Around the Monopoly board with the Hand in Hand Registers — Part 1
At the end of last year, we finally finished our mammoth project to scan the 150 policy registers of our oldest ancestor company Hand in Hand. We’ve scanned 59,160 pages over nearly 1026 hours and now have access to approximately 550,000 policy entries dating from 1696/7–1865 that give us insight into the lives of our earliest customers from royalty and political leaders to cheesemongers, peruke makers, and gingerbread bakers. To help us improve access to this fascinating information, we have set up a website at https://amicablecontributors.com/ where people can help us plot entries from the registers onto historical maps of London.
During the digitisation part of the project, we’ve been keeping an eye out for interesting names and places in the Hand in Hand registers. It turns out that many of the properties I’ve noted have been in places found on the Monopoly board (you can tell the source of my knowledge of London streets). I think that the resulting information gives a good insight into the range of people and property found in the registers, so to mark the launch of our new website I’ve pulled them together to write a Hand in Hand trip around the Monopoly board (London edition) — this is part one, covering the first side of the board from ‘go’ to ‘just visiting jail’.
Our first property is the Bull’s Head Ale House on Old Kent Road, then called Kent Street. The insurance on the pub was renewed in 1816 by Thomas Liversidge Fish. Mr Fish was also known as ‘the Golden Fish’ because of his immense wealth which was estimated to be £20,000 a year. He owned, and opened to the public, Knowle House in Sidmouth Devon which was described as a house of curiosities set in grounds with summer houses, fountains, grottoes, and a pyramid of shells. Visitors, who arrived by the hundreds to look around each summer considerably boosting the local economy, could also look forward to seeing 50 parrots, 6 Kangaroos, two buffaloes, and a camel. By the time of his death in 1861 he was estimated to own 400 pubs and the Bull’s Head might have been the start of his empire. The policy, number 88992, was originally taken out in 1774 by widow Jane Bennet of Newington in Surrey who insured it with the house next door, the addresses being 290 and 291 Kent Street.
I’ve not spotted any other properties on Old Kent Road, so we move on past Community Chest to Whitechapel Road. The property I’ve spotted here is the Royal London Hospital which was first insured with Hand in Hand in September 1754 under policies 75251–2 for £4000. The hospital was then known as the London, the foundation stone was laid in 1752 and the first patients were admitted in 1757. The policy was taken out by the Governors of the hospital and the building is described in the register as being 3 storeys high, on the south side of Whitechapel Road “standing clear and known by the name of the London hospital”. We can trace the insurance being renewed up to 26 August 1805.
I have not made a note of any other properties on Whitechapel Road and although the company insured property in the Kings Cross area, I’ve not found any entries for the insurance of stations so our next property on the board is the Angel Islington. The Hand in Hand first insured the inn, which became an unlikely landmark in the Monopoly game, in October 1705 when policy number 9166 for £1000 was taken out by Gibbons Bagnall. The property was described as being on the west side of the road leading to Islington.
The Angel was still insured by Hand in Hand in in 1747 when it was the subject of a Hogarth drawing, The Stage-Coach, Or The Country Inn Yard’ . In 1754, when insurance was renewed by Mary Blow and William Belitha, the landlord was Robert Bartholomew whose family ran the Angel until the end of the century. By the time the policy was renewed in 1766 by Mary Belitha, the original property had been extended and insurance was set at £2,400 for brick and £300 for timber parts. By 1880 insurance had increased again to a total of £3000 and the register describes the inn as a three-storey house with a gallery plus a tap house with rooms over and a scullery. The final renewal was in June 1787 by Benjamin Tate by which time the landlord was Robert Bartholomew’s son, Christopher, and after which the register is annotated to say the Angel was insured with a different company.
I’ve not noted any addresses on the Euston Road nor on Pentonville Road, although Hand in Hand did insure several properties in the area for Henry Penton who developed Pentonville in the 1770s and gave his name to the street.
We end this first side of the board with jail and even if we are ‘just visiting’ we have plenty to choose from in the pages of the registers. The earliest prison I’ve found Hand in Hand insuring was the Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark which was first insured in November 1713 by Edward Salisbury, a saddler. In March 1716, the company insured the Counter Prison and Borough Court House on St Olave’s Street Southwark for £700 under policy 33226, and in 1723 the Poultry Compter, a prison for minor criminals in Cheapside, was insured for £1500 under policy 47770. In 1749, the mayor and commonality and citizens of London took out new insurance on the Poultry and Wood Street compters as well as prisons at Ludgate and Newgate under policies 71975–71981. All of these prisons (except Wood Street) continued to be insured with Hand in Hand until 1799.
Inmates in Newgate during this period included the pickpocket George Barrington whose attempted escape in his wife’s clothes was reported in the newspapers in 1790, John Walter (founder of the Times newspaper) who was imprisoned for libel against the Dukes of York, Clarence, and Gloucester in 1789, and the famous lover Casanova who was arrested for bigamy in 1763. The prison also housed the counterfeiter Catherine Murphy (the last woman to be burned at the stake in England, in 1789), William Ryland the pioneer of stipple engraving who was sentenced for forgery in 1783, and florist Rhynwick Williams. Williams was found guilty of being the so-called London Monster who terrorised up to fifty women in London in the late 1780s by stabbing or pricking them either from behind or with a spike hidden in a bunch of flowers. Meanwhile, Poultry Compter contained men like 20-year-old James Waggot and 64-year-old Thomas Andrews both arrested for sodomy in the 1750s and 1760s and former slave Jonathan Strong who was rescued in 1767 by Grenville Sharpe from the prison where he was being illegally held at the request of his former master while awaiting a ship to send him back to slavery in the Caribbean.
Part 2 coming soon but please do check out the website in the meantime and see which interesting buildings and people you can discover for yourself.
