eastlondonhistory.com

There is history buried within every East End home, some of it more dramatic than others.
The houses and flats of Tower Hamlets have had more than their share of famous occupants, and an interesting tour can be had by tracing a path round blue plaque buildings.
The familiar plaques on the front of buildings, listing famous occupants and the time they lived there, have been a part of London life for more than 130 years, and are as much a part of London as black cabs or red buses.
Of course the omissions excite as much debate as the inclusions.
Why does Tower Hamlets have no plaque to Stalin, who lived in Poplar in the early 1900s as a political refugee, for example? Why no mention of Stepney and Limehouse MP Clement Attlee or Stepney’s own Bud Flanagan?
The plaques that do pepper the East End offer a cross-section of philanthropists, adventurers and artists, but there could probably be a hundred more. Using our selection, and plotting a route with the aid of your A to Z, you could happily fill an afternoon touring the blue plaque sites of Tower Hamlets.
58 Solent House, Ben Jonson Road, bears a 1953 plaque to Dr Thomas Barnardo, who began his work for children on a building on this site in 1866.
Move down to King Edward Memorial Park, in Shadwell, and you’ll see a 1922 plaque to four East End adventurers – Sir Hugh Willoughby, Stephen Borough, William Borough and Sir Martin Frobisher – and other navigators who, in the latter half of the 16th century, set sail from this reach of the Thames near Ratcliff Cross to explore the Northern Seas.
Captain James Cook is marked by a 1970 plaque at 88 Mile End Road. Before setting off for Australia, the circumnavigator and explorer, lived in a house on this site.
A different kind of maritime first was marked by a 1954 plaque erected in Westferry Road. The Great Eastern, launched in 1858, the largest steamship of the century, was built here by IK Brunel.
At 29 Turner Street, E1, a 1961 plaque remembers Charles Bradlaugh, the advocate of free thought who lived here from 1870 to 1877.

A 1988 plaque at the London Hospital marks the work of Edith Cavell. The pioneer of modern nursing in Belguim, and heroine of the Great War, trained and worked here from 1896 to 1901.
Mahatma Gandhi is probably one of the less likely inhabitants of Bow, but a 1954 plaque at Kingsley Hall, Powis Road, records that the philosopher and teacher, stayed here in 1931.
Meanwhile, a less famed philanthropist, Mary Hughes (1860-1941), friend of all in need is remembered at 71 Vallance Road, E2, with a 1961 plaque.
Dr Jimmy Mallon, warden of Toynbee Hall and champion of social reform, is remembered in a 1984 plaque at Toynbee Hall in Commercial Street. And Israel Zangwill, writer and philanthropist (1864-1926), is remembered at 288 Old Ford Road with a 1965 plaque.
Painter Mark Gertler (1891-1939) is commemorated with a 1975 plaque at 32 Elder Street, E1. And his contemporary, Isaac Rosenberg, is marked at Whitechapel Library with a 1987 plaque noting that the poet and painter lived in the East End and studied here.
John Richard Green (1837-1883), historian of the English people, lived at St Philip’s Vicarage, Newark Street, E1 – the plaque was unveiled in 1910.
The Rev St John Groser (1890-1966), the priest and social reformer, lived at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine, 2 Butcher Row, E14 and is remembered with a 1990 plaque.
Another notable East End cleric, Lincoln Stanhope Wain-wright (1847-1929), is remembered at Clergy House in Wapping Lane. The 1961 plaque records that the vicar of St Peter’s, London Docks, lived here.
A 1929 plaque at 10 Leyden Street, E1, records Strype Street, which derives its name from the house of John Strype, silk merchant, which was situated there.
And one blue plaque the East End would rather not possess hangs on the railway bridge at Grove Road in Bow. The 1988 plate reads that London’s first flying bomb fell here, on June 13, 1944.

If your idea of Christ-mas is mince pies, sleigh- bells in the snow, and a family feast round a roaring fire, then you’re dreaming of a Dickensian Christmas.
For all the elements of what we now think of a traditional Old English Yuletide were largely the invention of that greatest of English writers, Charles Dickens, in his 1847 masterpiece A Christmas Carol.
Ebenezer Scrooge huddles alone and miserable, hiding as a solitary youngster “gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold” sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen through the old miser’s keyhole.
Throw in that other great Christmas invention of the Victorian era, the Christmas tree – imported from Germany by Prince Albert – and you have all the elements of an English festive season.
Dickens, of course, took as his greatest source of research the people and places of London. And for Dickens, that meant the colourful characters and stories, cheerful despite the poverty and adversity they grew up in, who lived in the East End he visited as a child.
His first encounter with “this most colourful corner of the city” came with his childhood visits to his godfather, Christopher Huffam, who lived in Church Row, which became Newell Street, in Limehouse.
And Dickens’ childhood provided plenty of material for his later books such as Oliver Twist, with its hero cast out of a life of comfort and love into a horrific Thieves’ Kitchen.
In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens’ hapless father John lost his job as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. He was swiftly imprisoned for debt, joined in Marshalsea Prison by his wife and children.
With the exception of Charles that is. He was put to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. It only lasted a week, but the experience scarred him for life.
And when he drew on it for Oliver Twist he also drew on his knowledge of the East End, placing the home of the evil Bill Sykes in Bethnal Green.
In 1829 Dickens became a reporter, and would spend the rest of his days dividing his time between a prodigious output of journalism, fiction and punishing lecture tours.

He continued to draw on his knowledge of the East End. Nicholas Nickleby’s family live in “a little cottage at Bow” – an interesting historical snap of 19th Century rural Bow, before the new estates snaked out across the farmland from Bethnal Green and swallowed up the old village.
David Copperfield has his first sight of London and stays at an Aldgate Inn. Our Mutual Friend pulls heavily on Limehouse as the home of many of the characters. And the Grapes pub, which stands in Narrow Street today, was used by Dickens as the model for The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters tavern.
For his journalism too, Dickens returned again and again – journeys in Mile End, Wapping and Limehouse are detailed in The Uncommercial Traveller.
Dickens punishing workload took its toll and after a series of minor strokes he suffered a fatal attack, on June 8, 1870, after a full day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The unfinished last novel, researched by the author in visits to the opium dens of Shadwell, appeared posthumously that September.
Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey but his memorials were all around his beloved East End.
The hospital in Glamis Road, Shadwell, was financed by public contributions after Dickens’ heartrending picture of an East End in the throes of a cholera epidemic appeared in McMillan’s Magazine.
Today he is remembered by Charles Dickens House, Mans-ford Street, E2. But for most of us, his legacy is a Christmas of carol singers tramping through the snow, horsedrawn carriages racing cross-country, and a family exchanging gifts around a roaring fire.

A century ago the streets of the East End were very different to today, with a vibrant community of street traders, beggars and confidence tricksters employing any and every manner of business to drag them out of poverty. It’s a colourful world that would be lost to us were it not for an astonishing and immense photographic archive, compiled over three decades by one of the great pioneers of the camera.

Of course Francis Frith didn’t only snap the East End. Amazingly, this devout Quaker, former grocer and ace businessman set himself the project of photographing every city, town and village in Britain, as well as undertaking exotic and perilous photo-expeditions to Africa. But it is his pictures of the bootblacks, knife sharpeners, organ grinders and cake sellers of Whitechapel that provide a vivid history lesson in the nature of Victorian poverty.

Frith had established a thriving grocery business in Liverpool by 1855, but had always yearned to travel. He sold up for the enormous sum of £200,000 – around £15m at present values. A man of leisure, and captivated by the new science of photography, he set out to see the world.

He spent the next four years travelling to Africa, using a specially designed wicker carriage that doubled as sleeping quarters and dark room. He laboured for hours in his sweltering dark room, but the results were spectacular. Back in London, he exhibited to the Royal Society and was rapturously cheered.

Frith may have been an artist, but he was ever the businessman, and he spotted an opportunity in the increased leisure time of the Victorians. Bank holidays and half-day Saturdays had been made law by an Act of Parliament, and Frith reckoned that the new tourists would want souvenirs to commemorate their days out. The idea of the picture postcard was born, and Frith set out on his epic journey round Britain. It was to take the remaining 30 years of his life.

His pictures of the East End weren’t pretty mementoes of course. But deliberately or not, the sheer number of shots Frith took leaves us with an amazing photo-documentary of life on east London’s streets in the last years of the 19th century. The street traders were often grindingly poor. Selling a few lucifer matches was often a pretext for begging. Bryant and May of Bow employed 700 girls to sell their matches on London’s streets, and Frith’s picture of a shoeless and emaciated Bryant and May vendor paints a thousand words.

His pictures say a lot about the poverty of that age and the wastefulness of ours. Nowadays, we wouldn’t employ knife sharpeners, chair menders and street cobblers – we would simply throw away and buy new. And the growth of casual wear means there would be no employment today for the hundreds of shoeblacks who plied their trade in Tower Hamlets.

East Enders had a bewildering number of morning and evening London papers to choose from – and there were paper sellers on every corner.

Between the 1870s and late 90s, Frith wandered the East End streets with his camera, capturing the baked potato sellers, muffin and gingerbread men, strawberry vendors and the rest who have long disappeared. He also amassed an archive of shots of the bustling Thames, with steamers and good ships putting in and out of the Port of London.

Frith died in 1898 at his villa in Cannes, his mammoth project still growing. The Frith Archive continued to grow for another 70 years, in fact, by 1970 containing more than a third of a million pictures.

You can see more pictures of the East End at the Frith archive on the web, at www.frithbook.co.uk, or contact The Francis Frith Collection, Frith’s Barn, Teffont, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 5QP for details of books and prints. Tel: 01722 716376. Email: uksales@francisfrith.com.

London writer Peter Ackroyd has long had an interest in East End characters and locations – his novels Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Hawksmoor each use fascinating, factionalised accounts of real events in East End history. And his string of biographies include those of famed Londoners Charles Dickens and William Blake.

But Ackroyd’s new work is possibly his most ambitious yet – a biography of the town of London itself. This vast, sprawling work, running to 800 pages, treats the metropolis as an organic, growing thing, and for fans of East End history there are tales to keep you coming back over and over again.

Tower Hamlets and stink industries

Particular chapters will fascinate Tower Hamlets readers. The section on the history of the East End is entitled The Stinking Pile and charts the historical poor-relation status of the regions east of the River Walbrook.

The area was poor in terms of its people anyway, if not in its industries. The factories that generated wealth for London at the same time as they despoiled its eastern reaches were appearing surprisingly early. A Lea Mills court in 1614 recorded the appearance of “Launcelot Gamblyn, lately of Stratford Langthorne, starchmaker, because of unlawful making of starch such a stink and ill favour continue and daily arise”.

We see the gradual overfilling of Tower Hamlets until, in the 1880s, the East End implodes. From being merely dirty, noisy and overcrowded, it becomes the abyss, a nether world. The west had long been talking about the East End with horror, as a foreign country. In 1812, we see Thomas De Quincy talking of Limehouse as a strange and frightening world, as he writes about the Ratcliffe Highway Murders.

Jack London in London

And yet, by the early twentieth century, it was still a mystery to most outsiders. When Call of the Wild author Jack London visited London in 1902, and wanted to pay a visit to Tower Hamlets, he went into Thomas Cook in Cheapside.

The startled office manager informed London: “We are not accustomed to taking travellers to the East End; we receive no call to take them there, and we know nothing whatsoever about the place.”

London might have found the Klondike more accessible. Still he found his way there, and went on to describe East Enders as The People of the Abyss.
As Ackroyd observes: “The West End has the money, and the East End has the dirt; there is leisure to the West and labour to the East.”

Cockney slang from Middle Ages

We see a split between the speech of the West and the East as early as the Middle Ages. East Enders shared their East Saxon-derived dialect with the people of Essex and would ‘walk down the strate’, while westerners spoke the West Saxon dialect of the Court and would use the ‘strete’.

Ackroyd unearths a mine of colourful cockney witticisms and put-downs, though some would now sound more at home in the Fast Show’s music hall skits than on any East End street. Have a banana, what a shocking bad hat, has your mother sold her mangle?, and who put a turd in the boy’s mouth – a conversation stopper from the fifteenth century. Ackroyd sees much of the cockney character defined in its speech. The great essayist, William Hazlitt, had a rather jaundiced view of East Enders’ manner of talking.

Cockneys, booze, suicide & prostitution

“Your true cockney is your only true leveller,” he wrote in 1826. “Everything is vulgarised in his mind. Nothing dwells long enough on it to produce an interest … He has no respect for himself and still less (if possible) for you. He cares little about his own advantage, if he can only make a jest out of yours. Every feeling comes to him through a medium of levity and impertinence.”

There are fascinating chapters on a host of London’s character traits – on the history of drink, the history of suicide, the history of silence and the history of light, as the town ages from the time of the Druids to the dawn of the twenty-first century.

We read of East Enders as traders, gamblers, merchants, soldiers, prostitutes, politicians and nobles. It all builds into an enthralling biography of a complex and often-contradictory character… London.

London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd; published by Chatto and Windus; ISBN 1-856-19716-6; £25.

John Wilkes was an unlikely focus for campaigners demanding workers’ rights. A flamboyant and rakish figure, he married into money, and spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his friends in the West End’s notorious Hellfire Club.
But before his political career petered out he would become the figurehead for a rash of East End uprisings against poor pay and conditions.
Wilkes was born on 17 October 1725, the son of a City malt distiller. In 1747 he married Mary Meade, an heiress who owned a large estate at Aylesbury. It was a marriage of convenience and Wilkes spent most of the next ten years in London’s clubs rather than at home. Eventually, bored by his life of pleasure, Wilkes decided to try politics and in 1757 he was elected MP for Aylesbury.
But it was for his extra-parliamentary attacks that Wilkes would gain notoriety. In 1762 his weekly paper, The North Briton, began a series of attacks on Scotsmen in general and prime minister Lord Bute in particular.
Bute was a favourite of the king, George III, and after one article on 23 April 1763, George and his ministers prosecuted Wilkes for seditious libel. The Lord Chief Justice ruled that, as an MP, Wilkes was protected by privilege from the charges. The politician left the court as a champion of liberty and a huge popular favourite.
The establishment had other ways of targeting Wilkes though. Samuel Martin, a supporter of George III, challenged him to a duel that November. Martin, his skills suspiciously honed by a summer of shooting practice, hit and wounded Wilkes in the stomach. Worse was to come. A week later, Parliament ruled that privilege did not protect Wilkes from prosecution and the troublemaker was hurried off to France by friends.
In 1768, Wilkes returned to England, but was soon at odds with the Government once more. He stood as a Radical candidate for Middlesex, a constituency that included the East End. But after being elected, the new MP was arrested and taken to the King’s Bench Gaol, on the South Bank of the Thames.

For the next fortnight large crowds gathered outside the prison. On 10 May, 1768, a crowd of around 15,000 arrived, yelling “Wilkes and Liberty”, and “No Liberty, No King”. The hapless Government had, in trying to contain Wilkes’s threat, only made matters worse. Panicking troops opened fire, killing seven protesters, and sparking protests all over the capital.
Wilkes became a focus for various disenchanted groups in Tower Hamlets. In 1768, the Spitalfields weavers tried to cut the wages of their worlers. The workers paraded down Piccadilly that March, giving out pamphlets proclaiming “Wilkes and Liberty”. A month later, coal heavers marched down the Ratcliff Highway. Their grievance was the lack of lighting in their poor dwellings; “Wilkes and Liberty and coal heavers forever”, read their banners.
On 8 June that year, Wilkes was found guilty of libel for comments he had written about the St George’s Massacre, and received a 22-month sentence and a fine of £1,000. On his way to jail, the mob rescued him, and he appeared at the upstairs windows of the Three Tuns Tavern, next to Christ Church in Spitalfields, waving to his overjoyed supporters. But Wilkes realised his cause was lost, and later he quietly slipped away and surrendered to his jailers.
As a felon, he was expelled from the House of Commons but, in February, March and April, 1769, Willkes was three times re-elected for Middlesex. Each time Parliament threw out the result, and each time there was rioting in the East End. The disturbances culminated in the hanging of riot leaders John Valline and John Doyle at the southern end of Bethnal Green that December.
John Wilkes was freed from prison in April 1770, then in 1774 was elected Lord Mayor of London. And finally, he was again elected to represent Middlesex in the Commons – and at last admitted.
Wilkes spent his political career campainging for religious tolerance and parliamentary reform, demanding seats be redistributed from the old ‘rotten boroughs’ in the Shires to the new centres of industry, such as the East End.
Like many radicals, though, Wilkes’s fire cooled with age. He became more conservative, the radicals grew dissatisfied with him and in the 1790 General Election he was defeated at Middlesex. Wilkes died on 29 December, 1797.

Lennox Lewis’s triumphant defence of his world heavyweight title, and the emergence of East End Olympic hero Audley Harrison, confirm one thing – unfashionable and controversial though boxing may be in many quarters, the East End retains an extraordinary enthusiasm for the sweet science.
And that’s an enthusiasm only matched by our capacity for producing championship fighters.
But if Lennox thought his points win was an epic battle, he has a Wapping waterman to thank for it being such a relatively brief contest. And the well-protected Audley has the same fellow to thank for the first moves to body protection for pugilists.
In the mid-1700s boxing was a brutal sport. Rules were few, bouts open-ended, and physical protection non-existent. The winner was the last man standing and the loser often paid with serious physical or mental damage… or even death.
This was a problem for Jack Broughton. Jack, the third heavyweight boxing champion of all England, augmented his waterman’s wages with bare-knuckle street fighting, but increasingly trained and managed a stable of fighters.
Modern boxers talk about leaving the fight in the gym due to over-training; Broughton’s boys often couldn’t make the fight because they had beaten one another so badly in the gym.
But rigorous training was needed to produce a bare-knuckle fighter capable of going dozens of rounds, so Jack set to thinking. His solution was to invent mufflers, the earliest boxing gloves, which made their first appearance in his Hanway Street gym in 1743.
Brutal prize fights
And Jack, having invested time and money in training promising young fighters and crowd favourites, saw the problem in their careers being curtailed by injury and death in the brutal prize fights so, at the same time, he devised his own set of competition rules.
The London Prize Ring rules were boxing’s first, and pre-dated the more famous Queens- bury Rules by a century or so.

It would be a mistake to think that Jack had gone soft – in a handbill published during the 1740s, he described boxing as simply the most successful method of beating a man deaf, dumb, lame and blind.
But his ideas proved so effective in prolonging the careers of fighters that the rules he prepared in 1743 remained in effect until 1838.
In their new form, they were the benchmark for fighting until the last bare-knuckle championship bout in 1889. After 1889, gloves became the rule, so Broughton’s ideas persist to this day.
The rules were as follows: no hitting below the belt; no hitting an opponent who was down; wrestling only allowed above the waist; fights to be contested in rounds, with a 30-second rest period in between; rounds to be over with a knockdown; and fights over after a rest period if a fighter couldn’t toe the mark or come up to scratch.
This mark was a square of a yard chalked in the middle of a stage which boxers had to approach at the start of each new round.
Butcher
The rules were sponsored by Jack’s patron, William Augustus, the Third Duke of Cumberland. Augustus was to become known as Butcher Cumberland for his merciless slaughter of Jacobite Scots at the Battle of Culloden in 1745. The Duke also had a taste for bloody sports, wagering huge amounts on Jack’s successful fights.
As a sideline, Jack began to teach sparring with mufflers to the young relatives of the Duke of Cumberland. But the pair fell out after Broughton was beaten by Jack Slack in 1750.
The Butcher lost £10,000 on the fight and his interest in pugilism soon afterwards.
He may have fallen from favour with Cumberland, but Jack enjoyed a long and comfortable retirement. When he died in 1789, a wealthy 85 year old, he was still a national hero, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

As the fashionable riverside restaurants multiply, the prosperous young move into Wapping and Spitalfields and the shining office blocks of the new Dock-lands spread over the Isle of Dogs, the very words East End begin to have a different ring.
For centuries, East End was synonymous with sweated labour, poverty, Cockney solidarity and popular protest, such as the dock and Bryant & May strikes, and the Poplar rent protests.
Now, an East End battered by the collapse of traditional industries, by wartime bombing and equally brutal redevelopment is beginning to redefine itself.
A fascinating book, in paperback for the first time, looks at the defining threads that have run through the last 400 years of East End life – what has changed, and what remains the same.
The East End – Four Centuries of London Life is a remarkable work. Alan Palmer writes of a quarter of London perennially poor, yet rich for the historian and casual reader alike.
And he does so in a way that is never a dry discourse of the historical facts but rich in colour and poetry – this is an elegant, detailed, lively and sometimes hilarious trawl through the characters and events that produced the rich stew of Tower Hamlets.
We learn how the East End was first marked out by its geographical otherness.
It lies on a raised strip of gravel separate from the other hills emerging from the flood plain of the London Basin. As early as the fifth century, this marked a division, with the conquering Saxons settling to the west of the River Walbrook, while the defeated Romano-Britons retreated to the east.
The role of the Church in limiting and defining the nascent East End is tackled in fascinating detail.
The Church dominated the manors of Stepney and Hackney – St Dunstan’s was the earliest Christian settlement east of London and for centuries was the diocesan centre for the whole of Middlesex and prevented the suburbs spreading to the east of the City.

This in turn led to the short-term speculation in land that blighted Tower Hamlets development. Land was only available on 31-year leases, and so investors were never lured to develop the grand squares and avenues that characterised the western sprawl of population into the likes of Kensington and Mayfair.
The East End, in consequence, took on a piecemeal appearance – no Regent Streets or Piccadillys in Stepney or Wapping. Ironically, the first wave of planning unity was only to break in response to the Blitz and the subsequent redevelopment of the 1960s and 70s.
But amid the poverty, planning blight and constant rebuilding, Alan Palmer suggests that the East End remains a microcosm of London’s past. Though time and Tower Hamlets have moved on, what happened in London happened first here.
The marvellous invention of the London Theatre took place in Shoreditch with The Theatre and The Curtain, and Music Hall took its bow in the houses of Hoxton and Wellclose Square.
Radical and religious reinvention had their London births here with the various millenarians and levellers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Ana-baptists, Fifth Monarchy Men and Quakers.
Municipal Socialism, one of the defining notes of late 19th and early 20th century politics (and without which we would have had no Labour governments), found its voice in George Lansbury, alongside the early feminism of Sylvia Pankhurst and the Bow match girls.
Above all, Palmer’s aim is to sketch in the details of this colourful past, while relating what was happening in the East End to the rise and fall of London as an imperial city.
This isn’t local history, he is saying – the whole area between the City and metropolitan Essex is rich in a history which is of national significance rather than merely of local curiosity.
The East End – Four Centuries of London Life by Alan Palmer. Published by John Murray Publishers. ISBN 0-7195-5666-X. £10.99 paperback.

Some villains drift into crime through circumstance or misfortune and some, like East End boy George Smith, seem born to it.
Smith was born at 92 Roman Road on January 11, 1872
and was just nine years old when he received his first custodial sentence – eight years in a Gravesend Reformatory. It was a criminal career that
was to conclude more than 30 years and at least three murders later, on the scaffold of Maidstone Gaol.
Smith received several
short sentences for theft between his eventual release and signing up for the Northampton Regiment in the early 1890s. But in 1896, his true modus operandi was emerging – exploiting women for financial gain.
In that year he received
12 months for persuading a woman to steal from her employers. He used the money to open a baker’s shop in Leicester. It was Smith’s final brush with genuine work, and the start of his tireless travels around England in search of more victims.
Bigamy
He married Caroline Thornhill in 1898, bigamously adding a second wife in 1899. She described his appeal:
“He had an extraordinary power; this power lay in his eyes. You had the feeling you were being magnetised, they were little eyes that seemed to rob you of your will.”
And robbing was Smith’s aim. He persuaded Caroline to steal a set of silver spoons from her employer, Smith acting as a receiver. The hapless pair were arrested, Smith getting two years on her evidence.
On his release in 1903, the vengeful husband went after Caroline, who fled to Canada to escape him.
The angry Smith returned to his bigamous bride, cleared out her bank account, and left.
It’s unknown how many more women Smith conned over the subsequent years. Certainly in 1908 he met and married Florence Wilson, a widow from Worthing, in the space of three weeks. He took her straight to the nearest Post Office, withdrew her £30
savings, went off to get a newspaper and walked out of her life, returning to clear out their Camden digs en route.

Next arriving in Bristol, he swiftly married Edith Pegler. Smith would disappear for months at a time, saying he
was off to Bedford, Southend, Croydon or Luton to sell antiques, and always returning with money.
Never returned
In October 1909, he married Sarah Freeman from South-ampton. He used the same scam as on Florence Wilson – clearing out her Post Office account before selling her war bonds and pocketing £400. He took Sarah to the National Gallery, nipped off to the toilet, and never returned.
But larceny turned to murder when he met Bessy Mundy in Bristol in 1912. The pair moved to Herne Bay, where Smith consulted a solicitor about how he could get his hands on Bessy’s £2,500 inheritance, despite the resistance of her family. A bequest seemed the only way, and the pair made their wills.
Smith’s plan seems transparent to us today. He repeatedly called the doctor about his wife’s ‘fits’ though she had no recollection of these, and he immediately bought a bath for their hotel room – a bath in which Bessie was found dead days later. No post mortem was held and the inquest decided it was misadventure.
Smith should have been rich, with his £2,500 inheritance, but he could never hold on to his spoils. In November 1913 he married Alice Burnham in Portsmouth. He swiftly had her life insured for £500, emptied her account, and took her
on holiday to Blackpool. He rejected a first hotel for not having a bath.
Drowned in bath
The next day, Alice was dead, drowned in the tub of their guest house. The landlady, Mrs Crossley, was appalled by Smith’s callousness – immediately selling his wife’s effects and refusing a deal coffin because “when they’re dead they’re done with”.
Along the way, Smith certainly conned many more women, but there was to be one final murder.
On December 15, 1915, Margaret Lofty went out for tea… and never returned. She had bumped into Smith, and within days they were married and moved to London. At 8pm on Friday 18, the couple’s Highgate landlady, Louise Blatch, heard a furious splashing from the bath upstairs,
followed by a gurgle, a sigh and then silence. Moments later she heard Smith playing the harmonium in the front room. The tune – ‘Nearer My God To Thee’.
Finally Smith had gone too far. The report of the inquest in the News of the World newspaper caught the eye of Mrs Crossley and Alice Burnham’s father. The similarities were too great and the pair called Scotland Yard.
Smith’s career of crime soon unravelled as the Yard travelled the country amassing evidence. He was convicted of the three murders – though there may have been more – and carried unrepentant, kicking and screaming to the scaffold on Friday, August 13, 1915.

Tower Hamlets may be richer in history than just about any other corner of the globe, but it isn’t a peaceful, uninterrupted history.
In fact, the diversity and colour of our part of London is due in a large part to the changes wrought by industrial rise and decline, the constant arrival and departure of new ideas and cultures, the developers’ wrecking ball and the Luftwaffe’s bombs.
It means that the hamlets of the East End aren’t neat, easily defined ones. As we’ve seen before, Ratcliffe has disappeared altogether. The meaning of Poplar, meanwhile, has changed several times over the last centuries.
Rise of the docks
In the mid-1600s, Poplar had a population of around a
thousand – a mere hamlet linking the much larger villages of Limehouse to the west and Blackwall to the east. These villagers lived along what is now Poplar High Street, but it was events next door, where the East India Company had just set up its shipyard, which were to change everything.
The company took over the little village. In 1628, it bought the land to the north of the high street, building its almshouses there. These were replaced by the new council offices, and then by the recreation ground (lying between Hale Street and Woodstock Terrace).
It also built Poplar Chapel, in Woodstock Street, for the workers. The bosses worshipped elsewhere – merchants and shipbuilders making their homes out in the Essex countryside (then only a mile or so to the east) or in the rich
suburb of Limehouse.

Soaring population
The result was that Poplar never grew rich, though
the population soared from
4,493 in 1801 to 7,708 in 1811, with the building of the West then East India Docks in those years.
A new parish church was needed, and All Saints
was built in Newby Place between 1820 and 1823, with the dock companies contributing to the cost. New homes soon sprung up around the place of worship, and the drift of Poplar northwards had begun.
Poplar now meant a lot
more than the hamlet, and from 1817 the parish of Poplar covered the Isle of Dogs, Blackwall and, looking down from the high ground to the north, the village itself. With Millwall Docks joining the West and East India, Poplar could claim to be the hub of the greatest maritime trading centre in the world.
New buildings were raised, reflecting the new size and importance (if not affluence) of the village. Poplar Chapel was enlarged and became St Matthias, new District Board of Works offices were built next door and a town hall was erected next to All Saints.
But Poplar had already peaked. Although the population continued to grow until around 1900, little housing was built after 1870. The docks were already in decline, although it would be another 90 years or so before they would be shut altogether. In 1886, a new dock opened down the Thames at Tilbury, and Poplar’s lifeblood was choked off. The shops on the high street closed and the little alleys off the once-bustling thoroughfare quickly declined into slums.
1930s council flats
In 1900, the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar was
created, covering the old parish area, but little work was done until the 1930s, when a huge programme of council flat-building took place. The village of Poplar had long been developing to the north of the East India Dock Road, and this triangle of land was redeveloped as the Lansbury Estate.
The final symbolic severing of Poplar from its original lifeblood – the docks – was yet to come. In the 1960s, the Blackwall Tunnel approach was slashed between the high street and the East India Docks. And Aspen Way and Limehouse Link completed the job, as the West India Docks became the glittering towers of Canary Wharf.

London is nearly 2,000 years old, growing from a Roman walled settlement to the one of the world’s greatest cities. And not a year has passed in those two millennia without the emergence of epoch-making characters and events.

History books normally concentrate on those great men and women, and those turbulent events. But an astonishingly ambitious volume puts London right at the heart of the story, charting events year by year over the past 1,000 of those years – and the East End has a starring role.

The story of the modern London really begins in Tower Hamlets, with William I fortifying the Tower of London in 1067 and then building the stone structure in 1078.
On to 1101 and we see how traffic was already starting to come in to the City – the evidence being the building of Bow Bridge across the River Lea, by Queen Matilda.
In that year too, the Tower held its first prisoner, the Bishop of Durham, who also became the first man to escape from the Tower of London.

Bedlam and Liverpool Street Station

The East End’s long association with holy orders is first noted in 1108, when the Augustinians founded Holy Trinity Priory near Aldgate. The buildings were to burn down in 1133. 1235 sees the establishment of the first London zoo, with leopards and polar bears housed at the Tower of London. And in 1247, the notorious lunatic asylum of St Mary Bethlehem, or Bedlam, was instituted on the later site of Liverpool Street station.

In 1374, Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the greatest writers in the English language, set up home above the Aldgate, and in 1380 we read the first recorded settlements on the Isle of Dogs, with the establishment of a chapel on the old ‘Stepney Marsh’. In 1448 we see an early danger of living on the Island, the whole area being submerged when the embankment was breached.

The theatre at Shoreditch

1576 sees the opening of the first London playhouse, the Theatre at Shoreditch. And in 1614 we see the East India Company – which shaped the fortunes of the East End as much as any – taking over a new ten-acre site at Blackwall. So began the modern London docks.
In 1684, Spitalfields Market opened for business.

Then, in 1711, the East End received a rash of new churches in response to a Government Act addressing the lack of places of worship in the east. Christ Church Spitalfields, St Anne’s Limehouse and St George in the East all date from this time.

In 1780, religious intolerance reared its head in the East End, with the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots. On a happier note, in the same year William Addis set himself up as a ‘stationer and rag merchant’ at 64 Whitechapel High Street. Addis was to invent the first toothbrush, made of bone and horsehair, giving East Enders relief from the scourge of tooth decay resulting from their consumption of the new delicacy – sugar. The company still bears Addis’s name.

East End brothels and alehouses

And interspersing all these seminal events we read of more mundane matters. The constant attempts of the authorities to contain the nuisance and noise of the East End brothels and alehouses, via a series of laws over the centuries – none of which worked. The continual attempts to curtail the anti-social behaviour of the tanners, weavers, spurriers and other guild workers as they go about their trade with scant concern for the comfort, safety or well-being of their neighbours.

And we read of the strange freaks of nature – the first sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1446 which “served only to confirm a general air of unease and foreboding”, the once a century freezing over of the Thames, and the blazing summers bringing plague and pestilence. And, least expected of all, the East End being hit by a hurricane in 1703.

The Annals of London by John Richardson; published by Cassell and Co; price £30.