eastlondonhistory.com

The East End has a long tradition in
furniture-making – with one-man workshops of cabinet makers and upholsterers peppering Shoreditch and Spitalfields during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
But the greatest success story came about in a most unexpected way: the combination of the inventive genius of a young American and the entrepreneurial eye of a Bow businessman.
Jack of all trades
William Lusty started his business in 1872 out of a small hardware shop in Bromley-by-Bow. William was a jack of all trades – salvaging driftwood fallen from barges out of the canals, and fashioning the lumber into packing crates.
By the new century, Lusty’s was a thriving business. During World War I, the business boomed, opening up new
production lines to make munitions cases.
Peacetime meant idle assembly lines and a huge factory to keep busy. The works now covered 17 acres in a triangular plot bounded on one side by the Limehouse Cut, with Empson Street and railway sidings forming the other boundaries. Meanwhile, the maze of terraced streets round the factory housed hundreds of W Lusty & Sons employees.
So when a New York agent for the packing case business telegrammed details of a new invention to William, he jumped at the opportunity.
American inventor
Marshall Burns Lloyd had been born in Minnesota in 1858, the son of an English immigrant. Lloyd typified the adventurous spirit of the new Americans, travelling the country, working as an insurance salesman, a property speculator and, finally, an inventor.
He had noticed the elaborate – and expensive – wicker furniture popular with style-conscious Americans. It was
all hand-woven, and having attempted to apply the new principles of mechanisation and line production, Marshall figured wicker furniture could only be made by hand.
Instead, he used the new skill of twisting paper to make fake wicker, crucially adding his own idea – a core of steel wire to strengthen the weave, making it strong enough to use as furniture.
Lloyd Loom furniture became a sensation in America. Classy tables, chairs and bureaux became affordable to ordinary Americans through the mail-order catalogues.

William Lusty’s son, Frank, arrived at Lloyd’s Menominee factory in 1920, staying four months and immersing himself in the production process. He worked on the factory floor, and everywhere else. And by the time Lusty’s had bought the machinery and patent rights in 1921, Frank had all the knowledge he needed.
Lusty’s would corner the British market, Lloyd the American, and designers from both companies would pool knowledge and ideas.
Cool reception
But the British proved less keen than the Americans on wicker furniture. The Brits insisted on seeing Lloyd Loom as exclusively garden furniture, and given the vagaries of the English summer, there was a limited demand for it. By the mid-1920s, Lusty’s was on the verge of collapse.
Its fortunes were changed
by an inspired advertising
campaign. ‘Bring our furniture into the home’, ran the copyline, and people began to do just that. Sales picked up and, when LNER decided to furnish its enormous railway hotels with the newly stylish Lloyd Loom pieces, Lusty’s was made.
The company grew from strength to strength as Lloyd Loom furniture became increasingly popular. It could be seen on ocean liners, in hotels and tea rooms; it became the standard issue for the British Army and RAF
all over the world; it even graced the Royal Boxes at Wimbledon, Henley and Twickenham.
German bombing
The First World War had seen a boom in the Lusty factory and it was World War II that was to abruptly end things. Standing right by the East India Docks, the Bromley works was perilously close to
a key Luftwaffe target, and on the afternoon of September 7, 1940, it was completely destroyed by firebombs.
Fortunately, it was a Saturday and the workforce were at home. No-one was killed but the business was so shaken that the next Lusty’s catalogue didn’t appear until 1951.
Lusty’s struggled on at the site in much-reduced workshops. but eventually moved to Martley, Worcestershire, in 1963. Today, the newly
fash-ionable furniture is made in Chipping Campden, Glou-cestershire.
From being cheap, utility furniture, Lusty’s Lloyd Loom pieces have become design classics. You’ll still see them in secondhand and junk shops, though they have become increasingly collectable and pricey. Flip one of these chairs over and you will probably see the distinctive Lusty’s label, bearing the address Bromley-by-Bow E3, underneath.

These days you’d be hard-pushed to be a hermit in Bethnal Green. But 300 years ago, when it was a sleepy hamlet, buried in the countryside a couple of miles east of the London wall, it was a different matter.
For the East End was home to a recluse who became an inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, whose strange tale brought together Alice in Wonderland and Oliver Crom-well, religion and astrology and medicine and fortune telling.
Roger Crab was originally a Buckinghamshire man and a soldier. He enlisted in the English army, what was to become the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell, in 1642.
England was in a state of turmoil, embroiled in the series of battles running from 1639 to 1660 which would become collectively known as the English Civil War.
The very hands-on rule of Stuart king Charles I was infuriating Parliament, as was his habit of levying direct taxation without the permission of the Commons.
Crab signed up in 1642, just as Parliament and Charles had fallen out yet again, this time over who should raise an army to put down the Irish rebellion.
The King, affronted at the challenge to his authority, tried to marshal the provinces against a London heavily favouring the Roundheads. He failed, and it was Cromwell who raised the force to viciously suppress the Irish.
Terrifying giant
Crab was a good soldier. Stand- ing a full 6ft 7in – a giant by today’s standards, let alone those of the 17th century – he terrified the men he fought against.
Over the next few years, he travelled with the Roundheads as they viciously crushed revolts in Ireland and Scotland and, for the first time, England totally dominated the British Isles.
But the next challenge was to come from within England. There were constant battles between Royalist and Republican forces, especially following the execution of King Charles in 1649.
The battles of Edgehill, Naseby, Newbury, Marston Moor and the rest peppered the 1640s. But it was probably in the course of the battle for Colchester in 1648 that Crab received the knock that was to change his life forever.

The soldier escaped with his life but was badly stunned by a blow on the head from a Royalist soldier. The injury led to early discharge from the army and he returned to his home town of Chesham, where he set up in business as a hatter.
He was a success but the blow on the head was affecting Crab. He sold the business and gave his money to the poor, opting for a solitary life, living in a tree near Uxbridge.
The formerly strait-laced puritan began to dabble in astrology and ‘physic’ or natural medicine. His philosophy was rather confused but had its roots in a rejection of conventional religion. The former man of war became a pacifist.
He now moved to the secluded village of Bethnal Green, where he subsisted on three farthings a week, eating grass, mallow and dock leaves.
Crab now developed a talent for telling the future. Ironically for a former Roundhead, one of his visions was that the monarchy would be restored and, in 1660, the son of the executed Charles took the throne as Charles II.
And the diet of grass did the old man’s health no harm. He lived to the ripe age of 79, dying in 1680. He is remembered on his tomb in Stepney’s St Dunstan’s churchyard with the following epitaph.
“Through good and ill reports he past, oft censured, yet approved at last … a friend to everything that’s good.”
And he was remembered again, 200 years later, when Lewis Carroll based his Mad Hatter character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Crab.

The year was 1381 and England was on the brink, not just of civil war, but of a revolution that would rend the very fabric of society.
But a meeting at Mile End between the King and a peasant preserved the fragile social structure of the realm.
London in the mid-1300s was a booming city. Banks were doing good business funding new enterprises like breweries and tanneries, and to staff the growing firms of the capital, people were pouring in from Essex and Kent.
By the 1350s, the population of the City touched 80,000, doubling in 50 years, and the populace was squeezed into an overcrowded, dirty and in-creasingly diseased square mile.
Filth piled up in the streets and, in 1348, bubonic plague reached London. By the start of 1349, 200 bodies a day were being shovelled into the plague pits of the City and Smithfield, and over the next two years, almost half of those 80,000 souls died of the dreadful disease.
By the 1380s, London’s population had recovered a little but not enough to man the still thriving economy. More people were sucked in from the farms around London and that’s when the English social structure started to unravel.
Feudal society
In the early Middle Ages England was still a feudal society – farm workers were tied to the gentry and nobility who owned the farmlands, indeed they were more or less owned by their masters themselves.
But as the City filled up, the farms depopulated, and peasants found themselves expected to work harder. At the same time, they were hit by new taxes, including the hated poll tax.

It was only a matter of time before they discovered their power. An army of rebelling peasants, led by Wat Tyler, marched on London. They had no quarrel with King Richard II, but were out for revenge on the fat cats, the wealthy landlords and corrupt men of the Church, who they saw becoming rich at the expense of the sweated peasants.
And chief villain was Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Peasants’ Revolt coalesced on Blackheath, where Tyler rallied his men and marched on London. They made for Lambeth Palace, still the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury today, and set it on fire.
The now-roused rabble crossed the Thames. Many more joined the band in London and soon the streets of the Square Mile were littered with corpses.
Sympathisers opened the doors of the Tower itself, and the peasants murdered the Archbishop and his men, removing their heads and spiking them on London Bridge.
The band then moved out of the City to set up camp. It was there, at Mile End, the worried king came to negotiate.
Rather than challenge them head on, Richard played to their sympathies and announced himself as their ally. He asked the band to follow him to Clerkenwell where he would address their complaints.
In the narrow and winding City streets it was simple for the king’s men to pick the peasants off.
By the time they reached Clerkenwell, and the spurious conference, many were dead and the rest had fled. And Tyler, who had led his men to the brink of revolution, lay dead, a soldier’s sword in his back.

THE date was Wednes-day, July 7, 1948. Lon-don was in the midst of rebuilding itself after six long, hard years of war.
The East End of London had more rebuilding to do than most – much of it was bombsites or building sites, as reconstruction went on to repair the damage wrought by the Blitz.
Meanwhile, up West, the life of one of the key figures in the East End’s rebuttal of the Luftwaffe was brought to an untimely close.
When Councillor Frank Robert Lewey collapsed and died crossing Westminster Bridge that summer morning, he was just 55 – but he already had a lifetime of dogged service to the East End behind him.
Frank Lewey was a Stepney councillor for all but three years between 1928 and his death. He was election agent for Labour leader Clement Attlee in the great, post-War shock General Election victory of 1948 and he was Mayor of Stepney during the dark years of the Blitz.
But he might have been forgotten except for his remarkable, and exhaustive, book logging the experiences, horrors and privations of the East End during those times.
The reissue of Cockney Campaign over 50 years after his death is a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary Londoners during the Blitz.
Part diary, part reportage, much of it told in the directly quoted words of East Enders in the thick of it, it has a power and immediacy most historians could only dream of capturing.
Frank Lewey was born in Mile End and spent a bleak childhood, much of it in the Stifford Homes. After his apprenticeship as a gardener, he fought for his country in the Great War. Coming back to Civvy Street, he faced what so many other veterans had to contend with – unemployment and constant lay-offs.
For Lewey, the answer lay in politics. He joined Limehouse Labour Party, determined to help build the promised – but illusory – land fit for heroes to live in.

It was the beginning of a solid commitment to the people of the East End that would win him friends on all sides – after his death there were tributes from Conservative and Communist councillors, as well as his own group.
In Cockney Campaign, Lewey paints an extraordinary picture of an East End only too aware – and wary – of fascism, from its repelling of Mosely and his Blackshirts in the late 1930s.
And it’s as an insider’s view that the book draws its strength. He talks of East Enders erecting barricades in the Stepney streets in the weeks before war broke out (a story suppressed by Fleet Street at the time for fear of stimulating national panic).
Spies at large
He writes of the German fascist spies who were seen at large in Tower Hamlets at the same time.
The sub-headings of the chapters tell their own story. ‘Fifty per cent of houses
gone’, ‘Their spirit cannot be broken’, ‘Mass murder raids begin.’ And intriguingly ‘Digging out 120 sheep’!
In fact, the whole story of horror is peppered with humour and hope.
And it doesn’t stop with the end of hostilities. Lewey casts a critical eye at the slums left in the wake of the bombing, the tardiness at rebuilding for the people of the East End, how despite all the efforts for a fairer society, the wealth of the country remained in the hands of just 30,000 men.
Through it all shines Lewey’s admiration for the resilience of the East Enders. It may be a tragedy that he didn’t live to see the rebuilding continue, but his lasting legacy is Cockney Campaign, as vivid a picture of life in Blitzed Britain as you will ever read.

l Cockney Campaign by Frank R Lewey. Originally published by Stanley Paul and Co, 1948. Reissued by Tower Hamlets Local History Library, 1999. Hardback, £14.99.
Available from Bancroft Library, 277 Bancroft Road, London E1. Tel: 0181-980 4366.

This month, the people of Britain wore poppies to mark the sacrifice of the millions of men and women who gave their lives in the Great War.
It was the 80th Armistice Day since the end of hostilities; the eightieth time people had gathered on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month to remember the dead.
Seventy years ago, the service at the Cenotaph was being mirrored by services all over Britain – memories of the war were still fresh, and the silence was strictly observed.
Traffic and trade would come to a halt as people stood in silence in the streets. As the two-minutes ended cars and lorries would roar back into life and people would go on their way.
For Limehouse costermonger Arthur Lovell, it was a miracle he found himself observing the silence at all.
Arthur was one of the Old Contemptibles – he had volunteered to fight and gone out with the first battalions in 1914. Amazingly, among the carnage of the trenches, he had survived to finish the war at Mons on Armistice Day. Wounded twice, both times he returned to his company to fight.
On the morning of 11 November 1928, Arthur was observing the ‘Great Silence’ at his costermongers barrow in Burgess Street, Limehouse – in those days, the service was held on the actual anniversary rather than the nearest Sunday.
Horror
As the silence came to an end, the horrified veteran saw a four-year-old girl, Rosie Wales, run into the busy road – right into the path of a steam lorry that was trundling back on its way.
Rosie faced certain death, and Arthur ran into the road, pushing the child to safety. But the brave ex-soldier, who had cheated bombs and snipers’ bullets for four years, slipped and was killed by the truck.
It was an act of heroism which caught the imagination of the nation.
A week later Arthur was given a full military funeral – and the crowds which jammed the streets of the East End dwarfed even those who had turned out for Armistice Day a week before.

And the story didn’t end there. At the funeral, the Bishop of Stepney recounted a strange tale from the days after Arthur’s death.
‘Last night there came to his house’, said the bishop, ‘a man who had been attracted by the name and asked if he could see the body. He said quietly: “I thought so. This man saved my life out in France during the war. I have not seen him since then until tonight.”’
The service was organised by the Rev CH Lancaster, chaplain of the 17th London Regiment, and he went on to tell the tale.
Arthur had saved the man’s life during a gas attack by lending him his gas mask, risking his own life for a comrade.
Arthur was buried with full military honours and thousands lined the route, bringing the traffic to a halt once again. At the scene of his death, the gun carriage, bearing his coffin, came to a halt, and a wreath was brought forward.
Then the carriage went on, followed by a costermonger’s cart organised by Arthur’s mates and piled high with chrysanthemums, orchids and, most poignantly, poppies.
East End costermongers joined with Countess Haig to honour their hero and the
service ended as little Rosie
Wales presented a bouquet
to the countess at Bromley Public Hall.
Among the mourners were Arthur’s wife and seven kids. Their dad had been a hero in peace as well as wartime.

Everybody knows the hardships the East End endured during the Blitz bombing of the Second World War – Mile End was the victim of the first flying bomb of World War II.
But what many forget is the suffering inflicted during the First World War, when the threat came not from Goering’s Luftwaffe but the Zeppelins of the Kaiser.
The aims of the enemy were similar. Britain, a great maritime nation, was an island dependent on its mighty merchant fleet for much of its foodstuffs and trade.
By bombing London’s docks, the gateway to the UK, the Germans hoped to shatter the British economy, cut off her food supply and, vitally, break her spirit.
Bombing of civilian targets was a radical development in modern warfare but, in May 1915, the Kaiser gave the order to bomb Tower Hamlets.
On the night of May 31, the residents of the East End endured a new horror as a German Army Zeppelin LZ38, captained by Hauptmann Erich Linnarz, dropped explosive and incendiary bombs in a line from Leytonstone to Stepney.
In the absence of a visible enemy, frustrations and anger turned against German immigrants living in the East End. Many of them had fled to London for sanctuary from Eastern Europe and Germany in the decades previously.

Meanwhile, the air campaign went on. On August 17, the navy Zeppelin L10 bombed Walthamstow, Leytonstone and Wanstead. And on the night of October 13, Tower Hamlets suffered again as the Germans launched their heaviest raid yet.
Five navy Zeppelins set out to bomb the East End and the City. For the first time the infant Royal Flying Corps, the magnificent men who went on to become the RAF, launched a defence, attempting to intercept the deadly airships as they closed on the capital.
But it was to no avail. L11, 13, 14, 15 and 16 got through to their target with no loss. 71 people were killed in the devastation around Aldgate High Street and the Minories.
The papers reported growing anti-German tension on the streets. The first serious outbreak came outside Messrs Herman, the cabinetmakers in Dod Street.
A frostbitten young soldier, home from the front, was walking past the works when one of the hands, said to be a German, made “uncomplimentary remarks”.
The East End News takes up the story: “Some women standing about took up the cudgels. About 200 of them assembled round the works and prevented the workmen from loading. This was the beginning of the anti-German riots.”
But the flying corps was at last beginning to get the measure of this new enemy. Lieut. William Leefe Robinson was awarded the Victoria Cross when he became the first pilot to bring down a Zeppelin.
Many more were brought down by the corps’ new explosive bullet in the following months, and the Germans realised the day of their new warfare was already past. The Zeppelin was abandoned.

In September 1916, Britain was in the grip of the darkest days of the First World War.
The East End in particular was suffering, with Zeppelin air raids razing houses and factories to the ground. Meanwhile, the carnage of trench warfare in Europe was cutting a swathe through London’s youth.
With men being slaughtered by the million, one more death might have gone unremarked. But the sacrifice of boy sailor Jack Cornwell caught the imagination of the nation – and earned him a state funeral to rank with that of any monarch.
Jackie Cornwell was born in Leyton in January 1900. At 16, he would today have been finishing his GCSEs and thinking about college.
But in the Great War, 16 was old enough to go into battle. And, on the morning of June 16, 1916, Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell found himself on the deck of HMS Chester, under the command of Captain Robert Lawson, joining the battle fleet at Scapa Flow.
As the Chester picked her way through the morning fog, disaster struck. She had run into a scouting group of German destroyers. The British ship opened fire but the battle was hopelessly one-sided.
Three of the Chester’s ten guns were knocked out in minutes, its crew lying dead or dying on deck. Despite sustaining terrible wounds, young Jack was the only member of his gun crew left alive.
The losses were terrible, with 34 dead and 42 wounded – mainly casualties of the bomb splinters strafing off the water and along the deck. Yet despite his injuries and the horror around him, Jack stood by his post.
After the battle, he was transferred to Grimsby Hospital, where his condition deteriorated.
Moments before he died, he called for the matron. “Give my mother my love,” he told her. “I know she is coming.”
Devotion to duty
His heroism was mentioned in dispatches by Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, who wrote: “A report from the commanding officer of the Chester gives a splendid instance of devotion to duty.
“Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell was mortally wounded early in the action.
“He nevertheless remained standing alone at a most exposed post, quietly awaiting orders till the end of the action, with the gun crew dead and wounded all around him.
“His age was under 16 and a half years. I regret that he has since died, but I recommend his case for special recognition in justice to his memory.”
The admiral would never have guessed just how publicly Jack was to be remembered.
The dispatch appeared in the papers and, among all the millions of terrible deaths, Jack’s story touched the hearts of the British public.
More and more tales appeared in magazines and papers until, eventually, his mother bowed to public demand, had Jack’s body disinterred, and a ceremonial and public funeral was arranged.

Military honours
On a baking summer’s Saturday on July 29, 1916, Jack’s body was reinterred with full ceremony.
The band of the Naval Volunteer Reserve led a huge group of servicemen, themselves followed by the gun carriage which bore his coffin, covered with the Union flag.
At Manor Park cemetery, the coffin was reconsigned to the earth before thousands of hushed mourners.
A fusillade of gunfire marked the closing of the service and the band sounded the Last Post.
More honours were to follow. On September 15, Jack was recognised along with the other victims of Jutland, receiving a posthumous Victoria Cross.
And perhaps even more touching, September 21 was pronounced Jack Cornwell Day in all of Britain’s elementary schools.
These two honours throw the story into stark relief.
Though he died as a man and received the honours of a soldier, at 16 years of age, Jackie Cornwell was little more than a boy.

For further reading, see “The East End Then And Now”, After the Battle Publications,
ISBN 0 900913 991.