The 1867 Fire at the Rising Sun Inn:
A Tooting Landmark Disappears

Lower Tooting in 1867 was a small country village surrounded by market gardens and farmland. It would be a year before Tooting Junction railway station opened and many more before its grand old houses disappeared under streets of brick-built terraces. For many day trippers Tooting provided an escape from the grime of the city, an escape that was made easy by the regular horse-drawn omnibuses that stopped at the Castle and the Angel, two old inns situated on the High Street.

A drink in the Angel would have felt like a step back in time. It still looked like a medieval building with low ceilings, tiny paned windows and a jutting jettied first floor. An extensive yard opened out behind it for the convenience of those lucky enough to travel by their own transport.

Lower Tooting, which was also known as Tooting Graveney, was said to be the smallest parish in Surrey. And yet it had thirteen drinking establishments to choose from, for in addition to the Castle and the Angel, and its nine beer houses, there were another two old inns, the Mitre and the Rising Sun, which faced one another on opposite sides of Mitcham Road.

The latecomer

The Rising Sun looked to have been built in the late eighteenth century, and this made it the newest of the four Lower Tooting inns. It had sixteen rooms comprising a taproom, a bar, a parlour and a kitchen on the ground floor, bedrooms on the first floor, and more in the second floor attics. Behind was a yard with stabling and sheds. The sheds may have been privies.

To the right was the jewel in the pub’s crown. This was the grandly named assembly rooms, which were in fact a sizable single storey building measuring about fourteen by seven-and-a-half metres. The rooms were used for entertainments, but also for meetings, such as the Mitcham Anti-Corn Law Association.

Next door to the right was Avon Villa, the home of William Wombill, an animal artist who lived there with his family. Beyond the yard stood the parish church of St Nicholas. Rebuilt in 1833, this stern example of Georgian Gothic had replaced a charming but rather ramshackle building with an unusual Saxon round tower, which looked more like a windmill than a church.

Thomas Weaver

The landlord of the Rising Sun was Thomas Weaver. Born in Shropshire in 1800, Weaver came to London as a young man to work as a licensed victualler or publican, but in the early 1830s, having run a pub in Shepherd Street in Mayfair, he moved with his wife Ann and oldest daughter to the Surrey village of Mitcham. The family grew to three daughters and a son, but only six months after the last child was born Ann Weaver died.

Ann was buried in Mitcham, in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul, and it may have been the tragedy of her death that prompted the family to move to nearby Tooting, where Thomas established himself in the Rising Sun. In common with other Tooting landlords of the nineteenth century, he leased his pub from a landowner, who in the case of the Rising Sun was Thomas Pell Platt, a librarian and orientalist and the owner of a sizable plot of land and other houses nearby.

Over the years Weaver was assisted in running the pub by two or three members of staff. For example, we find that in 1851 he had the help of a barmaid, who happened to be a niece by the name of Caroline, along with a barman, or potman, and an ostler whose job it was to take care of horses. His daughters Annette, Mary and Jane also worked in the pub as they got older, and probably he hoped that his youngest child, who was another Thomas, would take over the licence one day. Sadly the boy died in 1852 at the age of thirteen, and we can only speculate if having his body buried in the graveyard behind the pub brought Weaver comfort, or if it served as a bleak reminder of what he had lost.

The lodgers

During this period most of the Tooting inns provided accommodation for travellers, but throughout Weaver’s tenure the Rising Sun appears to have been less like a hotel than a lodging house for large numbers of working men. Some of these men, such as the seventeen agricultural labourers who were there in June 1841, stayed while doing seasonal work in the vicinity, while others almost set up permanent homes. Among the boarders were farm labourers, general labourers, a carman or delivery man, a tailor, a painter, an omnibus coachman and a gardener.

The 1860s saw changes at the Rising Sun. They began with a happy event, which was the marriage in August 1861 of Weaver’s second daughter, Mary, to a local grocer called Thomas Pulbrook, although a few months later the family made a less joyful return to the church for the funeral of Mary’s sister Jane, who was only twenty-four. Things appear to have been going further downhill in 1865 when the Vestry complained to Weaver’s landlord about ‘the disgraceful state of the yard and premises of the Rising Sun adjoining the churchyard’. Possibly the complaint against him had been made at the behest of his neighbour, William Wombill, who happened to be an active member of the Vestry.

Off to bed

Now we come to Sunday 10 February 1867. In that year Thomas Weaver, aged sixty-six, was running the Rising Sun with the help of Thomas Porter, a sixty-year-old barman who had been at the pub for at least six years, and a more recent recruit, Sarah Violet, who was a general servant. Sarah, who was twenty-one at the time, was a native of Tooting, having grown up in Christchurch Grove near the Common. She had started work in her early teens as a nursery maid in the family of a Tooting wine merchant before coming to the Rising Sun a year before these events.

One of the lodgers, a labourer by the name of James Bourn, returning from an evening out at about nine-thirty, joined four others where they were smoking their pipes around the tap room fire. Henry Owen, a gardener who had lived at the Rising Sun for two years, was reading the Bible to James Tabby, who was sixty years old. Also present was Richard Cutting, a master carman aged sixty-eight, who had lodged there for over ten years following the death of his wife. The final lodger was Richard Smith, about whom nothing is known, other than that he was fifty years old.

At about ten o’clock the men went up to their attic bedrooms. They took candles with them as the gas lighting only extended to the ground floor public rooms and passages. Sarah Violet retired to her room downstairs, while Thomas Weaver locked up and switched off the gas, just as he had done for the last twenty-six years, before going upstairs to bed.

Smoke and flames

All seemed well until about four in the morning, when PC William Tuthill, 198 W, who was patrolling the village, heard the sound of breaking glass. He then saw smoke escaping through the closed shutters of the Rising Sun, and immediately began to raise the alarm.

The first person to appear from the building was the landlord, Thomas Weaver, clad in a nightshirt with a coat thrown over his shoulders. Waking up to see white smoke around his window, he had headed downstairs to investigate, but as he pushed open the taproom door a great wave of smoke and flames had forced him back. Realising that there was nothing to be done to contain the fire, he had quickly unlocked a door and hurried outside, and it is likely that this sudden ingress of fresh air had fuelled the fire which roared up the staircase.

Weaver now broke the window of Sarah Violet’s room, telling her to get out, but his urgent order did not seem to register with her. Having woken up in total darkness, she was confused. She called out, asking what the matter was, but it was some time before James Bourn and Henry Owen responded. ‘Save yourself!’ they shouted. Wearing only a nightdress, Sarah escaped through the back of the building, leaving all her possessions behind.

Through a window

A short while before, upstairs in the attics, James Bourn was woken up by shouts from outside on the Mitcham Road. He tried to rouse his roommate Henry Owen. ‘Get up,’ he shouted, ‘house a fire.’ Owen, stirred to action, opened the bedroom door in the hope of escaping via the stairs. He could not see flames, but the heat and fire coming from the stairs knocked him back into the room, where he struggled for breath.

Realising the severity of the situation, Owen quickly closed the door, but not before he and Bourn heard the cries of their fellow lodgers, of which the most terrible and disturbing was the ‘Murder! Murder!’ of Thomas Porter, the man they called Potty. They were fortunate: their room on the south side of the building overlooked the single-storey assembly room. It was the only possible means of escape, and so they climbed through a second-floor sash window before dropping down onto its roof.

As it so happened, a watchman employed at the new sewers on Tooting Road, whose name was William Harrington, had arrived on the scene moments before. He had been alerted by the bright light of the fire, and now he heard men screaming, and saw flames at the windows. Spotting the two men stranded on the assembly room roof, he ran to the nearby wheelwright’s house for a ladder, and then helped them to safety. Just as Bourn and Owen reached the ground the assembly room caught fire, and before long the blaze had spread to the neighbouring Avon Villa.

The fire engine

You may well be wondering where the fire engine was. Where indeed? In the Tooting of 1867 the only readily available means of putting out a fire was the so-called parish engine, which was, in effect, a water container on wheels that could be taken to the scene of a fire. The container was filled manually with water, which was then pumped through a hose by two men working handles.

Until 1855 Tooting’s local government rested with what was called the Vestry or parish council. The Vestry appointed local officials — churchwardens, overseers of the poor, tax collectors, and the ale-kenners who tested the quality of locally sold beer — and they also managed the parish engine. But after 1855 many of these responsibilities were centralised to the Wandsworth District Board of Works.

This Board of Works had recently condemned Tooting’s fire engine, which, admittedly, was primitive. They also decreed that the parish could not pay for a local fireman out of the rates, though no alternative was provided. Luckily for Mr Wombill, the Vestry had ignored the Board’s instructions, or so it would seem. They had kept the old engine after all, and, while it was not powerful enough to put out the pub fire, it soon doused the flames attacking Avon Villa.

Nobody and nothing

As the fire raged it became obvious that there was no way to rescue the four men trapped on the second floor. Many parishes owned what was called a fire escape: extra-long ladders with canvas chutes attached to their undersides which people used to slide to safety. But Lower Tooting did not have a fire-escape — the nearest was three-quarters of a mile away and there is no report of it being sent to the fire. 

There was criticism that the powers that be — the police? the Vestry? it is not clear who — did not act soon enough to summon help. But eventually assistance came from outside, possibly through the action of policemen who were said to have seen fire — or perhaps the light it gave off — when standing on bridges in London. First to arrive was a steam-powered fire engine from Hewett’s Brewery, up in Larkhall Lane in Clapham, and then another from the works of Shand, Mason & Co., who manufactured these engines in Blackfriars.

But by the time the horse-drawn vehicles trundled into Tooting there was nobody and nothing to save. The Rising Sun’s walls had been reduced to a mere twelve inches from the ground, and it was soon realised that four men —Thomas Porter, Richard Smith, James Tabby and Richard Cutting — had lost their lives. The next terrible task was to retrieve their bodies or what remained of them. Edward Dangerfield, the commander of the Hewitt’s fire engine, retrieved three, the fourth being found later.

Picking over

As Monday dawned a large crowd of distressed Tooting inhabitants gathered around the still smouldering site of the Rising Sun. They would have seen the arrival of William Swanston, the Superintendent of the London Salvage Corps, who appeared on site with his men, many of whom were ex-sailors. The Salvage Corps had been formed by the fire insurance companies to retrieve any goods or property that might be saved from disasters such as this fire.

Weaver held a policy for six hundred pounds with the Sun Fire Insurance Company. There was nothing for them to retrieve, but they picked over the wreckage for days, only to make the grim discovery of body parts from the victims. They were forced to damp down the site while they worked as it continued to smoulder for several days after the inferno.

An accidental fire

On Wednesday 13 February an inquest was held just over the road from the Rising Sun in the Mitre Inn, presided over by William Carter, the coroner for East Surrey. It was common for inquests to be held in local pubs as they were often the only public spaces large enough to seat a jury, witnesses and spectators. As well as a local jury, representatives of Hewett’s Brewery fire brigade were present, along with Mr White, who was the loss adjustor for the insurance company, and Inspector Fraser of the Metropolitan Police.

Carter explained to the jury that their role was to decide what had caused the fire that resulted in the deaths of the four men, following which they were taken to view the bodies, as was the usual practice at an inquest. It was with some difficulty that they managed to get back to their seats through the heaving crowd in the makeshift jury room. After hearing the witnesses, the coroner and jury accepted Thomas Weaver’s theory that a canvas apron hanging on a trivet next to the taproom stove must have caught light, causing the fatal fire.

The jury returned their verdict with an additional statement:

That the dead were burnt to death by an accidental fire and the jury recommended that a memorial be forwarded to the Board of Works urging that a fire-escape should be supplied to each of the outlying districts within the District, such a provision being rendered the more necessary by the fact that most of the said parishes are situated at a distance from the principal stations of the fire brigade.

On the following Saturday the four men were buried in St Nicholas Churchyard. The location of their grave is not known.

The aftermath

It is likely that there was local gossip after the fire. Some might have put it down to bad luck. But others might have blamed Weaver’s negligence, or even made a connection between the fire and Weaver’s fire insurance policy.

Whatever was thought or said, Thomas Weaver left Tooting, first to lodge with a local publican in Mitcham, and then to spend his final years in the Licensed Victuallers’ Asylum in Peckham. The Asylum was a retirement home for publicans, where as well as being accommodated he received a small pension and coal. He died in1881 and was laid to rest on 10 August in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul in Mitcham, where his wife had been buried over forty years before.

Sarah Violet left Tooting after the fire to work as a servant to a pork butcher in Kent. Eventually she returned to South London: she married at the age of thirty-seven and was widowed by the time she was forty-one. She lived in Battersea with her three children and supported them by working as a charwoman.

The elusive dead

It has not been possible to discover what happened to James Bourn and Henry Owen after the fire. We would need to know more about them than that they were a labourer and a gardener.

The victims of the fire remain as elusive, although a little more is known about Richard Cutting, probably because he had lived in Tooting for at least twenty years. Born in Norfolk, he had been married and had at least three children. He is described as a master carman in the 1861 census, and after his death his son William, who gave his address as The Mitre, claimed his estate of about fifty pounds. But the earlier lives of Thomas Porter, James Tabby and Richard Smith cannot be traced: very little information is given about them in contemporary newspapers apart from their deaths.

Several years later two buildings comprising four houses and called Collingwood Terrace were built on the site of the Rising Sun.