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Archive for: August 2011

Fleet Street moves to the East End

Aug. 16 East End crafts and craftspeople, East End industries, East End policing, East End writers no comments

The second half of the 19th century was a great age for the press, as taxes on publications and newsprint were removed, new printing techniques made big print runs possible, and pioneering editors such as the pacificist WT Stead reinvented their trade. And as the 20th century approached, a new breed of entrepreneurial owners would push the industry to new heights.

In 1896, Alfred Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail, costing a halfpenny against the penny cover price of its rivals. The Mail was fiercely imperialist, backing the Government in the Boer War (to the horror of Stead) and earning a reputation for putting patriotism above objectivity. The power of the press was such that many people blamed Harmsworth for Britain’s entry into the First World War (he had been predicting war with ‘The Hun’ since the turn of the century). ‘The most unscrupulous man in Britain,’ railed Lloyd George – before inviting him into his cabinet. But, adding popular features and crisp, concise writing into the mix, the Mail was a huge success.

In 1900 Sir Arthur Pearson founded the Daily Express, which moved its sights from court, war and hard news reporting, bringing in gossip, sports and features for women. And in 1903, Harmsworth launched the Daily Mirror, which replaced illustrations with photographs. Popular mass journalism had been born.

Over the following years, many more papers followed: The Daily Sketch in 1909, the Daily Herald in 1911 (the first national paper of the Labour movement), the Sunday Pictorial (Sunday Mirror) in 1915, Sunday Express in 1918, the Daily Worker and News Chronicle in 1930.

Alongside them, London had three paid-for evening papers, each of them hitting the streets in several editions each day. Its unimaginable today, but in an age before radio and TV, let alone the instant information of the internet, the paper was your only source of information. People would wait on East End corners for the latest edition of The Star (born 1888), The Evening News (1881) or The Evening Standard (1827) to get the racing results from the courses around the country. And scandal was never far away. Journalists from The Star were accused of sensationalising the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 and even inventing the name of Jack the Ripper.

The 1950s and 60s were a peak for Fleet Street, with a dominant Daily Mirror (by now transformed into a Labour, working class title) battling the Mail and the Express for readers, and readerships for ‘the qualities’ steadily climbing. In the 60s, the Daily Express sold an astonishing 6m copies a day (against a tenth of that today) and had foreign correspondents dotted around the globe. The Daily Mirror, meanwhile, was selling 5m copies against 1.2m today.

But things were about to change dramatically. Along with huge readerships the papers had accrued huge staffs. Proprietors began to look at new print technologies as a way of cutting costs, particularly a move from the old, labour intensive hot metal style of typesetting and printing. In 1968, Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World and added the Sun in 1969.

It was a baleful end for a paper that had started as the Daily Herald before being unsuccessfully reinvented by Mirror Group in the early Sixties. The remnant of a paper once edited by Hamilton Fyfe, Charles Lapworth and George Lansbury would now feature Page 3 girls and greet the sinking of the Belgrano with the headline ‘Gotcha!’. Murdoch added the Times and Sunday Times to his News International portfolio in 1981. Long battles with the unions ensued, with lockouts, papers shut down for months at a time, and a state of simmering war between journalists and printers (who could stop the presses at any time).

Fleet Street needed to change but change was brutal when it came. Under the guise of launching a new Sunday paper, Murdoch moved his titles to Wapping over a dramatic weekend in 1986. The aim, with the complicit assistance of the Tory government was to break the unions and, in a violent replay of the Miners Strike of the two years before, that was exactly what they did.

‘The Dirty Digger’, as Private Eye gleefully dubbed him, declared that Fleet Street had ‘three times the number of jobs at five times the level of wages’ as other countries. He also knew the new Atex typesetting technology could remove typesetters at a stroke, and neuter their powerful unions. Murdoch, who as a student at Oxford was so left wing he was dubbed ‘Red Rupe’, devised a military style plan to smash the print unions and make printing profitable.

Police officers would hold back the pickets each night, and Wapping residents (who often couldn’t get to their own front doors) would find themselves in a warzone. Just over a year later the pickets admitted defeat – News International hadn’t lost a single night of printing, and the industury was changed forever.

Many of the other papers may not have liked Murdoch’s approach, but they quickly followed his lead. The papers left their old Fleet Street homes, with editorial office upstairs and presses below, for the East End.

1 Canada Square, previously derided as the most obvious landmark of a white elephant Docklands, became home to the Telegraph, the Mirror, the People and the Independent. The Mail, along with its Evening Standard, would head in the opposite direction, to Kensington, and the Express to the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. The Telegraph and Express papers, meanwhile, would be printed at Westferry on the Isle of Dogs.

Fleet Street had moved to the East End. Meanwhile the printers and compositors, many of them East Enders themselves, found themselves out of jobs – most would never work in newspapers again. 301 years after the Daily Courant first hit the London streets, we stand at the other end of the newspaper revolution, with dwindling sales and the reputation of newspapers and their proprietors (and their friends in police and Parliament) lower than ever. As the owners of News International lurch through their daily crises, East Enders may be wondering how much longer they’ll have the Murdochs as neighbours.

Fleet Street, Wapping and News International

Aug. 16 East End industries, East End writers no comments

The recent murky goings-on at Wapping have seen the closure of one national newspaper and the unravelling of a newspaper empire that controversially moved to Tower Hamlets a quarter of a century ago. The overnight flit of News International to Wapping back in 1986 was just the start as half of ‘Fleet Street’ – liberated from living upstairs from the printing presses – moved to Tower Hamlets over the following years.

As ever, in the 300-year history of London’s national newspapers, the shift was as much about changing laws, changing technology and changing political alliances as anything else.

Walk along Fleet Street in the 1960s you would have passed the offices of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail in its Carmelite House office, the ‘Black Lubyanka’ of Sir Owen Williams’ magnificent Daily Express building, the Daily Telegraph. The Mirror had its offices in Fetter Lane and then on High Holborn just north of Fleet Street, while the Sun (reinvented from the wreckage of the Daily Herald) lay on Bouverie Street just to the south of the street. The Times was in Printing House Square just off the Grays Inn Road.

Throw in the associated Sunday papers, the London offices of dozens of regional papers, magazines and news agencies, and Fleet Street was – by the high point of newspaper circulations in the 1960s, abuzz with the clatter of typewriters, the thunder of the printing presses and the chinking of drained pint glasses as hundreds of journalists rubbed shoulders with lawyers in legendary hostelries around the street, such as the Cheshire Cheese and the Stab in the Back.

Today, with only the London offices of DC Thomson on Fleet Street (think the Sunday Post, the People’s Friend and the Beano) the road is almost exclusively associated with the law. The Inns of Court lie north and south of the street, the Royal Courts of Justice just west in the Strand. It’s an association that goes back many centuries, to long before newspapers and printing.

Fleet Street began as the road joining London’s two cities – the seat of government at Westminster and the home of commerce in the City of London. It thus became the perfect home for the law, drawing up documents for both Crown and the City livery companies, and in their turn an army of scribes grew up, drawing up papers for the lawyers. In 1476, a City liveryman, William Caxton returned from Bruges with a new invention, the printing press. Setting up business in Westminster, he produced the first printed editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (penned just up the road in Aldgate), as well as verses from the Bible, chivalric romances and histories of England and Rome.

His apprentice Wynkyn de Worde kicked off printing in Fleet Street in 1500, setting up a shop near Shoe Lane. The new process was fast and allowed multiple copies of documents. It suddenly became affordable to reproduce and distribute a book or pamphlet and – in a process that has been repeated down the centuries – hundreds of scribes suddenly found themselves made redundant by new technology, lumbered with superb skills that nobody required anymore.

But for many years the freedom of the press to print news was strictly curtailed. The Crown, and its select group of lawmakers and enforcers, the Star Chamber, looked at a medium that could quickly spread information and rumour and thus encourage dissent and organisation among the people, and shuddered. That’s why the first newspaper to be printed in England didn’t roll off the presses in London but in Amsterdam, around 1620. The laws were relaxed with the scrapping of the Star Chamber in 1641, just in time for one of the most tumultuous periods in English history. The Civil War fuelled a huge demand for news – previously, ordinary people might have waited weeks for an incomplete story of what had occurred at the Battles of Marston Moor or Newbury, to trickle down to them.

By the late 1600s, Fleet Street had the London Gazette and in 1702 its first newspaper – the Daily Courant. By the 1720s there were a dozen London papers and two dozen more in the provinces. and by the early 1800s 52 papers in London (and 100 or so other periodicals) among them The Daily Universal Register, launched in 1785 and quickly to be renamed as The Times. That the growth was still quite slow was down to economics. Paper was still expensive, but it was the Stamp Duty on papers that was really holding the industry back.

It didn’t stop John Browne Bell launching the first newspaper aimed directly at a newly literate working class – improvements in mass education had created a whole new market, eager for scandal and gossip. The News of the World hit the streets for the first time on 1 October 1843, priced at 3d (1.5p). In 1855 the last tax on papers was scrapped (taxes on advertisements had been abolished two years before). It opened the way for cheap, mass-produced papers, funded by a boom in advertising. In September that year, the Daily Telegraph launched as London’s first one penny morning paper. In 1861, duty on the newsprint itself was scrapped and – while Charles Dickens and his fellows enjoyed a boom time for authors and journalism – a whole new era of Fleet Street was about to be born.

East End popstar Marc Bolan

Aug. 16 East End musicians, Jewish East End no comments

Like so many pop lives it ended sadly young. Yet for East End star Marc Bolan it wasn’t his own excesses that brought his death, but a tragic accident.

Mark Feld was born in Hackney in 1947, the son of lorry driver Simeon and Phyllis. He was tiny, standing just 5ft2in, but had no illusions – he knew that he was a star just waiting for his moment. That moment would be a long time coming though.

Mark would come up to Soho to see his mum on her fruit stall in Berwick Street Market, and he was soon spending as much time in the record shops that fringed the stalls. He soaked up the American rock and roll that was filling their racks and soon the charts – although you couldn’t hear it on the radio of course: Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Elvis Presley and dozens of others, though his first musical experiments were with that peculiar British hybrid of skiffle music, popular in the UK charts of the late 50s. Years later, Bolan would remember sneaking into the legendary 2i’s coffee bar in Old Compton Street, where British stars such as Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Wee Willie Harris were honing their acts.

Mark had always been destined for stardom. Helen Shapiro, who would reach number one in 1961 at 14, remembered him well. At the age of just 10, East Ender Helen and her brother Ron formed a band which “included Marc Bolan, who was nine and lived down the road. He was called Mark Feld then and was very chubby and very into Cliff.”

Cliff Richard, along with Billy Fury and Rory Storm ruled the charts. But Shapiro, appearing on a bill with an unknown band called The Beatles in 1963, could see the writing on the wall. “I thought: ‘Uh oh, something is changing,’” she remembers.

Pop music moved incredibly swiftly in the 60s. The pair were just a year apart in age, yet Helen topped the charts in the years before the Beat Boom and Marc in 1970. By then, Beat music, flower power and the hippies had come and gone and the pop stars were now rock musicians. Steve Marriot was no longer fronting cheeky Stepney popsters the Small Faces but the much heavier Humble Pie, while Steve Winwood had gone from the Spencer Davis Group to Traffic. They were interested in ‘progressive’ and experimental music, focusing on albums and very sniffy about singles. Some canny musicians spotted a gap for singles artists and Marc – a veteran yet still only 23 – was perfectly placed to exploit it.

He had served a long apprenticeship. After leaving school at 15 ‘by mutual consent’ he had scratched a living as a model. Pick up a catalogue for long-defunct clothing store John Temple from the early 60s and you will see a moody Feld smouldering out from the pages. He also appeared as an extra in TV show Orlando, dressed as a mod.

He cut a series of demos for EMI and others. It’s fascinating to hear the evolution of his voice today (you’ll find many of the recordings on youtube.com). A 1964 cut of Mark singing Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind reveals an American accent halfway between cut-glass and cabaret (think Adam Faith, Eden Kane and John Leyton). By the time he was demo’ing Hound Dog with the early Tyrannosaurus Rex a few years later, the voice is sliding into the trademark Bolan whining drawl.

Luckily for Mark, the A&R men weren’t interested, giving him crucial years in which to develop his own voice. It wasn’t the only change. Mark Feld became Toby Tyler (the name nabbed from a Disney film of 1960), Mark Bowland and finally Marc Bolan. As mod faded, Marc’s hair grew longer and the music more experimental. After a brief stint with the group John’s Children Bolan formed a new band, Tyrannosaurus Rex, with Steve Peregrine-Took providing percussion and bass to Marc’s vocals and acoustic guitar.

The band’s debut album, released in 1968, was very much of its time, ethereal and with an eclectic grab bag of cultural references. My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair… But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows had as its closing track a Bolan-penned poem, Frowning Atahuallpa (My Inca Love), read by DJ John Peel. Marc had probably never met an Inca, nor an ‘Afghan Woman’ (side 2, track 2), though he might have visited Virginia Water (side 1, track 5), but the important thing was that the band was on its way.

Peel was playing Tyrannosaurus Rex on his Radio 1 show, though they still weren’t bothering the charts. But beneath the corkscrew curls and hippy stylings, there was a laser focus on the success that had long eluded him. Bolan dispensed with Took, whose drug taking had reached career-derailing proportions, and drafted in Mickey Finn – a far less talented musician but he looked great on stage.

No record label would be so patient, but EMI imprint Regal Zonophone allowed the band to make four albums with producer Tony Visconti, each barely touching the charts. The fifth, T Rex, was the turning point.

After Ride a White Swan made number two in the chart in 1970, Marc boiled the sound down to a tighter version of the rock and roll he had loved as a child. Hot Love and Get It On, Telegram Sam and Metal Guru – the hits kept coming, eight singles in the top over the next two years.

John Peel was appalled by the blatant tilt at success, though he later admitted that his famous falling out with Bolan saw fault on both sides. But if a long time coming, success was fleeting. New stars were topping the charts – Slade, David Essex, the Bay City Rollers. A distraught Marc took solace in food and alcohol and his elfin good looks disappeared as the pounds piled on.

Salvation was to come from an unlikely direction. In 1976, a whole generation of musicians would be swept away by the rise of punk. Marc, with nothing to lose, embraced it, going on tour with The Damned and wowing audiences who had grown up on his singles. Ironic it may have been, but Bolan’s long years in music gifted him a musical virtuosity the punk acts could only dream of.

Better was to come. TV producer Muriel Young put him in his own TV show, Marc, which went out just as kids were arriving home from school, and brought the new bands such as The Jam to a young audience, as well as Marc’s famous duet with old pal David Bowie).

Marc was a success once again. But by the time that appearance with Bowie went out (20 September 1977) he was dead. Driving home from a West End drinking club, Bolan’s girlfriend Gloria Jones lost control of her car, and the Mini struck a tree. Marc was killed instantly.

William Addis, inventor of the toothbrush

Aug. 16 East End crafts and craftspeople, East End entrepreneurs, East End industries, East End inventors 1 comment

They are called Eureka moments, as chance and inspiration combine to create something great. Archimedes, the man whose overflowing bath led to his principle for discerning the volume of objects must top the list of course. And Einstein has to be right up there. Observing the clock tower in Bern, the German genius suddenly realised that time could move at different speeds in different places, and thus relativity was born.

But, with no disrespect to the scientists, East Ender William Addis’s invention probably tops them all. For the simple device he developed is not only used by every one of us, twice a day, it has prevented pain, illness, misery and early death. Addis was the father of modern oral hygiene and the company he founded is in business to this day. But it came from an unlikely source.

In 1780, the unfortunate Addis was arrested on the streets of Spitalfields and charged with causing a riot. At 46, William was already a successful businessman, a stationer and rag merchant, supplying finished paper to the book trade. The rags he harvested would be pulped down and remade into new sheets of paper – nothing went to waste.

William’s clients, the London booksellers of the 18th century, also sold patent medicines and supplies for pharmacists. It seems curious today, but is maybe no odder than barbers also being surgeons or American pharmacies also being ‘soda fountains’. Or, for that matter, modern London bookstores also doubling as coffee shops.

As he languished in his Newgate gaol cell, William struggled to clean his teeth with the traditional combination of a rag with salt and soot. If only he could get in between the teeth, he could do a much better job. Spying a broom, Addis got an idea. He picked a small animal bone from his plate and drilled small holes in it, pestered a guard to get him some bristles and – eureka – the toothbrush was born.

Timing is all of course, and this was an idea happening at just the right moment. Refined sugar, unknown in London in medieval times, was now being consumed in industrial quantities as supplies came back from the West Indies. Georgian Londoners had rotten teeth but effective dental repairs were a century away, with the only option painful extraction (by those barber surgeons again). Addis, however, added prevention to the mix.

Back at liberty, the entrepreneurial William realised that his new ‘tooth brush’ could be a winner. He produced a small number of the products, fashioned from animal bone and horsehair and offered them to his contacts in the book trade. They quickly sold and soon a toothbrush became a fashionable thing to have in Georgian London.

It was a hard thing to patent, and other manufacturers soon copied William’s bright idea, but it didn’t stop the company growing, and William growing rich. By 1840, the company was run by his son (also called William). Rather than a central ‘manufactory’, the Addis company used a system that was widespread in the East End of the time, piecework, with the women of Spitalfields and Whitechapel producing the brushes in their own homes. The system was also the basis for the matchmaking business, weaving, laundry and many more trades. The women would be paid by how much they produced, invariably having to buy their own tools and materials up front. And if the goods weren’t up to scratch – the company wouldn’t pay.

A brutal system in the days before unions and the legal protection they afforded workers – but the Addises grew very wealthy. By 1840, William Jr was employing 60 workers in an increasingly sophisticated production involving 53 separate processes, and producing four different models: Gents, Ladies, Child’s and Tom Thumb. William would use badger hair for the poshest brushes, but imported hog, pig or boar hair for the rest, mostly from Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and France.

Most of us wouldn’t fancy brushing our teeth with a mixture of bone and hair, but an American invention was to change everything. On 28 February 1935, and after dozens of failed experiments, Wallace Hume Carothers, the head of organic chemistry at DuPont in Delaware, came up with the molten polymer the company would market as Nylon. Carothers, tragically, would kill himself a couple of years later, wracked by depression and convinced his work was useless.

But the Addis company, now marketing its wares as Wisdom Toothbrushes, was quick to see the potential of nylon. Agreeing a deal with the UK licensee, ICI, they produced the first synthetic brushes and launched a huge newspaper campaign. The new brush was more expensive than the competition at 2 shillings (10p) but the timing was perfect. It was 1940 and British housewives were being told to waste nothing – animal bones were going into soups and stews or simply being boiled off by butchers and slaughterhouses, their marrow making nutritious stock. A shortage of bone thus worked in the favour of the Addises and their new nylon brushes.

By the 1960s, Wisdom had moved out to Suffolk and a new factory, and the last Addis left the firm in 1996, bringing more than 200 years of history to a close. But the legacy is clear – a product as ubiquitous and essential as any, the toothbrush is repeatedly voted the one object Britons could not live without. For William Addis, his unfortunate incarceration in a London prison was not just the happy accident that made his fortune, it was one that changed the world.