History of No.68 Dean Street
London W1D 4QJ
We know from the Survey of London, the original house on this site dated from the late 1680s. It was probably constructed by Nicholas Barbon [d.1698] who held a forty-six-year leasehold interest ultimately derived from the Crown. Barbon was Member of Parliament for Bramber 1690 and 1698. He introduced the concept of fire insurance into England; and wrote two treatises on raising the value of the coinage. He built a great many houses in central London in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666. Sadly, his reputation as a jerry-builder preceded him. In 1698, when the foundations were being laid for Red Lion Square, Holborn, 'the local people came in a mob and thrashed his workmen'. (Footnote 1) Barbon was probably the son of Praise-God Barebones [1598-1679] the anabaptist, and Fleet Street leather-seller. A some time Member of Parliament for the City of London, Barebones opposed the restoration of Charles II to the throne and circulated in pamphlet form a highly critical account of Charles's life in exile in Holland. He also petitioned Parliament not to take him back. For these activities he was confined after the Restoration in the Tower of London for some time.
Not surprisingly, Nicholas Barbon's original houses in Dean Street did not long survive; and the street was almost entirely rebuilt under a longer leasehold interest between 1731 and 1735. The earliest surviving houses date from this period. In 1697 a 99-year Crown lease had been acquired by Thomas Pitt M.P. of Old Sarum, Wiltshire, Governor of Fort St. George at Madras, owner of the fabulous Pitt Diamond and 'in whom the family's strain of hard rapacity seems to have been concentrated'. (Footnote 2)
The first lease of the present No.68 Dean Street was dated 20 March 1731-2 for a term of a hundred and two and a quarter years from Lady Day [25 March] 1731, the year No.10 Downing Street became the official residence of the Prime Minister. The Pitt Estate's lessee was a carpenter named John Meard, who probably built the house and whose name is commemorated in Meard Street, adjacent. The dwelling had a frontage to Dean Street of twenty feet ten inches.
The first occupant of the property was Sir William Sanderson of Combe, Greenwich, 2nd baronet. Records for 1736 reveal Sanderson paying £1 2s 6d rates for the property. He is shown in the Survey of London as occupying the house from 1735 to 1737. Sanderson's father had been created a baronet 19 July 1720. The son seems to have lived a life of no great distinction and on his death without issue in 1760 the line and the dignity both died out.
Meard seems to have had difficulty letting the house after the departure of Sir William Sanderson in 1737 and is himself shown as the rate-payer [and possibly, but not certainly, the occupant] in 1741. By 1746 the rate-payer was 'James Gordon Esquire', of whom nothing is known.
About 1750 No.68 was acquired by [Arthur] Benjamin Lane who in 1759 was paying rates of £1 6s 0d on a rateable value of £40. Lane was a ship and insurance broker. The eighth edition of the London Post Office Annual Directory [1807] places his offices at No.4 Birchin Lane, City, a thoroughfare long since vanished. (Footnote 3)
Benjamin Lane continues to appear as the rate-payer for No.68 Dean Street until about 1779. He was replaced here soon after this date, and certainly before 1784, by Thomas Rendall, late a surgeon in the Royal Navy. In his civilian practice, cases would have come to Rendall singly, perhaps even sparsely. As a naval surgeon he had worked under conditions which - sooner or later - must have called upon him to do the work of twelve: the day when his cockpit began to fill with halves of men and the decks ran, all too literally, with blood. In this smoking, dust-filled shambles, with tourniquets, hot irons and bubbling pitch, Thomas Rendall would have sought to salvage such portions of the King's servants as seemed worth saving, while the deck tilted, plunged and shuddered beneath his feet. Many of his patients must have died [as they would have died had he not sawn them] but in every seaport, and on many a quarter-deck, the presence of sailors with hooks for hands and pegs for legs, would have stood testimony to his rough skill.
At some point No.68 must have been sub-let by Rendall ['Rendell' in some records] because Boyle's Court Guide for 1806 lists it as the London home of General Count Behague. Exasperatingly this gentleman has no notice in the Dictionary of National Biography. He receives no mention in the notice of any one else in that great work (footnote 4) nor does he feature in any of the other standard works of biographical reference, including my copy of the Almanac de Gotha. [This is not to say that he may not feature in some earlier edition.]
Thomas Rendall's widow continues, to feature for No.68 Dean Street until her death circa 1832. The house then passed to another surgeon, Robert Wade, who was to occupy it until his death about 1874. The London & Provincial Medical Directory for 1864 has this to say of him:
68, Dean Street W - Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in England [Hon.] 1844. Fellow of the Royal Medical Chirurgeons and of the Medical Society of London. Senior Surgeon, Western General Dispensary. Late Surgeon, Royal Metropolitan Infirmary for Children and Lecturer on Pathological Anatomy. Author of 'Address to the Medical Profession upon the Neglect of the Studies of Physiology and Morbid Anatomy' [1831]; 'Stricture of the Urethra, its Complications and Effects, a Practical Treatise on the Nature and Treatment of those Affections' [4th edition 1860]; To the Lancet in 1845 he contributed an article entitled 'Remarks on Strangulated Hernia, reduced en masse, with a Case in which an Operation was successfully Performed'.
In 1851 Robert Wade contributed an article, very probably written in this house, to the Medical Times, entitled: Practical Observations of the Treatment of Permanent Stricture of the Urethra. To the Medical Chirurgical Transactions of 1849 he contributed Exfoliation of the Anterior Arch of the Atlas. Wade seems also to have been in the forefront of vaccination for the masses. The London Post Office directories for 1866 showing him sharing No.68 with the National Vaccine Establishment, with which he is known to have been associated and of which he may have been the director. The National Vaccine Establishment had grown out of the Jennerian Institution, founded by the pioneer of vaccination, Dr. Edward Jenner [1749-1823]. It had been formed for the promotion of vaccination 'for the extermination of the small-pox'. It was replaced [with government aid] in 1808 by the National Vaccine Establishment, of which Dr. Jenner was the first director.
At the taking of the 1871 census, Robert Wade was sixty-five years of age. He gave his occupation as 'surgeon' and his place of birth as 'Woodbridge, Suffolk'. He shared No.68 with his wife, Margaret 50, and with their three children, Margaret 26, Susan 22 and William George 24, described as 'architect'. The family kept two resident domestics, John Thomas Guntlett 17 and Mary Moylen 60, who was Irish. Her presence here suggests that her employers were either liberal-minded or desperate. Many householders refused to employ Irish domestics because of what was perceived as their untrustworthy reputation, their instability, and what was called 'a proclivity for drink'.
The London Post Office directories for 1874 list No.68 Dean Street in the occupation of a home for fallen women run as St. Mary's Mission and superintended by the sisters of St. John the Baptist. This worthy undertaking seems not to have long survived; because the 1881 census shows the house in multi-occupation, accommodating no less than thirty-one souls. One suspects it must then have been a fairly desperate sort of place, a typical Victorian 'rookery', so-called from the tendency of rooks to congregate and nest-build together. By the standards of the time, No.68 offered relatively spacious accommodation.
Although it is hard for the modern mind to comprehend such squalor, it was not unusual for forty people to be occupying a single building, with two or even more families per room. They would sleep in shifts unsegregated by sex. In Victorian London many were simply starving slowly to death. Disease in such rookeries was an ever-present spectre, many of the thoroughfares being undrained, unventilated, steeped in black mud and corrupt water, reeking with such smells as can scarcely be believed - what Dickens described as: 'a large medley of shabbiness, shrinking out of sight'. This was Victorian England at its most uncaring. In 1881 No.68 Dean Street was accommodating two tailors, 'a tailor's cutter [unemployed]' a cabinet-maker who doubled as an undertaker, a dressmaker, a maker of waistcoats, a maid-of-all-work, a brass finisher, and a police constable, William Smith 27, who must have brought an air of respectability to the property. William Smith was attached to Vine Street police station under Chief Inspector Henry Hambling.
Fifteen minutes before going on duty, Smith and his fellow constables would have paraded for inspection and to hear the latest 'police orders' - largely descriptions of stolen property and of men wanted for interview. If the parade was for night duty, lanterns had to be filled and trimmed and flasks replenished with cold tea, which would later be heated by an ingenious little spirit lamp fitted to the base of the lantern. At the given hour, a long line of constables issued from the station house in Vine Street, snaking into the road and swinging along under the charge of the sergeant. As each duty-post was reached the man at the rear of the column 'fell out', until the entire column had been posted.
If he was a typical London policeman, William Smith would have spent eight hours each day pounding the pavements, either in a single spell or in two terms of four hours each. His tasks almost defy enumeration. He would have had to quell disturbances, watch doubtful characters, seize pickpockets, pursue errant horses, arbitrate in marital disputes, quieten noisy tenants, accost runaways, pilot the elderly and report those cabmen who ill-treated their horses. Policemen such as William Smith also enjoyed a profitable sideline to which their superiors usually turned a blind eye. In an age before the existence of security firms and guard patrols, it was quite common for householders to come to private arrangements with members of the metropolitan police, who in exchange for rent-free accommodation agreed to house-sit vacant properties until such times as a suitable buyer or tenant could be found for them.
The 1891 census shows No.68 Dean Street still in multi-occupation, housing eighteen souls, nine of whom were aged seventeen or younger. Part of the premises was occupied by a Jewish tailor, born in Poland, named Solomon Spielman 37, his wife and six young children. One room was let to Ellen Keith 44, a charwoman, and her 13-year-old son, Charles, who was employed by the Post Office as an errand boy. Other occupations included envelope-folder, embroiderer, waistcoat-maker and apprentice.
By 1901 the living quarters at No.68 seem largely to have been consolidated into the occupation of the Spielman family. Solomon's daughter, Miriam 22, was now employed as a teacher in an elementary school. Her pay would have been about £60 a year. [Her male counterpart earned about £94.] Almost half the teachers nationwide were completely unqualified, had risen, so to speak, 'through the ranks', from early beginnings as pupil-teachers. (Footnote 5) This lack of qualification was not considered of any particular note because academic achievement was generally considered to be subservient to a teacher's moral qualities. Neatness and plainness were the order of the day and it was generally stipulated by the governors or the School Board that 'no flower, ornament or other finery should be worn'. Discretion was everything; and if a female teacher married she stood every chance of forfeiting her employment. Social aspirations, too, had to be held in check. As the Quarterly Review observed in 1879, where pretensions were shown by teachers they were to be 'crushed and checked without mercy'. For all this, teaching did enable young women of relatively humble backgrounds to enter a respectable profession with modest prestige. The conditions of employment were far better than those which prevailed in domestic service, in factories or in dressmaking - the most common jobs open to females at this date.
Almost none of those who occupied this property after the death of Robert Wade in the 1870s appear for it in the London Post Office directories. They were chiefly ordinary folk in a small way of trade, hardly noticed by directory publishers and perhaps not much noticed by the authorities either.
The dwelling also has a second commercial history, that of those who worked but did not live here. Among the latter can be counted Edith Hamilton, who ran a shirt-making business from No.68 in the early 1860s but who features on none of the census returns.
Similarly, the firm of John and George Benford, afterwards Benford & O'Shea, occupied the ground and basement floors of the property from 1869 to 1983, although no one associated with the firm seems to have lived here on anything approaching a permanent basis. Although Benford & O'Shea are often termed watchmakers, they were actually 'watch material dealers'. They appear on Goad's fire insurance map of 1934 as suppliers of 'jewellers' requisites'. They were thus all-important to the watch-making trade. Although the art of watch-making has always been highly regarded, many of those who called themselves watchmakers were really no more than middle-men. They relied heavily on firms such as Benford & O'Shea. As a contemporary source noted: 'the steel pinions are drawn at the mill so that the watchmaker has only to file down the points ... the springs are made by a tradesman who does nothing else, and the chains by another. The works are given to the finisher, and the gilder adjusts it to the proper time. The watchmaker puts his name on the plate ... though he has not made in his shop the smallest wheel belonging to it.'
Bryan Burrough, a some time chairman of the Soho Society noted that post war George Benford & O'Shea 'horological sundriesmen to the Trade', were still taking on apprentices. (Footnote 6) They continue to feature for No.68 Dean Street until 1983. When they finally closed their doors after a span of a hundred and fourteen years, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph (Footnote 7) wrote that their quaint old shop front 'conceals an array of mahogany cases containing the levers, cogs and glasses to be found among the several million components in the firm's catalogue. More than half a century after he arrived as a 14-year-old apprentice, Alfred Wood tells me he can pinpoint within seconds any part needed by a watch repairer. The other day his shop took on the repair of an antique striking pocket watch for a Canadian. The work to 106 hours and cost £1,500, but the customer wrote to thank them for a 'unique service'. From tomorrow, alas, no more'.