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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

There is history buried within every East End home, some of it more dramatic than others.
The houses and flats of Tower Hamlets have had more than their share of famous occupants, and an interesting tour can be had by tracing a path round blue plaque buildings.
The familiar plaques on the front of buildings, listing famous occupants and the time they lived there, have been a part of London life for more than 130 years, and are as much a part of London as black cabs or red buses.
Of course the omissions excite as much debate as the inclusions.
Why does Tower Hamlets have no plaque to Stalin, who lived in Poplar in the early 1900s as a political refugee, for example? Why no mention of Stepney and Limehouse MP Clement Attlee or Stepney’s own Bud Flanagan?
The plaques that do pepper the East End offer a cross-section of philanthropists, adventurers and artists, but there could probably be a hundred more. Using our selection, and plotting a route with the aid of your A to Z, you could happily fill an afternoon touring the blue plaque sites of Tower Hamlets.
58 Solent House, Ben Jonson Road, bears a 1953 plaque to Dr Thomas Barnardo, who began his work for children on a building on this site in 1866.
Move down to King Edward Memorial Park, in Shadwell, and you’ll see a 1922 plaque to four East End adventurers – Sir Hugh Willoughby, Stephen Borough, William Borough and Sir Martin Frobisher – and other navigators who, in the latter half of the 16th century, set sail from this reach of the Thames near Ratcliff Cross to explore the Northern Seas.
Captain James Cook is marked by a 1970 plaque at 88 Mile End Road. Before setting off for Australia, the circumnavigator and explorer, lived in a house on this site.
A different kind of maritime first was marked by a 1954 plaque erected in Westferry Road. The Great Eastern, launched in 1858, the largest steamship of the century, was built here by IK Brunel.
At 29 Turner Street, E1, a 1961 plaque remembers Charles Bradlaugh, the advocate of free thought who lived here from 1870 to 1877.

A 1988 plaque at the London Hospital marks the work of Edith Cavell. The pioneer of modern nursing in Belguim, and heroine of the Great War, trained and worked here from 1896 to 1901.
Mahatma Gandhi is probably one of the less likely inhabitants of Bow, but a 1954 plaque at Kingsley Hall, Powis Road, records that the philosopher and teacher, stayed here in 1931.
Meanwhile, a less famed philanthropist, Mary Hughes (1860-1941), friend of all in need is remembered at 71 Vallance Road, E2, with a 1961 plaque.
Dr Jimmy Mallon, warden of Toynbee Hall and champion of social reform, is remembered in a 1984 plaque at Toynbee Hall in Commercial Street. And Israel Zangwill, writer and philanthropist (1864-1926), is remembered at 288 Old Ford Road with a 1965 plaque.
Painter Mark Gertler (1891-1939) is commemorated with a 1975 plaque at 32 Elder Street, E1. And his contemporary, Isaac Rosenberg, is marked at Whitechapel Library with a 1987 plaque noting that the poet and painter lived in the East End and studied here.
John Richard Green (1837-1883), historian of the English people, lived at St Philip’s Vicarage, Newark Street, E1 – the plaque was unveiled in 1910.
The Rev St John Groser (1890-1966), the priest and social reformer, lived at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine, 2 Butcher Row, E14 and is remembered with a 1990 plaque.
Another notable East End cleric, Lincoln Stanhope Wain-wright (1847-1929), is remembered at Clergy House in Wapping Lane. The 1961 plaque records that the vicar of St Peter’s, London Docks, lived here.
A 1929 plaque at 10 Leyden Street, E1, records Strype Street, which derives its name from the house of John Strype, silk merchant, which was situated there.
And one blue plaque the East End would rather not possess hangs on the railway bridge at Grove Road in Bow. The 1988 plate reads that London’s first flying bomb fell here, on June 13, 1944.

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.

The East End has been home to many nationalities and ex-pat communities over the centuries. Much has been written about the Huguenots, who fled religious persecution in the Low Countries to settle to their silk-weaving business in Spitalfields. Until the 1920s, there was a Chinatown in Limehouse to rival that north of Leicester Square today. And, of course, Brick Lane is today renowned as Banglatown.
But one of those communities, today almost forgotten, probably dwarfed the rest in size. Its final death knell was only sounded with the closure of Alie Street’s St George’s Church in 1997. But who today remembers London’s 16,000-strong German community?
Luckily, though the church itself held its final service on November 24, 1996, a mere handful of worshippers attending, its legacy is a rich library compiled by the church’s pastors over its 250-year history. The books were acquired by the British Library and were the subject of an exhibition earlier this year. They tell a fascinating story of two-and-a-half centuries of Anglo-German life in east London.
The Lutheran Church opened its doors to the parishioners of Goodman’s Fields in 1762, the fifth in the capital to cater to a large
and growing German-speaking congregation.
The man behind the new place of worship was Dietrich Beckmann, the rich owner of an East End sugar bakery. Whitechapel had many of these refineries at the time – the smell and the smoke were said to be overpowering – and they were almost exclusively staffed by immigrant German labour.
Beckmann recruited his cousin Gustav Anton Wachsel as pastor, from the city of Halberstadt, and Wachsel quickly acted to set up an English-German school to satisfy parents who were worried their children were already losing touch with their heritage and language. And it was Wachsel’s own private library that formed the core of the
collection the British Library would acquire more than two centuries later.
Over the years, books from the school were added, along with those which had belonged to the children and other parishioners.
Germans, like other immigrants, had to contend with
discrimination and prejudice, much of it sanctioned by law. But in 1769, William III,
himself from Orange in the Low Countries, passed the Toleration Act. As a result, St George’s could set up its own parish legislation.

The document the church elders drew up is still in the collection. But the library was much more than a dry reference source. The church encouraged its use as a lending library, and the children and their parents were enthusiastic borrowers of German folk and fairy tales. Some books were repeatedly borrowed over decades, and then centuries.
Travel literature, guide books, colourful engravings and street plans were also hugely popular as the parishioners soaked up knowledge of a land they had, increasingly as the years drew on, never seen.
The second half of the 19th century saw major expansion, with infants and secondary schools being added.
The church had a new
influx of parishioners in the 1930s, as refugees fled Hitler’s Germany. For a few months, the congregation was led
by the legendary Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer was a theology professor from Berlin. While many of the church tolerated and even lauded the Fuhrer, Bonhoeffer travelled at home and abroad decrying Hitler’s evil record. The safest place for Bonhoeffer was probably in Whitechapel, but he insisted on returning to preach his
message in Germany.
In 1943 he was imprisoned by the SS, and on April 9, 1945, the beleaguered Hitler had
him hanged.
After the war, German wives of British soldiers entered the congregation, and numbers boomed again. But, at the close of 1996, following the dispersal of the core community, St George’s was placed in the care of the Historic Chapel Association.
A Whitechapel church might have seemed an unlikely home for such an outstandingly important collection. And, indeed, the church elders thought better of using a small room above the vestry to house 750 volumes when burglars broke in in 1995.
Now, though, the tomes are safe forever in the British Library. And a viewing (by appointment only) secures a fascinating glimpse into a little piece of Germany in the heart of the East End.

THE East End suffered badly from bombs in the Second World War, Stepney worse than most. And what the Luft-waffe’s bombs didn’t flatten was to meet its fate at the hands of developers’ wrecking balls in the 1960s.
But take a walk down past Stepney Green, pass by Ben Jonson Road, and cut down the tiny stretch of Stepney High Street and you come to St Dunstan’s Church.
Suddenly you get a sensation of how the old village of Stebenhethe must have looked in the hundreds of years before it was swallowed in the eastward sprawl of the City.
The medieval church stands on a winding stretch of road, quaint and countrylike amidst the regimented grid of modern roads. Look at the pictorial map of Stepney, drawn in 1681, and compare it with the modern A-Z layout, and the reason becomes clear.
Amid massive redevelopment, the church – the heart of the ancient village – survives untouched, as it was hundreds of years ago.
It’s all the more remarkable as St Dunstan’s is by the far the oldest church in the borough. It dates from not long after Stibba, the Saxon warrior who gave Stepney its name, first landed.
Three millennia
Before Stibba’s Hythe, meaning landing place, became Stybbanhythe, then Stibenhede, and afterwards Stebenee, there was a church there. In this fast-changing world, it’s amazing to reflect that in January next year, Stepney will have been in existence through three millennia.
And for hundreds of years after its foundation, St Dunstan’s remained the sole church standing to the east of the City gates.
In fact, Stepney can lay claim to being the first of the Tower Hamlets. Shoreditch and Aldgate were hard by the walls of the City itself – suburbs in modern parlance – but Bow didn’t get its own church till 1311, and the famous White Chapel had only been built a hundred years before that.

With its enviable position as an established village amidst the Essex countryside, Stepney became popular and fashionable. It was thriving and prosperous, with a rich mix of farmers, millers, silk weavers, coopers, brewers and throwsters – the men and women who made the silk thread into yarn.
And in 1299, the good burghers of Stepney included the Lord Mayor of London, Henry le Waleys, emphasising the hamlet’s status as a rural retreat for the wealthy Londoner.
In the Middle Ages, parliament would tour, sitting in different halls in London. And so it was in 1299 that Stepney became, briefly, the home of the mother of parliaments.
And it could offer stiff competition to modern-day Mayfair for its sprinkling of nobs and aristos.
By the early 1500s, Stepney was still a fashionable spot and, in 1503, the wife of Henry VII made a note in her account book, detailing her payments to the Duchess of Suffolk, for a stay in her house in ‘Stebenhath’.
And just to the east of St Dunstan’s stood the mansion of the Marquis of Worcester. Visit the adventure playground today and you’ll be standing on the same spot.
Excellent hunting
What made Stepney so popular with kings of the time was its access to the excellent hunting in the old forest which covered the land, and all within an easy hour’s ride of London.
There’s little of the rural idyll left today of course. Snatches were saved in the establishing of Victoria Park, and the open green space of Stepney Green itself.
But walk by St Dunstan’s on a warm summer’s evening. Let your eye travel along the curve of the road and settle on the medieval, tree-flanked church – and you can picture the village that was.

Lionel Bart’s music ranged from his greatest success, Oliver!, and musicals like Lock Up Your Daughters and Blitz. His songs such as Living Doll, Rock With The Cavemen and Little White Bull gave chart hits to British rock’n’roll stars like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. It was a curious hybrid – but it had its roots in East End soil.

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter in Whitechapel in 1930, the 11th child of a Jewish tailor, and it was his childhood that formed his songs. “Oliver! was a strange marriage of the Jewish music of my barmitzvah and the street cries of my childhood,” he recalled. “Fagin’s music was like a Jewish mother hen clucking away!”

It was a colourful background, but one Bart was fond of embellishing still further. Many of his friends talked of his constant rewriting of his childhood, a habit which drove the ghostwriters of his biography to despair.
Certainly, although he never learned to read or write music, there were early signs of musical ability. Aged six, one of the young Lionel’s teachers told his father that the lad was a musical genius, and his proud dad bought him a violin. Lionel soon got bored with the discipline required and dropped his lessons.

Expelled from St Martin’s

At 16, he decided his artistic future lay with painting, and won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art. That didn’t last either, though. He was expelled for “mischievousness”, but didn’t regret leaving the lonely life of the artist in his garret. “I like a good mob working around me,” he explained, an esprit de corps that would be fulfilled in the huge musical productions that were to make his name.

One thing he did acquire during his studies was that name. His bus journey from Whitechapel to the West End every day took him past Barts Hospital, and Begleiter reinvented himself as Bart.

After National Service, Bart set up in business with his RAF pal, John Gorman. With a borrowed £50, they started a printing firm in Hackney. But business was never Bart’s forte – this was the man who later sold the million-spinning smash hit Oliver! for a paltry £15,000, and poured in £80,000 of his own cash in 1965 in a vain bid to save the flop musical Twang!!

Tommy Steele and Soho’s 2 I’s

Anyway, music was changing, with big bands giving way to rock’n’roll, and Bart was spending time up West, mixing with young hopefuls like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard in Soho’s 2 I’s coffee bar. At the same time as he was producing his first stage show, Wally Pone of Soho, which debuted at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford, he was banging out the hits for Britain’s answers to Elvis. It came easily. He claimed to have written Living Doll in six minutes on a Sunday morning – about twice as long as Cliff took to sing it!

But what came easy, went easy too. Bart was hugely generous with his cash, a legacy, he reckoned, of his gambling father. “There were endless arguments about money,” he said. “I hated money and had no respect for it. My attitude was to spend it as I got it.”

By 1972, Bart was bankrupt, with debts of £73,000, and a huge drink problem. What cash hadn’t been ripped off by casual acquaintances had been poured into unsuccessful stage shows. Often, his pals saw the warning signs in his shows long before he could. His friend Noel Coward, on reading the script of his Quasimodo, remarked: “Brilliant dear boy. But were you on drugs when you wrote it?”

But towards the end of his life, attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and with a percentage of the profits from the stage revival of Oliver!, Bart was reconstructing his life. And Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of that revival, made one of the most telling quotes on Bart’s death. “Of all the people in this business who have had ups and downs, Lionel is the least bitter man I’ve ever come across. He regrets it, but he’s never been sour, never vindictive.”

Britain may be proud of its role as one of the world’s oldest democracies, but it’s only in the last 70 years that the Mother of Parliaments has had true democracy at all.
For hundreds of years, the working man, the poor and those without property were denied a vote. Gradually, mainly thanks to the Reform Acts of the late 1800s, the franchise spread to every man over the age of 21.
But a bigger fight remained – one that was finally won 70 years ago when women over the age of 21 secured the vote.
It was a battle marked by violence, imprisonment and legalised torture – and it was fought largely in the streets, meeting houses and organised protests of the East End.
It is hard now to imagine the shock that suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurt caused in 1912 when she stood outside the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) shop in Bow Road and painted “Votes for Women” in letters of gold on the front.
She had begun her work at the start of the suffragette movement in her home town of Manchester in 1905. With sister Christabel and mother Emmeline, she was soon one of its leading lights.
She got to know the famed East End politician George Lansbury, who resigned his seat as MP for Bow and Poplar, and stood on a platform of suffrage for women.
He was defeated, and did not return to Parliament until 1922, but threw his weight enthusiastically behind Sylvia’s setting-up of a WSPU branch, at 198 Bow Road.
Sylvia had quickly moved beyond the aim of universal suffrage to encouraging working women to complain about unequal pay, the inadequacy of health care for their children and poverty.
“I regarded the rousing of the East End as of utmost importance,” she argued. “The creation of a women’s movement in that great abyss of poverty would be a rallying cry to the rise of similar movements in all parts of the country.”
It led to a split with the other Pankhursts, who were interested in representation, not revolution.

The London movement grew in militancy. In 1913, Sylvia and other members were arrested after marching to confront Lloyd George. Imprisoned, she went on hunger strike, and had to undergo the brutal practice of being force-fed.
Released from Holloway in March 1914, Sylvia was back on the campaign trail a week later when she joined a procession from Bow to Westminster Abbey. Too feeble to walk, she was pulled in a carriage.
The protests went on. On 24 May, she was arrested at a May Day celebration in Victoria Park. A month later, the still feeble Pankhurst lay on the steps of Parliament, refusing to move until an obviously shaken Prime Minister agreed to meet a delegation of East End women.
But one of her greatest moments came with the founding of a toy factory and day nursery in Bow.
It provided toys and clothes at reasonable prices, the workers were paid above the going rate, and mothers could leave their children for just 3d a day – Pankhurst had set up one of the East End’s first creches.
Controversy was never far away. Her growing support for Communism drove many away and in 1927, she scandalised the country by refusing to name the father of her baby.
But just a year later, all her work came to fruition when the franchise was extended to woman over the age of 21.
And if Sylvia seemed physically broken by her hunger strikes, victory had its own rewards. She recovered and lived to a robust 88, passing away in 1960.
Further reading: In Letters of Gold, Rosemary Taylor, Stepney Books 1993.

The East End Then And Now* is not only one of the most exhaustive histories of east London you’ll ever read – at more than 500 A4 pages, packed with glossy pictures, line drawings, contemporary reports and recollections, getting through it could be positively exhausting!

Of course this isn’t a book to read cover-to-cover all at once. It is a painstaking encyclopedia of the most diverse and fascinating region of England. The real strength of the book is in its “then and now” approach.
It’s sometimes difficult to picture the exact spot where a murder took place, or where an old building stood – the East End suffered so badly from German bombs that new buildings and remodelled streets sometimes make it hard to get your bearings.

But – on the old theory that a picture paints a thousand words – antique and contemporary pictures have been painstakingly sought out and placed next to their modern-day equivalents. Now you can actually see what the old St Mary’s Tube station – now lost forever under the Citroen garage in Whitechapel Road – really looked like. And you can take the same position as the waiting soldiers as they look towards the siege of Sidney Street – now replaced by modern flats.

Suffragettes, Krays and the Bell Foundry

Each set of pictures is accompanied by solid chunks of historical background and, where relevant, maps showing the street layouts of the time. Interested in the old pie shops of the East End? You’ll find them in here. Want to know the names of every master founder at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry? Each one since 1420 is listed in the book. And the sheer size of the work allows the authors the luxury of going into extraordinary detail – the chapters on the Suffragettes, Oswald Mosley, the Krays and the Ripper murders are almost books in themselves.

Interestingly too, it gives scope to take a broader picture of the East End. So we get the background to the Second World War and the Munich Crisis. And, post-War, we see the movement of East Enders out to the new towns of Basildon and Harlow. We also see the gradual spread of urban east London over the Essex fields of Stratford and Leytonstone. The book brings in the broader picture of east London, rather than cutting the area off at the River Lea and Hackney.
“Docks to Docklands” is one phrase the authors use to describe the destruction and rebirth of the area, and pictures of the Isle of Dogs vividly show the growing developments.

Introducing it all is the authentic voice of a Poplar eyewitness. Over 100 pages, 90-year-old Cyril Demarne strolls back around the East End of his younger days, noting how things have changed and how much, remarkably, remains the same.
Cyril recalls the characters, buildings and stories that coloured his childhood and the history of the East End. And, using the exhaustive index, you will find yourself flicking from Cyril’s recollections to more detailed chapters later in the book. You’ll find some familiar sights and a few surprises – well, I didn’t know TV gardener Geoff Hamilton came from Stepney – but what you’ll certainly get is a read you’ll never tire of.

* ISBN 0 900913 991, Edited by Winston J Ramsey, published by After The Fire books, price £39.95

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.