Peter Must is the great grandson of Reverend Robert Loveridge, the heroic but very modest vicar of St Philip’s, Mount Street (today’s Swanfield Street), who was scandalised by the publication of Charles Booth’s Poverty Map, in 1889: the depiction of the Old Nichol as a mass of black streets, indicating criminality, fecklessness and ineradicable chronic poverty, was, Reverend Loveridge said, “a malignant lie. . . the dwellers in the Boundary Street area were rather virtuous than otherwise”.
One of Reverend Loveridge’s descendants, Peter Must, wrote to me supplying some background information on the vicar and on his other Nichol ancestors. (Pictures of St Philip’s Church, now demolished, can be seen below.)
Peter has written: “Robert Whatwood Loveridge was born in Bethnal Green in 1831, but was brought up in Birmingham. He married Caroline Brain, the daughter of a toll-keeper, and they had five daughters, of whom Ellen (Nellie), my grandmother, was the third. Caroline died, aged 33, in 1876 and the task of bringing up the children was shared by Caroline’s sister, Alice, and her husband, Henry Day.
Cambridge in the 1920s: Loveridge’s daughter is third from right; my correspondent’s parents are fourth from left and furthest right.“My grandfather, Henry Must, was born at 6 Christopher Street, in the Old Nichol, to James Must, a dock labourer who was himself born just south of the Old Nichol in James Street, later renamed Chilton Street [just east of Brick Lane].
“Henry Must was baptised by Reverend Loveridge in St Philip’s in 1870 and was one of six siblings. In early 1891 he was a boot and shoe warehouseman but shortly afterwards entered theological college through the sponsorship of Rev Loveridge. He was ordained in 1893 and in 1895 married Nellie Loveridge, the reverend’s daughter. He became curate at St Philip’s in 1896 and succeeded his father-in-law as vicar in 1898. Subsequently he was for 37 years vicar of St David’s, Holloway, dying in 1942, two years before Nellie, who knew that my mother was expecting, but did not see me born.
“Grandma Nellie always walked a few paces behind her husband and appears to have never been photographed without a cloche hat on.
“Auntie Minnie, meanwhile (one of Reverend Loveridge’s other daughters), was a kindly spinster who looked after my sister and brother when they were ill and whose idea of entertainment was to seat them next to her at the piano while she bashed out and hollered ‘I’m H-A-P-P-Y!’ and other rousing hymns.
“While I am glad that Henry, and indeed all his brothers and sisters, escaped the ‘moral decay’ that eugenicists might have predicted for him, I also like to think that his parents, James and Betsey, provided the best support they could for their children out of the meagre and sporadic wages available to a casual labourer.
“My sister Brenda, who is ten years older than me, remembers Henry Must as a pretty strict disciplinarian, yet beloved by his parishioners; he was no doubt filled with the need to prevent his children sliding towards poverty and the workhouse (as his father and uncles had done) but also imbued by the sense of duty and care which I think was passed on by Reverend Loveridge.
“James Must typifies the difficulties faced by the very poor. He and his family lived at various addresses in Mead Street and Christopher Street in the Old Nichol; they moved out by 1891, presumably as their accommodation came up for demolition for the building of the Boundary Street Estate, but travelling only a few hundred yards to a house in Granby Street [close to James/Chilton Street]. Betsey died in 1893 and (unable to cope on his own, I guess) James was thereafter an almost permanent resident of the workhouse, as indeed were his brothers William and Thomas, who had also lost their wives. He died in the infirmary in 1907, aged 75.
“Your book provides heartening evidence to support Robert Loveridge’s view (was he thinking of his son-in-law’s family?) that the desperately poor of the Old Nichol were ‘rather virtuous than otherwise’. I sense you have some sympathy for the more chaotic, un-means-tested charity shown by Robert Loveridge. Loveridge was characterised rather snidely, as you point out, by his interviewer Arthur Baxter [part of Charles Booth’s survey team], a non-practising barrister of independent means – quite what ‘harm’ Loveridge and others were doing, as Baxter claims, remains unclear.
“For some obscure reason, Reverend Loveridge accepted the post of rector of Sigglesthorpe, East Yorkshire, after he left St Philip’s, but died there a year later, on 5 June 1899. Unfortunately, I do not have any picture of him, although I have this frustrating belief that there must be at least one image of him out there somewhere. He appears from your researches to have been a man suffused with charity almost to the exclusion of self-interest, or even objective reason.
“As for many descendants of families who passed through the slums of East London, there is always a ‘What if. . .?’ In this case, ‘What if the generation of Musts – who, in the late eighteenth century, thought the weaving trade in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green offered better prospects than the placid but uncertain Sudbury, Suffolk – had decided against uprooting themselves and their families to seek that more prosperous life?’ But of course, that question still resonates in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai and elsewhere.
“To finish off, we should perhaps contrast the life of Henry Must with the fate of his cousin, Sarah Ann. She was an early visitor to the workhouse, where her illegitimate daughter, also called Sarah Ann, was born and died. In that same year she married Thomas Jarvis, a matchbox-maker, and had nine children with him. What happened is chronicled in these documents…”
Below: a newspaper cutting; a report from Booth’s survey notebooks; and a poem by William McGonagall on the fate of the Jarvis family.
‘Calamity in London’ by William McGonagall
’Twas in the year of 1897, and on the night of Christmas Day,
That ten persons’ lives were taken away,
By a destructive fire in London, at No. 9 Dixie Street,
Alas! so great was the fire, the victims couldn’t retreat.
In Dixie Street, No. 9, it was occupied by two families,
Who were all quite happy, and sitting at their ease;
One of these was a labourer, David Barber, and his wife,
And a dear little child, he loved as his life.
Barber’s mother and three sisters were living on the ground floor,
And in the upper two rooms lived a family who were very poor,
And all had retired to rest, on the night of Christmas Day,
Never dreaming that by fire their lives would be taken away.
Barber got up on Sunday morning to prepare breakfast for his family,
And a most appalling sight he then did see;
For he found the room was full of smoke,
So dense, indeed, that it nearly did him choke.
Then fearlessly to the room door he did creep,
And tried to arouse the inmates, who were asleep;
And succeeded in getting his own family out into the street,
And to him the thought thereof was surely very sweet.
And by this time the heroic Barber’s strength was failing,
And his efforts to warn the family upstairs were unavailing;
And, before the alarm was given, the house was in flames,
Which prevented anything being done, after all his pains.
Oh! it was a horrible and heart-rending sight
To see the house in a blaze of lurid light,
And the roof fallen in, and the windows burnt out,
Alas! ’tis pitiful to relate, without any doubt.
Oh, Heaven! ’tis a dreadful calamity to narrate,
Because the victims have met with a cruel fate;
Little did they think they were going to lose their lives by fire,
On that night when to their beds they did retire.
It was sometime before the gutted house could be entered in,
Then to search for the bodies the officers in charge did begin;
And a horrifying spectacle met their gaze,
Which made them stand aghast in a fit of amaze.
Sometime before the firemen arrived,
Ten persons of their lives had been deprived,
By the choking smoke, and merciless flame,
Which will long in the memory of their relatives remain.
Oh, Heaven! it was a frightful and pitiful sight to see
Seven bodies charred of the Jarvis family;
And Mrs Jarvis was found with her child, and both carbonised,
And as the searchers gazed thereon they were surprised.
And these were lying beside the fragments of the bed,
And in a chair the tenth victim was sitting dead;
Oh, Horrible! Oh, Horrible! what a sight to behold,
The charred and burnt bodies of young and old.
Good people of high and low degree,
Oh! think of this sad catastrophe,
And pray to God to protect ye from fire,
Every night before to your beds ye retire.