eastlondonhistory.com

Many readers will know that the battle scenes for Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket were shot not in war-torn Vietnam, but just down the road from Tower Hamlets, in Beckton.
But east London’s connection with Vietnam-inspired Hollywood movies does not end with Stanley Kubrick’s bloody epic.
For the greatest of them all, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, was born in the reminiscences and romance of an exiled Eastern European writer – as he gazed on the misty River Thames from his adopted East End home.
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in Berdichev, in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
His parents, Apollo and Evelina, were fierce Polish patriots and were swiftly exiled by the autocratic Tsarist regime.
It was the first step in a journey that would take the young Jozef halfway round the world, before he settled in Whitechapel.
His parents died in exile, leaving the child Jozef an orphan. His uncle Thaddeus adopted the boy and, in 1874, conceded to his burning desire to go to sea. Jozef set off for Marseilles in search of a ship.
Journeys round the world followed until, in 1878, Jozef joined a British merchantman, winning his Master’s certificate.

Name change
He got on well with his shipmates, quickly rising through the ranks. But Jozef’s one problem was his name which, try as they might, the English-men just could not master.
In frustration at hearing their tortuous attempts, Jozef decided if you can’t beat them, join them, and changed his name to the more manageable Joseph Conrad.
Suitably Anglicised, he decided to make his home in England. The East End was already a second home to him – he made his first stay at the Sailors’ Home and Red Ensign Club in Whitechapel, while serving on the Duke of Sutherland.
While he was on his long voyages, Conrad would while away the time by writing stories and, in 1885, he had his first success, when The Black Mate was published in Titbits magazine.
In 1894, Conrad left the service, deciding to concentrate on writing. But his passion for the sea permeates his books.
His journeys in and out of the Pool of London inspired the memorable opening scenes of Heart of Darkness which, almost a century later, Coppola would update and transform into Apocalypse Now.
The book evokes a lost East End of bustling docks, sailors’ flophouses and schooners waiting for the next high tide and fair wind. And the story unfolds from the cold, misty and lonely Thames Estuary to the final horror in the heart of Africa.
Many more novels followed – ironically, Conrad came to be one of the greatest novelists in the English language, some achievement as it was his third tongue, after Russian and Polish.
His was a colourful life but also one touched by tragedy. In 1878, in one of his sporadic bouts of depression, Conrad shot himself but survived. In 1904, his wife became an invalid and his son Borys, often sick in childhood, was gassed in the trenches in France.
But by the early 1920s, Conrad was a celebrated English- man of letters. So English in fact that in 1924 he was offered a knighthood – the naturalised Briton declined the honour.
In the same year Jacob Epstein, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century completed Conrad’s bust. It was to be the final memento of the Polish East Ender. On 3 August that year, he died of a heart attack.

TOWER Hamlets has often been the focus of dissent, rebellion and rioting against the Government of the day. But for East Enders, the sight of armoured cars trundling along the East India Dock Road in peacetime must have been something of a shock.

It happened during May 1926. The whole country was on strike and, though the spark had been struck many miles from east London, dockers and many more joined in sympathy. And, months later, as the General Strike staggered to a bitter conclusion, the peace would be brokered in the heart of the East End.

Tower Hamlets had known its share of labour disputes of course. The matchworkers’ strike, centred on Bryant and May’s works in Fairfield Road, Bow, and the succession of docks strikes around the turn of the twentieth century were just two examples of hard-fought conflicts which had advanced the workers’ cause and given birth to the Labour movement.

But the 1926 strike erupted around the coalfields of Britain. In 1925 the mine owners announced that they would deal with falling prices by cutting the miners’ wages. The TUC protested bitterly and the Conservative Government, fearing the effect of a strike on an already tottering economy, supplied the money to make up the miners’ wages. Prime minister Stanley Baldwin declared the subsidy would only last nine months. And the pit owners pushed their case, saying wages would be cut by up to a quarter … any miners who didn’t like it would be locked out of the pits.

The TUC met on 1 May – appropriately international labour day – and called a general strike. To begin with they would bring out workers in the key industries – railwaymen, transport workers, dockers, printers, builders, iron and steel workers – a total of 3 million men (a fifth of the adult male population). Only later would other trade unionists, like the engineers and shipyard workers, be called out on strike. The Labour Party was desperate to avoid a walkout, fearing it would only harm the labour movement, and made frantic attempts over the following days to avert action, negotiating with the Government and the mine owners.

And they were close to agreement when printers at the Daily Mail refused to run a leading article attacking the pit owners. A furious Baldwin broke off negotiations and the General Strike began.

The months of subsidy to the mining industry had bought the Government time to build an alternative distribution system. And so the people of the East End saw food convoys motoring down the East India Dock Road with armed soldiers riding as guards.

Some of the precautions seem ludicrously over the top, with foot soldiers marching four abreast behind the trucks. But for Baldwin’s government it was an opportunity to make a show of strength – and smash the emergent labour and union movement. Nowhere was the policing firmer than around the docks – that lynchpin of the distribution system and hotbed of pilfering.

The strike was getting nowhere fast. Within days the TUC was looking for a settlement. Toynbee Hall’s position, with one foot in the establishment and the other amongst the poor and emerging union and labour activists in the East End, made it a natural go-between. The Spitalfields building hosted the meeting which brokered the end of the strike, and the TUC accepted a miserable settlement.

On 11 May the TUC General Council visited 10 Downing Street. They offered peace and demanded a guarantee of no victimization of the strikers. The Government refused to do so and the TUC capitulated. Cabinet member Lord Birkenhead wrote later that the TUC’s surrender was ‘so humiliating that some instinctive breeding made one unwilling even to look at them’.

The General Strike was over, though the miners held out till November. Gradually broken and trailing back to work they found they had been given longer hours, lower pay and were often victimised by the bosses. A year later, the Government turned the screw with the Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act. This act made all sympathetic strikes illegal, forbade Civil Service unions to affiliate to the TUC, and banned mass picketing.

It seemed the Labour Party had got it right. Years later Winston Churchill, a member of that Tory cabinet, admitted that the wage subsidy had merely been granted to buy the Government time, to allow them to organize … and to smash the unions.

When Tower Hamlets Council secured a £1.4m grant from the Arts Council for the Brady Centre recently, it guaranteed the continuation of 101 years of good work.
But it was also a world removed from the club’s humble beginnings in the poverty-stricken East End of the 19th century.
Back in 1896 Jewish immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe was at its height, as families fled persecution and pogroms – often they arrived in the East End with nothing but the clothes they stood up in.
The poor immigrants, with no money and less English, poured off the boats and straight into the rag-trade sweatshops of Stepney and Whitechapel. Wages were low and often it was not just the parents who had to work long hours, but their children too – all had to earn their keep.
Many of the earlier Jewish settlers had established themselves and done well in their new home, and up in the West End a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen looked at the situation with alarm.
They saw these young people going without proper clothing and decent meals, let alone a proper education or the chance to play organised sports to get away from the relentless misery of their hard-working lives.
This philanthropic band set up a club in Brady Street, Whitechapel and set to work putting right some of the basics – early club records tell of the boys being given boots to wear and proper meals to eat.
Things moved on. In the 1930s the club organised an annual camp. It would be a bit spartan for a lot of today’s kids. Two dozen boys slept in army tents for a week, and directly on the grass. Washing was a standpipe in the field, the toilet a hole in the ground.

Luxury it wasn’t, but for the lads it was an undreamt of break from the grime and grind of their London existence.
Meanwhile, back at the club, the boys not only played sports but many received a basic education – for many Brady boys this was where they learned to read and write.
The club moved to Durward Street, thanks to the managers’ tireless efforts to raise funds, and the work went on, only interrupted by the outbreak of war.
Full-time
Re-opening in the late Forties, the club moved to its present, Hanbury Street base. Now there was a girls’ club too, and in the 1950s a creche, parents’ section, senior citizens’ section and old boys’ section were set up. A settlement started and overseas students could stay there while pursuing their studies in London.
A full-time staff was taken on and, in a typical Sixties week, a thousand people used the Brady Centre every week.
But as the Jewish community dispersed to Essex, North London and further afield so the Brady declined, and the last youth members left in the Seventies, with the building being sold to Tower Hamlets Council.
With the Nineties came a re-birth for the centre. A new Brady Club was built in Edgware, and ex-members of the original club began running activities for the thousands who had passed through those doors.
With the Brady’s country house in Kent providing holidays for young Jewish Londoners and the Friendship Club still at Hanbury Street, the Brady is looking healthier than ever.
And that original group of philanthropists might be surprised and delighted that their vision not only helped generations through the 20th century but is now well-prepared to see the next generations long into the 21st.
l Miriam Moses, Britain’s first Jewish woman mayor, who founded the Brady Girls’ Club in 1927, was honoured on Sunday when the mayor, Cllr Albert Jacob, unveiled a plaque at her birthplace – 17 Princelet Street, Whitechapel. She became the first woman Mayor of Stepney in 1931.
Her life and times will shortly feature in East End History .

Steve Lewis, East End photographer by John Rennie
Find the story, get the faces. It was a simple mantra, but one which East End press photographer Steve Lewis always kept in mind as he headed out with his trusty Nikon camera. Where there was a great shot, there would always be a good story attached. And where there was a good story … well you get the picture.

The newspaper Lewis joined in the 1960s would be unrecognisable to present-day hacks. At the Ilford Recorder he wasn’t even allowed to venture out of the darkroom for his first few months – his bosses insisting he serve his apprenticeship before they let him actually start snapping people.

The equipment (an old-fashioned plate camera) allowed no room for error. ‘A typical Saturday would be to cover a dog show, football match, and school speech day all with seven double plates enabling you to take 14 pictures,’ Lewis recalls. A few months of this and he moved onto a rolliecord camera which took 120-roll film with 12 exposures.

But once allowed into the daylight of an East End still unreconstructed from the Blitz, Steve started to document a London that, to present eyes, seems to be in several decades, even centuries, simultaneously. And a collection of his best images make up a new book, London’s East End: A 1960s Album.In one shot, a group of young housewives, resplendent in their Carnaby Street styles gather on a wasteland strewn with rubble for a morning mother’s meeting, complete with prams and todders. In the background stand the gleaming new tower blocks to which they’ve been moved. Beautifully appointed, but unfriendly, with no garden fence over which to gossip – so they meet on the site of their now demolished homes.

In another, a tidy terrace of houses, a sixties replacement for the noisome slums, stands neatly in the background. In the foreground is a totter with his horse and cart – the backdrop may have changed but some of the people might have stepped straight from the pages of the Pickwick Papers.

Even the prefabs look more old-fashioned. Look long enough around London and you’ll still find a few of the old boxy prefabs thrown up as emergency housing immediately after the Second World War. But go back to 1969 and some East Enders are still living in Nissan Huts, makeshift accommodation constructed by Italian POWs, topped with curved corrugated asbestos roofs, and only meant to last a few months. Freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, with windows at each end – the funny thing, of course, was that people loved them. ‘I’ve been here since 1945 and I’ve become attached to the place,’ says Elsie Osborne, snapped (as ever) on a neighbouring stretch of wasteland.

Indeed, wasteland and bombsites are everywhere. It’s hard to believe that the swinging sixties was happening a few miles west in Carnaby Street and Chelsea. Steve also snaps one of its greatest chroniclers – East End lad turned top photographer, David Bailey. Bailey lounges around his Primrose Hill flat with model girlfriend Penelope Tree. He still nips back home to the East End to be cooked tea by his mum who chides him about not getting a proper job in a bank. ‘I’m not clever enough for that,’ he confides to Lewis.

The East End, if gritty and real, lacked colour, adventure and good weather, After a few years on the Recorder group of papers, Steve headed to Africa, covering the central area of the continent for United Press International based in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Back in the East End he combined work on the Recorder with shifts on the national papers in Fleet Street – he would move there permanently in the seventies. But it was an open brief by the Editor of the Newham Recorder, Tom Duncan, which liberated Lewis to take some of his finest pictures.

Duncan’s instruction was simple. Go out and take a weekly picture, a typical east London image, which really captures the East End: the weekly portrait would be called “ The Lewis View”. A lovely brief for a photographer and Lewis revelled in it. A group of old men, suited, cloth-capped and wearing ties to a man, play cards in the public bar, pints at their elbows, fags in mouths. Miniskirted lollipop lady Lesley Lucking works while baby Tracey sleeps in her pram on the pavement. Milkman Alfred Davies dispenses pintas from his Edwardian handcart – no electric floats or even a horse. And everywhere around the East End, real-life Steptoes buy, sell and sift for anything of value.

If East Enders were living in a borough still scarred by the bombs of World War II, many of them seemed still to be stuck in the 19th century. We see whole families living in a single tenement room. In one house, eight adults and 15 kids share two toilets, one bathroom and one kitchen. ‘Poor but happy’ is a lazy cliche and while many of the subjects of Steve’s camera are stoical some look downright miserable.

Soon that East End would be gone, and Steve would no longer be chronicling it in any case. In 1972 he moved to the nationals for good, spending his next 34 years on The Sun. In the closing acknowledgements to his book he thanks many people but foremost among them is Tom Duncan ‘who had the foresight to see the changes happening in the East End’. The result is a long way from the fish-and-chip wrapping that’s the traditional fate of yesterday’s papers: this sixties album is a fascinating historical record.

The strike of public sector workers at the end of June – and the promise of more to come – will have a lot of East Enders looking back worriedly (or wistfully) to the 1970s and 80s. But go back to 1768 and we visit one of the most turbulent years in London’s history. Radical journalists and politicians were damning each other in Parliament and the press, and some in London society even feared revolution might topple King George III.

And 1768 was also the year the word ‘strike’ entered the English language, largely due to the actions of a handful of East End dockers. The first strike to bear the name would be violent – and seven Wapping men would pay with their lives.

England was changing dramatically. The 1700s was the century of the industrial revolution, with each innovation changing Britain a little more from an agrarian to industrial land: there were new techniques for smelting iron, Watt’s steam engine, the flying shuttle and spinning jenny, the canals carving their way up from the East End and across England – even agriculture got industrialised with Jethro Tull’s mechanical seed drill and the first threshing machine. And London too was changed entirely, as thousands flocked to work in the cities and the ports, and the Middlesex riverside hamlets of Wapping and Limehouse became swallowed up in what would become the East End.

Meanwhile, London was in the grip of political discord, as the country and George III struggled with the emergence of modern government. Kings could no longer rule ‘by divine right’ but George attempted to place a series of favourites as prime minister, dismissing governments when they displeased him. His bete noire was the radical journalist and MP John Wilkes, who spent the early 1760s savaging George and his placemen in the press: these were the early days of radical newspapers. George in turn sued Wilkes for seditious libel and the journalist fled to France. 1768 was the year he returned to England in 1768, running as Radical candidate for Middlesex and being elected to Parliament. George promptly had him jailed, prompting a gathering of 15,000 of his supporters at St George’s Fields (near the modern Elephant and Castle). The panicked militia fired on the crowd, killing seven people.

In this febrile atmosphere, there were economic tensions too. Coal was the fuel of the industrial revolution and it came by the shipload into Wapping – where hired hands, paid by the day, would unload the cargoes. They were largely Irish immigrants, employed on piecework by the ‘undertakers’, who would not only recruit men in the taverns of Wapping but pay them in the same place. The undertakers, though, endeavoured to pass over as little cash as possible, generally paying them in kind (food, drink and lodging) at the inns and taverns they also owned. When there were no ships coming in, the undertakers would advance the heavers money – which in these idle times would of course quickly be spent in the tavern.

It got worse for the coal heavers. Their work was hard and thirsty, and they would be kept going through their shifts with supplies of beer and gin – supplied of course by the undertakers. It was a safer drink than water – Londoners of the day lived on alcohol, and even children were hydrated with ‘near beer’. The undertakers charged their heavers for their booze though. It meant that a man could reach the end of the week with no cash at all – sometimes they ended up owing the boss money. It’s an age-old trick, where the worker ends up owing his or her soul to the company store. Even the shovels the men used to move the coal had to be rented from the boss.

But the coal heavers worked together in gangs of 16 or so, and thus had the rudiments of a collective organisation. Remarkably they managed to successfully petition Parliament against the undertakers, and a 1758 Act gave responsibility for unloading coal to the alderman of Billingsgate Ward. Abuses went on though, and the introduction of new equipment, meaning fewer men were required, stoked things up further.

Matters came to a head in 1768 when food shortages led to unrest and riots throughout London. Families who had always struggled to put bread on the table now saw prices rising out of their reach. Indignant at the lack of work and pay – the heavers boarded the coal ships at Wapping and, scaling the rigging, removed or ‘struck’ the top masts, so rendering the craft unsailable. The phrase ‘to strike’ entered the language. Meanwhile, ashore, things were turning nasty.

Angry and often drunken disputes broke out between the coal-heavers and the sailors, who had been armed in defence of their vessels. One skirmish, in Stepney Fields, saw several sailors killed. The exultant and very drunk heavers then headed for the Roundabout Tavern in Shadwell and took pot shots at the landlord, Mr Green.

The army was sent in, and seven of the heavers were subjected to summary justice. Miscreants were traditionally hanged at Tyburn (in Westminster) but the authorities decided that a mass execution at Ratcliff Fields (also known as Sun Tavern Fields) in modern-day Shadwell would effectively discourage further trouble. And so, a writer of the day blithely notes, they got “the wished-for effect: the tumults immediately ceased, and peace and industry was happily restored.”

As teenage boxer Kid Mears stepped through the ropes and into the ring, his young girlfriend could scarcely bear to watch. And later that evening, after another successful bout in his brief career, she issued an ultimatum, threatening: “It’s the ring or me!”

Jack Solomons discarded his gloves and his nickname, and concentrated on the day job. Although hawking fish from a stall on Petticoat Lane market wasn’t the most fragrant of occupations, it was good regular money and – as he jokingly remarked years later – it was only the fish that got battered, not him. He and girlfriend Fay were swiftly married, and would remain together until her death 25 years later.

But in any case, Jack – like that other East End boxer turned businessman, George Walker – had too good a brain to want to it exposed too long to the brutality of life in the boxing ring. He figured that the real money, and the longer career, lay in promoting bouts.

Jack would make his name and his money in the big years of British boxing after the Second World War, with a unique approach, bringing big fighters from the US and Britain together – maximising the audience, maximising publicity and maximising the purse.

But first there was a living to be made. Jack had been born into a family of East End fishmongers in 1900. One wag had it that long before he began importing American fighters to take on the Best of British, his first import to England was live carp.

By 1935 he was working at Ruda’s Wet Fish Shop at 16 Wentworth Street in Petticoat Lane, alongside countless members of the Ruda clan, all under boss Jack Ruda. Jack’s grandson remembers the colourful scenes of live carp and bream being fished from the huge tanks at the back of the shop and his own uncles “coming home on a Friday afternoon, laden with greasy matt bags full of fish, bagels, rich yellow cream cheese, Vienna’s, herring and picked green cucumbers fished out of large barrels from the delis in the Lane with bagels bought from Polly the bagel seller”.

A colourful, if noisome scene. “Not much got washed, including the people,” he remembers. Solomons was destined for the finer things, but first he had to fight his way up through the lower reaches of the fight game. Breaking into the closed shop of fight promotion was tough, but Jack found his way in with The Devonshire Sporting Club. Affectionately known as the ‘Dev’, the club was opened in a converted church in Devonshire Road (now Brenthouse Road), off Mare Street in Hackney by boxing manager Joe Morris and three confederates, one of them Jack. Their speciality was in putting on young, up and coming boxers not handled by the established business – men like the lightweight turned heavyweight from Poplar, Johnny Softley, renowned for his ‘heart punch’ and as ‘the man who was never knocked out’.

After a slow start the hall became one of the most popular boxing venues in London and soon Jack was running the venue, promoting weekly (sometimes twice weekly) shows to crowds of up to 1500 people. Solomons put on more than 300 in all, before the hall was destroyed by German bombs in 1940.

Solomons became increasingly frustrated by the bureaucracy and restrictions placed on small promoters by the British Boxing Board of Control. The BBBBC had been formed in 1929 and was determined not to let too many newcomers challenge the big boys for their share of the considerable money to be made from boxing. The old City of London corporations had nothing on them when it came to closed shops, but Jack wasn’t afraid to take on authority, and The Glasgow Herald of 22 December 1939 reports the fledgling promoter making the news ahead of his fighters, having resigned from the BBBC and defiantly put on an ‘unlicensed’ bill at the Devonshire. The supine Board, apparently less up for a fight than Jack’s boxers, decided against banning him, and over the next decade Solomons would go from strength to strength.

For many East End boxing fans, the highlight at the Dev came in March 1936, when Harry Mizler took on Alby Day for the Southern Area lightweight championship, winning the fifteen round contest on points. Jack was matchmaking for the bigger promoters and managing his own fighters, including Eric Boon, ‘The Fen Tiger’ who became British Lightweight Champion with a win at the Harringay Arena in December 1938. His fighters weren’t getting rich but it was better than the alternative, literally fighting your way out of poverty. East Ender Jack Martin, who boxed under the title Kid Nitram, was managed by Solomons and remembered: “I done about six rounds for £2. If I done eight rounds, I got £4 pounds. If you were top of the bill you’d get £8. It wasn’t bad money. I was born in the East End in 1915 and in the 30s everyone was out of work. On the Dole I got 8 shillings (40p) a week. I hated it. How can you live on 40p a week?”

Harringay was now becoming Jack’s favoured venue and he was displaying the talent for showmanship that would see him dominate boxing for nearly half a century. A Boon fight in 1939 was the first televised boxing match, shown on the BBC as well as in cinemas.

Solomons hit a new level with the Jack London and Bruce Woodcock for the British heavyweight title at White Hart Lane in 1945, and was now promoting the big British fighters of the day such as Freddie Mills, and Randolph Turpin and promoted the sensational bout in 1951 when Sugar Ray Robinson lost his middleweight world title to Turpin. In 1963, he brought Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) to England to fight Henry Cooper. He beat him over five rounds with a technical knockout.

In all, Solomons would promote 26 world title fights and was working almost up to his death in 1979. It’s a measure of the role boxing played in British life then, that in 1957 he was a guest on Desert Island Discs, explaining to host Roy Plomley why his choices included Petula Clark (‘Take Care of Yourself’) and Johann Strauss II (Perpetual Motion) and East End favourites Flanagan and Allen (Down Every Street). His luxury item, curious to note, was a punchbag.

Dear readers,
A request below from Roy Burgess, royburgess21@yahoo.co.uk, of the Old Parmenterians. Can anybody help?

I am currently Vice-Chairman of the Society and am leading a project to restore the tomb of Peter Renvoize, which is located in St. Matthew’s Churchyard, in St. Matthews Row, off Bethnal Green Road.

Peter Renvoize was a treasurer and benefactor of the original school, when it was located near to the church, in the late 16th century.

The facing and engraving on the tomb was cleaned yesderday and work to lift heavy granite blocks and re-align them, etc., will start on Tuesday of next week.

Now, here is where I need your help or advice if you can give it. There were rails or railings around the tomb, when it was last renovated (in 1982), but these appear to have been cut off at the base and ‘taken away’.

We would like to replace the railings in the same form, but have no information as to what they looked like. Do you have any suggestions on how, or where, I can try to trace old photographs of the Church (which may, by chance, include the tomb in the background), or other documented evidence of this?

I must confess, I am a complete novice at tracing historic records and don’t even know the first place to look.

If you are interested in this project (perhaps for your own purposes), I have taken photographs of the tomb, before restoration and shall be taking more on Tuesday and when the final restoration is completed. I’m happy to share them with you and have attached a couple of photos of the tomb in its, pre-yesterday, sorry state.

Yours,

Roy Burgess