eastlondonhistory.com

It was an unnerving stay in hospital that got Ken Kimberley thinking again about his childhood days in the East End. Suddenly, as mortality became more real, he had a new sense of urgency about writing them down before they were lost to him.

So was born the idea for one of the most personal and ‘real’ memoirs of East End life in the 1920s, 30s and 40s – the curiously titled Oi Jimmy Knacker. As Ken admits, there is nothing unusual about his story, “there must be thousands like me with similar thoughts of yesteryear … whether you lived in London, Liverpool or Leeds.” But it is exactly the fact that this was a life everyone lived– and which no-one lives anymore, that makes it such an irresistible read. To anyone under 30 it seems like another world.

About that title first of all. Legions of readers will remember Oi Jimmy Knacker as a kids’ street game where one team of energetic cockney kids would form a human horse while the other team would leap upon their backs – trying to stay feet off the ground while simultaneously making the opposition collapse. It’s just one of the games Ken details, Knock Down Ginger being another favourite guaranteed to infuriate the neighbours.

Games are only part of this journal of East End street life for the kids of seventy years ago. There is Delamura’s horse-drawn ice cream cart; the spectacular and lavish East End funerals – also horse-drawn of course; and street parties for the Silver Jubilee of George V and Queen Mary in 1935.
And there is a taste of things to come for Ken and his young pals when a grumpy neighbour parks that rarity, a car, in their street. “You can’t park there, that’s our football pitch,” cry the outraged kids. Little do they realise that a couple of generations on and it will be a space between the cars that is a rarity.

And even when the kids aren’t in the street playing conkers, or cricket, or snowballs, or Christmas carol singing, or watching the council workmen “relaying our cricket pitch” as tyre-friendly tarmac smoothes over the old-fashioned cobblestones, they are out and about. The truth is, with no television, videos, computer games and precious little space, the children have to look far and wide for their fun.

Trips down to the Thames are a favourite pastime. The Woolwich Ferry makes an excellent free trip across the Thames, though as Ken’s Grandad warns, “across the water” is like being in a foreign land, “cos they don’t even speak the King’s English over there”. Off the ferry, the kids race down and through the tunnel to beat the boat back to the northern shore. The swing bridge at Custom House is another favoured destination. Watching the Star of India cruise past, its hull as long as a street, Ken remarks in wonder at the crewmen waving down at him “Look Grandad, they’ve all got black faces.”

And there are much-awaited trips out of the East End. Forget school skiing trips and excursions to France – Ken and his classmates travel to the wilds of North Ockendon, just outside Upminster. Trips out of town mean Essex of course, and the excursion to Southend on Sea is eagerly awaited, as much for the trip on the LMS steam train through the countryside as for the day at the beach itself.

Come World War II and the streets become places of fear, with the Luftwaffe and V2s bringing destruction, and unexploded bombs making whole roads impassable.

But mostly it is happy memories and of streets crowded with people, not cars. Salvation army bands play; huge gangs of kids assemble for the regular Sunday bike ride, children collect for Bonfire Night and chat to the night watchmen guarding the docks and building sites.

Whether you were born in the East End or just moved here, the stories strike a chord. Oi Jimmy Knacker was a game known all over – in other parts of London as Hi Jimmy Knacker, in Croydon ‘Bury the Barrel’, ‘Mountikitty’ in Newcastle and Pomperino in Cornwall to name just a few. But is it still played in East End streets? Probably not.

Oi Jimmy Knacker, written and illustrated by Ken Kimberley, is a Silver Link Book, ISBN 1857941209, price £15.99.

It seems an extraordinary solution to child welfare problems – to ship the youngsters off wholesale to the New World.
But a lecture next week at the Ragged School Museum will reveal that was exactly what London did with its deprived children for more than 300 years.
More extraordinary still, the export of cockney kids only ended for good in 1952.
But it was all done with the best interests of the children in mind. That can be seen by the identity of one of the prime proponents of resettlement – Thomas Barnardo.
Barnardo is rightly famous for the organisation he started in Hope Place, Stepney (just off Ben Jonson Road) in 1868. Barnardo’s is today one of Britain’s largest child welfare organisations, though many know it best for the homes it used to run.
The homes were only one of the solutions Barnardo hit on to relieve the suffering of East End children.
The idea of a new life in the wide open spaces and fresh air of the Colonies must have been appealing to the likes of Barnardo, who desperately wanted to get kids away from the pestilence, disease and crime of Victorian east London.
In fact, he was only continuing a process that had begun as early as the seventeenth century – records show that in 1618 the City of London sent 100 children to the new colony of Virginia.
In the nineteenth century Canada became a popular destination for local deprived children. By the 1880s, conditions in the East End were so appalling that Barnardo, who had been running homes since 1870, began to see the virtue of getting them away from the capital altogether.
There was, of course, also the appeal of providing workers for the new farms in Canada – a country of big farms and few people. His first party of boys left for Canada in 1882, while the first girls were sent in 1883.
Farming out

Then, in 1887, Barnardo’s work in Canada was given a boost with the acquisition of Manitoba Farm. The 7,000-acre spread became a training farm for boys coming over from England. The girls, meanwhile, were housed at Hazelbrae, a spacious timber-framed house, before being farmed out to families.
By the time of the doctor’s death in 1905, Barnardo’s had shipped 18,000 children to Canada.
Some thrived, but some did less happily. Look at the contrasting fates of two boys – William Carter and James Carver – sent to Canada in 1884 from the Barnardo’s home in Stepney Causeway.
William was described as a dark-eyed, intelligent but diminutive child when admitted to the Stepney Home when he was eleven and a half.
Both his parents were still alive – his father had been a boiler-maker, but had not recovered from the depression of losing his job, while his mother tried to support the family by selling whelks in the streets.
After two years in Stepney he went to Canada and was apprenticed to a Mr. Duff. He became a teacher and, by 1900, he was second-in-command at the Chatham National Bank in New York.
James fared less well. He was admitted to Stepney after the death of his father, a bee-keeper.
After a year he sailed to Canada, where, having failed to stay with any placement, he ended up in prison and by 1900 was reported as “being on the tramp”.
As well as Barnardo’s home in Stepney Causeway, another important site was the Labour House for Destitute Youths in Commercial Road.
Here boys learned practical skills such as woodworking in preparation for going to Canada.
One successful graduate was Henry Butt, who applied personally to the Labour House in 1888, by which time he had been reduced to begging on the streets.
After training, Henry was sent to Manitoba Farm, then found employment 200 miles further west.
By 1891, he was able to report that: “I am getting on first-class. I am busy ploughing at present and I like it very well, and I am going to learn all I can about the country.”
Though opposition was growing in Canada, often leading to prejudice against the children, Barnardo and his fellows rated emigration a success, and began to look at similar schemes in Australia and South Africa.
But by the 1940s, the fashion was turning against such traumatic removal of children from their home country, and the programmes ended in 1952.