eastlondonhistory.com

May Day has many symbolic meanings. For many it is the official day of organised labour throughout the industrialised world – and the origin of our own May Day holiday. For others it marks the true arrival of spring, with celebratory dances around the Maypole. But back in 1517, East Enders saw 1 May marked by riots against immigrant workers. The shameful scenes would forever be remembered as ‘Evil May Day’.

There has often been suspicion and fear of incomers in the East End of course. In our time it has surfaced in the Blackshirt marches and the Battle of Cable Street, and most recently in the Brick Lane bomb attack. In the 16th century, the targets of ignorance were not Jews or Bangladeshis, of course. Instead it was the incoming merchants and craftsmen from Flanders, Italy, the Baltic States and France who were on the receiving end.

A study of those immigrants throws up some interesting parallels with the more recent targets of racism. Many of them were fleeing religious persecution in their home countries. And there were common characteristics shared by the new Londoners. Sylvia L Thrupp, in her essay Studies in London History, identifies “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group” – a description that could equally be applied to the incoming Jews and Bangladeshis of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately hardworking newcomers are often viewed as trying to steal a piece of the existing pie, rather than creating new wealth of their own. The incoming craftsmen who settled outside the City walls in Spitalfields brought new skills and techniques, which gave them the edge over the existing cockneys. These new skills were in trades as diverse as weaving, silver and gold-smithing, jewellery making, tailoring, clockmaking and brewing. There were celebrated printers, basket makers, joiners and caterers.

Thrupp’s paper paints a fascinating picture of London’s racial mix of the time, with the Italians forming “a commercial and financial aristocracy”. There were Frenchman and Jews. Greeks, Italians and Spaniards comprised London’s physicians, and the servant class was largely made up of Icelanders.

Things would probably have settled down, with the new workers becoming assimilated, with their burgeoning businesses offering employment to the existing Londoners … and of course the existing Londoners adopting and adapting the new skills and techniques for their own advancement, were it not for the medieval version of a recession, which hit in the early 1500s.

A preacher named Dr Beal gave regular rabble-rousing rants at St Paul’s [Cathedral] Cross, a kind of Speaker’s Corner of the day. And on 1 May 1517, his target was the incoming tradesmen (though there was also a ‘denunciation to the death’ of that pagan fertility symbol the Maypole). A mob of apprentices, clerics and ruffians were roused to action by Beal’s racist polemic, and they marched toward the East End, led by a disillusioned broker named John Lincoln.

As they reached the East End itself, the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir Richard Cholmley, had his men fire on the rabble in an attempt to turn them back, and the Earls of Surrey and Suffolk rode in with their troops, seizing 400 prisoners.

Justice was swift and brutal. Lincoln and his fellow leaders were hung, drawn and quartered, their remains gibbeted as a reminder to others. The surviving prisoners were charged with the treasonable offence of “breaking the peace of Christendom”, another capital crime. Henry VIII was all for hanging the lot of them, but intercessions by his queen, Catherine, and Lord Chancellor Thomas Wolsey, secured their pardons. The prisoners “took the halters from their necks and danced and sang”.

And the incomers gradually assimilated themselves into the life of London – inter-marrying, bringing their children up as East Enders and, in time, becoming East Enders themselves.

When Henny Youngman died on February 24, 1998, at the age of 91 in Manhattan, New York, the world of comedy lost the last of a generation.
Henny was known as the ‘King of the One Liners’ in a career spanning 70 years.
But although he was in a
tradition of the wisecracking Jewish comics who worked New York’s ‘Borscht Belt’ – along with Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Sid Caesar – and seemed as New York as the Empire State and Staten Island, Henny was born Henry Youngman, a Whitechapel lad.
Henny’s parents, like so many thousands of others, had come to the East End from Eastern Europe in the latter years of the 19th century.
Bound for the USA
But they soon found that Whitechapel was lacking in fortune for poor immigrants and, in September 1906, when young Henny was just six months old, they boarded a ship to emigrate to New York, and new opportunities.
Henny’s dad had artistic ambitions for his boy but not as a comedian – he wanted him to become a violin virtuoso. But as one of his fellow comedians quipped in the 1930s: “Henny’s the only guy who, when he opens his violin case, the audience hopes he’s got a machine gun in there.”
Henny worked nights as leader of a band called the Swanee Syncopaters, and it was then, during the late 1920s, that comedy first started to creep into his act. During the band’s performances, Young-man often fooled around with the crowd.
Lucky break
As luck would have it, the regular comedian didn’t show one night and the club owner asked Youngman to fill in. He was a success, leading to more work as a comedian – although Henny admitted that his wife often supported him in the first two decades of show business.
In fact, his wife, Sadie, who died in 1987 aged 82, was the butt of his most famous one-liner: “Take my wife… please!” The quip was actually an off-the-cuff remark before a
radio show, but stuck to Henny, and was the inspiration for the title of his 1973 biography, Take My Life, Please!

In fact, while he was attempting to make his living as a musician, his real professional career was taking place during the day – as a printer in a five-and-dime store.
“But I didn’t have any confidence in a business that was run by a guy like me,” he joked.
“However, if things went sour in comedy, I could always get a job printing… or I could be out of two jobs at once!”
It was the day job that led to the first break in his career. Among his jobs were writing and printing comedy cards, a series of one-line gags that were sold in his store.
Milton Berle – a few years younger than Youngman and already a top comedian – discovered Youngman when he was enticed into the store by a sign for the cards and took an immediate liking to the ‘naturally funny guy’.
A life-long friendship began, although the two often traded barbs: “He once said he was the king of one-liners,” Berle wrote in his 1974 autobiography, “but I told him that was because he couldn’t remember two.”
Youngman would respond: “Milton, is your family happy? Or do you go home at night?”
Youngman’s big break came in 1937 when he appeared on the popular Kate Smith radio show. He was a big hit, staying with the show for two years, leaving eventually to pursue a career in the movies. But except for mostly cameo roles, film stardom never materialized.
His one-line style lent itself better to the club than the screen, so Youngman headed back on the road, averaging nearly 200 dates a year for the next 40 years.
Laugh-In regular
His career was revived in the late 1960s as a regular on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, a TV show that was perfect for his style because it was nothing but one-line gags. “Oh, that Henny Youngman!” soon became a national catchphrase.
He died, rich and successful, in Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan, at the end of a journey that had taken him all around the world – via Whitechapel.

The East End has been home to many nationalities and ex-pat communities over the centuries. Much has been written about the Huguenots, who fled religious persecution in the Low Countries to settle to their silk-weaving business in Spitalfields. Until the 1920s, there was a Chinatown in Limehouse to rival that north of Leicester Square today. And, of course, Brick Lane is today renowned as Banglatown.
But one of those communities, today almost forgotten, probably dwarfed the rest in size. Its final death knell was only sounded with the closure of Alie Street’s St George’s Church in 1997. But who today remembers London’s 16,000-strong German community?
Luckily, though the church itself held its final service on November 24, 1996, a mere handful of worshippers attending, its legacy is a rich library compiled by the church’s pastors over its 250-year history. The books were acquired by the British Library and were the subject of an exhibition earlier this year. They tell a fascinating story of two-and-a-half centuries of Anglo-German life in east London.
The Lutheran Church opened its doors to the parishioners of Goodman’s Fields in 1762, the fifth in the capital to cater to a large
and growing German-speaking congregation.
The man behind the new place of worship was Dietrich Beckmann, the rich owner of an East End sugar bakery. Whitechapel had many of these refineries at the time – the smell and the smoke were said to be overpowering – and they were almost exclusively staffed by immigrant German labour.
Beckmann recruited his cousin Gustav Anton Wachsel as pastor, from the city of Halberstadt, and Wachsel quickly acted to set up an English-German school to satisfy parents who were worried their children were already losing touch with their heritage and language. And it was Wachsel’s own private library that formed the core of the
collection the British Library would acquire more than two centuries later.
Over the years, books from the school were added, along with those which had belonged to the children and other parishioners.
Germans, like other immigrants, had to contend with
discrimination and prejudice, much of it sanctioned by law. But in 1769, William III,
himself from Orange in the Low Countries, passed the Toleration Act. As a result, St George’s could set up its own parish legislation.

The document the church elders drew up is still in the collection. But the library was much more than a dry reference source. The church encouraged its use as a lending library, and the children and their parents were enthusiastic borrowers of German folk and fairy tales. Some books were repeatedly borrowed over decades, and then centuries.
Travel literature, guide books, colourful engravings and street plans were also hugely popular as the parishioners soaked up knowledge of a land they had, increasingly as the years drew on, never seen.
The second half of the 19th century saw major expansion, with infants and secondary schools being added.
The church had a new
influx of parishioners in the 1930s, as refugees fled Hitler’s Germany. For a few months, the congregation was led
by the legendary Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was a theology professor from Berlin. While many of the church tolerated and even lauded the Fuhrer, Bonhoeffer travelled at home and abroad decrying Hitler’s evil record. The safest place for Bonhoeffer was probably in Whitechapel, but he insisted on returning to preach his
message in Germany.
In 1943 he was imprisoned by the SS, and on April 9, 1945, the beleaguered Hitler had
him hanged.
After the war, German wives of British soldiers entered the congregation, and numbers boomed again. But, at the close of 1996, following the dispersal of the core community, St George’s was placed in the care of the Historic Chapel Association.
A Whitechapel church might have seemed an unlikely home for such an outstandingly important collection. And, indeed, the church elders thought better of using a small room above the vestry to house 750 volumes when burglars broke in in 1995.
Now, though, the tomes are safe forever in the British Library. And a viewing (by appointment only) secures a fascinating glimpse into a little piece of Germany in the heart of the East End.