Post under construction.
St Martin's Round House, on The West Side of St Martin's Lane.
Engraving by Henry Fletcher (1710 -1750).
July 1742.
For Henry Fletcher and Furber's Twelve Months of the Year of 1732 see -
https://www.artic.edu/artists/34495/henry-fletcher
For his Furber's fruits engraved by Sam Smith see -
https://emuseum.history.org/objects/13305/october
For Fletcher's Rococo engravings probably the earliest engraved in England - Sixty Different Sorts of Ornaments invented by Gaetano Brunetti, Italian painter, very useful to painters, sculptors, stone-carvers, wood-carvers, silversmiths etc. - [London]: June ye 25. 1736.
see
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/henry-fletcher
The roundhouse was on St Martin’s Lane just south of Duke’s Court and opposite the parish church.88 It was made up of three floors, and a set of stocks, capped by an ornate wooden carving depicting one man flogging another, stood in the street outside.89
The lower ground floor contained two cells, one each for men and women. The women’s cell, or hole, was ‘about six Foot six Inches in Length, six Foot three or four Inches in Breadth’.
In 1742 a tragedy helped expose the failings of both the
parishes and the magistrates who oversaw them, prompting a direct response from
plebeian London.
William Bird, keeper of St Martin in the Fields roundhouse,
whom the vestry had unsuccessfully attempted to dismiss for his failure to
collect the watch rate in 1740, continued in place. While he was not ‘properly
a constable’, he was ‘deemed the officer’ responsible for the roundhouse by
other parish employees.
On the evening of 15 July 1742,
Bird, as usual, was sitting at a long table next to the constable of the night,
overseeing the work of the parish’s forty-three watchmen.
On this particular hot Thursday, the roundhouse also hosted
the constables of St Paul Covent Garden and the High Constable of Westminster,
Booker Holden .
They were there to check in before setting out on a
‘midnight reformation’, which had been authorised by a warrant signed by
Justices Thomas De Veil and John Bromfield to arrest ‘vagabonds, pickpockets,
and other dissolute and disorderly persons’.
Holden and his assistants targeted a range of houses and
streets. Sarah Bland and Mary Maurice were picked up in the street ‘just by the
round-house’. Elizabeth Amey , a prostitute who had previously worked at a
notorious brothel, The Rose in Oxenden Street just west of Leicester Fields,
was arrested in a cook shop.
Ann Norton was ‘taken
out of … Bed from my Husband and carried to the Watchhouse’.86 In total,
twenty-six women and nine men were arrested that evening.
The roundhouse was on St Martin’s Lane just south of Duke’s
Court and opposite the parish church.88 It was made up of three floors, and a
set of stocks, capped by an ornate wooden carving depicting one man flogging
another, stood in the street outside.89 The lower ground floor contained two
cells, one each for men and women. The women’s cell, or hole, was ‘about six
Foot six Inches in Length, six Foot three or four Inches in Breadth’.90
By one o’clock in the morning, with almost twenty people in
the women’s cell, the heat was intense, and the drunken camaraderie which had
earlier greeted the women as they came down the stairs was gradually
transformed into desperation. Stripped down to their shifts or completely
naked, they began to struggle for breath, while their clothes became soaked in
sweat. Mary Cosier later testified that her handkerchief was as ‘stiff as
Buckram, with Sweat from the Heat of the Place’.91 They beat on the low ceiling
of the cell with their shoes trying to attract attention and cried out that one
of them was in labour and needed relief. But mainly they cried out for water:
‘for Christ’s Sake let us have Water; for the Lord’s Sake a little Water’.92
The next morning, when the cell door was opened William Anderson found the
place ‘very nauseous, and the smell so strong, that I thought it would have
struck me down’.93 At least four people lay dead or dying.
De Veil, who had signed off on the original warrant, was
also responsible for examining the survivors, and gradually realising the
seriousness of the situation, he dismissed all the prisoners.94 However, by the
evening a crowd began to gather in St Martin’s Lane. Stones and bricks were
thrown at the house and by midnight a riot was in full progress. It took
Justice James Frazier at least two hours to restore order.95
The situation for De Veil, the most prominent signatory of
the warrant, was a delicate one, and he was ‘greatly scared’ by the likely
popular reaction to the disaster.96 A coroner’s inquest convened the following
day brought in a verdict of wilful murder against William Bird for the
suffocation of Mary Maurice and three others.97 De Veil attempted to deflect
public outrage away from himself and the select vestries by publishing his own
version of events early the next week. In his account, Booker Holden was named
as the moving spirit behind the warrant, and De Veil went on to blame the
constables (all appointees of the Court of Burgesses) for having ‘greatly
misbehaved’ themselves, before offering up William Bird as a possible
scapegoat.98 No mention was made of the legion of parish employees who had
participated in the arrests that night.99
Bird eventually stood trial at the Old Bailey on a charge of
murder two months later. Counsel were just beginning to participate in trials,
and four experienced attorneys were commissioned to make up the prosecution
team. Bird’s attempt to find a barrister to represent him, however, met a wall
of indifference. By the day of his first trial in mid-September, Bird had
failed to locate anyone willing to act – two claimed to be out of town, two
others ‘desired to be excused’, while a fifth simply returned the brief without
explanation. Bird, whom the trial records describe as a ‘labourer’, was forced
to defend himself.100 He was found guilty at his second trial and sentenced to
hang.101
In the months after the disaster, the parish rebuilt the
roundhouse at a cost of £83 15s., adding piped water and a new set of iron
palings, five feet, eight inches high.102 But the roundhouse continued to be a
target of regular popular attacks. The following year St Martin ’s spent a
further £8 19s. repairing damage done to the house by a population that saw in
it a continuing symbol of oppression, and in each succeeding year for the next
decade a similar sum was spent on repairs.103 This was no doubt one reason why
the parish strengthened its watch and revised its Watch Act.104 In addition,
the role of the beadles was regularised, and they were given new uniforms at
the cost of £36 17s.105 Despite all the Watch Acts, the denigration of the
Court of Burgesses and the newly powerful position of the select vestries,
magistrates and vestrymen found it impossible to secure more than the grudging
consent of the wider population to their policies and were continually forced
onto the defensive.
Image from British Museum.
For an excellent post on the Roundhouse and law and order in Westminster in the 18th Century etc. see -
https://www.londonlives.org/book/chapter4.html#c-4-8
Note the stocks and the date 1692 above the Parish stocks.
For more on the St Martin's Workhouse see -
https://www.workhouses.org.uk/StMartins/
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Drawing of the West side of the lower part of St Martin's Lane by George Scharf, dated 1825 with a man entering the alleyway into Duke's Court.
No. 6 is the Old St Martins Watch or Round House, with a man and child peering through the window.
There doesn't appear to be any access to the buildings illustrated above from St Martin's Lane. Buildings 1 to 6 in Scharf's drawing were all accessed from the Royal Mews behind.
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An Excellent Survey - Plan of the Royal Mews and the West Side Southern End of St Martin's Lane - 1790's
Image from the British Library.
The resolution isn't great but is good enough for our purposes.
St Martin's Watch House /Round House is coloured pink on the plan showing a width of 17'6"
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Horwood's Revised Map of 1819 showing the projected demolitions and improvements, around The Royal Mews and St Martin in the Field.
We must be thankful to George Scharf for recording some of the buildings before the destructions.
Drawings in the British Museum.
