eastlondonhistory.com

As the driver manoeuvred the bucket of his mechanical digger into the rubble he immediately realised that something was wrong. The boom of the digger lurched forward, as the resistance offered by brick, mortar and solid London clay suddenly gave way to air. Not fresh air though – the workmen had uncovered a vault which had lain undisturbed since the time of Henry VIII.

It was the sort of diversion the demolition company dreaded, as they rushed to clear derelict buildings in Stepney. The site was prime building land, just outside the old walls of the City of London, and work would now have to come to a halt as the architects inspected the site. But as they made their way down into the cellar, on that December day in 1964, things were about to get a lot grislier, and a lot more interesting. The workmen had found the long-lost body of Anne Mowbray – child bride of Prince Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two princes murdered in the Tower of London nearly 500 years before.

Anne, both daughter and heir to the Duke of Norfolk, was married to Richard Shrewsbury on 15 January, 1478. The wedding, at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, was a lavish riot of gold and azure, with guests including Edward IV and most of his court. Nothing unusual there, as Richard was the King’s second son and Anne was in line to inherit one of the great estates of England. But she was just five years old, while her new husband was only four.

The union was just one of the madnesses of one of the bloodiest periods in English history – as rival houses fought for the throne, and kings changed thrones with dizzying frequency. The wedding was a canny financial transaction for Edward IV – effectively selling a stake in the monarchy one of his friendlier nobles, and the Duke of Norfolk was far richer than he. It gave Norfolk, without a male heir, security, while Edward hoped the marriage would quash any quibbles about the succession after his own death.

But in medieval London life could be short. Anne died in 1481, aged just eight. The King, unwilling to give up what he had gained, swiftly passed a law allowing his son to inherit all her wealth and lands on the death of Norfolk. Norfolk acquiesced, fleecing his own relatives of their rightful inheritance. Anne’s cousins, Viscount Berkeley and Lord Howard, were furious. The swiftly concocted law even had a clause so that should the boy Richard die, the estate would revert to the King. Berkeley was bought off, with the King paying his debts; Howard was left with nothing.

On 9 April 1483 Edward IV died suddenly, but he might have died happy in the belief that he had secured the peace for which he fought so hard. He had two sons: 12-year-old Edward now became Edward V; his little brother Richard (already a widower at nine) would become Richard III should anything happen to his sibling; and to safeguard the pair, Edward IV had named his own brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester as Lord Protector.

But the boy king only enjoyed two months on the throne. Richard threw his nephews into the Tower of London and declared the marriage of Edward IV and wife Elizabeth, invalid. Thus the princes became illegitimate and ineligible for the throne. So Gloucester became Richard III, swiftly restoring at least part of the plundered legacy to Lord Howard, and after August 1483, the boys were never seen again, but were supposedly smothered in the Tower. Richard’s reign, meanwhile, was brief and unhappy, and plagued by rebellions. He became the last English King to die in battle, falling at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Plantagenet rule was over, and Henry Tudor took the throne.

For more than 500 years historians and dramatists have debated and imagined who killed the princes, though it’s hard to see past wicked uncle Richard as the culprit. As to the bodies? In 1674, workmen rebuilding a staircase at the Tower discovered hidden bones and these were placed in Westminster Abbey, in an urn confidently emblazoned with the boys’ names. In 1789, workmen carry accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and found an adjoining vault, with the coffins of two unidentified children.

The whereabouts of Anne seemed as much a mystery as that of her husband. But experts from the London Museum (today a part of the Museum of London) quickly put two and two together as they inspected the Stepney cellar. They knew that Anne had been buried in a lead coffin in the Chapel of St Erasmus in Westminster Abbey, but that her casket had been moved when the chapel was demolished in 1502.

Anne’s remains had then been carefully removed to a vault under the Abbey of the Minoresses (close to the modern Minories at the western edge of Tower Hamlets and hard by the old City wall). It was an order with connections to the princess’s father in law. In 1481, Edward IV had granted valuable licences to the abbey, which then lay in the Middlesex countryside but would soon be swallowed by the growing sprawl of London – the modern East End.

Her famously red hair was still on her skull, while her funeral shroud was still intact. For nearly 500 years, the child princess had lain undisturbed beneath the busy East End streets.

The history of Fleet Street is full of startups and failures, mergers and takeovers. An East Ender back in 1960 could have picked up long-gone dailies such as the Daily Sketch, the News Chronicle and the Sporting Life. Unthinkable today, they would have had a choice of three paid-for London evening papers (with several editions a day).

But just as evening the biggest titles swiftly fade from the memory (how many now remember the Daily Herald, which peaked in 1933 with sales of two million, making it the biggest selling paper on the planet) so do even the biggest press barons.

Edward Lloyd was the Rupert Murdoch of the mid 19th century. From his Bow printing works, on the banks of the River Lea, he ran two of the greatest titles of the Victorian age. Ducking and diving, and on occasions simply breaking the law, he built a press empire that set the template for the mass circulation newspapers of a half century later, such as the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Express.

Lloyd had ink and newsprint in his blood. In an era when many newspapers were the mouthpieces of rich men, used as propaganda tools to get their political points across (which may sound familiar today), he was a working class lad made good.

He had trained as a compositor at the London Mechanics Institute (which today forms part of Birkbeck, University of London) and so learned, literally, how newspapers were put together. The ‘comps’ were the men who assembled the metal type into page ‘formes’ from which the news pages were printed. Edward soon saw the potential of mass publishing for making his fortune. He was an entrepreneur by instinct but his training was in printing rather than journalism.

His first venture was Lloyds Stenography, a shorthand system in which Edward wrote the characters himself. It proved a useful if not spectacular seller to reporters and secretaries in London offices. Next off the presses at his River Lea paper mill was a series of popular songbooks, followed by The Penny Pickwick. This abridged collection of the works of Charles Dickens (writing as Boz) with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne (Phiz) was a hit, but it seemed the Bow printer had been rather lax about copyright clearance. Dickens sued, but without success, and the men would go on to become firm friends.

The tireless Edward then launched Lloyd’s Weekly Miscellany (news from around Britain) and followed it with Lloyd’s Weekly Atlas (stories from around the world). Both sold well around the East End and the rest of London, but Lloyd had bigger plans. In 1840 he launched the Penny People’s Gazette and in 1842 was inspired by the launch of one of the great publishing successes of the 19th century. The Illustrated London News quickly became a huge success simply by the novelty of including pictures.

The canny cockney swiftly followed suit with Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper, priced at tuppence (a third the price of his rival) and illustrated with woodcut illustrations. Alas, it quickly became apparent how Edward had managed to sell so cheaply: he was dodging the stamp duty that had to be paid on newspapers. He was forced to fold and relaunch it as Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper (Lloyd was never the snappiest at names for papers) and the Bow printer at last had a hit on his hands.

It was the accession to the editor’s chair of Douglas Jerrold in 1852 (at the princely salary of £1000 a year) that saw Lloyd’s Weekly News, as it was now called, hit its stride. In September 1852, the Duke of Wellington died. The most famous Englishman of his day, the hero of Waterloo and a former prime minister, he had lived to 83. The scale of his state funeral was comparable to that of Winston Churchill a century or so later. Thousands thronged the London streets, and those who couldn’t get there wanted to read about it and see pictures in the papers.

Lloyd’s paper sold 150,000 in the week of the funeral. The proprietor had installed a new rotary printing press at the Bow works – the first in England. He even set up his own esparto grass estate in Algeria, harvesting the raw materials for the Lea Valley works. In his spare hours, Edward and his subordinates would tour the country, spying unused advertising hoardings and snapping up cheap space to advertise his papers.

Edward had illegally dodged stamp duty when he began, and when the tax was finally scrapped in 1860 he took full advantage. He dropped the price of the ‘News’ to a penny and circulation soared to 500,000 a week.

Now he expanded, buying the Daily Chronicle in 1876 for £30,000, and setting himself the task of transforming a small local daily into a national newspaper. £150,000 was invested in that dream. The former Clerkenwell News soared from 8,000 to 140,000 copies a day, and by 1914 its sales would beat the combined circulations of The Times, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post, Evening Standard and the Daily Graphic.

Lloyd had set himself the goal of reaching sales of one million for Lloyd’s Weekly and died in 1890, at 75, with the magical figure almost in his grasp. As press barons do, he kept it in the family, son Frank serving his apprenticeship at Bow before taking over. The Daily Chronicle and Lloyd’s News went from strength to strength, and in 1896 Edward’s flagship title sold a million copies for the first time. The little East End title was now the country’s biggest selling newspaper. So famous was it that when East Ender and aspiring music hall performer Matilda Wood was looking for a stage name she took it from her favourite weekly read – becoming Marie Lloyd.

Things have a habit of coming full circle. In 1930, with the Lloyds a memory as proprietors, the Chronicle was merged with the Daily News ( itself founded by Charles Dickens 74 years before). The left of centre paper published daily until 1960, when it was swallowed by the Daily Mail.

The first million-selling paper, meanwhile, went into steady decline as the new popular dailies stole its sales. In August 1931, under the editorship of Edgar Wallace, it was merged with the Sunday Graphic. And on 4 December 1960, 51 years ago this week, the final Graphic rolled off the presses. The story of the East End press baron came to a close.

The battle to halt the demolition of the Jewish Maternity Hospital in Whitechapel’s Underwood Road has united a disparate group of campaigners. For many East Enders, past and present, this cosy arts and crafts building is a symbol of East End community. The Jewish population of Tower Hamlets has largely dispersed over the last decades. But the will to connect lingers on, with campaigners using the early 21st century phenomenon of Facebook to battle for an early 20th century building.

Like any solid achievement, the hospital began as a dream. The dreamer was Alice Model.
Born to a middle-class family in 1856, Model became a pioneer in maternal and child welfare. Mother and child mortality were horribly high in Victorian times, especially in poor areas such as Whitechapel. Most births would take place at home, with what support there was coming from friends and family, and sanitation and medical care were almost non existent.

Model’s idea was for a proper system of support, where mother and child could be cared for both before and after the birth. Conversations with her friend Bella Lowy, a writer, teacher, communal worker, gave birth to the idea of the Sick Room Helps Society, where mothers could have a safe place to give birth, with nursing help at home afterwards. Pressing the wealthier members of the community for funds, the pair made the plan a reality, with mat and by the early years of the 20th century the SRHS was a huge success. But what they really needed was a permanent home.

A £5000 bequest by Mrs Ada Lewis-Hill gave them their start. Sir Marcus Samuel, the founder of Shell (who would become Viscount Bearsted) gave another £2000 to buy equipment, and Mrs Harris Lebus chipped in to furnish the home. A row of old homes in Underwood Road was demolished and in 1911 the new hospital (affectionately known as Mother Levy’s, after the administrator) rose in their place.

It wasn’t a grandiloquent building. The trustees spent Samuel’s money on medicine rather than show. Young architect John Myers designed a modest arts and crafts style cottage as the entrance to the hospital (it is this that campaigners are fighting to save, rather than the utilitarian body of the hospital). Model and Co wanted the building to be welcoming and “domestic”. Ironically it’s this very modesty of design that led English Heritage to reject calls to list the building last year.

There were three maternity wards, an operating theatre, four free bedrooms and two for private patients. In 1912, the infant welfare centre was added, with free milk for nursing mothers. The nurses also dispensed lessons in hygiene and thrift. The hospital again became a victim of its success, with demand far exceeding supply. By the time Queen Mary visited in 1916, mums were getting lessons on feeding and clothing their tots, and there were lessons on how to hand sew baby garments, and visiting nurses from the Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Institute would distribute clothes from charity collections.

In many ways, the hospital anticipated the long-overdue changes in health care of the 20th century. In 1918 it amalgamated with the Ladies’ Benevolent Lying-In Institution to provide more home services; then the Maternity and Child Welfare Act of 1918 saw improvements in antenatal care. Mother Levy’s had been there ahead of the act, and took an active role. In 1927 neighbouring buildings were taken over, and there was now an infant welfare centre and antenatal clinic and renamed the Bearstead Memorial Hospital (benefactor Marcus Samuel dying that same year). Midwifery services were improved again in 1937, again following the lead of independent organisations such as Mother Levy’s. Ironically it meant the old hospital was now too small.

In 1939, an extraordinary story appeared in the London papers, under the headline ‘Treatment refused’. Expectant mother Francisca Neumann had gone, in increasing desperation, from hospital to hospital in her native Vienna, in search of a bed – only to be told repeatedly ‘We can’t treat Jews here’. Eventually a mercy flight took her to Croydon aerodrome in south London, and thence to Underwood Road, where her child was safely delivered. She would be one of the hospital’s final guests. The hospital closed as World War 2 began, and the hospital would eventually reopen as the Bearsted Memorial Hospital in Stoke Newington, in 1947.

Neumann junior came at the end of thousands of births, with some famous East End names sprinkled among them. Composer Lionel Bart was born there in 1930, and playwright Arnold Wesker in 1932, delivered by Dr Sam Sacks, father of the neurologist and writer Dr Oliver Sacks. The old building, meanwhile, would pass to Stepney Council and first became the Mary Hughes Centre and Day Nursery, then a home for the Family Welfare Association. By 2011 it was in the hands of Peabody – long a provider of homes in the East End – which announced the controversial decision to tear Mother Levy’s down.

A stroll down Underwood Road throws the problem of the hospital into relief. The 1911 building now stands marooned amid modern semis, its contemporaries long cleared in the developments of the latter half of the 20th century. The street, nestling between Vallance Road and Brick Lane, was once the heart of Jewish Whitechapel, but that community has dispersed and now the population is predominantly Bangladeshi. So is the Jewish hospital a building whose time is past? Is it not time to move on and redevelop the site?

Clive Bettington, chair of the Jewish East End Celebration Society, strongly disagrees. “The building may not be architecturally of the highest order, but it’s a vital link to the old Jewish East End. We should honour our past.” And other East Enders seem to agree. Comments on the online petition* speak volumes. “Another building about to be sacrificed. It’s criminal”, says one. Another complains that “enough were destroyed during World War 2. Leave it alone.”

Speaking to passers-by on a cold December evening I uncovered an unsurprising lack of knowledge about the building and its history (old buildings tend to fade into the landscape for most of us) but a heartening enthusiasm for saving it. Sharif, pausing to look at the facade as he hurried against the winter wind up to Brick Lane, seemed baffled that anyone should want to pull the hospital down. “It’s part of our history – of course we should keep it!” And perhaps that’s the most compelling argument. Just like the famous Brick Lane Mosque, previously a synagogue and before that a church, the old hospital is East End archaeology as much as architecture. This isn’t just East End past, but a crucial ingredient in what makes our present.

Useful links:
* Online petition at http://residents-first.co.uk/?p=760
Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Mother-Levys/142259705878324
Tom Ridge’s detailed description of the architecture of the hospital at http://tinyurl.com/c3rsvgr