eastlondonhistory.com

Today we remember James Cook as the great explorer who ‘re-discovered’ Australia and as an enlightened sea captain who turned the tide against the scurvy and vicious beatings that were the lot of the British sailor.
We also remember Cook as a Yorkshireman, hailing from the beautiful coastal town of Whitby. But a new book, Captain James Cook Endeavours, by Julia Rae, charts the hidden story of Cook’s life in Ratcliff and Wapping — and suggests that his association with the Quakers of the East End may have played a large role in forging the captain’s humanitarian approach to his men.

When Cook was born in the little North Yorkshire village of Marton on October 27, 1728, his parents, James and Grace, could never have dreamt their son would rise to such fame. Cook’s grandfather had moved to Yorkshire from Roxburgshire in Scotland, probably to work on the flourishing alum trade around the port of Whitby, whose boats in turn ran the goods down to the London docks. James Cook Senior was a farm labourer who rose to become a manager — the expectation would have been that young James would follow in his father’s steps. But after being sacked from his job as an assistant in a haberdashers shop, Cook signed up as an apprentice on the merchant ship of Captain John Walker. He was set to work on the regular runs of the merchantman Freelove as it hauled coal from Whitby to Wapping.

For a young sailor disembarking in the East End there were many temptations, all designed to relieve him of his pay as swiftly as possible. In Shadwell and Wapping, every other house was a drinking den. Goods liberated from ships’ cargoes were traded openly and the most likely job option for a young girl was to become one of the thousands of prostitutes who worked the dockfront streets and taverns. The pious and pacifist Quakers were very different and, despite persecution, had managed to establish a Friends meeting house in Wapping at the close of the 17th Century.

Cook lodged with the Quakers and, in 1762, married Elizabeth Batts, one of their number. These connections may have played a key role in his developing an unusual compassion to his men and the ‘natives’ he encountered in his travels. By this time, Cook had joined the Royal Navy and settled in the East End. His skill in navigation earned him swift promotion, rising from ordinary seaman to officer. He was responsible for the successful piloting of the fleet which took Quebec from the French in 1759.

His part in the victory made Cook’s reputation and he was chosen to captain the Endeavour on the Royal Society voyage to make astronomical observations from Tahiti. Australia had been discovered by the Dutch in the early 1600s, but ignored by Europe since. Cook’s journeys along Australia’s eastern coast and New Zealand were epic but it was his insistence on lime juice, clean water, limited ‘grog’ and an improvement on the normal weevil-ridden ship’s biscuit that kept his men alive.

In 1779, Cook’s sure touch deserted him when he was killed by natives in Tahiti. Elizabeth heard the news back in Wapping 11 months later. The church register of St Dunstan’s in Stepney records the christening of several of the six Cook children, but in 17 years man and wife had spent a total of just four years together. Three years later, his widow left her home in Assembly Row, Mile End, to move away to Surrey and the voyage that took the Cook family to the East End was over.

When Tower Hamlets Council secured a £1.4m grant from the Arts Council for the Brady Centre recently, it guaranteed the continuation of 101 years of good work.
But it was also a world removed from the club’s humble beginnings in the poverty-stricken East End of the 19th century.
Back in 1896 Jewish immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe was at its height, as families fled persecution and pogroms – often they arrived in the East End with nothing but the clothes they stood up in.
The poor immigrants, with no money and less English, poured off the boats and straight into the rag-trade sweatshops of Stepney and Whitechapel. Wages were low and often it was not just the parents who had to work long hours, but their children too – all had to earn their keep.
Many of the earlier Jewish settlers had established themselves and done well in their new home, and up in the West End a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen looked at the situation with alarm.
They saw these young people going without proper clothing and decent meals, let alone a proper education or the chance to play organised sports to get away from the relentless misery of their hard-working lives.
This philanthropic band set up a club in Brady Street, Whitechapel and set to work putting right some of the basics – early club records tell of the boys being given boots to wear and proper meals to eat.
Things moved on. In the 1930s the club organised an annual camp. It would be a bit spartan for a lot of today’s kids. Two dozen boys slept in army tents for a week, and directly on the grass. Washing was a standpipe in the field, the toilet a hole in the ground.
Luxury it wasn’t, but for the lads it was an undreamt of break from the grime and grind of their London existence.
Meanwhile, back at the club, the boys not only played sports but many received a basic education – for many Brady boys this was where they learned to read and write.
The club moved to Durward Street, thanks to the managers’ tireless efforts to raise funds, and the work went on, only interrupted by the outbreak of war.
Full-time
Re-opening in the late Forties, the club moved to its present, Hanbury Street base. Now there was a girls’ club too, and in the 1950s a creche, parents’ section, senior citizens’ section and old boys’ section were set up. A settlement started and overseas students could stay there while pursuing their studies in London.
A full-time staff was taken on and, in a typical Sixties week, a thousand people used the Brady Centre every week.
But as the Jewish community dispersed to Essex, North London and further afield so the Brady declined, and the last youth members left in the Seventies, with the building being sold to Tower Hamlets Council.
With the Nineties came a re-birth for the centre. A new Brady Club was built in Edgware, and ex-members of the original club began running activities for the thousands who had passed through those doors.
With the Brady’s country house in Kent providing holidays for young Jewish Londoners and the Friendship Club still at Hanbury Street, the Brady is looking healthier than ever.
And that original group of philanthropists might be surprised and delighted that their vision not only helped generations through the 20th century but is now well-prepared to see the next generations long into the 21st.
l Miriam Moses, Britain’s first Jewish woman mayor, who founded the Brady Girls’ Club in 1927, was honoured on Sunday when the mayor, Cllr Albert Jacob, unveiled a plaque at her birthplace – 17 Princelet Street, Whitechapel. She became the first woman Mayor of Stepney in 1931.
Her life and times will shortly feature in East End History

When the parents of young Joseph Merceron settled in Brick Lane 200 years ago they wanted their son to follow in their Huguenot traditions and work in the silk trade – but young Joseph saw a much quicker way of getting rich.
London was growing fast at the end of the 18th century with businesses springing up, buildings rising up around the fringes of the City and a whole new system of local government growing up to police and tax the new citizens.
Money was flooding into London, but Merceron didn’t set his sights on anything so crude as being a cutpurse or highwayman – he decided to use the system of law to his own ends.
Persuasive
Merceron started as a lowly clerk in a lottery office but quickly worked his way up to positions where he had power over money – other people’s. Local government was based on the church parishes and Joseph, a slick and persuasive public speaker, won many friends and supporters at St Matthew’s church vestry meetings.
The parishioners voted the plausible Merceron into place as churchwarden, with control over funds for the needy, and of the lucrative licences for public houses – he had his start.
He shamelessly granted licences to his friends, for a reasonable fee, of course, and a great many more were simply put into his own name. In his position as treasurer of the poor rate his abuses were even more breathtaking – cutting rates or increasing them, depending on whether the ratepayer was a friend or enemy, and at the same time pocketing a sizeable cut for himself.
Merceron was now also a magistrate, and lost no time in turning that to his advantage, too.
Encouraged
Although charged with keeping the peace, he encouraged bull-running and dog-fights in the streets of the East End, much to the delight of the locals who, as long as the magistrate got his percentage, now found that the law left him alone.
Merceron, meanwhile, made sure he greased enough palms to ensure he wasn’t bothered by the authorities.
With so many “friends” benefiting from his patronage, and in his pocket, Merceron seemed untouchable and Bethnal Green was seen as his personal kingdom. He thought he couldn’t go wrong, and that was when Joseph pushed his luck too far.
In 1818 he was jailed for 18 months for stealing £1000 from public funds – a suspiciously lenient sentence at a time when men were hanged for far less. But his spell inside was just a hiccup in his successful criminal career.
While incarcerated, his prime enemy, the vicar of St Matthew’s, mysteriously left the parish, probably scared off by the magistrate’s henchmen, leaving Merceron a clear field on his release.
It was business as usual and Merceron even took up his old official duties, without any further interference from the authorities.
Escaping the gibbet or the transportation ship, Joseph Merceron died a prosperous 75 in his Bethnal Green kingdom.
Ironic
Merceron left a few mementos of a lifetime of embezzlement and crookedness. Merceron Houses, Globe Road and Merceron Street, E1 bear his name. And his courtiers, mourning the man they hailed a hero, left an ironic testament. They buried him in his own churchyard, St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, remembered by the parish he had spent so much time defrauding.
(Further reading: Merceron’s Trial For Fraud And Corruption by WB Gurney, printed for W Wright, 1819.)

Frederick Charrington had everything going for him. He was young, tall, good-looking and, best of all, he stood to come into millions as heir to one of the great brewing families of the East End.
But Fred was no idle son of the rich, he also had a conscience and it was this that would change the course of his life forever.
Charrington was born in the East End, baptised at St Dunstan’s, Stepney and raised in 3 Tredegar Place, later re-numbered 87 Bow Road. He was sent to the posh Marlborough public school but returned to the family home in the East End and it was here, as a young man, that the extraordinary coincidence occurred that would lead Fred to renounce his millions and work for the poor.
Passing the Rising Sun pub in Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, Charrington saw a sight within, all too common in the Victorian East End. A woman with her three children in tow begged her husband for money, the drunken spouse hit his wife and Fred, unable to ignore any injustice, rushed in to pull the man off. He paused in horror. There, above the door was the name of the pub’s proprietors . . . Charrington.
He renounced the family millions and dedicated his life to helping the fallen and the falling and to fighting the “evils” that dragged them down – alcohol, poverty and prostitution.
Charrington would parade up and down outside the East End gin palaces, wearing a sandwich board which carried the dire warning “The wages of sin is death”.
He kept watch on the numerous brothels, noting down the comings and goings in his little black book, later handing on the details to the constabulary.
Needless to say, Fred’s public spiritedness was not always welcome and he received many batterings from the prostitutes’ pimps.
And on one unfortunate occasion, the madame of an East End brothel was so distracted by the news that Charrington was approaching with his little black book that she rushed inside her house, had a heart attack and promptly died.
On Sundays Fred would lead his temperance brass band through Stepney and Wapping, stopping to tempt converts at the many pubs along the way – many of them bearing that name Charrington above their door. The throng would grow along the way, and by the end would contain a large number of good-natured and noisy drunks, who found “Uncle Fred’s” regular weekend procession great sport.
Many mocked Charrington, and his opposition to music halls made him appear as one of those grim Victorian philanthropists for whom any entertainment was morally suspect. But he left his monument and one that did immense good for generations of East Enders.
Charrington, having renounced riches, campaigned vigorously to raise cash and build the Great Assembly Hall in Mile End Road. The mission, opened in 1886, fed the poor bodies with bread and cocoa and their souls with evangelistic religion. Before the phrase was ever coined, the mission was a centre of social work and, in 1910, provided Christmas dinner for 850 families.
Fred died in 1936, one of the last survivors of the great Victorian philanthropists. And just a few years later his mission would be gone too – burned down in the fires of the Blitz.

Everybody knows the blue plaques dotted around London – Charles Dickens lived here, Winston Churchill died there. But did you ever wonder how your street got its name? The history of the East End is the story of the characters and personalities who built it – philanthropists, politicians, businessmen and entrepreneurs – and they live on in the names of our streets and buildings.

Like Brabazon Street, in Poplar. Reginald Brabazon, Lord Meath, was one of that huge band of Victorians who devoted themselves to philanthropic works. After a time in the diplomatic service he founded, in 1880, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Society, becoming its chairman. And Londoners have Brabazon, who was also a London County Council alderman, to thank for the creation of the capital’s parks and open spaces – among them the disused Victoria Park Cemetery which became Meath Gardens.

East London exploded in size with the massive docks-building of the 18th and 19th century, and no-one played a bigger part than the engineer, John Rennie.
The Scot moved to London in 1791 as consultant and engineer for the West India and East India Docks. In 1798 he became a member of the Royal Society and is commemorated in Rennie Cottages, Colebert Avenue, E1 and John Rennie Walk in Wapping. One of the founding industries of the East End was silk, and one man who became rich through his trade in the fabric was Thomas Parmiter, of Bethnal Green. Parmiter died in 1682 and bequeathed part of his fortune for the setting up of a school for ten poor children and six almshouses for poor and deserving old folk. His original establishments are long gone but were rebuilt in Gloucester Street, E2, now called Parmiter Street.

Every time you pick up a magazine or newspaper you owe a small debt to William Caslon, for he devised some of the most popular typefaces in printing. And though Caslon lived in the East End nearly 300 years ago, many of his designs are still popular today. Caslon was born in Worcestershire in 1692, but set up shop as a gun engraver and tool maker in Minories. He started making type for printers and later retired to his country house in rural Bethnal Green. There is the traditional blue plaque in Chiswell Street, in the City, but he is marked locally by William Caslon House, Patriot Square and Caslon Place, Cudworth Street, E1.

Brewers played a big part in the history of the East End, and more than one left a permanent mark. Edward Mann not only played his part in the history of the Mann, Cross and Paulin brewery in Whitechapel Road, he was the first mayor of Poplar, elected in 1900. Edward Mann Close, in Pitsea Street, E1 marks his contribution to the East End’s history. Henry Raine, born in 1679 into a brewing family in Wapping, may be long forgotten for his beer, but his contribution to education lives on. Raine’s School moved from Wapping more than 100 years ago, but Raine’s original 1719 schoolhouse still stands in Raine Street, Wapping. Just a few of the names and characters who live on in the streets and buildings of the East End. So next time you’re flicking through your London A to Z, just stop and think – you’re reading a true history book.

What’s the connection between Mahatma Gandhi, Dixon of Dock Green actor Jack Warner and Sir Walter Raleigh? Give up? They are just three of the characters who have played a part in building the rich and varied history of the East End. But now you needn’t wrack your brains anymore. All the names and faces from centuries of East End Life are gathered together in one book. The Tower Hamlets Connection, A biographical guide, has been years in the making. It all came about as the brainchild of Harold Finch. In his 27 years working for the old London County Council and ILEA, Harold not only took a keen interest in contemporary Londoners, but found himself digging further into the past.

“It was a great learning experience,” he says. “These characters became my companions over many months. In the book there is much poverty, hardship and struggle and the spirit in which this is overcome is remarkable. “While some did much to improve conditions of home and work, others made significant contributions elsewhere.” They certainly did. And alongside philanthropists such as the social reformer Annie Besant, and William Cotton, founder of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church, there is a rogues’ gallery of villains. Baron George Jeffreys, the infamous ‘Hanging Judge Jeffreys’ was one who should have been on the side of the good guys. He earned his grisly nickname at the ‘Bloody Assizes’ of 1685, when he tried the rebellious followers of the Duke of Monmouth. Jeffreys didn’t believe in half measures and hanged, transported, whipped and fined hundreds of the unfortunate accused. He got a taste of his own medicine in 1688 at the fall of his royal protector, James II. He tried to escape from London disguised as a sailor, but was recognised in Wapping. He escaped the noose he had prescribed for so many in his own courtroom, but was sent to the Tower of London, where he died.

Then there was George Smith, born in 1872 in Roman Road, hanged in 1915, protesting his innocence after all three of his wives died in the bath on the first night of their honeymoons! Many of the characters are cockneys born and bred, like Elizabeth Lansbury, the wife of the campaigning local MP, George Lansbury. The young Elizabeth Brine was born in the 1860s in Whitechapel, where her father owned a saw mill. Elizabeth, the mother of 12, came to fame as one of the East End suffragettes, who withstood intimidation and imprisonment to fight for the woman’s right to vote. Her struggle and her bravery are commemorated by the Elizabeth Lansbury Nursery School, in Cordelia Street, E14. Or there is Jeremy Bentham, the legal reformer, born in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, now part of Commercial Street. The Poor Laws of 1834 and many of the legal reforms of the nineteenth century were based on Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism and he was instrumental in prison reform.

Many more came to make their home in the borough. Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, novelist Joseph Conrad and founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, to name just three. The Tower Hamlets Connection is an exhaustive and unputdownable book and essential reading for anyone interested in the names that made the East End great. You want to know the names of every East End mayor, MP or bishop? It’s here. Lavishly illustrated and with an exhaustive bibliography and suggested further reading after each entry, you’ll never be stuck for the information you need.

The Tower Hamlets Connection, by Harold Finch, is published by Tower Hamlets Library Services and Stepney Books, price £7.99 and is available now from all local libraries and good book shops.