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Today it is just another East End street, and passers-by doubtless sometimes wonder at the roots of its curious foreign name. But Swedenborg Gardens marks the home of one of the most extraordinary men of the 18th century – a brilliant scientist whose visions were to change the way many saw God and religion. It was here he lived in the heart of the East End’s Swedish community, and here he had his conversations with his maker.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688. The son of a clergyman, he grew up in a home filled with intellectual, philosophical, political and moral debate. He was certainly an intense child, writing later: “From my fourth to my tenth year, I was constantly engaged in thought upon God, salvation, and the spiritual sufferings of men, and several times I revealed that at which my father and mother wondered … from my sixth to my twelfth year my delight was to discourse with clergymen concerning Faith.”

Leaving Uppsala University at 22, he decided to travel Europe and immersed himself in an astonishing variety of disciplines. To the specialists of today, his work in physics, astronomy, metallurgy, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, watchmaking, bookbinding and lens grinding is staggering. And the tireless Swedenborg was a creator too. He designed a submarine, an aeroplane, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow combustion stove.

Most of his designs were never built, but undaunted he wrote numerous books, as well as taking a seat in the Swedish equivalent of our House of Lords. He also took up a post as the King of Sweden’s Assessor of Mines.

From the 1720s, Swedenborg was dividing his time between Sweden and London. The English capital attracted him, because its free press allowed him to publish his often controversial works without hindrance or censorship. Arriving in Wapping, Swedenborg first made his home in Wellclose Square, near the Highway.

Wellclose and Prince’s Squares were lined with grand townhouses, built by the wealthy Swedish merchants who had settled in the area. These timber traders had their wharves at Wapping, and soon the local Swedish community grew, with shopkeepers, craftsmen and itinerant sailors. In 1728, the community raised money for their own place of worship – and London’s first Swedish church was built in Prince’s Square.

Swedenborg became a regular worshipper at the new church. He was still commuting between his native and adopted countries - returning to the Swedish parliament to deliver a paper on the future of the national currency, coming back to London to publish his groundbreaking works on the brain and cerebral cortex – but soon his life was to take an extraordinary turn.

In 1744 Swedenborg began to have vivid, disturbing and exhilarating dreams and visions. He told no-one, merely logging his experiences in his diaries. But trying to make sense of it all, he began a meticulous study of the Bible. Then, in April 1745, came the experience that changed his life forever. God appeared to him, telling him that he would reveal truths to humanity through Swedenborg.

For the next 25 years, Swedenborg became ever more prolific, publishing 18 theological works at his own expense. Resigning his job as Mines Assessor, he wrote ceaselessly, expounding on the hidden, inner meanings to the stories of the Bible; the fundamental nature of God, Humanity and Creation; the truth about the afterlife; the key to personal spiritual growth and the secrets to a happy marriage, to name but a few.

Swedenborg kept as low a profile as such a productive writer was able. He published his work anonymously in London (his followers in Sweden began to be persecuted by the authorities), and he made no attempts to set up a church to disseminate his ideas.

But the secret escaped one night back in Gothenburg. Dining with friends, he suddenly became pale. Asked what was wrong, he said he had just ‘heard’ that a fire had broken out near his home in Stockholm, 300 miles away. A little later he became relieved, explaining that the fire had been put out safely. Days later, a messenger arrived from Stockholm, with exactly the same story. His vision became the talk of the town, and people realised that Swedenborg was the author of the extraordinary tracts that had been appearing.

On 29 March 1772, Swedenborg died at his Wapping home, and was buried in the little Swedish church in Prince’s Square. Not much remains to be seen now. The Swedish community has long since dispersed, and the visionary’s remains were removed to Uppsala Cathedral in 1908. The church closed in 1910 and, despite a fierce campaign, it was demolished in 1921.

In 1938, Prince’s Square was renamed Swedenborg Square. But though the fine old houses of Swedenborg and Wellclose Squares escaped the Blitz, they couldn’t dodge the planners. In the 1960s both were demolished as slums by the GLC.

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.

The East End has long been a home for outsiders, radicals and dissenters. As a maritime gateway to the world, it was often the first port of call for new ideas, practices and philosophies brought from Europe and beyond.

And with its position just outside the City walls it was also a home for Englishmen and women whose views clashed with King and parliament.

Henry St John Bolingbroke, who made his home in Spital Square when it was a country retreat at the extreme north-east of London, was a font of ideas, political ambition and energy.

A mass of contradictions, he was a man of God and a philosopher, but also famed for his fondness for women and drink. A staunch supporter of the ruling monarchy of Queen Anne and her successor George I, he managed to sandwich his backing for the Old Pretender (James III of England and VIII of Scotland) in between.

Bolingbroke was born in 1678 and after his studies at Eton and Oxford – and the customary ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe which moneyed young men of the day used as their finishing school – he returned to London in 1700 with his mind set on women and politics.

He married the daughter of Sir Henry Winchcomb in 1700. But even by the double standards of the day, Bolingbroke’s infidelity was too much to ignore, and the couple soon separated.

Bolingbroke entered parliament in 1701, and soon he was becoming as renowned for his oratory as he had been for his high living. He joined the Tory Party and by 1704 was secretary of state for war.

At 30, his meteoric political career was suddenly halted. The Whigs came to power and Bolingbroke announced his intention to retire from the exhausting business of parliament and devote himself to study.
In truth, he was as active politically as ever, but now operating behind the scenes, using his enormous influence as Queen Anne’s favourite counsellor. The Whigs fell in 1710 and Bolingbroke was made foreign secretary, moving to the House of Lords in 1712 as Viscount Bolingbroke.

He was increasingly mistrusted despite – or, perhaps, because of – his brilliant way with words. He was a master of intrigue, not only whispering in the ear of Queen Anne, but using the London Tory clubs and writers such as the great satirist Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver’s Travels) to swing public opinion in favour of his policies.

So skilful was his manipulation of parliament, though, that he managed to conclude the Peace of Utrecht in
1713 – the Anglo-French-Spanish treaty which established the first balance of power between the ever-warring nations – against enormous public opposition.

The opposing Whigs were furious. Bolingbroke had been chipping away at their power by pushing the Conformity and Schism acts through parliament, and they bitterly accused him of wheeling, dealing and intrigue.

In truth, the wheel of fortune was turning again for the great schemer. Henry foresaw a pro-Whig Hanoverian succeeding the now-ailing Anne and he began negotiations with the Old Pretender, replacing senior Whig army officers with Tories.
Events overtook him. Anne died suddenly in 1714, George I came to the throne and impeached Bolingbroke for treason, and Henry fled to France where he helped plan James’ Jacobite rebellion. At the same time, he augmented his fortune by marrying the rich widow of the Marquis de Vilette.

But whose side was he on? James dismissed him as an English spy and, in 1723, he slipped the new king a hefty bribe and bought himself a pardon.
Back in Spitalfields, Henry continued to influence from the shadows. He began a new political periodical, The Craftsman, from which he sniped at the government of Robert Walpole.

In later years, Bolingbroke accepted that his political influence was over, and his writings became increasingly preoccupied with religion. He argued strongly the existence of a god, and used philosophy and reasoning to prove it. But he was a furious opponent of organised religion and dismissive of the notion of God as a bearded heavenly figure.
As he had been mistrusted by the political establishment, now he was at odds with that of the Church. But the young dissolute died in comfortable and pious old age at his chateau in France in 1751.

Further reading: see Bolingbroke’s correspondence (ed by Gilbert Parke, 1798); biographies by Charles Petrie (1937) and H T Dickenson (1970);
J P Hart’s ‘Viscount Bolingbroke: Tory Humanist’ (1965);
I Kramnick’s ‘Bolingbroke
and His Circle’ (1968).

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.

Back in January, East End Life looked at the extraordinary life of Rudolf Rocker, the German anarchist who settled in Stepney Green.
He dedicated himself to the organisation of Jewish immigrant workers – his leadership of the 1912 garment workers strike swept away much of the Victorian culture of poor sweated labour.
Now a new translation by his surviving son, Fermin, tells a story every bit as remarkable.
It charts how the young Fermin grew up as the cockney son of East End immigrants, moved to New York with his parents as a boy and finally, as an elderly man, came back to settle in London in 1972.
The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood first appeared in German translation a few years ago.
It is a fascinating memoir for the thousands of Eastern European and German Jews whose families made the exodus to England to escape the pogrums and Nazi persecution.
Now, appearing for the first time in English to coincide with Fermin’s 90th birthday exhibition of paintings, the book is fascinating both for the descendants of those early refugees and anyone intrigued by the way Jewish immigrants shaped the rich culture of the East End.
And The East End Years doesn’t offer a dusty and impersonal image of Rudolf Rocker, the political activist, academic and hero. We see a German immigrant family at home, with all the fun, parties, arguments and racial frictions that were part of normal life.
The Rockers, though Christians themselves, were immersed in the Jewish community, and this gave the young Fermin a unique insight into the tensions between the two communities.
“The Cockneys of the district had little love for their Jewish neighbours, who in addition to being Jews, had the misfortune to be foreigners as well,” he wrote.

But the tradition of rubbing along with different incoming cultures was already established. “Open clashes between the adult communities must have been rare, for I never heard of any,” Fermin observed.
There were scraps between gangs of youths though.
“The Jewish youngsters of Whitechapel and Stepney were a rather rough and scrappy breed who gave as good as they got in those skirmishes,” he said.
The Rocker home in Dunstan House, Stepney Green, was a constant stopping-off point for visitors from mainland Europe – friends of Rudolf driven to England by religious or political persecution abroad.
Squalor and misery
For them, the East End was a culture shock. “Nothing they had seen in other capitals equalled the squalor and misery that confronted them here,” wrote Fermin.
“Nor can I recall ever seeing such numbers of beggars, drunks and derelicts as roamed the streets in those days. The sight of the poor sot lying sprawled in the gutter, drunk to the point of insensibility, was so common as to elicit hardly more than a shrug.”
Yet the main tone of the book is how much the young Rocker soon finds he has in common with his new compatriots, their humour and their strength during the Zeppelin raids of the First World War – a time of particular pain for Fermin, as it leads to his father’s internment and eventual expulsion from Britain.
When Fermin returned to London in the early 1970s, he saw how many of the buildings he remembered were still standing, though the worst of the squalor was thankfully gone.
And, most fascinating of all, Fermin’s writings bring history to life.
As one review had it: “This little book will come as a relief to all those who have had enough of the dryness and soullessness of much professional history.
“It is full of life and atmosphere. Not simply history to be digested, it brings to life a political movement in its day-to-day activities.”

The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood, Fermin Rocker, Freedom Press, ISBN 0 900384 92 1, Price £7.95.

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.

1997 was a year of celebration and reflection for London’s Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani communities — as they looked back half a century to Indian independence.
For one man, 1947 was the culmination of a lifetime’s struggle against the dying days of empire. But his triumph was short lived. As the New Year of 1948 was ushered in, Gandhi had only days left to live.
The assassination of Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi on January 30, 1948, also brought to an end the long association of the Mahatma, which means Great Soul, with the East End.
In 1931, Gandhi visited London for the Round Table Conference, which looked at changing the constitution of British-governed India.
The British Government, after years of resistance and antagonism to his revolutionary ideas, was now talking to Mahatma, and offered him accommodation.
But he had a long friendship with Doris and Muriel Lester and happily took up their offer of accommodation at Kingsley Hall, off Bruce Road in Bromley-by-Bow.
He still had 16 years to wait before his dream of a free India would come to pass — but then Gandhi had already been waging peace on intolerance and injustice for almost 50 years.
Well-to-do family
Born near Bombay in 1869, Gandhi was a son of the Hindu merchant caste — his well-to-do father had been prime minister of several small states — and Mohandas was married when he was just 13 years old.
But convention couldn’t hold him for long. When he was 19 he came to London to study, reading Law at University College.
He got his first taste of prejudice as fellow students snubbed him because of the colour of his skin. The young Mohandas was forced to spend hours in his room, reading alone.
But it was here that the seeds of his philosophy of non-violence were sown. He absorbed the ideas of Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and returned to India, determined to put them into practice.
Unsuccessful in Bombay, Gandhi went to South Africa to work and became the first “coloured” lawyer to be admitted to the Supreme Court.
He swiftly took up the cause of fellow Indians who had come to South Africa as labourers, only to find they were treated as inferiors — it backed up his experience of England and the caste system back home.

In 1906, he put his peaceful revolution into effect, saying he would die before obeying an anti-Asian law. Thousands of fellow Indians joined him in civil disobedience and Gandhi was jailed twice.
But through all his tribulations, Gandhi remained loyal to Britain, organising an ambulance corps for British troops in the First World War.
Then, in 1914, the long final passage of his campaign began when he returned home to India. He was an inspiring figure and Indians followed him in their thousands as he campaigned for “swaraj” (home rule) and vowed to unite all classes and religions — especially the Hindus and Muslims.
He encouraged Indians to boycott British goods, courts and authority — his reward was a series of jail sentences during the 20s and 30s.
World War Two came and the politically astute Gandhi demanded independence as the price for India supporting Britain — again, in 1942, he was jailed.
But in 1947, the years of peaceful protest paid off when independence was won. To Gandhi’s horror, the splitting of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India brought Hindu-Muslim riots. He met violence with peace — fasting until the Delhi rioters swore themselves to non-violence.
It made his end all the more ironic. On January 30, 1948, on his way to pray, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu infuriated by his success in bringing the two religions together.
It was a violent end to a life of harmony. But if you travel down to Kingsley Hall you will find a plaque to this day — commemorating a staging post on a lifetime’s quest for peace.

When a young Stepney housewife answered a knock on her front door on March 5, 1953, she expected to find one of her friends or neighbours on the other side – maybe even her mum, who lived next door.

But Golda Berk was in for a shock. Standing outside her tenement door in Jubilee Street were reporters from radio stations and newspapers – and not just from Fleet Street but all around the world.

It was the culmination of an extraordinary story that united refugees from Russia a half century apart.
Golda Berk was born in the East End in 1923, the daughter of Louis Toubervitch.

Joseph Stalin the political refugee

Louis had journeyed with his parents from the Ukrainian city of Kiev, just one of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who travelled from Russia and the East to the sanctuary of London.

But what had brought the world’s media to her doorstep was the death of one of the most powerful men on the planet. For the man, who would later be known as Joseph Stalin, had lodged at 75 Jubilee Street as an impoverished young political refugee 46 years before.

Stalin the cobbler’s son

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugas-hvili, aka Stalin, was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, Georgia, the son of a cobbler.

He was a cruel child. Schoolmates would relate how he would stone birds for fun and greet news of sickness among fellow pupils with a cold smile.
Perhaps it was because of his own misfortunes.

He was a sickly boy, badly scarred by smallpox and born with a crippled left arm. He stood only 5ft 4ins tall – throughout his life, the self-conscious dictator wore platform shoes.

Stalin at Tblisi Academy

But Iosif was a bright boy and a hard worker, winning a scholarship to the Tblisi Academy. His first career, as an accountant, did not hold his interest. While a student, Iosif had been absorbing the revolutionary works of Karl Marx and became involved in the first stirrings of the Russian Revolution.

These were dangerous times and Iosif was frequently on the run. He was arrested in 1902 and imprisoned for 18 months – after his sentence, Stalin was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia.
He escaped in 1904 and met Lenin for the first time the following year, at a Bolshevik conference in Finland.

Stalin in Jubilee Street

Then, like many Russian revolutionaries, he fetched up in London in 1907, living in a Jubilee Street tenement flat – the future home of Golda Berk.

By 1910, Iosif was back in Russia where, like many of the Communists, he adopted a nickname – ‘Stalin’, ‘The Steel One’. It was another seven years before the Tsar was finally overthrown in the October Revolution. Then Stalin’s swift and bloody ascent to absolute control of the Soviet Union began.

Stalin the ruthless dictator

He ruthlessly suppressed dissent, murdered his rivals and resettled peasants thousands of miles from their homes. Stalin’s triumph was to halt the march of Hitler’s armies, with his people’s resolute stand at the siege of Leningrad and the Battle of Stalingrad.

After the war, Stalin became increasingly paranoid and physically weak. In 1953, he looked to be plotting another purge of Moscow’s Jewish doctors. But it was to be the last emergence of the anti-semitism that surfaced throughout his life. The dictator died suddenly on March 5, 1953.

Stalin’s home in Whitechapel

Nearly half a century later, Golda ‘Goldie’ Berk has long since moved to a new flat in Waterview House, near Mile End Park. The Jubilee Street tenement which once had such a famous resident has long been demolished. “Good riddance,” says Goldie. “It was damp and horrible!”

But her thoughts often go back to that March morning years ago when, for a few days, the eyes of the world’s media turned to her Stepney home.

Casual visitors to University College London (UCL), just down the road from Madame Tussaud’s, are often taken aback as they spot what appears to be a dummy, sitting in a glass cabinet in the corner of the entrance hall. But this is no waxwork, rather the fully-clothed skeleton of the college’s founder. And these bones are only the last chapter in the extraordinary tale of an East End boy’s remarkable life.

Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in Red Lion Street, Spitalfields, now part of Commerical Street. He was a precociously-talented boy, reading Latin at the age of three and going up to Oxford to study at just 12. His lawyer father hoped his talented son would follow in his footsteps, and Bentham did enter Lincoln’s Inn, to practise as a barrister, at the age of just 15.

But a straightforward career in the law was too narrow to contain the extraordinary and eccentric intellect of the young Bentham. He soon gave up his work to study chemistry and the physical sciences, developing his ideas as he travelled in Italy, Turkey and Russia. In those days, scholars did not specialise to the degree they do now — science, politics and philosophy were not the separate disciplines they later became — and the young Bentham soon turned his thinking to philosophy, the law and social policy.

Bentham’s ideas came together in what became known as Utilitarianism, a philosophical theory based on the doctrine of the “greatest happiness of the greatest number”. It was radical stuff and had its real influence a generation on, through philosophers like John Stuart Mill and many of the law reforms of the 19th Century, such as the Poor Law. And Bentham’s renown in the field of social reform was such that in 1792 he was made an honorary fellow of the fledgling French Republic.

What the French champions of “Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite” would have made of Bentham’s Panopticon is not recorded. This was Bentham’s design for a prison where inmates would be under constant surveillance. The philosopher put forward the idea of extending this to workers, soldiers or students to “coerce by means of observation”. He believed organisations would first be transformed as those spied on were stimulated to hard work through fear — and in the next stage workers would take on the values of hard work and diligence of their bosses.

Perhaps it was not surprising the Panopticon never caught on. But Bentham’s ideas did. By the time he died in 1832, his ideas were shaping what we now see as typical Victorian values. In his will, Bentham specified that his friends “take the requisite and appropriate measures for the disposal and preservation of the several parts of my bodily frame”. His skeleton was to be clothed, a wax head was to be added and the body placed in a wooden cabinet.

And he had his memorial in UCL, whose founders wanted to start an accessible university: one that did not exclude students on the basis of religion, wealth, race, or creed. Critics referred to it as the “Godless university”. The eccentric radical sits there to this day. Rumour has it that the body is wheeled into all important meetings of the UCL administration. And in the minutes of the meetings, the East Ender is always logged as “present but not voting.”