Our Street Read online

  Gilda O’Neill

  OUR STREET

  East End Life in the Second World War

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Introduction: The Build-up to War

  1 ARP, the Blackout and Sheltering

  2 Coping with the Bombing

  3 Childhood

  4 Evacuation

  5 Rationing, Shortages, Making-do and Mending

  6 Joining Up and Doing Your Bit

  7 Work

  8 Needing the Doctor

  9 Courting and Weddings

  10 Family Separation and Loss

  11 Community Spirit

  12 Breaking the Rules

  13 Leisure Time

  14 The Aftermath: It’s All Over, or is It?

  Illustrations

  Chronology

  Acknowledgements

  Sources of Information and Suggestions for Further Reading

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  OUR STREET

  Gilda O’Neill grew up 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 has published ten novels and two non-fiction works as well as many short stories, articles and reviews. Her bestselling My East End was published in 1999 by Viking and later Penguin.

  Gilda O’Neill is a founder member of Material Girls, a network of women writers across the whole spectrum of the industry. She is married with two grown-up children and lives in the East End.

  With my thanks, as always, to Eleo Gordon, and, of course, to Lesley Levene

  List of Illustrations

  1. Blitz damage to Whitman House on the Cornwall Estate, Bethnal Green.

  2. ARP Warden King, accompanied by his dog Rip, begins his nightly duties along Southill Street during a London peasouper.

  3. The railway arches, Arnold Road, Bow, showing the sandbagged entrance to the shelter belonging to J. O’Connor, the cooper and barrel merchants.

  4. Bedtime stories in the shelter.

  5. East Enders experience nightly overcrowding and lack of privacy as they shelter in the underground.

  6. Devastation in Poplar.

  7. GIs lend Londoners a hand to clear up after a raid.

  8. Searching through the debris of a house in Cyprus Street, Old Ford.

  9. An ARP warden helping homeless East End mothers and their babies move to a place of greater safety.

  10–13. Ordinary domestic life still had to go on.

  14. The postman does his best to deliver the mail.

  15. A family with nowhere left to receive their letters. All that remains of their home is piled up on the handcart.

  16. Young Peter Hodgson sitting among the blitzed ruins of Single Street School, Stepney.

  17. London families waiting for transport to evacuate the women and children from the bombing.

  18. Little ones evacuated from Columbia Market Nursery to Alwalton Hall, near Peterborough, wave goodbye to their parents.

  19. Older London lads, evacuated to Devon, being taught how to plough.

  20. London evacuees and Italian prisoners of war in the West Country.

  21. A young Londoner ‘doing her bit’ by adding scraps to the pig bin.

  22. A housewife ‘doing her bit’ by sorting tin and paper for salvage.

  23. Queen Elizabeth pays a visit to the Sewardstone Road piggery in June 1943.

  24. Models demonstrating the new Utility underwear.

  25. Cancelling the coupons for a customer’s weekly ration, comprising tea, sugar, butter, cooking fat, bacon and ‘special margarine’.

  26. Goods such as tobacco, cigarettes and especially matches were not rationed, but they were still hard to come by.

  27. Children in Russia Lane, Bethnal Green, clearing a bomb site to create allotments for growing vegetables.

  28. Part of the astonishing 100 tons of scrap collected at Northumberland Wharf in Poplar after the mayor made an appeal for salvage in July 1940.

  29. Exhausted and dirty but safe, a childhood victim of war is given what limited comfort is available.

  30. An adult casualty being tended until medical help arrives.

  31. Nurses at St Peter’s Hospital, Stepney, recover what they can from the debris, April 1941.

  32. Damage to Spiller’s Flour Mills, Royal Victoria Dock, following the first mass daylight raid on London on 7 September 1940.

  33. A 1939 appeal for civil defence volunteers from the stage of the ‘Ipp’ – the Poplar Hippodrome, East India Dock Road.

  34. Protecting the docks, November 1941. A detachment of the Port of London’s Home Guard, originally known as Local Defence Volunteers, march with fixed bayonets.

  35. Tin hats, buckets and stirrup pumps were used by fire watchers such as these men on duty on the roof of the Troxy Cinema, Commercial Road.

  36. The London Fire Brigade battles with blazing warehouses in the Eastern Basin, St Katherine Dock, 8 September 1940.

  37. Salvaging what was left of the tens of thousands of tons of sugar that went up in flames in the West India Dock, 8 September 1940.

  38. Members of the Women’s Legion preparing cheese rolls for London dockers.

  39–40. Enjoying their work – women showing off newly found skills on the railways and the factory floor.

  41. Taking care of homeless East End youngsters.

  42. Elaborate use of gummed paper to protect the window of the Victoria Wine Company in East India Dock Road.

  43. London families settling down to enjoy their Sunday dinner.

  44. Londoners enjoying their special day, despite the sandbags, tin helmets and gas masks, and the lack of a traditional wedding gown.

  45. Even ‘down the shelter’ – in this case a section of uncompleted underground line between Liverpool Street and Bethnal Green – Londoners could still enjoy a knees-up.

  46. King George V Dock, March 1946. The war is over and young Peter Stewart is somewhat dubious as he inspects tins of honey and dried fruits.

  47. It’s 1946, and yes, we have some bananas! A stall in Bethnal Green proudly displays the much-missed fruit and also has beetroot for sale at 5d a pound.

  Illustration Acknowledgements

  Associated Press: 9, 13, 17, 26, 31; Camera Press: 4, 24, 45; Hulton Archive/Getty Images: 44; Imperial War Museum: 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25; Mirrorpix: 29; Museum in Docklands PLA Collection: 32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 46; Museum of London: 5; News International Syndication: 11, 16, 41; Press Association: 7, 10, 47; Public Record Office: 30, 39, 40, endpaper, pages 15, 23, 87, 126, 156, 208, 258; Science and Society Picture Library, Science Museum: 14, 15, 43; Tower Hamlets Local History Library: 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, 18, 23, 27, 28, 33, 35, 42.

  When a man dies, a book dies with him.

  Caribbean saying

  Preface

  One day, while I was watching the news on television, I saw a reporter interviewing members of the public about their sightings of an escaped vulture that had, for some reason, taken a fancy to roosting in their street. What interested me, apart from the presence of such an exotic creature, was the predominant response of the people being interviewed – one not of fear or surprise, but of pleasure. Not only was it an unusual and exciting event – visiting vultures must surely rank right up there with the remarkable – but it was also something that, in the words of one elderly man, ‘brought us all together, and that doesn’t happen very often nowadays’. For those few days, that street had been drawn back into being a community, and people in the neighbourhood were actually talking to one another.

  I wanted to write about a time and a place when living in such a street – or rather a community – would hav
e been part of so-called ordinary working people’s everyday experience, but when the circumstances couldn’t exactly be described as normal. So, in this book, ‘our street’ is a place in the East End of London during the Second World War.

  It is any average little turning in the area nowadays geographically defined by the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham, the borders of which also blur and leak into Hackney to the north and urbanized Essex to the east, and are, as always, halted by the Thames to the south and the City to the west. But it might just as easily have been situated anywhere that working people have thought of as home. It is most definitely a neighbourhood where you were part of a community, where you knew people by name and where you would notice if something untoward happened – such as if someone was ‘bothering’ the local kids. Because our street was a place where you looked out for one another, and you and your children probably lived just a few doors along from your mum and dad, if not in a few rooms in the same house where you were born.

  In my own post-war childhood – in Grove Road, Bow, in the early 1950s, and later, because of the so-called slum clearances, on the Becontree housing estate in Dagenham – when one gang of kids said to another, ‘Come and play down our street,’ they weren’t talking about a game of dodge the traffic. Nor were they likely to have been intimidated by bigger kids making threats, either to them or to terrified elderly residents. The difference in my experience – and in the experiences of many of those who contributed their testimonies to this book – was that our street, like your street, was a communal public space. Children would ‘play out’ together; adults would pass the time of day with one another, and maybe even have their place of work there. But most importantly, it was a place for people, a place where there was a sense of belonging, and not just a thoroughfare for speeding cars to use as a rush-hour rat run.

  Our Street looks at what went on in that world when, despite the backdrop of the tribulations and horrors of the Second World War, and the lack of even quite basic domestic facilities such as hot water, people didn’t live as isolated strangers. They were part of something that, while often very far from perfect, still gave them the chance to enjoy a way of life that has, for many people, all but vanished. Judging by the many letters I received from readers of My East End, a previous history book of mine, that way of life meant more to them than being able to afford the latest electronic goods or a week’s break to the Costas. Obviously, even the most nostalgic among us would agree that material comfort beats discomfort hands down, and that a nice holiday isn’t something many people would refuse if given the opportunity. But there are other things that, on reflection, we should perhaps prize more highly, and, based on the experiences of the people I spoke to, I believe sharing a sense of community certainly has to be one of them. That is why this book is not so much about the ‘big picture’ of history but is concerned with everyday experiences. While we are living them they might seem commonplace, but as they disappear into the past they become events and incidents and emotions that we begin to recognize as being worth remembering, recording and treasuring. The supposedly ordinary lives of ordinary people are all too easily forgotten, especially in our modern world, where everything is changing so rapidly, and new practices, beliefs and habits become the norm between each bewildered blink of the eye.

  While these are Londoners’ stories, they will, I hope, have meaning and resonance for anyone interested in how communities of working people lived through wartime – either because they have shared similar experiences or because they want to learn more about an all but vanished way of life. The stories themselves have inspired and dictated the shape and concerns of the book: because they are personal memories, told in the words of the people themselves, it is their views that are expressed and their emphases that are respected. This book is most definitely not concerned with the opinions of outsiders as they pass judgement on the people who lived in our street during the war – although that was absolutely the case with some of the histories I consulted while doing the background research. There were appallingly condescending assumptions made, for example, about cinemagoers, which went something along the lines of ‘the cheaper the seats, the more emotional the viewers’. And even a usually admirable historian, when writing about what he called the East End’s ‘ugly streets’, was baffled by the Cockney inhabitants’ keenness to return to their homes and communities once the bomb damage had been repaired.

  But why the period of the Second World War? Well, because in many respects life in our street had remained the same for generations, but so much was set to change.

  It wasn’t only huge swathes of the physical topography that were destroyed for ever; the social and psychological expectations of those who remembered living and working in the pre-war East End would never be the same again. And yet, as so many people said, with simple, stoical logic, even when bombs were crashing around them, ‘life still had to go on’.

  How could it? How did people manage in those six long years between 1939 and 1945? That was a major question I wanted to address in this book, and I did so by combining traditional research with original testimonies, as I had done in My East End. In fact, I actually decided to start this project after the overwhelming response I received to that earlier book. So many people generously bothered to contact me after they had read it. They sent letters, poems and cards, some saying how glad they were to have ‘their’ history written down somewhere, and others that they’d learned about an area they weren’t familiar with other than through cartoonish stereotypes of Cockney London. It was this response, and the many other recollections of the Second World War I heard, that inspired me to write this book.

  I believe, passionately, that all our lives are worth recording and that all our stories are important. There is no such thing as an unimportant or ‘ordinary’ person. But lives lived out against the backdrop of such dramatic and cataclysmic world events, and that are still within living memory, seem to me to have both a personal importance and a wider significance that people who did not experience those times can barely begin to imagine. And so, despite the daunting prospect – remembering how long it took me to complete my previous East End history, and how difficult it had been to carry on when my much-loved mother died – I knew it was a story I wanted to write – these were the testimonies I wanted to do justice to. Because if I didn’t record them, what would happen to them? They might not be taken seriously, would maybe be misinterpreted or, perhaps, worst of all, simply lost. Sadly, several people who contributed their testimonies to the book died during the time of its writing, so I had a very real sense of the increasing urgency to get it finished. These are real people’s stories, not fictional accounts that could be picked up and put down at will. This also explains why the book is not conventionally structured, with chapters of neatly equal length. There were some things that people wanted to speak about at length and others that, while they were still important, could be dealt with in a passing comment.

  People were speaking of times in which monumental world events were happening and yet their memories were often of the small domestic detail, tiny moments which illuminated the bigger picture: the everyday life of their family, neighbourhood and workplace. As I was told on more than one occasion, just because bombs were falling in the street outside, or even on your roof, it didn’t stop your child from becoming sick or demanding to be fed or getting up to mischief, or your old woman from carrying on with a bloke while your back was turned. In short, this book is about intimate events taking place against the staggering backdrop of international conflict. And that is why I have included a brief chronology at the back of the book – a time line outlining not only the events that people were experiencing in our street on the home front, but also those that were literally exploding and igniting the world around them. And it is this contrast that leads me to my other motivation for recording these stories. The world of Our Street has, on the whole, disappeared; or rather it has been destroyed, whether smashed by enemy
bombs and fires, or bulldozed by the muddle-headed, ill-thought-out, post-war housing clearances that flattened so much of what was left. It might have been an often dangerous, poor, slum-ridden world, but many still regret its passing.

  As I concluded in My East End, people are often mourning when they tell their stories, mourning the loss of a way of life in which they were part of a community that had grown organically over the generations. Unlike the planners and architects who moved them around as if they were pawns in a chess game, they understand that communities are not created by ordering removal vans to simply transplant people from one location to another – not if they are to have a cohesiveness that makes sense to those who live within them. But that said, communities change: they develop, flourish and die, and new ones grow up in their place – just as with any other living organism. And it is the recording of the once vibrant communities of wartime east London with which this book is concerned.

  As promised, all contributors who wished to be are listed in the acknowledgements, but, for reasons of confidentiality, they are not identified within the text. Also as promised, I have not edited the material – in the sense that I have not changed its meaning or the way language is used – but I have removed repetition and anything that might compromise confidentiality.

  Finally, before the book begins, I would like to add a dedication. It is said that one death is a tragedy and that a thousand deaths are a statistic, but as we know from viewing events in more modern times – be it in Belfast or New York, Afghanistan or Rwanda – that really isn’t so. Admittedly, electronic mass communication has meant that we are privy to the stories of individuals in a way that would have been rare some sixty years ago, and people who die are not the complete strangers they might once have been as we read about them in the papers and hear about them on the news. But in the Second World War those people came from my street and your street – we knew them, loved them, argued with them, worked with them, laughed with them, danced with them, had children, lives and dreams with them, and we miss them still.