James Mackenzie Roberts was my great-great grandfather. He was baptised at Upwey, Dorset on 2 March 1824, the eldest son of Lazarus and Mary Roberts. Lazarus was described as ‘Lieut RN’.

His younger brothers William Pollard and Henry Came both attended the Royal Naval School in St Giles Camberwell, south London, a boarding school for the sons of officers in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. So it is quite possible that James and his brother Charles Dunrich (who joined the merchant navy) were also schooled here: James would have been nine when the school opened in 1833. Pupils were not ‘designed exclusively for the Navy’ and, unlike Charles, James never went to sea. Instead he trained as an architect and surveyor.

But why this profession? 

One clue might be the architects and surveyors in his mother’s family, the Fookses – James Mackenzie Fooks (1780–1824), his son Charles Berjew Fooks (1804–79) and Charles Berjew’s son, Charles Edward Fooks (1829–1907). 

According to the Royal Blue Book, between 1844 (possibly earlier) and 1851, Charles Berjew Fooks, surveyor, had offices at 1 Serle Street, Lincoln’s Inn. The family historian Graham Fooks claims Charles Edward Fooks, a contemporary of James, worked in his father’s survey office south of the river at Camberwell (probably Camberwell New Road). We know James was also in London at this time so did his training in architecture and surveying include time spent in the Fookses’ offices during the 1840s? The records leave no clue to that. 

James may have begun his training at the Naval School, as did one of his contemporaries, the Irish-Canadian architect Kivas Tully (born 1820), who apparently studied architecture at the school before going on to a four-year training in architecture in Limerick. 

Across the river on the north bank of the Thames the neo-gothic shell of Charles Barry’s new Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) rose from the ashes of the fire that had destroyed the original building seven years earlier. Reconstruction began in 1840 and took over thirty years to complete. Henry Hunt provided Barry with the estimated costs and on Barry’s recommendation he was appointed surveyor. Grissell & Peto were the building contractors. 

Grissell & Peto were round the corner in Belvedere Street, and Thomas Grissell’s sawmill in the very same street as James. So it is just possible, given the close proximity, that James worked for Grissell & Peto. One clue might be the collapse of Greenwich Pier in May 1843. As several newspapers reported, ‘Mr Roberts from the firm of Messrs Grissell & Peto and several other practical men, on behalf of the different parties connected with the pier’ were brought in to inspect the damage. James was barely twenty years old, but could this be him?

Either way, the association between Grissell, Peto and Hunt might well explain why my great-great grandfather was living in this part of Lambeth. James’s lodgings were a five-minute walk from Hunt’s and Peto’s residences in York Road.

There would have been much for the young James to do in bustling Lambeth, when not toiling in Hunt’s office or perhaps at Grissell & Peto. Barge-houses and wharfs lining the busy river frontage at Stangate Stairs (by coincidence, one was called Roberts Boat House) may have provided the opportunity for recreational hire. He surely paid visits to the famed Vauxhall pleasure gardens, just a short walk along the river from his lodgings. Although in decline by the 1840s, Vauxhall was still very much a middle-class pleasure ground. At three shillings or so, entrance offered attractions day and night, inside and out, from fireworks and pageants to refreshment halls and masked balls. 

James would have been too young in 1841 for the inns on Palace New Road – the Mitre, the Two Sawyers –  but perhaps he visited the horse circus – the ‘hippodrama’ – at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, a few paces from his door on the corner of Westminster Bridge Road? Owned by the circus proprietor and performer Andrew Ducrow, this must have been an alluring venue he would have passed each day on his way to Hunt’s office. Two days after the census was taken, in the early hours of 8 June, as James slept, fire swept through Astley’s, destroying the circus and killing one person. Among the animals rescued was a zebra. Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre did not reopen until 1844: three years after that the celebrated equestrian Pablo Fanque appeared there in his first London show. 

By 1847 though, James, now aged twenty-three, had moved house a mile south to 30 West Square in the parish of St George, Southwark.

West Square and Marriage

Built in the 1780s, West Square (above) was – and still is – an elegant square of three‑storey town houses with basements, off the busy thoroughfare of St George’s Road and adjacent to the infamous Bethlem asylum (now the Imperial War Museum). From here it was a short walk up Great Surrey Street to Albion Place, by Blackfriars Bridge, where James’s brother Henry lodged in 1851 whilst working at the census office.

James may well have taken on the lease to number 30 from James May, who was listed at West Square in 1841. May was a coal merchant, like John Matthews, James’s landlord at Palace New Road. Was there a connection? Maybe Belvedere Coal Wharf?

Although Southwark was not a particularly salubrious area, West Square comprised mainly professional households. James’s neighbours included legal attorneys, medical agents, several police constables and, next door, a ladies’ boarding school. 

Perhaps James witnessed the Chartist rally on Monday, 10 April 1848, when several thousand radicals and reformists marched over the river and down the Walworth Road, passing close to West Square, and on towards their destination at Kennington Common, where they gathered to be the subjects of the first photograph of a public event ever taken. Many civilians were recruited as special constables that day. Records show that the magistrate of the Thames Police Court appointed 318 special constables for the parish of St George, so it is possible James may have been among their number.

In the summer of 1851 the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park. Henry Arthur Hunt had been responsible for its planning and construction (letters from Hunt to Edgar Bowring, secretary to the Royal Commission for the Exhibition, can be read here). Even if he had no input himself to this vast building project, surely James visited the Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, to view Joseph Paxton’s revolutionary architecture. 

[Side note: Much later, fifty years after James had vacated number 30, the house – or part of it, as it was now divided into flats – was occupied by Kate Hill (1870–1916?), a music-hall star in the 1890s, known on stage as Kitty Fairdale. She was the aunt of Charlie Chaplin, who also lived in West Square (at number 39) for a while before America and fame beckoned. At this time Kate Hill’s rooms at number 30 were apparently known as ‘The Kitteries’. So I suppose it is quite likely Charlie Chaplin went through the same front door as my great-great grandfather had fifty years earlier.]