My East End Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MY EAST END

  Gilda O’Neill was born in the East End of London. Having left school aged fifteen, she later returned to education as a mature student and went on to take three university degrees. Since 1990 she has been writing full-time and her novels include The Cockney Girl, Whitechapel Girl, The Bells of Bow, Just Around the Corner, Cissie Flowers, Dream On, Tlie Lights of London, Playing Around and Getting There, as well as her oral history Pull No More Bines, the story of East London women hop-pickers, and many short stories, articles and reviews. She and her husband John live in the East End, as do their two grown-up children.

  My East End

  Memories of Life in Cockney London

  Gilda O’Neill

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1999

  Published in Penguin Books 2000

  29

  Copyright © Gilda O’Neill, 1999

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192938-5

  For my family, who filled my head with wonderful stories

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART 1

  The Makings of the East End

  PART 2

  Feeding the Imperial Powerhouse

  PART 3

  The Golden Age

  PART 4

  Post-war, Post-imperial, Post-industrial, Postmodern, Post-East End?

  Appendix: The Docks

  Bibliography, Further Reading and Suggested Sources

  List of Illustrations

  Section One

  1. The Whitechapel hay market, 1899.

  2. The Waller family outside their butcher’s shop in Watney Street, c. 1910.

  3. Evans’s diary in Poplar High Street, c. 1928.

  4. A view of the ‘LaBo’, the La Bohème cinema, c. 1931.

  5. Abraham Cohen’s barbers, Ellen Street, Stepney, c. 1930.

  6. George Gardens, Bethnal Green, 1903.

  7. Drying racks in the Sophia Street laundry, 1931.

  8. Refuse collection using a tip-up cart in Old Montague Street, c. 1895.

  9. Mrs Robinson of Bethnal Green stuffs a palliasse with straw, c. 1900.

  10. Members of a family of nine, July 1912.

  11. My father in 1924, with the rest of Mrs Chalkley’s form at Alton Street School, Poplar.

  12. Children enjoying a game of leap-frog, 1905.

  13. Using the tin bath as a makeshift paddling pool in the backyard of 109 Grove Road, c. 1954.

  14. Celebrating peace by ‘slipping the slip’ at the English Fair, Poplar recreation ground, 1919.

  Section Two

  15. The children’s ward in Poplar Hospital, 1906.

  16. The workhouse, Poplar High Street, c. 1900.

  17. Victoria Park, 1908.

  18. A family day out.

  19. Posing, 1934-style, at Poplar Baths.

  20. The Russian vapour baths at 86 Brick Lane, c. 1910.

  21. Bethnal Green, 1904.

  22. A family selling ice cream and ice in the 1920s.

  23. ‘Chinatown’: Pennyfields, Limehouse, 1927.

  24. Dunbar’s Wharf, Narrow Street, c. 1900.

  25. A ‘dock copper’ checking that a dockworker isn’t leaving with more than he arrived with.

  26. The Royal Artillery unloading a ship during a dockworkers’ strike in July 1949 at the Royal Albert Dock.

  27. London Docks, 1961.

  28. Royal Docks, 1942.

  Section Three

  29. Sheltering from the bombs for the night became a part of wartime family life.

  30. The docks, vital to the life of the country, were continually targeted by enemy bombers.

  31. Royal Docks, 1944.

  32. ‘Bombed out’. Lydia Street, 1940.

  33. VE Day celebrations, 8 May 1945.

  34. Women enjoying a chat in Whitechapel, 1938.

  35. Teatime, Whitechapel, 1938.

  36. Scrubbing the step ready for the Coronation party, 1953.

  37. Coronation street party in Morpeth Street.

  38. Attracting the punters, Petticoat Lane, 1936.

  39. Attracting the punters, Petticoat Lane, 1998.

  40. Likely lads, 1951, by an advertisement for the ever-popular Troxy.

  41. A celebration knees-up at Bill Cannon’s ‘Pigeon-do’, 1960s.

  42. Girls playing in the street, c. 1950.

  Author’s collection: 11, 13, 18, 39, 41, endpapers; Hulton-Getty Picture Collection: 10, 26, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42; Museum of London: 9; Museum of London, PLA Collection: 28, 29, 30, 31; NMPFT/Hulton-Getty/Science and Society Picture Library: 33; Private collection: 3; Springboard Educational Trust: 12; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 32, 40; The Whiffin Collection/Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive: 7.

  Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be glad to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

  Acknowledgements

  First, my very special thanks to Rosy Fordham for all her help, and to Eleo Gordon for her support and advice, to Lesley Levene, Graínne Kelly and to all the many people who shared their stories, thoughts and memories, by telephone and letter, in notes and conversations, as well as in the extended, formal interviews, without whom this book could not exist: Vivian Archer, Julia Ashwell, Mary Bacon, Reg Baker, Vic Baker, Sarah Baron, Ernie Bennett, Theresa Bennett, Eileen Berley, John Bond, Grace Clay, George Cooper, Len Crickmar, Harry Davies, Michael Davis, Vicki Diamond, Eileen Doe, Gwen Field, H. Field, Robert Field, Ken Fletcher, Sally Fletcher, Keith Gotch of the Metropolitan Police Service, Thames Division, Janet Greaves, Eunice Green, Brenda Hall, Marion Hancock, Stevie Hobbs, Fred Hodgkins, Irene Horner, Mrs Horrobin, Edward Inch, Rosemary Inkpen, Rezaur Rahman Jilani, Priscah Karanja, Vera Knights, Mr and Mrs Kurtz, Matthew Lagden and his mother, Gerry Leheup, Sheila Leheup, Elsie Lewis, Terry McDermott, Elsie Mackie, Rosa Moss, Edith Nailard, Diana Nicholson, Dennis O’Neill, Isabel Pam, Iris Perez, Carol Price, Mrs Procter, Lavinia Richardson, Cherie Rolph, Lil Rolph, Mrs E. Rose, Mary Rose, Pat Rutter, Peta Sandars, Lionel ‘Sid’ Sheldrick, Helen Sheppard, Bert Slattery, Val Slattery, Doreen Smith, Richard Smith, Jim Stevens, with the kind help of his daughter, Margaret Stone, Mr V. Stubbens, Mrs W. Taylor, Mr L. Townsend, Winifred Tyley, George Wainaina, Eve Wee, Pamela Whetton, Esther Wilson, Ken Younger and Benjamin Zeph
aniah, plus, of course, those who wished to remain anonymous.

  My thanks as well to all the people whose stories appeared in Pull No More Bines, my history of hop-picking, on whose recorded testimonies I have also drawn for this book.

  Thank you to the staff at the libraries, museums and information centres I have visited, for their patience in answering questions and for directing me to further sources of information. Details are listed in the bibliography and further reading section: Bishopsgate Library, Brentwood Library, British Library, Commission for Racial Equality, Corporation of London Records Office, Guildhall Library, London Metropolitan Archives, London Museum of Jewish Life, London Research Centre, Museum of London, Newham Local Studies Library, Newspaper Library (Colindale), Public Record Office, Ragged School Museum and Tower Hamlets Local History Library.

  Specific mention should go to Sarah Harding of the Newham Local Studies Library, Chris Lloyd of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library, Lena Martinez of the Tower Hamlets Advice and Information Centre, Tim Owen of the London Research Centre and Iris Perez of the Fern Street Settlement.

  Thanks to all the local and regional newspapers around the country who printed my requests for information.

  Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their kindness and understanding when I took a break in my work following our family bereavement.

  Introduction

  I was born in Bethnal Green in 1951 into a traditional East End family. My nan had a pie and mash shop, my grandfather was a tug skipper on the Thames and my great-uncle was a minder for Daddy Lee, the owner of a gambling den in Limehouse’s Chinatown. My childhood was at the fag end of a world that is now mainly the constituency of history: hops were still being picked by hand; horse-drawn vehicles were used as transport, rather than as advertising gimmicks; trolley buses with their sparking, crackling, overhead rods ran past our street door; women, exhausted from childbirth because they were unable to plan the size of their family safely and reliably, were old before they reached their forties. It was a world before the silicon chip, mobile phones and the Internet; a smaller, less private world made up of your close neighbours, where children addressed the women in the street as ‘auntie’ regardless of actual blood relationships. Looking back on this past could be a barren exercise in, admittedly pleasurable, nostalgia, but it is also a way of deciding what the past means to us, what it says about who we are now and what we wish to be in the future, by allowing us to reclaim the best of what was, and is, important to us as social beings living in a world of sometimes alarmingly rapid change.

  I chose to write a history of the East End because of the pride and great affection I have for my birthplace, and from a fascination with the cockney identity, which was once carefully hidden by those who considered themselves fortunate to leave the slums of their childhood but is now more often acknowledged as a source of great pride. Where once people would have been wary of discussing their working-class roots, with mothers telling their children to talk proper and to ape the ways of their betters, they are now more likely to celebrate such memorable beginnings. In the course of this project, I received letters and invitations to record stories not only from people in the East End itself but also from those as far away as Canada and New Zealand, all of them keen to share their experiences and enthusiasm for their common birthplace. The words of one man who asked me to do a good job in telling ‘our story’ echo those of so many others who contacted me.

  It was because of this desire for ‘our’ stories to be told in an appropriate way that I felt drawn to write the book in the way I have, beginning with a brief traditional history which provides a context for the oral testimony of East Enders themselves.

  As the first parts of the book deal with times which are out of the reach of living memory, they are dependent on printed primary and secondary sources, including popular as well as more scholarly works, and archive materials housed in various libraries, public record offices, local history collections, museums and private collections. These sections are deliberately brief, an overview of events, as they are intended simply to put the creation of the East End into the wider setting of the development of London as a whole, and to provide a backdrop against which the main body of the book, the oral history, can be seen more clearly.

  It is there, in the oral history, that big moments are recalled which still have resonance today. Stories are told of families struggling to survive during the hard inter-war years; and of another kind of bravery and determination, when the East End defied everything ‘Hitler could throw at us’. Then there are smaller moments, such as the pleasures of getting together with your neighbours for a knees-up; the anticipation of preparing for the annual jaunt ‘down hopping’; and simply looking back fondly on a time when ‘we was all one’ and you could leave your door on the latch without fear of being robbed, although it wasn’t likely that you would have had that much for a burglar to have taken anyway.

  As well as one-to-one interviews, I had discussions at day centres, women’s clubs and retirement fellowships, many telephone conver­sations and, thanks to some wholehearted generosity, extended corre­spondences with a number of people. As was familiar to me from previous oral histories I have compiled, most conversations or letters would begin with something like: ‘I used to live in the East End and I’d love to tell you some stories, but I think you might be wasting your time talking to me. I’m just an ordinary person.’ I think there is no such thing as an ordinary person. There is something extraordinary about all of us, as the following stories of hopes and fears, desires and aspirations, loss and disclosure, longing and recovery, will show.

  When researching, it is easy to become waylaid by such things as the cost of a whitebait supper at a Thames-side inn, or the exact rules of the children’s game High Jimmy Knacker, but I don’t dismiss these as insignificant. It is the recollection of the smell from Stink House Bridge, the sputtering of a gas lamp when adjusted by the lamplighter, the flick of a long, dusty skirt as a woman sits down on her street doorstep to shell peas into a colander, which give us access to other worlds; to our past, about which we seem to have such a strong need to know. A line of a song, a half-remembered tale from a much-missed relative, a sudden, fearful memory of that first day at school, all can make us weep. Not from nostalgia but from loss. Why didn’t we write it all down, ask more questions, realize it was our past we would lose?

  A lot of what we call history – the factual representation of the past – is as much to do with opinion, faith and dogma as any philosophical or religious system of belief. But through oral history, how we represent what we remember, we can explain the meaning of the past to ourselves, and thus the meaning of the present, and who and what we are, or want to be.

  As we are separated from the past of our memories by the increasing number of years that, before we know it, have slipped by, so the barriers to understanding, knowledge and lessons that maybe learned also slip ever further from our reach. Who was my great-aunt Mog’s husband? Did she have one? Was she widowed? Does that explain why she was in the workhouse? Wanting to understand things can lead us to a realization that we can only ever have a partial knowledge.

  I wondered why my dad calls what is now known as the Three Mills Heritage Site ‘Long Wall’ and discovered that that was the name of the defence erected to protect against tidal flooding of the surrounding low marshy land. Preventing a breach of the banks or walls of the river was a vital task for a community which depended on the Thames and the Lea as arteries, places where you lived, worked, that were life itself. But to my dad, a man approaching eighty, Long Wall would always be more than that. It was the name of the place where, as a child, he and his friends would sneak in and scoop molasses from the treacle barges that were moored there. Something I probably would never have found out without having access to his memory; a memory which evokes a time when trade on the river was thriving, when children were not restricted in the ways they are today, and when the chance o
f eating something sweet required risking a clip round the ear from a bargee, or a potential soaking in the river, rather than a trip to the supermarket with your mum.

  As with any history, I have had to be selective. Just the resonance of a place-name can encourage a detour down one of the winding side roads of the past. Learning that Limehouse, for instance, recalls the lime oasts where Kentish chalk was processed to produce the lime needed by the increasingly demanding London building trades. Who worked there? I want to know. What sort of lives did they lead? Were they happy to be in the East End or had they come, as so many had, as strangers desperately seeking work in the big city? And discovering that Middlesex Street, close to my own home, was once known as Hog Lane for the pigs that were kept in the nearby fields and herded along it on their way to the slaughterhouses of Whitechapel; and that it was then renamed Petticoat Lane for its huge second-hand clothing market, the roots of which can be traced back at least to the Peticote Lane of the seventeenth century, which has now metamorphosed into a bustling general market that spills into the surrounding streets, and is closed only on Saturdays – a reference back to its once having been in an almost exclusively Jewish neighbourhood.

  It is said that an average person living in the seventeenth century would not, in his or her lifetime, have encountered as much information as is contained in just one edition of a Sunday broadsheet newspaper. I’m sure that’s so, but a lifetime of Sunday papers, complete with supplements, is nothing compared to the amount of information that can be had from a brief chat with my dad, or one of his friends, any of my aunts or even a willing passer-by in that East End street market. After a quarter of an hour your head will be filled with stories of cobbled streets, how people looked out for neighbours bombed out in the Blitz, what it was like to be a child when the Thames really was the gateway to the world, and how things were different then. The wealth of detail – poignant, surprising, funny, dark – could fill volumes on any single aspect of this history: Irish immigration; the extended cockney family, transport; housing; children’s games; pearly kings and queens; worrying about having to pay the doctor; and so it goes on. This book is a compilation of such information, the personal views and reminiscences - the oral history – of East Enders themselves.