Francis Cable

CHAPTER II

The Cable Family in London – 1815 to 1841

We family historians, enjoy stories of the ‘Black Sheep of the family’ and unquestionably, within the Shellaker family, Frank Brown is well deserving of that title. One of the aims of writing this story is an attempt to make contact with those who may be researching the ancestry of the Cable family, with whom some of us may share a common ancestry and who could well be speculating upon the whereabouts of FRANCIS JAMES CABLE after c.1892. This narrative attempts to chronologically detail the information we, from the ‘Shellaker side’ of Frank’s life, have unearthed concerning Frank’s forebears on ‘the Cable side’.

HENRY ISAAC CABLE
Francis Cable’s father, as identified on the second wedding certificate from 1934, was HENRY ISAAC CABLE a builder, so I will commence this part of the story with him. He was born on 21st January 1815, a few months before The Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

1815 – The Baptism of Henry Cable – 27th February

Henry Isaac Cable was baptized on Sunday 26th February of the same year, 1815, St. Saviour’s in Southwark, an area on the south bank of the River Thames close to London Bridge.

HENRY ISAAC CABLE’S PARENTS
Henry’s father, and Frank Brown/Cable’s grandfather, was JOHN CABLE, his mother – ANN MARIA CABLE.  Her maiden name was ANN MARIA BARWOOD and she was born in 1796 to Henry and Ann Barwood and baptized at St Clements Danes, Westminster. JOHN CABLE & ANN MARIA BARWOOD married on Sunday 20th Dec 1812 at St Leonards Church, Shoreditch, London.

An engraving of the church, which was opened in 1740, can be seen on the above right. This church is still standing, although the inside of the church no longer appeared as it was in 1812, because in 1870, the galleries were stripped out and the ground floor windows bricked up – an example of Victorian church ‘vandalism’.

Witnesses at the wedding of John and Ann were Henry Barwood (presumably the bride’s father) and a man named George Imming.

THE LIFE & DEATH OF JOHN CABLE

(The grandfather of Frank Brown / Francis Cable)

Disclaimer: Unfortunately I have seen examples of family trees created on sites such as ancestry.com that clearly contain errors. Arguably it appears some users ‘guess’ the parentage of various individuals. These guesses are subsequently taken as ‘facts’ by other users thereby perpetuating the falsehood.

My aim on this site is to only use validated information – cross-referred and supported by known facts. However, for the life of John Cable it is necessary to use ‘circumstantial evidence’ – evidence that does not directly prove a fact but allows a reasonable inference to be drawn.

JOHN CABLE’S BIRTH

John Cable was born on 19th February 1781 (see below – first column) and was baptised around three later on 11th March 1781 (see below – second column) at St Mary Magdalen Church in Bermondsey.

St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey is an Anglican church dedicated to St Mary Magdalen in Bermondsey in the London Borough of Southwark. The majority of the present building is late 17th century and is Grade II listed.

Its parish extends as far as the Thames (including the south tower of Tower Bridge, City Hall and part of London Bridge station). The parishes of St Olave Tooley Street, St Luke Grange Road and St John Horsleydown have all been merged into it.

The engraving of the church on the right was made in 1810 and is consequently contemporary to the time that John Cable was baptsied by his parents.

The church survived the Blitz of WWII and remains standing to this day and continues as a place of worship.

In addition to the dates, the record, second from bottom of the parish entry below, states that John was the Son of JOSEPH and JANE CABLE.

The family lived in Salisbury Street, which was near the river and was one of the worst areas for slums in Bermondsey. Dr Salter, by then a well-known MP, called it a ‘death trap and fever den’. It was rebuilt and renamed Wilson Grove and is now totally unrecognisable of what it once was.

I cannot decipher the profession of Joseph Cable. Suggestions anyone?

The Baptism of John Cable – 11th March 1781

Historical Note: At the time of John’s birth King George III was on throne of Great Britain and The Industrial Revolution was dramatically changing the country. The American War of Independence was ongoing (1775-1783) and over the English Channel Louis XVI (14th) was the King of France from 1774 until the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789. In 1793 he was beheaded by guillotine.

A second child for Joseph and Jane Cable, a son who they named Robert, was born on 11th December 1781, only nine months after John’s birth. He was baptised on 1st January 1782 also at St Mary Magdalen Church in Bermondsey

The Baptism of Robert Cable – 1st January 1782

I cannot decipher the profession of Joseph Cable on this record.

CURRENTLY UPDATING …..

Henry was born around three years after this wedding and he had at least one sibling, a sister MARY ELIZABETH CABLE, born three years later and baptized on Friday 20th Feb 1818.

There are other names in the records who are likely to also be the children of John and Ann Maria Cable are JOHN RICHARD born in 1820, a JOHN CABLE baptised Sunday 20th August 1826 at Saint Saviour, Southwark, a daughter, FANNY who was born in 1830 in Bermondsey, THOMAS born the following year of 1831 in Southwark and a girl, MARTHA born in 1834 also in Southwark.

HENRY CABLE MARRIES
In 1835, at around twenty one years of age, Henry Isaac Cable married CHARLOTTE RICHARDSON in Bermondsey. Charlotte was originally from Barkham in Surrey.

Update: 24th January 2023

The marriage took place at the relatively recently consecrated St James church in Bermondsey on 26th April 1835. It was to be the first of Henry’s three marriages, (Although no offical record has been found yet for his second ‘marriage).

One of the witnesses was ‘MARY CABLE’, likely to be his younger sisiter who was born in 1918, three years after Henry’s birth.

Bermondsey is an area in London on the south bank of the river Thames, and is part of the London Borough of Southwark. To the west lies Southwark, to the east Rotherhithe, and to the south, Walworth and Peckham.

The Church of St James’s Bermondsey, was completed and consecrated in 1829 and given a separate parish (split off from the ancient parish of St Mary Magdalene’s, Bermondsey) in 1840.

END OF UPDATE

 THE CABLE FAMILY – Henry Isaac Cable, his parents and siblings

LIVING IN DOCKHEAD, LONDON (Updated 4th January 2023)

After Henry and Charlotte married they lived in an area of London named ‘Dockhead‘. This was revealed on the record of their second child, Edwin.

Dock Head was notorious slum next to the river in Bermondsey, which formed an island.

Excerpts from the contemporary 1850 Handbook of London are below, together with images, which graphically illustrate the unimaginable and utterly horrendous conditions in which Henry and Charlotte lived with their young children after they married…

Historical Footnote:

[“There is a creek opening into the Thames. This creek bears the name of the Dock Head. The walls of the warehouses on each side of this muddy stream are green and slimy, and barges lie beside them, above which sacks of corn are continually dangling from the cranes aloft. This creek was once supplied by the streams from the Surrey hills, but now nothing but the drains and refuse of the houses that have grown up round about it thickens and swells its waters.

On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the musty atmosphere.

It is not only the nose, but the stomach, that tells how heavily the air is loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen; and as soon as you cross one of the crazy and rotting bridges over the reeking ditch, you know, by the black colour of what was once the white-lead paint upon the door-posts and window-sills, that the air is thickly charged with this deadly gas.

The heavy bubbles which now and then rise up in the water show you whence at least a portion of the mephitic compound comes, while the open doorless privies that hang over the water side on one of the banks, and the dark streaks of filth down the walls where the drains from each house discharge themselves into the ditch on the opposite side, tell you how the pollution of the ditch is supplied.

The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, and against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction. Along its shores are heaps of indescribable filth, the phosphuretted smell from which tells you of the rotting fish there, while the oyster shells are like pieces of slate from their coating of mud and filth. In some parts the fluid is almost as red as blood from the colouring matter that pours into it from the reeking leather-dressers’ close by.

Across some parts of the stream whole rooms have been built, so that house adjoins house; and here, with the very stench of death rising through the boards, human beings sleep night after night, until the last sleep of all comes upon them years before its time. At the back of nearly every house that boasts a square foot or two of outlet – and the majority have none at all – are pig-sties. In front waddle ducks, while cocks and hens scratch at the cinder heaps.

The inhabitants themselves show in their faces the poisonous influence of the mephitic air they breathe. Either their skins are white, like parchment, telling of the impaired digestion, the languid circulation, and the coldness of the skin peculiar to persons suffering from chronic poisoning, or else their cheeks are flushed hectically, and their eyes are glassy, showing the wasting fever and general decline of the bodily functions. The brown, earth like complexion of some, and their sunk eyes, tell you that the sulphuretted hydrogen of the atmosphere in which they live has been absorbed into the blood; while others are remarkable for the watery eye exhibiting the increased secretion of tears so peculiar to those who are exposed to the exhalations of hydrosulphate of ammonia.

Scarcely a girl that has not suffusion and soreness of the eyes, so that you would almost fancy she had been swallowing small doses of arsenic; while it is evident from the irritation and discharge from the mucous membranes of the nose and eyes for which all the children are distinguished, that the poor emaciated things are suffering from continual inhalation of the vapour of carbonate of ammonia and other deleterious gases.

On approaching the tidal ditch from the Neckinger Road, the shutters of the house at the corner were shut from top to bottom. Our intelligent and obliging guide, informed us that a girl was then lying dead there from cholera, and that but very recently another victim had fallen in the house adjoining it.

As we walked down George Row, our informant told us that at the corner of London Street (picture right) he could see as many as nine houses in which there were one or two persons lying dead of the cholera at the same time; and yet there could not have been more than a dozen tenements visible from the spot.

We were then led to narrow close courts, where the sun never shone, and the air seemed almost as stagnant and putrid as the ditch we had left. The blanched cheeks of the people that now came out to stare at us, were white as vegetables grown in the dark, and as we stopped to look down the alley, our informant told us that the place teemed with children. Fevers prevailed in these courts we were told more than at the side of the ditch.

By this way we reached a dismal stack of hovels called, by a strange incongruity, Pleasant Row. Inquiring of one of the inmates, we were informed that they were quite comfortable now! The stench had been all removed, said the woman, and we were invited to pass to the back-yard as evidence of the fact. We did so; the boards bent under our feet, and the air in the cellar-like yard was foetid to positive nausea.

As we left the house a child sat nursing a dying half-comatose baby on a door step. The skin of its little arms, instead of being plumped out with health, was loose and shrivelled, like an old crone’s, and had a flabby monkey-like appearance more than the character of human cuticle.

The almost jaundiced colour of the child’s skin, its half paralyzed limbs, and state of stupor, told it was suffering from some slow poison; indeed the symptoms might readily have been mistaken for those of chronic poisoning from acetate of lead. At the end of this row our friend informed us that the last house on either side was never free from fever. Continuing our course we reached “The Folly,” (Image right) another street so narrow that the names and trades of the shopmen were painted on boards that stretched, across the street, from the roof of their own house to that of their neighbour’s.

We were here stopped by our companion in front of a house “to let.” The building was as narrow and as unlike a human habitation as the wooden houses in a child’s box of toys. “In this house,” said our friend, “when the scarlet fever was raging in the neighbourhood, the barber who was living here suffered fearfully from it; and no sooner did the man get well of this than he was seized with typhus, and scarcely had he recovered from the first attack than he was struck down a second time with the same terrible disease.

Since then he has lost his child with cholera, and at this moment his wife is in the workhouse suffering from the same affliction. The only wonder is that they are not all dead, for as the man sat at his meals in his small shop, if he put his hand against the wall behind him, it would be covered with the soil of his neighbour’s privy, sopping through the wall. At the back of the house was an open sewer, and the privies were full to the seat.”]

This area was actually mentioned in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist (published 1837-1839)…

“In such a neighbourhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old name.

At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him.

Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it—as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.

One of Dicken’s most infamous characters, Bill Sikes, is chased into this area after killing Nancy before accidentally hanging himself.

“Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled over the parapet. The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds. He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his stiffening hand.

The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting aside the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come and take him out, for God’s sake”.

Oliver Twist – Chapter 50 published March 1839

END OF UPDATE

1841 – CENSUS – HENRY ISAAC CABLE
Around six years pass and Henry and his wife Charlotte are recorded on the 1841 Census, taken on the night of 6th June 1841. With them are their three children; CLARA, aged 5 years. She was born on 11th March 1836 and baptised at St John Horsleydown, Bermondsey on 21st August 1836, There was also a son EDWIN, born on 21st Sept 1838 (and baptised the following month on the 14th October),  aged 2 and a half years and baby daughter born in February 1841 – the year of the Census and therefore only four months old. She was named CHARLOTTE after her mother. A copy of that Census is below – the entry for Henry and his family is at the bottom of the section although I cannot clearly identify Henry’s occupation on this Census.

In the 1841 the details on Census returns were relatively sparse; Place of residence – the street name, house number or house name, the Age and sex of each person. In regards to the persons age it should be noted that Ages up to 15 are listed exactly as reported/recorded but ages over 15 were rounded to the nearest 5 years (i.e. a person aged 53 would be listed on the census as age 50 years). The Census also included the occupation of the residents and their birthplace, but only if the person was born in the county where the census was taken (usually recorded as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’).

1841 Census – Henry Cable & Family

The birthplace of the children is recorded only as Surrey, e.g. ‘Yes’ – born in the same county. In this Census Henry’s age is recorded as 26, his wife Charlotte 25 years of age. One significant part of this document is the address of the Cable family – they were living in St Olave Union, Fashion Street, St John, Southwark and it appears ‘St Olave Union’ was a Workhouse!

THE WORKHOUSE & THE POOR LAW
The St Olave Union Workhouse was located at the corner of Fair Street and Parish Street with the main part of the site arranged around three sides of a square. The main entrance was located on Parish Street but all the buildings have since been demolished. A picture of the building is shown below right.

An amendment to the Poor Law was introduced in 1834; seven years prior to the time Henry Cable, his wife Charlotte and their three children were living in this Workhouse. Under this new Poor Law, smaller parishes were grouped into unions and each union had to build a Workhouse to accommodate the poor of the area. Within Southwalk the St Olave Poor Law Union was formed on 25th March, 1836 utilizing the existing buildings.

Under this new law poor people could only get help and support if they were prepared to leave their homes and go into a Workhouse; previously they are received support from the parish in which they lived.

We do not know the cause of Henry’s destitution but entering the Workhouse was not uncommon. However families would need to be very wretched before doing so as conditions inside the Workhouse were made deliberately harsh to ensure only those who desperately needed help would be forced to enter.

FAMILIES SEPARATED
Undoubtedly Henry would have separated from Charlotte and his three children during their time there as families were split up and housed in different parts of the workhouse. At St Olave Union the men were housed in the southern wing, and females in the northern wing behind which the workhouse laundry was located.

FOOD
Within the Workhouse the inmate were forced to wear a uniform and the diet was monotonous, barely sufficient for most paupers and some starved. For babies and young children, such as Clara, Edwin and Charlotte Cable, the dietary was at best, very poor. Charles Dickens based his harrowing ‘Oliver Twist’ on the reality of workhouse conditions in the 1830s – particularly contemporary to the time Henry and Charlotte Cable were there with their own three children.

The food provided in Workhouses was based around bread (which was coarse, deep brown in colour and often extremely stale), meat (the cheapest and toughest cuts and served once a week), cheese, potatoes, soup (made up of water, onions and grease), suet pudding and of course the infamous gruel. In 1840 one Workhouse inmate describes gruel as being…. “Mustiness and fustiness! Most revolting to any healthy taste. It might have been boiled in old clothes, which had been worn upon sweating bodies for three-score years and ten.”

WORK
Charlotte Cable possibly picked Oakum while in the St Olave Union Workhouse. The Workhouse has a strict regime of rules and regulations. Inmates, both male and female and the young and old were made to work hard, often doing unpleasant jobs such as breaking stones or picking oakum.*

*Oakum was a tarred fibre used in shipbuilding, for packing the joints of timbers in wooden ships.It was recycled from old tarry ropes which were painstakingly unraveled by the inmates and taken apart into fibre”.

The picture on the right depicts women, in an East London Workhouse, picking Oakum around the end of the Victorian Era.

The Children could also find themselves hired out to work in factories or mines; it is possible Clara Cable, although only six years old in 1841, could have been sent out to work in local factories.

TREATMENT OF INMATES
Around this time Workhouses around the country were scandalized in the press. At one Workhouse in Hampshire it was reported that half-starved inmates were found eating the rotting flesh from bones. Strict rules were introduced shortly afterwards for those running the workhouses and a system of regular inspections was introduced. Although inmates were still treated with contempt by ruthless masters and matrons who continued to abuse the rules.

This was the life experienced by Henry & Charlotte Cable and their three children during their time in the St Olave Union.

1841 – CENSUS – HENRY’s MOTHER & SIBLINGS
Henry’s mother and siblings are also recorded within the 1841 Census Records. A copy of the actual record is below and the details highlighted below. Ann Cable (née Barwood) is now on her own and living at St John Street, St Mary Newington, Lambeth. Her husband John is not recorded – he could have died or living elsewhere on the night of this Census. With Ann are three of her children Fanny who was born in 1830 and is now 11 years old, Thomas, born in 1830, aged 10 and Martha born in 1834, now 7 years old.

Not recorded on this Census are Mary Elizabeth Cable who, as she was born in 1818, would have been around 23 years old at time and could be married and so no longer living with the family. Also ‘missing‘ are John Richard born in 1820 and John born in 1826 who would have reached 21 and 15 years respectively – three possibilities; alive and living elsewhere, dead and a third option is that these children are not the offspring of  John and Ann Cable.

The Census shows Ann Cable (née Barwood) was not born in the county of Surrey.

1841 Census – Ann Cable & Family

Next Page: Life after the workhouse  – a wife dies

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