eastlondonhistory.com

England’s canals were the arteries of the Industrial Revolution; their cargo-laden barges the lifeblood that fed the greatest manufacturing and commercial explosion England has ever seen. Bringing the raw materials from the West India Docks via Limehouse to the factories of the North and the Midlands, they then carried the finished goods back to the Isle of Dogs and thence around the world.

Their heyday was relatively short of course, from the mid-18th century to the mid-1900s, as the much-quicker railways stole their trade. And so the poor canals fell into decay, more likely to contain old prams, bikes and dead dogs than working vessels. All has changed in the last few decades as plucky campaigners cleared the canals and brought them back to life, as leisure craft replaced the working barges, and a new phrase entered the language: ‘canal holiday’.

And so the names of the Lea Navigation, the Regents Canal and the Grand Union are familiar to Londoners today … but where on earth is the City Canal? London has plenty of grand architectural and engineering projects that became white elephants, and the East End more than its share. Often bad planning, dodgy economics or transport cock-ups put paid to (apparently) great ideas.

Until the start of the 1800s, all the cargo vessels which came into the capital was loaded and unloaded in the Pool of London, battling for berths in the area between London Bridge and the later site of Tower Bridge. It was bedlam, and ships could be queuing for days or weeks. The West India Docks was the bold answer. The Isle of Dogs would be hollowed out into two great docks. Northmost was the Import Dock, to the south was the Export Dock. To avoid jams, ships entered into a basin from the eastern (Blackwall) end, lighters coming in from the Limehouse side to the west. Now ships could unload their cargoes of bananas and sugar from the West Indies in the northern dock, before swinging round to load up again in the southern dock.

To the south of the dual docks another grand design was taking shape. The City Canal was dug by the City of London Corporation, slicing the Isle of Dogs in two from Limehouse Reach to Blackwall Reach. Now sailing ships could cut the big loop of the Island out of their journey, as they instead traversed the 1130m of the canal, entering and exiting via locks. The City Canal opened on 9 December 1805. It had cost £168,813 to build, and it immediately became apparent the City fathers had got it wrong. The canal relied on the tide (so was still slow) and the owners felt unable to charge a toll. In 1829, the City sold the canal off to the West India Docks Company for just £120,000.

The West India were less interested in a misconceived canal than in stopping it falling into the hands of competitors: the opening of the St Katharine Docks in 1828 and a bid for a coal dock south of the canal had unnerved the Company. And then, with the exception of a timber dock to the south of the canal in 1832, they let their new acquisition lie fallow. It wasn’t until 1866 that the owners got to work, enlarging the old canal into a new South Dock. Now the West India had the familiar three-dock layout that it kept until the development of Canary Wharf a century and a half later.

You can still just about trace the line of the City Canal today. The western inlet lies just west of Westferry Road as you drive up to the Heron Quays roundabout. To the east, the old canal exits into the Thames just south of the Gun pub. That Blackwall entrance (and the old entrance to the Blackwall Basin which fed the Import and Export docks), effectively sliced Coldharbour off from the rest of Blackwall at the start of the 19th century and turned it into an isolated hamlet. The City Canal had joined the long and inglorious list of the East End’s architectural white elephants.

One of the greatest of them all was the covered Columbia Market, endowed in 1869 by Angela Burdett-Coutts, a philanthropist strong on charity but not so hot on the numbers. Nobody used the building, the market traders preferring to hawk their wares on the streets around. A planned railway line to serve the market was never built, and the market closed in 1886.

Of course you can be ahead of your time. The Thames Tunnel was a labour of love for Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the father-and-son team laboured over 18 years with their revolutionary ‘shield’, and overcoming several collapses (both financial and actual) and the deaths of a number of workers. They finally proved to the sceptics that a tunnel could be run beneath a river, only to find that (at a penny a time) foot travellers would never recoup the costs (£630,000, an enormous amount in the 1840s). The Tunnel was eventually sold off to the East London Railway Company and now carries the East London Line.

The Tower Subway was built by James Henry Greathead in 1870, using his own version of the shield. Another foot tunnel, running from the Tower of London to Tooley Street on the South Bank, it went the same way as the Brunels’ tunnel, with foot passenger revenue insufficient to keep the project alive. The Tunnel now carries electrical cabling.

London being London, we generally press these architectural appendices into new uses, but there is little sadder than a disused tube station. St Mary’s (Whitechapel Road) obviously seemed a good idea when it was built in 1884 by the South Eastern Railway – but who really needs a station between Aldgate and Whitechapel? It closed for good in 1938 and was destroyed by enemy bombs in 1940. Ironically, it was then pressed into service as an air raid shelter, but for nearly 70 years has lain forgotten and unused beneath Whitechapel Road.

Video of St Mary’s Whitechapel at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008vfj5

There is little natural and untouched about the Isle of Dogs. Little that doesn’t bear the mark of Man and his relentless industrialisation, tinkering and changing down the centuries. The embankments and defensive walls that gave the old marshy island its defined shape. The enormous hollowing out of its hinterland that created the West India and Millwall Docks (and turned a peninsula into an ‘island’ in the process) creating pocket communities almost completely isolated from one another and from the rest of London. The development of Canary Wharf, building over much of the West India Dock and turning it from island to peninsula once again.

As the architectural critic and topographer Ian Nairn wrote in his excellent Nairn’s London in 1966, “You will know a bit about East End topography by the time you find this one.” For just as the elements shape the topography of the landscape and leave historical curiosities (the meandering Thames having created the ox-bow of the Isle of Dogs in prehistory), the relentless building and overbuilding of the Island has created its own oddities. Head south down Prestons Road and you’ll probably miss it – unless you know what you’re looking for.

Coldharbour was once the main thoroughfare down the east side of the Island, but is now marooned, cut off by the development of the West India Docks in the early 19th century. Turn left off Prestons Road and you find yourself in an impossibly narrow road, more a cobbled path really. Apart from challenging the driving skills of the modern Islander, manoeuvring their Land Rover Discovery round the neighbour’s Audi, it gives aclues to the medieval highway. Once the island was embanked against the river here, creating the ‘Blackwall’ that gave that hamlet its name, a path was run along the top. ‘Coldharbour’ as it became known, ran south from Blackwall Stairs before petering out somewhere near the present entrance to the South Dock of the West India Docks.

There is little known about the early inhabitants of an area that, in medieval times, must have been very bleak and remote, prone to flooding and to river fogs, damp and low lying and isolated from the rest of London. A series of architectural digs in the 1960s and after revealed old wooden piles (remnants of earlier river defences) but little more. By the time reliable church and tax records appear in the 18th century, the roll call is an unsurprising one – there are fishermen, watermen, lightermen, river pilots, shipwrights, boat builders and ship-chandlers. Some of them grew rich on the river trade. The Clippingdales, river pilots who lived in a house on the site of No. 15 in the eighteenth century, were reputed to have made a fortune out of their profession.

From the second decade of the 17th century buildings began to appear. The development of the East India Company’s shipbuilding yard at Blackwall in 1614 and the opening of Browne’s (later Rolt’s) shipyard in the 1660s, saw the hamlet of Blackwall grow into a bustling riverside village. The river side of the old path, now the high street, became built up – so much that today you might be unaware that the Thames lies on the other side of the buildings. It’s only as you approach the southern end of Coldharbour that a gap appears: between the modern development at Concordia Wharf and the Gun pub (where dubious legend has it that Lord Nelson enjoyed a drink). Then Coldharbour curves back round to meet the highway again. As Nairn described it “a tiny loop off Prestons Road”.

300 years ago this was the highway, but in the 1800 work began on the West India Dock. Progress was extraordinarily swift. By 1805, the Import and Export docks were complete (and would eventually become the north and middle docks). And to the south, the City Canal completely bisected the Island from Limehouse Reach on the west to Blackwall Reach on the east. What had once been a main thoroughfare with businesses, houses and pubs (the Gun dates from the 1720s) now became almost completely isolated, an island within an island. Coldharbour, once part of Blackwall, now found itself cut off from the village.

Perhaps it’s that isolation that has seen the character of Coldharbour remain distinctively antique. There is little elsewhere of even the Victorian Isle of Dogs. Some grand buildings remain. Overlooking the entrances to the West India Docks are the two houses built for dock officials. Bridge House (1819) was designed by John Rennie for the Superindent of the West India Dock Company, while Isle House (1825) was built by Rennie’s son. The elegant, detached houses have full-height bow windows – designed to allow the dockmasters to observe the ships entering the dock. Number 3 is an amalgamation of two houses by Samuel Granger (1820), giving a double-bowed river frontage, looking onto a garden. At Number 15 is the former home and workshop of Benjamin Granger Bluett, joiner, mast and block maker. Built in 1843 on an earlier 1770 house, it’s listed today for its largely intact interior.

A little slice of old docklands has survived the destruction and development of the 20th century then. But what happened to the City Canal? You’ll look in vain on a modern map for this marvel of engineering. Next week, we find out.

The lady of the house proudly showed the reporters around her ancestral pile, perfect in every 17th century detail, from the stone-lined fireplace with overmantel bearning the arms of James I, to the ornamented plaster ceiling (a marvel of intersecting squares and quatrefoils). Everything, in fact, was as James I himself had commissioned it.

But this was no drawing room in England (Olde or otherwise). Rather, the elaborate confection dubbed ‘the Bromley Room’ stood within a house in a residential street in Milwaukee, on the shores of Lake Michigan. How this copy of a reconstruction of a real room is a bizarre tale, perhaps even odder than the shipping of London Bridge to Lake Havasu City in Arizona.

With no disrespect to the citizens of Bromley, it’s not a part of London to which tourists in search of ‘ye olde Englande’ immediately head. Yet this often overlooked part of the East End, with most of its built environment dating from the last century or so, crops up again and again in London history.

It boasts what is generally reckoned to be the oldest brick house in London in the early Tudor manor house of Bromley Hall. Constructed by Holy Trinity Priory in 1485, the hall stood on the earlier foundations of the twelfth century Lower Bramerley Manor (so old that Bromley wasn’t even called Bromley yet). It now stands in Gillender Street, which certainly wasn’t around when it was built. The award-winning restoration of the hall in 2006 safeguarded the building for a few centuries more.

Centuries before that, the area was called Bromley-St Leonards, after St Leonard’s Priory, built in the reign of William the Conqueror. The Benedictine Priory even crops up in the Canterbury Tales. That son of Aldgate Geoffrey Chaucer mocks the prioress’s cockney-accented French, saying: “And frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, after the scole of stratford atte bowe, For frenssh of parys was to hire unknowe”. The priory, like so many others, was destroyed by Henry VIII, and its site is now somewhere beneath the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road. The only reminder of the old abbey today is in the name of St Leonard’s Street.

But one of the grandest lost buildings of Old Bromley was a palace built for James I in 1606. Its construction says much about the area as it was in the 17th century. Just as the Isle of Dogs was (perhaps) so named because Kings of England kept their hunting dogs there, so Bromley Old Palace was primarily a hunting lodge for the Scottish king. Partly built from stone salvaged from the demolished priory, it was still a royal palace into the reign of James II, with stables being added.

Its history holds up an interesting mirror to the development of this part of Middlesex as it slowly became subsumed into London and headed steadily downhill. During the 18th century it was subdivided into two merchants’ houses, in 1750 it became ‘The Old Palace School’ and then a factory. In 1894, universal education and the need for new schools sounded its death knell. What had once been a royal palace would now be demolished, with the a new London Board school raised in its place.

A few years before nobody would have cared: the fine wood panelling would have been tossed on a fire, the stonework smashed and recycled into a new building. But the Victorians had fallen in love with the past – albeit an often romanticised and sylvan version of Old England before the Fall of industrialisation. They had even invented a new type of building in which to put the past – the museum. There was an outcry over the loss of such a precious piece of London, and the artist and designer CR Ashbee led a campaign to save the building. Before the demolition men moved in, the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased the house – lock, stock and state room – for £250, and rebuilt what became known as ‘the Bromley Room’, but this time in Kensington..

Miraculously, the interior of the palace had survived largely unscathed through 300 years, and the V&A curators of today give a loving description of what was found. This was the original parlour of the house, with “exuberant classical ornament typical of the period…a doorway opposite the chimney-piece, which led into a passage…the panelling divided by six Doric pilasters, or rectangular columns. These and the frieze that encircles the room at ceiling height decorated with strapwork ornament…the elaborate overmantel contains a variety of carved decoration. At the room’s heart the stone chimney-piece features a frieze of carved birds and monsters, which were probably originally picked out in gold and colours”.

Fifty years later, Wisconsin housewife, Mrs Dake, visited the V&A on a tourist jaunt to London and was entranced by what she saw. So was born the third version of the Bromley Room, an exact replica with all the carving done by the local woodworking firm Matthews Brothers abetted by a team of skilled masons. Unicorns and lions danced across the stonework, just as James I had decreed, 360 years before.

It wasn’t quite Old England. In an admirably eclectic approach, the Dakes also plundered medieval tapestries from an impoverished French count, and created a ‘tavern’ (think Hollywood does Robin Hood) using oak beams ‘rescued’ from old barns in the Wisconsin countryside. Alongside was ‘The Tent’, a room featuring a full-size Italianate fountain.

2344 East Back Bay Street in Milwaukee may be an improbable place to find a complete slice of early modern England, but the house survives to this day and is currently up for sale (a shade under $1m should you be interested). One can only wonder: does the Bromley room survive? And what an earth will prospective buyers make of it when they walk through the door?

* You can see the State Room at the V&A, http://www.vam.ac.uk/

Just how drunk were Victorian East Enders? Did button makers quaff more pints in a day than opticians? Did bookbinders sink more gin than drapers? Hard statistics to collate and crunch you might think, but it didn’t stop the inexhaustible Henry Mayhew, who would die penniless in near obscurity, but whose ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ is still read today.

These days, data journalism is one of the buzz words in publishing, so Mayhew (writing in the 1850s) was arguably 150 years ahead of the game.The problem was that despite a forensic obsession with compiling statistics, Henry didn’t really know what he was doing, being a far better journalist than statistician. But along the way his endless writings about the East End, and especially the East End docks, yielded fascinating colour and detail.

Henry Mayhew comes down to us today as a social researcher and journalist, but he was much more than that – a larger than life man with a remarkable history before he took up his pen. One of 17 children of Joshua Mayhew, he went to Westminster School before heading to Wapping to run away to sea. After several years as a midshipman with the East India Company he returned to London, becoming first a trainee solicitor and then a freelance journalist. Mayhew rarely stood still, moving quickly from job to job (and at one point combining managing a West End theatre with his freelance jobs. His fleetness of foot proved handy when it came to escaping his creditors – a pattern that continued his whole life.

Mayhew found himself at the heart of much pioneering Victorian journalism. In 1842 he co-founded Punch magazine. A year later he was at the heart of the new Illustrated London News. Henry’s stock in trade was a sort of stats-based reportage. He would sail enthusiastically forth into the streets of the East End, his long-suffering wife Jane at his side as a copytaker, and seek out ordinary working people, recording their stories and observations on their (often miserable) lives.

His inability to avoid extrapolating from the facts they gave him generated his famously imaginative statistics. So, finding himself outside a Whitechapel theatre, talking to the sandwich vendor plying his trade there, he set off on one of his sallies. “This man calculated that in the saloons [and] concert rooms … at Limehouse, Mile End, Bethnal Green Road and elsewhere there might be … 70 sandwich sellers in all.” Now Henry extrapolates that the spending on ham sandwiches on the East End streets is “£1820 yearly, or 436,800 sandwiches.” There is much much more, as he goes on to calculate the cost per vendor of setting up in the ham sarnie trade: “2s for a basket, 2d for mustard, 6d for a knife and fork…” and so on, and on, and on.

Mayhew is scathing about official government statistics, with some justification. He believes they have got the number of street children wrong (he is almost certainly right) and attempts to calculate it himself from the returns from workhouses, hospitals and gaols. He tuts over their estimate of the number of London dustmen (so called because they collected coal ash or ‘dust’ in those days) and ups their figure from 254 to 1800, doing a back calculation from the number of London houses and an estimate of how much coal each domicile would burn each year.

And it was the coal trade that led Henry to his calculations on booze. Interviewing the coal whippers, heavers and backers down on the docks of Wapping, he is stunned by the amount they drank. One, who turns out to be “a good Latin and Greek scholar”, asserts: “If I have anything like a heavy day’s work, I consider three pints of porter a necessity.” Another states that: “Of my £1 wages, I need to spend at least 12s (60p) on liquor.” Gathering the other coal men together, Mayhew discovers the reasons. This was hot and thirsty work, the dust got into your throat, and there was precious little chance to slake your thirst if you were on a shift all day. Breaks were few, and there was no fresh water to be had.

This of course got Mayhew thinking: which trade drank the most? So emerged one of his most entertaining (if scientifically questionable) pieces of research, as he questioned an enormous number of East Enders about their drinking. He then collated figures for each trade, rating each for an average level of drunkenness. This, compiled from Metropolitan Police figures which were themselves rather dodgy, said that one person in 114 had an ‘above average level of drunkenness’. It’s hard to pin down what their ‘average level of drunkenness’ was however.

Henry picked up the figures and ran with them regardless. The least drunk East Enders were servants (only 1 in 586 was drunker than the average: unsurprising perhaps as it might lose you your living). Clergymen and grocers were also surprisingly abstemious, as were clockmakers, carvers and gilders – their work perhaps requiring a precision that would be destroyed by strong drink – or perhaps more prosaically it was simply solitary in its nature and they didn’t get out much.

Certainly it was the jobs where men did heavy work in gangs where boozing was at its worst – and perhaps that hasn’t changed so much. Irongmongers, bricklayers, millers and carpenters were very fond of a drink. But almost as soon as we conjure up a convincing argument, so it collapses. Surveyors, hatters and opticians were also notably thirsty (one in every 22.3 of the latter being drunker than your average cockney). Worryingly too, one in 68 doctors were above the average, one in 28.7 cab drivers and one in 11.8 surveyors. But the drunkest East Enders of all? Button makers, with one individual in every 7.2 being a heavier than average drinker. These days Tower Hamlets has no button makers and there seem to be East End pubs closing every day – now there’s a statistical correlation Mayhew could have fun with.

The eyes gaze out demurely from the music hall posters, snaring the casual passer-by. Lottie Collins was a huge draw on the Victorian stage and part of that was an indefinable something that catches the eye and makes you want to keep watching – star quality. But behind the beguiling stare lay unhappiness, and Collins would be dead in early middle age.

Of course, by the time the pictures we see here were taken, sometime around 1890, Lottie was an old trouper. Only in her late twenties, she had already been pounding the boards of the London music halls for a decade and a half. Born in Spitalfields in 1865, Charlotte Louisa Collins had started on stage at just 11, in a skipping rope act with her younger sisters. Together Lottie, Lizzie and Marie made up The Three Sisters Collins.

It sounds an unpromising routine. But with at least 30 music halls in mid-Victorian London, plus countless more pubs with stages, and a dozen or more acts needed to fill each bill, there was an immense appetite for new talent, and the skipping Collinses took their place at the bottom of the playbill alongside the plate spinners, sand dancers, stilt walkers and shadow puppeteers.

Music hall was itself relatively young and had its roots in the complexity of London bylaws. From its earliest days, theatre had a tinge of anarchy about it, with travelling players mocking the establishment figures of the day. That had continued when the minstrels put down roots, with the first permanent playhouse in London being Shoreditch’s ‘The Theatre’ in 1576. Plays had been banned from the City proper, and as in 1572 plays had been banned (supposedly to prevent spread of the plague, but probably also to prevent the spread of sedition).

By the early 1800s, what was performed in the London theatre was strictly controlled. The Lord Chamberlain could veto the performance of any new play, or any modification to an existing one, and music in the theatre was banned. Little surprise then that Londoners found the theatre a dull place and looked elsewhere for their fun. In the early 1800s, that meant open air venues such as the Vauxhall Gardens, but by the 1830s entertainment moved indoors. The dingy drinking holes of the 1700s were being replaced by much grander pubs, complete with saloon bars. And the finest saloons had their own stages, where unlicensed, bawdy-as-you-like musical entertainments played nightly. Demand was such that impresarios then simply sidestepped the law. If legitimate theatre couldn’t give the punters what they wanted, they would build their own halls, free of the Lord Chamberlain’s dead hand.

And so the Collins girls found themselves skipping from stage to stage. Several large music halls were built in the East End, including the Empire at 95-99 Shoreditch High Street, and the Royal Cambridge, at 136 Commercial Street. Of course, nobody wants to occupy the bottom of the bill for long, and by her early twenties, Lottie had shaken loose from her sisters to launch herself as a singer and dancer. She moved from the halls to perform in the theatre too. By the 1880s, the rules on music in the theatre had been relaxed, and Lottie started appearing on the West End stage, before making the leap across the Atlantic. By the early 1900s, many English music hall artists would be playing Burlesque and Vaudeville revues around the US (Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel among them) and Lottie was an early pioneer. And like all the big stars of the Victorian halls – the Dan Lenos, Marie Lloyds and Little Tiches – she needed her theme song. Big singalong choruses, ideally packed with double entendres, and simple catchy tunes were a must.

It was while touring the US in 1891 that she first heard the song Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!, in the fine tradition of saucy music hall songs that simultaneously scandalised and titillated the staid Victorian audience. There was Marie Lloyd with She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas (which after complaints was changed to ‘cabbages and leeks’), and What are we going to do with Uncle Arthur, a music hall favourite about a geriatric sex pest which survives today as the theme music to Upstairs Downstairs. And while the lyrics of Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! might not quite match Li’l Kim for lewdness, they were strong enough to be censored. Lyrics such as ‘just the ust the kind for sport I’m told’ and ‘though not too bad I’m not to good’ were censored in the sheet music versions, to present the image of a girl sparky yet devoutly moral, and remove any suggestion of extra-marital fun.

On the stages of the East End music halls, of course, Lottie could carry on regardless. As the show wore on, and the beer and gin flowed more freely, the laughter would get louder and more raucous, and Lottie’s winks, nudges and mugging to the crowd would grow ever more broad and outrageous. A demure first verse would give way to an uninhibited and exhausting series of high kicks exposing stockings held up by sparkling garters, and bare thighs – a sort of cockney can-can.

It seems extraordinary today to build a fortune on one song, but in 1892, Lottie saw her earnings rocket into the stratosphere, as she performed her song at four London theatres a night, at £25 a time. She was also on a retainer of £75 a week to render the song in a revue at The Gaiety Theatre in the Strand. She then took the boat to New York once again, earning $1000 a week at the Standard Theatre and clearing $25,000 in her six-month tour of the song.

Lottie became extraordinarily rich, but something was obviously going badly wrong. In 1898, estranged from Samuel Cooney, the father of her three children, she attempted suicide by cutting her wrists. There was another big hit, with Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me A Bow-wow, and another marriage, in 1902, to songwriter and producer James William Tate, ten years her junior, but by now her big-earning days were gone, and music hall had moved on. It must have been particularly galling to a star in her thirties to receive a condescending review in the United States as a ‘mature’ performer. Lottie died of bronchitis and heart disease back in London in 1910. She was just 44.

london history/23 april 2012/toynbee and the olympics/rennie

If the young Pierre de Coubertin were to stroll around the London Olympics site today he’d doubtless be amazed, and slightly baffled, as to how the seed of an idea had flowered. He would certainly be impressed at the competition between all classes of men and women taking place on and in the multifarious tracks, fields, courts, ranges and pools of east London. And he would probably be delighted that for the first time it was happening here.

For it was in the East End that his ideas for an Olympic Games first began to come together. In Whitechapel’s Toynbee Hall, itself a social experiment in bridging the gap between haves and have-nots, to the mutual benefit of both, the French de Coubertin began to embrace a very English idea. Healthy minds and healthy bodies would be cultivated together, to the greater good of society. The roots of Coubertin’s idea lay in a crisis of confidence for the French nation, and the young Baron’s mission was to find a means of rebuilding France’s morale.

In June 1886, Coubertin was on what we would today call a fact-finding tour. The aristocratic 23-year-old had turned his back on the expected military career to tackle social issues and fight for educational reform in France. His country had been humiliatingly trounced in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 and Coubertin, along with many of his countrymen saw a lack of physical fitness, teamwork, leadership and moral courage as being at the root of the problem.

Coubertin’s first call had been to the English public schools. Eton, Harrow and Rugby were producing young men who spent almost as much time on football, rugby, tennis, fencing or fives as on Latin and Algebra:some people remarked scornfully that exercising the body seemed much more important than stretching the mind at times, with intellect being rather mistrusted. Nonetheless, these were the boys who would go on to form the officer class of the British Army, and Pierre was impressed.

But then, at Toynbee Hall, he found the young scions of the upper and the upper middle classes doing something rather unexpected. Rather than viewing the working classes as people to drive their carriages or till the fields of their estates, the young Oxbridge graduates were working with them: teaching them mathematics and English; running boxing, swimming and rowing clubs. The Toynbee ‘missionaries’ were practising that very Victorian brand of muscular Christianity, helping working class people to help themselves, and giving them skills which would lift them out of poverty.

Toynbee Hall had been founded by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett in 1884, in memory of their friend Arnold Toynbee, a young Oxford historian who had devoted his time to working with the poor of Whitechapel until his untimely death at the age of 31. The idea of ‘two nations’ was a powerful strain in late Victorian thinking, and the Barnetts saw the only way to cure the stubborn poverty of the East End was to get rich and poor working together. The rich would bring their skills, helping to draw out the latent talents of the working classes. In the process, the Oxbridge men would learn valuable social lessons and a divided England would be brought together.

The idea quickly spread, with other ‘settlements’ spring up in London and around the globe. Many of the residents of Toynbee Hall would go on to become major 20th century figures in social reform – Clement Attlee and William Beveridge to name just two. Coubertin was enthralled by what he saw, saying: “Many links across the classes were developed and many friendships formed. Beliefs have joined these different men who fight for the same cause.”

Crucial to Coubertin’s nascent idea was a union of sport and culture – he expressed pleasant surprise at the high-brow books workers were borrowing from the library. And he believed in starting the job young, noting with approval the trips the graduates would lead into the countryside, with teams of children playing sports and learning about the flora and fauna they encountered.

Courbertin made other visits during his time in England, famously to the Much Wenlock Games in 1890. The Shropshire event was unusual in bringing a number of sports together, and had itself been modelled after the ancient Olympic Games. And there had been other ‘Olympics’, including Liverpool’s Grand Olympic Festival, held each year between 1862 and 1867. Pierre could even have looked to his own country: Revolutionary France held L’Olympiade de la Republique annually from 1796-8. By 1896, the Baron was ready to launch his own version, with the first modern Olympiad taking place in Greece.

A century later, the Olympics is a massive global phenomenon. De Coubertin’s social experiment unknowingly anticipated our modern thirst for sport as spectacle and event, and receptacle for ever greater quantities of cash. To the motto of ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ some sceptics might add ‘Ever more expensive’. And the Baron might have wondered how his dream of rich and poor working together sat with the spectacle of ‘Games Lanes’: IOC members speeding in their limousines past the hoi polloi stuck in traffic jams. The Barnetts, meanwhile, would be astonished where their proto-version of ‘we’re all in this together’ has led.

But Whitechapel, as much as Athens and Much Wenlock, takes its proud place in the history of the modern Games. Without Toynbee Hall and its muscular missionaries, there would be no London 2012.

[944 words, ends]

As the price of fresh food goes through the roof, many East Enders are heading for the shed and digging out long forgotten trowels, spades, rakes and … what exactly do you call that thing with the hollowed-out triangle on the end. “Why not grow our own?” we think. And so we set off to create something as uniquely English as pie and mash or saucy seaside postcards – the kitchen garden.

There is history here of course. Watch any film purporting to depict East End working class life during World War II, and sooner the later the father of the house will roll up his shirt sleeves and head to the backyard with his spade. But all those Jack Warners and Stanley Holloways were only the onscreen versions of real East End dads. The destruction of the Blitz had an unexpected side effect: there weren’t just plants growing among the cracked concrete, the good people of Whitechapel, Stepney, Bow, Poplar and Bethnal Green were planting their own gardens in the rubble.

The Dig for Victory Campaign had been launched in xxxx by a Government terrified that Britain was about to run out of food. Rationing had been introduced in 1940 as German U-boats began to threaten merchant vessels bringing in essential foodstuffs. Britain, declared the Ministry of Agriculture, had to go self sufficient. The result was one of Britain’s most successful propaganda drives. Dig for Victory encouraged every man, woman and child to turn their garden, or even the grass verge in the street, to fruit and veg. By 1942, half of us were taking part and even the Royal Family had grubbed up the Buckingham Palace rose beds for onions (or at least they’d had a man do it for them).

David Cotterill was a Bethnal Green schoolboy when war broke out. He remembers the shock at hydrangeas and hyacinths making way for carrots and cauliflower. “Gardening wasn’t new. All these little terraced houses with front doors direct onto the pavement [David grew up near Columbia Road] had roses and beans in the back garden. People used to go behind the brewery and the milk carts, pick up the horse’s mess to put on the roses.” What was new was those precious flowers making way for utilitarian vegetables. “My mum wasn’t happy losing her flowers. I remember her saying we had to grow peas intead of sweet peas.”

Front gardens were dug up too, casting aside the strict hierarchy of the English garden. Angela Canty lived in slightly leafier Bow. “My parents had been very proud of having a front garden. It was a status symbol I suppose, in that they’d done quite well and moved out from Whitechapel before the war. But then all the gardens were getting planted with runners, carrots and lettuce … it looked very peculiar but you couldn’t live on the stuff you got from the shops.”

Of course, some crops needed a bit more space than you’ll find in a terraced garden. And so the public spaces of London were thrown over to the Dig for Victory campaign. David remembers allotments being laid out in Victoria Park, while the destruction of the German bombs opened up gap sites that were often swiftly planted up.

The campaign was a huge success and by 1944 the Ministry was no longer calling for more land to be planted up – rather it was looking for efficiencies in agriculture. The Government, with brilliant marketing and posters that still look good on a study wall today, had mobilised the innate keenness and love of the outdoors of Londoners. But, as so often in English history, Londoners’ gritty response to the call concealed an amateurishness on the part of the authorities. East Enders had long been keen gardeners – some historians have put it down to the Industrial Revolution and our early move away from the land. Perhaps all those pocket gardeners in Shoreditch, Wapping and the Isle of Dogs were subconsciously tapping in to the race memory of their great great grandparents back in the field of Essex, Yorkshire or Ireland.

Whatever the reason for our love of tilling and sowing, we’d been here before. The roots lay in one of the first mass conscriptions, for the Second Boer War in 1898. London recruiting sergeants were appalled at the physical specimens emerging from the tenements of Whitechapel. A 70-hour week in a sweatshop wasn’t conducive to good health of course, but nutritional scientists such as Boyd Orr petitioned the Government for a coherent food policy. Much of the enthusiasm for growing your own during the early years of the 20th century came from the lack of decent fresh fruit and veg to be had. That famed English love of roses (with many tons of manure freely provided by the thousands of London dray horses) was perhaps more about a craving for beauty in the heart of a very grubby city. And during World War I it became painfully obvious that rural England wasn’t providing enough to feed urban England. The allotment craze took off, and there were 1.5m of them by the end of the war. By 1936, the number had halved.

But, just in time, the people stepped into the breach. And of course, with rationing persisting well into the 1950s, there was still a compelling reason to grow your own. That withered as affluence grew in the sixties and seventies and more of us moved away from the land and towards the pre-prepared foods section of the supermarket. The seeds have always been there, lying dormant and waiting for the right climate perhaps. It’s hard to imagine another country’s national television broadcasting an hour of gardening programming at prime time on a Friday, as the BBC does with Gardeners’ World. A crop of other gardening programmes flourish across the schedules, there is Gardeners’ Question Time on Radio 4 and the Chelsea Flower Show seems to push major world events off the headlines come the summer. Meanwhile, gardening books fight with cookery books for pride of place in the best-seller lists – the English, it’s fair to say, love their gardens.

And that famous English amateurism? As we’re threatened with £1000 fines for using a hose, the Environment Agency reports that every day more than 3.3 billion litres of treated water – 20 per cent of the nation’s supply and 234 million litres a day more than a decade ago – are lost through leaking pipes in England and Wales. The water lost would meet the daily needs of 21.5 million people. East End gardeners may be forgiven for ruefully looking at their patch and thinking of the bonuses leaking into the bank accounts of Thames Water bosses. But it’s spring and the last frost is (hopefully) gone. So hosepipe ban notwithstanding, it could be time to scrape off those rusty tools and start digging for victory once again.

It’s the stuff of Boys’ Own stories. A young officer, seeing his superior officers cut down by enemy fire and his own troops thinned by machine gun fire, defies overwhelming odds to hold the line against the Germans. Victory is impossible yet he shrugs off his fears and machine gun bullets to keep his men together until reinforcements arrive. Feted by his countrymen, he returns home to receive the highest military honour Britain can bestow – the Victoria Cross. What makes the story of East Ender Geoffrey Harold Woolley the more remarkable is that he wasn’t even a regular soldier – he became the first territorial to win the VC.

The horrors of the First World War are well documented. But even by the standards of the Great War, the Battle for Hill 60 was brutal. Sir John Denton Pinkstone French, chief of staff of the British Army during the conflict, described it as “the fiercest fight in which British troops have ever been engaged” and it was pivotal in the direction the war took on the Western Front.

Woolley was a peace-loving man, destined to be a vicar. He had been born in Bethnal Green on 14 May 1892, the son of the curate of St Matthew’s in Hackney. The Woolleys were an academic (and abundant) clan. Among Geoffrey’s ten siblings were Sir Leonard Woolley, one of the fathers of modern archeology and a friend of Lawrence of Arabia. Another was the ethnographer George Woolley. After grammar school (Parmiter’s in Approach Road, Bethnal Green) Geoffrey went up to Queen’s College, Oxford and seemed destined to follow his father into the Church.

But the Woolleys were cut from the cloth of muscular Victorian Christianity. Heroes of the Great War by GA Leask takes an unironically patriotic stance unfashionable today. Nonetheless it paints an interesting picture of 23-year-old Geoffrey as “British and unassuming to the core, and a typical specimen of muscular Christianity. He excels at cricket, tennis, and football, and played the greater game of war with all his heart and soul. Notwithstanding his deep religious principles and his connection with a clerical family, this young Briton waived his intentions of entering the Church from a sense of duty to his country.”

War is, of course, no game. Woolley, having laid aside his nascent career in the Church, was posted to the Western Front in April 1915 – just as the opposing forces cranked up to the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. On Woolley’s very first day in the trenches a hand grenade landed at his feet. Unfazed he picked it up and threw it back. But it was nothing compared to what would come – the assault on Hill 60 and the desperate attempt to hold it from the Germans.

It was a style of warfare that no longer exists. The town of Ypres in Belgium was held by the British, Canadian, French and Belgian armies, and lay at the heart of the Ypres Salient – a promontory jutting into enemy territory. Trenches were dug in on both sides. The nature of a salient is, of course, that it can gradually become surrounded and cut off, and also that it becomes a focus for fierce fighting. But to the south east of Ypres lay Hill 60, held by the Germans and offering them a perfect vantage point over the surrounding countryside. It was also a perfect seat for their big guns, and the British decided it had to be taken out.

The sappers spent months tunnelling into the hill, secreting hundreds of tons of high explosive, and at seven on the evening of Saturday 17 April the fuse was lit. The hill exploded and the Allies completed the job by raining shells down on the German positions. The British troops swarmed in to take the hill, but next came the tough part – holding it.

The Battle of Hill 60 was a descent into hell for both sides. Thousands of German reinforcements poured in, only to be mown down by British machine gun fire. Hand grenades rained into the British trenches, while Highland soldiers invaded the German trenches with fixed bayonets. The Germans in turn introduced the horror of gas for the first time, blinding and crippling many of the British troops.

At the heart of the fighting stood Woolley, as one by one his superior officers – first major, then captain, then lieutenant – were killed. Now the senior officer, he rallied his 150 or so men, at times standing on the lip of the trench, hurling grenades at the enemy. It was a reckless bravery, with a hint of madness to it. And when backup eventually came, with Hill 60 still in British hands, Woolley’s cadre had been reduced to just 20 – 14 territorials and six regular soldiers. Woolley was carried from the front suffering from gas poisoning, promoted to captain, and promptly suffered a nervous breakdown.

The Bethnal Green boy was indomitable though. In 1916 he returned to the Western Front and saw out the rest of the war before returning to Oxford to finish his theology studies. The war hero was ordained in December 1920 and went on to become a parish vicar in Monk Sherbourne, Hampshire. In January 1940, Woolley volunteered once again, resigning his post as chaplain at Harrow School to serve as Senior Chaplain in Algiers. The Second World War brought tragedy too, with his son (Spitfire pilot Rollo) dying in November 1942 in a fight over Tunis.

After the war Woolley returned to Harrow though resigned (rather ironically) as he was finding it increasingly difficult to scale the hill to his parish church of St Mary’s. He moved to the parish of West Grinstead (it was presumably flatter) and retired in 1958. Woolley died in 1968, bearing the VC, the Military Cross and the OBE.

John Rennie
Spitalfields Life

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Jewel thief Lenny Hamilton, aesthete Rodney Archer, bric-a-brac street trader Kevin Stocker -
the cast of Spitalfields life is as diverse and colourful as any Dickens novel. The difference is
that the people who stroll, drink and reminisce through the pages of ‘Spitalfields Life’ are real
people, though some seem as eccentric and improbable as a Newman Noggs or Old Bill Barley.
The 400 pages here have their roots in a blog started just two years ago by a local writer known
only by the myterious sobriquet ‘The Gentle Author’ who ‘in the midst of life [woke] to find myself
living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London’. It’s all part of a carefully
constructed mystique – the ‘author’ writes in a deliberately affected style that evokes a Pepys or
a Dr Johnson.
But if there’s a strongly affected voice, the content of both blog and book is anything but fictional.
There is more real life here than you’ll find in a hundred blogs or newspapers. The writer relies
on that old-fashioned journalistic skill – and on the conviction that spending time teasing stories
out of the ordinary punters who inhabit your street will reveal any number of fascinating tales. In
his introduction, the writer recalls being asked: “What are you going to do when you run out of
stories?” As anybody who covers the East End for any length of time will attest, that’s never
likely to be a problem; it’s fitting them all in that’s the challenge.
Of course it helps if your street is Brick Lane, one of the most colourful and diverse on the planet
surely. The history of Spitalfields is succinctly and expertly dealt with in the introduction: the
Romans building their villas next to Ermine Street beside the City walls; the opening of St Mary’s
Hospital (whose ‘Spital Fields gave the place its name); the Jewish market which sprang up
from necessity, these incomers not being allowed to trade within the City itself; then the
Huguenot weavers, Bengalis, Germans, Somalis, Italians and dozens more.
Thus the author arrives late to a party that has been running for 2000 years. This being Brick
Lane though, things show no sign of winding down. Moving to Spitalfields in the early years of
the 21st century, his only acquaintance is Sandra Esqulant, estimable landlady of Commercial
Street’s Golden Heart, though he brings ‘a lifetime interest in the East End’. He is overwhelmed
by what he finds, and how many stories will simply be lost – a poignant symbol is the numerous
photo albums for sale on the bric-a-brac stalls of the markets and is filled with alarm ‘at the loss
of the affectionate histories which accompanied these once treasured artefacts’. But how to get
it all down?
Quickly realising that it’s beyond the capacity of any writer to create a definitive account, the
author takes the old-fashioned approach. Pepys and Johnson may not have had access to
Wordpress or Blogger but the method wasn’t so different. Immerse yourself in the area; talk to
the people; write what you see. Quickly though, the author finds the boundaries coming down.
He starts interviewing people ‘as if I were a journalist’ but these are his neighbours and friends
and those who aren’t quickly become so. It makes ‘Spitalfields Life’ an extraordinarily human and
unfailingly kind venture – a quality all too absent in much journalism. The author discovers anew
that old truth, that the more you get to know a person, the more you get to know what makes
Enable screen reader

Jewel thief Lenny Hamilton, aesthete Rodney Archer, bric-a-brac street trader Kevin Stocker -
the cast of Spitalfields life is as diverse and colourful as any Dickens novel. The difference is
that the people who stroll, drink and reminisce through the pages of ‘Spitalfields Life’ are real
people, though some seem as eccentric and improbable as a Newman Noggs or Old Bill Barley.
The 400 pages here have their roots in a blog started just two years ago by a local writer known
only by the myterious sobriquet ‘The Gentle Author’ who ‘in the midst of life [woke] to find myself
living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London’. It’s all part of a carefully
constructed mystique – the ‘author’ writes in a deliberately affected style that evokes a Pepys or
a Dr Johnson.
But if there’s a strongly affected voice, the content of both blog and book is anything but fictional.
There is more real life here than you’ll find in a hundred blogs or newspapers. The writer relies
on that old-fashioned journalistic skill – and on the conviction that spending time teasing stories
out of the ordinary punters who inhabit your street will reveal any number of fascinating tales. In
his introduction, the writer recalls being asked: “What are you going to do when you run out of
stories?” As anybody who covers the East End for any length of time will attest, that’s never
likely to be a problem; it’s fitting them all in that’s the challenge.
Of course it helps if your street is Brick Lane, one of the most colourful and diverse on the planet
surely. The history of Spitalfields is succinctly and expertly dealt with in the introduction: the
Romans building their villas next to Ermine Street beside the City walls; the opening of St Mary’s
Hospital (whose ‘Spital Fields gave the place its name); the Jewish market which sprang up
from necessity, these incomers not being allowed to trade within the City itself; then the
Huguenot weavers, Bengalis, Germans, Somalis, Italians and dozens more.
Thus the author arrives late to a party that has been running for 2000 years. This being Brick
Lane though, things show no sign of winding down. Moving to Spitalfields in the early years of
the 21st century, his only acquaintance is Sandra Esqulant, estimable landlady of Commercial
Street’s Golden Heart, though he brings ‘a lifetime interest in the East End’. He is overwhelmed
by what he finds, and how many stories will simply be lost – a poignant symbol is the numerous
photo albums for sale on the bric-a-brac stalls of the markets and is filled with alarm ‘at the loss
of the affectionate histories which accompanied these once treasured artefacts’. But how to get
it all down?
Quickly realising that it’s beyond the capacity of any writer to create a definitive account, the
author takes the old-fashioned approach. Pepys and Johnson may not have had access to
Wordpress or Blogger but the method wasn’t so different. Immerse yourself in the area; talk to
the people; write what you see. Quickly though, the author finds the boundaries coming down.
He starts interviewing people ‘as if I were a journalist’ but these are his neighbours and friends
and those who aren’t quickly become so. It makes ‘Spitalfields Life’ an extraordinarily human and
unfailingly kind venture – a quality all too absent in much journalism. The author discovers anew
that old truth, that the more you get to know a person, the more you get to know what makes
them unique.