Well, it’s that it’s so rural, isn’t it. It’s not London, it’s a farm. And that was just two hundred years ago. But given that the house I live in in West Hampstead was built in the 1880s, well, I suppose a cow-house and a dairy and a pig-stie and a field of four acres in Kilburn 70 years before my house was built maybe shouldn’t be such a shocker.
What else? Well, there were ads for furniture and libraries and books of sermons and wine and Grecian Water. Magic stuff, Grecian water. If the ad is to believed. Here’s what it says: “Hair, Eyebrows and whiskers changed from red or gray to brown or black by the Grecian water, which produces the desired effect by one application; it neither stains the skin or linen, and is entirely free from that purple shade that renders the user the subject of ridicule.”
And then lots of ads for positions. A footman wanted here. There “a young lady of respectability who wishes to sink her time in a school, in or near London; she will undertake to give instructions in English; and the first rudiments of French; also to superintend the young Ladies’ wardrobe and make herself generally useful.”
And then there were the institutional ads. The St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, for example. Or one from Sydenham House Academy addressed To Parents and Guardians. It reads: “It has been for a long time, a general complaint among parents and guardians, that young men, who had been taught French at school for many years, were, however, when their situation in life required it, not only unable to converse in that language, but could not even understand it when spoken to. In order to remedy this defect, the principal of this seminary, a native of a France, and a graduate in one of the French universities, during an establishment of more than 12 years, in the course of which he has fitted many young men for public offices, and almost every respectable situation, informs parents whose sons are intended for commercial pursuits that, by unremitting care and attention, he has been able to make his pupils speak French.”
My favourite though, a Parish Contract ad published by St Martin in the Fields. It reads: “The churchwardens and Overseers of the Poor of the above parish hereby give notice, that they will receive proposals from such persons who may be desirous of contracting to supply their workhouse with the following articles for 12 months: viz, Good Ox-beef, to consist of clods, stickings and mouse buttocks.” Yes, you heard right. And don’t ask. I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know.
And the other big advertising categories: entertainments (the theatre) and horses.
“To be sold, a handsome bay mare, with capital actions; five years old, free from vice, and warranted sound; price 30 guineas.” How do you go wrong with a horse that’s “free from vice?”
But seriously, all those ads for horses, it was suddenly borne in upon me that 205 years ago London was horse-powered. The railway was still a few years in the future. As was, incidentally, the horse-drawn omnibus. The underground was nearly half a century in the future.
So – with one significant exception, which I’ll get to in a minute – that left horse-drawn carriages. Or walking. Or riding. Horse-drawn carriages had been around since 1625.
Brand new on the streets of London, were hackney cabriolets. And how do you not fall in love with the way the history is compressed into the name. Hackney from the French word “haquenee” for “ambling horse.” And cabriolet from the way the carriages were sprung. They bounced along. Again, the French supplied the word, cabriole. It means goat’s leap. Bears repeating: the way they were sprung – they bounced along – mais oui, monsieur, puts you in mind of a goat’s leap. Is this one going to stick with you? I think it will. From here on out you hail a cab you’re going to think of a goat bounding along.
And then there were the out-of-town coaches. To Southampton and Liverpool and Hastings and Brighton. And Paris. They came under the delightful heading Paris Diligences and Dover Coaches.
I said there was one exception. In the June 25th, 1817 edition of The Times there’s an ad for the Majestic Margate Steam Yacht. How do you resist this? “The proprietors of this favourite vessel for the better accommodation of the visitors to Margate, and desirous of doing away every idea of contending with another vessel, beg leave to inform the public that in future the Majestic will leave the moorings off the Tower every Tuesday and Friday for Margate; and return from thence every Sunday and Wednesday at 8 each morning. The Majestic is equal in speed to any steam vessel between London and Margate; and requires only inspection to convince the Public that she is the safest sea-boat propelled by steam, and far superior in accommodation to any other vessel.”
Again, this was brand new. Passenger steamboats had been introduced just two years previously. And it took off. By the mid-1850s steamboat services carried several million passengers a year and every day around 15,000 people travelled to work by steamboat. Today, apart from tourist cruises and the Uber boat – which is for commuters but just in central London – that’s a lost London, London of yesteryear. People going to Margate today go by train or they drive. But – if the ad’s anything to go by – in 1817, a coach service, if it existed, from London to Margate was a poor second choice for that journey.
Now those are the ads. As for the “news” – though it’s a stretch to call it “news”, by our standards anyway, well, there was Parliamentary News and Law Reports and City business and Shipping News and a Theatre review and news – just in – from Windsor, Paris and Guttenberg. And a High Water notice at London Bridge. But it was mostly court and society carryings-on. How the Duke of Clarence was faring. He wasn’t well.
The Prince Regent dining with the Duke of Monrose at his house at Grosvenor Square. Births, marriages and deaths of what today we’d call the “one per cent.”
And how about this. This is an announcement that’s come from a body called the Board of Green Cloth. “In the name and on behalf of His Majesty, by his Royal Highness the Prince Regent’s command, notice is herby given, that all carriages proceeding to her Majesty’s Drawing Room at the Queen’s Palace, on Thursday, the 26th of June, are to fall into the line at the top of St James’s Street; go along Cleveland row, and through the stable yard into the Park, and set down with their horses’ heads towards Buckingham Gate; after setting down, they are to wait in the Birdcage walk; and on the Parade opposite the Horse Guards; in taking up they are to go along the road of the Mall, or the walk adjoining, and go out at Buckingham Gate or the Horse Guards. No hackney coaches will be permitted to come into the Park but must set down at the outside of Buckingham Gate. The gate at the top of Constitution Hill will be open only for carriages belonging to persons having the entre, and servants attending the Royal Family; which are to set down at the great door of the Palace in the Courtyard and to wait at the bottom of the Constitution Hill.”
Reading something like that you suddenly understand why the Prince Regent could snap his fingers and say, get the money, build the Brighton Pavilion, that’s an order.
Turns out, though, there was a news item that revealed a real fissure in that society.
Habeus corpus had been suspended. It seems that unrest was afoot. Especially up north. The better sort – the officials, etc. – in the Yorkshire Town of Dewsbury placed an ad in that issue of The Times. Dewsbury was a centre of Luddite opposition to mechanisation in which workers retaliated against the mill owners who installed textile machinery and smashed the machines which threatened their way of life. Just a few years in the future, it would become a centre of Chartist agitation, that huge working close movement for political reform in Britain that lasted for 20 hears and was fiercely opposed by the government.
Here’s the Dewsbury ad: this was a canary in the mineshaft. It made it clear that serious trouble was brewing, was coming.
“We, the clergy, ministers, churchwardens, constable, other parochial officers and principal inhabitants of the Township of Dewsbury, do hereby declare, that, to the best of our knowledge and belief, there does not exist, nor ever has existed, any Society of People in this our Township, who are or ever have been in the habit of meeting or assembling together for any political purpose whatever, save such as the Constitution and Laws of the Country warrant; nor have we any grounds to believe or suspect that there exists any conspiracy of any kind whatsoever in this populous Township inimical to, or subversive of, its peace and good order and the general tranquility of the country at large; and moreover, that there have not been found in this Township any individuals who have suffered themselves to be seduced to attend the meetings which have been promoted by those political missionaries or spies who have been recently detected, and who, with intentions the most criminal and diabolical, have endeavoured to inflame the minds of the lower classes to acts of treason and open rebellion.”
My goodness.
Anyway, that’s our report from The Times of June 25th, 1817. The extraordinary thing is, apart from that Dewsbury notice, which must have looked to them like a fissure cracking open the foundations their world rested on, what’s depicted here is a world of the one per cent. Or maybe five per cent. The London bent double underneath of the weight of the existence of the top five per cent – and doing all the work that made their lives what they were – that London’s not visible at all in that paper. The news from Dewsbury excepted. Together with that extremely sobering business of the suspension of habeus corpus. It would have been – but maybe every age is – an anxious, steady-as-she-goes time. Maybe even more so that morning. Because a lot of the people reading The Times that morning – for them the French Revolution would have been a living memory. The underclass rising up and turning on their betters. Overthrowing them. The world turned upside down.
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Okay, let’s goat leap out of the London of June 25th, 1817 and come down in the London of June 25th, 2022. Today’s recommendation. These ten days – it started on June 23rd – are Kensington and Chelsea Art Week. In the words of Vestalia Chilton, the Director of the Art Week, “we celebrate our return with yet another fantastic programme of events hosted by venues and artists in our unique area of London.” And as I – the London Walks capo say – you want to find out more about the seriously impressive KCAW Art Trail and its projects – hie on over to www.kcaw.co.uk. But while you’re at it, not forgetting our Chelsea Walk or our Kensington Walk or our Notting Hill and Portobello Market walk. All of them a good fit with the K & C Art week.
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You’ve been listening to the Today in London History podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company. London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just the right size walking tour company. And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything. It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you can’t get world-class guides – let alone accomplished, distinguished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for. And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a blockbuster question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world? You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do what you have to do to attract and keep elite, all-star guides. Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing. It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason we’ve got a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality – it’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished professionals:
barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, archaeologists, historians, criminal defence lawyers, Royal Shakespeare Company actors, Guide of the Year Award winners… well, you get the idea. As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks. Good Londoning one and all. See ya tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to the Today in London History podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company. London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just the right size walking tour company. And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything. It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you can’t get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for. And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a blockbuster question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world? You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do what you have to do to attract and keep elite, all-star guides. Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing. It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason we’ve got a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality – it’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished professionals:
barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, archaeologists, historians, criminal defence lawyers, Royal Shakespeare Company actors, Guide of the Year Award winners… well, you get the idea. As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks. Good luck and good Londoning. See ya tomorrow.
You’ve been listening to the Today in London History podcast. Emanating from www.walks.com – home of London Walks, London’s signature walking tour company. London’s local, time-honoured, fiercely independent, family-owned, just the right size walking tour company. And as long as we’re at it, London’s multi-award-winning walking tour company. Indeed, London’s only award-winning walking tour company.
And here’s the secret: London Walks is essentially run as a guides’ cooperative.
That’s the key to everything. It’s the reason we’re able to attract and keep the best guides in London. You can get schlubbers to do this for £20 a walk. But you can’t get world-class guides – let alone accomplished professionals.
It’s not rocket science: you get what you pay for. And just as surely, you also get what you don’t pay for.
Back in 1968 when we got started we quickly came to a fork in the road. We had to answer a blockbuster question: Do we want to make the most money? Or do we want to be the best walking tour company in the world? You want to make the most money you go the schlubbers route. You want to be the best walking tour company in the world you do what you have to do to attract and keep elite, all-star guides. Bears repeating: the way we’re structured – a guides’ cooperative – is the key to the whole thing. It’s the reason for all those awards, it’s the reason we’ve got a lively, loyal, discerning following – quality attracts quality – it’s the reason we’re able – uniquely – to front our walks with accomplished professionals:
barristers, doctors, geologists, museum curators, archaeologists, historians, criminal defence lawyers, Royal Shakespeare Company actors, Guide of the Year Award winners… well, you get the idea. As that travel writer famously put it, “if this were a golf tournament, every name on the Leader Board would be a London Walks guide.”
And as we put it: London Walks Guides make the new familiar and the familiar new.
And on that agreeable note…come then, let us go forward together on some great London Walks. Good luck and good Londoning. See ya tomorrow.