1784 - 1805
James Hall was born in New Inn Yard, Shoreditch on the 17th September 1784 and was baptised at the parish church of St Leonards a fortnight later. New Inn Yard was built on the site of Hollywell Priory and in the 18th Century was surrounded by small gardens and courts. A member of the family, who visited the area in the 1870's remembers Joseph Hall's house before it was pulled down, and describes it as a comfortable two-storeyed dwelling in a terrace of houses of the type lived in by the respectable artisans of the time. It had a workshop behind the living rooms.
We know very little about James's parents except that they were called Joseph and Mary and that Joseph belonged to the small master and journeyman class and that Mary had been a widow when they married at Saddleworth, Yorkshire, in 1778. The only further information we have of Joseph comes from his grandson William who remembers him in the 1820s as an old man wearing knee breeches, a fancy waistcoat, silver buckles on his shoes and smoking a long clay pipe. He died in the early 1830s.
James had his early education in the Spitalfields Parish School in Quaker Street. This establishment had been endowed by a benevolent hair merchant called Mr John Cobb with the aim of providing free education for boys and girls between the ages of seven and ten. This was not a particularly promising start to life, but James's fortunes were about to turn.
At the time there was a physician called Daniel Williams living in Wood Street, Spitalfields. He was aged 42. It is not known how he met James, but it was a fateful meeting for the young child. Years later James wrote on the fly-leaf of one of his diaries: "Died on the 16th August 1831 at Stamford Hill near London, Sir Daniel Williams Kt. In the seventy-ninth year of his age, born 1753. My entrance into life began under his auspices when in my eleventh year of age." He added in Latin: "In memory of this man I give thanks to God, and I know that I will never forget him as long as I live."
The physician took a fancy to James and gave him his chance in life by starting him in the medical profession and making himself responsible for the expenses of his training. There were practically no medical schools in those days. The first step for a boy student was to be apprenticed to a general practitioner. This was the longest part of his training and usually lasted for five years, but James at the age of fourteen had reached the next rung on the rather rickety medical ladder of the period, and had gone to St Thomas's Hospital as a pupil.
Little is known of James's life between the time he left St Thomas's and the date he began to keep diaries at the age of twenty-one in 1805, except that during that period he decided to go to sea and by his nineteenth year he had visited Rio de Janeiro. The Editor of Sea Saga, who had access to his diaries writes that, by the age of twenty-one, he had evolved into an ambitious, adventurous young man of considerable accomplishments. His diaries testify to his linguistic talents. He made entries in them with equal facility in French, Latin, Italian, Russian, and Greek and on one occasion later in life completed one of his Medical Logs entirely in Latin, a demonstration of his linguistic skills which drew a reprimand from Their Lordships. He was well read and considered a charming and interesting companion by men of varying types, though he was inclined to be over-talkative, indiscreet, and obstinate in his dislikes. In appearance, when he was young, he was slight, of medium height, with bright colouring and expressive blue eyes. Judged by the then prevailing standards, he was a skilful doctor. He was very humane.'
If this description is accurate James had certainly come a long way since his schooldays in Quaker Street, although as we will see later there may have been other sides to his character that the editor of Sea Saga was not aware of.
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