“Irish Row” – a history

Mark Gorman continues his series on pre-suburban farms in Forest Gate and district (first episode here) by looking at the inhabitants and conditions in Irish Row during the 19th century. In doing so, he updates and elaborates on an earlier feature we ran on the area (here). The detailed story below is a testimony to the dire conditions and poverty endured by local agricultural workers 150 years ago.

 Where was "Irish Row"?

The exact location of Irish Row is elusive. It seems most likely that the name was attached to a group of buildings on what is now the corner of Romford Road, Balmoral Road and Katherine Road in Forest Gate. Irish Row has also been assumed to be the name given to a group of cottages on the north side of Romford Road, the site of which became stables in the late 19th century and is occupied today by a monumental mason. However, the evidence is far from clear. "Irish Row" appears in newspaper reports, census returns and official records, but seems to have been applied in different ways to the buildings grouped together around the junction of the road from Stratford to Ilford and Plashet Lane (sometimes called Red Post Lane) which is today's Katherine Road, stretching to Gipsy Lane (Green Street today).

The cottages on the north side of present-day Romford Road appear as “Ebor Cottages” on the contemporary OS maps. These were sold in 1845 as 8 brick-built cottages “with good gardens in front of the High road”, part of the Greenhill estate (which also included Woodgrange Farm). Ebor Cottages appear (in an 1864 notebook recording the perambulation of West Ham parish boundaries) as Farey’s Cottages, although Samuel Farey, a local surveyor, who lived in The Grove at Stratford, may only have owned one or two, perhaps bought in the 1845 sale. 

The 1865 OS 25" map shows only two of the "Ebor Cottages" in existence at that time, but this cannot be correct, as other OS maps of the same period show more houses on this site. (Ordnance Survey revisions did not always keep up with the rapidly changing local geography).

The 1841 census does not clarify the Irish Row question. Its entries for the houses south of the road to Romford appear to be working from west to east, but begin with William Maxwell, the farmer who was a tenant of Plashet Hall and Farm, which would suggest that the enumerator was working the other way! It then lists dwellings called "Irish Row Ramsden's Cottages" (possibly after Joseph Ramsden, a farmer in the small village of Plashet to the south who may have been the leaseholder - he certainly was the tenant of a field south of Romford road). The next group of houses is listed as "Irish Row", the "Upper Irish Row Ramsden's Cottages", after which come Sun Row and Sun Buildings. The list confusingly ends with Plashet Hall, the recorded occupant of which, William Streatfield, lived in the hamlet of Plashet, half a mile south. It is possible that the census enumerator was not working methodically, and loosely applying local names to dwellings.

This 25-inch Ordnance Survey map was one of several editions published in the 1860s. It shows only some of the cottages called Ebor Cottages. Other editions published at about this time show a longer group of dwellings. All tenements on the south side of the main road and King Harry Row down to Plashet Lane are show

By the 1860's a terrace and pub or beer-house (the "King Harry") had been built along Plashet Lane called King Harry Row. These were said to abut Irish Row and Sun Row, which stretched along Romford Road. In the 1861 census Sun Row is divided into an eastern and western section, with a group of cottages (Prospect Cottages, which still exists today) and a larger building called Prospect House in between. Another cluster of buildings, Orchard Place, also appears, and in 1891 an Orchard Alley is listed, as is "Sun Row Buildings" which in 1892 were described as being at the back of Sun Row. A discussion at a meeting of the local Board of Health in that year seems to indicate that it was well known that tenements crowded in behind those facing the main road had existed for half a century or more (Barking, East Ham etc Advertiser, 20 February 1892).

So Irish Row as almost certainly a group of tenements between Plashet Lane and Gipsy Lane. Probably the most reliable records of its location are the tithe apportionment map and entries of 1838. These list Sun Row and Prospect Row as two lines of "tenements under one roof" between Plashet Lane and Gipsy Lane. This suggests that the term "Row" was applied to a terrace of houses, in which case Irish Row would have had to be on the south side of Romford Road, since Ebor/Farey's Cottages on the north side were clearly individual dwellings.

The 1838 tithe map (Source: The Genealogist)  - see appendix for details of owners and occupiers. King Harry Row and Prospect Cottages were not yet built. In the 1841 census the occupants of plot no. 23 above are listed as living in “Irish Row Ramsden’s Cottages”. Joseph Ramsden was the tenant of plot no. 30 in the tithe records, suggesting that Irish Row was part of his property.

All this may reflect the fact that this group of tenements in multiple occupancy was very difficult to define, and defeated the best attempts of officialdom to clarify who was living where. Irish Row may have been a name applied both to a specific group of dwellings and a generic name for a rural slum which occupied this corner for most of the 19th century.

"Irish Row" and its inhabitants

Origins

These tenements existed over most of the 19^th century; they were first occupied in the early 1800s, and were still in use in the early 1890s.  Although relatively little evidence survives of the lives of those who lived in Irish Row and the surrounding tenements throughout the 19^th century the six censuses taken between 1841 and 1891 give some idea of their lives, as do occasional reports in the press.

That Irish migrants were the early occupiers is demonstrated by the 1841 census. Of the 48 household heads 29 were Irish born, as were 18 of their wives. They seem to have been a relatively settled community; of the 112 children living there 105 were locally born, with just 5 being born in Ireland. The ages of the children indicate that 14 families had lived locally since at least 1830, with 8 having probably arrived before the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Ten years later only 11 out of 37 household heads were Irish born, and more than half of these had already arrived in south-west Essex by the late 1830s. None of the 128 children in the 1851 census were born in Ireland, indicating that at least in this small farming community there had been very few incomers as a result of the Irish famine. In 1861 just 6 out of 52 household heads were Irish born, and all of these were long-term residents in the area. This pattern continues through until the last census (1891) before the demolition of the tenements, with evidence of very few arrivals. In the 1850s for example there may have been about half a dozen migrants, judging by the ages of their locally born children in the 1871 census.

Nevertheless, connections with Ireland seem to have been maintained; Irish surnames appear even among those who were born and grew up locally and the 1871 census lists one couple where Forest Gate-born Cornelius Hays had married Catherine Chidle in Ireland in 1856. Since she was born in Cork and the marriage took place in Cashel, Tipperary, it seems likely that Cornelius had his own family connections in Ireland. James and David Barry, both in their forties and both Irish born, lived with their families at 6 and 7 Orchard Place. All their children were born in East Ham, and their ages indicate that James and David (possibly brothers) had arrived in the 1850s. James’ wife Johanna was born in Ireland, but David’s wife Anne was from East Ham.  Perhaps one brother had paved the way to East Ham for the other. James Barry’s household included an Irish-born widower, also called James Barry, who was perhaps a cousin. From 1841 onwards a number of households contained Irish-born relatives (ageing parents as well as members of extended families) and lodgers.

Over the half century from 1841 to 1891 the number and proportion of locally-born household heads remained fairly constant at about half of the total. Incomers were predominantly from the south-east of England with a handful of Londoners. Irish Row must have been enlivened by the presence of the well over 100 children recorded in each census until 1881, and there were still over 50 children in 1891, when the number of households had fallen to 31. 

Two out of the three Prospect Cottages in 2023. They stood between the terraces of Sun Row East and West.

Employment

For much of its existence, Irish Row was occupied by farm labourers and their families. In 1841 nearly 70% (33 of 48) of the households were headed by an agricultural worker, rising to 78% (32 of 41) in 1851, and peaking at 80% (42 of 52) by 1861. Thereafter the percentage fell to a still substantial 69% (41 of 59) in 1871, but then declined dramatically to 6% (4 of 66) in 1881 and 12% in 1891 (4 of 31). The 1850s may have been the best years for the inhabitants of Irish Row. Not only were most male household heads working on local farms, a few of their wives (6 out of 50) were also farm workers, while others were orange sellers, a dressmaker, a “small shopkeeper” and a housekeeper. In fact the census may not give an accurate picture of the true involvement of whole families in farm labour; for instance on William Adams’ Plashet Hall Farm, where many Irish Row inhabitants were employed, families worked in groups on pulling, cleaning and bunching vegetables for market. (Essex Herald, 24 Jan 1865).

Between 1841 and 1891 the number and range of occupations other than agriculture rose significantly, though manual labourers were still the predominant group in the 1880s. As we have seen, farm work had however declined significantly by this time. Over the period the number of artisans, shopkeepers and factory workers rose gradually and by the 1880s a wide range of occupations were listed. In 1851 Prospect House on the Romford Road was a tambour lace factory staffed by girls from St George’s parish in Southwark, presumably farmed out by the parish to earn a living. Tambour lace was a method of decorating net by using a tambour hook and a frame. It was an Essex cottage industry centred on Coggeshall, and it is not clear what lace work the girls at Prospect House were doing. The trade was at its peak about 1850, but then declined as fashions changed and machine production came in. By 1861 the tambour lace makers were gone from Prospect House.  Behind King Harry Row was an “animal charcoal” factory, where for over two decades the bones of slaughtered horses were boiled down to produce fertiliser and other by-products, providing employment for some living in the tenements.

Living conditions

Throughout their existence these dwellings were barely fit for habitation. A graphic - if prejudiced - description of a visit to Irish Row about the year 1810 is in a memoir of the Quaker philanthropist Elizabeth Fry, who lived in the hamlet of Plashet, to the south of Romford Road (Cresswell, F: A Memoir of Elizabeth Fry (1886) pp 43-44):

"About half a mile from Plashet, on the road between Stratford and Ilford, the passer-by will find two long row of houses, with one larger one in the centre, if possible more dingy than the rest. At that time they were both squalid and dirty. Windows stuffed with old rags, or pasted over with brown paper, and the few remaining panes of glass refusing to perform their intended office from the accumulated dust of years; puddles of thick black water before the doors; children without shoes or stocking; mothers, whose matted locks escaped from remnants of caps which looked as though they could never have been white; pigs, on terms of most comfortable familiarity with the family; poultry, sharing the children's potatoes - all bespoke an Irish colony."

Little changed over the succeeding decades. Looking back over half a century in the early 1890s the chairman of the East Ham Local Board of Health recalled that in the 1840s-50s: "they have ten to twelve in a room ... there were two of them that had as many as fifty or sixty in the house at night. They used to take them in a penny-a-night". Even allowing for exaggeration, this seems to fit with the general pattern of occupation of these tenements. The census returns show many houses subdivided, with numerous "boarders" and relatives sharing accommodation, which was probably common practice locally. In a case heard at Ilford Petty Sessions in 1829 an unemployed Irish labourer declared that when he took in lodgers at the house he rented in Barking, they slept in the same room as his wife and family.

In 1853 the Essex Standard named Irish Row among a number of localities in West Ham where open sewers and cesspools were breeding grounds for disease, warned of the advent of cholera if no action were taken, and called for the establishment of a Local Board of Health. The following year there was a serious outbreak of cholera in West Ham.

Ten years later cases of typhus fever were reported in one house in Ebor Cottages, and the report noted that it had been endemic here and across the road in Sun Row for years. Although typhus is an animal-born disease, the prevalence here was ascribed to open sewers near the houses, about which the now-established Local Board of Health had done nothing. The houses, noted the report, were occupied by poor Irish families. In 1867 The Inspector of Nuisances finally served a notice on the landlord Samuel Farey to drain the cesspool and lay water on Ebor Cottages, but four years on the problem persisted, despite Farey's assurances that he had addressed them.  

Ebor Cottages, shown in the notes of the 1864 perambulation of West Ham Parish boundaries as Farey’s Cottages. The broken line marks the perambulation along the West Ham Parish boundary. “Gipsy Lane” (or Campbell Road) is Green Street today

In February 1871 an inquest was held over the death of Mary Ann Bailey, who lived with her bricklayer husband James in King Harry Row, a line of tenements which stretched down what was then called Plashet Lane (now Katherine Road). Reports of the inquest gave graphic descriptions of the conditions in which the family lived, showing that nothing had changed since Elizabeth Fry’s time.

“The house was one of a row of miserable hovels, abutting on Irish Row. Dark, low pitched, and mouldy rooms, bare of almost any furniture and exhibiting traces on every hand of the greatest poverty. In this den were crowded ten little children, five of whom had belonged to the deceased, and five belonged to a lodger.  The hungry-looking little things were but half clothed, and the whole abode wore an aspect of misery”. (Essex Times 25 Feb 1871).

Landlords and tenants

These tenements were owned by several landlords. By the 1860s the biggest landlords were the Oldaker family, who owned properties throughout East Ham and Ilford, and Stephen Carey, who owned the whole of King Harry Row, which consisted of 20 tenements, each of four rooms with gardens behind. There was also a pub, the King Harry. When the tenements were sold in 1876 they were yielding £220 a year in rent, with the pub providing another £25.

Another group of smaller-scale landlords typically had three properties each, possibly bought from the Oldakers as investments for a small income. In the late 1860s, for example, three owners each had three of the Sun Row tenements, charging £4 10s rent a year. At least two of these owners may have been widows. Meanwhile as we have seen Samuel Farey owned at least two of the cottages on the north side of the Romford road, bought in the sale of Woodgrange Farm in 1845, for which he was charging an annual rent of £6 10s. 

 

Carey’s factory was sold in 1876, but the business continued for a number of years. This advertisement is from 1888.

In addition to King Harry Row, Stephen Carey also owned the “animal charcoal factory”, a knacker’s yard where horse bones were boiled down, located behind King Harry Row and Sun Row. The factory produced fertiliser or “chemical manure” for local farms and a number of the tenants in Sun Row worked there. Carey obviously took his business seriously, having taken out patents on improved apparatus for “reburning animal charcoal” in the 1860s. Nevertheless some idea of the local impact of this factory may be had from the advertisement when it was sold in 1876, describing the property as “just outside the radius within which obnoxious businesses are prohibited”. A complaint about the “horse boiling” works was made to the East Ham Board of Health in 1878, and though it was stated that the nuisance had been removed the factory was still located there ten years later.

It is also notable that on the other side of Plashet Lane from King Harry Row was Plashet Hall (Potato Hall) the home of various large-scale tenant farmers during the nineteenth century. In the 1860s-70s William Adams and later his son, also William, had the tenancy of Plashet Hall Farm. In the early 1860s William senior employed more than 100 farm-workers, most of whom probably lived in the slums grouped around the corner of Plashet Lane and Romford Road. The Adams family would have looked out over the Irish Row tenements from their front windows.

The last years of Irish Row

Right up until their demolition the tenements clustered around Plashet Lane were in a wretched condition. In February 1892 the East Ham Board of Health heard from its “Outdoor Committee” about their inspection of Sun Row Buildings, which appeared to have been cottages at the rear of Sun Row itself, and may have been converted from wash-houses. The committee found the cottages “in a dilapidated state, and the w-c very damp from defective roof and flushing apparatus, and the approach to the cottage very dirty”. They recommended serving notice on the owners to make repairs. The landlord, J.W. Oldaker, wrote expressing surprise at the Medical Officer’s report, declaring that he would never allow his cottages to become unfit for habitation. In a justification familiar to slum landlords everywhere he then blamed everything on a single female tenant who would not leave despite receiving notice to quit, and was drunk and abusive. Oldaker concluded that the cottages were a bargain at 1s 9d a week.

Nevertheless the Board, having heard that the tenant had been removed to hospital, accepted the report. Some members wanted to go further and condemn the tenements, which were “an eyesore to the parish”, but one, Elias Keys, countered that though they were in bad condition they could be made habitable. Since (according to the 1881 census) Keys’ income came from “house property” this may have been a case of landlords sticking together. 

 

25-inch OS map (1897). The tenements along Romford Road had been demolished, though Prospect House & Cottages remained. King Harry Row was still standing in Plashet Lane/Red Post Lane but Ebor Cottages had been replaced by stables. The animal charcoal factory was now a smelting works.

The urbanisation of the area increased rapidly towards the end of the century. By the mid-1890s Sun Row had been demolished, and the “animal charcoal” works was also gone, replaced by a smelting works, which itself was the subject of an inspection by the Board of Health due to its smoke emissions. King Harry Row survived for some time longer, but by 1914 it too had disappeared.

 

The 1910 Valuation Office Survey, the so-called “Lloyd-George Domesday” survey, showing Ebor Cottages replaced by a row of stables

The site of Ebor Cottages may still be seen today in Balmoral Road, now a monumental mason’s premises, though the existing buildings were constructed as stables, which would have replaced the cottages. Prospect Cottages on Romford Road, which stood between what may have been two terraces forming Sun Row, also survive today.

 Appendix

Sun Row etc in Tithe Apportionment records

 

Date	Plot number	Owner	Occupier
April 1838	14 “Sun Field”	Executors of William Wickham Greenhill	William Maxwell
April 1838	15 “Paddock”	Now John Inyr Burges Esquire	George Lord
April 1838	16 “Rising Sun Inn & stables”	Now John Inyr Burges Esquire	George Lord
April 1838	17 “meadow”	Executors of William Wickham Greenhill	William Maxwell
April 1838	18 “Mansion and garden” (Plashet Hall)	Executors of William Wickham Greenhill	William Maxwell
April 1838	19 “Homestead”	Executors of William Wickham Greenhill	William Maxwell
April 1838	20 “Paddock”	John Dyer	John Dyer
April 1838	21 “Sun Row consisting of 12 tenements under 1 roof with yards” & “Sun Buildings behind the above consisting of 4 tenements under 1 roof with yards”	Executors of William Scoffins	Cornelius Sullivan Daniel Mahony Edward Castle  Eleanor Chard  George Smith  James Broker Jeremiah Driscoll  John Mullin Mary Murray Michael Michael Chard  Michael Stabbs Richard Westley Sarah Linnard Thomas Deller William Slater
April 1838	22 “Orchard”	John Dyer	John Dyer
April 1838	23 listed as “Irish Row Ramsden’s Cottages”* in 1841 census	John Dyer	John Cocks & Joseph Baker
April 1838	24 “House & garden”	John Dyer	John Dyer
April 1838	25 “malthouse”	John Dyer	John Dyer
April 1838	26 “beer shop & shed”	John Dyer	Matthew Guerrier
April 1838	27 “Prospect Row consisting of 12 tenements under 1 roof with yards”	Executors of William Scoffins	2 Unoccupied David Barry Dennis Kilfray James Cain James Hagan James Mahony John Lequade John Marrow John Ragan Julia Downey Owen Larkins
April 1838	28 “2 tenements under 1 roof with gardens”	Poor of Stepney	John Owens Simeon Dawson
April 1838	29 “Garden”	Poor of Stepney	John Owens
April 1838	30 “Colville Hall piece” arable	Poor of Stepney	Joseph Ramsden*
April 1838	31 “Paddock”	John Dyer	John Dyer

The farms of Wanstead Flats and Forest Gate – introduction

Local author and regular blog contributor, Mark Gorman, has undertaken extensive research on pre-suburban Forest Gate and surrounding areas. In doing so, he has produced an impressive account of the farms that dominated the locality, their produce, workforces and markets, between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

We will run a series of articles focussing on the history of these farms, whose legacies survive today in the names of roads and geographic areas in and around Forest Gate. In this opening chapter, Mark provides an introduction to farming in the locality. Subsequent, more detailed, articles on some of the farms will appear regularly on this blog over the coming months.

The farms of Wanstead Flats and Forest Gate – introduction

Forest Gate and Wanstead Flats today show very few signs of their rural past, but before the development of the housing which now surround the Flats the area around the open spaces of the common was dotted with fields and farms. Meanwhile modern Forest Gate developed out of a small hamlet surrounded by farms. This past which now seems so remote is in fact surprisingly recent; the last farm-house on the Flats was demolished in 1963 (even though by then it had become a petrol filling station on Aldersbrook Road), and traces of these farms can still be found in the area today.

 Over the coming months we will take a look at some of the farms which existed around Wanstead Flats and Forest Gate, focussing particularly on their later history in the 19^th century as urbanisation began to spread, first slowly and by the 1870s in a wave which eventually swept away nearly all traces of the area’s rural past. We’ll visit Cann Hall, west of the Flats towards Leytonstone, the two Aldersbrook Farms, Hamfrith Farm and Woodgrange Farm, both south of the Flats in Forest Gate, Plashet Hall Farm on the highway between Stratford and Ilford, and two smaller farms or smallholdings, Druitt’s Farm on Wanstead Flats near the City of London cemetery, and Rabbits Farm on Romford Road.

 We’ll go over to East Ham to Jews Farm, an agricultural enterprise which became a local agro-industry over the course of the later 19^th century, and played a minor role in the growth of women’s trade unionism.  We’ll also take a look at the history of a farmworker community centred around a group of tenements known collectively as “Irish Row” which stood on what is now Romford Road.

 Agriculture in the area

From the Anglo-Saxon period, and perhaps even earlier, the southern part of Epping Forest was an area of agricultural production, both through grazing animals and growing crops. Over centuries in the parishes of the southern forest land was cleared and fields formed. Much of the production was for local consumption, but as time went on and London began to grow, the importance of commercial agriculture grew. This part of south-west Essex was close enough to London to be a prime provider of produce for the ever-growing metropolitan market. 

Chapman and Andre’s map of Essex (1777) showing some of the local farms. Hamfrith Farm is incorrectly named “Wood Grage” (Woodgrange). The actual Woodgrange Farm is unnamed, south of the Eagle & Child. “Kan Hall” & the first Aldersbrook Farm are also marked, as is Jews farm in East Ham.

Until the late 1600s Londoners' diest were meat and bread based; fruit and vegetables were not widely eaten. It was therefore not until the mid-18th century that market gardens began to be significant in local farming, though potatoes had been a staple crop of the local farmers in the West Ham parish for centuries. The parish was said to be one of the poorest near London. One farmer, writing probaly in the late 17th - early 18th century, complained that although "the planting of Potatoes ... sometimes helps us to pay our REnts and that not once in three years". He believed that the closeness to London actually undermined the local economy.

As London expanded, this began to change. The stimulus of the metropolitan market caused local farmers in both East and West Ham to begin to grow market garden produce on a commercail scale. Already in the 1750s potatoes and turnips were imporatnt local crops. In 1974-5 about 450 acress were sown with potatoes and a further 120 acres with cabbages and other vegetables, representing in all over half the arable area of the parish. Daniel Lysosn described the area and its importance for the London food market in "The Environs of London", published in 1796 -

 

“In proportion as this great town has increased in population and opulence, the demand for every species of garden luxury has increased also; and, from time to time, fields have in consequence been converted into garden-ground, till a considerable proportion of the land within a few miles of London became occupied for that purpose. The culture of garden-ground is principally confined to those parishes which lie within a moderate distance of the river, on account of the convenience of water-carriage for manure, which, since the prodigious increase of carriages, as well of hackney and stage coaches as of those kept by private families, is procured in great abundance from the London stables”.

 In apparent contradiction of this account Thomas Milne’s Land Use Map of 1800 showed that the area around Forest Gate was still mainly arable, and the Flats were surrounded to the west and south by meadows and fields of grain crops. According to Milne it was only south of the main road to Ilford that market gardens were appearing. Unfortunately his map does not cover East Ham where more market gardens may have been located (see map).  Given Lyson’s comments above it is possible that Milne underestimated the extent of local market gardens.

Potatoes and the growth of London

Notwithstanding Milne's map. much evidence points to the increasing emphasis on growing vegetables for the metropolitan market. Three factors played a role in the growth of commercial market gardening locally. Free draining soil, the availability of a ready supply of manure and the proximity of "an insatiable market for produce" were key reasons for the success of commercail vegetable production. Indeed such was the importance of the potato crop on the land around Forest Gate at this time that Plashet Hall, a large mansion built by the Greenhill family on the corner of Plashet Lane (now Katherine Road) and the main road to Romford, became known as Potato Hall, even appearing with this name on an early Ordnance Survey map, and the name survived at least until the 1870s.

Thomas Milne’s Land Use Map (1800): Forest Gate was mainly arable fields (yellow); market gardens (blue) were appearing south of Romford Road. Upton was mainly large houses with parks (pink).

Athough the Greenhills were pioneers of commercial potato production, after 1800 other local producers were also growing potato crops and sending them into Spitalfields market (the main destination for Essex vegetable crops) for sale. The proximity of the metropolitan market meant that produce could be sent in daily, the carts leaving overnight to arrive at Spitalfields by early morning. The need for the manure meant that the returning carts were loaded at collection points (such as the Truman brewery in Mile End Road) and brought back to be spread on the fields immediately. 

The opening of the Eastern Counties Railway in 1838 meant that crops could be moved into London even more quickly and cheaply, but this soon proved to be a double-edged sword for local market gardens As a commentator in the 1850s pointed out, "distant counties now compete with all these gardens and gardeners, being able to do so by the railway facilities. Peas, asparagus, new potatoes are thus brought, to the advantage of the London consumers, if not of the suburban growers." Indeed, when the Great Eastern railway (successor company to the Eastern Counties) opened a wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Stratford in October 1879 the dealers who set up there were all from East Anglia, with none locally based.

Part of Forest Gate and the road to Ilford and Romford on the Ordnance Survey first edition map, possibly a draft from the 1790s. Plashet Hall ia marked as "Potatoe [sic] Hall". Irish Row was probably among the dwellings west of Potatoe Hall on the Romford road.

 

 

 

 

In the 1840s local potato crops were affected by the same disease as in Ireland, but unlike the Irish situation potato blight locally did not impact on the profitability of local farming. With the huge metropolitan market on their doorstep farmers were able to adapt to both growing conditions and market demand by diversifying into other vegetable crops. When blight struck the potato crop at Woodgrange Farm in the 1840s the whole crop was sold at a heavy loss, but this was recouped when the land was ploughed and replanted with cabbages. From the early years of the century the high quality of the "Imperial East Ham Cabbage" variety meant that it was sold by seedsmen across the country. Local growers sold cabbages into the London markets in large quantities. Peas and onions were also grown extensively.

 Farmers and their workers

Until the mid-19th century farming in the Forest gate area was a profitable business. Most farms were rented by tenants, who made a good living supplying the nearby metropolitan market. A few families farmed in the area over several decades, and names such as Adams, Lake, Greenhill and Circuit reappear consistently. James Adams, who died in 1832, had farmed in Plaistow, and from 1843 his son, William, was the tenant at Woodgrange Farm, which, which tigether with Plashet Hall Farm  gave him an estae of over 800 acres and a workforce of 116 men by the early 1860s. The lakes farmed at Cann Hall and Aldersbrook, while the Greenhill family had extensive lands across Forest gate and East Ham, including both Hamfrith and Plashet Hall Farm before the family's finacial difficulties foreced the sale of their properties in the 1830s-40s. Thomas Circuit farmed extensive market gardens in East ham, specialising in onion production, a business eventually taken over by Crosse and Blackwell.

The scale of these operations is illustrated by a description of William Adams' business in the 1860s. On his 850-acre Plashet Hall Farm he was employing 116 workers, with an annual wage bill of over £6,000. Adams' total outgoings, including wages, rent, rates and tithes, commissions to salesmen in the metropolitan wholesale markets and contracts to buy manure from large-scale stables, cowhouses and breweries in London amounted to £20,000 annually (well over £1 million today).

Adams was farming on an industrial scale, Each year production per acre was up to 70 tons of cabbages and greens, 12 to 20 tons of carrots and 8 to 12 tons of potatoes, followed by 10 to 14 tons of onions, and then by a further cropping of greens and cabbages. "As soon as one crop is off another is put in; the only respite is in the winter time, before the onion crop, when it is left bare for season frost. The land is being perpetaully robbed."

This intensity of cropping could only be sustained by abundant application of manure. 80 tons of dung per acre was a normal dressing, and the soil was drained and deep ploughed to enable the huge quanity of manure to work into the roots of the plants. The smell which must have hung over the area throughout the year can only be imagined. William Adams was also an innovator; like his neighbour Chamberlayne Hickman Lake at Cann Hall he experimented with steam ploughs. "The land about East Ham lies in large and open fields, and is admirably adapted for steam cultivation; and Mr Adams is on the point of introducing the steam plough. It will be almost the first introduction of it into the business of growing vegetables for the London market, to which it is nevertheless perfectly adapted". The Gardeners Chronicle could only describe these operations in industrial terms - "We do not suppose that there is a larger manufactory of food for London anywhere."

The first migrant workers

Potato growing also attracted the arrival of Forest Gate's first group of overseas migrants. By the late 18th century Irish migrants were coming to both East and West Ham to provide labour for potato growing. An estimate of when the first Irish workers and their families arrived is difficult to establish, though Irish migrants were living in the Forest gate area by the early 1780s. We know little of their circumstances, and sources such as vestry minutes and newspaper reports usually focussed only on the crime and disorder which they claimed was associated with Irish migrants. For example, it was reported in 1790 that a large body of men, who said they were Irish, had commited armed assaults in the parish. In 1810 the newspapers reported the sensational murder of John Bolding, the landlord of the eagle and Child after "a large body of Irish labourers" broke into the pub. Six were found guilty and three were executed for the crime.  

Despite what the newspapers thought, the Irish migrants formed the backbone of local agriculture from the late 1700s onwards. They were employed in numbers by the local farmers; in the 1820s John Greenhill at Hamfrith and Richard Gregory at Woodgrange Farm both had significant Irish workforces. Irish migration seems to have peaked around 1816, in the economic downturn that followed the ending of the Napoleonic Wars, and then again in 1831. 

The murder of John Bolding at the Eagle & Child 1810

 

Many of the migrant families were living in poverty, but received little sympathy  from the local parishes, who were mainly concerned about the impact on the Poor Rate. A meeting of West Ham vestry in February 1819 heard that numbers of "the poor" had been rapidly increasing in the parish since 1815, particularly during winter months and "that the great increase of the poor are, for the most part, of the Irish labourers, who in the summer season, go to different parts of the County [i.e. Essex] to Harvest Stock, Hop picking &c; and after these works are over, they return into this Parish, and are employed in the Neighbourhood for a few weeks in getting up Potatoes, and upon the finish of that Stock (about the beginning of November) they with their wives and families quarter themselves upon and are mainatined by the Parish until the next Spring and the scarcity of Employment has been such that very few get any Stock to ease the parish of the burthen of the maintenance of themselves and Families, and altho' the Workhouse has been greatly enlarged and improved it is still found very inadequate in size to the increasing number of poor who apply for admission."

Ten years later the vestry noted that the workhouse had over 200 inmates, "and also the out Door poor ... have been much increasing" and warned that the Poor Rate might have to be increased "if some means are not adopted to avoid the burthen of the Irish poor."

In 1833 the neighbouring parish of East Ham was said to be "overwhelmed with Irish poor", who it was claimed made up 3/4 of the local population.

The Poor Rate was paid by all owners and occupiers of property within the parish

 

Parliamentary acts in the 18th-early 19th century had given magistrates the power to return Scottish and Irish "vagrants" on application from the local overseers of the poor, and East Ham parish was said to be removing 50-60 "Irish vagrants" daily (a number which seems very high and is probaly greatly exaggerated), at a cost to the parish of £4-5. This was administered under a system of removal orders (known as passes) by which "vagrants" were sent to their home parish with a small cash amount. In 1833 a parliamentary select committee on Irish vagrants reported that the pass system was abused by Irish and Scottish migrants who applied for passes, then simply disappeared to another parish and later returned to claim further poor relief. As a result, another parliamentary act tightened the law, and migrants began to be sent back directly by ship.

Despite these draconian measures, there seem to have been very few cases of repatriation enforced by the local parishes. On occasion the Essex magistrates restrained the zeal of parish authorities to remove migrants, by applying a principle they called "moral settlement", where migrants could prove lengthy residence locally. Such a case was heard at Ilford petty sessions in 1829, when two Irish widows appealed against the attempt of West Ham parish officers to expel them. They said they had lived in the parish for 15 years, where both their husbands died, and had no family connections in Ireland. The magistrate, the redoubtable R.W.Hall Dare, declared that if the women could prove their local residence over 15 years they could claim moral settlement.

It was more common for magistrates to authorise specific cash sums of poor relief for local workers, which due to the seasonal nature of local farm work tended to spike in the winter months. Magistrates were not always sympathetic to claims, declaring profligacy in the summer months was the cause of penury in the winter, and often committing claimants and their families to the workhouse. 

Despite the claims of the parish authorities, there is little evidence of large numbers of migrants from Ireland arriving in East or West Ham after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Even the famine years in the 1840s do not seem to have led to a significant increase in migrants locally, although nationally very large numbers arrived, particularly in the peak famine year of 1847. From 1845 the East Ham potato crops were affected by disease, which may help explain why there was not a larger influx of people fleeing famine in Ireland. 

"Irish Row"

From their first arrival, many Irish migrants were living in poor conditions, and many families lived in a group of houses collectively named as "Irish Row". This little hamlet clustered around the corner of the road to Ilford and Romford (now Romford Road), on the corner of what was then called Plashet Lane to the south, and is now Katherine Road. The earliest references to these tenements are from about 1811, and they were still in existence in the early 1890s. Occupied for most of this time predominantly by farm workers, Irish Row and its neighbouring tenements formed some of the poorest housing in the area, bringing into question the idea of pre-development Forest Gate as a rural idyll. A more detailed account of Irish Row will feature in a future blog.

Wages and poverty

 By the mid 19th century this rural way of life was increasingly impacted by urban development. A lifelong resident of East Ham recalled in the early 1930s that 50 years previously there had been market gardens on both sides of the road from the site of the future East Ham town hall to Manor Park. Yet housebuilding was gathering pace, and from the 1860s some farmers were beginning to relocate from the area.

Local farms needed significant labour to maintain the intensity of their production. It seems that rather than directly paying their whole workforce they employed a contract system, rather like that in operation on the local brickfields. Thus William Adams, whose labour bill varied between £70 a week in winter and nearly £200 a week in spring and summer, paid over the wages to foremen with whom he had contracted. These were either groups of men, working on a share basis, or where women and children were also employed, families could be working together. Probably households in Irish Row were working in this way. Thomas Circuit, who was growing onions for pickling at Jews Farm in East Ham employed 600 men, women and boys in pulling, carting and peeling onions for pickling during the summer months. His wage bill was £2OO weekly (about £12,000 today). Much of this work was done by women who were paid by the rod of ground (approximately 5 metres). During the harvest season Circuit was said to be making about 1500 different payments daily, as his employees received their wages three or four times a day.

 Farm worker wages in south-west Essex during the first half of the nineteenth century were probably higher than elsewhere in England. Local farm productivity seems to have been high, and market gardening yielded good profits. A gang of 20 workers on Woodgrange Farm in the 1830s could lift 12-13 tons of potatoes daily, earning 35/- (£1.15p) a week each, equivalent to the earnings of a skilled artisan. A carter on the same farm earned 18/- weekly. Towards the end of the following decade, a carter could be earning 25-28/- a week locally.

 However, work was seasonal and insecure, and even during harvest periods was not guaranteed. In 1852 Thomas Circuit refused pea-picking work to a group of “mainly Irish” labourers, as he already had enough hands. This resulted in a violent confrontation and damaged to crops before the police arrived to disperse the crowd. Competition between workers could also be intense. In 1830 Irish and Scottish workers at Woodgrange Farm were in dispute over the Scots’ proposal to plough up potatoes rather than dig them with spades. The confrontation ended with the prosecution of one of the Irishmen for assault.

 Some farm workers could provide for themselves from their own gardens or from rented allotments. In 1842 The Gardener’s Chronicle covering the South Essex Horticultural Show

reported that “Upwards of 30 prizes were awarded to Cottagers for fruit and vegetables, mostly grown on the allotments let out by S. Gurney, Esq., Upton: they thus receive a double reward, in the superior quality and abundant crop, and also the value of the prizes-varying in amount from 5s. to nearly 30s, each”. It was also common to allow “gleaning” of fields after a crop had been harvested, a practice which often shaded over into theft of crops.

 Thefts from farms

The regular newspaper reports of thefts from local farms, usually involving farm employees, also testify to the difficulty of surviving on wages alone. In the 1830s Richard Gregory of Woodgrange Farm claimed that it was a common practice for farm workers to steal items overnight and store or sell them in local inns (notably the Pigeons on the Romford highway). Twenty years later the thefts were continuing, despite harsh sentences for offenders. In 1853 James Ainsworth, an ostler at the Pigeons was sentenced to transportation for 14 years after being convicted of receiving a large consignment of oats stolen overnight from a barn at Woodgrange Farm. Produce was also stolen from farm waggons as they made their way into London in the early hours of the morning.

The Pigeons pub before 1885, showing farm carts with produce for the London market outside

 

Gregory and Adams both alleged that carters taking produce into London would stop at pubs along the way and sell items ranging from farm stock to the oats they had been given to feed their horses. Even manure had a value. In 1871 three workers from Plashet Hall Farm were convicted of stealing dung belonging to their employer at Truman’s brewery, each receiving one month’s hard labour. Gates and even sections of hedges were also taken, and thefts of growing crops were very common, a problem not just for large-scale farmers but also smallholders.  As we have seen some claimed that gleaning after harvests was a practice allowed by local farmers, and two “destitute-looking women” caught taking onions from a field in Gipsy Lane got off with a caution. Two months later one of William Adams’ employees was not so fortunate after stealing onions; he received a sentence of two months’ hard labour. 

 Poverty was undoubtedly a major factor in these thefts, many of which were of small quantities, probably to feed families. During the campaign against the Corn Laws in the 1840s evidence was produced from West Ham that “sober and industrious men” who were being paid the going rate for farm labour locally were only able to feed their families “the very refuse of potatoes, without meat or bread”.  Farm workers had little sympathy from employers like Gregory and Adams however. Gregory maintained that his neighbours were afraid to prosecute thieves for fear of having their homes set on fire or animals killed. He blamed the opening of a beer shop in Forest Gate for exacerbating the problem.  

Urbanisation and the end of farming 

By the mid-19th century this rural way of life was increasingly impacted by urban development. A lifelong resident of East Ham recalled in the early 1930s that 50 years previously there had been market gardens on both sides of the road from the site of the future East Ham town hall to Manor Park. Yet housebuilding was gathering pace, and from the 1860s some local farmers were beginnig to relocate from the area. Between 1861 and 1863 Thomas Circuit left his farm at  North End (near East Ham station) moved out to Rainham, In the next few years land round his farm in Jews Farm Lane (now East Avenue E12) was sold for building, although in a sign of the industrialisation of agriculture Crosse and Blackwell maintained Circuit’s picking sheds until the 1890s. William Adams’ son, also William, and his business partner sold up at Plashet Hall Farm and moved out to Dagenham in 1879, and Plashet Hall was never again a solely agricultural enterprise. Also in the 1870s the lands of Woodgrange and Hamfrith were sold for building, as was Cann Hall a decade later.

While many local farms were sold, operations on those that remained were increasingly curtailed. Market gardening continued, though on a much smaller scale than previously.

Census firgures and local directories from the 1840s to the 1860s  track the rise and decline of farming locally. Building development came to West Ham parish earlier than East Ham, so farms disappeared here some years before they did in the neighbouring parish. At mid-century, West Ham remained essentially a rural community. It contained 1,100 acres of arable (including market gardens), 2,600 acres of meadow and pasture, 8 acres of woodland, 62 acres of domestic gardnes and orchards and 82 acres of osiers and reeds. By 1905 only 127 acres of arable farmland remained, most of it east of Prince Regent Lane. The last market-garden at Plaistow is said to have closed in 1905, and in the same year the closure of some watercress beds near Temple Mills, suspected of spreading cholera was recommended.

East Ham was to follow this pattern a couple of decades later. In 1839 a local directory records 16 farms in East Ham, of which 5 were over 100 acres. This number remianed the same in 1863 and 7 were described as market gardens.

Census records of farm labourers tell a similar story. The number of male agricultural workers in East Ham rose from 266 in the 1841 census to 360 ten years later. By the early 1860s though, numbers had declined to 166, reflecting the decline of agriculture as urban development gathered pace.

Beddall's Farm, Newham's last working farm, in East Ham, Manor way, Beckton. Picture from 1970s, some years after the farm's closure. 

Although in the mid-1880s there were still 9 farmers in East Ham, the remaining holdings had largely disappeared by the eve of the first world war, though the last farm did not close until the 1960s. 

However, of the farms around Forest Gate, only Aldersbrook dairy herd could claim to retain any resemblance to a working farm after 1918. Over the course of no more than half a century a way of life that had existed since the first settlements of East and West Ham had disappeared.