Stephen Pomeroy

Stephen Pomeroy organises the public meetings through which London’s working grievances are shaped from random noise into organised pressure. The city counts him among its recognised shadow operators, though what he trades in is pressure rather than contraband.

In Southwark Stephen Pomeroy organises public meetings, and his particular gift is to turn grievance into something that may be counted. The borough outrage of Tobias Pell reaches the fish-market soonest; Martin Bale’s broadsheets are read aloud in the taverns of Fleet Street; and it is Pomeroy who gives the lower river’s grievance its heat upon the public platform. Wherever grievance threatens to harden into organised pressure, his name is used. London ranks him with Hester Grayshott and Lora Winterbourne as the three kinds of authority its shadow economy acknowledges: Grayshott’s resting on memory, Winterbourne’s on discretion, and his on a crowd shaped with intent.

He writes as well as he speaks. His Yard Tribune Notes, dated from Southwark, are the work of a man who knows exactly where the city is soft, which is among men set to work so close together that they discover, all at once, that delay itself may be made a grievance. His natural ground is the yards, stairs and wharves of the lower river, and he knows which queue, which late wage and which stoppage left unexplained will turn a muttering crowd into a meeting.

He is not simply a respectable reformer. When he is mentioned after dark, hearers understand that money, grievance or both have entered the evening, and it is widely supposed that he knows who pays for a meeting as well as who attends it. Employers, wharf interests and ward men tend to treat him as a force to be negotiated with rather than a nuisance to be moved on.

Companies meet him from both sides. A wharf employer may want to know what is planned before the next shift; a meeting may want steady hands at the door when the other side sends men of its own; a missing speaker, a stolen petition or a hall that burned the night before a gathering all fall naturally into his orbit. He makes a useful ally and a poor enemy, since he can make a company’s name known along the lower river in a single evening, and not always kindly.

In person

A man of about forty-four, Stephen Pomeroy is of medium height, lean and broad-shouldered, with receding sandy hair, a substantial sandy moustache and a rectangular, weather-beaten face. Deep-set grey-blue eyes sit beneath heavy brows either side of a prominent straight nose, and a diagonal scar cuts through one eyebrow. He dresses plainly in a brown wool frock coat, waistcoat and high collar, with sturdy boots and a cheap watch chain, and carries a leather document case crammed with petitions, notices and meeting papers.