eastlondonhistory.com

11am on 11 November, 1918, ‘the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’ and the First World War finally came to an end. The ‘war to end all wars’ had seen the mobilisation of 60m European soldiers, 40m casualties, and some 20m military and civilian deaths.

It was a war that most Londoners struggled even to understand. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 would lead to a chain reaction of declarations of war across Europe. Yet few East Enders had even heard of the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina where the archduke was shot, and would struggle to understand why it should immerse them in a World War.

But life was to swiftly change for East Enders. Although Britain had a large standing army, a rush to enlist deprived London of workers. With conscription coming in 1916, things got tighter still, yet it opened up many jobs to women for the first time. And previously unemployable men, the old, the ill, prisoners, vagrants, even children were pressed into jobs. The irony was that with everyone working, the standard of living actually rose for working class Londoners. On the home front there were changes and losses of liberties. Opening hours for pubs were cut and British Summer Time introduced (all in the cause of productivity). Curfews and censorship were imposed, as were restrictions on movement.

Paranoia and fear of spies sometimes hardened into violence. In the East End the shops of Germans were attacked, never mind that some had been here for decades. For good measure, some attacked the shops of Russians, Poles, Lithuanians - the East End was full of exiles from Eastern Europe in those early years of the 20th century. Some would write explanations to put the mob right, with shops displaying signs such as ‘We are Russians’. Some simply followed the lead of the Royal Family and changed their surnames. As Saxe-Coburg and Gotha became Windsor, so Greenbergs became Greens, Schmidts Smiths.

Though we tend to associate air raids with the Second World War, East End suffered bombing during World War I too. The first daylight bombs fell on 13 June, 1917 (dropped from Zeppelins rather than airplanes). But though the raids were shortlived, with airships proving easy targets, the damage was bad enough, with 104 people killed in the East End, 154 seriously injured and 269 slightly injured. Among the casualties were 120 children killed and injured, 18 killed in Upper North Street School, Poplar. Across London, 600 people died in total.

After four long years, war was over, but some things would never return to normal. Society and a rigid class system had been rocked by the conflict, and the thousands of domestic servants who left service in 1914 would never return in any number. Women had discovered new freedoms, some of which were rudely snatched away with the peace, but many were inspired to fight for jobs and votes. More people had moved around Britain on active service or to new jobs in the cities, than ever before and some would never return home.

Of course many would never return at all. 750,000 British servicemen died, and 1.7m were wounded. 160,000 women lost a husband and 300,000 children lost fathers. One million London men enlisted, with 131,000 of them dying on active service. Go to almost any town or village across Britain and you will see the war memorials, the lists of names.

Each was a life cruelly cut short, denied possibilities. A glimpse at just three of the names whose lives ended during the Great War offers a glimpse of what might have been - lives of talent and promise prematurely ended.

Isaac Rosenberg lived from 1890 to 1918. Uniquely talented as both a gifted painter and poet. Rosenberg was opposed to World War I but signed up, not through patriotism, but to ‘find a job’ and financially support his mother. Brushing aside the claims of better-known war poets such as Sassoon and Owen, critic Paul Fussell claims Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ as “the greatest poem of the war”. Rosenberg was killed, possibly by a sniper, at dawn on 1 April 1918 on the Somme, having just finished night patrol.

Bethnal Green orphanage boy, Walter Tull, was the first black outfield professional footballer in Britain. In action from day one during the first battle of the Somme, he was also the first British-born black officer in the Army. During the second battle of the Somme, on 25 March 1918, he was cut down by machine gun fire. His body was never found, and his story was lost for decades.

And at sea there was the extraordinary heroism of young Jack Cornwell - just 16 years old as he 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 sustained terrible losses, with three of its ten guns knocked out within minutes, and men dead or dying on the deck, the East End lad found himself the last member of his gun crew left standing. Boy (1st Class) John Travers Cornwell stood his post despite being mortally wounded. He died in Grimsby Hospital days later, and was mentioned in dispatches by Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty. The East End funeral, on a scorching summer’s day in July 1916, became an event to rival any state ceremony.

Each year since the end of hostilities, the sacrifice of millions has been marked - first on Armistice Day itself, and since 1939 on Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday closest to 11 November). The national ceremony is at the Cenotaph in Whitehall of course, though for many years there were ceremonies around Britain on the day too. Inevitably, with time and the natural passing of veterans and their families, the ceremonies have diminished somewhat, as has the wearing of poppies. Many people argue that interest has noticeably increased again in recent years (and especially on the 90th anniversary this year). Certainly, the sacrifice of these millions of men, women and children should never be forgotten.

By Remembrance Sunday 2008, only four British First World War veterans remained. Remarkably three of them - Henry Allingham (112), Harry Patch (110) and Bill Stone (108) were at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday to lead the two minutes’ silence. It’s 90 years since the guns fell silent - though around the world wars have never ceased.

Clive Wright is an East End lad who left Bow a full 80 years ago … yet returned every Sunday with his family to worship at Liberty Hall in Lincoln Street, Mile End. Liberty Hall is no more (though the building still stands), and Lincoln Street has now been renamed Brokesley Street. Yet for Clive, many of the memories are as fresh as in those pre-War days - and he is on a quest for information. It all turns on Clive’s uncle, Wallace Hancock, and his journey from the trenches of World War I to becoming a conscientious objector in World War II. Clive takes up the story.

“My parents were born in the late 1890s and grew up in Bow. My mother’s family lived in Merchant Street; my father at Bow Common Lane then Lichfield Road. As a child my mother, Rose Plantin, attended Sunday School at Bow Wesleyan Church next door to the house in which she lived. My father, Tom Wright, was a choirboy at Holy Trinity Church, Mile End, which was the church where they were married in 1923.

“I am not sure when or how my parents became members of the Liberty Hall Mission. They were certainly involved when my father returned from four years in the trenches of the Western Front. His active service came to an end after he was blinded for weeks by gas in August 1918. My mother’s sister, Lily Plantin, and her future husband, Wallace Hancock – another survivor of four years in the trenches – were also members of Liberty Hall.”

Wallace joked about his time in the trenches, writing home that the rock buns the folk at Liberty Hall had sent him could have been used as shells with which to bombard the Germans. But the horror of war seems to have had a profound effect. In modern parlance, Hancock was ‘politicised’ by his experiences of the First World War and after. During the 1920s, Wallace worked for the Poplar Board of Guardians during the Poplar Rates Rebellion, led by George Lansbury in 1921. And, at the outbreak of World War II, pacifist Wallace became a conscientious objector.

As the 1920s drew on, Liberty Hall was very much the focus of the family’s social life. Clive’s father, Tom, was a keen member of the church’s football team, alongside Mission founder, Albert Green. The Greens’ home, at 54 Antill Road in Bow, became a home from home to church members. “I remember the interior as crowded in the Victorian fashion, heavy dark furnishings, chairs stuffed with horsehair which pricked the bare legs of little boys like myself,” recalls Clive. “I am pretty certain that on the wall was a framed list of friends killed in the Great War. The First World War, and the terrible grief that was its legacy to the 1920s and the 1930s was a calamity from which my parents’ generation and the founder members of Liberty Hall were never quite to recover.”

But if there was sorrow, there was a lot of joy too. “Mr Green and his wife Win were very hospitable and lunches at their home were a meeting occasion for friends. Mrs Green, a florid-faced woman, was the epitome of the hard working housewife and she devoted herself to providing food to huge numbers of people, either in her home or at parties in Liberty Hall. She seemed always to be toiling at domestic tasks.” To the Wright family, making their long Sunday pilgrimage from South Harrow to Mile End, 54 Antill Road was a welcome place to rest.

At the heart of it all was the energetic, slightly terrifying figure of Albert Green. Universally referred to as ‘Boss’, he was “a vigorous and forceful man, with a large hooked nose, a loud voice and a dominating personality”. This lively speaker vigorously asserted the importance of Liberty Hall remaining non-denominational and nonconformist, and was scathing about the Church of England’s status as the established church. At Liberty Hall, religion inevitably had a political dimension. Speakers were invited from local surrounding churches, invariably nonconformist organisations. One was Rev Ted Sorensen, a Unitarian minister who was later an MP and became Lord Sorensen of Leyton. The mission had the energy so typical of nonconformist churches of the day. Each week was a blizzard of activity - three services on Sundays, Scouts, Girl Guides, the Junior Christian Endeavour group, concerts and more.

Like so much in the East End though, the initial grouping dissolved in a gradual diaspora of members - in this case hastened by bombing and evacuation. Just as the Wrights had moved out, so their friends followed, and by the end of World War II Liberty Hall was no more. The community spirit persisted though, as Clive recalls. “The post-war reunions were very jolly events with huge quantities of food (provided presumably by the indefatigable Win Green) and with members supplying entertainment by songs, recitations and monologues or by playing musical instruments. One of the stars of these entertainments was the daughter of one of the Liberty Hall stalwarts, Gladys Cronmire, who had a fine and strong voice. My own sister played the piano on one occasion. My father did recitations and played the one-stringed fiddle. My mother helped in the kitchen. These hearty get-togethers were the final flowering of Liberty Hall and took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

Today of course, most of the congregation are long gone. Among them were Ashley and Emily Cronmire and daughter Gladys. “Ashley worked on the railways and had a dreadful impression on his forehead in which the corner of a crate or box that must have fallen on him could be clearly seen.” There was fireman Tom Sweeney and wife Elsie; the prolix speaker Harry Pike; Frank Willson, an LCC employee and Secretary of the Hall, and who moved his family out to Kent after World War II; schooteacher Bill Berger and wife Lil and son Martin. As Clive describes them: ‘modest and typical East Enders’. Now Clive is digging back into that history while there are still (we hope) some people around who remember it. If you have any recollections of his uncle Wallace, please contact us at East End Life.

Think about East End food and your mind possibly moves to pie, mash and liquor, to jellied and stewed eels, and crustacea prised from their shells and swallowed with pepper and vinegar. Fish and chips would be right up there too.

Go back to Victorian times and you would have found cockneys downing oysters by the dozen - so plentiful were they that were considered poor man’s food, and steak and kidney pie was padded out with oysters as a cheap alternative. Overfishing saw the end of that. Contemporary East End dishes might include the ubiquitous curry, as Banglatown has become a magnet for food lovers from all over London.

But twice in the last century, Londoners had to forgo their favourites as wartime rationing saw the grocer’s shelves empty, and strange new foods appear. Most of us know a bit about rationing during World War II, courtesy of Dad’s Army, with butcher Jack Jones covertly slipping an extra slice of ham or half pound of sausages into Mr Mainwaring’s bag. But World War I had its rationing too.

As an island nation, and one which had seen a huge flight from the countryside to the towns since the Industrial Revolution, Britain was uniquely vulnerable in times of war. And when the Germans started using their U-boats to sink the ships of the Americans and other allies who were bringing us food, there was a very clear plan - to starve Britain into surrendering. It was a successful plan too, and by 1918, Britain had just six weeks’ food left.

So began a brief period of rationing very late on, but when World War II broke out, the Government remembered the lesson, and rationing came in early. The hard thing was that, as ‘the war that would be over by Christmas rolled on’ the rationing had to get tighter. In our overfed times, imagine the grim prospect of facing yet another year of war on even smaller portions.

So, on 8 January, 1940, sugar, bacon and butter were rationed. Next came eggs, milk, cheese, tea, jam, biscuits, breakfast cereal and canned fruit. Vegetables were largely unrationed, though there would of course be none of the out-of-season exotica we enjoy today, with fruit and veg being flown in from round the world. Nonetheless you could (up to a point) have all the potatoes, carrots and swedes you could eat.

A look at the average ration in the list below shows it was not only meagre but a pretty boring diet. Perhaps a creative modern-day chef might make some interesting vegetarian dishes, but there weren’t many vegetarians anyway; the Vegetarian Society estimates that there just 100,000 in wartime Britain. And of course fresh fruit, such as oranges and bananas, disappeared altogether. All the British could see was their favourite dishes disappearing one by one.

The solution? Come up with new ones. And so were born the likes of Woolton Pie, with a filling of oats flavoured with vegetable stock, carrots and swedes. There was vegetable roll with potato pastry - boiled swede and carrot wrapped in mashed potato. For afters you might have carrot fudge, a delicious concoction of carrots, gelatine and orange essence. Little wonder perhaps that the Government launched campaigns lauding the health benefits of carrots (they help you see in the dark): they seem to be the one thing that Britain had enough of during the War.

Remarkably though, some of the recipes stuck. Favourites such as apple crumble, toad in the hole and corned beef hash date from these austere years, and some people even look back fondly on powdered egg and chicory coffee. And that modern favourite, carrot cake, first appeared during the war.

But it wasn’t just food that was rationed. Clothing, petrol of course and even furniture was in short supply. Making do and mending was essential in those days. By 1943, the clothing ration was down to 36 points per year. A man’s shirt would ‘cost’ five points, a pair of knickers two, shoes five points, a dress seven, and a suit 26.

And when you did get a bar of soap you had to eke it out carefully - you got one bar a month. Restaurants were exempt from rationing - pretty unfair as the rich could afford to eat out more and thus eat better than the poor. Winston Churchill’s government partly addressed this was the British Restaurants though - new establishments where no meal could cost more than five shillings.

The war won in 1945, East Enders looked forward to enjoying their old foods once more. How dismal then to find rationing getting tougher. Bread, unrationed during the war, went onto the ration in 1946 (the hungry of the newly liberated Europe had to be fed). In fact sweet and sugar rationing didn’t end until 1953 and the last item to come off the ration was the exotic banana in 1954.

[BOXOUT]
The average ration for a Briton during World War II

1lb 3oz of meat
4oz of bacon or ham
2oz of butter
3 pints of milk
2oz of margarine
2oz of lard
2oz loose tea
1 egg
2oz jam
3oz sugar
1oz cheese
3oz sweets
2lb onions
Plus 16 points a month for dried and tinned food.

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.