Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End

When I was young, the way my grandmother and great-aunts – the daughters of Nellie and Harry – would describe Silvertown made it seem like a magical place. Even the name made it sound wondrous, the stuff of fairy tales, and the way these old cockney ladies, quick to laugh and masterly storytellers all, would talk about Silvertown did nothing to disabuse me of the notion that it sat on clouds with the sun glinting off a forest of golden turrets.

My first sense that Silvertown was actually somewhere real came one Saturday when I was about 10 years old. My mother had been out all day and arrived home as darkness was falling. She had, she announced, just been to Silvertown. She’d taken Nan and a couple of my great-aunts across the water to revisit a few old haunts and, what’s more, hadn’t come back empty-handed. She placed a lump of rock on the table in front of me on top of the copy of Roy of the Rovers I was reading.

St Mark’s Church, where my mother’s family had been christened, married and eulogised for generations, had been deconsecrated and was derelict when they got there, the victim of first a serious fire and then vandals. Our posse of nostalgics had snuck in through a side door and found the place in dusty chaos. The pews, on which successive generations of Greenwoods and myriad Silvertonians had sat for reasons both joyful and tragic, were either gone altogether or reduced to a jumble of splintered planks. The vandals had enjoyed themselves immensely, not least when taking a sledgehammer to the font and reducing it to a mound of shapeless lumps on the floor. One of these lumps now sat in front of me on the dining table, retrieved by my mother who had been the last of the Greenwood babies to be christened in it. I ran my fingers over it: there was a beautiful shiny white side, blemished gently by a web of cracks so thin it was as if they’d been drawn on faintly in pencil. It was slightly curved with a champhered edge, all perfectly smooth to the touch. It was beautiful even out of its context and destroyed. The rest of this piece of pilfered font rubble, the sides visible where it had been broken away from the curved symmetry and craftsmanship of the whole, was rough and ugly, the raw material beneath the carefully constructed exterior, the bits you weren’t supposed to see. In this piece of font was Silvertown, all right.

It’s only as I’ve grown older that I’ve come to question or even explore the received wisdom that Silvertown was this Greenwood utopia, a lost land of green and plenty. A cursory delve into the history of the place reveals that Silvertown was far from bucolic; it was mercilessly, relentlessly, unpleasantly industrial and life there was hard. Constance Street was topped by the docks at its north end and tailed by heavy industry at its south: the sugar refinery, the chemical works, the rubber factory, the paint factory. Silvertown was noisy, dirty and dangerous. It had grown rapidly from empty marshland into the largest industrial manufacturing area in the south of England in a process that took barely forty years while the kinds of amenities we take for granted struggled to keep up, as did the law. Indeed, it flourished partly because it was outside the boundaries covered by the Metropolitan Buildings Act of 1844, which banned ‘noxious trades’ from London.

Yet that street, that one beloved street, seemed immune to the reality. Constance Street was a sliver of heaven, of pride, of scrubbed doorsteps and starched aprons, of kids playing, welcoming shops and the pub on the corner. Like the name Silvertown, Constance Street has a certain air to it: Constance sounds like the feisty younger sister from a Regency novel or the prim but kindly governess in a Victorian serial: there’s a propriety about the name Constance. Yet this was an artery between dock and industry, a typical street at the heart of one of the poorest areas London ever saw, and that really is saying something.

As I grew older and the pew of Greenwood sisters grew shorter with each funeral, we youngsters loosened the bonds as our lives began to look further outwards and our horizons widened. The modern world, in which industry and community were forced to beat a relentless retreat, meant large family gatherings became a thing of the past, yet I began to think more and more about Silvertown. As my grandmother and her sisters died I regretted not finding out more, not preserving their stories. Why had they spoken so fondly of the place? What was so special about Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular? How accurate were their memories of days where the sun always seemed to shine and every story seemed to end with screeches of helpless, eye-dabbing laughter?

My great-aunt Joan is the last of the aunts, the youngest of Harry and Nellie’s daughters, 91 years old now, widowed, sprightly, sharp as a needle and still the best and funniest storyteller I’ve ever heard. I was at her home on the Kent coast a couple of years ago and the conversation inevitably turned to Silvertown and Constance Street. ‘’Ang on, boy,’ she said at one point. ‘Joan’s got something to show you.’

She rummaged in a draw for a moment, pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me.

‘Constance Street,’ she said. ‘At least as Joan remembers it.’

On the sheet in front of me was a crudely drawn row of buildings, each numbered, each inscribed in unmistakable old lady’s shaky handwriting with a name, a street number and, where appropriate, the nature of their business. It was a plan of Constance Street as it had been in the 1930s.

Railway Hotel Cundy pub, said the first in line, the pub at the end of Constance Street that, despite being named for the station opposite, was always known as Cundy’s after the landlord at the turn of the twentieth century right up to the building’s recent demolition. All the shops were there, the butcher, the grocer, hardware shop, fish and chip shop, right up to the dairy at the far end of the street. And there, in the middle of the row, ‘Greenwood laundry’.

Joan had been barely 17 years old when the Greenwoods left Silvertown for ever, yet here, three-quarters of a century on, was as vivid a manifestation of a lost community as you could wish for.

Joan’s diagram stayed with me and I began to project the half-remembered stories of my grandmother and the aunts onto it, trying to work out what it might be that makes Silvertown my spiritual home even though I was born miles away, three decades after we left, and why all of us, Connellys, Millers, Whites, Burkes, Gileses, Hickfords, Busseys, Mitchells and the rest – why all of us are, and will always remain, Greenwoods of Silvertown.

I often think of my grandmother’s instruction never to forget the dock water coursing through my veins. I will never forget it, but to find out why this specific briny fluid flows in my arteries and understand why my roots are so firmly embedded in Silvertown I needed to use Joan’s diagram as a key to unlock the story of the Greenwoods and take myself back to the very origins of Silvertown itself.

Chapter Three

Stephen Winckworth Silver was four years old when his father died early in the summer of 1794. He had a vague memory of a warm day, sun streaming through the windows, the sound of his father’s footsteps on the stairs, then voices and laughter outside, horses’ hooves in the courtyard and finally the shouts of the riders encouraging the horses as the group rode away. He would never see his father again.

Stephen Silver senior, publican of the Three Tuns inn in Winchester, had set out that morning for the village of Barton Stacey with a group of friends. The landlord at the Swan Inn there was an acquaintance and had proposed a cricket match between the two inns for a wager. Silver and two companions were riding the seven miles to Barton Stacey to finalise the arrangements over a meal and a few pots of ale and also to see how the rebuilding work was progressing after the fire that had swept through the village two years earlier.

The three men left The Swan as the sun began to set, mounted their horses and set off back for Winchester beneath a burnished golden sky lined with long, dark clouds. When his friends made it clear that they were in no great hurry Stephen Silver, in great spirits, told them he’d go on ahead as he wanted to see his son before he was put to bed, dug his heels into the flanks of his horse, called out that he’d meet them in the saloon and galloped ahead.

The wind pushed his hair back from his face. Twenty-six years old, handsome, fast establishing himself as a leading local businessman, Stephen Silver was about as full of life as he’d ever been as he thundered home to Winchester that night.

Nobody would ever be quite sure how it happened as there was nobody else on the road at the time, but as Stephen reached the edge of Winchester, barely two minutes’ ride from the Three Tuns, something caused him to fall from his horse and strike his head against the ground so hard that he must have been killed instantly. His friends arrived shortly afterwards and found him lying in the road, on his back, face looking up at the darkening sky, eyes open and lifeless, a trickle of blood from his left ear the only tangible sign that something was wrong other than the agitated horse trotting one way and then the other nearby, tossing its head as the reins hung down from its neck.

The two men knelt by him and shouted his name, lifting his head from the ground and imploring him to answer, but Stephen Silver was gone.

They lifted him gently from the ground, laid him over the back of one of their horses and rode slowly back to the Three Tuns. They brought him in through the back door and one of them went to fetch Elizabeth and tell her the dreadful news while the other laid him on the dining table. Young Stephen, oblivious, was woken by the low, guttural wail of his mother that rose to a shriek, and then there was silence. He fell asleep again.

His mother came in during the night, sat on his bed, leaned over him and when she was sure he was awake said, ‘Stephen, your father’s had an accident and he’s had to leave us to be with God. Be brave, my son, my dear boy, for it is just you and I now.’ With that she plunged forward, the weight of her head heavy on his torso, and wailed again, so loud and so long that Stephen felt the vibration deep in his own chest.

Stephen Silver was buried three days later in the churchyard at St Thomas’s, but young Stephen wasn’t there; having been deemed too young to attend he stayed back at the Three Tuns where he was watched over by Emily, the family’s young domestic servant. The inn was closed and shuttered and they sat in the dark, just the two of them, Emily saying nothing; just crying quietly and watching him through red, weepy eyes.

He’d been told to stay out of the back parlour, where his father had lain since being placed there, and where the local doctor had carried out the inquest, confirming a tragic accident, giving his condolences to Elizabeth and ruffling young Stephen’s hair before he left. The sight of the closed door of that room would be a constant memory of his childhood, for him the ultimate representation of his father’s death, far more poignant than the grave itself which his mother never visited after the funeral and which he never visited as long as he lived.

This meant he also never visited his little brother, William, who had died the previous year at eighteen months of a weak heart. It wasn’t until much later that Stephen appreciated just what his mother had gone through, losing her baby son and her husband within the space of fifteenth months. It wasn’t until Stephen’s twilight years that he really forgave her for marrying again, either.

Four years after the death of his father, Elizabeth married again. So much for it being just the two of them now, he thought. After Stephen’s funeral she had thrown herself into the running of the Three Tuns and barely mentioned her late husband ever again. On the day of the funeral itself there appeared in the Hampshire Gazette a notice she’d placed, informing ‘her late husband’s friends and the public in general that she continues the business of the Three Tuns inn and solicits the continuance of their favours to which every attention will be paid’, and asking that everyone to whom her husband was indebted at the time of his death should send their accounts immediately.

And that was it. There was barely a mention of his father ever again. Indeed, so busy was Elizabeth with the running of the inn that he saw her but rarely. Emily prepared his meals and he’d help her with some of the chores when he wasn’t at school – the laundry and the pot-washing, and he’d occasionally go into the centre of Winchester on errands – but shortly after his mother’s marriage Emily left the Three Tuns when she herself was married, to a sailor, and moved to Portsmouth.

Stephen’s mother’s second husband was a man called John Hayter, who had also been widowed. He was kind to Stephen but he wasn’t his father. Every time John smiled at him Stephen would clamp his eyes shut as if every vaguely paternal act from somebody else, every tiny kindness, took his real father further away from him. His memories were faint enough and he struggled to hold on to them. He remembered a shape rather than a person; the features of his face had dissipated among the wispy caverns of Stephen’s memory. He wanted to cling on to what he had of his father, especially his name, and John Hayter, for all his good intentions, was gradually erasing all of it.

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