eastlondonhistory.com

There are many extraordinary figures and high achievers in the history of the East End, but few are more remarkable than the woman who
broke down two of the
barriers to her sex – becoming England’s first doctor and the country’s first
elected mayor.
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel in 1836, one of 12 children of Newson and Louise Dunnell. Newson was a very able businessman, and supported his sizeable family by running a thriving pawn-broker’s shop – always much
in demand in poverty-stricken Whitechapel.
In 1841, Newson made another shrewd business move, buying a corn and coal warehouse in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The business was a roaring success and the Garretts could afford to send all 12 offspring to boarding schools.
More to life…
Young Elizabeth’s life was mapped out. After finishing school, she would stay idle in the family home until a suitable husband appeared. But she had other ideas. In 1854 she met Emily Davies, a fierce proponent of women’s rights. Emily introduced Elizabeth to other feminists, and in 1859 she met Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first woman doctor.
She decided to pursue a medical career herself but first had to win over her father. He was appalled by the idea. Elizabeth wrote later: “I asked [my father] what there was to make doctoring more disgusting than nursing, which women were always doing, and which ladies had done publicly in the Crimea. He could not tell me.
“He said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment. I felt rather overcome with my father’s opposition, but said as firmly as I could that I must have this or something else, that I could not live without some real work.”
Newson came round in
the end, though Elizabeth’s mother never did.
“My mother speaks of my step being a source of lifelong pain to her, that it is a living death,” Elizabeth recalled.
Sneaked into lectures

Next she had to take on the medical authorities. All the medical schools rejected her, so Elizabeth became a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, sneaking into lectures for the male
doctors. After students complained, she was banned from the lecture rooms.
The persistent Garrett then discovered that the Society of Apothecaries didn’t debar women from their exams. She took her exams, passed and was made a doctor, and the Society immediately changed its rules so that no other women could follow her.
But Elizabeth was qualified and, with her father’s support, set up a medical practice in London.
In 1866, Elizabeth set up a dispensary for women, later to become the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. In 1870 she scored another first by being appointed as a visiting physician to the East London Hospital.
Still she was determined to earn her medical degree, and sat and passed her exams at the University of Paris. The British Medical Register, though, blankly refused to recognise her degree.
Marital laws
There were more battles
to come. Although her new
husband, James Anderson, supported her career, they fell out when he tried to insist he take control of her earnings – under the law of the time, a wife and all she had were the legal property of her spouse.
In 1872 she opened the
New Hospital for Women, a London infirmary entirely staffed by females, for females.
In 1902, Elizabeth retired to Aldeburgh. Her interest in the politics of change was still strong and, in 1908, she stood for mayor of the town. She was elected, the first woman mayor ever in England.
Even in her 70s, Elizabeth became active in the suffragette movement that had
its roots in the East End, and her daughter Louisa was jailed in 1912 for her militant
suffragette activities.
Elizabeth died in 1917 in Suffolk.

ONE thing we all take for granted today is clean, fresh water and – barring the next Thames Water hosepipe ban – plenty of it.
But until just a century ago, East Enders were more likely to be killed by their water than revived by it.
In the 1800s, as Tower Hamlets multiplied in size with the influx of immigrants from the countryside and abroad, cholera became a chronic threat to human health.
Look left out of the train window as you travel from Bromley-by-Bow to West Ham and you will see the distinctive rococco form of Abbey Mills pumping station.
It may look like something from a horror film but, in its day, it made the East End a safe place to live and work, as it carried sewage out to the Thames.
London had a problem getting rid of its rubbish for centuries, and for a long time the East End benefited. There was no mains drainage in the middle ages – instead excrement would be stored in cesspits under the houses.
This ‘nightsoil’ would then be carted away to ‘laystalls’, and then from there to the new market gardens around the Essex villages of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Bow.
If that sounds unsanitary, it was an improvement on the earlier system in the City, where a gulley down the middle of the street would be awash with rubbish and human excrement.
The lack of concern of Londoners was shown by Samuel Pepys observation in his famous Diary, recording how his wife “stooped down in the street to do her business”.
The Tower Hamlets market gardens may have flourished, but by the mid-1800s they had been buried under bricks and mortar, and cholera epidemics were sweeping the borough.
In desperation, the newly- formed Metropolitan Commis-sion of Sewers decreed in 1847 that cesspits were now banned.

The move was a disaster, as the main sewers and underground streams now discharged their filth straight into the Thames. A decade before, salmon had still been seen jumping in the river at Wapping. By the 1850s nothing could live in what had become a huge, stinking open sewer.
The matter came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1858. Wapping windows had to be draped with lime chloride soaked curtains, and tons of chalk and carbolic acid were tipped into the Thames.
But nothing could mask ‘The Great Stink’ as it became known. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli himself described the river as “a Stygian Pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
It was the last straw, and in that year a Bill for the purification of the Thames was passed – but the first step was to find an answer to the removal of the human waste of three million Londoners.
One plan was proposed by the painter John ‘Mad’ Martin. Rather unfairly named, his plan was to pipe the filth out to Essex to propagate land – pretty much what the East Enders had previously done for their farmland.
But the task eventually fell to the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He constructed a huge system of sewers running east from London Bridge for a distance of eleven miles, assisted by pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.
When Bazalgette was finished, London boasted 1,300 miles of sewers, along with the London Underground, one of the great engineering marvels of his age.
And as with the Under-ground, many of the same tunnels are still serving East Enders today. Others, like that beneath Stratford’s Greenway, have now gone out of service.
But all were part of the hidden network that saved the East End from the cholera-ridden hell it was a century ago.

These days, most East End children will study at school or college until the age of 18, and more than ever before are going on to university or some other form of higher education.
Extraordinary to think then that, little more than a century ago, most cockney kids wouldn’t have been going to school at all – their only option was to go out to work as soon as they were able.
Until 1870, there were a handful of private and church schools in the East End but most parents couldn’t afford the school fees – especially when the alternative was putting the children to work to augment the meagre family income.
All that changed with the 1870 Education Act, which created the School Boards. Among their powers was the option of making education compulsory in their area – an option the London School Board took up.
The Isle of Dogs was one of the poorest areas for children’s education. The Board set to putting this right by building three new schools. Arthur Joseph Hubbard, born in 1869, was one of the first pupils at Glengall Road School.
“There were vacant fields on the Island, one in Glengall Road… on which I have seen a flock of sheep brought there for pasture. This became the Board School,” he recalled.
The three-storey building – infants on the ground floor, girls on the first, and boys on the second – was a revelation to the poor kids of the Island. Everything was brand new – slates, books, pencils and coat pegs, even the asphalted and shell-coated playground.
3 Rs and the Drill
The new students learned the 3 Rs of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic among other subjects – including the rather military sounding Drill.

The Island’s other Board schools were in British Street (later Harbinger Road) and Wharf Road (later Saunders Ness Road), and these were joined in the 1870s by three new church schools.
Frederick Pearson, born in 1899, went to St John’s Church of England School.
“St John’s School was a happy one,” he remembered.
“My first memory was threading long strips of coloured paper into a kind of small mat.
There were slates, too, with scratchy slate pencils. There was a lot of spitting,
with a rag to clean the slates. Hardly hygienic, but then it was the 1890s!”
“The school was gas-lit, in those days, by a naked flame. Three pineapple-shaped gas-holders hung from the rafters, nine jets to each pineapple.
“In the winter at lighting-up time, I sat fascinated when the school caretaker came in with his long pole on which was a lighted taper. For me it was all very wonderful.”
In 1902, local education authorities were set up to take learning a stage further. All primary education was now free and the LEAS set up secondary and technical schools, evening institutes and adult education.
A different world
Lily, born in Janet Street in 1897, remembers her daily trek to grammar school in Hackney as entering a different world.
“I wore a straw boater with elastic under the chin, which was very uncomfortable,” she said.
“Immediately I arrived home I changed into my usual clothes, as the other children would only play with me when I was dressed in ordinary clothes.”
Lily travelled to and from school by tram, but for most kids it was a long, and in winter very cold, walk.
Dick Waterhouse was born on the Isle of Dogs in 1911, and in his early walks to Cubitt Town School had to contend with Zeppelin raids and foul weather.
And there were no expensive Nike or Adidas trainers to pose around the playground in back in the early 1900s.
“A sound pair of boots was a must,” he recalled.
“In my last new pair, I had walked about a hundred yards in some snow and, by the time I got back indoors, the soles had fallen off!”

To read more about the early years of East End schooling see ‘Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970’, edited by Eve Hostettler, published by the Island History Trust, 1993.

These days, keeping your fruit, veg and meat fresh is easy – you just pop it in the fridge or freezer.
As a result, the time-honoured culinary arts of bottling, curing, pickling and salting are performed mainly as a treat for the tastebuds, rather than from hygienic – or economic – necessity.
Go back 400 years though, and things were very different. Keeping the abundant spring and autumn harvests fresh to see people through the long, cold months of winter was a matter of life and death, and throwing food away was a costly luxury.
It was to these problems that wealthy Bethnal Green landowner Sir Hugh Platt turned his considerable intellect in the late 1500s.
The son of a successful Hertfordshire brewer, Hugh was also a bright lad, and studied at Cambridge University before coming down to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Blessed with an inventive and eccentric streak, Hugh never came to the bar. Instead, he bought a fine country house, Bishops Hall in Bethnal Green, and set about his studies of the cultivation of new and unusual plant varieties.
It was the time of Elizabeth I and England’s emergence as a naval and imperial power. Adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake were coming back from the new colonies with exotic crops such as tobacco and potatoes and Sir Hugh eagerly set about raising these from his East End soil. He also made wine grown from his own vineyards.
But if the new foods the Navy was bringing back were a source of excitement to Sir Hugh, the problem of keeping that same Navy fed sparked his scientific imagination to life.
The problem was that ships had never before sailed so far from land, fresh food and clean water. Scurvy and rotten grub were an intractable problem.
In the course of his experiments, Hugh discovered that keeping freshly picked fruit in a vacuum would prolong its life – and so was born the bottling of fruit. He also found that boiling beef in brine would stop the process of decay.

One of his recipes read as follows: “To preserve cowcumbers all the yeere: Take a gallon of faire water and a bottle of verjuice, and a pint of bay salt, and a handful of greene fennel or Dill; boile it a little, and when it is cold put it into a barrel, and then put your cowcumbers into that pickle, and you shall keep all the yeere.”
Drake’s saviour
Sir Francis Drake, busy with the fitting out of his ship, the Defiance, broke off from his work at Wapping to see Sir Hugh’s work at Bethnal Green.
The adventurer was so impressed that he took quantities of Platt’s salted meats and bottled fruits on his voyage. He also took Sir Hugh’s advice on keeping water fresh – though the addition of powdered brimstone, or sulphur – might not be swallowed quite so easily by today’s sailors.
Platt also addressed the health problems that the new foodstuffs were causing. Rich Londoners of the late 1500s were already developing smoker’s coughs and rotten teeth from eating too much sugar – Queen Elizabeth’s teeth were black from advanced decay according to contemporary reports.
Common remedies included rubbing ashes of rosemary or powdered alabaster over the teeth. More drastically, a barber would scrape the teeth, then apply aqua fortis (nitric acid) to bleach them white.
Sir Hugh, who had now also produced his beauty book, Delights for Ladies (1602), warned that after a few of these treatments “a lady may be forced to borrow a ranke of teeth to eate her dinner, unless her gums do help her the better”. The book became a 17th century best-seller.
He was also ahead of his time in developing an early turkish bath. In his “delicate stove to sweat in”, a gentlewoman could “sit or stand in the steam for two hours or more, her head helde above the tubbe”.
Sir Hugh’s authority and knowledge was growing. He drew up plans for English agriculture, advocating crop rotation and the use of artificial fertilisers.
For his pains, he was knighted in 1605, by James I, for his services as an inventor.

IT was the middle of the Christmas holidays, 1664, when Dr Nathaniel Hodges “was called to a young man in a fever, who after two days’ course of alexiterial medicines, had two risings about the bigness of a nytmeg broke out, one on each thigh”.
Dr Hodges’ young patient was to recover. He was lucky, being the first recorded victim of an epidemic that was to kill around 100,000 Londoners over the next year and a half.
The onset of the Great Plague hit Whitechapel and Aldgate worst of all. It was to lead to the building of a pest-house, or hospital, in Stepney, with a specially constructed road to cope with the enormous traffic of sick people, and turned Aldgate into a vast plague pit for stricken corpses.
The East End was no stranger to plagues. The first had been recorded back in 664AD, the Black Death decimated the population in 1348, and 20,000 Londoners were killed in 1499.
And in 1603, London was hit by a plague that originated in Stepney. 2,798 died in just a week and Stepney dwellers fled into Essex, where they were less than welcome.
“The sight of a Londoner’s flat cap was dreadful to a lot, a treble ruff threw a village into a sweat,” recorded one observer.
But the Great Plague was the worst yet. It started slowly. London was in the grip of a black frost, so cold that even the River Thames had frozen over and the cold weather delayed the onset of the virus.
But in April 1665, the weather became milder and during the second week of that month, 398 were officially logged as dead.
May and June were unusually warm and the few remaining doctors – most had fled for their lives – were recording hundreds of deaths.
They often cited ‘dropsy’, ‘griping of the guts’, ‘winde’, ‘worms’, ‘French pox’ and ‘lethargy’ – anything but the panic-inducing ‘plague’ – as the cause.

Samuel Pepys, a frequent visitor to the East End, walked through town on “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life” and noted the plague houses, shut up and with a red cross on the front door.
The graveyards were filled, and Aldgate was turned into a giant plague pit. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote: “They dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was… about 40ft in length, and about 15 or 16ft broad… about 9ft deep, but it was said they dug it about 20ft afterwards.
“For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two of Aldgate and Whitechapel.”
The Lord Mayor and justices of the peace, desperately searching for a cure, ordered that all cats and dogs be destroyed, lest they be carrying the contagion. It was a disastrous move. The real villains were the rats and, with no natural predators left, they multiplied a hundred-fold.
Meanwhile, the animal corpses joined the piles of human ones rotting, and often exploding, in the baking sun.
By mid-July, 1,000 were dying every week and King Charles and his courtiers fled for Hampton Court. East Enders took to boats, mooring off Wapping and Limehouse in an attempt to beat the infection. Many survived this way, and then, the deaths suddenly declined.
Cold weather set in again and, from a high of 4,000 deaths in the last week of September, just 900 died in the final seven days of November.
Life slowly returned to normal, albeit briefly.
Just a few months later, the Great Fire would sweep much of London away.

TODAY, mental illness is treated as just that – an illness to be treated. But an understanding of its causes, and the treatments for it, is a recent development – if we go back just 100 years, the sick were treated as a danger, to be incarcerated. Go back to the Middle Ages and the ill were possessed by demons.
The treatment of mental patients was often brutal, and nowhere more so than in the most notorious ‘hospital’ of them all, whose very name passed into the language as a byword for the chaos associated with mental illness.
Pastoral
Bethlehem Royal Hospital was founded in 1247 by the Bishopsgate Sheriff, Simon Fitz Mary, as the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem. Today, the site is in the heart of the City of London – Liverpool Street Station occupies the space. But back in the 13th century it would have stood on the edge of open farmland.
Like many abbeys, convents and friaries, whose religious interns led a less cloistered and isolated life than those in the monasteries, the priory conducted pastoral work among the people of London. The hospitals, such as they were, were based in the religious houses, and by 1327 there are records of a hospital at Bethlehem.
Early on the priory catered for general complaints but, in 1346, the Mayor and Corporation of the City took over stewardship of the hospital and, in 1377, Bethlehem began to look after ‘distracted’ patients.
Treatment was rudimentary to say the least. Patients were kept chained to the wall in leg irons. When they became restless or violent they were whipped or ducked in water.
In 1547, the priory was finally dissolved, the Corporation bought the site from the King, and Bethlehem was officially re-classified as a ‘lunatic asylum’.

The definition of a hospital or asylum was a loose one. Little or no distinction was made between criminals, beggars and the insane – all were considered idle in an age when hard work was the road to redemption, hence the whippings and beatings handed out to the lunatics.
The mother of the painter JMW Turner, known for his seascapes, was one of the unfortunate inmates of Bedlam – like many others, she was committed there for “mental instability” and never left it alive.
Shame
So, as the insane were considered a badge of shame upon a decent family – and to enable the West End gentry to tuck away their unfortunate offspring in an asylum on the wrong side of town – a grotesque sideshow grew up at Bethlehem.
From the early 1600s, visitors had been allowed in to view the inmates. Soon a trip to Bethlehem, or ‘Bedlam’ as it became known for short, was one of the great treats of a Londoner’s leisure time, like a trip to the theatre or, more accurately, the zoo.
100,000 people a year were paying to see the patients, who were placed in cages on the hospital’s galleries. Much later, Charles Dickens imagined the scenes in his piece “A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree” in the magazine “Household Words”:
“Bethlehem Hospital was ‘a dry walk for loiterers’, and a show; when lunatics were chained, naked, in rows of cages that flanked a promenade, and were jeered at through iron bars by London loungers.’
By the time Dickens wrote those words, in 1852, things had changed, at least slightly, for the better. The porphyria of George III had increased the sympathy of the public for the mentally ill and, in 1770, the hospital bowed to pressure. It reluctantly foresook the tuppeny entrance fees being paid by the 100,000 visitors who ‘tended to disturb the tranquillity of the patients’, and shut its doors to the public. The warders even stopped using whips.
By now, the expanded hospital had moved to Moorfields, then to Lambeth, and on to Surrey. Today, the Bethlehem Royal Hospital is in Beckenham.

Many great institutions have been born over a drink. Lloyds Bank and Lloyds of London both owe their names to the Lloyds Coffee House where their founding fathers met to discuss business.
And the world’s first football association, the English FA, was started on October 26, 1863, when members of the main clubs and schools met at the Freemasons’ Tavern, in Great Queen Street, Holborn, to thrash out a structure.
But there can’t be many hospitals that have been founded over a pint. But that’s how the London Hospital began, when seven men met at the Feathers Tavern in Cheapside one night in 1740.
The guiding light was a 22-year-old surgeon John Harrison, a new member of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company – this was in the days when your hairdresser practised rudimentary medicine too.
The seven leased a house in Moorfields, the first of a series of short-lived homes. In 1741 the London Infirmary, as it was known, moved to Prescott Street near the Minories.
The infirmary seems a curious hospital to modern eyes. No deaths were recorded and the only discharges were for misdemeanours. From 1755, released patients were classed as cured or relieved, and had to return to their parish churches to give thanks to God. Any who failed to do so were blacklisted and never treated again.
Professional bug destroyers would continuously delouse the wards – there was no running water, while excrement and removed body parts were carried out at night by the orderlies and dumped in the street.
Filthy streets
Hygiene was a huge problem in the filthy streets east of the City – and the Minories was a hotbed of brothels and gin palaces. But in 1753 the governors had raised sufficient cash to build a grand new hospital, among the green fields of Whitechapel.
The London Hospital was the finest in the capital, boasting running water and flush toilets. And it attracted the finest surgeons.

Until now, the hospital had refused to take students but, under Sir William Blizard, the pre-eminent medical man of his age and founder-president of the Royal College of Surgeons, the first London teaching hospital was set up. Until now the profession had been taught in private schools.
The new school opened in 1785, boasting a chemical laboratory, the now-famous museum and a dissecting room.
Throughout the 19th century the hospital became the most famed in England.
In 1854, a new medical school was set up, and in 1876, Queen Victoria opened a new wing. The hospital now had 790 beds – it was the biggest in the country.
The dominant figure of the early 20th century was Sydney Holland. He became Chairman in 1896 and, until his death in 1931, raised huge sums of money for the hospital. By the time he died, the Boulton Mainwaring building of 1857 had been completely rebuilt.
War damage
The London suffered major bomb damage in World War II but, beneath the rebuilding, and the 1990 addition of a helicopter pad, Mainwaring’s Georgian building remains, at the heart of a group of hospitals which since the 1960s has also encompassed St Clement’s Bow and Mile End Hospitals.
And it was in 1990 that the London changed its name. The infirmary which had once housed 30 beds in a rented house, leased by a barber turned surgeon, became the Royal London Hospital and the Queen marked 250 years of history with a royal visit.

This month has seen the 50th anniversary of a great British institution – the NHS.
And for the London Chest Hospital in Bethnal Green, it’s a double cause for celebration.
Half a century ago, it joined the fledgling health service. But, exactly a century before, it was set up as a pioneering hospital for the poor of the East End.
At a special service held recently, the London Chest Hospital celebrated 150 years of caring for the sick. And it was not only a testament to the hard work of the doctors, nurses and campaigners who have kept an East End institution up and running – but also to the efforts of a group of philanthropists a century and a half ago.
Towards the middle of the 1800s, the East End was becoming terribly overcrowded as people piled into the area to work in the sweatshops.
Sub-standard housing, with whole families living in one room, was the norm. And with poor nutrition, and smoke from the many factories polluting the air, chronic lung diseases, particularly tuberculosis, became endemic.
Gift to the poor
But a new spirit of responsibility toward the poor and needy was infusing the rich. Victoria Park was being laid out in the east of the borough, in an effort to give East Enders a breath of fresh air.
And in 1848, under the leadership of Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, a group of benefactors came together. The consortium of City bankers, merchants and philanthropists launched a public appeal and, with the handsome response, set up a dispensary in Liverpool Street prescribing medicines to people who previously would have done without.
The dispensary was a huge success, so great in fact that the governors soon realised that there was a greater need – a need for a special chest hospital.

The healthy, green open space of Victoria Park was an ideal location, and a competition was run to find a design for the new hospital building.
Joseph Paxton, famed as the architect of another of Albert’s pet projects, the Crystal Palace, applied his talents to the London Chest.
When the hospital opened its doors in 1855, its work was soon being hailed by the press. Charles Dickens’ weekly journal Household Words describing it as “replete with ingenious contrivances and, indeed, wanting in no essential thing”.
There was controversy when the building costs overran from £10,000 to £12,000, but the hospital soon established world renown, with Joseph Lister, the Essex doctor who pioneered the use of antiseptics in medicine, one of the staff medics.
During the First World War, the hospital was called upon to treat the thousands of wounded soldiers returning from the trenches in France.
Help for gas victims
And the hospital’s particular expertise came into its own, as many of the men had been victims of that most horrible of weapons – poison gas.
The hospital became a victim of enemy bombs itself in the Second World War, the North Wing and chapel being destroyed.
Then, in 1948, the hospital joined the new NHS and moved from the treatment of TB, by then a declining problem, into pioneering open heart surgery.
And a century and a half on, through enormous change, German bombs and threats of closure, the London Chest remains one of the East End’s most important monuments.

Amid the debate about standards in the NHS, it is easy to forget that what we now see as a great British institution is a mere 50 years old. Many readers will remember the time when a trip to the doctors was an expensive luxury and when the days before universal inoculation meant epidemics of diseases like scarlet fever and diptheria were a serious threat.
Go back a further generation and a poor and crowded East End suffered badly as life-threatening diseases swept the big cities, taking a heart-rending toll of the youngest and weakest.

The hardship of life for many East Enders is chronicled in the book Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970. It tells of the August 18, 1890, entry in the Cubitt Town School diary, where the headmistress wrote that the milk was having to be boiled to combat the scarlet fever spreading among the pupils. By September 5, she was logging an epidemic of measles as well and by October 6 the school was threatened with closure. Six years later measles, today a curable and preventable hazard of childhood, was keeping 120 kids out of the school – eight of them died.

It was a pattern repeated throughout the East End as families struggled amid crowded and insanitary conditions – conditions perfect for diseases to take hold and spread. Local man James Mee, who was born in 1915, writes: “They were only little houses… three families in some of them. Places were bug-ridden, not because people were dirty, but if you’ve got people living and sleeping in one room how could they keep decent?” Often the answer was to send sick children right away, for the protection of the rest of the family as much as themselves.

Catherine Lerpiniere was born in Wharf Road on the Isle of Dogs in 1897, the youngest of nine. Hit by scarlet fever then rheumatic fever, she was sent across the river to Shooter’s Hill fever hospital. She was relatively lucky. Many infected East Enders were simply put aboard a tug at North Pier, in Coldharbour, and taken to one of the fever ships moored in the Thames for isolation and almost certain death. John Gaskin was born in 1891 to Robert and Clara of 79 West Ferry Road, Millwall. In 1901, he contracted smallpox and was taken to an isolation ship. He died shortly afterwards, within sight of his Island home. The ten-year-old’s body was buried at sea.

These days, when overeating is an increasing health problem for children, the standards of nutrition in the early 1900s make shocking reading. James Mee recalls school dinner being a slice of bread and marge. He writes: “Miles of kids around the age of three and four could hardly walk because they had rickets – that’s a thing you never hear of now.” For further reading see Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970, published by the Island History Trust, Island House, Roserton Street, London E14 3PG. Tel: 0171-987 6041.