eastlondonhistory.com

Sam Wolman used to scoff when the young tailor’s assistant came into his chemist shop on Brick Lane to buy throat sweets, talking about his dreams of making it big in the music business.
“That was when he was nothing,” remembers the proprietor of Wolman’s with a laugh.
“He worked for a feller, a tailor or presser, off of Brick Lane, and he used to come in here and say he wanted to write songs, to sing songs, and I used to pull his leg and tease him something rotten.
“And then the next thing I knew he was having hit records, he was on Top of the Pops. Well it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”
The young no-hoper was one Leslie Sebastian Charles, but he would become better known to fans of pop music and the movies as Billy Ocean.
Leslie was born on January 21, 1950, in Trinidad. Like many other West Indian families in the Fifties, the Charles’ emigrated to England, in search of work, and their son became an East Ender.
He had his dreams of making it in the music business but, like many others, had to find a day job while working on his performing career. That’s how he ended up working in the Spitalfields rag trade, and supplementing his income with work as a session singer.
But all that changed forever when he scored a brace of hits on the GTO label as a solo artist.
Love Really Hurts Without You charted in 1976 and Red Light Spells Danger followed it into the Top 10 in 1977.
A successful career seemed to beckon but, like so often in the fickle world of the pop charts, the momentum was hard to maintain.
Billy’s subsequent releases struggled for radio play and, between 1980 and 1984, Ocean was absent from the UK charts.
But, with the kind of determination that powers pop longevity, he turned his attention to a bigger target the US charts.
Ocean decamped to America at the turn of the Eighties and had a string of successes in the US R&B chart. Then he broke into the mainstream US charts and the hits crossed the Atlantic to make it big in Britain too.

Caribbean Queen (No More Love On The Run) was Ocean’s first national US pop Number 1, and it swiftly became an enormous hit in Britain.
He followed the million-selling 1984 single with There’ll Be Sad Songs (To Make You Cry) in 1986 and Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car two years after that.
It was a dazzling period of chart success, with both records going to Number 1 in the States as well as being huge hits over here.
Suddenly continued the astonishing run of successes, but Billy hit his UK high point in 1986 with another huge Number 1 hit. When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going was the theme song to the smash-hit film The Jewel Of The Nile, starring Michael Douglas.
The video featured Douglas and co-stars Kathleen Turner and Danny de Vito dancing with Ocean, with the quartet dressed in white tuxedos.
Chart success in the UK started to wane once more but Billy, with the canny business sense that had seen him kick-start his career in the States, was one step ahead.
He had released Caribbean Queen in Africa as African Queen and on the Continent as European Queen, each version having specially-rewritten lyrics tailored to its new market!
Just like the old days in the Brick Lane tailors, he was cutting his material to fit. Both versions were just as successful as the original, and it was to the European dance market that the singer now turned his attentions.
Today, Billy is much more a force on the European music scene, though When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going was covered by Boyzone and became a Number 1 for the second time around.
As sceptical Spitalfields pharmacist Sam said: “It just goes to show…”
With thanks to This Bright Field by William Taylor. £15.99, Methuen Books.

These days, most of our entertainment takes place indoors – the TV or video, the cinema, a concert or the theatre.
But the buskers you see on street corners and plying
their trade in the shelter of Tube stations are descendants of a much older tradition.
For hundreds of years, East Enders enjoyed their music and theatre in the streets. And the diversity and sheer strangeness of some of the acts would put today’s street performers to shame.
Strange to say, but religion played a huge part in bringing such secular delights as jugglers, tumblers, stilt-walkers and fire eaters onto the streets of the East End.
Homeless clerics
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and priories between 1533 and 1540, huge numbers of clerics were thrown out of work and, literally, out onto the streets.
Minstrels and entertainers had always congregated round the abbeys, because that was where the crowds were. In the early Middle Ages, London and the whole of Europe was being continually criss-crossed by people walking on pilgrimages to holy sites – they were the package tours of the day.
Fairs grew up at the gates
of the East End monasteries, with the purpose of extracting money from the holidaying
pilgrims.
And so when the Augustini-ans at Aldgate and Shoreditch, Franciscans at the Minories and the nuns at the hospitals of Bishopsgate and Bedlam found themselves needing to earn a crust, many turned to street entertaining themselves… with mixed results.
John Evelyn kept a diary detailing his trips into the East End in the 1600s, and went out of his way to see some of the more bizarre acts. He told of: “A sort of cat with a monkey’s body… the hairy woman whose eyebrows covered her forehead, whose ears sprouted hair, and whose face was adorned with a thick beard and moustaches.”
The Turk, meanwhile, climbed with his toes up an almost vertical rope attached to a church spire and slid down head first. The Turk also danced blindfold on the high wire with a small boy attached to his foot, then did a headstand on a mast.
Richardson the fire eater had a spectacular act for the crowds at Aldgate in the 1600s. He chewed and swallowed burning coals, then downed melted glass and, for an encore, put a hot coal on his tongue and cooked an oyster on it, finally swallowing the lot. As light refreshment after this, he washed it down with flaming pitch, wax and sulphur.

Punch and Judy
In the mid-1600s, an enduring favourite arrived when Punch and Judy was imported from Italy. Then in 1835, the Chinese Shades was brought from China to Limehouse. Punch and Judy men switched to this new shadow show for night-time work.
The Victorians were enraptured by the new discoveries of science, and the Microscope Exhibitor worked night and day opposite the London Hospital. Objects were placed on a wheel at the back of a microscope and inspected in turn – a flea, a human hair, a cheese mite, a droplet of water. The Whitechapel site was favoured because of the exceptionally good light.
Stilt-walkers were popular, and, of course, could be seen above a crowd. The Jellini family was famed in Limehouse for performing ballet on stilts, to a barrel organ accompaniment. And the Commercial Road provided rich pickings for the Street Reciter, who recited Shakespeare backwards and earned a princely 10 shillings (50p) a week.
The rise of the cinema and music hall killed off the street theatre. And these days our homes are warmer, cosier and we have entertainment at the flick of a switch.
But next time you’re settling down to watch EastEnders, remember when the real East Enders were watching and performing on our streets.

TALK about British comedy and there is a name that stands head and shoulders above the competition. The Carry On series ran for 30 years – from the gentle post-War approach of Carry On Sergeant to the ironic alternative comedy of Carry On Columbus.
The films are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank.*
And for East Enders, the films have a special resonance – Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor are just two locals who went on to star in the series, and they have been celebrated in East End History in the past. But the Cockney connection goes far deeper – for the man who penned those first few Carry Ons was a Tower Hamlets boy.
Norman Hudis was born in Stepney in 1923. He always had a sharp mind and a gift for words and, on leaving school, he landed a job as a local newspaper reporter, working on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
War came, and Norman served with the RAF in the Middle East, turning his hand to writing for Air Force News. And like so many of the entertainers who came to dominate British comedy in the ’50s – such as Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and the Goons – he sharpened his comedy pen writing for the concert parties and camp concerts organised as a tonic for the troops.
It was tougher in Civvy Street however. Back in London after the War, Norman decided to throw in journalism and try his hand as a playwright. He was certainly prolific, but not successful. However one of his works, Here is the News, got good reviews.
These caught the eye of the producers at Pinewood. At the time, south-east England had a thriving film industry, at Pinewood, Ealing and Shepperton, and the money men were always on the lookout for young talent to turn out the features needed to fill Britain’s bustling cinemas.
It was production line stuff – many of the films were destined to be ‘B’ features to the big American movies. But after two years at Shepperton, and with not one film produced, Norman was fed up, and decided to go freelance.

His years of apprenticeship paid off, and he was soon churning out successful scripts. The quality was sometimes iffy, not surprising as at one point Norman was working on three scripts at once!
Fortune took a lucky turn when he bumped into Peter Rogers in 1957. Rogers was already an established producer on the UK film scene, he went on to make more than 100 movies, and he was working on a biopic of the rock and roll singer Tommy Steele. Norman was offered the job of scripting Rock Around the World.
The film was a hit, and Norman was immediately drafted in to pen a swift follow-up, after all, no-one knew how long the singing ex-seaman’s chart career would last! But The Duke Wore Jeans was another success for the pair, this time with director Gerald Thomas on board.
Rogers and Thomas were working together on a production of RF Delderfield’s novel The Bull Boys, and called in the reliable Hudis to rewrite the book for the screen. Dumping the original title as too flat, they selected one of the final lines from the film as a name. And “Carry on Sergeant” was a massive hit.
Norman went on to pen five more Carry Ons. Carry On Nurse was the top-grossing UK film of 1959. Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising followed, one a year, each charting the battles of a crew of bunglers who come through against all the odds.
But by 1962, the team felt the formula was wearing thin. Hudis was replaced by Talbot Rothwell, who took the films in a bawdier and more farcical direction.
The Stepney writer took off for pastures newer and more lucrative. Throughout the ’60s he worked on TV and film in California, eventually moving there full time in the seventies. Episodes of CHiPs, The Wild Wild West, Marcus Welby MD, The Man From Uncle and Buck Rogers are just a few to have flowed from his typewriter.
But of all his writing, the Carry Ons remain closest to his heart. Back in London recently for the 40 Years of Carry On celebrations, he remarked that it was his core of irreverent, risque East End humour that made those comedies. Best of all, 40 years on, people are still laughing!

When Lord Grade died just before Christmas, it was more than just the passing of a larger than life figure on the UK entertainment scene.
It marked the demise of the last great impresario to make the leap from music hall to TV and films.
And Lew was also the last great link with the old Jewish East End – the East End of working class lads who transformed themselves through hard work and an eye for the chance into the great entrepreneurs of post-War London.
Louis Winogradsky was born in the Ukrainian town of Tokmak on Christmas Day 1906, to parents Olga and Isaac. But in 1912, along with thousands of other Jewish families, the family fled the pogroms in the Tsar’s empire to a new life in the East End.
It was an uncertain existence. Within the first months, Isaac had lost all the capital he had brought with him. The Winogradsky boys, however, were adapting to London life a little better.
Louis and little brothers Leslie and Bernard (later the theatrical impresario Lord Del- font) excelled at the Rochelle Street School in Shoreditch, and Louis was soon coming top of the class in maths.
But showbiz seemed to be in the blood and, while Isaac was making a fresh start managing a cinema in Soho’s Brewer Street (Paul Raymond’s Revue Bar today), young Lou was skipping Saturday morning synagogue to go to the pictures.
He didn’t find his niche straight away. First he decided to put his maths nous to use as an accountant, then at 15 became an agent for a rag trade firm. The budding entrepreneur soon set up his own firm with his dad, turning out clothes 24-hours a day.
Fred’s favourite
But his energy wasn’t confined to work. He loved to go dancing at the East Ham Palais. And in 1926, “Louis Grad” was crowned World Solo Charleston Champion at the Albert Hall. The judge? No less than Fred Astaire.
Lew was hooked and sold up the firm to become a professional dancer, “the man with the musical feet”.

By now he was “Lew Grade”, after his name was misspelt on a bill, but by the 1930s knee problems – and the fact that the Charleston had had its day – prompted him to move into management.
He first worked for the agent Joe Collins, Joan and Jackie’s dad. Then, after returning from a wartime stint in the Army, set up with his brother Leslie. As a minnow in a hard business, Lou had to fight for his share, and he went over to the States to snatch up-and-coming acts, bringing Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Jack Benny to London.
The biggest agent in Britain now moved into fledgling commercial TV. The Midlands franchise (ATV, now Central) was a flop at first. But Lou knew what sold, and Crossroads, Emergency Ward 10, General Hospital and the Muppets made the station one of the giants, along with Granada and Thames.
Titanic flop
Films beckoned too with successes like the Pink Panther series and On Golden Pond. And Lew got there nearly 20 years before James Cameron and Leonardo Di Caprio. Unfortunately though, his 1980 production Raise The Titanic was such a flop that he remarked that “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic!”
Joking apart, the financial disaster nearly sunk Grade’s company ACC, and it signalled the beginning of the end of his one-man operation.
But even when he’d loosened the reins at ACC, Lew just couldn’t stop working – finding new talent and setting up deals well into his nineties. Even the energetic Grade couldn’t finish one of his projects though – he had bought 450 of Barbara Cartland’s books with the aim of making films of them.
One of the big men of the entertainment industry, he’ll always be remembered for his chutzpah and big cigar.
Louis Winogradsky died Baron Grade of Elstree, just days short of his 92nd birthday, which would have fallen on Christmas Day.

You may know him as the suavely evil gangland boss Victor Maitland, who torments Eddie Murphy in the 1980s smash movie Beverly Hills Cop. Or the villainous Russian General Orlov, Roger Moore’s adversary in Octopussy.
You may know him better for his own plays, drawing deep on his childhood and teenage memories of East End life, to write and produce East and West. Or maybe as the producer and director of 30-odd years of pedigree avant-garde theatre, adapting and bringing new life to the plays and books of literary heavies like Kafka, with The Trial and Metamorphosis.
Steven Berkoff is a tough talent to pin down – which is probably just how he’d want it – but his road to becoming an international movie star and successful producer and director starts back in the 1930s enclave of East End Jewish immigrants, and an endless succession of dead-end jobs.
Berkoff was born in Stepney in 1937. Berkoff’s father Abraham (Al) ran a tailor’s shop in Leman Street, from which the talented cutter would turn out lavishly-made zoot suits for the West Indians who were already settling in London.
He also catered for East End boxers who were making a name for themselves – Jewish fighters like Ted Kid Lewis and Kid Berg, both world champions.
After the war, the Berkoffs returned to the East End following an ill-fated attempt to settle in the US. Home now was two rooms and an outside loo in Anthony Street, off the Commercial Road.
With chickens in the back yard, it was a far cry from the glamour of New York, but there was plenty to entertain the young Steven.
The Troxy Cinema in Poplar was the local venue for Saturday morning films, and there was the Palaseum at the end of the road for the Sunday afternoon film.
Steven was enrolled at Raine’s Foundation in Arbour Square – a first-rate school – where he was a near-contemporary of fellow playwright Harold Pinter.
And his physical welfare was taken care of by regular dips in the lido at Victoria Park in summer, and at Betts Street Baths, off Cable Street, in the winter.

The East End was a fascinating playground, and the young Berkoff would spend hours in Petticoat Lane market, transfixed by the wares at the stamp collectors’ corner and examining the animals in the now-defunct Club Row livestock market for signs of ill-treatment.
It was a world Berkoff would dip into time and again in his later work.
After a succession of aimless jobs in the fabric and garment trades, miserable stints in West End clothes shops, and a spell working in the US Army PX’s in Germany, Berkoff studied drama in London and Paris.
He worked in rep, appearing on TV in 1960s favourites like The Avengers, before forming his own company, the London Theatre Group, in 1968.
Drawing on his East End memories, Berkoff penned his first original stage play, East, first presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975.
West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch, Acapulco, Harry’s Christmas, Lunch, Sink the Belgrano, Massage, Sturm und Drang and Brighton Beach Scumbags followed from the writer’s prolific pen.
Meanwhile, the energetic Berkoff was mounting plays and adaptations in Japan, Germany and Los Angeles – Richard II and Coriolanus for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and touring with his one-man show in Britain, the US, South Africa, Finland, Italy, Singapore and Australia.
But to many he was better known for his film portrayals of sinister heavies, revisiting the East End for his role as murder victim George Cornell in the film of The Krays.
And, at 61, the former East End boy is still busy, with his new book of short stories, Graft, now in the shops, and a run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Shakespeare’s Villains.
Graft – Tales of an Actor,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN:1 84002 040 7, £12.
Free Association:
An Autobiography,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN: 0 571 19629 6, £7.99.

Today, London theatre is synonymous with the West End, Shaftsbury Avenue and Drury Lane.
But back in the 1800s, the East End had a theatre to more than rival the West End – and one with its own distinct audience.
Despite being ignored by the middle classes and the critics, east London in the 1850s actually had the majority of the capital’s theatres – 14 east of the city compared to 11 in the West End.
Among the biggest, with capacities ranging from 2,000 to 4,000, were Hoxton High Street’s Britannia, the Grecian in City Road, the Effingham at 236 Whitechapel Road and the Garrick at 70 Leman Street.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. There were seven music halls with a capacity totalling 7,000, as well as penny gaffs and saloon theatres like the Albion in Whitechapel.
And if you expected East End punters to be more rowdy than the toffs up West, you’d be rather wrong.
The famous actor Ben Webster gave evidence before a Commons Select Committee of 1866, looking into the state of London theatre, and said: “East End audiences are more attentive than the West and are just as appreciative of good acting.”
Good audience
And the actors themselves would have appreciated Webster’s observation, that unlike West End audiences, “East Enders don’t talk during the performance!”
A quarter century later, in 1892, another Select Committee heard the Examiner of Plays, Edward Pigott, tell that East End audiences were also much more moral… at least while they were in the theatre.
“The risky, immoral and indecent plays are intended for West End audiences – certainly not for the East End,” said Pigott.
“The further east you get the more moral your audience is.
“You may get a gallery full of roughs, in which every other boy is a pickpocket, and yet their collective sympathy is in favour of self-sacrifice. They have a horror of vice and a love of virtue.

“A boy might pick your pocket as you left the theatre, but have his reserve of fine sentiment in his heart!”
But if there were differences between east and west audiences, there were also distinct clientele at the various East End theatres themselves.
The Pavilion, at 193 Whitechapel Road, had a strongly Jewish audience – no surprise given the area – while the Effingham, down the road, had a mixture of local Jews and sailors.
In 1850, Charles Dickens described the audience at the Brittania as: “Prowlers and idlers… mechanics, dock labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay makers, shoe binders and shop workers.”
Surprisingly, the weekends were not the top nights for theatre-going.
The Sketch, a theatrical publication of the day, recorded in its edition of June 24, 1896: “The best nights are Mondays, the working class are paid too late on Saturdays to enable them to spend their few coppers.”
“Slumming it”
Of course, it wasn’t entirely true that west stayed west. Author Clive Barker writes of toffs coming down to the Britannia to “slum it” in Hoxton. And The Sketch report writes that “the natives were not pleased to see silk-hatted invaders.”
But the theatres gradually became music halls and they, in their turn, were killed off by the cinema – though many of the old theatres were themselves converted into the first East End picture palaces.
Now, of course, Tower Hamlets is bare of both and we can only dream of the days when the East End was London’s Theatreland.

For the past few years, Tower Hamlets has been a movie-free zone, but it wasn’t always that way.
When the Mile End Coronet closed in 1988 it brought an end to nearly a century of film-going in the East End. Now, twin exhibitions at Bancroft Road Library mark not just a century of cinema, but the part East End picture houses played in that history. The British Film Institute (BFI) promotes films and film-making in Britain – the BFI runs the National Film Theatre, the Museum of the Moving Image and the National Film and TV archive. And its touring exhibition, Cinema Memories, takes you through 100 years of British cinema, decade by decade. Posters, books and magazines lead you from the flickering world of the silent movies through to the high-tech world of British film in the 90s. And running side by side with Cinema Memories is Going To The Pictures In Tower Hamlets.

As you see the development of the British cinema you can also trace the history of cinema-going in the borough, as the old music halls transformed themselves into picture houses and the movies became the big night out for East Enders.The Wonderland in Whitechapel Road had opened in 1880 as a music hall, followed by the Mile End Road Paragon in 1885, the Foresters Music Hall in Cambridge Heath Road in 1891 and the Marlow Palace of Varieties in 1892.All became cinemas, the Wonderland as the Rivoli (1921-41), the Paragon as the Empire, ABC and then the Coronet (between 1939 and 1988). The Foresters Cinema ran from 1925 to 1960, and the Marlow opened as the Bow Regal between 1935 and 1958. As well as the converted theatres, numerous new venues – often converted shops, warehouses or assembly halls – sprung up to tap the massive demand for films by East Enders. Commercial Road alone boasted the Kings Hall Electric Theatre, the new Electric Theatre, the Imperial Picture Palace and the Grand Eastern Central.

By the late 1930s, these makeshift movie-houses with grand names had given way to modern, purpose-built cinemas – and they were huge. The Whitechapel Rivoli seated 2268, the Mile End Odeon 2304. But the king of them all was the Commercial Road Troxy, with an amazing 3250 seats. As film-goer John Hector well remembers, the Troxy was the place to go. “If you wanted somewhere special to go it was the Troxy,” remembers John.“It was luxurious, it had the best films and a super floodlit organ which rose from the orchestra pit during the interval, playing all the latest tunes. People loved the atmosphere.” The management even sprayed the cinema with perfume to make the punters feel good!

Less flashy was The Ideal, in Kings Street, off Poplar High Street, with a corrugated tin roof and long benches bolted to the floor. Whether you wanted your night out be luxurious or cheap and cheerful, the East End had a cinema for you. Of course it didn’t last. By the 50s and 60s, the advent of TV was closing movie-theatres by the score – the closure of the Coronet sounded the end of an era.