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It’s the sort of mad scheme that only an enthusiastic amateur historian would come up with … and for which researchers ever after would be eternally grateful. For when Mrs Basil Holmes set out to write a book detailing every London cemetery of every and all denomination and creed, there was no financial incentive in the job. The market for the book, would be small, but Isabella Holmes (to give her back her Christian name) was tireless, sometimes fanatical in tracking down her sites – often risking suspicion and physical danger in the process. But writing as she did at the close of the 19^th century, she caught some of the burial grounds just in time. If it hadn’t have been for her seminal work, many sites of special historic interest in the East End would have been lost to posterity.

The London Burial Grounds website* takes the work of Mrs Holmes as its starting point. The book is a ‘useful and surprisingly lively account’ of Isabella’s adventures around the East End and beyond ‘encountering mystified workmen, suspicious householders and savage guard dogs on the way’. Her aim was to preserve as many of the burial grounds as possible as open spaces - the demands on land in a London with an ever growing population were huge.

Many of the spaces we still have. There is St Anne’s Limehouse, one of Hawksmoor’s triumphs, with its mysterious pyramid, ‘beloved of occultists and psychogeographers’. And there is St Paul’s Shadwell, consecrated in 1671 and a plague pit for Stepney Parish originally. There is another old plague pit opposite St John’s Church in Wapping. And there are churchyards that have been pressed into new uses: St James’s Church in Ratcliff was destroyed in 1940 and the churchyard was cleared in 2002, to create ‘a bleak, joyless park overlooking the approach to the Rotherhithe Tunnel’. But there are still fragments of gravestones left at the park’s edges. The Brunswick Wesleyan Chapel Ground in Three Colts Lane, meanwhile, which reportedly contains some thousand bodies, is now the playground of the Cyril Jackson primary school. And some are lost forever, such as the Roman Cemetery which stood on Sun Tavern Fields as was, between the Highway and Cable Street today. Lost too is the Friends Burial Ground in Wapping, first used in 1700, but now buried beneath later redevelopments.

Some sites have a mixed history. The Roman Catholic Burial Ground in Bethnal Green was in use in the early 19^th century, but was possibly on the site of an earlier plague pit. Certainly, by the 1900s, some of the cemeteries were becoming full up (leading to the creation of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – giant new cemeteries, including Tower Hamlets Cemetery (now the Cemetery Park) in the 1830s and 1840s. The rather ominously titled ‘Gatherings from Graveyards’ was written by London surgeon GA Walker in 1839, just as the problem of overcrowding was at its worst. Walker writes in sometimes gruesome detail of the worst of the burial grounds. The doctor was a subscriber to the ‘miasmic’ theory of contagion - the same thinking that attributed cholera and malaria to ‘bad air’ rather than, respectively, dirty water and mosquitoes. He thus had a particular interest in the health problems that could result from overcrowded local churchyards (which certainly were a health hazard, though for different reasons). He writes of the ground having to be ‘dug with care’ to avoid disturbing newly interred corpses.

Death was not always bad news for all concerned of course. For some it was good business. In 1736 it was discovered that the grave digger at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, one Thomas Jenkins, was selling bodies to Cesar Hawkins, a surgeon at Pall Mall. Mr Hawkins seems to have got away with what was effectively receiving stolen goods. Jenkins was less lucky, being sentenced to a public whipping. In ‘Albion’s Fatal Tree’, author Douglas Hay writes that ‘a mob of sailors and chimney sweeps met in Stepney Churchyard and he was tied to a cart. The cart horses were walked slowly so that he received many hundreds of lashes from the hangman, John Hooper, encouraged by the mob who shouted that he was not to spare him’.

The sites are peppered around the borough, from Bow in the east to Aldgate in the west, north from Bethnal Green to south on the Isle of Dogs. Many of us walk past the evidence every day without realising – a few headstones laid up against the wall of a park here, some fragments almost buried in tarmac there. The sites (and you can find dozens more at London Burial Grounds) could form the basis of a fascinating history tour around the East End … and the history that lies hidden beneath our feet and in unexpected corners.

* http://www.doubleo.fsnet.co.uk/bgpage1.htm

Today it is just another East End street, and passers-by doubtless sometimes wonder at the roots of its curious foreign name. But Swedenborg Gardens marks the home of one of the most extraordinary men of the 18th century – a brilliant scientist whose visions were to change the way many saw God and religion. It was here he lived in the heart of the East End’s Swedish community, and here he had his conversations with his maker.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688. The son of a clergyman, he grew up in a home filled with intellectual, philosophical, political and moral debate. He was certainly an intense child, writing later: “From my fourth to my tenth year, I was constantly engaged in thought upon God, salvation, and the spiritual sufferings of men, and several times I revealed that at which my father and mother wondered … from my sixth to my twelfth year my delight was to discourse with clergymen concerning Faith.”

Leaving Uppsala University at 22, he decided to travel Europe and immersed himself in an astonishing variety of disciplines. To the specialists of today, his work in physics, astronomy, metallurgy, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, watchmaking, bookbinding and lens grinding is staggering. And the tireless Swedenborg was a creator too. He designed a submarine, an aeroplane, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow combustion stove.

Most of his designs were never built, but undaunted he wrote numerous books, as well as taking a seat in the Swedish equivalent of our House of Lords. He also took up a post as the King of Sweden’s Assessor of Mines.

From the 1720s, Swedenborg was dividing his time between Sweden and London. The English capital attracted him, because its free press allowed him to publish his often controversial works without hindrance or censorship. Arriving in Wapping, Swedenborg first made his home in Wellclose Square, near the Highway.

Wellclose and Prince’s Squares were lined with grand townhouses, built by the wealthy Swedish merchants who had settled in the area. These timber traders had their wharves at Wapping, and soon the local Swedish community grew, with shopkeepers, craftsmen and itinerant sailors. In 1728, the community raised money for their own place of worship – and London’s first Swedish church was built in Prince’s Square.

Swedenborg became a regular worshipper at the new church. He was still commuting between his native and adopted countries - returning to the Swedish parliament to deliver a paper on the future of the national currency, coming back to London to publish his groundbreaking works on the brain and cerebral cortex – but soon his life was to take an extraordinary turn.

In 1744 Swedenborg began to have vivid, disturbing and exhilarating dreams and visions. He told no-one, merely logging his experiences in his diaries. But trying to make sense of it all, he began a meticulous study of the Bible. Then, in April 1745, came the experience that changed his life forever. God appeared to him, telling him that he would reveal truths to humanity through Swedenborg.

For the next 25 years, Swedenborg became ever more prolific, publishing 18 theological works at his own expense. Resigning his job as Mines Assessor, he wrote ceaselessly, expounding on the hidden, inner meanings to the stories of the Bible; the fundamental nature of God, Humanity and Creation; the truth about the afterlife; the key to personal spiritual growth and the secrets to a happy marriage, to name but a few.

Swedenborg kept as low a profile as such a productive writer was able. He published his work anonymously in London (his followers in Sweden began to be persecuted by the authorities), and he made no attempts to set up a church to disseminate his ideas.

But the secret escaped one night back in Gothenburg. Dining with friends, he suddenly became pale. Asked what was wrong, he said he had just ‘heard’ that a fire had broken out near his home in Stockholm, 300 miles away. A little later he became relieved, explaining that the fire had been put out safely. Days later, a messenger arrived from Stockholm, with exactly the same story. His vision became the talk of the town, and people realised that Swedenborg was the author of the extraordinary tracts that had been appearing.

On 29 March 1772, Swedenborg died at his Wapping home, and was buried in the little Swedish church in Prince’s Square. Not much remains to be seen now. The Swedish community has long since dispersed, and the visionary’s remains were removed to Uppsala Cathedral in 1908. The church closed in 1910 and, despite a fierce campaign, it was demolished in 1921.

In 1938, Prince’s Square was renamed Swedenborg Square. But though the fine old houses of Swedenborg and Wellclose Squares escaped the Blitz, they couldn’t dodge the planners. In the 1960s both were demolished as slums by the GLC.

IT is a familiar landmark to East Enders driving back from Essex, and anyone taking the M11 up to Stansted will have passed over it. But where did the Charlie Brown’s roundabout, one of London’s busiest intersections, get its unusual name?
The roundabout was
certainly not christened after the hero of the Peanuts
cartoon, but after a larger-than-life Limehouse man, who was just as famous in the 19th century as Snoopy’s master was 100 years later. Yet how did the bland and featureless junction come to be connected with one of the East End’s most colourful characters?
The story begins in the 1890s when Charlie Brown, a former boxer, took over the ownership of the Railway Tavern.
The Limehouse pub stood on the corner of Garford Street and the East India Dock Road and it was a popular watering hole for the sailors and dockers who made up most of Limehouse’s
population at the time.
Even among his noisy and outspoken clientele – many of whom were colourful characters with tales to tell – Charlie managed to stand out.
In fact, he was such a loud and extrovert landlord that he managed to stamp his
personality on the pub itself.
As Charlie’s reputation grew, so did the contents of the pub. Sailors would return from their travels with mementoes from every corner of the globe and bring them back to a delighted guv’nor, who would hang them on the wall of the tavern.
And as the collection grew, its fame spread throughout the capital. People would make the trip down to infamous Limehouse, which in the early 1900s was synonymous with Chinatown, white slaving and opium dens, just to view his map of the world.
In June 1932 Charlie Brown died and the ‘uncrowned king of Limehouse’ was laid in state in the pub that had been his palace.

His funeral procession was fit for a king too as 16,000
people went to Bow Cemetery to say goodbye to Charlie.
Charlie Brown’s legacy was a lucrative one, and both his children ran pubs. His
daughter Esther kept the
existing hostelry, while Charlie Brown Jr was the landlord of the Blue Posts, directly
opposite the Railway Hotel.
Both of them erected signs saying that their pubs were the genuine Charlie Brown’s.
In 1938 Charlie Jr gave up on the East End to move to leafier Woodford, taking the name with him of course. The new Charlie Brown’s lay at the end of the Southend to London road which was to become the A127.
But in 1972 the road that had given the pub its reason for being also became the cause of its demise, when the road
intersection was extended and the pub was demolished.
Young Charlie had salvaged many of the famous
mementoes from his dad’s pub, and legend has it they passed on to the Greyhound pub in Harlow, though there is no trace of them today.
By a weird coincidence, it was transport that created and destroyed the original Charlie Brown’s too. The Railway Hotel had been built to serve the old London and Blackwall Railway in the 1800s.
Despite the rebirth of the line, when the Docklands Light Railway was built in 1989,
the Railway Tavern stood
in the way of the Commercial Road extension and so was demolished.
Today, all that remains of the world-famous character, three pubs and a confusion of names is a traffic blackspot on the fringes of London.

There are a hundred tales of cockneys setting forth to make their mark on the world – as soldiers and explorers, as the adventurers who travelled to build the New World of the Americas and Australia.
But few stories are stranger than that of an East End boy who started life going from police station to reformatory, but ended it as a general in the Chinese army, and one of the most influential figures in that vast country in the years leading up to Mao’s revolution.
Morris Cohen was born in 1887, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants to the East End. His birthright was a life of devout religious piety and crushing poverty.
Cohen soon gave up on his studies, spending his time on the streets of Whitechapel, watching the card sharps and the conmen working their pitches. In 1900 he was arr-ested for the first time, for picking pockets.
He was sent to reform school and then, as was the custom in those days, shipped off to the Colonies – western Canada in Cohen’s case.
Shipping a 13-year-old boy halfway round the world with no prospect of ever seeing his family again seems a brutal remedy, but Cohen seemed to take to the rugged life of the Canadian wilds. He spent years wandering between Manitoba and British Columbia, building up a reputation as a hustler, a rabble-rouser and general troublemaker, with a taste for gambling and women.
Returning to the prairies after service in the Great
War, Cohen went back to his card-sharping and con tricks at the carnies and fairs that travelled around western Canada.
He became a regular customer at a Chinese gambling house in Saskatoon, where one evening he happened upon an armed robbery in progress. Cohen came to the aid of the Chinese owner – an extraordinary deed in a racist age when the Chinese were considered fair targets.
Bodyguard
Cohen now became lauded as a hero by the Chinese community and found himself becoming interested in the volatile world of Chinese politics. The conflicting forces of Nationalism and Communism were soon to vye for leadership of that country, as its ancient imperial system teetered toward collapse.
In 1922, Cohen set off for China itself, signing up as a bodyguard for legendary political leader Sun Yat-sen. He became fascinated by Sun’s ambitious plans to unify and develop China into a modern nation state. The stocky tough guy became a familiar figure at the leader’s side, earning the soubriquet ‘Two-Gun’ as he always strode around with two enormous pistols at his hips.

Cohen was an aggressive and ambitious man, and his habit of talking up his own achievements saw him slowly rising to become an influential figure in Nationalist China. He became a friend and confidant to key figures in the revolution, and a general in the Chinese Army.
The sharp-dealing Cohen was also building up a fortune as a property tycoon and arms dealer. Extraordinarily, he prospered in Asia while never learning a word of Chinese, but his career was abruptly halted with the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. He was interned, and spent years in brutal prison camps.
Gambling
Back at liberty, Cohen trod a blurred line. The Nationalists and Communists were bitter enemies, China splitting into the tiny Nationalist-ruled Taiwan while Mao’s Comm-unists took control of the huge new People’s Republic. Cohen professed loyalty, at various times, to both sides.
Ageing, and with his savings exhausted by his love of gambling and women, Cohen increasingly blurred fact and fiction, talking up his exploits to ever-greater heights.
Picking back through his extraordinary story, it’s often hard to separate his deeds from his dreams. What is certain is that Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen – huckster and conman, soldier and diplomat – did more than most Westerners to promote understanding of the Chinese in an age when his contemporaries saw no further than the opium den stereotype.
Two-Gun Cohen –
A Biography by Daniel S Levy. ISBN 0312156812.

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.

He gave his name to one of the most famous, or infamous, pubs in Britain, and is now a byword for the East End, even for people who have never been here. But who exactly was the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green?
The story itself is shrouded in legend, and set in a Bethnal Green vastly different from the chaotic and overcrowded slum it became in the 19th century.
Bethnal Green is first mentioned in an Eighth Century deed. One Mathilda le Vayre of Stepney is listed as having a home in ‘Blithehall’, and making a grant of the house’s courtyard.
By the Middle Ages, however, Bethnal Green was rather isolated from London, a quiet little village and rather grand. There were manor houses and mansions in the surrounding countryside and cottages cluster- ed around the green itself.
In the 1200s, one of those manor houses belonged to Simon de Montford – the young lord who is today remembered by Montford House, a red-brick block of flats on the north side of Victoria Park Square.
His story, and how he went from landed gentry to poor beggar, became hugely popular in early Tudor times, and was given a new lease of life by Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which was published in 1765.
Simon was a soldier in the service of the king, and fought at the Battle of Evesham, in the West Country, in 1265. According to the legend, he fell at the battle and was found wandering, blinded, by a nobleman’s daughter. She nursed the wounded soldier back to health, they fell in love and were married.
In time a daughter arrived, but although Besse was beautiful she couldn’t find a husband – the problem being her father. Besse was courted by four suitors; a rich gentleman, a knight, a London merchant and the son of an innkeeper.
Most of them withdrew their suit when they met Montford to ask for the old soldier’s consent to the marriage.
Montford’s reduced circum-stances were related through a popular song of the time:
“My father, shee said, is soone to be seene
The siely, blind beggar of Bednall-green,
That daylye sits begging for charitie,
He is the good father of pretty Besse.
Hie makrs and his tokens are knowen very well;
He alwayes is led with a dogg and a bell;
A seely old man, God knoweth, is he,
Yet he is the father of pretty Besse.”

In a predictably medieval twist, the courtly knight was the only man who could see past the seeming lack of a decent dowry to the woman he loved.
He received his reward, as the couple received a dowry of £3,000, plus £100 for Besse’s wedding dress. The benefactor? Grandfather Henry, who was still a rich man.
The legend persisted. Samuel Pepys visited fashionable Bethnal Green to stay with his friend, Sir William Ryder; Ryder’s house occupied the very same spot as the Montford mansion. The great diarist records the occasion on June 26, 1663:
“By coach to Bednall-green, to Sir W Ryder’s to dinner. A fine merry walk with the ladies alone after dinner in the garden; the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw, and good. This very house was built by the Blind Beggar of Bednall-green, so much talked of and sang in ballads.”
By 1690, the Bethnal Green beadle bore the badge of the Blind Beggar on his ceremonial staff. And in the 18th century every pub in the area bore the image of the beggar on their signs. Even Kirby’s Castle, a lunatic asylum, was dubbed the Blind Beggar’s House in 1727.
Kirby’s Castle was demolished to make way for post-War redevelopment, Montford’s House is buried in mystery, and today only one pub bears the sign of the Blind Beggar.
But Besse is remembered in Besse Street, the mayor bears an image of Simon and Besse on the borough’s ceremonial badge and, most famous of all, in 1966, the Kray twins and the unfortunate George Cornell sealed the Blind Beggar in the nation’s folklore forever.
With thanks to London’s East End: Life and Traditions, by Jane Cox, Phoenix Illustrated, ISBN 1-85799-956-8, £9.99.

Christmas is a time of tradition and indulgence. A stuffed goose has given way to the turkey and Christmas pudding is a popular choice instead of plum duff.
But one thing remains – Yuletide is a time of feasting, and dining on delicacies we never really eat for the rest of the year.
The centrepiece of any Christmas is the cake, with its rich casing of marzipan. And the soft yellow paste had been a rare luxury in Europe for centuries before it caught on here.
How it did so is a remarkable story for marzipan owes its popularity in England, and its very name, to a poor girl from Stepney who fled the East End to seek fame and fortune.
Eliza Marchpane was born in 1760 and, like thousands of other girls born in Stepney that year, faced a miserable life of drudgery, poverty, marriage – if she was lucky – followed by a huge brood of children.
Then, if she were lucky, her almost-certain early demise would be a peaceful and painless one.
Of course one way to scrape a living was to follow the tradition of countless other cockney girls of the time, and become a prostitute, working the inns of Wapping and Radcliffe.
That was the path Eliza took. But, looking around her at the women who had been plying the same trade for a dozen years or more, she realised she would soon be old before her time and her value would fade.

Passage to Paris
She decided to move upmarket. Saving her money, she bought a passage onboard a ship to the continent. In Paris she purchased one set of fine clothes and adopted the title ‘Marquesa de Marchpane’.
In England, her accent marked her out as a guttersnipe. To unaccustomed ears in the salons and boudoirs of Europe, she sounded strange and exotic.
The beautiful Eliza moved around the courts of Europe, becoming a famed courtesan, with a string of aristocratic lovers swelling her fortune.
In the 1790s she came to Vienna, where she seduced the young musical genius Mozart, composer of the Marriage of Figaro and the Magic Flute. And it was in Vienna, the most fashionable city in Europe at the time, that she first tasted little delicacies, fashioned from almond paste.
Eliza was back in London at the turn of the 19th century, but she certainly wasn’t going to revisit her Stepney roots. ‘The Marquesa de Marchpane’ was rich and established and now had a suitably ‘foreign’ accent by way of disguise.
She set up home in the affluent West End, where she would give dinner parties and soirees. The exotic and beautiful Continental courtesan was a huge hit and her parties boasted many dishes and delicacies imported from Europe – among them the little sweets and fruits made from ‘marchpane’, or marzipan as it become known.
Marzipan became a delicacy – sugar and almonds were still relatively expensive and made it the province of the rich.
By the time Eliza died in Brighton in 1830, she had been the lover of the dandified and promiscuous Prince Regent, the future George IV, and marzipan was fast becoming an integral part of Christmas.
And when Charles Dickens penned his descriptions of ‘traditional’ English Yule feasts 20 years later, the marzipan-clad Christmas cake was a firm – and cheap – popular favourite.
Eliza had fulfiled her aim, to escape poverty and an early death, to find riches. But with all her rich imagination, she could never have dreamed of her legacy to our Christmas a century later.

Arthur Orton wasn’t a man born to great things but the Wapping butcher knew he wanted more than a lifetime selling sausages.
In 1852 18-year-old Arthur set sail for Australia, a new identity and one of the most costly, lengthy and extraordinary trials in legal history.
One of the novelties of the New World was that peers and paupers could rub shoulders as equals and Arthur befriended exiled Sir Alfred Tichborne, the 11th Baronet.
Alfred died in 1866 but never confided in Arthur the Tichborne family secrets, not least the “loss” of his elder brother Roger.
Sir Roger Doughty Tichborne had been born in Paris in 1829, 10 years before Alfred. And, after receiving his military commission in the Sixth Dragoons, he was expected to become the 11th baronet.
But Roger disliked military life, preferring to fritter the family fortune in the clubs of London with his friends.
He also had an eye for the ladies and soon a romance was blossoming with one Katherine Doughty. Her parents were appalled, not least by the fact that the dissolute Tichborne was Katherine’s first cousin.

The parents decided on a three-year wait before the two exchanged vows, reckoning that the feckless Tichborne would lose interest. The plan suited Roger perfectly, and he immediately made plans for a world tour.
The 24-year-old peer set sail for Rio de Janeiro in January 1853. From there he journeyed to New York, setting off on the SS Bella on 20 April 1854.
Young Tichborne never reached the US, the vessel capsizing due to a poorly balanced load of coffee. Around 40 passengers and crew were presumed lost when an empty lifeboat was found drifting a by a passing ship.
Weeks later the news reached the Tichborne estate back in England and the family lawyer’s set about executing Roger’s will, which he had completed before he set sail. Roger’s father inherited the estate but eight years later he too died and Roger’s younger brother stood in line to inherit Tichborne wealth.
But young Alfred was, if anything, even more feckless than his brother and mother, Lady Henrietta was determined he should not succeed his father.
Clutching at straws, and the rumour that Roger had survived the shipwreck, Henrietta placed advertisements in newspapers inviting information about her son’s whereabouts.
Glancing over a week old copy of the Times in a shanty hut in Wagga Wagga, Australia, one Thomas Castro’s sharp eye chanced on the name Tichborne. Castro was none other than Arthur Orton.
His plans for fame and fortune hadn’t panned out, and Orton was facing financial ruin.
Orton had not only met the late baronet years before but he had also met Sir Edward Doughty’s valet Bogle.
Orton decided on a bold gamble. Using Bogle as a go-between he travelled to Melbourne and passed himself off as the long-drowned Roger.
He returned to London, at Lady Henrietta’s expense, to meet his joyful mother.
Bizarrely, Lady Henrietta convinced herself that an obese Wapping butcher with an Australian accent was her slim, aesthetic and aristocratic son but other members of the family were not so easily fooled.
The case went before the London Court of Common Pleas on 11 May 1871. Almost three years, hundreds of witnesses and 10,000 pages of evidence later, the prosecution found Orton’s claim false.
The fact that he had forgotten any details of the first 16 years of his life and that he no longer had his school days’ tattoo of the initials RCT on his arm where just two damning pieces of evidence.
Orton got 14 years, serving 10 before his release in 1884. In poverty he sold his story to People magazine and he died on April Fool’s Day 1898.
The imposter was buried in a coffin bearing the curious legend: Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. It seems the only person he successfully fooled was himself.

Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564

For centuries, the people of the East End have been travelling to the four corners of the globe – as sailors, traders, missionaries and colonists.
And for centuries they have been returning from distant lands, bringing cargoes, customs, new words and new ideas that have enriched London and made it the cosmopolitan city it is today.
Many have returned with extraordinary tales and with new found riches from their travels but the story of Joseph Druce must be one of the most amazing.
Druce came from a humble enough beginning. He was born in 1777 in Shadwell, the son of a labourer in one the Limehouse distilleries.
The young Joseph moved from job to job, working on fishing boats out of the Thames and spending a short time in Bellamy’s Ropeworks.
But he fell into trouble when he turned to crime. And in March 1791, he was convicted of housebreaking and robbery at the Old Bailey.
The usual sentence for the crime was hanging – in the late 1700s literally hundreds of Britons, including children, were hanged every year for such petty offences as shoplifting and pickpocketing.
But Joseph was lucky to come up before a “liberal” judge. He was sentenced to death, but because he was only 13 years old the sentence was commuted to transportation to the colonies. So, like thousands of his fellow Englishmen in the 18th and 19th centuries, Druce began the long and perilous voyage to New South Wales, Australia.

Cheap solution
Transportation was seen as a cheap and final way of England getting rid of its problems. Many of the convicts did not survive the journey, with its storms, scurvy and sickness.
But Druce survived and did quite well in his new home, working as a bushranger and, ironically, a police officer.
But the sea soon beckoned again and he signed up on one of the many merchantmen ships running the route between Australia and New Zealand.
On one of his journeys, he met and befriended a Maori chief. His new friend became sick on the journey and Joseph nursed him back to health, returning him to his grateful family in New Zealand.
The Maoris had settled in New Zealand around a thousand years before after completing an epic sea journey from Hawaiki, in Polynesia.
They had lived peacefully for centuries but when the Euro-peans arrived, they brought conflict with them.
The Maoris found themselves driven from their traditional lands and suffered terrible massacres at the hands of the settlers.
But Joseph still found himself welcomed by a hospitable people – so welcome, in fact, that he married his new friend’s daughter. And the poor boy from Limehouse found himself created a fully-fledged Maori chief!
Sadly, his wife didn’t live long, and Joseph put their baby daughter into an orphanage. He was now a free man, having been pardoned in 1801, and he joined the HMS Porpoise, setting sail for London.
Back home, he soon fell on hard times again and, in 1851, there is a record of his entering the Shadwell Workhouse.
At the age of 40, the ailing Joseph was taken in to the Greenwich Seamen’s Hospital where he revealed a final string in his many talents – producing the story of his life, The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner.
In 1819 Joseph died. Sailor, policeman, author and Maori chief – in just 42 years he had lived enough lives for half a dozen men.