eastlondonhistory.com

Charles Booth famously expended a dozen years of his life, between 1891 and 1903 compiling his mammoth Life and Labour of the People of London - 17 volumes exhaustively documenting the jobs, habits, lives and deaths of the cockney working classes. But if it hadn’t have been for Henry Mayhew, a half century before, the epic work may never have been started.

For before Mayhew turned his pen to them, nobody had paid too much attention to the poor of London’s East End. And yet the man was no philanthropist, politician or philosopher, rather a popular journalist picking up on the spirit of the times. This was the 1840s, and Friedrich Engels was writing about the appalling conditions of the working classes in Manchester, that ‘the working class and the bourgeoisie are like two radically dissimilar nations’. Benjamin Disraeli had just published his novel ‘Sybil, or The Two Nations’, laying bare the shameful state in which working people lived.

London had mushroomed in size from under a million souls in 1801 to being the world’s most populous city, with 1.6m people in 1831. By 1851, it would number more than 2.4m as trade and industry pumped ever more money and manpower into the capital - with the East End and docks growing most of all. And yet most of it was uncharted territory, unplanned housing, the people with no fixed jobs and often no fixed abode. The vast mass of the workers were effectively invisible to those in Westminster. Mayhew sensed that there were stories to be told about the millions who made up the other of the ‘two nations’

Mayhew may have been an unlikely social chronicler: he was joint founder of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 with Mark Lemon and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Educated at Westminster School, he had worked as a lawyer in his father’s practice for three years, a stormy relationship that say Mayhew abandon the law for journalism in 1831. As well as writing he had an entrepreneurial streak, but he was a better wordsmith than businessman: Punch struggled to sell 6000 copies a week while 10,000 were needed to break even, and the title was sold in 1842. Severing his connections with ‘The London Charivari’ in 1845, Mayhew attempted to hop aboard the craze for railways with the launch of ‘Iron Times’. It lost so much cash that in 1846 he ended up in the Court of Bankruptcy.

His life took an unexpected turn in 1849, when an outbreak of cholera, a continual problem in Victorian London, killed a probable 13,000: the exact number was, of course, never known. Mayhew was still writing as a freelance for the Morning Chronicle (along with contemporaries Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill) and he wrote a piece on the outbreak. Mayhew saw the disease as one of poverty, centred as it was on the poorest and most crowded parts of the capital; it would be another five years before Dr John Snow would observe the common water pump in Soho’s Broad Street and make a further connection, that the disease was borne by dirty water.

Mayhew suggested to his editor, John Douglas Cook, that the paper should carry out an investigation into the state of the working classes in England. It would turn into a long-running and exhaustively researched project, fully feeding the Victorian reader’s obsession with detail, statistics and empirical ‘proof’. Cook assigned three reporters to help Mayhew: Angus Reach was sent off to the industrial towns of the north (he would die exhausted from overwork before he made 30), with Charles Mackay and Shirley Brooks.

Mayhew headed into the East End, where he interviewed milliners and millers, prostitutes and publicans, sawyers and smiths, tinkers and tailors … every conceivable profession in fact. The team produced an article every day for the rest of 1849 and most of 1850. It was a remarkable quantity of words, and the detail bordered on the obsessive. The minutiae on people’s religious and domestic practices, habits and working hours seems extraordinary to modern readers, with our myriad distractions and, perhaps, shorter attention spans, but it was meat and drink to the earnest and worthy Victorian readers, who loved facts and figures. And the Victorians, with long nights at home under the gaslight like to read. With no other media to distract them, these were Londoners who found light relief in the wordy tomes of Dickens and Walter Scott.

So we find out what the mudlarks who scoured the Thames foreshore were dredging up in the 1840s. Mayhew watches in horror as people draw drinking water from an open sewer ‘more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink’. He painstakingly asks interviewees their wages and their detailed outgoings (and logs the shortfall). He cross references censuses, police reports and his own researches, to work out how many street traders are operating per square mile. He works out the margins tea traders are making on their cheaply hawked goods … the detail is remarkable.

The unexpected bonus for modern historians, of course, is that Mayhew and his team piled up a huge amount of original source material, telling us exactly how East Enders lived a century and a half ago. Next week we’ll see what they discovered about our forebears.

Last week we saw how Henry Mayhew and his team of reporters set out to chart the lives of the labouring classes of England and Wales - but what exactly did the inexhaustible founder of Punch discover when he ventured east of Aldgate?

An example of Mayhew’s staggering attention to detail, almost comical to modern eyes, is his attempt to quantify the excessive drinking habits of the various East End trades. In ‘The curiosities of drunkenness’ (one of the dozens of pieces that would appear during 1849 and 1850), Mayhew interviewed the coal whippers and coal backers employed in the Pool of London - the men who did the backbreaking job of hauling the coal out of the holds of ships. One of the men tells Mayhew that it ‘was an absolute necessity that the men … though earning only a pound a week, spend at least 12 shillings (60p) on beer and spirits to stimulate them in their work’.

In classic style, Mayhew sets out to test this thesis, interviewing men who drink, men who had signed the pledge ‘and kept it without any serious injury to their constitutions’ and those who had signed the pledge ‘but had been induced to violate their vow in consequence of injury to their health’. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that large quantities of water might be a better option than booze, but at least alcohol didn’t give you cholera and to Victorian East Enders beer was about as safe as liquid got. Mayhew prevents us with a magnificent table of those professions that are above the average for drunkenness (button makers top this, for some reason, with one in every 7.2 of them being a drunk). Toolmakers, surveyors, paper makers and brass founders come in close behind. Among the most sober professions are clergymen, grocers, book-binders and artificial flower makers.

Thomas Heath, a weaver of 8 Pedley Street, Spitalfields, gives Mayhew a detailed account of his earnings. ‘The sum of the gross earnings for 430 weeks is £322 3s. 4d., being about 15s. a week. He estimates his weaving expenses at 4s., 11s. net wages. He states his wife’s earnings at about 3s. a week. He gives the following remarkable evidence:

“Have you any children?” [asks Mayhew].

“No. I had two, but they are both dead, thanks to be God … I am relieved from the burden of maintaining them, and they, poor dear creatures, are relieved from the troubles of the mortal life.”‘

A woman is forced into prostitution to make ends meet. ‘I used to work at the shirt work - the fine full-fronted white shirts; I got 2d. each for them. There were six button-holes, four rows of stitching in the front, and the collars and wristbands stitched as well. By working from five o’clock in the morning till midnight each night I might be able to do seven in the week. Out of this the cotton must be taken and that came to 2d. every week. I had a child, and it used to cry for food.

‘So, as I could not get a living for him myself by the needle, I went into the streets and made out a living that way. I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labour that drove me to prostitution.’

As Mayhew says in a speech to a meeting of London tailors in October 1850: ‘Morality on £5,000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.’

Those who weren’t forced to sell themselves scraped what they could where they could. Tea traders adulterate their product with used leaves, grass and dirt; ‘pure finders’ gather dog faeces to sell to tanners; and of course the mudlarks and toshers dredge anything of value from the riverbanks and sewers.

The journalism of Mayhew and his team became hugely influential, gathered together in book form as London Labour and the London Poor, in three volumes in 1851, then a fourth ten years later. Christian Socialists such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and FD Maurice seized on the work, as did Radicals and Republicans (a growing worry for the Government of Victorian Britain). And that other great chronicler of the East End, Charles Dickens, drew on his colleague’s work for inspiration. Henry Mayhew died in 1887.

London Labour and the London Poor: Selection
by Henry Mayhew, published by Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 0140432418

Like other East End politicians, the convictions of John Benn weren’t just forged by observing the poverty and suffering of others, they came from bitter personal experience.

In the 1860s, Will Crooks had been forced into the Poplar workhouse with his siblings. In the early 1900s, George Lansbury would return from a failed emigration to Australia, angered by the falsely rosy picture of what lay there for Britons seeking to improve themselves. He poured his disappointement into political activism. And back in the 1850s, John Benn had seen his father Julius removed from his job because of debts from failed investments. There were other curious parallels: both men would found dynasties that encompassed both socialist politics and Hollywood. The Benn story was more remarkable yet - including a bloody murder that lay concealed for a century.

John was born in Manchester in 1850, the son of Julius and Ann. His parents soon moved to run the London City Mission in Stepney, and then opened the Home in the East, a school for homeless boys in the East End. This refuge, a converted rope factory nicknamed “The Star in the East”, makes an appearance in Sketches by Boz.

The institution was such a success that the Government invited Julius to head up the first Reformatory and Industrial School in Britain at Tiffield in Northamptonshire. Success again, but Julius’s attempts to supplement the meagre family income of around £100 a year (and with eight children to support) ended in disaster. He invested in an agricultural equipment supplier, which went bust taking the family’s money with it. Julius, heavily in debt, was forced to resign.

Returning to the East End, he became a missionary with the East London Congregational Evangelistic Association, saved hard, and paid back the debt - it took him 17 years to do so. Public service and self-help were equally important in the Benn household and John, who received his schooling at home from his parents, was expected to help with the finances. He set up a stamp business and by 14 he had posted a profit of £80.

By 17 he was working for wholesale furniture company T Lawes & Co, first as a clerk and then as a designer. At 23 he had married Lily Pickstone, a distant relative of the Wedgewood pottery clan, and was earning £300 a year as a designer and manager of the company. John and Lily had a large family, the start of a clan at the heart of British politics to this day.

John had the touch for business that had eluded his father. He returned from a visit to the 1878 Art and Industrial Exhibition in Paris having penned an article on the show, and sent it to The Furniture Gazette. Stung by their refusal to publish it, he put £800 of his life savings into starting The Cabinet Maker. Launched in July 1880 the magazine grew to become the main journal for Britain’s furniture trade (it’s still going strong), and established the company of Benn Brothers in the process.

But tragedy was to strike the family. John’s brother William married Florence Nicholson in December 1882, but before his honeymoon was over he was warning his family that he feared for his sanity. He arranged for several weeks leave from his job as a shipping clerk, but in January suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to Bethnall House (a private asylum in Cambridge Heath Road). The superintendent, Dr John Millar, was a leading light in the Employment and Relief Association, a charity with close connections to East End churches. He advocated rest cures rather than confinement and, crucially, was very discreet. But Millar’s approach was to lead to disaster.

After six weeks, William was released back into the care of Julius - now pastor of the Gravel Lane Congregational Meeting House in Wapping. Julius took his son for a vacation to Matlock Bridge in Derbyshire. Matlock was ‘the Switzerland of England, with healing waters and thermal baths, a haven for convalescents. On the Sunday of their stay, the Benns failed to emerge from their suite of rooms at George Marchant’s boarding house. Pushing open the door at noon, he found William in a blood-soaked nightshirt, blood spattering the floor, ceiling and walls, and the sheets soaked with blood. Julius lay dead on the bed, his head broken by a single vicious blow from the enamel chamber pot. The dazed William had attempted to slit his own throat with a tortoise-shell penknife, a wound which local GP William Moxon stitched, before allowing Police Constable Smith to charge him with murder.

In the weeks leading up to the inquest William was under suicide watch - on one occasion flinging himself 17 feet from the window of Derby Infirmary (his police guard was temporarily distracted by pulling on his boots), but only broke an ankle. John Benn headed the family group at the inquest, defending William against accusations of religious mania from newspapers excited by the Benns Noncomformist religious background: ‘His brothers explicitly repudiate the notion that he was actuated by any of that excitable religious fervour which characterises the Salvation Army,” reported the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal.

William was, however, unarguably insane. At his committal he insisted on addressing the magistrate as ‘Pontius Pilate’ and was sent to Broadmoor, where he would remain for nine years.

Meanwhile, brother John was devoting himself in equal measure to business and charity work in the East End. His son, William Wedgewood Benn (his middle name a nod to his mother’s ancestors) remembered walking to chapel and seeing a man with a placard reading ‘I have suffered a great injustice’. John commented ‘Will, I have suffered many injustices … let’s give him a couple of shillings.’ It made a deep impact on his son. And John was increasingly becoming involved in politics, accepting the Progressive Party candidacy for East Finchley for the inaugural London County Council in 1889. Sons Ernest and William, though just 14 and 12, helped run his campaign.

The Progressives (formed by a grouping of Liberals and Trade Unionists) swept 70 of the 118 seats, their number including such future Labour figures as Sidney Webb and Will Crooks. The same year Benn became involved in the London Dock Strike, hosting meetings at his home. The successful paralysis of the East End docks would lay the foundations for mass trade unionism in Britain.

In 1891, Benn was adopted as Liberal candidate for Wapping. That same year, he was told his brother had recovered from his mental illness; John approached the Home Secretary and asked that William be released into his care. William joined his wife in Balham - she had written to him every day, and twice on Sundays, during his incarceration. He changed the family name to Rutherford and the following year the couple had their only child, Margaret, who years later would become one of Britain’s best-loved actresses.

The dynasty continues

John Benn won Wapping in the 1892 General Election. He now handed over running of the family firm to son Ernest and devoted himself to public transport - with a particular interest in developing an efficient tram system for London. But the 1895 Election saw him lose his seat to the Conservative, Harry Marks, by a mere four votes. Benn argued that Marks had bribed, cheated and bought the seat. He brought the case to court, lost and had to pay legal costs of £6000. He was also banned from standing for Wapping for seven years. Still on the LCC, he threw his energies into public transport, and in 1903 London’s first electric trams were introduced.

In 1904 He returned as MP for Devonport and in 1906 was joined by his son William. Elected for his father’s old seat of Wapping the 28-year-old William Wedgewood Benn was ‘Baby of the House’, the youngest member in the Commons. William was already grounded in politics and dissent. As President of Union Debating Society at University College London he had argued furiously against Britain’s involvement in the Boer War - and been hurled out of a window by angry students. In Parliament he accused a Conservative, Percy Simmons, who voted against the 1906 School Meals Act, of being ‘against the feeding of children’. Simmons sued for libel and won £5000. Father John managed to pay off the debt.

William also maintained his support of the trade union movement, upsetting fellow ministers - by now he was Junior Lord of the Treasury - when he helped raise funds for the 1912 London Dockers Strike. When war was declared in 1914, Lllyd George put him in charge of the National Relief Fund. With the help of the Fleet Street papers he raised over £1m in ten days. War service was another thread that ran through the family. Resigning his seat William joined up, training as a pilot and winning the DFC, the Croix de Guerre and the Italian Military Cross. And although 62 at the outbreak of World War II, Benn signed up again, as a pilot officer, flying operational missions for the RAF. Now he was joined by two of his sons Tony and Michael, both pilots, though Michael was to be killed, tragically young, in a flying accident.

He was still a politician, by now switched to the Labour Party in protest at Lloyd George’s leadership of the Liberals. Son Tony joined him there in 1950, succeeding Stafford Cripps as MP for Bristol South East. At 26 he was, like his father before, ‘Baby of the House’ and with soft left views that owed much to the families Liberal and Noncomformist history. In later years he would move firmly to the left (though would justifiably argue that the Labour leadership had moved much to the right).

William died in 1960, leaving Tony an unwelcome legacy. He inherited the title Viscount Stansgate (which had been intended for brother Michael, who was to have become a clergyman and sat in the Lords). The family plan was that Michael could argue for the family from the Lords and Tony from the Commons, but in an unexpected twist, the younger brother was now barred from entering the Lower House. He even fought the by-election caused by his elevation … and the voters of Bristol re-elected him, though he had to give the seat to runner-up Malcolm St Clair. Three years later he would finally win his fight to renounce the peerage, and St Clair sportingly took the Chiltern Hundreds, triggering a further by-election, which he won.

A Benn was back in Parliament and Anthony Wedgewood Benn served with honour and controversy in equal measure, under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and finally as a backbencher under Tony Blair. Often at odds with the leadership and his fellow ministers, Benn oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, the launch of Commemorative stamps, the Concorde project and took charge of Britain’s energy policy. He became an outspoken critic of British war policy, most recently as a member of the Stop the War Coalition. ‘All war is a failure of democracy’ is one of his quotes. He is, unsurprisingly, no fan of Tony Blair; his retirement in 2001 from Parliament, as Labour’s longest-serving MP, allowed him to ‘devote more time to politics’. His son Hilary had followed him into politics as the fourth generation of Benn MPs and now serves as Secretary of State for International Development.

Amidst it all, the family had been a source of strength for the Benns. The sprawling, activist, teetotal and tea-drinking Benn clan had always found great strength in the home, but in 1983 the Benns had a nasty shock. A lurid book by Margaret Rutherford’s son-in-law had splashed the story of the murder of Julius Benn, a hundred years before.

‘It was all over the News of the World.’ Benn recalls. ‘They’d hired someone to investigate my ancestry, and identified my connection with Peggy Rutherford and Julius Benn. I was worried that it would be politically embarrassing, but the only person who ever referred to it was a cab driver who said, “sorry to hear about your uncle’, as if it had happened last week.”

The closure of St Clement’s Hospital in Bow Road - with a move to a new purpose-built complex at the Mile End Hospital in Bancroft Road is one of the final (and long overdue) breaks with the asylums of Victorian times. The new centre, with its quiet areas, lounges, landscaped garden and family visiting rooms could hardly be in greater contrast to the dread hospitals of a century and a half ago. In those days, the line between mental hospital, workhouse and prison was blurred at best - and that can be seen in the genesis of St Clement’s.

The original buildings of the St Clement’s Hospital were raised in 1848-49 as a workhouse, for the Board of Guardians of the City of London Union. The workhouses, the first of which opened in the 17th century with the last not closing its doors unitl the early 1930s (the workhouse system was abolished in 1929), were the last safety net for the poor. Designed to be as unpleasant as possible (there was a fear among the powers that be that any raising of the minimum standard would see the working classes giving up on work and opting for ‘poor relief’ instead) they were loathed and feared by the ordinary people. Oliver Twist may have given a highly coloured picture of the workhouse, but maltreatment was not uncommon - and of course entering the workhouse meant the family was split up.

Extraordinary then that a workhouse should have been thought suitable for transformation into a psychiatric hospital - but then the care of those suffering mental illness was a very different thing in Victorian London. The world’s first psychiatric hospital was in the East End of course, the Bethlem Royal Hospital was established in 1330 on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station. Restraint rather than cure was the order of the day and progress was slow. Nobody really knew what mental illness was. The afflicted were called ‘lunatics’ from a primitive belief that their maladies were caused by the cycles of the moon (from which the werewolf legends also descend of course), and there was a not so fine line between mental illness and demonic possession in the minds of many. and things hadn’t moved on much by the 1800s, though by 1700 the ‘lunatics’ were at least being called patients.

From 1725, Bethlem apparently accepted that some patients could be helped, opening a ‘curable’ ward which - more ominously - was followed by an ‘incurable’ ward. But what was wrong with these unfortunates? Morality and sanity were confusingly conjoined, with ‘moral insanity’ being a common diagnosis. Deviation from the sexual mores of the time was a common reason for committal - some of the patients at St Clement’s might have done nothing more than have a baby out of wedlock and failing to conceal the fact.

And not for nothing did Bethlem become corrupted to ‘Bedlam’. Well into the 19th century visitors could pay a penny to watch the peep show - the sane Londoners amusing themselves by observing the very perversions and aberrant behaviour for which they’d locked up the unfortunate lunatics. Antics of a sexual nature were particularly popular of course, and during 1814 there were 90,000 such visits to Bethlem. In our more civilised times we take our voyeuristic pleasures at one remove … William Hogarth (currently showcased at Tate Britain) in his celebrated panel piece ‘A Rake’s Progress’ shows his dissipated hero finally ending up in the Bethlem asylum.

When St Clement’s opened in 1848, Bethlem had been recently demolisehd and moved to Lambeth (in what is now the Imperial War Museum). The sexes were now separated (the censorious Victorians were more wary of sexual freakshows) but the regime was still brutally harsh, with many being punished for their sexual incontinence. The workhouse was converted into an infirmary for the City of London Union [workhouse] in 1874, and in 1912 was reopened as the Bow Institution for the chronic sick.

Workhouses went in the early thirties and the hospital, renamed St Clement’s in 1936 became an exclusively psychiatic unit. It survived major bomb damage in 1944, and became part of the London Hospital in 1968. The treatment of mental illness has moved on and the site of St Clement’s is to be used (probably) for social housing.

Life wasn’t easy in the seventeenth century East End of London. ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ may be a cliche but it accurately described existence in the Tower Hamlets of the 1800s and after. Infant mortality, arcane illnesses, early death and the risk of ending your life at the end of a rope were just some of the hazards.

The ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by the various parishes, were begun in the early 1600s. In this era of continual epidemics, they were intended as an early warning system, the local clerks logging where and when each death had occurred and posting the results on a weekly basis. One wonders what effective action a casual worker in Wapping, living from day to day just above the poverty line, could have taken to escape the cholera in his parish in any case. But what it does do is provide a fascinating picture of what ailed and killed those East Enders of a couple of centuries back.

The information is fine up to a point. The problem was that the people listing the information were not doctors but parish clerks, whose ‘diagnosis’ of what had seen the unfortunates off was vague at best. Certainly, the greatest number of deceased were simply ‘aged’ (though ‘age’ not being an illness nobody actually dies of it). Likewise, ‘bedridden’ and ‘lethargy’ are barely adequate as symptoms let alone diagnoses.

Medical science was far more primitive than today of course, and some illnesses cover a multitude of ailments today. ‘Ague’ for instance, was a condition of alternating hot and cold sweats with fever: sounding very much like modern-day malaria. ‘Quinsy’ was simply an infection caused by untreated tonsilitis, while ‘apoplexy’ (still used metaphorically today) would nowadays be diagnosed as a stroke. ‘Dropsy’ meanwhile, referred to a collection of lymphatic fluid (the modern-day oedema).

And some of the diseases had spectacular titles. St Anthony’s Fire would later be known as Ergotism and was a spectacularly nasty disease caused by fungal contamination of the grains used in baking. Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhoea, paralysis, itching, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hallucinations similar to those of an LSD trip … followed of course by death. In earlier times, the illness might even have been seen as evidence of demonic possession. ‘Rising of the Lights’ would be a disease of the lungs, with ‘Headmouldshot’ a catch-all for illnesses of the brain, such as encephalitis or meningitis.

Entertaining to read (though certainly not to suffer) are entries over the years that include bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s disease, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck. The latter again emphasises the persisting belief that Man’s moods and even sanity were at the mercy of the planets (moon struck would be a variation).

Sad too to see how mundane were many of the illnesses that saw people off. Until recently we’ve complacently thought of measles and chicken pox as childhood diseases to be overcome with a few days off school. But then (as in many parts of the world today) they were real killers. Colds would see off many (especially the young and old of course). The London of the 1700s was not a city of old people, and many of the young didn’t reach maturity. In the 1700s, around 150 or every thousand infants born failed to reach a year old - and things had barely improved a century later. The table below shows just how many mothers died in childbirth too.

LONDON BILL OF MORTALITY 1775
Natural deaths
Abortive and stillborn 529
Aged 1297
Ague 5
Apoplexy, suddenly & planet struck 215
Asthma & tissick 286
Bedridden 6
Bleeding 9
Blood flux 3
Bursten & rupture 9
Cancer 54
Canker 9
Childbed 188
Chicken pox 1
Cold 18
Colick & Twisted gut 70
Consumption 4452
Convulsions 5177
Cough, chin & whooping 206
Diabetes 2
Dropsie 865
Evil 11
Falling sickness 1
Fever, scarlet, purple spotted 2244
Fistula 9
Flux 9
French pox 71
Gout 69
Gravel, stones 36
Grief 3
Griping in the guts 1
Horseshoe head, head made hot, water on the head 19
Headache 2
Jaundice 120
Impostume 11
Inflammation 114
Itch 1
Leprosie 1
Lethargy 6
Livergrown 2
Lunatick 52
Measles 283
Miscarriage 4
Mortification 169
Palsie 65
Quinsie 4
Rash 1
Rheumatism 6
Rickets 1
Rising of the lights 1
Scald head 4
Sciatica 1
Scurvy 2
Sore throat 4
Smallpox 2699
Sores & ulcers 9
St Anthony’s fire 2
Stoppage in the stomach 10
Surfeit 1
Swelling 1
Teeth 694
Thrush 77
Tympany 1
Vapours 1
Vomiting & looseness 5
Worms 1

Non-natural causes
Bite - mad dog 2
Broken limbs -
Bruised 1
Burnt 8
Choked 1
Drowned 104
Excessive drinking 2
Executed 24
Fools etc 64
Found dead 2
Frighted 1
Frozen 1
Murdered 3
Overlaid 4
Poisoned 1
Scalded 1
Shot 1
Smothered 1
Stabbed 1
Starved 2
Suffocated 4
Suicide 29

Last week we saw how East Enders of preceding centuries were beset by illness. Cholera and typhoid and the rest were the diseases of the overcrowded city, and they had a dramatic impact on life expectancy. The census of 1851 recorded half of Britain’s population as living in towns (the first time ever, anywhere on the planet). Death from sickness was now at a level not seen since the Black Death in the 14th century, and things had been getting steadily worse. A child born in London in 1820 could expect to live to 35. by the 1830s, life expectancy had fallen to 29. To give a comparison: a man born in 1960 could expect to live to around 68. If he’s still around today, he can expect to get past 80.

The pattern, since the late 17th century, meant that although London was becoming biggest and most populous city on the planet (overtaking Paris), it also had a population shortage. After steady growth during the 1600s, numbers had topped half a million by 1700, and reached a million by 1800. Numbers doubled again by the time of that 1851 census. London would look strange to us now, with few old people (though a less healthy populace would undoubtedly appear older) and with relatively few children. Infant mortality was over 50 per cent, and in any case people weren’t having many children.

In the late 1600s, people were marrying late for one thing - Londoners struggling to survive financially were perhaps less likely to want the additional financial burden of children, or perhaps even to survive long enough to bear them. Illegitimacy was a stigma, so there were relatively few children born outside wedlock. The London population was barely even replacing its numbers.

As ever with London, this huge growth was largely fuelled by immigration, mostly from a good distance. Certain districts of London were predominantly Scottish, Irish or Yorkshire. And Spitalfields was fast filling with Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in mainland Europe. As fertility and reproduction declined, so the numbers rose - there was lots of work but not enough new Londoners to do it. As the 1700s wore on, so immigration increased from around the capital. The rise of extensive farming (fewer people needed to farm larger estates) meant many were forced from the land of the home counties, and fetched up in the ever-growing conurbation east of Aldgate. By one estimate, around a sixth of England’s population had lived in London at one time.

By the early 1700s there were Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazim from Poland and Germany settled in Whitechapel and Petticoat Lane, while the Irish were creating ‘Little Dublin’ in St Giles in the Fields. The end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the American War in 1781 saw black immigrants from Africa, America and the Caribbean settle in numbers in London. By 1800 there were probably between 5000 and 10,000 black people in London.

And social patterns changed. From the 1730s onwards, the marriage age began to fall (to below 25) and illegitimacy increased too. Of course infant mortality accounted still for around half of all births. And still, the London population couldn’t replenish itself ‘organically’ - still immigrants poured in. By 1841, less than two thirds of Londoners had actually been born here. French, Poles, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews and Blacks were all common sights on London streets. London grew rich on trade (for the lucky few at least). For the rest, pouring in from Essex and beyond, there were always jobs in service, on the docks or in the burgeoning ‘manufactories’.

And by the 19th century there had been another interesting turn. Infant mortality was dropping. There were more children about just as life expectancy was plummeting to below 30. The result, was more orphans, and more of street children seeking any way to survive that they could. In rising panic, the toffs of the West End identified the young urchins, pickpockets and cutpurses who made traversing the streets of the City such a risk. The records of the Central Criminal Court of the time identify two thirds of defendants in trials as being between 14 and 30. Not too much of a leap from here perhaps to the ‘thieves’ kitchens’ that journalist Charles Dickens observed on his journeys through the East End of London - the characters redrawn as The Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes and the rest.

London’s Chinatown today occupies a prime position in the West End, around Shaftesbury Avenue, Lisle Street and Gerrard Street. Brushing aside the occasional lurid restaurants about triads and gambling, most Londoners will have visited at some point, to enjoy the restaurants or New Year celebrations.

But the old Chinatown, which existed until the early 1930s in Limehouse, was a far scarier proposition for Londoners - whether for good reasons or simply because the press of the time were less cautious about sensational and racist headlines.

By the time the Sunday People started a series of pieces on May Flack, the ‘White Woman Ruler of Chinatown’ on 17 April 1932, the area’s heyday was over. Nonetheless, the readers of the Sunday tabloid thrilled to a weekly diet of how May had, for 21 years, been ‘the uncrowned queen’ of the quarter. ‘May Flack has stopped knife fights and revolver battles and lives to tell the tale’, boasted the paper.

Limehouse had always had immigration. As a port and centre of boatbuilding since medieval times, one of London’s oldest ‘villages’ built up a ‘Lascar’ population. This was a catch-all term for Asian sailors who, having working a passage to London, were often paid off (and marooned) when they got to Limehouse. Many stayed, but Chinatown really became established around the 1860s. By 1890, there were two distinct communities in the East End. Shanghai Chinese were settled round Pennyfields, Amony Place and Ming Street (between the present Westferry and Poplar DLR stations). And Chinese from southern China and Canton lived around Gill Street and Limehouse Causeway. By 1911, the whole area had been dubbed Chinatown.

From Victorian times, the East End had been feared as a place of poverty and depravity by the rest of London, and Chinatown was thrown into the mix, with lurid tales of opium dens, white slaving and reckless gambling. Sherlock Holmes discovered rich young white men slumming it here; Oscar Wilde evidenced the corruption of Dorian Gray by showing him in a Limehouse opium house; DW Griffith researched his movie Broken Blossoms here; most famously, Sax Rohmer invented Fu-Manchu “the yellow peril incarnate in one man”. The newspapers lapped it up, running stories of the ‘Yellow Peril’: and Rohmer had first visited Limehouse as a reporter, researching such a piece for the Daily Sketch.

The truth of course was rather different. Novelist Arnold Bennet visited Limehouse in April 1925 and saw: “On the whole a rather flat night. Still we saw the facts. We saw no vice whatever. The Inspector of Police gave the Chinese an exceedingly good character.” This was, in fact, a settled, segregated and quite small community. There were Chinese sailors serving in both Merchant and Royal Navies, and a good deal of intermarriage with English women.

The People’s reporter had a long talk with Mrs Flack, who had come to the area from Worcester 21 years before. “To her door come Chinese, Lascars, Germans, Scandinavians and other stray nationals washed up on the dock areas by itinerant shipping from the seven seas … May never fails them.’ May’s tale of disarming fighting men (sometimes literally) and facing down angry mobs, certainly makes stirring reading: the reporter acutely describes her tale as “like a page from a romantic novel”.

Rather disappointingly for The People, amidst all the tales of pitched battles and blood feuds, May admits that “opium smoking and heavy gambling have more or less been stamped out in Limehouse. The law has got a hold on Chinatown at last”. Her words conceal a darker truth. Chinatown had been targeted for years. The Chinese population peaked just after World War I at around 3000. In November 1918, actor Billie Carleton was found dead in her bed, possibly from an overdose of cocaine, possibly purchased in Chinatown.

There were calls in Parliament for the deporting of all Chinese; the Pictorial News wrote again of ‘the yellow peril’. There were anti-Chinese riots in Limehouse in 1919, but it was the Chinese who felt the full force of the court system: possession of opium now earned a sentence of hard labour; some men were deported for gambling on the popular game of puck-apu. And just two years after May Flack revelations, the local council would take a brutally radical approach to the ‘problem’ of Limehouse.

‘In a small house at the bottom end of that windswept street in London’s Chinatown, known as Pennyfields, you may find a woman with an incredibly white face, eyes which have taken on something of Oriental stolidness, and lips which are accustomed to tactful silence.’

So began the Sunday People’s serialisation of the memoirs of May Flack in 1932, ‘a Worcestershire woman who, after 21 years in Limehouse, has become the uncrowned queen of that romantic district.’ As a boarding house landlady from the early years of the century, May saw at first hand the changes in Chinatown.

And despite an initial sprinkling of spice - in her early years in Limehouse ‘opium smoking, gambling and White Slave Trafficking were rampant here’ she reports - she gives a resolutely fair account of a people she came to treat as friends. Dismissing the ‘yellow peril’ stories, May is rather more scathing about the English toffs who come down to Limehouse for a thrill. The white slave trafficking is almost certainly nonsense, though a popular fantasy of the time, and there is certainly no evidence of it from the rest of her tale. One wonders whether it was more an excitable reporter or sub-editor giving the People what it wanted.

Amidst the tales of her disarming knife-wielding Tong members and pitched street battles, men ’scrambling over roofs and rfiring revolvers from behind the chimeyes, others engaged in a running knife fight in the street’ May identifies the point at which Chinatown started to die. Having a foot in both communities allowed her to see how the community was being slowly squeezed. ‘Young English girls married to Chinese sailars brought their troubles to me. The greatest agony was in the days after the Opium Laws of 1914. Chinese seamen were dported by the dozen, leaving wives and children.’

And yet all the while Chinese were being deported for opium (even for gambling), many tourists from the West End were using Limehouse as a playground. One of the most famous casualties was actress Billie Carleton who ‘went to Limehouse a mere curiosity monger. Her insatiable curiosity led her to try “just one shot of cocaine” … After cocaine she learned to smoke opium … Could anything be more tragic? Here was a young and beautiful girl, earning £20 a week as the leading lady of a West End revue, a promising career before her.’ May takes it upon herself to steer sensation seekers away from the opium dens of Limehouse, returning one young society beauty to her grateful parents. ‘I found her in a hovel … I shall never forget the picture. Pale as death, one arm haning limp and motionless. Her fair hair haung loose about her shoulders. One glance and I knew she was drugged’. Frustratingly May ‘cannot reveal her identity … a few years ago the girl make a fine marriage to a well-known sporting personality’.

May helps the Chinese in trouble too. Though not always with such happy endings. Ching Loo San is being pursued by a rival Tong. Opening his house in Birchfield Street for gambling he has been accused of stealing business from another man. He flees to China, but is never seen again. His English wife simply receives his pigtail in the post - telling her that he has been killed. The closest we get to ‘white slaving’ is the story of Ah Ling Jee, the ‘Red Dragon of Chinatown’ who has three English girls working as his servants and messengers. ‘The day would assuredly have come when he would have demanded more of them than the mere carrying of messages’. One of the most romantic stories is of the arrival of three priests from Fuchow, ‘bearded, dignified figures in skull caps and loung ecapes of gorgeious golden hue … across the distant seas they had come, in search of the sacred Token of Serpent’. The local man who has stolen this scrap of cloth from their temple is terrified - they have crossed the planet to track Ah Tsin down. He hands the token to May for safe-keeping, flees and is never seen again.

Today of course, Limehouse is much changed, with a busy trunk road carving a swathe through what was Chinatown. Pennyfields and the Limehouse Causeway are still there of course, though much changed. Gazing down from the Sunday People’s modern offices, on the 23rd floor of 1 Canada Square, you can just pick the streets out on the other side of the Limehouse Link.

He was one of British TV’s most recognisable faces, an East Ender playing Londoners in a series of gritty roles … and the occasional comedy. A gravelly voice and rugged looks would always secure George Sewell a safe living playing cops and heavies, though as is so often the case with solid character players, he was a much better actor than many gave him credit for. With his death on 2 April aged 82 ends a prolific career - because Sewell was acting right to the end.

Like so many actors, Sewell didn’t take the drama school route, but stumbled into the profession. He was 35 before a chance meeting with a group of actors in a West End pub propelled him to the stage.

Sewell was born in 1924 in Hoxton: his dad was a printer, his mum and her family flower sellers. Although George had a boxer’s looks it was his brother Danny who went into the ring. George meanwhile left school at 14 and became a printer’s apprentice. World War II and a shortage of paper put paid to that. He moved onto building work - there was plenty going, repairing houses damaged by enemy bombs. Towards the end of the war he joined the RAF, trained as a pilot, though was demobbed before he saw any action.

Now followed a bewildering array of jobs in post-War Britain: from street photographer to drummer and road manager of a rumba band. He joined the merchant navy and became a steward on a Cunard cruise ship. Back in Britain he became a coach courier for a holiday tour company, using the German and French he had acquired on his travels. At one point he was helping manage a French roller-skating troupe. By 1959, when he wandered into that West End pub, George was ripe for a career change.

Among the well-refreshed troupe was Dudley Sutton (best known to many of us as Tinker Dill from the Lovejoy series). Sutton pushed Sewell to audition for a part with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, at that point attracting all sorts of untried talent to the stage of the Theatre Royal Stratford East. Littlewood would quite deliberately cast actors against type: she once selected 17-year-old Howard Goorney (another Theatre Workshop member who died recently), as the Old Shepherd, ‘the oldest man who ever lived’, in a production of Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweyk. As it was Howard’s first acting job, this must have been quite an intimidating role. George Sewell, however, she cast as a policeman, a part he was to play time and again over the years. George became a mainstay of the Theatre Workshop around the turn of the sixties, appearing in Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be and then as bus driver Bert (living with Barbara Windsor’s Maggie) in Sparrers Can’t Sing, and going on to appear in the movie. Other Theatre Workshop productions took him on his travels again - this time to Paris and Broadway.

Sewell became a fixture on British TV. His work included Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), The Power Game, Z-Cars, Man in a Suitcase, Softly Softly, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Paul Temple, Minder and - most recently - Doctors and Heartbeat. Movies included This Sporting Life, Get Carter and Barry Lyndon. The list, as they say, is endless. Completists should go to www.imdb.com and tap in ‘george sewell’ to see the CV of a man who never stopped working. Brother Danny had by now quit the ring and followed George into acting.

During the early seventies he seemed to never be off the small screen, with major roles in UFO (as Colonel Alec Freeman) and in Special Branch (as DCI Alan Craven). His skill at playing such authority figures was only matched by his adroitness at playing heavies - in a standout cast in Mike Hodges’ 1971 classic Get Carter, Sewell manages to shine convincingly as a cockney enforcer sent to Newcastle to fetch Michael Caine’s Carter back to the Smoke. The skill of his performances lies in the fact that Sewell manages to convey menace while rarely lifting an eyebrow, let alone throwing a punch. It was a skill he surprisingly, yet effectively transferred to comedy. Playing the straight man to hapless lead characters such as Rigsby in Rising Damp and Frank Spencer in Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em, and later in the Jim Davidson vehicle Home James, he managed to suggest a powerful yet contained presence who might, if pushed, get nasty.

Of course, the real-life Sewell was a far gentler proposition: survived by wife Helen and daughter Elizabeth, he was a doting grandparent, dividing his time between London and his house in the south of France, a country he had fallen in love with all those years before.

George Sewell born 31 August 1924, died 2 April 2007.

The new Mediatheque at the BFI Southbank (formerly the National Film Theatre) is bringing hundreds of long-forgotten movies and documentaries to visitors, in easy-to-access digital format. Liberated from their dusty vaults, there are real gems here for lovers of London: one of three strands in the first release, of 300 hours of film, is ‘London Calling’.

One absolute gem comes from Lindsay Anderson. He became a maker of feature films during the sixties and seventies, with ‘This Sporting Life’, ‘If’ and the dystopian ‘Britannia Hospital’, but he was a documentary maker first. In the fifties he was producing the kind of short movies you just don’t see anymore. No talking heads, precious little talking in fact - the camera was simply allowed to observe Britain. As part of the ‘Look at Britain’ series, Anderston shot the 40-minute ‘Every Day Except Christmas’ over four weeks in 1956, a beautifully paced black-and-white movie depicting 12 hours in the life of the stallholders and customers of Covent Garden Market. While Covent Garden is now a place of coffee shops, clothes stores and street entertainers, you don’t have to be very old to remember it as a working flower market. It still comes as a shock though to see a lady flower vendor pushing her barrow (real shades of Eliza Doolittle) in the film. A highlight of the Free Cinema movement of the time, it has a soundtrack that is a clever montage of voices, natural sounds and added music. The film hardly needs a narration, though Anderson added one as a concession to the series’ sponsor, Ford Motors.

Another extraordinary example of the Free Film movement was Lorenza Mazzetti’s 52-minute ‘Together’. Set in an East End of bombsites, narrow streets, riversides, warehouses, markets and pubs. It follows two deaf-mute dockers who are completely cut-off from the outside world and are constantly pursued by groups of jeering children. Mazzetti had been a student at the Slade and she used two friends - sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and painter Michael Andrews - as the two main characters. Lindsay Anderson enters the picture again, helping Mazzetti with the editing and adding a soundtrack. The movie was a phenomenal success, being selected as one of two British shorts for the Cannes Film Festival of 1956.

There are the feature films too, including ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. First performed at Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal in Stratford and written by workshop member Stephen Lewis (who went on to greater fame as Blakey in ‘On the Buses’ and now Smiler in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’). Littlewood used her famed improvisational techniques on the transfer to the big screen. Made on location in Stepney the film thus acquired an amazing realism. This is a true East End of pub goers, spivs, shopkeepers and street people, quite unlike the ‘cockernee’ characters usually grafted onto a feature film. Actors James Booth, Barbara Windsor, Roy Kinnear, Brian Murphy and George Sewell fit right in - Windsor winning the 1963 Best Actress Bafta for her performance. A bemused New York Times reviewer said “This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.”

‘A Kid For Two Farthings’ meanwhile, penned by Bethnal Green writer Wolf Mankewitz stars East Enders David Kossoff and Alfie Bass in a magical fable of a young boy’s dreams and hopes amidst the harsh realities of life in Spitalfields. Diana Dors, Sid James, Irene Handl and Sydney Tafler are among the other stalwarts of British film on show.

It isn’t just London film makers making use of the city. A couple of weeks back we recounted the story of May Flack in the Chinatown of Limehouse in the 1920s. Hollywood director DW Griffith recreated that Limehouse in his ‘Broken Blossoms’ of 1919. A masterpiece of melodrama, which some critics claim invented the whole ‘film noir’ genre, and which inspired the young Federico Fellini, it was based on Thomas Burke’s collection of short stories ‘Limehouse Nights’. America was indulging in the same terror of Chinese immigration (the ‘yellow peril’) that was infecting the English popular press, and Griffith altered Burke’s story to emphasise a message of racial tolerance.

Just a few hours of the 300 on offer, and with lots more to come - you could spend months in the BFI Mediatheque and not exhaust the catalogue. And it’s all free!

For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year. Every month new specially selected programmes will be added to the collections. Coming soon for May 2007 is ‘Play for Today’: a complete retrospective (300 titles) of the groundbreaking BBC drama strand including ‘Blue Remembered Hills’, ‘Nuts in May’ and ‘Abigail’s Party’. 30 titles will be launched in May followed by new additions every month. Other programme highlights for later in 2007 include: ‘The Way We Ate’ – A social history of food, eating and feasting in Britain – from rationing to Fanny Cradock to the rise and rise of the chicken tikka masala; 100 titles which reveal the hidden history of Black Britons; 100 titles reflecting lesbian and gay experience in British film and television.
The year is 1961, the scene Hessel Street in London’s East End, moments before bulldozers started pulling down the old shops and houses. A shopkeeper stands at the door of his store, knowing that in the space of a few minutes his business, his job and the certainties of his life in London will be torn away. ‘The Vanishing Street’ documents, in 20 minutes, the life of a typical Jewish community in 1960s Britain, showing us its street market, kosher food shops, newspaper and synagogue.

It’s an astonishingly vibrant and moving piece of work, one of the highlights of the Free Cinema documentary film movement, which emerged in Britain in the 1950s. Leading lights included Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti - the movement really beginning with a programme of their short films at the National Film Theatre in London in February 1956.

For decades these, and countless other depictions of London life past, have been out of the reach of most of us. They form part of the enormous archive of the British Film Institute (BFI), which comprises more than a quarter of a million international films and half a million TV programmes. This “filmic equivalent of the collections of the British Museum, containing more material than the Library of Congress”, as it is described by BFI director Amanda Neville, occupies 37 acres on two sites outside London. Previously, you could only view the films at special screenings or by request.

For the last year or two, BFI technicians have been undertaking the marathon task not just of restoring and preserving the movies, but also digitising them. Loaded onto hard disk, a fraction of the film stock is now available for instant access at the Mediatheque, which occupies old Museum of the Moving Image beneath Waterloo Bridge. So far there are just 300 hours of footage, with the same again due by the end of the year. Now visitors to the Mediatheque can slide in front of a plasma TV screen at the sparkling new BFI Southbank complex and, with a mouse click, enjoy the film of their choice.

The initial offerings are under three headings. ‘Exodus’ is a collection of 25 or so documentaries and TV dramas that tell the story of Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade - 2007 marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery. ‘Essentially British’ is a collection that explores Britain and British identities with 100 titles dating back as far as 1900. Visitors to the Mediatheque can call up images of Victorian tourists at Stonehenge, see life in Britain during the war as depicted to audiences in the US or take a sweep through the history and traditions of cricket. They will be able to see scenes of communities in the 1950s linked by their connection to the coal mining industry, and a film that follows the fortunes of young punk rockers in Northern Ireland.

Most fascinating for East Enders is ‘London Calling’, more than a century of London through the lens. Here you’ll see some of the very earliest film in the Archive, including ‘Blackfriars Bridge’, a 25-second film from 1896. In a film from 1903 we are taken on a journey round central London taking in familiar sights and some that have long since disappeared. Half a century later, the innocently titled ‘Nice Time’, by Goretta and Tanner, pulls together the disparate sounds and images of a Saturday night out as the crowds gather around Eros. And you’ll see some of the most recent, with Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London’ and Saul Dibb’s ‘Bullet Boy’ from 2004.

The documentaries are perhaps the most enticing place to start. ‘The Elephant Will Never Forget’ is a record of the last week of London’s trams in July 1952. The film is largely shot from the tram driver’s position, giving you the rather strange sensation of actually driving the vehicle. Half a century on, of course, our trams are on the way back. By 2013 they’ll be rattling over Waterloo Bridge, right above the NFT’s current home. Ironically, that will force the BFI Southbank to find a new home. In the meantime though, there are delights from London past to enjoy - Carnaby Street swinging in the sixties, lunch at the top of the Post Office Tower, and a host of documentaries and feature films filmed in and about the East End, from ‘Broken Blossoms’ to ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’. Next week we look at a sample of what’s in store.

BFI Southbank is on the southern end of Waterloo Bridge (nearest tube Waterlool). For programme listings visit www.bfi.org.uk/mediatheque. The Mediatheque will be open Tuesday – Sunday from 11am – 9pm and Bank Holiday Mondays throughout the year; www.bfi.org.uk.

The May Day holiday means different things to different people. Rather stripped in Britain of its associations as an international day of Labour, it has sometimes been the focus in recent years for anti-capitalist protests in London. In China and Russia over the 20th century, its labour associations were twisted until the May Day parades became a vehicle for lavish public displays of military hardware. In the US meanwhile, two periods of hysteria in the 1920s and 1950s (the ‘Red Scares’) saw May Day unceremoniously uprooted and dumped into September as ‘Labor Day’ - any connection with Communist celebrations thus severed. Part of the problem for Britons is that this is a relatively young Bank Holiday (it only entered the official English holiday calendar in the seventies, along with the non-entities of ‘Spring Bank Holiday’ and ‘August Bank Holiday’ and the brutal culling of the traditional Whitsun) The result is that many people are unsure of what May Day is for.

And yet, like many of our holidays and celebrations, this one has ancient roots, and a natural place in the calendar. So Christmas marks the winter solstice and Easter the spring solstice, while the autumn equinox is marked by harvest festivals. May Day, similarly pre-dates the arrival of Christianity in this country, and heralded the start of summer in pagan England. It might seem a bit early to be celebrating summer to many of us, but take the summer solstice (midsummer) as 21 June and work back six weeks (or half a season) and you arrive at early May. This ‘cross quarter’ day equates to the Celtic feast of Beltane. For a population deprived of fresh food during the long winter, the fact that spring crops were finally appearing was a significant one, and the celebrations reflected this. Traditional rites included the crowning of the May Queen, the celebration of the Green Man, and dancing around the Maypole, all connected in their differing ways with fertility and fecundity.

And May Day has a long association with civic unrest, protest and riot. Evil (or Ill) May Day exploded onto the streets of London in 1517, as a mob of ‘apprentices, clerics and ruffians’ voice violent protest against the increasing numbers of foreign merchants and craftsmen from France, Flanders, Italy and the Baltic who were settling in London. The story wasn’t new and it has been repeated many times since by vocal and charismatic leaders seeking to stir up action against immigrants. There was a shortage of skilled tradesmen in London, and the Government of the day encouraged silversmiths, jewellers, silkmakers, traders, bankers and many others to come and fill the gap. The control of the City of London by the livery companies meant that immigrants had to settle and practise their trades just outside the City walls … in the East End that meant homes and workshops in Spitalfields. The obvious problem was that the existing tradesmen found their inferior skills were no longer in demand, in an already depressed London economy.

Into this tinderbox, preacher Dr Beal, who would speak publicly at St Paul’s Cross each Sunday, threw his spark. Over Easter, he demanded that ‘Englishmen rise up and defend themselves’. Rumours grew that May Day would see the tinderbox ignite. On 1 May, a thousand-strong gang of apprentices gathered in Cheapside. Led by an embittered broker, John Lincoln, they first moved north to St Martin Le Grand, home to many immigrants. Despite the pacifying efforts of under-sheriff Thomas More, fighting broke out as the mob looted houses. They headed for the East End, by way of the Tower of London.

As they reached Tower Hill, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Richard Cholmley, had his men open fire; the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners. Justice was immediate. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the ‘breaking the peace of Christendom, another capital crime. Pardoned by Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, the prisoners ‘took the halters from their necks and danced and sang’.

Within a generation or so, the newcomers would be part of the seamless fabric of the East End of course - Anglicised French and Dutch names being the only reminder that their families had once been anything other than Londoners. But down the centuries the pattern of rabble-rousers leading the common people against ‘economic migrants’ would persist, through the Gordon Riots, the Blackshirts marches and beyond.