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Fleet Street moves to the East End

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

The second half of the 19th century was a great age for the press, as taxes on publications and newsprint were removed, new printing techniques made big print runs possible, and pioneering editors such as the pacificist WT Stead reinvented their trade. And as the 20th century approached, a new breed of entrepreneurial owners would push the industry to new heights.

In 1896, Alfred Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail, costing a halfpenny against the penny cover price of its rivals. The Mail was fiercely imperialist, backing the Government in the Boer War (to the horror of Stead) and earning a reputation for putting patriotism above objectivity. The power of the press was such that many people blamed Harmsworth for Britain’s entry into the First World War (he had been predicting war with ‘The Hun’ since the turn of the century). ‘The most unscrupulous man in Britain,’ railed Lloyd George – before inviting him into his cabinet. But, adding popular features and crisp, concise writing into the mix, the Mail was a huge success.

In 1900 Sir Arthur Pearson founded the Daily Express, which moved its sights from court, war and hard news reporting, bringing in gossip, sports and features for women. And in 1903, Harmsworth launched the Daily Mirror, which replaced illustrations with photographs. Popular mass journalism had been born.

Over the following years, many more papers followed: The Daily Sketch in 1909, the Daily Herald in 1911 (the first national paper of the Labour movement), the Sunday Pictorial (Sunday Mirror) in 1915, Sunday Express in 1918, the Daily Worker and News Chronicle in 1930.

Alongside them, London had three paid-for evening papers, each of them hitting the streets in several editions each day. Its unimaginable today, but in an age before radio and TV, let alone the instant information of the internet, the paper was your only source of information. People would wait on East End corners for the latest edition of The Star (born 1888), The Evening News (1881) or The Evening Standard (1827) to get the racing results from the courses around the country. And scandal was never far away. Journalists from The Star were accused of sensationalising the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 and even inventing the name of Jack the Ripper.

The 1950s and 60s were a peak for Fleet Street, with a dominant Daily Mirror (by now transformed into a Labour, working class title) battling the Mail and the Express for readers, and readerships for ‘the qualities’ steadily climbing. In the 60s, the Daily Express sold an astonishing 6m copies a day (against a tenth of that today) and had foreign correspondents dotted around the globe. The Daily Mirror, meanwhile, was selling 5m copies against 1.2m today.

But things were about to change dramatically. Along with huge readerships the papers had accrued huge staffs. Proprietors began to look at new print technologies as a way of cutting costs, particularly a move from the old, labour intensive hot metal style of typesetting and printing. In 1968, Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World and added the Sun in 1969.

It was a baleful end for a paper that had started as the Daily Herald before being unsuccessfully reinvented by Mirror Group in the early Sixties. The remnant of a paper once edited by Hamilton Fyfe, Charles Lapworth and George Lansbury would now feature Page 3 girls and greet the sinking of the Belgrano with the headline ‘Gotcha!’. Murdoch added the Times and Sunday Times to his News International portfolio in 1981. Long battles with the unions ensued, with lockouts, papers shut down for months at a time, and a state of simmering war between journalists and printers (who could stop the presses at any time).

Fleet Street needed to change but change was brutal when it came. Under the guise of launching a new Sunday paper, Murdoch moved his titles to Wapping over a dramatic weekend in 1986. The aim, with the complicit assistance of the Tory government was to break the unions and, in a violent replay of the Miners Strike of the two years before, that was exactly what they did.

‘The Dirty Digger’, as Private Eye gleefully dubbed him, declared that Fleet Street had ‘three times the number of jobs at five times the level of wages’ as other countries. He also knew the new Atex typesetting technology could remove typesetters at a stroke, and neuter their powerful unions. Murdoch, who as a student at Oxford was so left wing he was dubbed ‘Red Rupe’, devised a military style plan to smash the print unions and make printing profitable.

Police officers would hold back the pickets each night, and Wapping residents (who often couldn’t get to their own front doors) would find themselves in a warzone. Just over a year later the pickets admitted defeat – News International hadn’t lost a single night of printing, and the industury was changed forever.

Many of the other papers may not have liked Murdoch’s approach, but they quickly followed his lead. The papers left their old Fleet Street homes, with editorial office upstairs and presses below, for the East End.

1 Canada Square, previously derided as the most obvious landmark of a white elephant Docklands, became home to the Telegraph, the Mirror, the People and the Independent. The Mail, along with its Evening Standard, would head in the opposite direction, to Kensington, and the Express to the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. The Telegraph and Express papers, meanwhile, would be printed at Westferry on the Isle of Dogs.

Fleet Street had moved to the East End. Meanwhile the printers and compositors, many of them East Enders themselves, found themselves out of jobs – most would never work in newspapers again. 301 years after the Daily Courant first hit the London streets, we stand at the other end of the newspaper revolution, with dwindling sales and the reputation of newspapers and their proprietors (and their friends in police and Parliament) lower than ever. As the owners of News International lurch through their daily crises, East Enders may be wondering how much longer they’ll have the Murdochs as neighbours.

Posted in East End crafts and craftspeople, East End industries, East End policing, East End writers | No Comments »

Fleet Street, Wapping and News International

Tuesday, August 16th, 2011

The recent murky goings-on at Wapping have seen the closure of one national newspaper and the unravelling of a newspaper empire that controversially moved to Tower Hamlets a quarter of a century ago. The overnight flit of News International to Wapping back in 1986 was just the start as half of ‘Fleet Street’ – liberated from living upstairs from the printing presses – moved to Tower Hamlets over the following years.

As ever, in the 300-year history of London’s national newspapers, the shift was as much about changing laws, changing technology and changing political alliances as anything else.

Walk along Fleet Street in the 1960s you would have passed the offices of the Daily Express, the Daily Mail in its Carmelite House office, the ‘Black Lubyanka’ of Sir Owen Williams’ magnificent Daily Express building, the Daily Telegraph. The Mirror had its offices in Fetter Lane and then on High Holborn just north of Fleet Street, while the Sun (reinvented from the wreckage of the Daily Herald) lay on Bouverie Street just to the south of the street. The Times was in Printing House Square just off the Grays Inn Road.

Throw in the associated Sunday papers, the London offices of dozens of regional papers, magazines and news agencies, and Fleet Street was – by the high point of newspaper circulations in the 1960s, abuzz with the clatter of typewriters, the thunder of the printing presses and the chinking of drained pint glasses as hundreds of journalists rubbed shoulders with lawyers in legendary hostelries around the street, such as the Cheshire Cheese and the Stab in the Back.

Today, with only the London offices of DC Thomson on Fleet Street (think the Sunday Post, the People’s Friend and the Beano) the road is almost exclusively associated with the law. The Inns of Court lie north and south of the street, the Royal Courts of Justice just west in the Strand. It’s an association that goes back many centuries, to long before newspapers and printing.

Fleet Street began as the road joining London’s two cities – the seat of government at Westminster and the home of commerce in the City of London. It thus became the perfect home for the law, drawing up documents for both Crown and the City livery companies, and in their turn an army of scribes grew up, drawing up papers for the lawyers. In 1476, a City liveryman, William Caxton returned from Bruges with a new invention, the printing press. Setting up business in Westminster, he produced the first printed editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (penned just up the road in Aldgate), as well as verses from the Bible, chivalric romances and histories of England and Rome.

His apprentice Wynkyn de Worde kicked off printing in Fleet Street in 1500, setting up a shop near Shoe Lane. The new process was fast and allowed multiple copies of documents. It suddenly became affordable to reproduce and distribute a book or pamphlet and – in a process that has been repeated down the centuries – hundreds of scribes suddenly found themselves made redundant by new technology, lumbered with superb skills that nobody required anymore.

But for many years the freedom of the press to print news was strictly curtailed. The Crown, and its select group of lawmakers and enforcers, the Star Chamber, looked at a medium that could quickly spread information and rumour and thus encourage dissent and organisation among the people, and shuddered. That’s why the first newspaper to be printed in England didn’t roll off the presses in London but in Amsterdam, around 1620. The laws were relaxed with the scrapping of the Star Chamber in 1641, just in time for one of the most tumultuous periods in English history. The Civil War fuelled a huge demand for news – previously, ordinary people might have waited weeks for an incomplete story of what had occurred at the Battles of Marston Moor or Newbury, to trickle down to them.

By the late 1600s, Fleet Street had the London Gazette and in 1702 its first newspaper – the Daily Courant. By the 1720s there were a dozen London papers and two dozen more in the provinces. and by the early 1800s 52 papers in London (and 100 or so other periodicals) among them The Daily Universal Register, launched in 1785 and quickly to be renamed as The Times. That the growth was still quite slow was down to economics. Paper was still expensive, but it was the Stamp Duty on papers that was really holding the industry back.

It didn’t stop John Browne Bell launching the first newspaper aimed directly at a newly literate working class – improvements in mass education had created a whole new market, eager for scandal and gossip. The News of the World hit the streets for the first time on 1 October 1843, priced at 3d (1.5p). In 1855 the last tax on papers was scrapped (taxes on advertisements had been abolished two years before). It opened the way for cheap, mass-produced papers, funded by a boom in advertising. In September that year, the Daily Telegraph launched as London’s first one penny morning paper. In 1861, duty on the newsprint itself was scrapped and – while Charles Dickens and his fellows enjoyed a boom time for authors and journalism – a whole new era of Fleet Street was about to be born.

Posted in East End industries, East End writers | No Comments »

Gilda O’Neill obituary

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

The sudden death of Gilda O’Neill at 59 has robbed the East End of a unique figure. Social historian, novelist and advocate for change, Gilda didn’t just write about the East End, she lived it.

O’Neill first hit the bookshelves in 1990 with a social history about hop picking, drawing on the memories of her mother and her own as a child of the 1950s, taken down to Kent in the dying days of the annual hopping expeditions. Pull No More Bines is a terrific book – there is no risk of a dry history here. O’Neill realised early, and never forgot, that whether you’re writing memoirs or fiction, it’s all about people and their stories. And the subtitle of that first book set the benchmark. ‘Memories of a Vanished Way of Life’ recognised that the East End these people loved had all but gone, with East Enders dispersed to Dagenham, to Basildon and beyond.
Gilda Griffiths was born and raised in Bethnal Green and Bow, leaving school at 15. Her family read like East Enders straight from central casting: one grandmother had a pie and mash shop, her grandfather was a tug skipper on the Thames, her great-uncle was the minder for a gambling den. Gilda did what lots of young East Enders did in the 1960s, she headed into the City for a succession of bar and office jobs. Then, like lots of young East Enders, she married young – to John O’Neill in 1971 after the pair had only been going out together a week . A son and daughter soon followed and hers might have been the story of a thousand other young women from the East End.

Except there was always an intelligence, a questioning and a demand for more. She enrolled at East London Poly and then the Open University. Her ‘Educating Rita’ experience made her realise a couple of things. First that she wanted to write. Second that she didn’t need to look anywhere for her material but back at home. Her parents Tom and Dolly had moved out of the East End to Dagenham by now, and Gilda became fascinated by the way the East End was being steadily pulled to pieces by policy makers. The East End wasn’t a collection of streets and buildings after all – it was a huge network of communities.

Pull No More Bines was a personal story as well as a social history. A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having a Good Time followed in 1993, then My East End: Memories of Life in Cockney London (1999). The comment by one happy reader about Our Street: East End Life in the Second World War (2003), says it all. ‘Real history about real people – not a load of dates and politics but first hand accounts of how people actually lived/survived through the second world war.’ The ironically titled Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London came in 2006 and East End Tales in 2008.

Gilda’s workrate was formidable, as alongside the histories she began writing novels. The material was the same – an East End that was just out of sight, just about to be lost forever. They became hugely popular, with the writer turning out a book a year. A growing readership would devour The Lights of London, Playing Around or Getting There and impatiently wait for the next. The critics weren’t always kind. With shamelessly heart tugging cover photos of 1950s East End urchins – all basin cuts, bobs and cheeky smiles – and with the author’s name gold, embossed and larger than the title, O’Neill was never going to be a darling of the London Review of Books or the Booker Judges.

But, as her commissioning editor, Lorraine Gamman, wrote in an obituary this week, those people didn’t get it. Those who did were ‘the women who read Gilda in big print, or listened to her on audio books and wrote five-star reviews on Amazon, or the taxi drivers who heard and loved her contributions to the Danny Baker or Robert Elms radio shows.’

Those who dismissed the books as simply historical soap opera were missing the truth behind them. The Flanagans, Lovells and Tanners of ‘Rough Justice’ may be fictional families, but the men are casual dock workers, the Spanish Civil War and the threat of fascism in the East End is the backdrop. The historical details – large and small – are beautifully observed, as O’Neill drew on her background as a writer of East End histories, and of her own life. This may be fiction, but it’s no less true.

By now she had moved back to the East End, to a Limehouse much changed and gentrified since the 1950s and was doing her best to encourage others to stretch their wings. She spoke movingly at the Skills for Life Conference in 2008 on how her confidence had been crushed by teachers and career advisers. She became involved in the National Year of Reading with her message that ‘everybody has a story’ and that the policy makers should be listening to learners, not lecturing them. ‘Everyone has a story to tell,’ said Gilda.

And in her story, the personal and the general are never really separated. One of O’Neill’s most popular histories is an immaculately researched trawl through centuries of history, from the Romans, to the ‘stink industries’, through the Huguenots to the Bengalis of today. But its title ‘My East End’ makes it clear – it’s about the people who live here now. And so we get Gilda’s interviews with local pensioners, precious snippets of social history gathered before they are lost.

The East End of the early 1900s through to the 1950s (when an infant Gilda enters the story) was a time of poverty, when luck, juggling and mutual aid could just about get families from one payday to the next. People seemed to live in each others’ houses, especially the kids. It’s not a rose-tinted world. If there is happiness, laughter and a lot of love, there is also crime, drunkeness, violence, unemployment and early death. Throughout, O’Neill turns a sympathetic eye, seeming to say that people are good, but they often do bad things. Perhaps the element that the critics dismissed as sentiment and sugar was something else entirely – affection and kindness.

• Gilda O’Neill, writer, born 25 May 1951; died 24 September 2010

[boxout, can lose if too many words]

Gilda O’Neill’s books

Non fiction
Pull No More Bines: Hop-Picking: Memories of a Vanished Way of Life (1990)
A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having a Good Time (1993)
My East End: Memories of Life in Cockney London (1999)
Our Street: East End Life in the Second World War (2003)
The Good Old Days: Crime, Murder and Mayhem in Victorian London (2006)
East End Tales (2008)

Novels
The Cockney Girl (1992)
Whitechapel Girl (1993)
The Bells of Bow (1994)
Just Around the Corner (1995)
Cissie Flowers (1996)
Dream On (1997)
The Lights of London (1998)
Playing Around (2000)
Getting There (2001)
The Belts and Bow (2001)
The Sins of Their Fathers (2002)
Make Us Traitors (2003)
Of Woman Born (2005)
Rough Justice (2007)
Secrets of the Heart (2008)

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Posted in East End writers, Women in London history | 3 Comments »

A Child of the Jago – Arthur Morrison and the Old Nichol

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

ARTHUR Morrison became famous as a chronicler of the East End. It wasn’t always a picture that went down well with his fellow historians.

Many criticised his seminal Children of the Jago, first published in 1896, for sensationalising and dramatising the violence and criminal activities of the Old Nichol, that chunk of Shoreditch that Morrison fictionalised as ‘the Jago’. Morrison himself argued that, horrific though the scenes were – in one chapter a woman thrusts a broken bottle into a rival’s face – he had in fact underplayed the violence of an East End he knew very well.

For Morrison was, unlike the majority of his critics, an East Ender himself – though he frequently muddied the waters about his own background. His birth certificate shows he was born at 14 John Street, Poplar on 1 November 1863, the son of an engine fitter. Nothing further is known until 1886 when, at the age of 23, his signature appears on a cash receipt in respect of a month’s salary. At that point he was Clerk to the Beaumont Trustees, the charity that ran the People’s Palace in Mile End.

Morrison became sub editor of the house paper, the Palace Journal, where he penned weekly studies called Cockney Corners. But as the idealistic dream that was the People’s Palace began to collapse in a welter of financial disarray and infighting, Morrison launched into writing for magazines.

By the early 1890s he was a full-time journalist and on the way to being a successful writer of fiction – a talent he also applied to his own life. By now he was saying that he was born in Kent, the son of a ‘professional man’, and the product of a private school. His time at the People’s Palace he now more grandly described as his being ‘the secretary of an old Charity Trust’ or as a ‘civil servant’.

Ironically, his journalism and fiction drew heavily on those East End roots he was trying to bury. It led to an interesting juggling act when critics doubted the realism of his East End books, as he stressed his first-hand knowledge of the area, playing up the People’s Palace connection while covering up his humble roots.

In October 1891 his article A Street appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine. Morrison captured the essence of the East End life he remembered. Rather than the violence and melodrama usually served up in East End fiction of the day, he focused on ‘the deadly monotony and respectability of the mean streets’. The style was melancholy, despairing and terse: ‘a shocking place … an evil growth of slums which hide human creeping things, where foul men and women live on penn’orths of gin … our street is not a place like this’.

A series of short stories grew out of the article. Published in National Observer throughout 1893, they were collected together as Tales of Mean Streets. He then began work on his next London novel To London Town, but events made him put it aside to begin a more pressing work.

Invited to visit the Old Nichol by the local vicar, Morrison was shocked to find an East End that lay just a mile or so from his childhood home, but which was far worse than anything he had seen. The violence and squalor that had previously been absent from his work filled A Child of the Jago*.

Morrison decided to ‘tell the story of a boy who, but for his environment, would have become a good citizen’. Even today, it’s a superbly readable book – violent, grim but compelling reading. Its language may be dated but the pace doesn’t flag until the predictably bleak ending.

The prolific Morrison was meanwhile churning out journalism and hugely successful detective stories. One series featured Martin Hewitt, a deliberately low-key, realistic, working-class, and frankly dull answer to Sherlock Holmes. His other ‘hero’ was Horace Dorrington – a strikingly amoral detective, who employed theft, blackmail, fraud and murder in his work.

But by the early 1900s Morrison was becoming more interested in his great hobby – collecting the Japanese prints he found in shops during his tours of Wapping and Poplar. And at 50 he retired to Essex, devoting his time to the collection of art.

By the time he died in 1945 he was wealthy but obscure. The books which had entertained and shocked were 50 years old and out of print. On his death, his wife Elizabeth obeyed his wished and dispersed his art collection, sold his library and burnt his personal notebooks and papers. Only the original manuscript of A Child of the Jago, presented to Bethnal Green Library in 1936, escaped the flames.

*For the story of the demolition of the Old Nichol, see East End Life 26 November 2001.
A Child of the Jago is currently in print, published by Academy Chicago Publications, ISBN 0897333926, £10.99. It’s also available as an audiocassette on Assembled Stories, ISBN 1860154417, £14.99.

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Posted in East End philanthropy, East End philosophers and thinkers, East End writers | 3 Comments »

Clouds of Glory … the life of Bryan Magee

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

We like to pigeonhole people. But with Hoxton boy Bryan Magee it’s a tricky one. If you’d turned on the telly in the 1960s and 70s you might have known him as a current affairs reporter on ITV. Turn on Radio 3 and you would have him down as a critic of the arts on BBC Radio 3. At one time he taught philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. From 1974 to 1983 he was Labour MP for Leyton … then a Social Democrat. He is now a full-time author. And his latest book (his twentieth) taps into the roots from where all these personas came – the streets of 1930s Hoxton.

Many readers will have got accustomed to the gentrification of their part of the East End. Wapping, Spitalfields, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs have all seen themselves reinvented as fashionable quarters of inner London. Hoxton is no exception – now becoming a centre for artists and designers, and seeing rocketing property prices. Yet within living memory it was one of London’s most notorious slums. ‘Hoxton is the leading criminal quarter of London, and indeed of all England,’ wrote Charles Booth at the turn of the twentieth century.

It remained a byword for its combination of poverty and crime until the Second World War. This was the world the young Bryan grew up observing at street level, from the door of the family shop: men’s and boy’s outfitters, EJ Magee. But the keen eye he was later to turn to journalism observed other, rather less respectable, trade going on. Hoxton was London’s busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the pickpocket trade, and home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was one of the East End’s best known street markets, but it was also known as the roughest street in Britain.

Magee’s recall of the 1930s is as good as any diary or film. As he says: ‘I was all the time avid for something, and I did not know what, so I wanted to absorb everything’. He recalls ‘Wingo: the dollar tailor’ and having his curiosity satisfied on discovering that a dollar meant five shillings (25p). He remembers every detail of childhood street games and songs. And he encounters anti-Semitism for the first time when his friend Davy Franks is called ‘Jewboy’ by bigger kids.

‘What did they do that for?’ asks a puzzled Bryan.
‘Coz I’m a Jew.’
‘What’s a Jew?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How d’you know you are one then?’
‘Coz my mum and dad said so.’

Even as a child, Magee was to get a first-hand view of the extremist politics of the thirties. Hoxton was a favourite meeting place and rallying ground for the Blackshirts, and Bryan would stand at the back of the rallies, excited and appalled by what he was hearing. In his later career he would interview Mosley and quiz him about his methods of whipping up a crowd.

Everyone played in the street, turfed out by mothers sick of kids under their feet, and everywhere became a playground. Watching the steam trains at Liverpool Street, playing marbles, swapping cigarette cards, and pinching from the stalls in Hoxton Market.

This world would last only until World War II. On 2 September 1939, the day before war broke out, Bryan’s anxious parents evacuated him to live with his grandparents, in the Sussex village of Worth. It was to be the beginning of a long journey. He won a place at Christ’s Hospital School, then military service, followed by a scholarship to Oxford.

Returning, he was to find that first the Blitz and then slum clearance had ripped the heart from the place. But a new Hoxton emerged towards the end of the twentieth century. The swimming bath and public library used by the young Magee was now a rehearsal room for the English National Opera. And the market place where he observed the pickpockets (and more honest traders) was now home to the campus of a new university.

All was changed beyond recognition from the pre-War ‘garden of Eden’ he remembered, but it was still there inside. ‘I was not invariably happy, and I didn’t think of it as a paradise. I had the kind of innocence from not knowing anything else. There is a small part of me that has never left it, and that lives in it still.’

Clouds of Glory, A Hoxton Childhood by Bryan Magee, published by Jonathan Cape, £17.99 hardback, ISBN 0224069799

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Israel Zangwill

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

Jewish immigration to the East End produced a melting pot of businessmen, entrepreneurs, writers, artists and musicians.
Among them was one writer who was unique – he not only grew up in the East End of East European Jews, he took it as the subject of his work. And in doing so he brought the story of the mass immigration to a much wider audience.
Israel Zangwill was born in 1864 at 10 Ebenezer Square, Stoney Lane, in the City of London – growing up in the streets off Brick Lane, living first in Fashion Street and then in Princes Street.
Israel’s father was a poor peddlar from the tiny country of Latvia, later to be swallowed up by the USSR.
Israel was to make his fame by turning out a series of popular novels on the theme of immigrant Jews – in successive years publishing Children of the Ghetto (1892), Ghetto Tragedies and The King of Schnorrers.
How he came from being the son of an impoverished immigrant to a popular and successful writer was a testament to the self-improvement ethic of the incoming Jews.
Triple honours
Israel became a pupil at the Jews Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields, and then became a teacher.
While still teaching he set aside his evenings to study for a degree at London University, eventually passing with triple honours.

And the energetic Zangwill was not content with work and study. While teaching in Bell Lane he was working on his first book, Motza Kleis, or Matzo Balls.
This lively account of market days in Spitalfields brought him an enthusiastic and loyal audience – and Zangwill never looked back.
Novels and plays followed, all richly observed slices of East End life. One of his most popular works was The Big Bow Mystery.
A huge cast of characters knock against each other trying to solve the mystery behind the strange death of Oliver Constance, one of the most prolific orators of his day.
Zangwill had a great flair for storytelling but, more than that, the mystery is a thoughtful satire of Victorian England, set “in London’s picturesque Bow district”.
But Israel’s interests in the history and future of his people had long been leading him beyond simply writing fiction.
He became a leading member of the Order of Ancient Maccabeans, a Zionist society established in 1891.
The Zionist movement was working toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland, a dream that became a reality with the birth of the nation of Israel in 1948.
And When Zionist leader Theodor Herzl visited London in 1896 he met Israel to discuss the plans for that state. Argentina and Uruguay were two of the venues proposed for the new homeland, as well as the eventual Israel of the Holy Land.
Defiant gesture
Zangwill attended the First Zionist Congress, supporting Herzl’s Uganda Territory plan. It was rejected, and a defiant Zangwill led the “Territorial-ists” out of the Zionist organization in 1905.
He swiftly established the Jewish Territorialists Organi-zation (ITO) whose object was to acquire a Jewish homeland where possible.
Following the securing of the Balfour declaration, named after the British political leader backing Jewish calls for a solution to the Arab Question and the forming of a Jewish state, the ITO fell into decline and by 1925 it was officially dissolved.
Zangwill was never to see the setting up of modern Israel. He died in 1926 in Preston, having laid much of the groundwork for his dream of a homeland – a future for the displaced Jews of Europe.
But a visit back to his books paints a rich picture of those people in the century before – and of the lives they lived in their long journey from eastern Europe on their way to the new Promised Land.

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Emile Zola in London

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

Emile Zola was a writer famous – infamous in his time – for examining the seamy side of life. In his enormous series of Rougon-Macquart novels, everyday life in Paris and the French countryside was depicted as a cycle of drunkenness, murder, abuse and the systematic swindling of friends and family. The working classes were shown stewing in a sordid, miserable life, victims of the poverty society condemned them to.

Little wonder that Zola was deeply unpopular with both the French establishment and some of his fellow writers. Yet when he went to Whitechapel and the London Docks in the early 1890s, he saw far beyond the misery and poverty that caught the eye of most visiting writers of the time. George Gissing famously saw the East End as a ‘netherworld’, Jack London dubbed it ‘the Abyss’, and a generation or so later, George Orwell could only remark on the ‘bleakness’ of the place.

But interviewed in The Guardian in 1893, Zola felt his fellow writers had it wrong.
Whitechapel as he saw it was ‘a thriving, prosperous place, with its wide, busy, well-lit central artery, and all the wretchedness and squalor buried in contiguous courts’. The writer was well aware of the poverty that existed in the city, but recognised that it wasn’t the whole picture.

And, unusually for the time, he didn’t see the East and West Ends as two different planets. ‘Squalor was existent in the West End as well as the East, and he had seen sweating dens, slums, and over-crowded dwellings in the purlieus of Covent Garden, within a few yards of the palatial mansions of Piccadilly, and near the wealthy shops of Bond Street.’

Unsurprisingly, Zola saw drink as having ‘a good deal to do with whatever misery and squalor existed’; it was one of his preoccupations, forming the core of one his bleakest novels. L’Assommoir (literally ‘the falling-down place’) was a relentless study of a family’s descent into alcoholism, using the cheap booze that made their grim city lives bearable. But even here he had good news. Historically, French visitors had been staggered by the amount of liquor that Londoners could put away but as far as he could make out ‘men were now drinking less in London than formerly’ (though he did observe that women were drinking more).

With his writer’s eye, Zola remarked that it surprised him that no novelist had depicted the great city thoroughly. ‘Even Dickens had not done so since the days of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby’.

Asked if he was about to write something on the city, he said: ‘I may probably go back there, live in a quiet hotel, and take my notes at leisure. I shall introduce the Thames above all, as it so deeply impressed me.’

But what about Whitechapel’s most famous horror? This after all was just a year or two after the Jack the Ripper murders. M Zola visited some of the places where Jacques l’Eventreur had perpetrated his outrages. What struck him most ‘was the tendency to efface and forget these crimes exhibited by the inhabitants. Whitechapel, he considered, had been much belied, and many of his fellow countrymen had come away from it with preposterous stories of murder and misery’.

Zola loved the river and the docks around Wapping and Limehouse, which he felt far outstripped Paris. ‘The Thames from London Bridge to Greenwich, I can only compare to an immense moving street of ships … the docks are stupendous buildings, but what impressed me most were the splendid arrangements for unloading vessels, which came close up to the quays, and disembarked their cargoes into the shops as it were. One can understand the secret of London’s greatness after having seen these things.’

Even pea-soupers felt right to Zola. He noticed that all the Turners he saw showed London in such a fog. He believed that it suited the London landscape better than the sunlight, with the Thames ‘heightened in artistic effect in its folds’.

London was a city ‘made for me, and I hope to have leisure to study it better some day’, he said. He was to be back five years later, while on the run from the French authorities. In 1898 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was falsely charged with treason and transported to Devil’s Island. An enraged Zola wrote an open letter J’accuse, attacking the Government. Sentenced to imprisonment and removed from the roll of the Legion d’Honneur, Zola escaped to England, returning after Dreyfus was cleared.

Sadly he never got to write about the East End of London. Zola died on 28 September, 1902, in mysterious circumstances, overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in his sleep. Some speculated that his enemies had blocked the chimney of his flat, but the truth will never now be known.

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Horatio Bottomley of Bethnal Green

Saturday, November 6th, 2010


Horatio Bottomley was one of those larger than life characters who seemed to populate Victorian and Edwardian London. A man of enormous energy and intellect, he was a talented speaker and writer, a popular MP and a creative businessman. He was also the most relentless swindler of his day, and three times a bankrupt.

Bottomley was born in Bethnal Green on 23 March, 1860. His father seems to have disappeared the scene almost immediately and luckless Horatio was left entirely alone when his mother died.
East End orphanage

Placed in an East End orphanage, he was then cast out onto the London streets – and his own wits – at age 14. He first took a job as an office boy in a City firm, moving on to a company of legal shorthand writers.

Bottomley was a bright lad and had learned to live on his wits; the quick learner became a partner in the company, and began to soak up an impressive legal knowledge from his time spent taking shorthand in the courts. Company law was his especial interest – though his speciality would be how to circumvent it.
Horatio Bottomley’s first swindles

In 1885 Horatio left to set up his own company, a printing and publishing concern. It was to set a pattern for his entrepreneurial ventures over the next four decades. Bottomley was terrific at raising money, good at ripping it off, but useless at controlling his own finances or escaping detection.

When the first of his bankruptcy writs duly rolled in (there were to be 66 more over the years), the authorities started to investigate his failure to pay interest due to investors who had collectively poured £250,000 into the firm.
Bottomley’s Australian swindles

During their digging, the City authorities discovered that £85,000 had disappeared from the company. But Bottomley, ace confidence man that he was, managed to talk his way out of any charges – and persuaded the court to revoke the bankruptcy order.


An emboldened Horatio now turned his attention to raising money through stock issues on the new gold mining companies in Western Australia. It was a classic scam: the promise of untapped riches in an exotic and far corner of the planet appealed to gullible and greedy London investors. And crucially, Kalgoorlie and Boulder were so far away that nobody could actually check whether there really were any goldmines.

From 1893 to 1903 Bottomley launched about 50 mining and finance companies with a nominal capital of £25 million – and racked up a personal fortune of £3 million.
Bottomley becomes an MP

Typically, Bottomley now overreached himself, turning his attention to the promotion of British stock. It was too close to home, and in 1908 he was charged with conspiracy to defraud, when it was revealed his Trust had issued 10 million shares in excess of its stated capital. Remarkably, the very chaos of the Trust’s affairs saved him – so confused were the books that the auditors decided they would never unravel them. It was a second extraordinary escape from justice.

Meanwhile, Horatio had embarked on a parallel career, being elected MP for South Hackney in 1906. That career had to go when he was declared bankrupt in 1909, and had to resign his seat.
Bottomley and Lord Northcliffe

Bottomley turned his undoubted gifts of persuasion to the national cause during the First World War. He became active as a speaker on recruiting drives, and would regularly pack halls for his patriotic speeches. He even managed to earn a fairly honest penny, when newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe commissioned him to write a weekly article in his Sunday Pictorial newspaper. Bottomley’s fee £7,800 a year, an astonishing sum at the time.

But even here Bottomley was lining his own pockets. He founded the John Bull Victory Bond Club in 1918, and £900,000 in subscriptions duly rolled in; Bottomley swindled much of it to spend on high living, with horse racing and a string of mistresses his expensive hobbies. The club went bust and Bottomley called in the receiver in 1921.
Bottomley becomes a bankrupt

It was one fix he couldn’t talk his way out of. Later that year he was charged with fraud and sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Back outside in 1927, Bottomley raised cash for a new newspaper: it quickly folded and he found himself bankrupt again.

Decline and humiliation swiftly followed. One of his girlfriends got him a stage appearance at the Windmill Theatre, where he rambled incoherently about ‘the old days’ until the audience booed him off. The broken Bottomley collapsed and was carried off. Another bankruptcy followed in 1930 and by 1933 he was destitute, and relying on the charity of his few remaining friends. He died in 1933.


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Boundary Estate

Saturday, November 6th, 2010


It occupies the north-east corner of Tower Hamlets, a Victorian development of grand scale and imposing construction. Extraordinary then that the Boundary Estate was the realisation of the dream of one man – a tireless local vicar, determined to rid London of its most squalid and infamous slum.

Like so many East End slums this area hard by the walls of the City had seen much better days, before unplanned and uncontrolled building turned the rural hamlet around St Leonard’s Church into a byword for crime and disease. It was originally part of the garden of the nunnery of St John the Baptist, Holywell. But in the 18th century the rapidly growing East End population was exerting pressure on space, and the land was turned over to housing. You can still see the origins of this new building at 74 Swanfield Street, the last remaining weaver’s house in the area.

But even as Swanfield Street was laid out, the East End’s great days as a weaving centre was behind it, with cheaper fabrics being produced on the Continent. And soon the new houses were subdivided, with each room home to small workshops and ‘manufactories’, where East Enders scraped a living making matches, matchboxes, clothes pegs, shoes and cheap clothes.

By the mid-1800s the area, bounded by Virginia Road to the north, Mount Street on the east, Boundary Street to the west, and Old Nichol Street to the south, was famous as the worst slum in London. Friars Mount, as it was more poetically known, was now infamous as ‘the Old Nichol’.


The inhabitants were the poorest of the East End’s homeworkers, and their miserable plight was graphically described in the Illustrated London News of 24 October 1863. “The limits of a single article would be insufficient to give any detailed description of even a day’s visit. There is nothing picturesque in such misery. It is but one painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty, huddled in dark cellars, ruined garrets, bare and blackened rooms, reeking with disease and death, and without the means, even if there were the inclination, for the most ordinary observations of decency and cleanliness.’

So notorious had the Old Nichol become that it grasped the attention of two influential outsiders. The first was the Revd Osborne Jay, who accepted the living of the parish in December 1886. It was to be a cheerless Christmas in the area Charles Booth named the most poverty-stricken in London. 5,700 souls were crammed into the tiny area. Crime was rife; street fights between the rival gangs were a regular event; the death rate was 40 per 1,000, twice as high as the rest of Bethnal Green and four times that of London as a whole; and one child in four died before his or her first birthday.

The Revd Jay realised that simply preaching from his pulpit wouldn’t change things– most of his lost souls never strayed through the doors of his church. Instead he began to work on the streets, a cheerful and charismatic presence. Within ten years he had raised £25,000 to build a new church, social club, gym and lodging house in Old Nichol Street. But he wasn’t content in ministering to his parishioners’ social, physical and spiritual needs; he realised that nothing would really change until the Nichol was reduced to rubble and built anew. And in 1890, he persuaded the newly formed London County Council (LCC) to clear the slum and build new flats.

The second influential outsider was Arthur Morrison. Jay persuaded the writer to visit the area. The shocked writer poured his observations into the seminal A Child of the Jago. Victorians were horrified by the barely fictionalised account of a child’s struggle against poverty. So deep did it cut that when the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) opened the rebuilt estate in 1900, he mentioned Morrison’s book, saying: “Few indeed will forget this site who had read Mr Morrison’s A Child of the Jago.”

The irony was that by the time Morrison wrote his account, the Nichol was already half-demolished. But a more bitter twist lay ahead for the inhabitants of this real-life ‘Jago’. The new flats comfortably housed 6,000 souls, and statistics from the LCC had recorded 5,666 previously squeezed into the rat’s nest of streets and alleys. Before, the widest road was only 28ft across; some of the ground floors of houses were below street level; many of the houses were built back-to-back; and the average room was home to 2.25 people (with 107 rooms housing five or more). Now there rose huge blocks of flats, sited round the circular park of Arnold Circus, with a bandstand provided for the residents and the blocks named after Thames beauty spots.

But they weren’t the same 6,000 people as before. It was the ‘industrious poor’ who were rewarded with the new flats. Meanwhile, the residents of the Nichol were swept further into Dalston or Bethnal Green … creating more overcrowding and new slums.
With thanks to Walks Through History – Exploring the East End by Rosemary Taylor.


Posted in East End philanthropy, East End writers | 1 Comment »

Simon Blumenfeld … an obituary

Thursday, November 4th, 2010



When Sidney Vauncez died in April this year, he ceded his place in the Guinness Book of Records … as the world’s oldest working journalist on a nationally available weekly paper. At the age of 97 he was still penning his regular piece for theatrical journal The Stage. He had had a long and varied career. Novelist, journalist and playwright, he was also a keen documenter of the Jewish East End. His own history though was a little more mysterious, and it was a mystique Sidney positively encouraged.

Vauncez was a nom de plume for a start. Simon Blumenfeld was his real name, as Jewish as you can get, though Simon embraced the culture and not the faith: a confirmed Marxist, he was no fan of religion. He was deliberately vague about his roots, though his son Eric was to dig out what little he could of the family tree, revealing that his father’s family (then called Composiore rather than Blumenfeld) had come from Sicily, where they grew olives until a volcanic eruption destroyed the business. Simon’s grandfather had been a sailor, possibly a pirate, while Simon’s father was born in Turkey. His mother came from Odessa in the Ukraine. Certainly, during a brief stop in Bavaria, en route to London, the Composiores were practising Catholics. Towards the end of the 19th century they came to London and settled in the East End.

The young Simon was born here on 25 November 1907, and his early years were formed by the radicalism of the Jewish East End. He became a Communist and soaked up the works of Israel Zangwill, becoming determined to make it as a writer. He was a friend of East End boxer Jack Berg (once sparring with him). Largely self-educated he became involved in organising volunteers for the Spanish Civil War and against Mosley.


During the 20s and 30s, Blumenfeld produced plays and novels. His first The Iron Garden, set in the East End, was published in America in 1932. It came out in Britain in 1935, re-entitled Jew Boy, and was reissued in the 1980s. A 1937 novel, Phineas Kahn, was reissued in 1988, with an introduction by Steven Berkoff.

But during the 1930s, Simon realised that journalism was more likely to pay the bills. He became a correspondent for a French news agency, simultaneously hacking out cowboy novels (a hugely popular genre at the time) under the soubriquet Huck Messer. From the Yiddish for ‘carving knife’ it was only one of Simon’s colourful pen names. Literary friends at the time included Aldous Huxley, who had penned the dystopian fantasy Brave New World in 1932.

His political beliefs didn’t stop Blumenfeld signing up at the outbreak of World War II – he considered the Nazis a far greater evil. A curious posting saw the talented writer assigned to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in the Midlands, where he became an authority on German ammunition. The Army got it right second time around, transferring Simon to the script-writing crew of Stars In Battledress, an army talent show. His station was now the rather more glamorous Grosvenor Square, where he began rubbing shoulders with future stars such as Charlie Chester. It was Blumenfeld’s entrée to the world of showbiz.

Simon began writing for titles including Band Wagon, and here he adopted the alias Sidney Vauncez. From the Yiddish for ‘moustache’, it reflected the luxuriant handlebar job he had now cultivated. He founded the Weekly Sporting Review with army pal Isidore Green, the paper combining their twin loves of showbiz and boxing. But a libel suit from the managers of Tommy Steele sunk the title.

Blumenfeld became light entertainment editor of the Stage in the early 1960s, a pivotal time for the business. Rock and roll and TV light entertainment had all but killed off variety (the successor to the music halls). But the astute writer realised traditional talent was flowing into the club scene, largely based in the north but soon to cover the whole country.

He had an extraordinary breadth of showbiz friends and acquaintances: Paul Robeson, Mistinguette, the Beatles and Barbara Windsor to name but a few.
Legendary East End villain Jack ‘Spot’ Comer asked Simon to ghost his autobiography … his wife then dissuading him.

In 1987 he penned a play for the Edinburgh Fringe, The Battle of Cable Street – a modern look at the East End, which drew on his own past. A video produced a few years ago, East Endings, took Simon and friends back to their East End beginnings. Released to mark the 80th birthday of Simon’s pal, the artist and illustrator Harry Blacker (aka the cartoonist Nero), the film was set in Bloom’s in Whitechapel and featured a diverse cast of East Enders, including Barnet Litvinoff. Bill Fishman, Anna Tzelniker and Simon/Sidney himself.

· Simon Blumenfeld, journalist and author, born November 25 1907; died April 3 2005


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