My East End Read online

  I have not changed the language in the testimonies to make it grammatically correct, but have made editorial changes to prevent unnecessary repetition and, more importantly, to protect the confidentiality of respondents. That is why names are sometimes omitted and precise areas sometimes undefined. I have included a selective bibliography, further reading suggestions and contacts for sources of additional information for readers who wish to pursue particular interests, or who want to find out more about the earlier history of the area. It would be useful, however, to remember the point made by Millicent Rose in her 1951 book on east London that, apart from ‘sensation-seekers’ writing about the criminal, bizarre or otherwise seamy side of existence, there is often no record of what she calls the ‘common run’ of people, and that many standard London histories have all but ignored the East End. Quoting from as far back as John Northouck’s 1773 A New History of London, Rose cites his as a typical opinion that much of the area has no interest for the serious historian:

  [As] these parishes, which are chiefly inhabited by sea-faring persons, and those whose business depends on shipping in various capacities, are in general close and ill-built: therefore afford very little worthy observation…

  But some outsiders have continued to write about the history of the East End, and occasionally to raise the eyebrows of East Enders with what they have to say. The ‘East End’, for instance, according to a recent book on the regeneration of the area, written by a non-East Ender, is a phrase that was ‘once used’ to describe the area. Once used? The same book also concerns itself with whether Newham can be included in the geographical description ‘east London’.

  It does have to be admitted that there is a difficulty in defining what and where the East End is, begins and ends. The physical East End is as difficult to define as the spiritual ideal with which so many cockneys, wherever they now live, feel such connection. During my own childhood it was very clear where it was placed: it was where we lived, and Hackney was, according to us lot south of Victoria Park, very definitely in north London, and parts of what is now Newham were definitely much too posh to be thought of as being inhabited by rough East Enders – when an auntie and uncle moved to furnished rooms in Upton Park, they had ‘made it’. But times and understanding, and meanings, change.

  One boundary, however, was constant: that of its western edge, the City of London, the bounds of which have not changed significantly since the thirteenth century. But the same could not be said for the area beyond and to the east of the city walls. This is a topography which grew organically with intermittent spurts of development, changing yet still enjoying some measure of continuity for the generations who lived there.

  The East End in its earliest incarnation can best be defined as the ancient Tower Hamlets, a name which was revived in 1965 with the creation of the London borough, which referred to the settlements east of the walls and west of the River Lea. But nowadays the East End seems to include not only Hackney, Newham, Redbridge, Barking and Dagenham, but much of urbanized Essex as well. It once seemed odd to hear news broadcasters referring to Romford as east London. As a child, that was the market town where I was taken as a treat to watch the cattle being auctioned. But claims to being from the East End now come from people as far apart as those who live in the shadow of the Tower itself and Essex cockneys right out in Southend – the result, no doubt, of all those families, like my own, that moved out to the new housing estates in the post-war slum clearances. Because of this self-definition of being cockney, the book is concerned with the areas covered by Tower Hamlets and Newham, staying north of the river, but also ‘leaking’ from within the boundaries of those boroughs northwards through Hackney, out to the easterly boroughs of Greater London, and, of course, through into Essex.

  With its predominantly, though certainly never exclusively, working-class population, swelled by more or less exotic immigrants from both home and abroad, the East End has often alarmed its far more prosperous and highly regulated neighbours in the City of London, and the West End beyond, with its apparently ungovernable, ever-expanding sprawl nudging at the walls. A consequence of its seemingly limitless power to attract consecutive waves of newcomers has been that its history is also the story of an ever-changing series of communities. Cheap housing, the anonymity of the slums and, in its foul-stinking prime, its diverse opportunities for work (both legal and criminal) have combined to make it an area ripe to take the blame for all manner of ills. Not only has it been the focus of moral panics – being held responsible for everything from unbridled criminality to the very destruction of the British way of life – but the most recently arrived have found themselves the targets of such blame. Indictments have come both from outsiders looking in, who see nothing but the threatening stare of the poor, condemned to a life of squalor and immorality in the ghetto, and also from those already established in the area; those who were from immigrant families themselves, now taking the first opportunity to flee what they come to perceive as threatening, foreign, shameful even, leaving what was once their own place of sanctuary, the community which welcomed them. It is salutary to remember that people often believe this perceived danger – of the most recent newcomers taking away or spoiling their culture – to be a recent phenomenon pertaining only to them. But whether considering the earliest settlers from Europe, the desperate poor from rural England, or the Bengali, Somali, Eastern European and other new arrivals of the 1990s, immigrants have continued to be attracted to the great port of London, to the capital of what was once the British Empire, and have proceeded to band together to establish places to work, eat and worship. They may have different concerns in some ways, but they still share the need to survive, the desires and aspirations, the hopes and fears, that have to be a constant if we are to describe a society as human.

  That is what makes this a living history. Yes, there are the crossing sweepers, the mudlarks and the flower-girls, the music halls and the mayhem, Jack the Ripper and the workhouse, but, more importantly, there is the present – a present made by that past. This is the oral history, the voices of which communities are made, the voices that speak to us, to each other, and which stop us being alone; the voices that can give meaning to our lives and all that we experience.

  I can remember, when I was about eight, the shame of having the toes cut out of my shoes when I grew out of them and sulking because I couldn’t have new ones. When, as an adult, I told my dad how I had not understood that there was no money for new ones, he told me about being made to wear clogs to school. He had hidden at playtime so the other children wouldn’t see him and had preferred to walk home barefoot rather than be spotted wearing what was, for him, such humiliating footwear. But he then told me of a boy far worse off than him who had had to wear his mother’s old lisle stockings under his ill-fitting boots. What other deprivations had he and his generation had to endure in their far harsher, less flexible world? This was a world where men queued on the stones in the despondent hope of getting a half-day’s casual work at the docks, and women stretched their meagre budgets to feed their husband, then their children, and went without themselves; a world without the benefit of a welfare net – however inadequate – to stop you sliding off the edge and into desperation.

  Now, as one millennium closes and another opens before us, the idea of the community we once had has come to be cherished as a nostalgic haven, a mythic projection of our longings. We look back and see a warm, cosy place where we were all once safe, where everybody shared and where we sorted out local wrongdoers with a fair, if rough, sort of justice – much the same place that we longed for when we watched the black and white, but sunshine-filled, Ealing comedies in the austerity numbed, Utility-clothed post-war years. But representations of this highly desirable location carry, of course, a great deal of ideological baggage, and ‘community’ has become a particularly slippery and politically loaded concept, employed by spin doctors and analysts from both the left and the right. For the right, there is the village with
its warm beer and maiden ladies on bicycles; for the left, the glories of social housing and nurseries for all. While acknowledging the importance of the past in enabling us to construct meanings and desires within the present (a theme I have explored in Pull No More Bines, my book about hop-picking as a vanished way of life), I also wanted to question some of the myths, because as actual, physical communities – as opposed to a nostalgic fantasy land – are forced to change for a combination of social, cultural, economic and political reasons, no one has quite put their finger on what these changes mean in practice to those who live within them or those who choose to leave them. By looking at the changing history of east London, I hope that is what this book will do.

  Like the woman speaking below, my family moved from the East End to a housing estate in Essex when I was a schoolgirl.

  I hadn’t started school, so I must have been about four. I was sitting on the damp, warm ridges of a wooden draining board, swinging my legs, in a big, low-ceilinged room, listening to the sound of women talking and laughing over the din of them doing the weekly laundry. It was the communal wash house under my nan’s buildings, the big block of flats where she lived. All the women had cross-over aprons on and their sleeves rolled up above their elbows. My nan probably had her slippers on, she usually did, and her stockings rolled down to her knees. It must have been hard work, when you think of it – they were scrubbing collars and cuffs on their rubbing boards, their hands all chapped red from the hot, sudsy water in the big butler sinks round the room. All that wringing and rinsing and mangling. Pulling all those heavy sheets and towels and napkins dripping wet out of the boilers. But, like I say, they were laughing, talking. They knew one another. They were friends, part of the neighbourhood. Probably related, a lot of them. Families lived close to one another then. I don’t know where my mum was, she must have had to go out somewhere. But I was all right, I was with my nan. And all the old girls made a fuss of me. It was good. Why I’m telling you this is, the difference when we moved to our new place. My mum, who had always done her washing the same way as Nan, now had a nice new kitchen. A Formica-covered sink unit and an Ascot water heater, and a twin-tub washing machine that had the washer and a spin-dryer attached. It must have been so much easier doing the washing and keeping things clean, but I know my mum was never happy there. It was lonely, you see. There was no one to have a laugh with, no one to mind me if she had to go out. She didn’t know her neighbours and she certainly never had her mum a couple of turnings away. What I’m saying is, I know the house was a lot better than where we’d lived in Poplar, which, to be honest, was no better than a slum when you think of it, but we lost a lot moving away from there. She was never happy. Never really settled. It was never her home. Not like the East End was.

  I understand what she means, as my own mum never really liked Dagenham. One day, I was on a playing field near our new house and I saw, high overhead, a plane trailing a banner declaring ‘You never had it so good’, a message from the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, trumpeting the post-war affluence we were all meant to be enjoying. But was it true? Were our mothers in their Formica-clad kitchens really better off than their mothers ‘up home’ with their scrubbing boards? I have spoken to East Enders of all ages to find out and present here the stories of those so-called ordinary people, the stories of those who helped create the geographical and intangible place which we know as the East End, which I hope will correct the idea that it is little more than a place of deprivation and poverty. Because it isn’t. It is a place of great and varied riches: courage, warmth, strength, anger, humour and rebellion. I have attempted, in my sifting and sorting of this complex and very human story, to achieve some level of objectivity, but it is a history of which, with my mongrel, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Jewish, East End background, I am very much a part, so it is as much about me and mine as it is about you and yours, them and theirs. And that history continues to be made, with cockneys starring in it as part of a strong, saucy, wild, often difficult continuum in which I am proud to play my part by telling some of its tales.

  The first of which has been defined as liquid history, as it begins with the River Thames.

  PART 1

  The Makings of the East End

  The Thames is liquid history.

  John Burns (1858–1943)

  [ 1 ]

  The place that would become London, the centre of world trade and the pinnacle of the greatest empire ever seen, has been populated since the Ice Age, when people scavenged a living in the Thames valley. The river was far broader and shallower then than it is today and, without its artificial banks and walls, was more like a lake dotted with small islands.

  The early settlers found plenty of clean drinking water, which came from rainfall filtering through the gravel subsoil and then, after being trapped by the base of London clay, eventually resurfacing on lower ground, forming brooks, streams and springs. Several of these springs have recently been discovered in the new Mile End Park. As well as water, there were plentiful sources of food, fodder and materials for building homes and fences, and for weaving baskets and fish-traps, all to be found by the river, among the rushes and sedge of its bank-side marshes, in its lush, grassy meadows and in the surrounding broad-leafed woodlands, all making it a desirable place in which the early farmers decided to settle.

  Centuries later, in 54 BC, when Julius Caesar crossed the Thames on his way to do battle with the British tribal leader Cassivellaunus, it is recorded that he encountered settlements throughout what is now Greater London, and that, in AD 43 , when the Roman invasion finally occurred, under Claudius, there were around 5,000 inhabitants scattered throughout the area. But it is still accepted that the kernel of the London we know today, and what would eventually become the largest town in Roman Britain, was established by the invaders in around AD 50, although their first attempts to create a Thames-side settlement were destroyed by Boudicca’s avenging army in AD 60.

  The port rapidly developed as a centre of commerce and trade, with slaves and commodities being shipped to and from the rest of the Roman Empire. By AD 100, Londinium had a population of around 45,000, and had replaced Colchester as the capital of the Empire’s most northerly province.

  The farms and hamlets to the east of the city’s defensive walls provided food and services for the Roman metropolis, but, with trouble brewing in other parts of the Empire, the occupying population began to decrease and, in AD 410, the Romans finally abandoned London altogether.

  The tribal Britons, who had lived alongside the invaders for 400 years, were now facing invasion from Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, who took advantage of the soft, almost undefended target. Despite the signal towers on the Thames to warn of their approach, AD 457 saw the Saxon victory in Kent just across the river. This marked the beginning of another period of foreign occupation.

  These new arrivals seemed, at first, concerned more with cultivation than with administration, clearing much of the forested areas in what is now Newham and farming land right up to the Roman wall, but, as the raids continued, their numbers increased.

  During the fifth and sixth centuries the Saxons and native Britons were locked in battle over land ownership, with the Britons generally coming off worst. New kingdoms were established by the victors, including Essex – the kingdom of the East Saxons – which had London within its boundaries.

  By AD 600 around half of all Britain was under Saxon rule, and an Anglo-Saxon culture was evolving, and with it the Germanic language of Englisc. The new Saxon population revived the abandoned city, establishing a trading settlement known as Lundenwic, and returning it to prominence as a base of political power within occupied Britain. A bishopric was also founded, the head of which would have authority as the manorial lord over almost the entire district to the east, the area which would eventually become the East End of London.

  It was also at this time, almost 600 years after the Roman occupation, that the creation of the Saxon settlement of
Stebenhythe or Stibenhede – covering most of what is now Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green – saw the area becoming increasingly populous, and indentifiable signs of the East End’s future characteristics came into existence. Trade and manufacture began to flourish alongside the traditional activities of fishing and farming, and, with the prevailing eastward winds blowing any unpleasant smells downstream towards the estuary, the ruling patricians were happy to live upwind of the so-called stink industries, such as the slaughterhouses of Stratford, which were to rise to prominence after 1371, when the messy and smelly business of medieval slaughtering was banned from within the city walls. Other businesses, such as metalworking, brewing and leather trades, were joined over the centuries by a whole variety of crafts and activities which were unwelcome further west. Still today, if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, the stench from works close to the river can be detected from as far east as the Millennium Dome, and most local people who have worked in or around Carpenter’s Road, Stratford, will wrinkle their noses in recollection of its own, special pungency.

  London’s fortunes prospered throughout the next two centuries, and Bede could describe the eighth-century port of Lundenwic as an important centre of international trade. But battles between the Saxon leaders saw London again being left vulnerable to attack. By the last quarter of the ninth century, the Danish were occupying the city.