On 20th May Dave Charnick premieres his brand new walk To Blackwall and Beyond, you can find booking details on his walks page.  In the meantime, as a little taster he tells the story of The East India Company’s involvement in pastoral care in the area.

The East End boasts visible traces of the mighty Honourable East India Company’s presence. Blackwall contains some relics of the East India Docks: some stretches of perimeter wall, occasional buildings and a basin serving as a bird sanctuary. Upriver at Ratcliffe is a surviving pair of Georgian saltpetre warehouses known as Free Trade Wharf, nowadays a residential development.

These riverside reminders of maritime trade are not the Company’s only surviving traces however. A little further inland, on Poplar High Street, are reminders of the East India Company exercising pastoral care.

Once a prominent thoroughfare marking the limit of the floodwaters which swamped the Isle of Dogs when the tidal Thames rose too high, Poplar High Street retains still a high street feel, unless approached from the far greater East India Dock Road.

115 Poplar High Street, next door to the former Poplar District Board of Works offices, is known now as Meridian House. A private residence, it boasts in its pediment a weathered but recognisable coat of arms – that of the East India Company. It is all that remains of the 1802-06 rebuild of the Company’s almshouses on Poplar High Street.

The story of the almshouses begins with fraud. In 1619 a former Company factor, or trader, called Hugh Greete died, his will directing that his estate be used to found a school or a hospital. The problem was that he had been recalled to London in disgrace the year before for defrauding his employers. Having been entrusted with buying Indian diamonds, he had been buying the best ones for himself and the lesser quality stones for the Company. His assets, comprising diamonds and other goods worth between £700 and £900, were seized by the Company to make up for his misdeeds.

As the Company’s fortunes were not uniformly good, it deferred as long as possible Greete’s wish that an almshouse be built for the Company’s disabled seamen, their widows and their orphans. In the meantime Sir Thomas Roe, returned from a tour of duty as the Company’s ambassador to the Court of the Mogul Emperor Jehangir, promised £400 towards an almshouse. A levy of 2d in the pound from the wages of all but the poorest employees generated a further £60. After a deduction of £300 from Greete’s estate to pay his debts, the residue was put aside for the project. Something over £200 was added from miscellaneous Company funds.

In 1627 the Company acquired a largely Elizabethan manor house on Poplar High Street from Edward Dalton of Ratcliffe for £360 ‘and a satin suit’. The cost of demolishing it and building a new almshouse was prohibitive, so the building was converted. Another £134 was diverted from the levy on wages and the remainder of Greete’s estate, set at £446 10s 1d, was employed in the conversion project.

At last, in March 1628 the Company’s first pensioners, John Ferne and Tristram Hughson, moved into the almshouse. No formal description exists of the almshouse; a drawing from 1798 is the only indication of what it was like.

Despite being a provision of Greete’s will, the Company had no intention of naming the almshouse after him, considering that Greete’s money belonged rightfully to them. Sir William Russell, Treasurer of the Navy and one of Greete’s executors, objected. A ‘committee’ or director of the Company, Russell refused to give a formal release of the estate unless Greete were remembered as the benefactor. So the Company went ahead without the release, not minuting the use of Greete’s estate and not bestowing his name on the almshouse.

In 1796 the Company decided to upgrade, building nice new almshouses in the grounds of the original establishment. Completed in 1799 and known as the Upper Buildings, these twelve two-storey houses were to be occupied by retired Commanders and Officers, or their widows. The old house now catered for boatswains, gunners, carpenters and caulkers, or their widows. But then Poplar was transformed with the coming of the West India Docks.

It was clear that Poplar’s importance was growing, and in 1802 the old almshouse on Poplar High Street was demolished to make way for a range of twenty-six new almshouses, the Lower Buildings. Completed in 1806, they were arranged symmetrically either side of a chaplain’s house. The chaplain’s house, now Meridian House, is all that survives of this development.

There was more to come as the Upper and Lower Buildings were extended. By the time the complex was demolished in 1867, it consisted of 38 Lower Buildings and 18 Upper Buildings at either end of a large enclosed rectangular plot. Why were they demolished? After all, when the Company ceased trading in 1858 the Government kept the almshouses going as the Poplar Marine Hospital. In 1866 however the local authority, the Poplar District Board of Works, decided the land would be better used as the Poplar Recreation Ground.

The reason why the 1867 demolition left the chaplaincy standing is that it was not the chaplaincy for the almshouses. It was the chaplaincy for the Company’s other pastoral venture on Poplar High Street, which was also spared in 1867 and still stands.

In 1633 the inhabitants of the hamlets of Poplar and Blackwall approached the Company and asked them to build a chapel of ease on their recently-acquired land behind the almshouse. This would do away with the need to travel all the way to the parish church of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney for services. But the Company pleaded poverty, their fortunes being at that time in a temporary decline. Also it had a chapel in the almshouse, so it didn’t need another one.

But the locals did not give up, and pressed the Company again in 1642. Gilbert Dethick, lord of the Manor of Poplar and a member of the Stepney vestry, left £100 towards the cost of a chapel when he died in 1639, but his bequest was time-limited. The foundation had to be laid within three years of his death. The Company’s answer was to grant half an acre of the land behind the almshouse and sixty loads of stone towards the chapel’s foundation, but it would not part with any money. The chapel’s foundations were laid, but the locals were unable to raise any more money. Then Civil War broke out, and soon grass was growing over the foundations.

The locals applied to the Company again in 1652; this time the chapel was to be built at last, facilitated by some fundraising in addition to donations and bequests. The Company agreed to contribute £200 from its maintenance fund, provided that space in the chapel would be reserved for its residents. And so, in 1654 the chapel was opened for worship. It was not consecrated as a parish church; at that time England was a republic governed by Puritans who had no time for such practices. This was to cause problems.

In the following year, the chapel’s first minister left and needed to be replaced. Seemingly the allowance was too low, since the locals appealed for help from the Trustees for the Maintenance of Preaching Ministers. It was not to be had; empowered by Parliament in September 1654, they could help only parish churches. Once again, the locals approached the Company but it was not inclined to help, as it was maintaining a chaplain already at the almshouse.

The locals asked the Company to take over patronage of the chapel, but it refused. In 1657 a compromise was reached. The Company accepted a candidate put forward by the locals to serve as chaplain to both almshouse and chapel. It would accommodate the chaplain in the almshouse and pay him a salary. It also took the chapel key and had its Arms applied to the plaster roof boss at the centre of the church’s crossing, a prominent place.

Sadly the relative positions of the Company and the locals regarding the chapel were not defined clearly, and this was where friction started. In 1690 and 1711 the locals began asserting their authority to appoint a chaplain – or minister, as the locals referred to the incumbent. This however was as nothing compared to the problem of maintaining the fabric.

In November 1703 a great storm caused extensive damage to the chapel. The Company, which was experiencing difficulties at the time because of challenges to its trading monopoly, refused to help. The locals had to pay more than £104 for the repairs. Subsequently the locals were to complain of the Company’s lack of assistance. Things came to a head when the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches agreed twice that the chapel might become the church for a newly-created parish of Poplar.

On both occasions (in 1718 and 1724) the Commission stipulated that considerable repairs were required before the chapel could be considered fit for use as a parish church. It seems that now the Company decided to exploit the need for repairs to take over exclusive patronage of the chapel, which it did in 1728, having refused to do in 1655. However, despite the Company carrying out repairs in 1722, 1733 and 1755, the locals still had to write to the Company in November 1774 to complain that the chapel was in a state of considerable disrepair.

The Company’s refusal to spend more than was absolutely necessary is no doubt the reason that the fabric of the chapel survives much as it was when it opened for services in 1654. The only major work to be carried out by the Company was during the expansion of the almshouses in the early 1800s. In 1803 the chapel itself was ‘repaired and embellished’, finding itself the centrepiece of a collegiate group of buildings when the development was completed in 1806.

The possibility of the chapel becoming the church for a new parish of Poplar was dispelled by the creation in 1817 of the parish of All Saints, Poplar. The new church opened in 1822, after which the chapel continued in use almost exclusively as the Company’s chapel, though some locals used it still. However in 1866, at the time of the demolition of the almshouses, the chapel was conveyed to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. It was this change which resulted in the most intrusive modifications to the original fabric.

Consecrated on 19 February 1867 by the Archbishop of Armagh, the chapel was dedicated to St Matthias, with the former chaplaincy as its vicarage. Accordingly much work was carried out to make the ‘low’ chapel fit its new status as a parish church. It enjoyed this status for little more than a century. Falling numbers resulted in the church closing in 1976. However, while the vicarage was sold to become a private residence, St Matthias Poplar became a community centre, a function it continues to carry out.

Picture Credits:

Meridian House [EIC 01] and Meridian House (Detail) [EIC 02] – https://londontraveller.org

East India Company Arms 1698 [EIC 03] – https://www.economist.com/node/21541753

EIC Almshouse drawn 1798 [EIC 04] – http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/plate-13

EIC Almshouses 1817 [EIC 05] – http://mapco.net/darton1817/darton.htm

Poplar Chapel [EIC 06] – http://www.stmatthiascommunitycentre.com/history.jsp

Poplar Chapel with Ceiling Boss [EIC 07] – http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/plate-15

St Matthias Church [EIC 08] – http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2636624