Family History 4.03

Robinson story

Extract from Robinsons of Rotherhithe by Joanne Robinson

Rotherhithe

The Rotherhithe area gets its name from two Saxon words: rethra, a sailor, and hythe, a landing-place. In the last four centuries the area was tied up with sea-faring, ship-building, repairing and breaking up. Originally it was just a small maritime settlement on the riverbank, and here Jonathan Swift invented his Lemuel Gulliver. Much of the area became occupied by the docks, the first enclosed wet dock being built in 1699. It became the area for the import timber trade. The River Thames was an important link for Rotherhithe and Bermondsey, as Tower Bridge was not built until 1894. London Bridge, upstream, was the only road access to the North Bank.

Thames boatmen 1870s

Bermondsey was the area that serviced the docks. Here were the factories and warehouses the ships unloaded their goods to, and here also were housed the large number of workers employed to cater to the needs of the shipping fraternity. Bermondsey was at one stage known as 'London's Larder' and later the main centre of the leather industry and those industries such as the hatters, who depended on the waste offcuts. So if William was in the building trade he could have been involved in shipbuilding or in the tanneries. The premises of the large firm of Hepburns covered two and a half acres [one hectare] and had its own carpentry.

All these people had to be housed somewhere and a diverse range of housing was available. In Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London written in 1890, later than the period we are concerned with, he describes the area. He depicts Prince's Street, near Paradise Street, as: 'a handsome street; the houses dating from 1726 have carved door-posts and lintels and panelled passages within: they were built for ships' Captains in the days when merchant Captains were merchant traders also. All around are the houses of the poor.'

The workers' wages were low and employment was often irregular; there were times of considerable distress, areas of terrible slums and appalling poverty. The most notorious district here in the 19th century was Jacob's Island, an area around Jacob Street which Dickens vividly describes in Oliver Twist. This area was rebuilt in 1860. So William and his family were indeed fortunate in that they seemed to be better off than many.

Did the young lad Joshua hear of Samuel Marsden's first visit up the Waitemata Harbour in 1820 and dream of far-off places? By the early 1820's the older children were approaching adulthood and on the 20th of August 1823, Lydia married her young man, James Carr, at St Giles's in Camberwell a few miles south of the Bermondsey area.

At the time when the first settlers were landing in Queensland, Lydia and James had their first child. They were to have ten more children, showing the trend of this era to marry young and have a large family.