The Mahoneys of West Ham

In the early 1800s, the settlement of Stratford in Essex was mostly centred around agriculture and early maps of the area show large expanses of fields.

By the 1830s, the Northern and Eastern Railway company began constructing a line from Broxbourne in Hertfordshire through to Stratford, in order to join up with the Eastern Counties Railway. With large amounts of land at their disposal, the railway companies also constructed a large goods yard and a sizeable engine construction works. All of this required manual labour and the area saw a large influx of workers, including many from Ireland.

It seems likely that Sylvester Mahoney was one of many who travelled from Ireland and the records list other Irish families with the same — or similar — surname who may have been related to Sylvester. The following is an attempt to identify as many of the Mahoney's living in the area as possible.

Many of the workers lived in cramped and unsanitary conditions in the back streets near to Maryland Point and in November 1857, several newspapers reported on a visit made by the President of the Board of Health, the Right Honourable W. Cooper, to West Ham which included a visit to Gilby's Alley (marked as Gilbert's Place on maps of the period) where at least families named "Mahoney" had lived:

No language can can depict the state of these hovels, without water supply, except of the foulest description, with small back yards only a few feet square, with accumulations of putrid matter, sodden by wet. The court is only about four or five feet wide, and the water fouled by privy drainage, and therefore always a source and centre of disease.

By the early 1850s, Sylvester Mahoney was destitute and declared himself a pauper on the 1851 Census, and his son Dennis died within a few weeks of the Census, aged only 15. It seems almost certain that the marriage of his daughter Ann to local greengrocer Joseph Hitchcock in December 1851 saved the Mahoney family from ending up at the local workhouse.