eastlondonhistory.com

Alfred Hitchcock had a lonely, sheltered and rather strange childhood, caught between brutally strict parents and his terrible shyness. Yet the years before the First World War that the young Hitchcock spent in the East End had a huge influence. By the end of his life he had been in Hollywood for 40 years - but his movies returned time and again to London. Now, a new 70-minute documentary film ‘Alfred Hitchcock in East London’ uncovers the lesser known facts about his early life and pinpoints key local sites from his formative years - many of them still existing today.

ALFRED! was born on 13 August 1899 in Leytonstone, the youngest of three children of William and Emma Hitchcock. In 1907, the family moved to 175 Salmon Lane in Limehouse, his father running a fishmonger’s at No. 130. Hitchcock was sent to St Ignatius College in Stamford Hill. As well as a long journey across London each day, Hitchcock had to endure the sometimes harsh discipline of his Jesuit teachers. But it was nothing compared to the rigours of home.

The sensitive Hitchcock, self conscious about his obesity, was continually corrected by his father for offences real and imaginary. He would send him to Limehouse police station bearing a note asking the sergeant to lock him in the cells for ten minutes. His mother would order him to address her while stood at the foot of her bed. If he made a mistake he would be forced to stand there, somethimes for hours. The bullying and humiliation would stay with him and provide material for his films - most memorably Norman Bates’s ‘conversations’ with his mother in ‘Psycho’. Another repeated theme in the movies would be of the central character being wrongly accused or pursued: think Robert Donat in ‘The 39 Steps’ or Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest’.

But in the years before the First War, Hollywood was just a California farming village and moving pictures had only just arrived in London, the capital’s first cinema opening in 1906. And there wasn’t much to see: online movie bible imdb.com shows no movies at all receiving a theatrical release in the UK in 1907. Salmon Lane was a long way from Sunset Boulevard, but the seeds were already being sown. By 1913, the solitary Hitchcock was dividing his time between the Limehouse Library and the new Palaceadium Cinema in White Horse Road. Crowds flocked to see melodramas, comedies, biblical dramas and versions of the classics. Some were from America, many from Italy, hardly any from Britain - it didn’t matter of course, as all were silent.

But if the movies were silent, the audience certainly wasn’t. The Palacedium lay at the heart of the ‘Old Road’ street market, and the boundarie sometimes got blurred. Ben Thomas, a later visitor to the Ben Hur remembers the scene: ‘While watching the films the women would peel their spuds. When the lights went up, the cleaners had potato, carrot, swede and parsnip peelings as well as the nut shells and orange peels!’ The noise, with patrons sobbing, booing, cheering and catcalling was more music hall than movie theatre.

Hitchcock, by now studying at Poplar’s London County Council School of Engineering and Navigation, loved it. He took a job as a draftsman and designer for adverts, learning photography in his spare time. His strong visual sense, was established in these days before moviemakers had sound to help them out. Years later he explained that “once the screenplay is finished, I’d just as soon not make the film at all …  have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.”

The teenage Hitch moved on to design title cards for the London branch of Paramount Pictures and in 1922 made his debut as a director for Gainsborough with ‘Number 13′ shot in Rotherhithe. Hitchcock later recalled the ‘chastening experience’ as the project ran out of money and was scrapped halfway through. No footage survives. But by the late twenties, Hitch was churning out three features a year for Gainsborough and British International Pictures: titles such as The Lodger (which picked up on the Jack the Ripper story) and Blackmail (the first British talkie) The thirties saw huge success, with ‘The 39 Steps’, ‘Jamaica Inn’ and ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’.

In the forties, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood and hit a rich vein of form, with ‘Rebecca’, ‘Notorious’, ‘Spellbound’, ‘Rope’ and others. As reliable and industrious as he was original and entertaining, Hitch knocked out a movie a year. In the fifties came ‘Strangers on a Train’, ‘Rear Window’, ‘Vertigo’ and ‘North by Northwest’, his purple period ending with ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Birds’ in 1960 and 1963. Although settled in Hollywood for the last 30 years of his life, Hitch returned to his childhood home to shoot again and again, with ‘The Paradine Case, ‘Frenzy”, the ‘Man Who Knew Too Much’ and many others. Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and James Stewart may have been the marquee names, but to the end London still played a starring role.

[info on screening]
Produced to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Britain’s first talking picture ‘Blackmail’, ‘Alfred Hitchcock in East London’ will be premiered at 8pm on Saturday 27 June at the Heathcote Music Venue, 344 Grove Green Road, London E11. Tickets are available now and advance booking is strongly advised. For further details visit the website at www.mcguffin.info A DVD of the new documentary can also be ordered from the website.

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The Palacedium Cinema opened in 1913 at 137 White Horse Road, Stepney by Messrs Prideaux and Son. The one-floor movie theatre was taken over by Ben Hur in 1917, and in 1948 was renamed the Ben Hur Cinema. It remained an independent for nearly 50 years, eventually closing on 6 May 1962, with Fred MacMurray in ‘Quantez’ and John Wayne in ‘Jet Pilot’. The building became a bingo club, then a snooker hall and was demolished in 2008, to be replaced by housing.

* For more on Hitchcock’s use of the capital in his movies, see Alfred Hitchcock’s London by Gary Giblin, Midnight Marquee Press, 2006, (Paperback: ISBN 188766467X).
* For tours of Alfred Hitchcock’s London Locations go to http://www.geocities.com/sandra_shevey/Alfred Hitchcock.html.

[pics
palacedium: Where it all began. Alfred Hitchcock got his first taste of movie magic at the Palacedium, shown here before its demolition in 2008

And lots of film posters … plus all the stuff you already have]

So what do ‘canaries’ and ‘herons’ have to do with the docks? What exactly was the ‘poplar’ or the ‘mudchute’. The London Underground and DLR have some pretty curious station names, and in the East End we have some of the more bizarre.

Aldgate Station was opened on 18 November 1876, and is named after one of the four original gates in the wall of the City, built by the Saxons, rebuilt in 1609 but finally taken down in 1761. The gate which once spanned the road between Dukes Place and Jewry Street, was once thought to derive its name from ‘old gate’, though the Saxon root is ‘Aelgate’, meaning ‘open to all gate’ or free in other words). The derivation of Aldgate East station is fairly obvious, though the halt, opened on 6 October 1884, was originally to be called Commercial Road. The station was moved a short way east in 1938.

There are some arguments about the derivation of the name Bethnal Green. The green is obvious enough (though there is little of that left) and the area was known as Blithehale during the 13th century. There was a family named Blida here during the early middle ages and the Bythe stream once flowed through the area. Before the station was opened as part of the Central Line extension on 4 December 1946 there was some debate as to whether it should be called simply ‘Bethnal’ to distinguish it from the LNER station a few minutes away.

On the same day, the new Mile End station opened with Central Line trains; the station had first opened in June 1902 as part of the Whitchapel and Bow Railway (W&BR), one of the many midget operations that abounded in London at the time. Mile End is so called because of its position on the main London-Colchester road (the main thoroughfare from Roman times). ‘La Mile ende’, as it was recorded in 1288, was a hamlet a mile east of Aldgate.

The only other stops on the W&BR were Whitchapel, Stepney Green, Bow Road and Bromley. Stepney is recorded as Stibenhede in the Domesday Book, coming from Stebbing (a family name) and hithe (meaning ‘landing place’, think Rotherhithe). Stepney remains though the green is much reduced. Whitechapel owes its name to the white stone chapel of St Mary Matfelon, which dated from 1329. After several rebuildings and World War 2 bomb damage, it was eventually demolished in 1952. This station predates the W&BR, opening in 1876 with the extension of the East London Railway north from Wapping to Liverpool Street.

The W&BR eventually joined up with the District Railway and ran into Tower Hill station (which of course gets its name from the rise next to the Tower of London). To inject a dash of the confusion so beloved of London Underground, the station has been renamed (originally Seething Lane was an option before it was opened as Mark Lane in 1884). It got the name Tower Hill in 1946, and was then moved in 1967 to the site of the old Tower of London station (open for just two years in the 1880s). Clear enough? Good.

The district of Bow, of course, owes its name to the arched or bowed bridge built over the River Lea in the 12th century. The main road east out of the City thus became the Bow Road. The current Bow Road tube station opened in 1902 but was one of only three stations within a few yards of each other. There was also a Bow Road station on the Great Eastern Line (the old station building is between the Ferrodo rail bridge and the Little Driver pub), and Bow station on the North London Railway (now the site of Bow Church DLR station).

Just down the line from Bow, Bromley station was opened on the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway (the modern Fenchurch Street Line) in 1858. It was taken over by the London Underground in 1902 and renamed Bromley-by-Bow in 1968. Records from the year 1000 have Bromley as Braembelege, from the Old English broom (tree) and leah (forest).

The new Docklands tube and DLR stations tend to hark back to the days when these were docks proper. Canary Wharf station dates from 1987, but the original Canary Wharf was built in 1936, a nod to the Canary Island imports which were a mainstay of the area’s trade. West India Quay was once the West India Dock. This seems to follow a post-industrial naming tradition in London - just as Surrey Docks became Surrey Quays, so the southern part of the West India Dock became South Quay, and a nesting place for Herons became Heron Quays. A neat theory that breaks down once we get to the old East India Docks: the station is plain East India.

The medieval ‘Bleak wall’ was a shipyard from the 16th century, and became the entrance to the West India Docks in the 1800s. Today the ships are gone and we have Blackwall station. Crossharbour, meanwhile, was the functional name invented for the new development at the centre of the Isle of Dogs, the station losing its ‘London Arena’ appendage in 2007 after the arena was demolished. The name Mudchute is similarly prosaic - lying next to an artificial hill created by the dredging of mud from the Millwall dock down the years. Island Gardens, meanwhile, lies next to the formal gardens laid out on former wasteland at the tip of the Isle of Dogs in 1895 by the London County Council.

And Poplar? Well, in the absence of documentary proof, historians have to fall back on that reliable mainstay … guesswork and a bit of cheating. Many sources have it as ‘probably’ a poplar tree that served as a meeting place for local folk.

For more (loads more) see ‘What’s in a name’ by Cyril M Harris, which documents the origins of the names of all current stations on the Tube and DLR. A London Transport Museum publication, ISBN 9781854142412, £4.95.

Nice one … thanks to Jim Canty for this little taxer. Come out of the Rotherhithe Tunnel and you emerge in Stepney. Stepney is where John Wardle was raised. The same John Wardle who, under the moniker Jah Wobble (named thanks to a drunken mispronunciation by Sid Vicious) played bass in the John Lydon’s post-Sex Pistols band Public Image Ltd. Lydon and Vicious, while in the Pistols were dressed by Vivienne Westwood, then the partner of their manager Malcolm McLaren. The pair famously ran the Kings Road boutique Sex/Seditionaries, where the proto-Pistols hung out in the mid-seventies.

Nod goes out to Billy Moonshine for this one. The Monument of course marks the conflagration that we know today as the Great Fire of London, which was a bit of a curate’s egg of a disaster. Very bad news if you happened to be one of the hundreds of people whose homes and businesses were destroyed by the 1666 blaze, but many argue that it DID cleanse the capital of the pestilential streets that had been a hotbed for disease. To be fair, historian Roy Porter counter argues that this is nonsense, as the fire left the worst slums unscathed. Whatever, it gave Christopher Wren a chance to remodel the City along European boulevardesque lines. Wren’s model was only partly taken up, but he did leave us with St Paul’s and the Monument.

Why did the City authorities fail to put the fire out for so many days? Complacency, and the lack of decent fire fighting. The inability to get water to the flames (in a city that sits on a river) infuriated many observers, among them Wren and Pepys. Water was transported through a rickety and inefficient system of wooden pipes, and was not only scarce at times, but insanitary. London’s sewage poured into the same water that people were drinking. Nobody realised for years that the constant outbreaks of plague and cholera were connected to dirty water, blaming it instead on a ‘miasma’ (a vague answer as a result of vague thinking one might argue).

The man who eventually pinned cholera to dirty water was John Snow, a physician in Soho who observed the clustering of cases among people who used the Broad Street water pump. Visitors to Soho can see the site of the pump in what is now called Broadwick Street, before nipping across the road to enjoy a pint in the John Snow pub (many’s the drunken evening I’ve spent in there. Happy days). I digress. 28 Broad Street was the birthplace of William Blake - poet, painter, seer of visions and all-round genius. Incidentally, the Beatles and Public Image also come into this story if you think about it … but I’m not telling you that one yet. A shout of respect to anyone who can get back to me with the connection!

Are there any lists of stall holders in the 1940s?

I used to be in touch with Jo Barnett deceased [son of Harry] who was ”

“Barnett of Frying Pan Alley” with his cousin Morris (mermaid topped blue vans) since 1975 part of Associated Fisheries; then with H.Foreman & Sons, salmon curers.”

I have just received this from another Barnett in a different branch:

“I vaguely recall that in Petticoat Lane (where my Great-uncles Harry and Louis Barnett had the smoked-salmon business- a very small shop where they smoked salmon in the back-yard -  no ‘elf & Safety then! )  and  a few yards further on there was another Barnett deli  where people would buy their  meat & salt-beef sandwiches.   This was also a well-known and a favourite Jewish food as were smoked-salmon sandwiches on rye sold by H & L  and even today both are a mainstay of Jewish delis.  In America salt beef  is called Pastrami.  Salt beef has to be hot, served on rye bread and accompanied by a pickled gherkin.

The only thing that comes to mind now is that the ‘other ‘ Barnett was a half-brother or even a cousin, and   didn’t get on with H and  L.    As it was  and still is, customary for a husband to go out on Sunday morning and buy one or the other for lunch for the family, so the wife has a rest (those who could afford it, that is)  they were competing for customers.    Or  maybe some animosity  was due to their relationship with H & L.

A very distant memory thinks that there was a Louis there or maybe a Michael - or maybe my mind is playing tricks. but as I never went there I cannot tell you more.   Have you ever contacted the local history museum and/or the library of the borough of Tower Hamlets as I remember that they have records of the Lane  and may be of use especially as the smoked-salmon business became well known enough to eventually supply the Royal Family and were allowed to put  the royal coat of arms up outside”purveyors  to Their Majesties Queen Elizabeth 11 and King George V1″ I still have newspaper cuttings referring to H & L ”

Anybody who can help, contact annchiswell@yahoo.co.uk

Edward VI crowned King of England this day in 1547. The son and heir of Henry VIII, he reigned for six years (under two regencies) before dying, probably of tuberculosis, at the age of just 15 in 1553. Due to his father inventing the Church of England, the young Edward became England’s first Protestant monarch. After his death, and the shortlived reign of Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s half-sister ‘Bloody Mary’ would reinstitute Catholicism with a vengeance.

Also on 20th February, Jimmy Greaves was born in 1940 in East Ham. The England team’s third highest goalscorer, sometime Sun columnist and one-time TV football commentator (’it’s a funny old game Saint’), Greaves was one of the most superlatively strikers the English game has seen.

In 1819, William Smith who was born in Northumberland but captained cargo vessels out of Wapping, was sailing round Cape Horn as he skippered the vessel ‘Williams’ from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso.  Spotted an archipelago which he dubbed the South Shetland Islands. In 1820, the Royal Navy sent Smith and Williams back to survey the islands, discovering the Antarctic Peninsula as they did.

In 1985, the first episode of TV soap ‘EastEnders’ is broadcast, documenting the everyday life of rape, murder, arson and general unpleasantness that typifies life in the imaginary East End borough of Walford (an amalgam of south London’s Walworth and east London’s Romford).

Two London actors born on this day. In 1717, the great actor-manager David Garrick (who gives his name to both a West End street and theatre). His great grandfather, David Garric was a French Huguenot family, who fled Europe after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, first to Spitalfields in the East End. Somewhat in contrast, Ray Winstone was born in 1957 in Homerton - Scum, Sexy Beast, Quadrophenia, I’d like to have seen Garrick take a pop at those.

This blog started out as an online presence for the pieces I’ve been writing for East End Life for the last 13 years. Those features go out now (as back then) to the ‘lucky’ folk of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, who get a free copy posted through their door each week (actually it’s not free as they pay for it through their Council Tax but let’s not get too semantic about this). The wonderful thing is, though, that the website has mutated far beyond the few miles bounded by the City of London, the borough of Hackney, the River Lea and the River Thames. I’m increasingly getting emails from people all over the planet, who have family connections with the East End and want to retrace their roots.

Now I’m not a genealogist, and I haven’t the time to help people with their family trees (though I wish you disparate Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Americans and Canadians, for that’s largely who gets in touch, the best of luck). I CAN however, post your requests for info in a dedicated section on the site, within which this is the first entry. The idea is that you can ask … and the helpful readers within the blogosphere will respond. Well it’s a theory. From time to time I’ll also post any useful information on where to look, who to contact, and other resources as they come my way.

So come on down. If you are trying to retrace your East End roots, or you just have a letter or story to share with us, let me know. It doesn’t have to be a response to another post, you can just drop me an email at eastlondonhistory@googlemail.com. Look forward to hearing from you.

We seem to be awash in anniversaries at the moment. But Charles Darwin and Robbie Burns can step aside for a true hero of the East End this month. George Lansbury was born on 21 February 1859. He lived to see World War II, having fought alongside striking dockers, founded a national newspaper, gone to prison for his beliefs, and led the Labour Party.

A programme of events at Bow and Westminster will mark a century and a half since the birth of the man AJP Taylor called ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. Local happenings include a memorial service at St Mary’s Bow, where Lansbury worshipped for 40 years. There will be a meeting at Bromley Public Hall, addressed by Tony Benn. The connections both with family and East End politics go back a long way - Benn’s grandfather John was an LCC councillor and active in the 1889 London Docks Strike alongside Lansbury. Other speakers include Shirley Williams and Roy Hattersley - it’s obvious that Lansbury means a lot to the Labour movement to this day. But the tenor of the celebrations marks a change of emphasis, putting Lansbury’s remarkable political contribution firmly in the context of his Christian faith.

The enduring affection for Lansbury largely comes from his stubborn determination to stand up for what he thought was right: he was a constant thorn in the side of party colleagues and opponents alike. In 1886 Lansbury, at that time a Liberal, was General Secretary of the Bow & Bromley Liberal Association, but would resign over the leadership’s refusal to support legislation for a shorter working week. In 1892 Lansbury was elected to the Board of Guardians that ran Poplar Workhouse.

Bucking the principle that the workhouse should be made miserable, so miserable that people would avoid it at all costs (and so save the borough money), Lansbury and his colleagues made the workhouse a useful experience. They sent unemployed men out to the Laindon Farm Colony, near Basildon, taught them the basics of market gardening and got many back to work.

It took Lansbury three goes to win a Parliamentary seat, but having landed Bow & Bromley for Labour in 1910, he resigned his seat two years later, fighting the resulting by-election on a platform of votes for women. It was a ploy to draw attention to the plight of Suffragette prisoners, but was never likely to find sufficient popular support (women not having the vote of course). The Daily Herald he helped found in 1911 opposed Britain entering the First World War: they weren’t unique in this, but it was a boldly contrary move as the country was being whipped into a jingoistic fervour.

And in 1921 came the campaign which would define Lansbury in the eyes of many East Enders - and which would create that reputation as ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. As Mayor of Poplar he defied government to raise the rate - again, it was to boost poor relief. Lansbury and his councillors refused to back down, going to prison for four months for their principles and inventing the word ‘Poplarism’ in the process. He would resign from Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government in 1931 (and go on to lead the Labour Party himself), and bitterly opposed Britain’s entry into World War II.

Lansbury’s politics were grounded in principle and in his Christian faith. Some would argue that such a principled refusal to compromise is the opposite of politics. But another East Ender, who succeeded him as Labour leader, neatly argued that Lansbury was not only a good man, but an effective operator. Clement Attlee called him ‘an evangelist rather than a Parliamentary tactician. Yet during those years in which he led the small Party in the House he showed great skill and powers of everyday leadership’.

The Revd Michael Peet, Rector of Bow church is leading the events that celebrate Lansbury’s life over the weekend of 21/22 February and argues “George Lansbury’s achievements in local and national politics are enormously impressive, but even more so is the sheer goodness of the man. After his death a local man said that, ‘One just could not help loving George Lansbury because there was nothing but love in his heart.’” While maintaining his political career and running the Daily Herald, Lansbury was a tireless figure in his local church, serving on its councils, running men’s and youth groups, Bible classes, the Temperance Society, supporting the church football team.

Events include a history walk along Bow Road on Saturday 21 February at 2pm, starting at Bow tube station. The memorial service is at St Mary’s Bow Church on Bow Road, Sunday 22 February at 4pm. For further information contact Nigel Whiskin on 01793 747362, 07775 630153 or whiskino6@btinternet.com.

Dear John
Not so much a tale about the East End but a request for some detective work for you to follow up. Perhaps an article in it? As a Wapping resident of the past 21 years I  regularly admired the Henry Moore bronze of mother and child that used to stand in front of the flats on Jamaica Road. During some renovation work some years ago it disappeared and has never been put back.  I sem to remember that the sculpture had a colloquial local name - fondly referrerd to as something like ‘Old Flo’

At one time I attempted to follow this up via the Local History Library and learned that in the 1990s it had been sent on loan, I think to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park or Henry Moore Foundation up North.

As I assume it was originally commissioned or gifted to Tower Hamlets ( by whom and to commemorate what?), I am wondering why it is still on loan and not in its rightful place somewhere in the borough? I seem to remember some comment about its value/ risk of damage in which case I feel at least Tower Hamlets is owed a  less valuable cast of the original. Surely we did not lend it permanently to Yorkshire? Perhaps it was only temporaily placed in the East End and why Jamaica Road?

I often think of it when driving down Jamaica Road and it seems to have been a forgotten piece of  recent  local history. Could you please research/ investigate and let me  (and others  via an article with photo?) know why it is no longer a part of the Tower Hamlets public art scene?

Thanks.

Deryn Hall

I’d forgotten this one … can anyone shed any light? JR