Alternative Explanations

The Mariners’ Church – St. Paul’s Shadwell, taken from the River, just beneath. Charles Robinson was baptized here.

With Charles Robinson now detained in France then, a short digression is in order, which may perhaps illustrate some of the general hazards as well as insights that this kind of genealogical enterprise brings to light. It is all too easy to transpose the narrative of one time onto another. The horrific descriptions of the docklands and East End of the later Victorian commentators, Charles Dickens, amongst them, cannot help but set up images in the imagination that are then transferred backwards through time into previous eras. It is important therefore to pause and contemplate further the Farmer Street of the late eighteenth century, a street where mariners, shipwrights, and shipowners were all prepared to both live and work, right next to the river that was the source of their livelihood, and in some cases, vast profits. 

At this point, and perhaps this contradicts the flow of this story to date, certain elements start to take on a different colour. What would Maria West, the Irish exile have been doing circulating around the London Docks in the late eighteenth century? Well, very possibly, making contacts with maritime business folk of a slightly higher status than might have been imagined earlier. Business and trade with the West Indies and Caribbean was booming, and the infrastructure of the London docks was struggling to cope with the demand. 

In the previous generation, let it not be forgotten, John Potter was buying up lands in County Down from the profits made in illegally importing sugar, rum and other Caribbean products directly into Ireland. John may though also have had his own London contacts that would explain Maria’s presence in Docklands.

In the same way, the migration of Richard Wombwell from Essex to East London, there to set up his chandler’s business, then looks less like an act of adventurism, and more like a thoroughly clued-in move, based on an assessment that an economic boom was just around the corner. Taking this on board is to consider the possibility that certain branches of the Wombwell family were just a little higher in the Essex pecking order than we might have thought, and had resources enough to invest in a brand new and opportunity-rich environment. 

It was in this period, as Charles was growing up, that the West India Docks were in fact built, and formally opened in 1802, stimulated by the need to process more quickly and efficiently the vast amounts of produce now coming into London, not the least of which were sugar, rum, and coffee. It needs only one further step into the historical context to realize that this immense business thrived and profited through the slave plantations and slave trade more generally.