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and shops.
By 1881, more than 86,000 people were crushed into an area less than two miles square: as
many as nine or ten might live in one room, without sanitation or a water supply, except for a tap
in the street serving 25 houses. Once a large Cluniac Abbey flourished in the area, among open
fields and market gardens, with the town houses of the wealthy spaced out along the river bank.
Tower Bridge had not been built when George got married (it was opened in June 1894), and
London Bridge was then the last bridge across the river before it flowed out into the North Sea.
But a subway existed under the Thames in 1887, an iron tube seven feet wide that ran from
Tooley Street to Tower Hill. People could walk through it and under the Thames for a
halfpenny. It is said a million did so every year.
This was the scene of George Honeycombe's last days as a bachelor, and of his first years of
marriage. His bride was Charlotte Flegg, the daughter of a tailor. The fact that she was 20, half
George's age, and that the wedding took place in the Methodist Chapel in Manor Road on
Christmas Day, 1887, implies a sudden or romantic urge - although there was nothing romantic
about their married life.
The following year, in the Whitechapei area across the river, an urge to kill, to cut and mutilate,
was given its most sensational form in the later months of Charlotte's first pregnancy. Five
prostitutes were horribly slaughtered between August and November 1888 by a man who
became known as Jack the Ripper. During Charlotte's second pregnancy, another three
prostitutes would die in the Waterloo area, poisoned by a cross-eyed Scotsman, Dr Cream.
The first of George and Charlotte's eight children, a girl, was in fact the only one to live beyond
her teens and then to marry. Six of their children died before they were four years old, and three
of these, all boys, died in their infancy. The fact that Charlotte was employed in the Newington
Workhouse as a general
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servant and laundress cannot have improved the children's chances. For three of her children,
Mary, Rosina and Thomas, were actually born in the workhouse, and the first two died therein.
Her second child, Mary, died aged two in the infirmary attached to the Newington Workhouse:
cause of death, marasmus, or wasting away. That was in May 1892. In October the following
year Rosina died, of bronchopneurrtonia: also aged two and also in the workhouse. After a
seven-year gap of no known births (miscarriages maybe, or perhaps George was away), the
eldest son, George, born in September 1898, died accidentally the following month of, as the
death certificate puts it, 'suffocation while in bed with parents'.
Were they both drunk that night? Or so exhausted by the labours of the day that the baby was
smothered as they slept? They were living then at 16 Elham Street, as they were the following
year when a second baby boy, Thomas, born in the Mint St workhouse in July 1899, died, it
seems, in the same way in September. An inquest was held, and the cause of death was
attributed to 'asphyxia - accidental death'.
A third son, Frederick, died aged three months of heart failure in Guy's Hospital in May 1903.
One-year-old Emily died in 1909.
She was the Honeycombes' last and eighth child. The sixth child, Lilian, born late in 1901,
somehow survived for 14 years. That was her age when she died in July 1916 of tuberculosis
and exhaustion in the Workhouse Infirmary at Tonbridge, in Kent. What was she doing down
there? Her parents were in London. Was she earning a crust as a beggar or a prostitute? No
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