Arthur Newens
When Arthur Newens was born in Bethnal Green in 1899, families were large and food was scarce. Horses were the haulage of the day, and salt was bought from a man who went door to door, sawing off a three-inch slice for the housewife. A boy’s haircut cost a penny and it was 6d to visit the doctor.
It was the end of the Victorian era - Arthur’s dad Thomas, a police constable, had been posted to the area from Holloway a decade before, as part of the unsuccessful police attempt to apprehend Jack the Ripper. The Newens family home in Gascoigne Place was on the site of the old ‘Jago’ (London’s most notorious slum, which had recently been cleared to make way for the Boundary Estate). And, all too typically of the time, two of Arthur’s siblings, Frederick and Violet, died in infancy.
Over the next 77 years or so of his life though, things would change beyond recognition, and Arthur followed the trajectory of so many East Enders of his generation: into uniform, out of poverty as a small businessman, and eventually out of the East End altogether, to a new life in Essex.
Much of it would have been lost had his son, the former Labour MP and MEP Stan Newens, not been worried by his dad’s loss of purpose and confidence in the late sixties. In 1966 his beloved wife Celia had died and a year later Arthur had retired. ‘It was a strange experience to be free with no bothers,’ he writes, and a not-entirely welcome one. The former haulier, who had rarely found time to stop and think in a busy life, found time hanging heavy on his hands, admitting to loneliness and occasional depression. Stan prompted him to type up his autobiography*. The no-nonsense East Ender, a good ‘carpenter, shoe repairer, motor engineer and gardener’ was a resolutely practical man. His literary efforts in life had extended to the odd letter, but now he took himself to Loughton Community Hall and learned touch typing. Fairy tales and detective stories followed … and then this slim autobiography.
The Newens siblings were typical Edwardian East End kids. Arthur’s elder brother found work in a leather and grindery shop, working 8am till 8pm everyday. His sisters worked as machinists, manufacturing boots and garments in private houses around Bethnal Green. ‘Much of the machining, millinery box making and other manufacturing then was done as outwork in private homes,’ Arthur writes.
His father had work which, if not well paid, had the huge advantage of having a guaranteed pay packet each week. It suited Thomas - ‘a homely type of man who was fairly content with very little’. Tom served the Met from 1888 to 1913, remaining a constable in Whitechapel for most of that. His one excursion outside the East End left bitter memories. These were the years of ‘The Great Unrest’, a host of industrial conflicts around Britain, as well as the Suffragette protests. The Tonypandy Riot of 1910 saw Home Secretary Winston Churchill sending London coppers to subdue the protesting miners (troops too, though they were never actually deployed). Sent to South Wales in 1911, Tom returned to tell his family that he had no doubts about the justice of the miners’ claim - the pitmen were being paid piecework rather than by the hour and were struggling to feed their families. Nonetheless Thomas was a disciplined PC who followed orders. To him the uniform was all important. Arthur’s elder brother Tom was to follow his dad into the Met, but tragedy was to strike the family when the parents got a call from Stratford police station. The young constable had died suddenly at just 26.
Arthur hadn’t shone at school. The only way he and his best pal Cecil got their hands on one of the much prized ‘reward’ cards at St Phillips School in Mount Street was to pinch some from the school cupboard. An after-school job running errands earned him 1/1 (around 5.5p) a week: the shilling went to mum to help with the housekeeping, the penny Arthur would keep to spend on a treat (usually an overripe orange or a carrot).
Leaving school at 14, Arthur had a succession of false starts in the job market. First he worked at Solomon Stern, a garment importer in Nicholl Square in the City. ‘Not my sort of job’ decided Arthur and pestered his dad to get him apprenticed as an engineer. But apprenticeships cost money, and instead Thomas got him a lowly paid job in an engineering shop - Scammell and Nephew in Fashion Street, Spitalfields. But in 1917, Arthur turned 18, and he was soon being fitted for a uniform of his own.
Last week we left the young Arthur Newens hopping from job to job, always trying to earn a little more*. But as World War I drew on it got ever harder - the shortage of able-bodied men, materials and business saw London’s economy shrinking. To make things worse, employers were loath to employ a lad coming up to 18 - as they were likely to train him up only for him to be drafted into military service.
Arthur finally landed a job servicing the buses for the London General Bus Company (later to become London Transport). War seemed to be drawing ever closer to the East End, with air raid warnings signalling that Zeppelins were on their way over. In 1917, Arthur turned 18 and was sent for his medical. ‘If you had two arms and two legs you were passed A1 … and I was very fit,’ he notes wryly.
There was a nervous trip over the Channel from Sheerness, the troop boat zig-zagging to avoid U-boats, and Arthur staying on deck: ‘I didn’t fancy a watery grave if the fun started.’ But arriving in France, it all seemed too quiet. ‘I was disappointed when I didn’t hear guns, as I’d imagined … but perhaps I was too eager.’ Joining a handful of troops just out of the line, Arthur was shocked to discover that this was all that remained of the hundreds of men in his new battalion (18th Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps).
There was a less than even chance of getting back to Blighty alive. Arthur and an officer were paying out a line of communications cable across open country when the enemy let fly at them with field guns. ‘Run for your f***ing life, Newens,’ stammered the Scottish officer, and the two were fortunate enough to escape. The men were kept plied with rum, but food was always scarce and pretty basic. The occasional rabbit came to hand and, at one point, Arthur found himself lying in a turnip field, sheltering from the shells. The squaddie had the presence of mind to hoik out a couple of the vegetables and munch them raw, smearing them with the jam he was carrying back to his billet.
Fortunately for Arthur, he had come in at the tail end of the action, and on 11am, 11 November 1918, came the long-rumoured news … that the Armistice had been signed. ‘I had not collected a bullet or a piece of shrapnel so far,’ writes Arthur. ‘I thought I’d keep my head down and see the “land fit for heroes” for which we were supposed to be fighting.’ Ironically it was flu that got him (the terrible pandemic of Spanish Flu that year was to kill at least 50m people). An awful train journey home, watching fellow soldiers dying around him, saw him marooned at the docks, in total chaos as thousands of servicemen tried to board the few ships, and made it back to Southampton and then his home base of Winchester and a medical discharge. Liverpool Street station had never looked so welcoming, and Arthur and a group of his mates, revelling in being civilians again, repaired to the buffet for a few beers.
Back home at 3 Gascoigne Place, and his policeman dad was horrified. ‘Discharged unfit? How are you going to get into the police now?’ he demanded. ‘Dad, I’ve had enough of uniforms to last me all my life,’ replied Arthur. But times were hard back in the East End, a succession of nothing jobs ending with employment stoking the boiler at Major Drapkin’s cigarette works in Houndsditch. The newly married Arthur talked to wife Celia and decided it was time to go it alone.
So began Arthur’s transport business: first one van, then a small fleet, servicing the small furniture factories of Houndsditch, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney. Removals were a solid earner too, and by the mid-1930s, the company owned six vans. Three kids followed, with holidays in Margate seeing the family of six (mother in law making up the numbers) piling in a van and down to the coast. And then, like many East Enders, they decided to move out to Essex. The impetus was the coming World War II, and the threat of air raids on London. The family settled into their new bungalow at North Weald, with fruit trees and vegetables, rabbits, ducks and chickens in the garden.
If business had been tough in the inter-war years, hostilities made things only harder. There was a lack of decent employees, vehicles and petrol, while the furniture makers (starved of raw materials) went out of business one by one. The only market that seemed to thrive was the black market (and Arthur had to contend with black marketeers pinching petrol and engine parts from his vehicles). Somehow the company battled through, but by the mid-sixties Arthur had reached a low ebb. The company was struggling, and his beloved wife Celia was terminally ill. He sold up and retired to Essex.
Like many people, Arthur found retirement difficult. Trying hard to fill his days, making shopping trips back to Bethnal Green for old times sake ‘I more and more wonder what it’s about … so many things seem so futile’. But taking to the typewriter, to complete his autobiography, gave the ‘old East Ender’ new purpose. Looking at his kids he reasoned that there had been some meaning, in bringing into the world ‘three respectable and loyal citizens. Though not unique, it is still something to be admired.’
*The Memoirs of an Old East-Ender by Arthur Ernest Newens is available for £4.50 (post free) from Stan Newens, The Leys, 18 Park Hill, Harlow, CM17 0AE..