Georgian and Regency Greenwich

This month I have a new book out in the US, Desired, book 5 in my Scandalous Women of the Ton series. Desired will be out in the UK next year. One of the geographical locations I used for the book was Greenwich. I love modern day Greenwich with its park, riverfront and Maritime Museum and as a place with a long and fascinating history it proved to be a very interesting setting for a book.

Here are a few of the things I learned about Greenwich in the course of my research:

At the beginning of the 18th century Greenwich was an impoverished fishing village on the Thames with no more than a collection of timber cottages on some dirty lanes and some very dodgy inns such as Fubb’s Yacht, a notorious “beer house” for the sailors. By the end of the century, however, planners were imposing order and geometry on the growing town, designing houses in the style of Bath or Cheltenham but on a miniature scale. Gloucester Circus was the epitome of this, two crescents of houses enclosing a central circle. Only one of these crescents was built and the twenty-one houses, completed in 1809, are still standing.

Greenwich was the place where the body of Lord Nelson was brought ashore after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar. It was Christmas Eve 1805 and crowds had gathered but the weather was so poor that by the time the ship carrying Nelson finally arrived in Greenwich at 8pm, everyone had gone home assuming that he would not arrive that day. The sailors carrying Nelson’s coffin had to leave it at the top of the riverfront steps whilst they went off to find someone to let them in to the Seaman’s Hospital.

Princess Caroline, wife of the Prince Regent, rented Montague House in nearby Blackheath from 1798 and was a fixture on the Greenwich party scene. One guest commented of her: “The Princess is grown very coarse and she dresses very ill, shewing too much of her naked person.”

The Blackheath caverns were a considerable tourist attraction during the Regency period. They consisted of four underground caves cut from the chalk. They appealed to the romantically inclined as dating from an age long past and there were wild theories about their origins and purpose. Visitors complained of the cold and the spooky atmosphere and suggested that they had been created in Anglo Saxon times as a hiding place from the Vikings. In fact they originated as a 16th century quarry but this explanation was not suitably gothic to satisfy people. During the 19th century candles were installed in the caves and masked balls held there. These were considered extremely indecorous.

I drew much of my research from “The Story of Greenwich” by Clive Aslet and “Greenwich” by Charles Jennings which are both great reads as well as being packed full of useful facts.

Research takes you to some interesting places!

As part of the research for the book I’m currently writing, which is set in the Arctic during the age of exploration, I have been researching life in the British Royal Navy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In doing so I came across the Royal Hospital, Greenwich, (the naval equivalent of the army’s Chelsea Hospital) and a recent archaeological excavation there that threw light on the lives of the pensioners living there.

The Royal Hospital was a retirement home for “seamen worn out or become decrepit by age and infirmities in the service of their country.” At least 93 men who served at the Battle of Trafalgar lived there. Interestingly one of the facts about Trafalgar that I had not realised before was the number of different nationalities who fought alongside the British, including 28 Americans. Veterans became in-pensioners at the Royal Hospital only in old age or if they had no family to care for them. Hospital food was plentiful if basic. Each man had 1lb of meat a day, boiled or sometimes roast beef on three days of the week, mutton on two days a week, 4oz cheese a day, 1lb bread a day and half a gallon of beer a day. On Wednesday and Fridays they were given pease pottage, a stew with peas and bacon, 8oz cheese and 2oz butter. Tea joined the rations in the early 19th century, as it did in the Navy; also chocolate at breakfast, potatoes, and other improvements. Even then, cabbage was the only green vegetable, for two months in summer so maybe there was scurvy on shore as well as at sea!

Archaeological excavations at the site bear out the suggestion that life in Nelson's Navy was tough. Work was hard, discipline brutal, accommodation dark, cramped and unhygienic and food often uneatable. Disease was rife. The Navy tried to keep its ships clean but with so many men in such cramped and fetid conditions, fever could spread fast and only the strongest survived. 60% of the bodies examined by the archaeologists had broken noses, either from falls – or fights! Fractures were common, from falling out of the rigging to being crushed by the proverbial “loose cannon.” However the Greenwich Pensioners were a hardy lot. Many survived into their 70s, eight of the Trafalgar veterans were over 80 and one was over 90 years old!

Nicola Cornick
www.nicolacornick.com