carried a warning for its subscribers. ‘Readers who have thoughts of making a pilgrimage to Shadwell to see Perkin’s birthplace would be well advised not to delay,’ wrote the journal’s editor Laurence E. Morris. ‘For the site has been scheduled for redevelopment.’ Once the developers moved in there was no stopping them. The site has been the subject of significant municipal improvement three times in the last four decades.
King David Lane, Upper Shadwell, is a short street containing Blue Gate School and an ugly office block, and practically nothing remains from the area in which William Perkin was born on 12 March 1838. Today’s visitor finds that King David Lane has become one-way, built up with islands and bollards and signs. The road connects Cable Street – a string of council estates – to The Highway, a thundering four-lane parade of trucks and speeding Ford Mondeos. Number 3 King David Lane, where Perkin was born at home as the last of seven children, has been demolished. Like much of the East End of London, little looks the way it did before the last war.
The oldest structure is the parish church of St Paul’s, a small building with an incisively tall spire. Built in 1669, the last of five London churches constructed during the Restoration, it has some famous names to its history. John Wesley preached here. Captain James Cook was an active parishioner and baptised his first son here. Jane Randolph, the mother of Thomas Jefferson, was also baptised at the church, as was William Perkin in 1838. There is a little graveyard around the church, but it is impossible to read the gravestones. In the church crypt you will find the Green Gables Montessori School.
Behind the church there is a footpath leading to many converted wharves, where those who live there can have breakfast on little terraces overlooking the Thames. Beneath them are offices for security guards and estate agents. At Shadwell Basin you may go angling and canoeing, and admire the view towards Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome.
Forty years ago, Perkin’s birthplace became A. E. Wolfe, beef and pork butcher. When that went, and the shop and rooms above it were knocked down, another new estate went up. Opposite this stands a council block called Martineau that once used to be 1 King David Fort, the house and stables the Perkins leased when William was in his teens. On one corner of this building there is a round blue plaque affixed by the Stepney Historical Trust: ‘Sir William Henry Perkin, FRS, discovered the first aniline dyestuff, March 1856, while working in his home laboratory on this site, and went on to found science-based industry.’ No one you meet who lives here today knows very much about him.
When he was in his twenties, William Perkin went to Leeds on business and found time to visit the house of his late grandfather, Thomas Perkin, born in 1757, of a line of Yorkshire farmers. Thomas became a leather worker, but his grandson was moved to find that he also had a rare hobby. On visiting his house at Black Thornton, near Ingleton, Perkin found a cellar containing what looked to be a laboratory. There was a still and a small smelting furnace, and various jars with grimy burnt mixtures. It was a strange stash to find in this rural community; on asking around, Perkin learnt that his grandfather had been an alchemist, and had attempted to transmute base metal into gold.
Thomas Perkin’s leatherwork led him to London, where he appears to have switched trades to become a carpenter and boat-builder. His only son, George Fowler Perkin, who was born in 1802, also became a carpenter, and a successful one. He employed twelve men, and engaged them exclusively in building the new terraced housing for the local dock workers. By today’s standards, his family would be judged parvenu middle class.
Not long after his birth, William Perkin’s family moved into a larger three-storey house close by, a few yards north of the High Street, a place known as King David Fort. They employed servants, and were one of the wealthiest families in the area. Their house stood out, a neighbourhood talking point. Shadwell, particularly the lower side by the docks, had some of the most wretched and crowded slums in the East End. One visitor in the early nineteenth century noted that ‘thousands of useful tradesmen, artisans and mechanics inhabit, but their homes and workshops will not bear description, nor are the streets, courts, lanes and alleys by any means inviting.’
Victorian writers liked to remark on the extremes of London’s poverty and wealth, virtue and iniquity. When Henry Mayhew viewed the city from a hot-air balloon in the middle of the century he was struck by the presence of mass destitution so close to the great institutions of trade, finance and empire. In Shadwell, the Perkins encountered such extremes on a daily basis. Disease was all around them. William Perkin was to lose both eldest sister and brother to tuberculosis. Their mother Sarah, a woman of Scottish descent who had moved to east London when she was a child, was thought never to have recovered from her losses.
The Perkins grew up opposite the police station, from where they witnessed an endless stream of the drunk and lawless. Much of the police work centred on a pub named Paddy’s Goose, where local seamen sought prostitutes, and the unwary were press-ganged into the Royal Navy.
William Perkin attended the private Arbour Terrace School in Commercial Road, a few hundreds yards from his home. He was a gifted student, with many interests outside the standard curriculum. ‘He showed remarkable dexterity in all kinds of hobbies,’ his nephew Arthur H. Waters recalled. Waters’s mother was about two years older than Perkin. ‘They were fond of taking long rambles together, and William was particularly keen on natural history and botany. On one occasion he produced a large pipe and tobacco and proceeded to puff away manfully. But after a time he became so confoundedly ill that his sister had some difficulty in getting him home. William’s craze for probing into everything, especially small things, seems to show that his wonderful instinct for research was present at a very early age.’
He became interested in photography when he was twelve, and at fourteen he took his own picture: he has a stony look, his broad forehead and strong features framed by dense black hair. He is done up in evening gear, or perhaps his church best, and he looks about twenty.
‘I do not quite know where to begin,’ he wrote to his colleague Heinrich Caro in 1891. ‘But as the circumstances connected with my childhood and youth had, I believe, a good deal to do in influencing me in respect to practical matters, I have ventured to relate a little connected with that period for your private information.’
Caro, from 1869 to 1890 the principal investor at BASF, had written to Perkin a few weeks earlier, explaining that he was preparing the first major history of the dye industry and would like more details about his early life. Perkin wrote that he would help him with the facts as he could remember them, but midway through his reply he had a change of heart. ‘I have now written you out an account of my early days, which I have never done before, and now I have done so feel some hesitation in sending it to you.’ Why this should be so he did not say, but he remained a meek and demure man throughout his life. He said later that he believed only his work was important.
At the beginning he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, though he fancied something artistic, or something practical he could do with his hands. ‘Being interested in what I saw going on around me, I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps,’ he wrote. He built wooden models, among other things of the steam trains he saw passing near his home. He was also drawn to engineering, and liked the illustrations of levers and pulleys he saw in a book called The Artisan. Published in 1828, this contained a popular summary of what was then known about mechanics, optics, magnetism and pneumatics, all of it written with an element of wonder and disbelief that science was moving so rapidly.
But Perkin was being pulled in other ways. ‘I took a great interest in painting,’ he explained, ‘and for a short time had the mad idea that I should like to be an artist.’ There was also music – he learnt the violin and double bass, and he and his brother and two sisters entertained thoughts of becoming a travelling quartet. But just before his thirteenth birthday a friend showed him some elementary experiments with crystals that he regarded as ‘quite marvellous’.
‘I saw chemistry was something
