Untold lives blog

Today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Snow, the pioneer anaesthetist and epidemiologist who demonstrated that cholera was spread by infected water rather than being airborne. To mark this, we are going to post a series of stories relating to cholera. We start with a cholera outbreak in Soho and the effect on the bookbinding community there.

Image taken from Punch 25 September 1852.  Images Online.

Bookbinders in Victorian London often worked in particular neighbourhoods.  One such was present day Soho.  Poland Street, Broad (now Broadwick) Street and Noel Street contained at least twenty three workshops. Binders and their families and apprentices lived above the business, and any spare rooms were rented out to lodgers. Other employees worked on the premises for six days a week. Crowding was the norm, conditions were insanitary, and water came from communal outdoor pumps.  Disease was rife.  September 1854 saw a virulent outbreak of cholera. 127 people living in or around Broad Street died in three days.  The Bookbinders’ Trade Circular noted that Wickwar & Co of Poland Street lost four people to the disease and Wright of Noel Street, six.

Local physician and early epidemiologist, John Snow, investigated the cause of the cholera by gathering reports of the circumstances of the fatalities:

[William Wickwar] was sent for from Brighton to see his brother [John Wickwar] at 6 Poland Street, who was attacked with cholera and died in twelve hours, on 1st September. The gentleman arrived after his brother's death, and did not see the body. He only stayed about twenty minutes in the house, where he took a hasty and scanty luncheon of rumpsteak, taking with it a small tumbler of brandy and water, the water being from Broad street pump. He went to Pentonville, and was attacked with cholera on the evening of the following day, 2nd September, and died the next evening.

Analysis of these incidents led Snow to an important discovery; cholera was not air borne but transmitted by water, and the epicentre of this outbreak was an infected supply in Broad Street. The pump there was eventually shut down and measures were taken, albeit slowly, to eliminate the conditions in which the disease could thrive.

Jaffray Collection 156       

Despite the loss of these experienced craftsmen and women, items in the British Library’s John Jaffray Collection indicate that the Wickwar and Wright businesses survived, as did the wider bookbinding trade in Soho, ultimately thanks to the enquiring mind and perseverance of their neighbour, John Snow.

Philippa Marks
Curator, Bookbindings; Printed Historical Sources  

Further reading;
Maurice Packer, The bookbinders of Victorian London, London, 1991
The Bookbinders’ Trade Circular, London, issue for September 1854
John Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera second edition, London, 1855

Our readers who liked the blog about the Persian silks might be interested to know of the volumes of beautiful Indian textile samples prepared under the direction of John Forbes Watson who was Director of the India Museum in London from 1858 to 1880. His compilation of textile samples and his works relating to a wide range of Indian products were part of his efforts to encourage commercial exchange between Britain and India.

These images are from the expanded set of textile samples compiled between 1872 and 1880. Typically they included a strip of fabric to indicate the overall design, and a small sample at the bottom of the page which could be touched to feel the texture of the fabric - not something we would wish to do now because of the risk of wear and tear.

The volumes relating to kincobs (gold and silver-embroidered cloths) and choli cloths (for women’s bodices) tend to be the most colourful, but I also like the quiet charm of some of the muslins, so reminiscent of Jane Austen novels.

Penny Brook
Lead Curator, India Office Records

Further reading
Collection of specimens and illustrations of the textile manufactures of India. Second series / prepared under the direction of J. Forbes Watson (London : India Museum, 1872-1880)
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

See Explore the British Library for catalogue records of printed sources

See Search our Catalogues Archives and Manuscripts for details of the India Office Records. A search on Forbes Watson reveals his interests in public health, economic plants and their cultivation, the Indian Department of the International Exhibition of 1862 and the reorganisation of the India Museum and Library in London.

This article about late seventeenth century silks adds another dimension to the British Library's Spring Festival celebrating fashion, design and film.

The English East India Company had a profound influence on fashion, soft furnishings and British life in general through its sales of textiles and other commodities at its headquarters in London. Its first cargoes of cloth from India came to England in the early seventeenth century and quickly proved a hit with customers. The fabulous range of fabrics from Gujarat, Coromandel, and later Bengal included fine muslins, silks and cottons, printed and painted chintz, plain cloths, stripes, ginghams and embroidered materials. The Indian producers excelled at dyeing cloth and creating beautiful designs and combinations of colours. 

Entry for 3 August 1697, Persia and Persian Gulf Factory Records, 1602-1712 IOR/G/29/1

India was not the only source of fine fabrics. In 1697, these silk samples were sent from the Company's factory, or base, in the Persian Gulf so that the Company would know what was available and could consider what would be most suitable for its customers. The Company could then send its overseas agents detailed instructions about its requirements. I find documents such as this intriguing because they show the continuity in people’s everyday preoccupations. Many of these descriptions of colour, such as ‘pistachio’ or ‘light sky’ would not look out of place in a modern mail order or online catalogue. We would however be surprised to see one described as ‘water rat’. This appears at the top right hand corner of the document, and presupposes a familiarity with rats or the now-threatened water vole. Has anyone else come across unusual or amusing descriptions of colour that give insights into ordinary life? 

From Thomas Pennant The British Zoology (London, 1766)
© British Library Board Images Online

As well as holding the archives of the East India Company, an extraordinary commercial venture of the past, the British Library supports modern entrepreneurs through its Business and IP Centre.

Penny Brook
Lead Curator, India Office Records

Further reading
Anthony Farrington Trading Places, The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 (The British Library, 2002)
Persia and Persian Gulf Factory Records IOR/G/29/1 f.233

See Explore the British Library for catalogues of printed materials
See Search our Catalogues Archives and Manuscripts for archival materials

The booming economy of India has brought to our attention one of the oldest companies in the world which is still in business. Forbes & Company Ltd was established by a Scot in Bombay in 1767.  It was taken over in the recent years by the Tata Group and is now part of the Shapoorji Pallonji Group.

Forbes & Company's office, Bombay. 1810.BL/WD 315 no.10. Images Online      

In 1764, John Forbes (1743-1821), descendant of an ancient family of Lord Forbes of Pitsligo, set sail on board the ship Asia as a purser on the East India Company’s service.  After three years in India as a ‘free mariner’ and later as ‘free merchant’, independent of the East India Company, he started his own business by trading Indian cotton.  Forbes’ company quickly widened its interests into ship brokerage, ship building and eventually into banking. Within a few years, his company was appointed banker to the Government of Bombay.

John Forbes never married.  His business passed to his nephew Charles Forbes, who was sent to India aged 16 to learn the trade and became head of their Indian business in 1821.  Charles was made a Baronet in 1823.

Letter from James Forbes to his sister describing his journey from Port Victoria to Bombay, 1771. (IOPP/Mss Eur F380/2)

Searching the archives of the Forbes family in the India Office Private Papers, several interesting items emerged.  Among their family papers, IOPP/Mss Eur F380/1 is a volume of family history.  IOPP/Mss Eur F380/2 is a volume of fine manuscript copies of letters adorned with exquisite watercolours, in which James Forbes, a cousin of John Forbes, described his six voyages made between 1765-1773 to the East Indies, with remarks on the people, animals and vegetable products of Asia, Africa and America.

A view of Anjengo (IOPP/Mss Eur F380/2)    

Apart from family papers, there are several volumes of other papers relating to their business affairs and social life, including a group of commissioned miniatures depicting the dwelling house of Charles Forbes, the office of Forbes & Company, and their social life in Bombay in the 1810s.

Xiao Wei Bond
Curator, India Office Private Papers  

It’s safe to say that not many people are familiar with the poems of William Nathan Stedman.  Like William McGonagall, however, he does have a certain notoriety among connoisseurs of really bad verse.  His best-known lines appear in one of his sonnets – ‘And when upon your dainty breast I lay / My wearied head, more soft than eiderdown’ – but if I had to pick one specimen of his poetic oeuvre, it would be ‘Bells’, a particular favourite of Stedman’s which, he claimed, had been ‘recited by myself many times, before large and critical audiences’:

The Bell!  Ah, yes, the bell.
What fate may it foretell?
Birth, death, marriage, dinner;
News – for saint or sinner:
The youth in office, lanky grown,
Is rung up on the telephone.
The young man on commercial trip
Knows that it signals through the ship.
From start to finish life is largely hung with bells,
And in them sounds quick summonses and funeral knells.

Portrait of William Nathan Stedman, from What Might Have Been: Ballads and Poems for Reading and Reciting (1912), 11601.g.31 (5)    

Like other unsuccessful poets, Stedman blamed his failure on the critics, ‘a clique of unmitigated scoundrels, fools, would-be-somebodies, white-livered parsons, hatchet-faced scribblers, grub-street lepers, bottle-nosed editors, pawnshop reviewers, syphilis-veined critics and bull-browed bastards’.  However, his special venom was reserved for the former Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, who he believed to be both Jack the Ripper and the Great Beast (666) foretold in the Book of Revelation.

Gladstone proved to be the Great Beast, from Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics (1911), 11601.g.31 (4) 

It was this that drew Stedman’s writings to the attention of Herbert Gladstone, son of the Great Beast and Home Secretary under Asquith.  Alarmed by the violent language of Stedman’s Antichrist and the Man of Sin (1909), Gladstone wrote to Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, requesting a confidential investigation.  The subsequent police report, which survives today among the Gladstone Papers in the British Library, revealed a fascinating story.  Stedman, it turned out, had been involved in one of the most notorious literary swindles of the 1890s, as secretary to a series of fraudulent joint-stock companies including the City of London Publishing Company (a vanity press), the Authors Alliance (a bogus literary agency), and the International Society of Literature, Science and Art, which charged its members the sum of eight guineas for the privilege of putting the letters FSL after their name and wearing a special hood and gown on formal occasions.  For his part in these schemes, Stedman had been convicted of fraud at the Old Bailey in September 1892 and sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour.

Police report on William Nathan Stedman: Gladstone Papers,Add MS 46067, f. 72 

Gladstone and Macnaghten concluded that Stedman was a harmless crank rather than a dangerous lunatic, and agreed to take no further action.  Stedman went on writing poetry, and the British Library holds several of his later productions, including ‘His Majesty the King’, an attack on Irish Home Rule in Shakespearian blank verse:

Ireland is beautiful, in spite of bogs,
And holds her own great natural ‘vantages.
Hard-headed businessmen of State proclaim
That many parts of Ireland should be drained,
So that the soil in part be put to plough,
In part to build, and railways opened up.
I see the busy hum of factories,
And giant engines groaning in their strength.
Harbours arise; the Mercantile Marine
Finds many ports round Ireland’s rugged coasts.
If landowners will but begin their work,
The Government its duty will not shirk.

Nicholas Parsons, in The Joy of Bad Verse (1988), sums up Stedman’s poetry as ‘completely unhinged’.  But it is only fair to leave the last word to Stedman himself, who remained serenely confident that despite ‘all the beautiful gilt-edged programme of extra-superfine double-action donkey-power ignorance’, his true poetic genius would one day be recognised.

Arnold Hunt
Curator, Modern Historical Manuscripts

“The usual talk of a Saturday night amongst the [bookbinding] trade was about who had got the last new roll cut, its pattern and cost, and the last new tale of anecdote of Mackinlay.” ‘Black Jock,” as he was nicknamed, was even commemorated in song (binders’ gatherings were frequently musical). John Mackinlay was a trained bookbinder, born in Dumbarton, Scotland.  Despite being a “shocking bad workman” he managed to establish successful workshops in Covent Garden, London (at 8 Bow Street and then 33 Southampton Street), by employing 8 to 9 talented binders including the best finisher (practitioner of gold tooling) of the day.  Mackinlay “was short, thick-set, carried his head very much forward, very shrewd, quick eye, drank beer, a dirty old brute.  In his best days he was not above 5 feet 5 inches”. His character proved to be as unprepossessing as his appearance.

Mackinlay was democratic in the exercise of his ill humour, abusing everyone from fee-paying clients to errand boys.  His workers perhaps bore the brunt; a lame binder was sacked for his infirmity, and another employee for whistling.  Mackinlay refused to deal with customer John Philip Kemble, the actor manager of the neighbouring Covent Garden theatre, because he “talked tragedies to him” and forced his foreman, the gifted finisher Charles Tomlinson, to take his order instead.

Gold tooling from a binding produced by Mackinlay’s workshop BL, G.8032 

As a master, i.e. workshop owner, Mackinlay joined 3 other proprietors who had their striking employees arrested in 1786 as they tried to achieve an hour’s reduction in the working day (which ran from 6am to 8pm). Being friendly with Mackinlay was no safeguard against his temper.  He attacked a fellow ‘prosecuting master’, James Fraser, for poaching his foreman, and a “sair tussle” ensued at a leather merchant’s shop where the “men rolled each other over in the leather until both were exhausted.” 

This Quilp-like character gave rise to numerous anecdotes, but, as historian Ellic Howe pointed out, many are “not fit for polite society”!

P. J. M. Marks
Curator, Bookbindings. Printed Historical Sources

Further reading about John Mackinlay (1737-1821):
A Collection of Manuscripts relating to the Art and Trade of Bookbinding. [A transcript made c.1945 of the fourth of a series of manuscript volumes compiled by John Jaffray, dated London, 1864.]
Ellic Howe, ‘London Bookbinders: Masters and Men, 1780-1840’ in The Library Fifth series, v. 1, no. 1, June 1946, pp.28-38

Humfrey Wanley (1672-1726) is a familiar figure to those who use the Harley Collection of manuscripts now in the British Library as the librarian employed by Robert and Edward Harley, who acquired these manuscripts around the turn of the 18th century.  Some of his catalogue descriptions are reproduced in the Catalogue of Harleian Manuscripts in the British Museum, and his diary and letters from his time as Harley librarian are important sources for fixing the provenance of Harley manuscripts.

The first page of another of Humfrey Wanley’s teenage notebooks, dated August 1687 when Wanley was 15; from Harley MS 6030, f. 2r

In some cases, however, Wanley not only curated the manuscripts of his patrons, he created his own.  In Harley MS 7578, between pages of Chaucerian ballads and Middle English music, is a notebook of Wanley's, written in 1687, when he was only about 15 years old and employed as a draper's apprentice in Coventry.

Despite his day job in textiles, the notebook is that of an aspiring scholar, with a copied Latin vocabulary manual and explanations of Ancient Greek grammar, as well as notes on Latin meter and heroic epithets from Greek epic poetry. 

If such a personal reference book seems a bit blandly dutiful and studious for the future librarian, the last page of the notebook offers a more well-rounded view of Wanley's young life.  Apparently concerned about his budget, he has written out a record of his expenses: 'Moneys laid out by me since I have been an Apprentice'.  Some of the entries are predictably bookish: ½d for parchment, 2d for candles, 2d for a 'pencil of black lead', and a total of 5 ¾d for ink and quills.  Probably also to be counted among his stationery supplies are vermilion (1d), blue bice (2d), and the romantically-named sanguis draconis, or 'dragon's blood' (on which Wanley spent 2 ½d over three separate purchases), all pigments used in inks.

Miniature (below) of sanguis draconis ('dragon's blood');from Tractatus de herbis, Italy (Salerno), c. 1280-c. 1310,

Egerton MS 747, f.89r

It was not all work and no play for Wanley, though.  Other expenses include 2d spent on ale and 1s 'lost at Cards'.  And the single largest expense on the list?  2s, 'for seeing 2 plays'.  The notebook is not important for the texts it contains so much as it is for its window onto the life, entertainments, and scholarly ambition of a young Coventry apprentice.

Nicole Eddy, Intern in the department of History and Classics

In many workplaces there is a fixer, someone who not only knows the ropes but the best way to tie them.  Hard-pressed bookbinders who worked in late eighteenth century London were lucky to have Watkin Nimmo on their side.  Accounts of his scams can be found in the Library’s Jaffray Collection. 

Watkin (also known as Watkins, Walter or familiarly, Wattie or Old Nimmo) worked as a bookbinder in Blackfriars and his son Watkin and grandson Richard followed him into the trade.  Opinions vary.  To the bindings historian, Ellic Howe, he was “a disreputable old gentleman.”  An account in the Ipswich Journal of Saturday 29 April 1797 demonstrated his fighting spirit and radical leanings, describing Nimmo’s two month imprisonment for punching fellow binder, John Dooy, in the eye for deserting the trade society. In the journal, The British Bookmaker, Nimmo appears in a more heroic, if humorous, light.

The 1780s saw considerable tension between the masters, i.e. the owners of the bookbinding businesses, and the journeymen, the qualified craftsmen who worked for them. The men requested a reduction in the work day from 14 to 13 hours.  They met together in local groups (prototype trade unions) for protection and support and, in 1786, decided upon strike action.  The masters protected their own interests by prosecuting their employees under the strict ‘anti-union’ Combination Laws. Nimmo was selected for prosecution but, despite this, he remained on good terms with the masters and acted as a spy for the trade society, passing on valuable information.

Westminster Hall from Lambert, The history and survey of London (London, 1806) vol III opp. p.410

When the matter came to trial at Westminster Hall in February 1787, Wattie was there, and not solely to tend to his nut-selling business, “a very profitable speculation”.  He distracted a waiting group of masters by plying them with rum and then picked the pocket of John Lovejoy (to whom his son was apprenticed), stealing evidence which would have put the journeymen in a poor light!  Lovejoy, lacking the crucial evidence, retired ‘discomforted’ from the court, amidst much laughter.

It was perhaps a mixed blessing that Nimmo himself was not called to give evidence, since he had devised a routine involving the ‘accidental’ dropping of a heavy beating hammer on the toe of the judge.

Philippa Marks
Curator, Bookbindings. Printed Historical Sources

The Jaffray Collection comprises scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings, trade society reports and other material compiled by the Victorian bookbinder John Jaffray.

Further reading

Charles Ramsden, London bookbinders 1780-1840 (London, 1956).
Ellic Howe, ‘London Bookbinders: Masters and Men, 1780-1840’ The Library. Fifth ser., v. 1, no. 1, June 1946.
The British Bookmaker Vols v-vii (1891-4) include articles on the actions of the trade societies.
Ellic Howe and John Childe, The Society of London Bookbinders 1780-1951, London, 1952.