Jacobs was born in Wapping, London; his father was a wharf manager at the South Devon wharf at Lower East Smithfield. He was educated at a private school in London and later at Birkbeck College (then called Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution, now part of the University of London)A MASTER OF CRAFTA pretty girl stood alone on the jetty of an old-fashioned wharf at Wapping, looking down upon the silent deck of a schooner below. No smoke issued from the soot-stained cowl of the galley, and the fore-scuttle and the companion were both inhospitably closed. The quiet of evening was over everything, broken only by the whirr of the paddles of a passenger steamer as it passed carefully up the centre of the river, or the plash of a lighterman's huge sweep as he piloted his unwieldy craft down on the last remnant of the ebb-tide. In shore, various craft sat lightly on the soft Thames mud: some sheeting a rigid uprightness, others with their decks at various angles of discomfort.
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