At Captain Cook’s House In Mile End Rd

Contributing Writer Gillian Tindall tells the story of Captain Cook’s house in Whitechapel, sacrificed for a car park in 1958, and makes a plea for its reconstruction as part of the history of the place

Captain Cook’s house, c.1936

Long before the East End acquired its reputation as London’s working-class quarter, it had a different character. Walk along the Mile End Rd today from Whitechapel and, even after so much has been demolished in the interests of supposed urban regeneration, you will spot surviving signs of grandeur. Trinity Green, the last remaining set of almshouses, is still intact, as are a few eighteenth century private houses further east, two with central porches and elaborate iron-work. There was once a particularly large and splendid one of the same kind on the south side of the road too, built by the rich widow of an East India Company director, but of that no trace remains.

By the second half of the eighteenth century the area was becoming built up, with the City of London spreading out – just as it does today – and the London Hospital already established, yet it was still a ‘nice’ area for comfortably-off people. It was also particularly convenient for those whose interests lay in ships, with the Thames wharfs not far off. A property developer with the evocative name of Ebenezer Mussell acquired a strip of land in the seventeen-sixties between Mile End Green, which already had some substantial houses along it, and Mutton Lane, which much later would become Jubilee St. He called his new terrace on the main road, Assembly Row, yet he took his time building it, using several different builders, so the houses were not all to the same design. In the usual way of the times, it was the builders who sold them off on long-term leases.

In 1764 a sixty-one year lease on the eight-roomed end house, near the one owned by the East India Company widow, was bought by a thirty-six year old called James Cook. He was a Yorkshire boy by birth, son of an agricultural labourer who had risen to become a farm foreman. The farmer’s wife taught the boy his letters and, realising how bright he was, arranged for him to go to a charity school. Later, when he was apprenticed to a shopkeeper, his master noticed the same thing and got him a place with a Quaker shipmaster in Whitby. After that, after a spell as an ordinary seaman and experience in a brief war with France, Cook’s career as a determined and visionary navigator began to unroll without a backward glance. He became well known to the Admiralty and members of the Royal Society.

He had been living in then-rural Shadwell, with his young wife Elizabeth and their first child, a son who had been born while he was away on a long, exploratory voyage round Newfoundland. But now he had acquired the grander Assembly Row house. Four years and three more children later he was preparing for the first of his great scientific journeys to the Pacific, accompanied by botanists and an astronomer. He insured the house for £250, his household goods for another £200, and the family’s clothing and silver for additional amounts. Given that in those times £50 a year was a sufficient family income for a modestly respectable lifestyle, with a servant, these sums suggest considerable comfort.

The British Empire did not exist then and the East India Company was – to quote a remark of the time – ‘a ramshackle company trading in tea and opium.’ Pursuing a cloud on the horizon further off than little-known Australia – as Cook did – was an act of curiosity. He did not expect to discover New Zealand. The Maoris he met there living on the shores of the North Island were themselves immigrants who had arrived only two or three hundred years before. After initial problems, Cook and they made friends.

The voyage Cook set out on in 1768 did not bring him back to his house in the Mile End Rd for three years. Then he was off again from 1772 to 1775, and again from 1776 to 1780. This last was the journey that carried him to an inglorious death off Hawaii, where he had – untypically – antagonised the local people. Elizabeth did not get news of his death until the following year. She inherited the house and its contents, and received a pension of £200 a year for life from the king. She was thirty-eight and had given birth to six children, three of whom had already perished. Her eldest boy, who was by then a teenage midshipman, was drowned in the same year his father died ended on the other side of the world. Both her other sons who survived birth also died young, one in a violent robbery and the other of a fever. Her only daughter also died. Deeply distressed by these repeated blows of fate, nevertheless she lived on to the age of ninety-three, apparently sustained by her Methodist belief. By then, Elizabeth had long since moved away from the Mile End Rd, which had become urban.

Later in the nineteenth century, when the grand inhabitants were forgotten, Cook’s house, along with the neighbouring ones, had a shop built out in front. In the early twentieth century, this became a women’s clothes shop – ‘Corsets made to measure a speciality’ – and later a kosher butcher. A London County Council blue plaque commemorating the fact that Captain Cook once lived there was put on the house in 1907, yet that did not protect it from demolition in 1958.

It was at the height of post-war architectural and historical destruction, when the Greater London Plan to demolish two-thirds of the Borough of Stepney was being implemented by planners possessing more simplistic political vision than any human feeling or common sense.

Egged on by ambitious architects and by well-intentioned ‘reformers,’ such as Father Joe Williamson of Whitechapel who seemed to think that Poverty & Sin could be wiped out by destroying the streets where it was currently in evidence, the local authority took high-handed decisions. None of the houses in the rest of the terrace were pulled down – they are still there now. The pretext for destroying Cook’s house appears to have been the supposed need to widen a narrow lane alongside it. In practice, the lane never got widened, its ancient cobbles remain to this day, leading merely to a puddled parking lot and the Seraphim & Cherubim Church. The pointless brick wall that has replaced the house was given a commemorative plaque in 1970, when the enlarged local authority of Tower Hamlets had acquired some notion of respect for the past – yet not sufficient to rebuild the house as it had been or to construct anything worthwhile in the empty space.

I will happily join forces with anyone who feels like campaigning for Cook’s house to be rebuilt. It will not matter if the interior is different from the original. What matters to me is to see the exterior reconstructed as it was, with the right twelve-paned windows, and the mutilated terrace restored. The inside could become ‘affordable’ flats or, even better, social housing. Why not?

Captain Cook’s house, c.1940

Wall constructed after demolition of Captain Cook’s house, 1968

Civic dignitaries unveil a plaque to Captain Cook in 1970

Elizabeth Cook (1742–1835) by William Henderson, 1830

Captain James Cook (1728-79) by Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, c. 1775

Captain James Cook’s signature

Archive images courtesy Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

Gillian Tindall’s The Tunnel Through Time, A New Route For An Old Journey is out now as a Vintage paperback

You may like to read these other stories by Gillian Tindall

In Stepney, 1963

Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Where The White Chapel Once Stood

The Old South Bank

Leonard Fenton, Actor

In Old Deptford

Lifesaving in Limehouse

From Bedlam To Liverpool St

Smithfield’s Bloody Past

The Tunnel Through Time