eastlondonhistory.com

Perhaps Henry Raine wasn’t sure whether he had been a force for good or bad in the East End. He had certainly made a good living from brewing beer, and he had employed a lot of East Enders, but as a devout Christian, he must have worried about the effects his ales had on his customers. So he took the route of many a successful London businessman of his day, giving the proceeds of his work to charity.

Raine lived from 1679 to 1738, but he founded his school in Wapping’s Fawdon Fields in 1719. There were two academies, one taking 50 boys, the other 50 girls. A master was employed at £40 a year to teach the boys reading, writing, and arithmetic. A mistress earned £20 for teaching the girls reading, knitting and sewing. School was tough in those days. Long days of study also incorporated real work to augment the finances of the school, with the boys making nets, while the girls had to knit and sew. Holidays were restricted to four days a year - Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and Bartholomewtide. And any girl seen speaking to a friend on the way to or from church would lose her next day off (with expulsion for repeated offences).

By the mid-1800s, the construction of the London docks had seen the Wapping school cut off from its catchment area, and Raine’s moved to Cannon Street Road. The school would move again, to Arbour Square in 1913. The clamour for a good education in the 19th century (and in the decades preceding World War II) had seen Raine’s and the other East End grammars thrive. But the years after 1945 were tough on local schools. The East End population dropped year on year. Many people had been bombed out of their homes of course. The razing of many of the remaining houses, the building of the new towns, and a general movement of East Enders out to the home counties only accelerated the drop in numbers. East End schools, even the good ones, found it hard to maintain their rolls.

In 1963, the Minister of Education ordered Raine’s to drop its long-cherished practice of two single-sex schools and it became fully co-ed. In 1977, Raine’s merged with St Jude’s, and became a comprehensive. And in 1985, irony of ironies, it moved into a new home - the old Parmiter’s school building in Approach Road. Parmiter’s had left the East End to escape the problems beseting Raine’s, setting up a new home in the country - and with plenty of prospective pupils.

The Coopers’ Company and Coborn School has an even more venerable heritage than Raine’s. Its roots lie in the Nicholas Gibson Free School, founded in 1536 at Ratcliff, by a wealthy City of London grocer: stewardship passed to the City of London Coopers’ Company in 1552. Meanwhile, in 1701, Prisca Coborn, the widow of a brewer, set up a co-educational school in Bow, first near Bow Church then moving to Fairfield Road in 1814, and to Tredegar Square in 1870. The two schools became one in 1891 and remained in Bow until 1971. But a declining East End population, and the allure of a new and spacious site among the green fields of Essex (or Upminster at least) persuaded the governors to shift the school 15 miles east. The East End’s hold on its grammar schools was weakening.

Ralph Davenant hadn’t done anything so morally questionable as brewing beer - he had dedicated his life to doing the lord’s work, but his chief concern was what would happen after he was gone. The clergyman, a favourite of King Charles II and rector of St Mary’s Whitechapel, was a wealthy man. But perhaps looking for greater riches in heaven, he instructed his wife that, after their deaths, their goods should be sold to build a school. The reverend died in 1680, with a bequest of £100 funding an institution for ‘the poor boys of Whitechapel’. With his wife’s demise, and a grand sale of silver and gold plate, the pot grew. A number of houses were given to the foundation, yielding healthy rents to keep the school funded.

A building was raised on the Whitechapel Road (and is there to this day). It was a huge school, with a roll of more than 1200 in 1818. But as for many other schools, World War II was a turning point. The school was evacuated, and returned after the war to decaying buildings and with fewer pupils. As peace dawned, the Davenant Foundation Grammar School for Boys had just 200 pupils. And so, in 1966, Davenant followed the well-trodden route out to Essex - a county now filling up with former East Enders. The Davenant link isn’t dead though. The legacy for the East End is the Davenant Centre, now a ‘centre of excellence’ for youth services. The buildings themselves are a terrific blend of the Renaissance style building older pupils will remember and some dramatic modern spaces. The Revd Ralph wouldn’t recognise it … but his educational work goes on.

It was a tricky conundrum for wealthy East Enders of bygone centuries. How to store up extraordinary wealth in this life, while assuring themselves of a smooth passage to the next.

The likes of Ralph Davenant, Thomas Parmiter, Henry Raine, George Green, Nicholas Gibson and Prisca Coborn would have been believers all … or at the very least would have wanted to hedge their bets with God by doing good works. Davenant, after all, not only had a bit of cash but was also a clergyman.

They also knew that, satisfying though building wealth was, you couldn’t take it with you. So, rather than copying the pharaohs, and after taking care of the family, they built for future generations. Schools would be the way that the children of the poor would raise and improve themselves. It was a subject dear to the heart of Gibson, Parmiter, Raine and the rest - for many of them had come from humble beginnings themselves.

And there began a curious evolution. While many of the public schools began in just the same way, as endowments for small numbers of the poor to educate their children, they soon became appropriated by the rich, who knew a good deal when they saw it. Hence the paradox of a ‘public’ school that most of the public can’t get into - unless they are very rich. In the East End, the foundation schools took a different twist, becoming the grammar schools that everyone wanted to send their children too. But where are they now? In large part, the answer is ‘the home counties’, though there is a lot more to the story than the schools simply following East Enders as they decamped to Essex and Hertfordshire. A couple remain. But who were these wealthy benefactors, and how have the centuries changed their schools?

Parmiter’s School is now at Garston, near Watford in Hertfordshire, but it started life in St John Street, Bethnal Green. The school was founded by a bequest from wealthy East End silk merchant Thomas Parmiter. When Parmiter died in 1681 he left two farms in Suffolk - between them they would supply a fund providing £30 a year for six almshouses and £100 a year for ‘one free schoolhouse or room for ten poor children’ in Bethnal Green. Elizabeth Carter gave a plot of land at the top of what is now Brick Lane, as well as a further £10 a year. And William Lee gave a further tenner a year plus £100 for the raising of school buildings.

The school opened in 1722 and by 1730 had 30 boys, by 1809 there were 50. In 1839 the school had to move when the Eastern Counties Railway bought the original plot (the Liverpool Street Line runs beneath the original site and out to Bethnal Green overground station). The new site was in Gloucester Street (now Parmiter Street). The school moved again, to Approach Road in 1887. Parmiter’s was gradually moving further out of London, and steadily growing in size.  In 1977 the first pupils had entered the new Parmiter’s school in Hertfordshire. The Queen officially opened the new school in 1981, the 300th anniversary of Thomas’s bequest. The grammar school in Bethnal Green closed the same year.

George Green School is still in the East End, on Manchester Road on the Isle of Dogs, not so far from the home of its founder. George Green was from humble beginnings, starting as an apprentice shipbuilder at the Blackwall Yard in 1782. In 1796 he married the boss’s daughter and was made a partner. It was a boom time for shipping and Green became rich but devoted equal industry to giving his cash away - to almshouses, sailors’ homes, a chapel and, in particular, schools.

In 1828 the first George Green’s School was built on the corner of Chrisp Street and the East India Dock Road. A larger building was raised on the corner of Kirby Street and East India Dock Road in 1884, before the most recent move, in 1976. George Green School now sits on the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, and looking across at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. The shipyards and shipbuilders may have gone, but at least Green’s foundation still has the Thames as a neighbour.

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.