eastlondonhistory.com

It sounds like a pub quiz question – though not one many of us could come up with the answer to. What links the Poplar rates rebellion of 1921, the fight for women’s suffrage, Murder She Wrote, The Good Food Guide, The Clangers, Peter Ustinov and Godspell. The answer is an East End dynasty, founded by the man historian AJP Taylor called ‘the best loved man in politics’, George Lansbury.

Lansbury is one East End politician who will never be forgotten, and rightly so. A campaigning local MP, he resigned his Bow and Bromley seat to stand as a candidate for women’s suffrage (a cause for which he was jailed). He campaigned against British involvement in World War I, and in the 1920s was imprisoned again, in Brixton, for leading the Poplar Rates rebellion. A sometimes recklessly brave leader, this proponent of ‘Poplarism’ was never a man to be afraid of taking a contrary position – and local people loved him for it.

But the extended Lansbury clan had many other claims to fame – though it was in the light entertainment, rather than the political field, that they would make their mark. George Lansbury was the father of Daisy and Edgar. Daisy married Raymond William Postgate in 1918. The multi-talented Postgate wrote mystery novels, social history and on the subject of food. He was also a socialist and a conscientious objector during the First World War, and had been jailed for refusing to fight. But his marriage to the daughter of Lansbury was the last straw, and his Tory father banned the pair from the family home.

A prolific biographer, Postgate would go on to edit the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Tribune, and in the fifties his great love of food writing saw him launching the Good Food Guide. Towards the end of his life, Postgate published a biography of his father in law, The Life of George Lansbury.

Raymond and Daisy’s son was writing too, though many of us will be more familiar with his work than his father’s. Oliver Postgate created The Clangers, Bagpuss, Ivor the Engline, Noggin the Nog and Pogles’ Wood, with partner Peter Firmin. Any child who watched BBC TV during the sixties, seventies and eighties will know Postgate’s work. But political blood still ran in the Lansbury/Postgate veins … Oliver being active in the anti-nuclear power movement.

Lansbury’s other child, Edgar seemed to have opted for a quieter life, working as a timber merchant. But with his marriage to Irish actress Moyna MacGill, he wasn’t going to be staying out of the limelight. Moyna already had a film career dating back to 1920. She had also been married before, and had a young daughter, Isolde. The couple had first a daughter, Angela, in 1925, then twin boys Edgar and Bruce. But Edgar senior was to die suddenly in 1934, and when World War II broke out, the widowed Moyna left her Bow home for the safety of the United States. Moyna soon began landing film roles in Hollywood; soon too, Angela would join her on screen: winning a contract with MGM in 1944, she was nominated for an Oscar for her very first film (Gaslight, 1944).

Mother and daughter would appear together in the 1945adapation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and once again Angela received an Academy Award nomination. Over the course of a career that now spans more than 60 years, Angela would be nominated three times (though never win an Oscar), be nominated for 10 Emmys and win four Tonys. She would win a BAFTA and, in the 1990s, be made CBE by the Queen. Her work spans dozens of films, much TV work and a critically lauded career on Broadway.

Half-sister Isolde, meanwhile, had also married into the business, and was wed to Peter Ustinov from 1940 to 1950. Both Edgar and Bruce, meanwhile, were to become film producers, with Edgar also producing the debut of Godspell on Broadway in the 1970s. The theatrical dynasty continued, with Edgar having a son, David Lansbury, also an actor, and who would marry Hollywood actress Ally Sheedy.

By the late 1960s, Angela Lansbury’s life in California had soured somewhat. Her home in Malibu burned down and her daughter became involved both with drugs and the Charles Manson ‘Family’. A worried Lansbury perhaps wisely decamped from Southern California to a new life in Ireland. She was to eventually return though, and now she’s probably best known to current viewers as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running ‘Murder She Wrote’ (on a TV near you on any given afternoon). And the Lansburys are still keeping it in the family – son Anthony was the producer.

Historian AJP Taylor described George Lansbury as ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. To the people of his Bow and Poplar constituency he was a hero – going to prison to defend his beliefs and constituents.

Yet to others he was naïve, even seeing in Hitler a germ of Christian belief that could avert World War II, and continually missing out on political power because of his refusal to compromise his beliefs.

In a new biography, John Shepherd reconstructs the life of a complex figure who was all these things and more, a socialist who would be hard pressed to recognize the Labour Party of Tony Blair. For George Lansbury was ‘at the heart of Old Labour’.

George was born in Suffolk, in 1859, and his family moved to the East End nine years later. He started work in an office at 11 but, after a year, returned to school until he was 14. A string of jobs followed – clerk, wholesale grocer and work in a coffee bar among them. He then started his own business as a contractor working for the Great Eastern Railway. But the business failed and in 1884 Lansbury, now married with three children, decided to emigrate to Australia. The adventure didn’t last long, as the family found it difficult to settle. The following year they returned to England and George began work at his father-in-law’s timber merchants.

Lansbury’s bitter experience of emigration – he felt the authorities had painted a deliberately false and rosy picture of Australia – led him to politics. He joined the campaign against emigration policy.

In 1886 Lansbury joined the local Liberal Party, and was elected General Secretary of the Bow & Bromley Liberal Association. But he became disillusioned with the leadership’s refusal to support legislation for a shorter working week.

In fact Lansbury was becoming more enmeshed in radical East End politics. In 1889 he joined a local strike committee during the London Dockers Strike of that year. And in 1892, Lansbury established a branch of the Social Democratic Federation in Bow.

Then came a defiant move that foreshadowed ‘Poplarism’ 30 years later. In 1892 Lansbury was elected to the Board of Guardians that ran Poplar Workhouse. The traditional approach for guardians was to make poor relief as unpleasant as possible – the theory being generosity would encourage people to rely on the workhouse. Lansbury and his colleagues decided to change the system from within.

Over the next years the conditions in the Poplar Workhouse improved dramatically. And the Laindon Farm Colony, near Basildon, taught unemployed men the basics of market gardening and got many back to work. It wasn’t popular with the government, who in 1906 were to order an inquiry into the wasting of ratepayers’ funds on the projects. Lansbury and his fellows refused to back down, and the government relented.

After three unsuccessful shots at Parliament, Lansbury was finally elected in 1910, as Labour MP for Bow & Bromley. As ever, he pushed tough causes. He campaigned in Parliament for votes for women. In October, 1912, Lansbury decided to draw attention to the plight of Suffragette prisoners by resigning his seat and fighting a by-election on votes for women. He lost, and the following year was imprisoned for making speeches in favour of suffragettes.

For ten years Lansbury was out of the House of Commons and concentrated on journalism, helping found the Daily Herald in 1911. The paper opposed Britain entering the First World War. Then, in 1921 he became Mayor of Poplar.

Defying government, the council raised the rate to increase poor relief. Lansbury and most of the local council went to prison for four months for their stance. In fact Lansbury was often at odds with the Labour Party. He was to the left of the party leaders. And when Ramsay MacDonald formed a National Government in 1931 to combat Britain’s economic crisis, Lansbury resigned and became the leader of a Labour opposition. He was to resign again – criticised by party members for his pacifist stance on the brewing World War II.

His views were to lead him to Berlin, and talks with Hitler, then on to Mussolini, both of whom led him to believe they would enter talks to avoid war.

Another East Ender succeeded Lansbury as Labour leader. Clement Attlee looked back on his predecessor in 1954. ‘An evangelist rather than a Parliamentary tactician. Yet during those years in which he led the small Party in the House he showed great skill and powers of everyday leadership. A leading Conservative once replied to a Labour Member who said he thought George one of the best men he had known – “The best! Is that all? He’s the ablest Opposition Leader I have ever known.”‘

George Lansbury died on May 7, 1940.

George Lansbury – at the heart of Old Labour by John Shepherd, £35 hardback, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0198201648

There aren’t many artists who enjoy success in the notoriously opposed worlds of Fine and Commercial Art. But it was Bow boy William Larkins’ unrivalled draughtsmanship that made him as comfortable designing the Black Magic box as producing exquisite etchings of his native East End.

He was born in 1901 into a Bow family of steeplejacks. It was a family skill that came into its own when he began studying at Goldsmiths College of Art. His fellow students were stunned by his contribution to a student rag – climbing Nelson’s Column to give it a clean!

One of those students was Graham Sutherland, later to become one of the greatest English painters of the twentieth century. But during his time at Goldsmiths he too became consumed by producing etchings – inspired in part by Larkins’ work.

“I knew William Larkins very well,” he remembered years later. “As students we sat side by side, he a little earlier than I in arriving at the School of Art, often as early as 6.30 in the morning, while I arrived about 7.00.”

Sutherland describes Larkins etchings as “exceptional – very small but packed with insight. He managed to combine a highly complex technique with an air of simplicity”. And it was Larkins who introduced his fellows to the work of great 19th century artist and etcher Samuel Palmer.

Much of the vitality and detail of Larkins’ early work derived from the fact he was drawing on his East End childhood. With his detailed local knowledge he was plundering an area rich in character and street theatre for his pictures. A boot stall in Whitechapel; a brewery and timber yard in Mile End; an Aldgate tripe dresser’s shop; the rays of sunlight beaming down into Whitechapel Underground Station. Mundane street scenes were carved into dramatic contrasts of greys, whites and blacks.

It was an extraordinary burst of creativity. But although he travelled extensively, making etchings of Bruges, Paris, New York, as well as a series of idyllic scenes from the Welsh countryside, most of the work would be compressed into the 1920s. Etching had been a lucrative business in the early years of the century – with the resulting prints sold in editions of thousands. But as the 1920s wore on, it was increasingly losing out to photography.

The Depression of the late 20s sounded the death knell for the etchings market. And so, although in 1925 he had been exhibited at the Los Angeles Museum, in New Zealand and at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, by the 1930s he was looking for a more solid career.

In 1932, Larkins joined giant advertising agency J Walter Thompson as an art director. He soon became an ad man as much as an artist, getting involved in selling and marketing. Back at the drawing board, he produced the famed Black Magic chocolates box (a design that for 35 years was to stay largely unchanged). He came up with the wrapper for Aero and designed the Lux soap flakes box.

But he was still drawing for pleasure as well as profit. Visiting New York in 1934, he made a series of large pastel drawings depicting Manhattan Night Life. Compared with the tight detail of his East End etchings, they are fresh, relaxed loose pictures. And in 1940 he formed the Larkins Studio, which produced films and animations on tank and aircraft recognition for the Ministries of Defence and Information, as well as propaganda and independent cartoons.

Larkins spent the last 30 years of his life as art and graphics director of the Reader’s Digest. With his jack-of-all-trades approach taking in sales, promotion and advertising, it was a million miles from his early days at Goldsmiths. It probably seemed all too distant to Larkins too – most of his work had been done before the age of 25. In later life he was dismissive of his work of the 1920s – yet in his stark pictures, there is captured all the vibrancy of the East End streets.
A 28-page book of Larkins’ life and pictures, William Larkins, Etchings of the East End in the 1920s and other scenes is available. £8 incl post and packing from Garton & Co, Roundway House, Devizes, Wilts, SN10 2EQ. Cheques made payable to Garton & Co.

Every so often in history a technological hotspot emerges – helping to drive industry and technology onward and upward. In the mid-1700s that clutch of enterprising Lancastrians John Kay, James Hargreaves and Samuel Compton were revolutionising weaving with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. In the 1970s it was the turn of the geeks of the US West Coast, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak et al – as they invented personal computing and kick-started the information age.

But who would have thought that the Lea Valley, running down Tower Hamlets’ eastern boundary, was the birthplace of Britain’s own post-industrial revolution? As the title of Dr Jim Lewis’s first book suggested, it was ‘Britain’s best kept secret’. Now, in a fascinating sequel*, Dr Lewis reveals more of the developments that turned the Lea into the UK’s technological crucible.

In fact, Lewis argues, the likes of Gates wouldn’t ever have been able to make their billions from the PC were it not for a much earlier invention in the Lea Valley. In 1904 Professor Ambrose Fleming developed the diode valve. The invention not only paved the way for today’s multimedia electronics industry – it also created the platform for space travel, computers, email and the internet.

Firstly though, the diode valve gave birth to the modern wireless. So radio has its roots in the Lea Valley, and Britain’s first radio valve factory was established there in 1916, with the first television tube factory following in 1936.

But the technological developments in the Lea Valley were as diverse as they were numerous. The monorail may still seem a futuristic mode of transport, but it was developed here by Henry Robinson Palmer as long ago as 1821. This ingenious method of hanging heavy goods from the sides of a rail carriage to lower the centre of gravity meant that great weights could be smoothly shifted. The invention went into use at the Royal Victualling Yard at Deptford in 1824, with the frictionless action meaning four men could easily shift 5cwt loads of provisions from warehouse to ship.

And another welcome innovation on board ship was that of IPA (India Pale Ale). Dreamed up by George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery, it was the first beer that could be transported to the hot climes of the Empire without tainting – giving East End sailors some relief and British soldiers a welcome taste of home.

The geography of the Lea Valley reads like a Who’s Who of British industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Johnson Matthey, Hawker Siddeley, Reuters, Lotus Engineering, Tesco, Keith Blackman, BOC and Matchbox Cars were just a few of the innovators who built their businesses here. Petrol was not only manufactured, it also received its name here, and the British Army’s rifle of choice was, for decades, the Lee Enfield. That reliable weapon was of course manufactured in the Lea Valley.

When Sir David Lean died in 1991, he left behind a huge home in Wapping and a reputation as a maker of some of the world’s most famous films.
Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Bridge Over The River Kwai were all big-budget, star-laden epics, and huge hits at the box office.
But it was a far cry from Lean’s humble beginnings in the business – and if it had been down to his devoutly religious parents, the most successful director the British industry has ever seen would never have got on the set.
The Croydon couple were strict Quakers who forbade the young David to go to the sinful cinema. He would sneak off from school to watch movies and dreamed of a career in films.
After throwing in a accountancy job, he became a clapper boy at Gainsborough studios. He swiftly moved to the editor’s chair, cutting documentaries and production line B-movies.
Noel Coward was at Gainsborough directing his first film and, with his keen eye for young talent, co-opted Lean to co-direct.
It couldn’t have gone better. In Which We Serve was a massive wartime hit, striking all the right notes with a patriotic British public. Coward was a film and stage star, and Lean was a winning director.
A string of hits ensued. Brief Encounter, starring Celia John-son and Trevor Howard, the Coward-scripted Blithe Spirit and This Happy Breed, followed by Great Expectations.
In the Fifties, Lean continued his dual path – the romantic themes of The Passionate Friends and Summer Madness and the patriotic harking back to the war years in the Bridge Over The River Kwai and the Sound Barrier.
Lean’s huge hits of the Sixties relied as much on great writing as tight direction.
Doctor Zhivago, shot in Spain and Finland, breathtakingly evoked the huge open spaces of the Russian Steppes, lasted nearly three and a half hours, cost a fortune and was the biggest hit of the mid-Sixties. It also boasted the heavyweight talents of novelist Boris Pasternak and screenwriter Robert Bolt.
But perhaps the movie which will stand as Lean’s masterwork was one made three years before and which, at 226 minutes, dwarfs even Zhivago.
Lawrence of Arabia, staring Peter O’Toole as the British colonel leading an Arab revolt, broke the mould.
“Traditional movie storytelling raised to its highest form,” raved one critic.
The audiences agreed and the film won seven Oscars, including best picture, best director, photography and score.
Ryan’s Daughter, in 1970, didn’t strike gold with the critics and the fans stayed away. Lean found himself out of fashion and it was difficult for him to finance the blockbusters which had been his trademark. He didn’t make another film for 14 years.
When he did, it was a triumphant return. A Passage to India in 1984 saw him writing as well as directing. It won five Oscar nominations, with Dame Peggy Ashcroft winning best supporting actress in her last film.
Lean was working on a film of Nostromo when he died – an adaptation of the novel by Joseph Conrad, who had made his home in Whitechapel a century before.
Who knows what that union of East End minds might have produced?

The East End is, sadly, as famous for its disappeared industries as its existing ones. The dockyards are gone and the shipbuilders of Blackwall are a distant memory.
And of course Tower Hamlets once boasted the biggest ‘manufactory’ in Europe – Bryant and May’s colossal Fairfield Works, now transformed into luxury flats as the Bow Quarter.
But it is matchboxes of a quite different kind that provided one of the East End’s greatest manufacturing success stories – a name that will bring back happy memories to generations of kids but, sadly, lasted less than half this century.
Take a walk north along the River Lea and, just before you hit Hackney Wick, you will see the name ‘Lesney’ emblazoned on the wall of a decaying blue building. Now the Lesney factory is just another industrial relic, but once it produced the Matchbox cars, trucks, buses and more which enchanted post-War British schoolchildren. And it all happened by accident.
Leslie and Rodney Smith were unrelated schoolchums who, in one of those quirks of fate which often spark great events, were reunited during their WW2 service in the Royal Navy. Both were engineers and both dreamed of running their own companies once the fighting was over – so they decided they would go into business together.
On 19 June 1947 they sealed their partnership, taking an amalgam of Leslie and Rodney to form Lesney Products – the vague word product was chosen because, for all their ambitions, the pair had yet to decide what they would be making!
With £600 of combined funds, the two bought an old pub, The Rifleman, further up-river at Edmonton, and kitted it out with Government surplus die-casting machinery. And, joined by expert die-caster Jack Odell, the company joined the scores of other post-War start-ups, as Britain rebuilt its economy and industry for peacetime.
The company would take on any and every job, subcontracting their skills to the major engineering firms who needed precision die-cast pieces. But, as the Christmas of 1948 approached, orders dropped off, and the Smiths decided to cast around for a way to keep the machines busy and the revenue rolling in.
And so the firm decided to produce miniatures of the vehicles Britons saw around them everyday, on the thousands of building sites which were reconstructing the country. A traction engine, cement mixer, tractor and bulldozer were the first off the production line, and Lesney set about selling them to local shops.
Fired by their success, the Smiths decided to pitch the bigger toy stores. They weren’t enthusiastic. The tiny cars were described as “Christmas cracker trash” by one buyer. But children loved them. Lesney, in fact, had difficulty meeting demand and soon 13 Woolworths stores placed orders.
Manufacturing was still tough in the austerity of post-War Britain. From 1950 to 1952, during the Korean War, the Government limited the use of zinc to essential purposes, and Lesney made only the tin Jumbo the Elephant toy.
But as the ’50s wore on, business took off. The company dumped the bigger toys it had experimented with and concentrated all its manufacturing on miniatures. Rather than an offshoot of the business it became the core, and Lesney went into business with an East End firm called Moko. The two firms registered the name Matchbox, and concentrated on building the range.
The idea of a matchbox to put toys in didn’t start with Lesney. Moko’s boss Moses Kohnstam had moved to Britain in 1900 from Germany, where the idea had long been popular. It proved a popular gimmick in Britain, with the first cars in plain boxes with tuck-in ends, with simple printing on the cover. And generations of kids will also remember playing with the firm’s Dinky toys.
Through the ’60s and ’70s, exports grew to the United States and the Far East, and Matchbox became a worldwide name. But the recession of the early ’70s, plus a rash of unsuccessful ventures into dolls and Far East production, took their toll.
After huge losses, Lesney was declared bankrupt on 11 June 1992. The brand names were bought and distribution switched to companies in the US, Macau, anywhere but the East End in fact. The irony today is that the ‘Christmas cracker trash’ is hugely collectable – toys bought 40 years ago with pocket money pennies now change hands for hundreds of pounds.

A chime that changed the world sounded on 8 July, 1776. The Liberty Bell rang out from the tower of Independ-

ence Hall, in Philadelphia, summoning citizens to hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, by Colonel John Nixon.
America was declaring its independence from the old country. But as it broke away, there were ironic echoes of the East End of London, which had given birth to one of the founders of the New World.
Valued
The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the Bell from Whitechapel’s world-renowned bell foundry, in 1751, to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges.
Penn’s charter, Pennsylvania’s original constitution, speaks of the rights and freedoms valued by people the world over. Particularly forward thinking were Penn’s ideas on religious freedom, his liberal stance on native American rights, and his inclusion of citizens in making his laws.
William Penn had been born on Tower Hill in 1644 and, during the late 1660s, had attended Quaker meetings in a private house in Wheler Street, Spitalfields.
His opinions meant he was sent down from Oxford University and, in 1668, Penn was thrown into the Tower for criticising the Church of England, the first of three times he was thrown in jail for his non-conformist views.
In 1681 he at last escaped religious persecution in England, receiving a grant of territory in America, named Pennsylvania, after his father, Admiral William Penn. And there Penn signed his treaty with the Lenni Lenape Indians.
The treaty let the Quaker settlers build Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” And in 1701 the Charter of Privileges was signed.
To commemorate the charter’s golden anniversary in 1751 the people of Philadelphia decided to commission a bell. And where better to commission it from than the East End that Penn had left 70 years before.
Cracked
The Whitechapel foundry cast a bell which was swiftly shipped to the USA. But the first time it was rung the bell cracked. Its unusual weight, more than 2,080 pounds, could have been the reason, but John Pass and John Stow, founders of Philadelphia, quickly recast the bell – and ordered a replacement from the Whitechapel foundry.
The new bell arrived, but not before another problem was noticed. The bell-makers at Whitechapel had inscribed: “By order of the assembly of the province of Pensylvania.”
They may have spelt the state’s name wrong, but at least it now did the job. In 1753 the bell was hung in the newly-finished Pennsylvania State House, now called Independence Hall.
In 1777 it was removed from the city and hidden from the British occupiers of Philadelphia. Today visitors to the Zion Reformed Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania, can see where it was hidden, below the floorboards.
During the Civil War the bell became a potent symbol for Americans, when abolitionists of slavery adopted the bell as a symbol of a country cracked in two, between its black and white citizens.
The bell travelled to cities throughout the land “proclaiming liberty” and inspiring the cause of freedom.
And two centuries later, the Liberty Bell Pavilion was opened in Philadelphia, in preparation for the USA’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976.
Now, on every Fourth of July, the bell is rung (or symbolically tapped), in unison with thousands of bells across the United States.
One East Ender, who fled England and religious persecution, had been responsible for giving the USA a symbol of freedom from his homeland.