Morning!
Welcome to issue 3. Today’s letter is slightly sombre in tone but don’t let that put you off. Mary was a cool dude who deserves your eyeballs for a few mins.
In Issue 2 I asked what happened to poor Helen the cheetah. My sister, Lucie, said she got made into a sandwich. Let’s hope it was with salmon and tomato (a little FTKT in-joke for you there). My friend Alex said she formed a band. I feel like both outcomes are plausible.
Today’s letter comes after an evening spent randomly trawling through Google Books (it’s a fantastic time waster — try it!) and stumbling upon a book and a story I’d never heard before. Made all the more poignant / worse after spending fifteen years living just a short walk from the place written about. But that’s life, isn’t it?
My thanks, as always, to Ferry Gouw for this letter’s illustrations.
Until next time!
Your pal,
Katie
MARY, THE PIGS, AND THE BRICKS
Mary Bayly couldn’t find the house. She walked the five minutes from her home to the Potteries1, passed the pigs, the dogs, the chickens and the ducks, but the location of the house eluded her. The air was thick with boiled fat and open sewers, pools of stagnant water bubbling with disease. If she was shocked by her surroundings she didn’t mention it.
Mary was new to the area and wanted to help her neighbours living in the notorious slum known locally as the Potteries. She was, by contrast, a wealthy philanthropist accustomed to assisting the poor but knew this time would be different. How could she give a man soup when a dirty saucepan would spoil it? And medicine, in the absence of cleanliness, failed to be effective. The rest of London had turned a blind eye preferring to pretend this level of squalor did not exist. Dickens visited the area, condemned it, left. Articles were written, scorn was poured. Nobody helped. The roads and pathways were pockmarked as clay was extracted from the ground, bricks were fired, houses were built. Mary walked around until a boy in the street pointed her in the right direction.
There were two kinds of people living here — those who reared pigs and those who made bricks, each contributing to the filth.
Pigs outnumbered humans. The sulphuretted hydrogen gases released from the brick making turned the window frames black. Slurry pits filled with drainage from the houses, dead dogs and cats floating amongst the slime and the filth.
Without directions from the boy Mary would never have found where she needed to be. Stepping through ‘a kind of shed’ she emerged into a room filled with feeding-troughs and wheelbarrows. And although she described the place as ‘very clean’ there was no escaping the truth — the old couple she was due to meet occupied a living space with their pigs.
This set in motion Mary’s first plan of action. With the help of a minister she formed the Mothers’ Society, a weekly meeting teaching mothers of the Potteries the basics, from hygiene to entertaining their children, to how to sew and mend clothes. Alongside this she continued her home visits, built up relationships with hundreds of families, set up a savings account system, and literacy classes. The idea of the Mothers’ Society caught on and up and down the country meetings were attended by hundreds of thousands of women.
But it was her book, Ragged Homes and How to Mend Them, which cast their atrocious living conditions into the spotlight. She detailed their everyday lives, their struggles, the meetings, the many deaths. That isn’t to say the book is all doom and gloom. The interviews Mary conducted are a truly fascinating glimpse into ordinary lives during extraordinary times. For example:
Rain made brick making difficult so often the workers would walk straight to the pub. Why? “Men ain’t ducks.”
162 years later and there are no pigs or holes in the Potteries, just multimillion-pound houses and super cars. The Potteries is now Notting Hill. There are little signs that point to its past — a street called Potters Lane, a funny concrete chimney shaped like a bottle wedged between normal-looking houses — but there is no blue plaque for Mary, no mention of the pigs and the bricks. The people who lived and suffered here have been relegated to the past.
I googled Mary’s name expecting to gain encyclopaedic knowledge but came away with only with the scantiest of bios. Why does history remember some but forget others? Mary Bayly wasn’t a health officer, nor a councillor, but a local woman working with the poorest people in London, greatly improving the lives of others and yet history has forgotten her. Where would these people have been without Mary Bayly? I wouldn’t like to think.
A KILN, AKA I APPARENTLY KNEW VERY LITTLE ABOUT MY AREA
Mary Bayly signed off every correspondence with her address, 8 Lansdowne Crescent. It takes five minutes to walk from there to the Potteries but who knows how long it would’ve taken 162 years ago (the pigs, the dogs, the holes). I’d caught glimpses of Notting Hill’s past during my fifteen years living there: street signs with names such as Hippodrome and Potters Lane, but I dug no deeper. I was a seasoned Londoner, after all. And all street signs in London point to its past — Fish Street Hill, Petticoat Lane, Wardrobe Place. So what was so special about this one, Potters Lane?
This, it turns out — Mary, the pigs, the bricks, and its inhabitants. Without Mary’s book I might never have taken a closer look.
WARDROBE PLACE
Do you know of a street in London (or where you live) that has a ridiculous name or points to its history? I’ll go: in Greenwich there is a Ha Ha Road.
‘The Potteries’ is how Bayly refers to the area in her book, Ragged Homes and How to Mend Them, though in later historical references the area was known as the Potteries and Piggeries.
All quotes and information from here on out are taken directly from Bayly’s book
I learned on the news yesterday that Angela Lansbury’s father was Edgar Lansbury; the former mayor of Poplar. He had twin sons, Bruce and Edgar, and named two neighbouring streets after them – Edgar and Bruce Roads in E3! I’m going to visit them 🫶