eastlondonhistory.com

Every so often in history a technological hotspot emerges – helping to drive industry and technology onward and upward. In the mid-1700s that clutch of enterprising Lancastrians John Kay, James Hargreaves and Samuel Compton were revolutionising weaving with the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny and the mule. In the 1970s it was the turn of the geeks of the US West Coast, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak et al – as they invented personal computing and kick-started the information age.

But who would have thought that the Lea Valley, running down Tower Hamlets’ eastern boundary, was the birthplace of Britain’s own post-industrial revolution? As the title of Dr Jim Lewis’s first book suggested, it was ‘Britain’s best kept secret’. Now, in a fascinating sequel*, Dr Lewis reveals more of the developments that turned the Lea into the UK’s technological crucible.

In fact, Lewis argues, the likes of Gates wouldn’t ever have been able to make their billions from the PC were it not for a much earlier invention in the Lea Valley. In 1904 Professor Ambrose Fleming developed the diode valve. The invention not only paved the way for today’s multimedia electronics industry – it also created the platform for space travel, computers, email and the internet.

Firstly though, the diode valve gave birth to the modern wireless. So radio has its roots in the Lea Valley, and Britain’s first radio valve factory was established there in 1916, with the first television tube factory following in 1936.

But the technological developments in the Lea Valley were as diverse as they were numerous. The monorail may still seem a futuristic mode of transport, but it was developed here by Henry Robinson Palmer as long ago as 1821. This ingenious method of hanging heavy goods from the sides of a rail carriage to lower the centre of gravity meant that great weights could be smoothly shifted. The invention went into use at the Royal Victualling Yard at Deptford in 1824, with the frictionless action meaning four men could easily shift 5cwt loads of provisions from warehouse to ship.

And another welcome innovation on board ship was that of IPA (India Pale Ale). Dreamed up by George Hodgson at his Bow Brewery, it was the first beer that could be transported to the hot climes of the Empire without tainting – giving East End sailors some relief and British soldiers a welcome taste of home.

The geography of the Lea Valley reads like a Who’s Who of British industry in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Johnson Matthey, Hawker Siddeley, Reuters, Lotus Engineering, Tesco, Keith Blackman, BOC and Matchbox Cars were just a few of the innovators who built their businesses here. Petrol was not only manufactured, it also received its name here, and the British Army’s rifle of choice was, for decades, the Lee Enfield. That reliable weapon was of course manufactured in the Lea Valley.

By the late 1790s, Spitalfields, which had been first a rural retreat without the City walls, then a fertile market garden, and latterly a borough of impressive Georgian houses raised on the proceeds of the silk trade, had become synonomous with poverty.

The weavers were getting richer, but their workers were not. The Spitalfields workhouses were full to bursting and, to the disquiet of the rich men of the City, the working class was getting restless. It was in this atmosphere of social change and unrest that one of the most radical thinkers of the 18th century was born.

Mary Wollstonecraft, born in Spitalfields in 1759, was intimately woven into the business of silk, as her family had grown rich on it. Her grandfather had been a craftsman handkerchief weaver, and her father had invested in looms to boost production, also making his money as a landlord.

But as quickly as her bullying father made his cash, he lost it. He blew his fortune in various unsuccessful ventures at farming. By the time Mary’s mother Elizabeth died in 1782, wearied by years of Edward Wollstonecraft’s bullying, the family had tried their hand at six different farms, mainly in Essex.

Mary quickly showed an extraordinary independence for a woman of her era. At 19 she set out to earn her own living. And in 1783 she helped her sister Eliza escape from her violent husband, hiding her until a legal separation could be negotiated.

The two sisters set up a school at Newington Green, but in 1785 another pivotal event was to occur and shape Mary’s life and future work. Her friend Fanny Blood had married and settled in Lisbon. Mary went to nurse her friend through a difficult pregnancy, but both mother and child died in childbirth.

Returning to England, Mary found that the school had suffered in her absence. She closed the establishment and took a job as governess to the daughters of Lord Viscount Kingsborough, in Ireland. And it was with the Kingsboroughs that Mary first began to write.

Her first work was a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters – at the time, the conventional wisdom was that daughters shouldn’t be educated. In 1788 her first book followed: Mary, A Fiction.

But her keynote work was to come in 1792. That date saw the beginning of the French Revolution, and Mary drew on all her earlier experiences, as well as the growing demands Europe-wide for ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’, to pen A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The book controversially demanded that men and women be educated equally.
In 1792 she set out for Paris. There, as a witness of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, she collected material for An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution: and the effect it has Produced in Europe, a book which was sharply critical of the violence of the Revolution.
She spent her time in Paris living with an American, Captain Gilbert Imlay, and in 1794 gave birth to a daughter – named Fanny after her friend. The relationship broke down, though, as the unfaithful Imlay continually deserted his lover and daughter, and Wollstonecraft made the first of several suicide attempts in 1795, on one occasion jumping into the Thames from Putney Bridge..
She survived and returned to working for the London publisher, James Johnson, who had published Mary years before. She soon became an enthusiastic member of the group of radical thinkers which gathered at Johnson’s home, including William Blake, Thomas Paine and William Wordsworth. One of their number was the political philosopher William Godwin, and before long she was pregnant with his child.
On 29 March 1797 the pair married. The ceremony was kept private due to Mary’s pregnancy and only announced the following month.
And in August Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born. But the future Mary Shelley, who would find fame of her own as the author of Frankenstein, never knew her mother. In a tragic echo of her friend Fanny Blood, Mary died of “childbed fever” just 11 days later.

SUGAR production has a long tradition in east London. Today, Tate & Lyle, with its Silvertown works, is the only cane sugar refiner in the UK.
But a century ago things were very different. In 1864 there were 74 refineries in the country, and the home of sugar refining was in the heart of the East End.
Paid in beer!
But it was a far cry from the hygienic, state-of-the-art factories of today. In 1876, James Greenwood was researching his book, The Wilds of London. His descriptions of the sugar bakers of Spitalfields describe a scene reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno.
The sugar firms employed several thousand men, and were so desperate for labour that they would offer unlimited beer as a bribe. Irish immigrants, the mainstay of much labouring work at the time, weren’t interested in such unpleasant work, and the firms ended up having to import labour from Germany.
To Greenwood, the East End was like a foreign country, the business a mystery to him, and it seems appropriate that his guide was a German missionary. Greenwood was revolted by what he saw… and smelled.
“Soon as I put my head in at the door of the bakery, the nature of the manufacture in progress was at once made apparent to my senses.
“Just as unmeasured indulgence in sugar is nauseating to the palate, so was the reek of it palling to one’s sense of smell. You could taste its clammy sweetness on the lips just as the salt of the sea may be so discovered while the ocean is yet a mile away,” he wrote.
Whitechapel provided sugar to the whole country. The raw cane would come in to the West India Docks, and countless backstreet sweatshops would set about the business of transforming the dark, rough raw material into a gleaming white confection.
Greenwood wrote: “In Backchurch Lane, in White-chapel, there are dozens of these baking, or, as they would more properly be called, boiling-houses.
“They are buildings enormous in size, usually occupying the whole of a street side, and so high that the massy ‘mats’
of sugar craned up to the topmost storey.”

Grim conditions
The conditions were as grim as you might have expected of a Victorian factory.
“Low-roofed, dismal place with grated windows, and here and there a foggy little gas-jet burning blear-eyed against the wall.
“The walls were black – not painted black. As far as one might judge they were bare brick, but basted unceasingly by the luscious steam that enveloped the place, they had become coated with a thick preserve of sugar and grime.”
And it quickly became apparent to Greenwood why the Irish wisely turned down work in the sugar bakers.
“The close, reeking, stifling place, the disgusting atmosphere, the incessant toil and the disgusting conditions of it… better a hod of bricks with a 60-round ladder to mount out in the open air than such mean, enervating drudgery as this.”
Greenwood’s guide remar-ked that without the generous helpings of beer, the labourers would be dead within weeks. It was common practice at the time for men in such dehyd-rating trades to continually refuel with ale, a diet that would have been slowly killing them anyway.
It is unlikely that the Whitechapel bakers would have passed any modern food standards tests, either. Spotting what appeared to be large heaps of mud, Greenwood was told that these were the scrapings from beams and the shovellings from the floors, gangways and workshops – once the stuff had been filtered through charcoal, it would be deemed fit to be sold to the public, as pure white sugar.
But even as Greenwood wrote, the East End trade was declining. In his book East and West London, the Reverend Harry Jones wrote: “In 1864 there were 23 producers of loaf sugar in London. Since then their trade has shrunk very seriously. A short time ago I believe only three survived, and the chief of them, in St George’s in the east, has ceased operations in the course of this year.”
And very soon the trade would move down river to Silvertown, where the two great rivals, Messrs Tate and Lyle, would vie for business.
The Wilds of London, by James Greenwood. Published in 1876 by Chatto & Windus.
East and West London, by Rev Harry Jones. Published by Smith, Elder & Co in 1875.

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

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

Currency seems to be constantly changing these days – two-pound coins, ever smaller notes. And if the politicians have their way we will soon all be spending euros, and pounds and pence will be a fond memory.
Of course, for many of us it doesn’t seem too long since shillings, ten-bob notes and half-crowns disappeared. And, as sterling looks set to disappear for good, we can reflect that it was only 30 years ago that all of Britain’s spending cash was minted in the borough.
The only legacy of Tower Hamlets’ job supplying the cash that oiled the wheels of the British economy is in the name – Royal Mint Street.
Previously the road, just below Tower Gateway DLR station, was known as Rosemary Lane. But by 1810, space was running short at the Tower of London, the Mint’s previous home. A new building was raised on ‘Little Tower Hill’, the road became Royal Mint Street, and manufacture of the coinage began.
Coins had been minted in the City since 825 and a dedicated building was constructed between the inner and outer walls of the Tower of London in 1300.
Up until then it had been difficult to control the coinage supply. Britain in Anglo-Saxon times was a collection of kingdoms, rather than a unified realm, with all the warlords issuing their own currency. There was huge confusion, with different denominations, and differing values of precious metals within each coin.
The new mint aimed to unify production. And there was summary justice for anyone who fancied knocking out their own coins – amputation of the right hand and castration.
Unsurprisingly, offences were rare and soon all money was struck in the new Royal Mint, under the supervision of the new Master Moneyer, William de Turnemire.

By the time Isaac Newton held the post, from 1699 to 1727, the job carried the title of Master of the Mint.
The mint was now a much more sophisticated operation, with artist-engravers working on sophisticated likenesses of the sovereign of the day, a far cry from the crude drawings on the medieval coins.
And there was a proliferation of new coins too – pounds, shillings, sovereigns, crowns and guineas. In previous times there had just been the humble penny, cast from precious metal of course, and then cut up into pieces to ease smaller transactions.
The eventual moving of the mint from the Tower was not just driven by lack of space. Even at this well-guarded fortress, the home of the Crown Jewels, security was a concern.
In 1798 a thief by the name of Turnbull succeeded in robbing the mint. At gunpoint, he relieved the shocked staff of 2,084 guineas (around one million pounds at current values). The purpose-built edifice in Wapping was far more secure.
But evidence seemed to have been unearthed of another plot, back in 1971. Excavations uncovered a tunnel leading from St Katharine Dock to the very walls of the Rosemary Street mint. At first the authorities thought they had unearthed an aborted robbery – until plans revealed it to be part of a feasibility study for a new pedestrian subway!
When the mint was born, the entire exchequer of Britain was worth around £20,000. By the late 1960s there was billions of pounds-worth of currency in circulation and, with decimalisation fast approaching, it was all going to need replacing.
Sadly, the Government decided the Wapping site was just not big enough, and to modernise and extend it would have been a costly operation.
So in 1968, the operation moved to Wales and, in 1975, the last coin was struck in Tower Hamlets.

The East End is, sadly, as famous for its disappeared industries as its existing ones. The dockyards are gone and the shipbuilders of Blackwall are a distant memory.
And of course Tower Hamlets once boasted the biggest ‘manufactory’ in Europe – Bryant and May’s colossal Fairfield Works, now transformed into luxury flats as the Bow Quarter.
But it is matchboxes of a quite different kind that provided one of the East End’s greatest manufacturing success stories – a name that will bring back happy memories to generations of kids but, sadly, lasted less than half this century.
Take a walk north along the River Lea and, just before you hit Hackney Wick, you will see the name ‘Lesney’ emblazoned on the wall of a decaying blue building. Now the Lesney factory is just another industrial relic, but once it produced the Matchbox cars, trucks, buses and more which enchanted post-War British schoolchildren. And it all happened by accident.
Leslie and Rodney Smith were unrelated schoolchums who, in one of those quirks of fate which often spark great events, were reunited during their WW2 service in the Royal Navy. Both were engineers and both dreamed of running their own companies once the fighting was over – so they decided they would go into business together.
On 19 June 1947 they sealed their partnership, taking an amalgam of Leslie and Rodney to form Lesney Products – the vague word product was chosen because, for all their ambitions, the pair had yet to decide what they would be making!
With £600 of combined funds, the two bought an old pub, The Rifleman, further up-river at Edmonton, and kitted it out with Government surplus die-casting machinery. And, joined by expert die-caster Jack Odell, the company joined the scores of other post-War start-ups, as Britain rebuilt its economy and industry for peacetime.
The company would take on any and every job, subcontracting their skills to the major engineering firms who needed precision die-cast pieces. But, as the Christmas of 1948 approached, orders dropped off, and the Smiths decided to cast around for a way to keep the machines busy and the revenue rolling in.
And so the firm decided to produce miniatures of the vehicles Britons saw around them everyday, on the thousands of building sites which were reconstructing the country. A traction engine, cement mixer, tractor and bulldozer were the first off the production line, and Lesney set about selling them to local shops.
Fired by their success, the Smiths decided to pitch the bigger toy stores. They weren’t enthusiastic. The tiny cars were described as “Christmas cracker trash” by one buyer. But children loved them. Lesney, in fact, had difficulty meeting demand and soon 13 Woolworths stores placed orders.

Manufacturing was still tough in the austerity of post-War Britain. From 1950 to 1952, during the Korean War, the Government limited the use of zinc to essential purposes, and Lesney made only the tin Jumbo the Elephant toy.
But as the ’50s wore on, business took off. The company dumped the bigger toys it had experimented with and concentrated all its manufacturing on miniatures. Rather than an offshoot of the business it became the core, and Lesney went into business with an East End firm called Moko. The two firms registered the name Matchbox, and concentrated on building the range.
The idea of a matchbox to put toys in didn’t start with Lesney. Moko’s boss Moses Kohnstam had moved to Britain in 1900 from Germany, where the idea had long been popular. It proved a popular gimmick in Britain, with the first cars in plain boxes with tuck-in ends, with simple printing on the cover. And generations of kids will also remember playing with the firm’s Dinky toys.
Through the ’60s and ’70s, exports grew to the United States and the Far East, and Matchbox became a worldwide name. But the recession of the early ’70s, plus a rash of unsuccessful ventures into dolls and Far East production, took their toll.
After huge losses, Lesney was declared bankrupt on 11 June 1992. The brand names were bought and distribution switched to companies in the US, Macau, anywhere but the East End in fact. The irony today is that the ‘Christmas cracker trash’ is hugely collectable – toys bought 40 years ago with pocket money pennies now change hands for hundreds of pounds.

The East End was built by the industry and endeavour of generations of immigrants – Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Bangladeshis and more.
But just as fascinating are tales of the youngsters who left the poverty of east London in search of a better life and made their fame and fortune abroad.
One lad who was a product of both these tides of immigration was Samuel Gompers. Though born into a poor Dutch family in Spitalfields, he would go on to dominate US trade unionism for almost half a century.
Gompers was born in Tenter Street, Spitalfields, on 26 January, 1850. He got his education at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane but his school days were shortlived. Young Sam was apprenticed to a shoe- maker at the tender age of ten.
He soon swapped trades, becoming apprenticed to a cigar maker at a wage of just one shilling (5p) a week. It was a humble start, but one that was to dictate his fate.
Many people were emigrating to the New World in search of a better life and Samuel and his family decided to try their luck in America, boarding a ship to New York in 1863.
But if the Gompers’ were expecting a land of milk and honey upon arrival at Ellis Island, they were in for a shock.
Life was tough in the slums of New York, swollen as they were by millions of immigrants in search of work. For the Gompers’, descendants of Huguenot immigrants, it must have seemed like the Spital-fields story all over again.
Young Sam, eager to take up his trade, found that there were few large cigar factories in the city. Instead, most of the work was done in thousands of sweatshops – often the workers rolled the cigars in their own tenement blocks. The echoes of the East End and its sweated match and garment workers were hard to ignore.

By 1885, Gompers had become an expert at his trade and was working in one of the larger shops.
And with trade unionism rising in power throughout the western world – back in the East End, the dockworkers and matchgirls were at last rising up against their appalling pay and conditions – Gompers realised that collective action was the only way forward.
He was respected by his fellow workers, most of them Germans, and they elected him president of Cigar Makers Union Local 144 (his local branch). Unpaid organisers like Gompers fought furiously to keep the union together under attack from mechanisation and the flooding into New York of new immigrants – most of them from Bohemia in eastern Europe.
This was only the start for Gompers, who realised that if more workers got together, they would grow stronger. In 1886, he was elected president of the new American Feder-ation of Labor, a kind of TUC.
Much work, little pay
Working out of a tiny shed, with his son as the office boy, Gompers laid the foundation for organised labour in the US. With a budget of $160, he described it as “much work, little pay and very little honour!”
Just four years later, the AFL had signed up a quarter of a million workers.
For 38 years, with just one year out, Gompers headed up the AFL. His influence didn’t end in the US.
At the end of the First World War, he travelled to peace negotiations in Versailles, where he helped set up the International Labour Organ-isation, a world-wide TUC.
Gompers died in Texas in 1924. Look around Tower Hamlets and you won’t see a street named after one of the borough’s most influential sons. But if you ever travel to Chicago, you might remember an East End lad made good with a visit to Gompers Park on the Northwest Side.

Exactly a century ago, a wealthy East End shipbuilder made an investment in a new sports ground for his works’ football team.
For Arnold Hills, it was another gambit in his long campaign to keep his workers away from the bottle and engage them in healthy outdoor pursuits. For the team, it was the first step that would take them to world fame and cup-winning glory.
When Hills’ father Frank Hills bought the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company in 1880, he took on a going concern – but one with a decidedly mixed pedigree.
The technology of iron and steel building was one of the new marvels of the science-obsessed 19th Century, and engineers everywhere were pushing back the boundaries.
Thames Ironworks was at the forefront, building the Warrior, the world’s first iron warship at its Orchard Road works in Blackwall in 1859.
But the launch of another battleship, the Albion, was less happy. Launches regularly drew huge crowds and the company constructed a vast grandstand to hold the throng. The Ironworks’ engineering skills let it down, literally, as the grandstand collapsed killing 200 people.
The company’s reputation was shot and, in 1880, the Hills family took over an ailing giant.
It was always an uphill struggle. Arnold Hills was determined to keep his 6,000 men in jobs and maintained the yard at Blackwall when a move downstream to Tilbury would have made more economic sense.
At the same time, the Thames industry was under increasing attack from bigger firms on the Clyde, Tyne and Mersey.
But Hills was no mere money man. Like many Victorian businessmen, he was a patrician with his workers’ welfare at heart.
He lived among them, in East India Dock Road and, after his short walk home, would spend evenings dreaming up schemes for their education and moral well-being.

The vegetarian Christian encouraged all his men to “sign the pledge”, to renounce the booze, but he knew that wasn’t enough. He had to give them a counter-attraction to keep them out of the pubs.
So in 1895, he founded Thames Ironworks Football Team.
The Football League had recently been founded and the game was quickly becoming a huge working-class sport.
The team quickly took off — so much that in 1897 Hills paid out for a new stadium at the Memorial Ground, which boasted a grandstand and hosted athletics and cycling meets as well as soccer.
Meanwhile, the shipyard was in trouble. And its swansong was also the end of the Thames as a shipbuilding river – in 1911, the Ironworks built the Thunderer, the last ship ever to be constructed on the capital’s great waterway.
Ironically, as the Ironworks itself foundered under the weight of competition, its offspring team went from strength to strength.
In 1900, the team were elected to the Southern League and became a Limited Liability Company in their own right — severing their links with Thames Ironworks.
And in 1904, under the new name of West Ham United, they moved to their present home in Upton Park.
Arnold Hills died in 1927. His legacy to the people of Blackwall was certainly very different to the one he planned. His ironworks couldn’t keep them in jobs — but at least he gave them their own football club to cheer.
The club’s engineering roots are remembered in the two crossed hammers on their crest. And that is why to this day you will hear the crowds at Upton Park chanting “Come on you Irons”, a chant and a nickname that dates back to the great shipbuilding days of the Thames.

September means the end of summer, going back to school, and the nights starting to draw in. But for generations of East End women and their kids it meant something more – hop-picking.There were many reasons why so many families made the annual journey down to Kent. Like with any other harvest, a lot of work had to be done in a short time, so lots of extra bodies were needed out in the fields, from dawn to dusk, to bring in the crop.

For the women, it might mean a break from a tedious job in the East End. Much work was casual and could be easily taken up again when they returned in the autumn – many simply packed their jobs in. It might mean a welcome paid holiday in the sunshine and the fresh air of the countryside. And for many London kids it was seen as a rest cure, a rare chance to build themselves up and get some clean air into their lungs. As one Canning Town woman remembered: “The birds never sang there, they coughed!” And a Kent farmer recalled: “The first few days here, the kids would be coughing from the fresh air, and every time they coughed, they’d be coughing out soot.”

The really efficient pickers could take advantage of the piecework nature of picking, and store away some much-needed cash to tide them over for the rest of the year. But perhaps the main reason for the exodus was the camaraderie that echoed around the hop fields. The hoppers would be roused by a blast on the farmer’s horn, and start work around 7am.

The usual method in the Kent fields was for families to work in a group, stripping the hop cones off the bines – the rough, vine-like stems of the hop plant – and into the hop bins. A long day pulling the prickly, resin-sticky hops would end at 5pm, when the cry “Pull no more bines” would go up, and the family would sit round the faggot-fuelled camp fires, sharing tea, stories and songs with their friends and temporary neighbours. From the 19th century on, summer conversations in the East End would revolve around the question “Have you got your letter yet?”

The letter was the sign that you and your family had been accepted by the farmer for another season’s picking. The traditional letter, confirming your job, your accommodation and when the picking would start, developed from the practice of London agents providing letters of recommendation to show to the Kent farmers. It was intended as a way of preventing a mass invasion of the peaceful Kent countryside by the supposedly rowdy Cockneys.

The disruption the Londoners caused may have been overstated but there was still friction between town and country long into this century. There was a running argument between the Kent and London County Councils, with Kent moaning that the influx of Londoners – especially the “economically unproductive children” – put a strain on the medical and other services. London, of course, made the counter argument that the families wouldn’t have been there at all if Kent hadn’t been so desperate for their labour.

But by the 1950s and 60s, mechanised picking was taking over the hop fields of Kent. Times were less hard and East Enders now usually had jobs which gave them paid holidays. For many, a trip to the seaside or holiday camp was preferable to an autumn of back-breaking labour. The machines tackled the shortage of labour, but ended up killing off hand-picking altogether. The annual migration of a quarter of a million Londoners was at an end and the call “Pull no more bines” would be heard no more.

For further reading, see Pull No More Bines, by Gilda O’Neill, published by The Women’s Press. See too, London History, 100 Faces of the East End by John Rennie.

A chime that changed the world sounded on 8 July, 1776. The Liberty Bell rang out from the tower of Independ-
ence Hall, in Philadelphia, summoning citizens to hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence, by Colonel John Nixon. America was declaring its independence from the old country. But as it broke away, there were ironic echoes of the East End of London, which had given birth to one of the founders of the New World. The Pennsylvania Assembly ordered the Bell from Whitechapel’s world-renowned bell foundry, in 1751, to commemorate the 50-year anniversary of William Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges.

Penn’s charter, Pennsylvania’s original constitution, speaks of the rights and freedoms valued by people the world over. Particularly forward thinking were Penn’s ideas on religious freedom, his liberal stance on native American rights, and his inclusion of citizens in making his laws. William Penn had been born on Tower Hill in 1644 and, during the late 1660s, had attended Quaker meetings in a private house in Wheler Street, Spitalfields. His opinions meant he was sent down from Oxford University and, in 1668, Penn was thrown into the Tower for criticising the Church of England, the first of three times he was thrown in jail for his non-conformist views.

In 1681 he at last escaped religious persecution in England, receiving a grant of territory in America, named Pennsylvania, after his father, Admiral William Penn. And there Penn signed his treaty with the Lenni Lenape Indians. The treaty let the Quaker settlers build Philadelphia, the “City of Brotherly Love.” And in 1701 the Charter of Privileges was signed. To commemorate the charter’s golden anniversary in 1751 the people of Philadelphia decided to commission a bell. And where better to commission it from than the East End that Penn had left 70 years before.

The Whitechapel foundry cast a bell which was swiftly shipped to the USA. But the first time it was rung the bell cracked. Its unusual weight, more than 2,080 pounds, could have been the reason, but John Pass and John Stow, founders of Philadelphia, quickly recast the bell – and ordered a replacement from the Whitechapel foundry. The new bell arrived, but not before another problem was noticed. The bell-makers at Whitechapel had inscribed: “By order of the assembly of the province of Pensylvania.” They may have spelt the state’s name wrong, but at least it now did the job. In 1753 the bell was hung in the newly-finished Pennsylvania State House, now called Independence Hall.

n 1777 it was removed from the city and hidden from the British occupiers of Philadelphia. Today visitors to the Zion Reformed Church in Allentown, Pennsylvania, can see where it was hidden, below the floorboards. During the Civil War the bell became a potent symbol for Americans, when abolitionists of slavery adopted the bell as a symbol of a country cracked in two, between its black and white citizens. The bell travelled to cities throughout the land “proclaiming liberty” and inspiring the cause of freedom. And two centuries later, the Liberty Bell Pavilion was opened in Philadelphia, in preparation for the USA’s bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Now, on every Fourth of July, the bell is rung (or symbolically tapped), in unison with thousands of bells across the United States. One East Ender, who fled England and religious persecution, had been responsible for giving the USA a symbol of freedom from his homeland.