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The East End of the late 19th and early 20th century was the birthplace and home of music hall – and nobody personified the energy, bawdiness and vigour of the halls more than Marie Lloyd. The cockney chanteuse sang of a life of drunkeness, lewd behaviour and moonlight flits. But musical fiction paled next to the facts of her outrageous life. It was a lifestyle that was to scandalise staid English society and would, ultimately, lead to her early death.

Matilda Victoria Wood was born on 12 February 1870 in Hoxton, the eldest of nine. All the sisters, Daisy, Alice, Rose and Marie would hang around at the Eagle music hall round the corner, and all wanted to go on the stage.

The young Matilda had a taste for hard work and a flair for organisation. She cajoled her sisters and friends into group called the Fairy Bells Minstrels, who toured the mission halls with a programme on the evils of drink – ironic given Marie’s later taste for the stuff.

Although she was only 16, the determined Matilda announced she would go on the stage. Promoters were always scouting the halls for fresh talent and she soon got a try-out at Belmont’s Sebright Hall in Hackney Road, and was then retained for a fee of 15/- (75p) a week.

Soon she was appearing at small halls around the East End, doing two or three shows a night, rushing from one to the other carrying her costume. Enormous success wasn’t far away and it resulted from a potent mix of talent, ambition, relentless hard work … and a ruthless and mercenary streak. Now dubbed Marie Lloyd she needed a signature song, and found it in The Boy I Love Is Up In The Gallery. She pinched the song from fellow performer Nelly Power and it quickly became her own, while Nelly faded from view.

Success came and with it the first of a string of disastrous romances. Marie was earning a fortune, which no doubt made her doubly attractive to Percy Courtenay. He became Marie’s first husband in 1887, when Percy was 25 and Marie just 17. She was working as hard as ever, but her husband had no regular job. Marie Jr was born but the marriage was over by 1893. The drunken Percy began following Marie, hanging around at the stage door and abusing her.

Marie’s career went into orbit. The audiences loved her and she loved the East End halls where she constantly pushed the limits with her saucy winks, vulgarity and risque songs. Marie was such a huge star by now that she couldn’t avoid the stories appearing about her in the papers. Eventually Marie had to appear before the Vigilance Committee.

She sang her songs without the usual winks and gestures and the committee let her go. Marie then gave a rendition of the chaste drawing-room ballad Come into the Garden Maud, so laden down with innuendo and gesture that it became quite obscene.

In 1901 she began living with singer Alec Hurley. It was another shock for puritanical England – she wasn’t to be divorced by Percy Courtenay till 1906. Soon after came the Music Hall Strike, which had its first meeting at the Hampstead house of Marie and Alec. It was called by the smaller artists who were being asked to do extra performances for no extra cash. The artists won, the managers gave in, but Marie had made powerful enemies.

In 1910 Marie was 40, but sedate middle age didn’t beckon. Instead she left Alec and moved in with Derby-winning Irish jockey Bernard Dillon, 18 years her junior. Dillon was to lose his jockey’s licence within months. His career over at 22, he began drinking heavily.

Her career began to falter too. The first Royal Command Performance was held in 1912 specially for the Music Hall, but Marie was omitted by the vengeful managers. Then in 1913 Marie and Bernard arrived in New York for a six-month tour. They were arrested at the quayside – their crime was to be unmarried. Charged with moral turpitude, they were deported straight back to Britain.

Marie began to drink. She often arrived late on stage, her voice became weaker and her act shorter. In October 1922 she was appearing at Edmonton and the last song in her act was the famous It’s a bit of a ruin that Cromwell knocked about. The delighted audience howled at her staggering about on the stage, thinking she was acting the drunk. But Marie was desperately ill. The crowd laughed when she fell, thinking it was part of the act. But it was Marie’s final call.. Three days later, on 7 October, she died.

Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564

When the docks left the East End they took with them a way of life and an economic base that had underpinned Wapping, Shadwell and the rest of the Tower Hamlets for 150 years and more. But along with them they took a whole language that had sprung up around ships, cargoes and the dirty, dangerous and uncertain work that serviced them.

The East and West India Docks, the Millwall and St Katharines, Blackwall, the Royals, and the Surrey Docks on the Rotherhithe bank are all history now – with large parts of the land and buildings taken over by premium-priced housing. But much of the arcane and colourful language that sprang up around the quaysides in the 19th and 20th century is with us still.

Tom Ash* started work in the Surrey Docks in 1960, and soon found it was a hard way to earn a living. ‘Bomping on money’ was just 13/- a day (65p). Bomping money was paid to dockers if they hadn’t got a job for the day – nobody was guaranteed a day’s work of course. If there was no work he’d have to go to the ‘Pool’ and get his work book stamped (or bomped). Better than the old days of waiting behind ‘the chain’ to be called forward to work or sent home with nothing, but an uncertain wage nonetheless.

The days of the chain had in turn been replaced by those of the ‘brass tally men’. Before the Dock Labour Scheme was created in 1946, bringing with it at least some guarantee of pay, the dockers were each given a brass tally, oval in shape. They would hand this in when given a job for the day, and collect it again when given their pay. If they didn’t get a day’s work they would have to sign on at the local Labour Exchange, bearing their brass tally as proof.

Even with those days gone, the dockers would still refer to a day’s work as ‘tallying’. And they would still gather each morning at the dock gates, ‘shaping up’ for work. And if you were the only person ‘on a call’ who hadn’t been taken on for work, you would be ‘left roasting’ at the gates.

For the rest, the day’s started. Each hold would have a ‘top man’ controlling the direction of the crane for the cranedriver. Right palm downward with an up-and-down movement would signify lower; touching the top of his head would have the jib raised; a clenched fist would stop the crane. The top man would shout ‘muggo’ when it was time for a tea break.

There would be extra money for different types of work. ‘Dirty money’ was the extra dockers would be paid for unloading particularly filthy cargoes, and ‘snow banging’ carried a premium too. When working in the cold storage depots or ‘cold pots’, men would be employed to bang the ice from the refrigeration pipes. Think about that next time you moan about defrosting the fridge.

For as long as there had been docks, there had been pilfering, and security was taken care of the dock policemen or ‘beadles’, which conjures up images of Dickensian London.

And there would be strikes of course. Any union member could call for a ‘show of cards’, and a manual count would be taken of the union cards held in the air. ‘White ticket’ holders, (members of the TGWU) would take precedence over those with ‘Blue tickets’ (the Stevedores Union). All this was to end with the abolition of the Dock Labour Scheme in 1989. Within a year the number of dockers fell from 9,221 to fewer than 4,000. A way of life – and a language – that had long been dying was finished off.
Childhood Days – the docks and dock slang, written and published by Thomas William Ash, ISBN 0952318407
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Some more dock slang
Beach comber
Day worker employed to keep the quays clear of broken pallets and other debris
Ceiling of a ship
Actually the floor of the vessel. When the dockers were unloading they would cry “I can see the ceiling” meaning the floor was in sight and the job was nearly done
The drink
Not refreshments, but the Thames itself. As in “he’s fallen in the drink”, very dangerous with the undercurrents swirling around the massive hulls of docked vessels
The Queen’s holiday
Dockers always got a day off work in honour of the Queen’s birthday
Ice cream man
The rat catcher, so called because he wore a white coat
Mud pilots
Tugs that brought ships in
Toke
Food
Dolly bags
Silk stocking carried by men in the tea warehouses for secreting tea inside their trousers
Light horsemen
Those who stole from barges or ships
Huffling
Steering a barge with an oar

So the Ashes are lost once again, as an unstoppable Aussie cricket team steamrollers England … again. But though the official history of Test cricket in England stretches back to September 1880 - when England beat Australia by five wickets at the Oval and with WG Grace scoring a hundred on his Test debut – the real history of the meetings dates back a dozen years before that.

Unlike the Pontings, Waughs, Warnes and Gilchrists though, these early visitors weren’t the Anglo-Saxon descendants of English and Irish settlers to Australia. The first Aussie tourists were Australian Aborigines. Before the tour was over one of them would be dead – a victim of the unfamiliar London weather – and buried in Bethnal Green. Unsung at Lords or the Gabba, he is remembered by a single eucalyptus tree planted in Meath Gardens.

When the cricketers disembarked at Gravesend on 13 May 1868 it was after a gruelling three-month voyage from Sydney. They had even had to be smuggled out of Australia. When it became public that a group of white businessmen were planning on taking an Aboriginal team to England the Victorian government - which had set up an Aborigines Protection Board in 1862 - did everything it could to stop it. Members warned that the long trip, the cold weather and the likely exposure to alcohol could have disastrous consequences for the players. So under the pretence of their being taken on a fishing trip the team met a steamer off the Victoria coast.

Reaction in England was mixed. The Times sniffily described the tourists as “a travestie upon cricketing at Lord’s”, and described the men as “the conquered natives of a convict colony”. The Daily Telegraph didn’t think much of Australia full stop. “Nothing of interest comes from there except gold nuggets and black cricketers,” it declared.

But the Aussies skill and athleticism won many admirers, as they criss-crossed England in their frantic itinerary, playing 47 matches and taking the field for 99 days of a possible 126. “They throw in very well indeed, making the ball whizz along at a great pace,” reported the Sporting Gazette. The Sheffield Telegraph called the tour “the event of the century”, and Reynolds News described the games as marking “a new epoch in the history of cricket”.

The team came from Edenhope in western Victoria, and owed their successes to sharp hand-eye co-ordination that put their white opponents to shame – the fielding and bowling particularly caught the eye of the fans. They wore white flannels and red shirts, and blue caps, each with a boomerang and cricket bat motif above the peak. And as a concession to a sheltered Anglo-Saxon audience (who believed they would be unable to tell black faces apart) each player had to wear a different-coloured sash. There was more. The English spectators wouldn’t even attempt to get to grips with the players’ aboriginal names, so they were given childlike nicknames to make it easy for the crowd. Bullchanach became Bullocky; Jumgumjenanuke Dick-a-Dick; Brimbunyah Redcap and so on. And Bripumyarrimin, who was soon to succumb to tuberculosis, was re-dubbed King Cole.

The eleven played the MCC at Lord’s on 12 and 13 June, 1868. MCC batted first with Aussie all-rounder Johnny Mullagh taking 5-82 off 45 overs. He bowled the Earl of Coventry, knocking out his off-stump. He took the top England scorer, Richard Fitzgerald, who made 50. MCC amassed 164 and the Australians outbatted them with a first innings total of 185 Johnny Mullagh getting 75 and Lawrence 25. The English press could no longer mock the visitors.

And there was more. At the close of the first day’s play, Dick-a-Dick caused a sensation by inviting members to pay up to a shilling for the chance to try to hit him with a cricket ball from 10 paces. Dick-a-Dick protected himself with a parrying shield. At Lord’s the members threw themselves enthusiastically into the test. Cricket balls rained on Dick-a-Dick for more than an hour, but not one found its mark.

And one young player was watching the Aborigines with a keen eye. WG Grace, then just 20, went to Lord’s fresh from scoring the first pair of hundreds in a first-class match and was fascinated by their athleticism and enthusiasm. He challenged them to the long throw. Mullagh managed 104 yards and Dick-a-Dick 107 yards, but Grace outdid them with 116, 117 and 118 yards.

Back at the cricket, MCC eventually won the match, but not before Johnny Cuzens put in a bowling performance of 6-65 in the MCC second innings.

Sadly it was to be King Cole’s last match. Much weakened by his disease he died at Guy’s Hospital on 24 June, 1868 - 11 days after the match ended. He was buried in Victoria Park Cemetery, later to become Meath Gardens.

People often talk about larger than life figures in football. But the tragic death of goalkeeper Les Sealey a week ago has robbed English soccer of one of its true characters. He was a highly motivated and hard-working footballer … with the touch of madness all keepers need.

“He was superb in the dressing room, very popular with his team-mates and worked tremendously hard in training,” recalls his boss at Luton, David Pleat. Sir Alex Ferguson goes even further, reckoning he won his place in Manchester United’s 1990 Cup Final on personality alone. And West Ham managing director paid tribute to the “energy and enthusiasm” Les brought to the West Ham bench on match days. Any fan who saw him running up and down the touchline screaming instructions would back that one up!

Les was born on September 29 1957 in Bethnal Green. Growing up a mad Hammers fan, his dream was to play at Upton Park, but it wasn’t to be, and in 1976 he joined Coventry as a 21-year-old apprentice. In 1983, after making 178 appearances for the Sky Blues, Les moved on to Luton, then in the old First Division, for a fee of £100,000. It was to be the start of an itinerant footballing career that would see him hit the European heights with Manchester United.
European glory seemed a long way distant when he joined lowly Plymouth on loan in 1984 though. After six first team appearances he returned to Luton. In 1988 he missed the Hatters’ League Cup final triumph at Wembley where Luton beat Arsenal 3-2.
The next year Luton returned to Wembley to defend the League Cup. Les got the call this time, but his side lost 3-1 to Brian Clough’s League Cup specialists, Nottingham Forest.
But Les’s Cup misery was to be turned on its head in a shock move in 1990. He joined Manchester United on loan in March and Alex Ferguson gave him two first-team matches before signing him on a free transfer.

These were dark days for Ferguson. After his domestic and European successes with Aberdeen, he had taken over at Manchester United in 1986. He was still looking for his first trophy, and under pressure of the sack, when United faced Crystal Palace in the 1990 Cup final.
Palace squeezed a 3-3 draw. And Jim Leighton, the Scotland keeper who Fergie had brought south with him, was at fault for at least one of the goals.
Walking into the Wembley dressing room after the match, the boss saw Leighton with his head slumped over his knees.
“It was then that I knew he had to be left out of the replay,” Ferguson said later. Dramatically and brutally Fergie dropped the Scotland international and threw Les into the replay.
“Was he a better keeper than Jim? No, but he thought he was, and that can sometimes be important,” he revealed. “Les Sealey was cocky and sometimes downright arrogant, so I did not foresee a failure of his nerve at Wembley.”
United won the replay 1-0 and Leighton’s United first team career was over. But if Les had unshakeable self-belief he also had humility. He offered Leighton his FA Cup winners medal after the game but Leighton declined it. Hurt by the psychological damage done to Leighton, Les also sent back the medal sent by the FA to mark his participation in the first game.
Sealey kept his place in the team for the next season, and even managed to better his cup-winning exploits. He played in goal in the 1991 Cup Winners’ Cup final in Rotterdam, as United beat Barcelona. He was to finish the match limping badly after suffering a leg injury in a collision. But he wasn’t to be denied the satisfaction of finishing the match, angrily waving away physio Jim McGregor as he attempted to give him treatment!
The next season Peter Schmeichel joined United, and Sealey was off on his travels once more. In July 1991 he moved to Aston Villa after making 44 first-team appearances for United. Then in 1992 he returned to Highfield Road on loan, making two appearances for Coventry. The tour of the Midlands continued in that year when he went to Birmingham on loan, playing 12 games.
Over the next few years he coached at Old Trafford, played for Blackpool, Bury and Leyton Orient and had two stints on the West Ham coaching staff.
Having finally made it to Upton Park he even got the opportunity to play for the team he had always supported. Ironically, one of those was up front, when an injury-hit Harry Redknapp threw him on as a makeshift striker.
Les left the Upton Park coaching staff this summer, along with Harry Redknapp and Frank Lampard. But the Sealey dynasty lives on at the Boleyn Ground. Les’s uncle, Alan Sealey played outside right when the Hammers beat 1860 Munich in the 1965 Cup Winners Cup Final at Wembley, scoring both West Ham goals.
And Les’s two sons, George and Joe, both goalkeepers, are both on West Ham’s books.

Les Sealey born 29 September 1957, died 19 August 2001. Leaves wife Elaine and sons George and Joe.

It was an unnerving stay in hospital that got Ken Kimberley thinking again about his childhood days in the East End. Suddenly, as mortality became more real, he had a new sense of urgency about writing them down before they were lost to him.

So was born the idea for one of the most personal and ‘real’ memoirs of East End life in the 1920s, 30s and 40s – the curiously titled Oi Jimmy Knacker. As Ken admits, there is nothing unusual about his story, “there must be thousands like me with similar thoughts of yesteryear … whether you lived in London, Liverpool or Leeds.” But it is exactly the fact that this was a life everyone lived– and which no-one lives anymore, that makes it such an irresistible read. To anyone under 30 it seems like another world.

About that title first of all. Legions of readers will remember Oi Jimmy Knacker as a kids’ street game where one team of energetic cockney kids would form a human horse while the other team would leap upon their backs – trying to stay feet off the ground while simultaneously making the opposition collapse. It’s just one of the games Ken details, Knock Down Ginger being another favourite guaranteed to infuriate the neighbours.

Games are only part of this journal of East End street life for the kids of seventy years ago. There is Delamura’s horse-drawn ice cream cart; the spectacular and lavish East End funerals – also horse-drawn of course; and street parties for the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935.
And there is a taste of things to come for Ken and his young pals when a grumpy neighbour parks that rarity, a car, in their street. “You can’t park there, that’s our football pitch,” cry the outraged kids. Little do they realise that a couple of generations on and it will be a space between the cars that is a rarity.

And even when the kids aren’t in the street playing conkers, or cricket, or snowballs, or Christmas carol singing, or watching the council workmen “relaying our cricket pitch” as tyre-friendly tarmac smoothes over the old-fashioned cobblestones, they are out and about. The truth is, with no television, videos, computer games and precious little space, the children have to look far and wide for their fun.

Trips down to the Thames are a favourite pastime. The Woolwich Ferry makes an excellent free trip across the Thames, though as Ken’s Grandad warns, “across the water” is like being in a foreign land, “cos they don’t even speak the King’s English over there”. Off the ferry, the kids race down and through the tunnel to beat the boat back to the northern shore. The swing bridge at Custom House is another favoured destination. Watching the Star of India cruise past, its hull as long as a street, Ken remarks in wonder at the crewmen waving down at him “Look Grandad, they’ve all got black faces.”

And there are much-awaited trips out of the East End. Forget school skiing trips and excursions to France – Ken and his classmates travel to the wilds of North Ockendon, just outside Upminster. Trips out of town mean Essex of course, and the excursion to Southend on Sea is eagerly awaited, as much for the trip on the LMS steam train through the countryside as for the day at the beach itself.

Come World War II and the streets become places of fear, with the Luftwaffe and V2s bringing destruction, and unexploded bombs making whole roads impassable.

But mostly it is happy memories and of streets crowded with people, not cars. Salvation army bands play; huge gangs of kids assemble for the regular Sunday bike ride, children collect for Bonfire Night and chat to the night watchmen guarding the docks and building sites.

Whether you were born in the East End or just moved here, the stories strike a chord. Oi Jimmy Knacker was a game known all over – in other parts of London as Hi Jimmy Knacker, in Croydon ‘Bury the Barrel’, ‘Mountikitty’ in Newcastle and Pomperino in Cornwall to name just a few. But is it still played in East End streets? Probably not.

Oi Jimmy Knacker, written and illustrated by Ken Kimberley, is a Silver Link Book, ISBN 1857941209, price £15.99.

The passing of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother this week at the age of 101 is an event like none before in our lives. Born in the last weeks of Queen Victoria’s reign, and just months into the 20th century, at the height of the British Empire, before aeroplanes had got off the ground, and when the gaslit streets around Buckingham Palace clattered with horses hooves rather than the rumble of traffic, the Queen Mother had, it seems, always been with us. Tragically for her, she outlived not only her beloved husband, but also her daughter, Princess Margaret, who died just a few weeks ago.

She was many things to the British people – a favourite grandmother; a Scot most at home fishing in the grounds of her beloved Castle Mey; a keen, canny and successful racehorse owner. But to the people of the East End of London she will always be someone more special still: a queen who, at the height of the Blitz, refused to abandon London for the safety of a bolthole in the country or the United States; and a woman who, with her king, was able “to look the East End in the face”.

But nothing could have seemed less likely to the young Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon than that she would become Queen of England. Her birth as a commoner, her father’s advice, her own sense of self-preservation, and of course her husband’s status as the second son of King George V, all mitigated against her ever ascending the throne. That she did so with such grace and success at a difficult and pivotal time for the British monarchy is a testament to her self-sacrifice, determination and sense of duty.
An Edwardian childhood
Ironically, even though we know so much of Elizabeth’s later life, her birth is shrouded in mystery. Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon was certainly born on 4 August 1900, but where we don’t know. She was the ninth of ten children born to Claude Bowes-Lyon and Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, a vicar’s daughter and a descendant of the Dukes of Portland. Perhaps her father can be forgiven for becoming a little forgetful at the birth of child number nine, but he didn’t register her birth for a full nine weeks. When he did, he gave the place of birth as the Hertfordshire family home of St Paul’s Walden Bury, though other accounts suggest she was actually born in London.

Though born in England and without a title, Elizabeth was actually descended from the Scottish royal family. And she once more ‘became’ a Scot at the age of four, when her parents became Lord and Lady Strathmore and inherited Glamis Castle. That began a lifelong love affair with Scotland. The castle had been a royal house since 1372 (Shakespeare had it as Macbeth’s home of course), and Elizabeth and younger brother David would have a wild time pouring ‘boiling oil’ (buckets of water in truth) from the turrets onto her mother’s guests. The castle’s ground staff also had to contend with being captured by the pair, tied up and held to ransom. On another occasion, having gone missing at St Paul’s, the pair were found hidden away sharing a cigarette. Her sense of humour and mischievous streak was still in evidence a century later when she would tease Palace staff, public and members of the Press alike.

Her childhood may have been idyllic, but her education was certainly wanting. Most of it was conducted at home by her mother and various governesses – with predictably patchy results. She was, however, fluent in French by the age of 10, and must have picked up some skills in arithmetic as she later showed a computer-like accuracy in working out the odds and returns on horses she was backing. Two terms of more traditional schooling, at the Misses Birtwistle’s Academy, were brought to an end by her protective mother.
World War I
And back at Glamis her education was abruptly ended altogether. When she was 14 years old, World War I broke out, and the castle was brought into use as a military hospital. Elizabeth learned to be a nurse, helped the injured men write letters to their wives and sweethearts, and would run errands, buying chocolate and cigarettes for the soldiers.

And if the separation from David (sent away to Eton) had been painful, the War was to shatter the childhood idyll forever. Her older brother Fergus perished at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Another brother, Michael, was held prisoner of war for two years more.
Between the wars
The end of the war coincided with Elizabeth becoming an adult and making the traditional entrée into Royal circles. It was a life the Bowes-Lyons were used to (members of the Royal Family would frequently visit Glamis) but both Elizabeth and her father had reservations about princes and kings. He had determined that none of his children should ever “have any post about the Court”. And Lord Strathmore had also warned Elizabeth early on to avoid “entanglements” with the Royal family. But it was inevitable that the beautiful young debutante should attract attention from the eligible young men of the Court. Prince Paul of Serbia wrote desperately to her that “My Queen of Yugoslavia is still missing and so I cannot plan my future. When will it happen?” It never did of course. But while it was one thing to turn down the throne of Serbia, Elizabeth was also to say no to the son of the King of England … twice.

Her first true love had been one James Stuart, but she turned down his proposal of marriage. Maybe it was the fact that this descendant of the illegitimate half-brother of Mary Queen of Scots had a terrible reputation as a philanderer and heartbreaker. Perhaps it was the fact that Stuart’s family was as hard-up as hers, but she kept her distance. Despite her initial reluctance her life was about to change forever.

The persistent prince
George V and Queen Mary’s second son, the Duke of York, had known Elizabeth since they were both children – a legacy of his family’s visits to the Strathmores at Glamis. Now, in 1920, he began to see her as his future Duchess. But while his older brother, the Prince of Wales, was cutting a reputation as a playboy prince, the Duke of York was a shy, introverted man with a pronounced stammer – how could he win the heart of Elizabeth where bolder men had failed? One barrier was swiftly removed. James Stuart was still interested in Elizabeth, and was now working as the Duke’s equerry. Ladies Strathmore and Moray (Stuart’s mother) conspired to send the rakish peer to work in the Oklahoma oilfields. But even with the coast clear, things didn’t go according to plan. ‘Bertie’, as Prince Albert, Duke of York, was called, proposed marriage. Elizabeth, mindful of her father’s earlier advice, said no. He proposed again. Again she said no. Queen Mary was scandalised that any woman, especially one born a commoner, should have the nerve to turn down her son. But Bertie was made of sterner stuff than his nervous and diffident manner would suggest. Walking in the woods at St Paul’s, on 13 January 1923, he proposed for a third time. Finally Elizabeth said yes.
A royal wedding
On 26 April that year, the couple wed in State at Westminster Abbey. There was no television of course, and at the last moment the Church banned the BBC from broadcasting the service on the radio. They feared that “disrespectful people might hear it whilst sitting in public houses with their hats on.” Certainly, a lot of East Enders might have liked to have heard that service in the pub.
East End visitors
A lifelong link with Tower Hamlets was to begin in the 1920s with the couple’s visit for the opening and dedication of Bethnal Green’s York Hall, but to many it seemed that the happy pair would slip into comfortable, happy obscurity. Their first child, Princess Elizabeth, was born in 1926 and Princess Margaret followed in 1930. And as the Duke and Duchess of York, Elizabeth and Bertie rarely performed the public duties so much a part of the Royal Family’s lives today.
One of their few public engagements brought them back to the East End, this time to Poplar. In 1935, the Duchess of York opened Frances Gray House, the very first block of flats on what was to become the Ocean Estate. Eileen Rainbird, of Tomlins Grove, Bow, remembered the visit years later to East End Life. “I lived in Ocean Street at the time and a group of Brownies from Dame Colet House formed a guard of honour along with our Brown Owl Miss Parnell.” But if such visits were rare, that was certainly how the Royal pair wanted it; and they might have become just another footnote, as forgotten minor Royals.
Unwelcome change
But another great love affair conspired against a quiet life for the Yorks. In 1936, George V had died and the Prince of Wales had succeeded the throne as Edward VIII. He had already begun his affair with Wallis Simpson. Twice divorced and American, she was considered a wholly unsuitable mate for the Prince of Wales, let alone as material for a future Queen. Edward put love before duty and abdicated the throne. The horrified Bertie was next in succession. It was a job he had never wanted, but putting duty first he felt he had to accept the Crown. The Yorks returned to Westminster Abbey on 12 May 1937, where Bertie was crowned George VI. The seething Elizabeth never forgave the Windsors for heaping pressure upon her nervous husband – she blamed them in part for the King’s premature death in 1952. And despite the Windsors wish to live in England and attend the new King’s coronation, she was insistent that they be exiled from Britain.
War breaks out
The King, despite vocal coaching from Elizabeth to conquer his stammer, was still a nervous public performer, often stuttering painfully through his public appearances, and history was once again to thrust him cruelly to the fore. In 1939 war broke out and, alongside prime minister Winston Churchill, the King and Queen were the figures that many Britons looked to for moral support and a display of fibre. The nervous King certainly lacked nothing in courage, but he wasn’t a crowd-rousing extrovert like Churchill or the Duke of Windsor. And the Queen’s visits to the scenes of devastating air raids in London were sometimes ill-received if well-meant. Dressed in her finery, there were early reports of the couple being whistled and booed by people who had been bombed out and left with nothing.

But if the couple had difficulty relating to their people they lacked nothing in guts. The Government and Royal household were insistent that the Queen and princesses should escape to the safety of Canada. Elizabeth refused to leave, saying “The princesses cannot go without me; I cannot go without the King. And the King will never leave.” So the family stayed at Buckingham Palace, where Elizabeth would employ her revolver for target practice in the gardens. But the couple truly became Londoners when Buckingham Palace itself was hit by a Luftwaffe bomb. The King had entreated his subjects in Britain and the Commonwealth to “stand calm, firm and united in this time of trial”. The Royal couple took their own advice, staying in a London where thousands were to be killed by enemy bombs. The Queen went even further than her King, saying she was “glad we’ve been bombed. It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face”. It was no surprise that the King and Queen were warmly received on their subsequent visits east of Aldgate.
Peace and tragedy
Having endured a World War for the second time in their lives, the Royal pair must have been hoping for a long and happy peace, but it was not to be. In 1952 the King, a heavy smoker and in increasingly frail health, suffered a fatal stroke. Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip returned hurriedly from an African safari. For the new Queen’s mother it was a blow too far. She retreated into mourning, wearing black and withdrawing from public engagements for an entire year. It was uncannily similar to the reaction of her husband’s great-grandmother a century earlier, on the death of Prince Albert. But unlike Victoria, Elizabeth managed to pull herself out of the depression that had enveloped her. Winston Churchill, a trusted lieutenant from the war years, gently persuaded her that she could not live out her remaining years in mourning. The trademark pastel shades replaced widow’s weeds and the Queen Mother took up her public engagements once more.
Another role
Elizabeth had never wanted the spotlight that came with being Queen, but now she found it switched abruptly onto the new monarch, her own daughter. Over the following decades she carved out a new role for herself. Much of that centred on becoming a marriage broker for her adored grandchildren. That was to have mixed results of course, but she remained a much-loved confidante to her favourite grandchild, Prince Charles.

But it was probably for her lifestyle and sense of fun that the Queen Mother will be best remembered. Into the 1980s, and her own eighties, she could be seen up to her waders, fly-fishing in the rivers of her Scottish estate. Horse-racing became another passion from the 1950s onwards. A friend suggested she take up the sport as an amusing distraction, but she poured time, energy and money into the racing game. She became a successful breeder, producing more than 400 winners over the years. Her dream, of course, was to win the Grand National, and she was only robbed of the ultimate prize in steeplechasing by one of the most extraordinary finishes in the long history of the race. In 1956, Dick Francis was lengths clear on the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch. With victory certain, the horse collapsed just 50 yards short of the post. It was a climax even Francis – who later went on to become a hugely successful writer of racing novels – wouldn’t have dared to make up.

Even toward the end of her life, when hip operations and illnesses forced her to give up many of her outdoor pursuits, she still insisted on fulfilling public engagements – without a stick if she could manage it. And though fishing might have become impossible, she still insisted on visiting Scotland – travelling from her London residence, Clarence House, to the Castle of Mey in the north-east several times a year. There was grit and determination there certainly, there was also that wicked sense of humour she had displayed when pouring oil on the guests at Glamis as a young girl. Once, fed up with waiting for her gin and tonic at the Palace, the keen tippler rang in exasperation down to the kitchens to chivvy up her servants. Referring to the large numbers of gay staff in her entourage she quipped “When you old queens are done gossiping, this old queen would like a drink!”

And years before, visiting a Bethnal Green estate to judge the gardens and window box displays, she noticed a nervous young resident desperately trying to get a photo of the famous visitor. The Queen Mother looked at the lad and asked gently “Haven’t you taken it yet?” “No,” he replied “the sun is in the wrong place.” “Well,” she said “we cannot move the sun, so where would you like me to stand?”

On 2 September 1666, London ignited. Over the next few days gales blew without interruption. The resulting firestorm took 100 hours to destroy virtually every trace of a medieval city that had been 600 years in the making. Now, 335 years later, a new book presents the astonishing true story of one of the most famous, yet little understood events in history.

The Dreadful Judgement* is an historical detective story, combing through the ashes, combining modern knowledge of the physics of fire, forensics and arson investigation, with the moving accounts of East Enders and City dwellers who lived through the Great Fire – and many who did not.

The book casts fresh light on the shadowy background to the Fire, which came as London was in the horrific grip of the bubonic plague, and it advances a startling new theory about the origin of the conflagration. It also attacks the previously accepted idea that only a handful of lives were lost in the blaze. with the mass graves of

The first Bill of Mortality (the weekly record published by the City authorities

The great diarist Samuel Pepys was up at four in the morning, loading ‘all my money and plate and best things’, into a cart sent by him by his friend Lady Batten. He then put a fire-break of countryside safely between him and his destination – Sir William Rider’s house in Bethnal Green. He wasn’t alone, observing ‘Lord to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding and getting of carts to fetch away things.

* The Dreadful Judgement: the true story of the Great Fire of London, by Neil Hanson. Published by Doubleday, £16.99, ISBN 0385601344.

The East End has elected its members of parliament for another five years – and no great surprises in our choices perhaps. So it’s strange to think that 90 years ago, Tower Hamlets was seen as not just a hotbed of political discontent, but a threat to democracy itself. In the early years of the 20th century the press and Parliament were in a state of near panic about the anarchists of the East End.
Three events thrust them into the public eye. The first was the Tottenham Outrage. On 23 January 1909, two Latvian refugees from the East End attacked a messenger carrying the wages for a Tottenham rubber factory. In the course of the struggle shots were fired and overheard at the nearby police station. A police chase ensued, and they ran the criminals to earth after a six-mile pursuit in which two people were killed and 27 injured.
Then, on the evening of 16 December 1910, a Houndsditch resident heard hammering coming from the jewellers shop next door. A group of Eastern European émigrés (and anarchists) were in the process of tunnelling through a wall to the jeweller’s safe. Several unarmed constables responded. One, Bentley, was fatally shot as he entered the building. In an ensuing street battle, Constables Strongman, Choat and Tucker were killed by gunfire. Of the robbers, Gardstein was accidentally shot and mortally wounded.
Then, on New Year’s Day 1911, came The Sidney Street Siege. The police sealed off a building supposedly hiding the remainder of the Houndsditch gang. Home Secretary Winston Churchill personally directed operations, police marksman opened fire, the building went up in flames, and the charred bodies of two anarchists, Svaars and Joseph were pulled from the embers.
Those events of nearly a century ago took place against a backdrop of panic about the influence of foreign ‘troublemakers’ upon the East End. Churchill himself later described Peter the Painter (a semi-mythical figure possibly involved in the siege) as “one of those wild beasts who, in later years, amid the convulsions of the Great War, were to devour and ravage the Russian State and people”. In the popular mind, anarchists were now thieves and murderers of policemen – but there was much more to the story than that.

The revolutionary politicians of the left had been driven from Germany and Russia and sought refuge in the East End. On Whitechapel High Street, opposite the London Hospital, a hall played host to the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (which played a key role in the emergence of the Bolshevik Party in what was to become the USSR). Stalin, of course, came to the East End and stayed in a hostel in Fieldgate Street, and Litvinov and Trotsky visited too. With Lenin paying many visits to Whitechapel, all the key players of the Russian revolution had visited Tower Hamlets during the few years before the First World War.
And with the crowned heads of Europe falling one by one to popular revolutions over the preceding decades (and most of the rest to go by World War II) it was perhaps unsurprising that Churchill and the police saw activities in the East End as a threat.
Much official interest focused on the Anarchists Club in Jubilee Street. Efforts were made to tie on of the most prominent members, Errico Malatesta, in with the Houndsditch Murders. Malatesta was an Italian anarchist who had been arrested in his home country at just 14, in 1867, or writing a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II, complaining about a local injustice.
He found London a safe haven from persecution in Italy, but soon he was attracting attention from the British police too. In 1900, Victor Emmanuel’s successor, Umberto, was assassinated, and the police began watching Malatesta. By 1909, he was under arrest, along with famed East End anarchist Rudolf Rocker, on a charge of criminal libel. He narrowly escaped deportation, when supporters organized a protest in Trafalgar Square.
And in 1910, as the police searched the Houndsditch crime scene, they found a card bearing Malatesta’s name. It was a red herring. The investigation revealed that, several months earlier, one of the thieves had contacted the Anarchists Club, and been introduced to Malatesta. The Italian anarchist was found innocent.
Britain never did erupt in revolution or anarchy. The East End revolutionaries were to return to their own lands to overthrow the ruling classes … and no threat to Crown and Parliament was to emerge from Tower Hamlets.

We all know Whitechapel, home of the Blind Beggar, the London Hospital, and entrance to the East End as you emerge eastward from the City. But what was the ‘White Chapel’ and what became of it?
The present Whitechapel/Mile End/Bow Road has for centuries been the main highway out of London into Essex. About a mile beyond Aldgate, 13th century travellers out of the City would have come across the alba capella or White Chapel, standing just to the south of the main road.
Another name for the distinctively whitewashed church was the chapel of the Blessed Mary of Matfelon. There are a number of myths about the naming of the chapel – one that it refers to a ‘felon’, a sailor hanged for robbing a local widow. Another is that it refers to the knapweed (otherwise known as matfelon) that grew in the locale. Most likely is that the Matfelons, a local family, had a hand in the funding of the church.
By the middle of the 14th century, the area that had begun as an overspill from London was becoming a sizable community in its own right, and St Mary Matfelon was established as the parish church. The parish, meanwhile, had become known as Whitechapel – the glistening white of the building’s stone had made it a well-known landmark on the London-Essex road, and the name had stuck.
Sometime in the late 1300s the white chapel was replaced by a new church, 100ft long and 60ft wide, and as the parish grew in population, legacies from parishioners made it richer. In 1410, the rector, Roger Haldanby left £2 for the belfry. John Sonder left £4 8/- 6d in 1428, and Robert Mason left 3/- 4d (about 17 pence in today’s money) in 1437.

This new parish of Whitechapel was effectively a suburb of the City, an extension of the ward of Portsoken. But even if it was increasingly affluent, it was a higgledy-piggledy and unhygienic offshoot. The historian John Stow wrote in the late 1500s about what had become a filthy shanty town. The field by Whitechapel church, “being sometime the beauty of the city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages, and with other purpressors, inclosures and laystalls (notwithstanding all proclamations and Acts of Parliament made to the contrary) that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway”. So chaotic had the unregulated development of Whitechapel become, that people were building shops and homes that actually blocked the route out to Essex.
It’s probably inaccurate to describe Whitechapel at the time as London overspill. What was happening was that the increased size and affluence of the City was starting to draw immigrants like a magnet from Essex, Suffolk and beyond. People travelled to the capital in search of work and riches, and fetched up camping outside the City gates, where lodgings were cheap – if not pleasant. Stow had, in fact, recorded the first emergence of the East End slums, with subdivided properties and an endless inpouring of new souls to fill them. The pleasant Essex countryside “without” the City wall had gone forever.
But though the new population may have been poor and transient, they were devout. Parishioners left money for lights to be burned before the statues in the church. Individual fraternities, or associations of worshippers, also endowed tapers to be burned in the church – Blessed Trinity, St Luke, the guild of Corpus Christi and Our Lady, the guild of St Katharine and St Margaret were just some of the associations remembered in the church.
The church was rebuilt again in 1669, and again after excavations in 1874. But the church was destroyed for the last time by enemy bombs in the Second World War, and was never rebuilt. Now, all that remains of the white chapel is a name.