Yet perhaps the most curious and notable resident of Clerkenwell was Thomas Britton, known everywhere as “the musical small-coal man.” He was an itinerant vendor of coals who lived above his coal-shed in Jerusalem Passage, between Clerkenwell Green and St. John’s Square; despite his humble trade, in the words of Walford’s Old and New London, he “cultivated the highest branches of music, and drew round him for years all the great musicians of the day, including even the giant Handel.” The musicians met every Thursday evening, in his room above the coal-shed; to reach this temporary concert hall, they had to climb a ladder or, as Britton put it in his invitations:
Vpon Thursdays repair
To my palace, and there
Hobble up stair by stair.
Ned Ward described Britton’s house as “not much higher than a canarypipe, and the window of his State-Room but very little bigger than the Bunghole of a Cask.” He himself played the viol di gamba, in the company of his excellent musicians, and afterwards served coffee to his distinguished visitors at a penny a cup. Then in the mornings he would take up his sack of coal, and tread the familiar streets calling out his trade. Britton’s death was no less fanciful than his life. A ventriloquist named Honeyman or “Talking Smith” “threw” his voice and announced that, unless Britton recited the Lord’s Prayer immediately, he would expire within hours. Britton fell on his knees and prayed “but the chord of his life was unstrung by this sudden shock”; he died a few days later in the autumn of 1714. It was rumoured that he was a Rosicrucian, one of the sects which haunted Clerkenwell, and naturally believed in the efficacy of invisible spirits. So the trick of the ventriloquist, or the atmosphere of the area, deeply affected a credulous mind.
Another native of Clerkenwell, Christopher Pinchbeck, may also throw a curious light upon the neighbourhood. He proclaimed himself, in the summer of 1721, as the “Inventor and Maker of the famous Astronomical-Musical Clocks … for showing the various motions and Phenomena of planets and fixed stars, solving at sight several astronomical problems.” He has been denominated “The Near-Alchemist,” yet his was the alchemy of time which bore strange fruit in the vicinity.
By the end of the eighteenth century some seven thousand artisans-almost half the parish-were dependent upon watch-making. Clerkenwell itself produced some 120,000 watches each year. In almost every street there were private houses which had as door-plates the sign of escapement-maker, engine-turner, springer, finisher, and so on. These were modest but solid properties, with the workshop generally constructed at the back. But not all the tradesmen were so fortunately placed, and a nineteenth-century essay upon clocks in Charles Knight’s Cyclopaedia of London remarks that “if we wish to be introduced to the workman who has had the greatest share in the construction of our best clocks, we must often submit to be conducted up some narrow passage of our metropolis, and to mount into some dirty attic where we find illiterate ingenuity closely employed in earning a mere pittance.” The passages, closets and attics may be compared with the wheels and dials of the clocks themselves, so that Clerkenwell itself becomes a vast mechanism emblematic of time and the divisions of time. The census of 1861 listed 877 manufacturers of clocks and watches in this small parish. But why here? The historians of horology have pondered the question and arrived at no satisfactory conclusion; “the commencement of that remarkable localisation” is not certain, according to one authority cited by Charles Knight, except that “it appears to have made a noiseless progress.” Another remarks: “nor have we heard any plausible reason assigned by those who, residing on the spot, and carrying on these branches of manufacture, might be supposed to be best informed on the matter.” So, we may say, it just happened. It is one of those indecipherable and unknowable aspects of London existence. A certain trade emerges in a certain area. And that is all.
But in Clerkenwell we have learned, perhaps, to find larger patterns of activity. Did the presence of skilled artisans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries actively promote the cause of radicalism? By 1701 the manufacture of the watch was being used as the best example of the division of labour, so that one might say that the creation of time-pieces formed the paradigm of industrial capitalism. “Here every alley is thronged with small industries,” George Gissing wrote of Clerkenwell in The Nether World (1889), “here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil’s sake … have worn their lives away imagining new forms of weariness.” Lenin and Eleanor Marx had found fertile ground. Or was it that the creation of the division and subdivision of time was an obvious neighbourhood idol, to be smashed by those patriotic radicals who wished to return to an earlier polity and a more innocent state of society? Nevertheless the clock-and watch-makers are there still. The mystery of the place remains.
The Marx Memorial Library is still to be found on Clerkenwell Green, within which is preserved the small office where Lenin once edited Iskra. Beside it are a snack bar and a restaurant, which have been owned by the same Italian family for many years. Until recent days Clerkenwell Green and its vicinity retained that dusty, faded look which was a direct inheritance of its past. It was secluded, out of the way of the busy areas to the south and west, something of a backwater which few Londoners visited except those whose business it was to be there. The green harboured printers, and jewellers, and precision-instrument makers, as it had done for many generations. St. John’s Street was dark and cavernous, lined with empty or dilapidated warehouses.
Then, in the 1990s, all was changed. Clerkenwell became part of a social revolution, in the process of which London seemed once more able to renew itself. The great transition occurred when Londoners decided that they would rather live in lofts or “shell” spaces than in terraced houses; these were not the same as Parisian apartments, since the loft offered inviolable privacy as well as proximity. Since Clerkenwell itself was noticeable for its warehouses and commercial properties, it became part of that movement of refurbishment and modernisation which had begun in the warehouses of Docklands before reaching other parts of inner London. St. John’s Street, and the lanes around it, have now been extensively redeveloped with floors of glass attached to old structures and new buildings rising so fast that parts of the area are now almost unrecognisable. As one character says in Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, a novel set in early twentieth-century Clerkenwell, “You’d scarcely think it … but this district was very fashionable once.” It was indeed “fashionable” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as even the presence of the mad duchesses testifies, and now perhaps that period has returned. Yet that same speaker when alone had another realisation, of “the ruthless, stoney, total inhospitality of the district.” Even in the middle of its restoration and rebuilding, St. John’s Street is curiously empty; from dusk to dawn it affords echoic effects rather than the energy of any real movement or business. One is reminded of the fact that in the eighteenth century travellers felt obliged to walk together down this road, guarded by link-boys bearing lights, in case they were harassed or attacked. Whether it was wise of property speculators and developers to choose the street as a great site of renovation is an interesting question, therefore, since it may not be easy to impose a new method of living upon a thoroughfare with so ancient and violent a past.