eastlondonhistory.com

During the Victorian era and after, it was a tradition for the well-heeled to enter the East End to do good works. And though for many one visit was enough, many stayed to leave a lasting legacy - their institutions outliving them and even growing far beyond the boundaries of Tower Hamlets. The names of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett and Thomas Barnardo come to mind, Angela Burdett-Coutts and the ‘East End Squires’ who started Oxford House.

All had entered the East End and been appalled at what they saw - the poverty, disease, drunkenness and exploitation. This was a world of high infant mortality and low life expectancy. But Maria Dickin was different. Visiting Whitechapel in the early years of the last century she saw plenty of pain and suffering, but it was the animals that caught her eye. She found goats and rabbits huddling sick and injured in backyards. There were the costermongers’ and coal delivery men’s donkeys and horses, often crippled and lamed by heavy loads and overwork. It was a horror her sheltered Victorian childhood had ill prepared her for, as she would describe in her book ‘The Cry of the Animal’. The suffering and misery of these poor, uncared-for creatures in our overcrowded areas was a revelation to me. I had no idea it existed, and it made me indescribably miserable.’

The eldest of eight children of a Free Church minister, Mia (as she was known) was born in 1870, and showed a fierce independence from the start. Women of her class weren’t expected to work in the 1890s, but Mia opened a sucessful voice production studio in Wimpole Street - one of her customers was the famed singer Clara Butt. But at 28 she married her cousin, Arnold Dickin and was encouraged to give up work to run the house. It wasn’t enough, and like many bright and industrious women of the time, Maria had turned to charity work as a conduit for her energies. So in the early years of the 20th century she found herself in Whitechapel.

Mia had been forced to have her own sick Yorkshire terrier put down. Bad enough, she thought. But how much worse for those whol couldn’t afford vets’ bills. The response of those she spoke to was derisory. The poor don’t have any sick animals and if they did they would not bring them for treatment,’ was one comment. But after a long struggle for funds, Mia finally opened her first ‘People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor’. Outside the dimly lit cellar in the Whitechapel district of London, a notice read:

Bring your sick animals.
Do not let them suffer.
All animals treated.
All treatment free.

The shop was mobbed, with police called to control the crowd. More than 100 animals a day were now coming in, and there was a rush to find larger premises. And Mia was ambitious, writing: ‘I must have dispensaries throughout the whole of East of London … no, throughout the whole of London, then I became very bold - why not - throughout England - then the British Isles, the British Empire?’

In 1921 she took a gypsy caravan and, accompanied by a vet, travelled the length and breadth of Britain treating animals and setting up clinics along the way. By 1923 there were 16 PDSA dispensaries and a motor caravan dispensary. By 1935 there were PDSA hospitals, 71 dispensaries and 11 motor caravan dispensaries, and the PDSA was spreading abroad.

In 1943, Maria endowed the Dickin Medal to honour animals’ war work, and it became popularly known as ‘the animals’ Victoria Cross’. By February 2008, the medal had been awared 62 times, often posthumously. The first award of the medallion, bearing the words ‘For Gallantry’ and ‘We Also Serve’, was to Winkie, a messenger pigeon who flew 120 miles to deliver an SOS from a crashed bomber. Messenger pigeons were big winners in the early days. In 1949, Simon became the only cat to win the medal having survived the shelling of the HMS Amethyst during the Yangtze Incident. In modern times, sniffer dogs from the Royal Army Veterinary Corps have won a lion’s share of Dickin Medals. In 2003 in Iraq, Buster nosed out a cache of weapons and explosives, while in 2007, Sadie uncovered a bomb planted outside the UN HQ in Kabul.

But the medal is not without its controversies, most famous among them the medal awarded to Rob, the SAS dog who supposedly completed 20 successful parachute jumps into Italy and North Africa during World War II. On the ground, the enterprising collie would lick the cheeks of sleeping commandoes to waken them at first scent of danger. An oil painting of the fearless hound would later accompany his medal at the centre of the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Animals War’ exhibition. The only problem was, it never happened. It was all a scheme cooked up by the SAS barracks’ quartermaster, who had grown attached to Rob and didn’t want to send him back to his owners. Ex SAS man Quentin Hughes helped devise the story, and laughingly remarked years later that “Nobody survived 20 parachute drops, let alone a dog. You were lucky to survive three!”

By the time Mia died in 1951, aged 81, she had been made both OBE and CBE. She had established a huge and lasting legacy, but as ever, she was looking ahead. Writing for children toward the end of her life she said: ‘oday we are all thinking about what each of us can do towards making the world a better place for every man, woman and child to live in. We must not forget to include the animals in our programme, they too must have a better world to live in.’

Read more on Rob the SAS Dog and the PDSA Dickins Medal.

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.

Nothing in Granville Sharp’s background would have suggested that he was to become one of England’s most celebrated campaigners for the abolition of slavery.
Yet a chance encounter in Wapping turned the course of his life forever, and hastened the demise of that evil trade.
Sharp was born in Durham on November 10, 1735. One of eight children, he was also the youngest son, and missed out on the formal education his older brothers enjoyed.
Instead he was sent to London, to work in the Spitalfields’ linen trade. But though he didn’t get the schooling of his professional brothers, he was learning in other ways. He moved from employer to employer, picking up wisdom from each.
“This extraordinary experience has taught me to make a proper distinction between the opinions of men and their persons,” he would write later.
Sharp was lodging with his brother, a surgeon in Wapping. One day a black slave, Jonathan Strong, staggered into the house. He had been so badly pistol whipped by his master that he was at the point of death.
An appalled Sharp took Strong to St Bartholomew’s Hospital, where he lay a full four months recovering from his terrible injuries.
Beaten and abused
Strong related his story – how his owner, David Lisle, had brought him from Barbados, but become unhappy with his work, beaten him and hurled him onto the street.
Strong recovered, and the unrepentant Lisle hired two thugs to recapture him. A furious Sharp decided to take up Strong’s case, and adopted the role of barrister, arguing in court that as Jonathan was living in England he was no longer legally a slave.
Many of the judiciary in England were already growing uncomfortable with the evils of the slave trade, but it took three years before English law took its labyrinthine course – Strong was freed in 1768.
The case became a national cause celebre. Sharp used the publicity to step up the fight to free not just victims of violence, but all slaves.

His argument was that a slave treading on English soil was subject to English law. English law precluded slavery, so “as soon as any slave sets foot on English territory, he becomes free”.
His most famous case came when he represented James Somerset. In what was to become known as the “Somerset ruling” Sharp fought and won a battle which allowed Somerset to stay in England.
Somerset’s master, a Virginia planter, wanted to take him back to the plantations in the West Indies. Sharp argued that everyone coming into this country was subject to its laws and protection, and that Somerset had every right to abscond because he was only property in the West Indies not here in England.
After much deliberation, Lord Mansfield found in favour of Somerset and Sharp won the case.
However, many people misunderstood the ruling believing that it meant that all the slaves in Britain were automatically free. The irony was that Sharp had had to accept the legal existence of slavery in other countries, using it as a tactic to fight slavery in England. The biggest fight was still to come.
In 1787, Sharp and his friend Thomas Clarkson formed the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, along with influential Quakers such as John Wesley and Josiah Wedgwood. Their breakthrough came when they persuaded William Wilberforce, the MP for Hull, to be their spokesman in the House of Commons.
Thumb screws
Thomas Clarkson was busily amassing information to support their case. He interviewed 20,000 sailors and collected equipment used on the slave-ships such as iron handcuffs, leg-shackles, thumb screws, instruments for forcing open slave’s jaws and branding irons.
Sharp, meanwhile, was becoming a thorn in the side of Government in other ways.
He argued in favour of parliamentary reform and an increase in the low wages paid to farm labourers. Now a prominent civil servant as well as a lawyer, Sharp also supported the American colonists against the British government and had to resign from the civil service in 1776.
Things were changing slowly but surely. After the passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 Sharp joined Thomas Clarkson and Thomas Fowell Buxton to form the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery.
Sadly he would never see abolition come to pass.
The great campaigner died on July 6, 1813.

George Peabody grew up on the other side of the world from the East End. And as he left school at 11, going to work to help support his seven siblings, it was unlikely that he learned much about London in the classroom either.
But the grinding poverty of the East End was to strike a chord with this extraordinary figure – and to set in chain a huge charitable venture that bears his name to this day.

US war with Britain 1812

Peabody was born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1795, and had already been a working ‘man’ for seven years when he signed up as a volunteer in the United States’ war with Britain in 1812. While serving, he showed the first signs of the financial acumen that was to make his fortune, raising the financial backing to found the dry goods firm of Peabody, Riggs and Co.
In 1816, Peabody moved to Baltimore and the thriving business soon established branches in Philadelphia and New York. Seeking still wider business opportunities, Peabody travelled to England in 1827 to negotiate the sale of American cotton in Lancashire. In 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, he made his home in London.

Great Exhibition 1851

In 1851, Britain staged The Great Exhibition of the World of Industry of All Nations in London. But despite the brave new world promised by the scientific and technical marvels on show in the spectacular Crystal Palace, England was in social turmoil.
London was paying a terrible price for the uncontrolled industrialization and sprawling urban growth. The homeless and destitute were increasingly seen on East End streets, while Charles Dickens scourged the heartless industrialists in works including Hard Times.
The East End has a couple of remnants of those days – one of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools and Burdett Road, named after benefactor Angela Burdett-Coutts.

Shaftesbury and Peabody

It was Shaftesbury who was the catalyst when the shaken Peabody asked what he could do to alleviate the suffering of his fellow Londoners. “Low-rent housing,” was the politician’s reply, and Peabody stumped up the at-the- time astonishing figure of $2.5 million. The trustees’ brief was to use the cash to benefit Londoners, who had to be poor, have moral character and be a good member of society.

First Peabody Buildings

And so the first of dozens of Peabody Buildings was raised in the East End. The buildings at 135-153 Commercial Road were for the housing of 40 low-income families, with shops, laundries and baths – undreamed-of luxuries at the time. The buildings still stand but, in a sign of the times, they are now privately owned.
In an 1831 letter to his nephew, David Peabody, George gave some clues to the reasons for his philanthropy: “Deprived as I was of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society in which my business and situation in life frequently throws me,
and willingly would I now give 20 times the expense attending a good education could I possess it.
“But it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those that come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me.”
Nobody knows for sure how much the benevolent millionaire gave away, but there are recorded donations of more than $8 million, most of it in his own lifetime.
George Peabody died in London on November 4, 1869. At the request of the Dean of Westminster and with the approval of Queen Victoria, he was given a temporary burial in Westminster Abbey. His will said he should be buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, and the prime minster, William Gladstone, arranged for Peabody’s remains to be returned to America on the Monarch, the newest and largest ship in Her Majesty’s Navy.

Peabody gets freedom of City of London

Peabody was honoured on both sides of the Atlantic for his generosity. He was one of only two Americans ever to have been awarded the Freedom of the City of London (the other was General Dwight D Eisenhower.) A statute to George Peabody still stands in the heart of London’s financial district. In the United States, he was awarded the Congressional Medal in 1867. Commercial Road may have gone but, throughout London, the Peabody Trust provides affordable housing for 26,000 people.

With thanks to Elizabeth Schaaf, archivist of the Peabody Institute.

T

This week’s Somali Festival, organised by and based around Oxford House, writes another chapter in the
116-year history of one of the East End’s great charitable institutions.
The ‘East End Squires’ who set up Oxford House in 1884 might have a little trouble recognising their manor today. Weavers Fields, the venue for Saturday’s outdoor festival, was then home to street upon street of back-to-back terraced slums.
And the clientele of Oxford House has changed as Bethnal Green has changed. A century ago, many of the people using the House would have been Jewish; today it boasts a large Somali contingent.
In the new millennium, the aim is to encourage “a sense of community in a multi-ethnic society”. But how did the whole thing begin?
Howling wilderness
A century ago, Bethnal Green was one of the most miserable districts in the capital. A visiting vicar wrote: “Bethnal Green! A howling wilderness; drunkenness in the back streets; fights in the squares; starvation in the alleys; pauperism rampant; religion nil.”
No wonder that when the new Bishop of Stepney, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, attemp-ted to set up mission services, he was told by a local priest: “It won’t do any good, nothing does any good round here.”
The early inspiration for Oxford House was based on a mix of Victorian muscular Christianity and an upper class sense of duty toward the lower orders.
James Adderley, the first active head of the settlement, wrote: “Our social system is based on the assumption that there is a leisured class in every locality who will see that the laws are carried out and keep the social life going… there is no such class in London where it is most wanted.”
Squires of the east
So was born the famous rallying cry for young Oxford gentlemen to undertake missionary work to Bethnal Green: “Come and be the squires of east London.”
The impetus for the new settlement came from Keble College Oxford, hence the name. The scholars of Keble had, for years, been contemplating an Oxford church settlement based in a London parish, so that tutors and trainee clergy could learn at first hand about the problems of the city’s poor.
The first two graduates arrived in 1884, taking up residence in a converted school
set among the old weavers’ houses. Oxford House soon gained a reputation for being friendlier and more relaxed than the rather more earnest Toynbee Hall settlement.

Things really started moving with the arrival of Winnington-Ingram as the new Head of House. He set about fundraising and, in 1892, the present building was opened.
The ‘squires’ lived in the house as well as working there. One of the first, Ernest Bramwell, wrote of his first impressions: “What a nice house, what splendid clubs for working men.
“In the House were Oxford and Cambridge men, all had different jobs assigned to them. They were all full of the Head’s enthusiasm, and there was a delightful spirit of friendship and welcome.”
Religion was important too, of course. Nobody was obliged to attend chapel, “but everybody did” wrote Bramwell.
One of the most successful ventures was the Webbe Club, which had a huge waiting list of local lads wanting to get involved in the running, rowing, boxing, billiards and darts clubs.
But the years after the war and up to the 1970s saw a long, slow decline, as the numbers of students willing to take up a year’s missionary work in the East End dwindled, and Oxford House itself started to question its role in a much-changed Bethnal Green.
A new lease of life came in the 1970s and ’80s, as new director David Clarke reinvented the House as “offices, a pub, a cinema, a church, a school, a gym, a youth club, an arts centre and a meeting place rolled into one”. Oxford House became involved in teaching new skills – including writing, typing, film-making, printing and photography.
Gallery and theatre
Today, it is essentially an arts centre and this year was awar-ded £1m of Lottery money to build a new art gallery and
theatre.
And as present director Kim Adams says: “Unlike many other Lottery-funded arts ventures – the English National Opera, for example – we will be open all hours for local people.”
That’s the spirit of the modern Oxford House – a hundred different things to different people, and every one welcome, irrespective of age, gender, culture or creed.

As dim as a Toc H lamp, went the joke. But for World War One soldiers and generations of young
people since, the Toc H club, founded by local
vicar Philip Clayton, was a beacon of hope.
Philip Thomas Byard Clayton was born in Queensland, Australia, on December 12, 1885. Two years later, Philip and his parents returned to England, where
he attended St Paul’s School. He went on to Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied
theology, coming out with a first class degree.
The newly graduated Philip – or Tubby as he became known – entered the church, and in 1910 went as a curate to St Mary’s Portsea.
Soon his life was overtaken by the Great War and, in 1915, he went to France as an army chaplain. It was during the war that his real life’s work began.
Signallers’ code
In December 1915, he opened Talbot House in Poperinge, a club just behind the lines in Flanders. It became known to the thousands of soldiers who found a touch of home there and a brief respite from the horrors of war as ‘Toc H’. This was a reference to the army signallers’ code, whereby the
initials of Talbot House – TH – would become Toc H.
Civvy Street
During the war, hundreds of men committed themselves, should they survive, to entering the church as priests. Tubby’s first task after the war was at the Ordination Test School, established in a disused gaol in Knutsford, Cheshire, where these men were prepared for theological college. He was the main inspiration and was, for a short time, a member of the teaching staff. Already, how-ever, he was planning for the rebirth of Toc H.
This was not to be a simple ex-service organisation, but an attempt to preserve and hand on to succeeding generations the special atmosphere and camaraderie which had characterised Talbot House in Poperinge. It was an ambitious project, but Tubby was determined to carry Toc H into Civvy Street.
In 1922, with the Toc H movement still in its infancy, he was asked by Archbishop Davidson to become the vicar of All Hallows by the Tower, in Newark Street, E1, and to bring new life to an ancient church with an uninterested and dwindling congregation.

At first this looked like a
distraction from his real work. But All Hallows gave him a base, letting him distance
himself from the day-to-day administration of Toc H and gain the freedom to act as a roving ambassador.
He was the vicar of All Hallows for the next 40 years and Tower Hill was his home for the rest of his life.
He travelled the world, renewing wartime friendships and launching Toc H throughout what was then the Empire. But Tower Hill was not neglected. He began formulating and discussing plans to beautify the area and to
create open space. These bore fruit in the establishment in 1932 of the Tower Hill Improvement Trust.
Towards the end of 1932 Tubby sailed for West Africa where he had his first contact with leper colonies. He was deeply moved by this experience, and within six months had inspired 50 people to volunteer for five years’ unpaid work with lepers and raised £25,000 for the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association.
At the start of the Second World War, he established a Toc H Club at the naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Then in 1941, he was appoin-ted chaplain to the Anglo-Iranian Line and spent much of the rest of the war at sea with the tanker fleet.
In 1940, All Hallows Church was bombed and Tubby’s first post-war priority was its rebuilding – a task which required all his energy and powers of persuasion.
He succeeded, of course. In 1962, Tubby resigned as vicar of the newly rebuilt All Hallows. He remained in Tower Hill, active in both Toc H and the Winant and Clayton Volunteers, until his death, just after his 87th birthday, in 1972.
These days, Toc H is as active as ever, as the pictures on this page show. Volunteers work on a variety of comm-unity projects – running a
children’s playscheme or camp, tackling conservation or construction projects, running a leadership training course
or first aid training.
The charity encourages a mix of volunteers, so that they learn, through living and working together, to break down stereotyped views and make friends from new cultures.

This summer, students of Queen Mary and Westfield College will gather at an imposing building on the Mile End Road to collect their degree certificates.
What most of them won’t know is that the building they are nervously gathered in boasts one of the longest and strangest histories of any in the East End.
Our story starts back in 1774, when Barber Beaumont was born in Marylebone. The young man showed talent as an artist and was enrolled in the Royal Academy School.
It was the beginning of a colourful and varied career. Beaumont’s speciality was miniature portraits and
he became the court painter to the Duke of Kent and the Duke of York.
But the talented artist gave up his painting, making his fortune from insurance after founding and running the County Fire Office.
Spurred on by his success, and by a philanthropic urge to help the poor of London, Beaumont then set up the Provident Life Institute and Bank of Savings. This was one of the first friendly societies, which encouraged working people to save money, and the forerunner of modern building societies.
Though a talented and prudent man, Beaumont was also a colourful character. He fought a duel in Hyde Park, and left the world of insurance to became a military commander during the Napoleonic Wars.
Returning to England, Beaumont set his mind again to philanthropic works.
He became determined to bring culture to the East End, by building a combined museum, concert hall and library. And so, the Eastern Athanaeum was born in Beaumont Square.
But his real legacy was a trust fund he endowed to build a home for higher education in east London. The money was re- leased on his death in 1841, but it was to be 40 years before his dream came to reality.
In 1887, Beaumont’s educational establishment, known as the People’s Palace, was opened by Queen Victoria. It was her first visit to the East End in four decades.

Built on the old Bancroft Hospital site, the plan was to include a technical college, gymnasium and swimming pool, library and concert hall.
Crowds for a queen
Aimed at the mind as well as the body, it would fulfil Beaumont’s dream of “the intellectual improvement and rational recreation and amusement for people living at the East End of London”.
Thousands turned out to watch the Queen in her rare outing east of the City. And thousands more eagerly attended the lectures and classes at the People’s Palace and Queen’s Hall.
But in 1931 disaster struck. Fire ravaged the Palace, the worst of it centred on the Queen’s Hall. Two-hundred and fifty firemen fought the blaze and two hours later the fire was out. Little had been saved and the Queen’s Hall lay in smouldering ruins.
The East End could have been downhearted, but local Labour MP George Lansbury put his usual positive spin on the disaster.
Broadcasting on the radio in 1936, he said: “We all felt a personal loss, but we were not dismayed. We knew that the goodwill that created our People’s Palace was not dead, that all classes of people would readily respond.”
And respond they did. An appeal for funds culminated in King George VI and his wife, the present Queen Mother, following in the footsteps of his great grandmother, Victoria.
On 13 February 1937, the King laid the foundation stone of a new People’s Palace.
But the dream was shortlived. After the war, the building had a new role to fulfil, when Queen Mary College took over the building.
Stand on the south side of Mile End Road and you will see the imposing building to this day, though the “People’s Palace” enscription has been sandblasted from its beautiful facade.
And every summer, groups of nervous graduates will gather within this building, the latest crop to benefit from Barber Beaumont’s dream of bringing education to the East End.

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.

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

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.