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her native land and her little boy.
There was more than one bastard called George.
George Edward Honeycombe apparently knew who his father was. But when was he told?
And when did he assume his father's first name? He was just Edward to Jane. He must have
been told at some point about the Bristol connection and about the Honeycombe and Wilkins
business. Perhaps by Mary Ann Henderson. For we find him in Bristol, unmarried, in 1871,
aged 24, lodging with a deaf laundress, aged 69, Elizabeth Haskins. Had he gone to Bristol to
see if any of his father's or mother's family could help him with money or a job? Did he go there
to find his father?
What we know of his life thereafter is a sad tale of infant mortality and gross deprivation in the
gas-lit squalor of south London.
After Bristol George disappears for 16 years. Was he for a while in the army or navy? Or
working wherever and how he could? Or even in prison? For he does not marry until 1887,
when he is 40, and employed as a porter in Bermondsey. He is then living at 15 Tenda Road, a
dismal row of cottages between two converging railway viaducts. Presumably he was a market
porter or a railway porter, and may have been so for some time.
One of these viaducts, the more northerly one with over 800 brick arches, had been
constructed in 1834 to carry London's first passenger railway trains to Greenwich. The first
section to be completed was from the Spa Road Station to Deptford, and the first train from
London Bridge Station to Greenwich steamed out, with the Lord Mayor of London on board,
in December 1836. When a branch line was added on to Croydon, the first signal box in the
world was erected where the lines divided. At night its red and white lights and lit interior
caused it to be dubbed 'the Lighthouse'. It stood less than half a mile from George's lodging, and
the sight and sound of trains, the billowing smoke, whistles and noise, must have constantly
marked his early married life. For trains from London Bridge ran every quarter of an hour,
between 8.00 am and 10.00 pm; fares were: 'Imperial carnages, one shilling; open cars,
sixpence.'
Perhaps George worked at the Spa Road Station, or in one of the stations nearby but built later
- either the Bricklayer's Arms or South Bermondsey.
23
Strong smells were endemic in late Victorian Bermondsey. Leather was one of the main
industries, the making of boots and saddles, shoes, gloves and bags; tanner's yards lined Long
Lane, their pits replete with animal skins being washed or soaked in tan-pits. Allied trades were
furriers and hatters. The effluvia of breweries also assailed the nose, especially the output of
Courage's Anchor Brewery by Tower Bridge. A sweeter smell issued from biscuit-making
factories: from Peek Freans, and Spinel's (who made dog biscuits). Pearce Duffs factory made
custord powder; Crosse and Blackwell's pickles; Hartley's jams; Sarson's made vinegar, and
the Metal Box Company made tins. There was a market in Blue Anchor Road crammed with
200 stalls; and a lively music-hall, the Star. And all along the Bermondsey wharves and
warehouses on the river, steam-ships and cranes conflated the sensory kaleidoscope of smells
and sounds. Much of the bacon, cheese, butter and lard that London needed was stored
thereabouts. Some of it was refrigerated, but part was stacked a few yards from the rat-
infested, sewage-ridden docks and alleyways, and the slimy turgid river. Bermondsey was the
background of some of Charles Dickens' novels; its workhouses and prisons, its fetid tenements
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