History of No. 5 Frederick’s Place and its occupants
Frederick’s Place commemorates Sir John Frederick, Lord Mayor of London in 1661, who owned a large mansion which covered this site. No. 5 was constructed over part of the site in 1776 by the Adam brothers, John and Robert, whose other work included the Adelphi and Portland Place, which when first built up was said to be the ‘grandest street in London’. The number and importance of the Adam brothers’ buildings did much to improve the beauty of London, and both men attained great eminence. At his funeral in Westminster Abbey, Robert Adam’s coffin was borne to its last resting place by a Duke, two Earls, a Viscount and a Baron.
The very earliest occupants of No.5 Frederick’s Place are lost to us. However, by 1785 the property was accommodating three legal gentleman, all members of Doctor’s Commons, the colloquial name for the College of Advocates and Doctors of Law situated near St. Paul’s Cathedral. These advocates - a wholly separate body from the barristers of the time - enjoyed a monopoly of practice and were required to hold doctorates in the civil (i.e. Roman) law before being admitted by the Archbishop of Canterbury to practice in the Court of Arches, which sat originally in the crypt of the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. A description both of the premises and the court at work is given by Dickens - who worked for a time as a shorthand reporter in this court as a young man - in Chapter 23 of David Copperfield. The court ceased to function in 1857.
Perhaps the most eminent man associated with No. 5 Frederick’s Place is the surgeon, William Coulson (1802-1877) the younger son of Thomas Coulson, master painter in Devonport Dockyard. The father was an intimate friend of Sir Humphry Davy, the inventor of the miners’ safety-lamp. The son was one of several surgeons who helped establish the Aldersgate Street School of Medicine; and for some time he oversaw the foreign department of the Lancet, making many translations from foreign works. In 1828 he was elected Surgeon to the Aldersgate Street Dispensary, and in 1830 Consulting Surgeon to the City London Lying-In Hospital. His investigations into puerperal afflictions of the joints did much to improve Victorian understanding of their nature and pathology.
In 1832 Coulson joined the medical board of the Royal Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate, of which he was long an active member. According to his notice in the Dictionary of National Biography: ‘He removed from his early residence in Charterhouse Square to a house in Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry, where he commanded for many years perhaps the largest City practice’. (He lived latterly at No.2 Frederick’s Place.) He was one of the first Fellows elected to the College of Surgeons (in 1843) and when St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, was established he was elected Senior Surgeon.
Coulson is said to have accumulated one of the largest fortunes ever made in practice - about a quarter of a million pounds, equivalent in today’s money to about £12m, although part of this included a substantial inheritance from his brother, Walter. In 1840 he married ‘Miss Maria Bartram, notable for her skill in painting as well as her attractive manners and great intelligence’. Mrs Coulson died on 4 January 1876, being followed to the grave by her husband on 5 May 1877. Coulson’s life is said to have been ‘marked by a strong belief in individuality, in duty, and in the fulfilment of promises.‘
By 1844 some part of No. 5 Frederick’s Place was occupied by the architect, George Smith, who as early as 1815 is referred to in documents as ‘architect and surveyor of Mercer’s Hall’. Smith was a pupil of Robert Furze Brettingham (1750-1806) and counted among his own pupils James Bunstone Bunning (1802-1863) who designed the City of London School in Milk Street and the Bethnal Green workhouse. During the 1840s Smith shared No. 5 with the yarn merchant, Andrew Dinsdale, who by 1852 had disposed of his business to Edmund Wiginton.
For large periods during the Victorian era, no part of the house was occupied residentially. The exception was at the taking of the 1881 census when some of the rooms here were the home of a 25 year old Bermondsey-born ‘carman’ or cabbie named Arthur Monday. He shared the house with his wife, Sophia (24), who was also Bermondsey-born and -bred, and with their two small daughters, Eleanor (2) and Ada, who on the night of the census enumerator’s visit in April 1881 was aged 3 months.
The lot of the Victorian cabbie was not an easy one, the centre of London being as choked by traffic as it is today, although generally speaking the streets were then much narrower. Arthur Monday would have been expected to manoeuvre his horse-drawn cab through these congested thoroughfares at high speed. Brakes were at best rudimentary and the only real safeguard against mishap was the skill of the driver. Few cabbies owned their vehicles. Most were hired daily from a cab proprietor or ‘jobmaster’ for ‘yard money’. This was so extortionate that it took most men at least half a day to earn it and the greatest insult one cabby could serve another was to call out: ‘Ain’t yer got yer yard money yet?’
In the late Victorian era No. 5 Frederick’s Place passed into legal use with a number of solicitors, many of whom were engaged in work before the Court of Chancery, the most protracted of the three divisions of the High Court of Justice. Cases here took so long to resolve that the phrase ‘to get a man’s head into Chancery’ became a popular Victorian saying. Dickens alluded to the exhausting nature of Chancery proceedings in Bleak House, citing the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, based on a true dispute which lasted 80 years.
Although No. 5 continued to be dominated by legal men for many years, one of the more interesting enterprises carried on from here during the Edwardian era was a servants’ registry run by Owen Limms. At this date the supply of domestics still exceeded demand. Consequently, employers could afford to be very selective. It would have fallen to Owen Limms to weed out the fly-by-nights, drunkards and pilferers who represented a significant portion of those who beat a path to his door, and to instil in the remainder the habits of industry and piety.
In addition to having to cope with mistresses who expected impossibly high standards, he would have had to check that servants were neither idle or insolent; that they could write, but no so well that they might have forged their references; that they had no ‘followers’ in tow and were sufficiently cultured that - when sent to fetch Corfe’s edition of Handel - they did not return (as one girl did) with a course dish with a handle. Some servants’ agencies were disreputable, existing solely to lure girls into prostitution. A good agency charged no fee to the servant, specified a minimum wage and stipulated that time off should be allowed on Sundays. Owen Limms may also have insisted that orphan girls be visited from time to time by a member of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.
By 1920 No. 5 was inhabited by two firms of solicitors, as well as by the accountant, Henry Finch Hill. Although anyone was then free to call themselves an accountant, Henry Finch Hill held the First Class Certificate of the College of Preceptors. He had spent a period articled to a firm of accountants in Cheapside to which his parents had paid a premium of £50. No doubt all this would have been worthwhile by the time he came to append his brass plate to the front door of No. 5. Since the end of the Second World War, this charming old property has accommodated a number of solicitors, two actuaries, various merchants and brokers as well as the offices of firms manufacturing everything from steel tubing to ladies’ underwear. And now it is the headquarters of london and oxford group.