eastlondonhistory.com

We seem to be awash in anniversaries at the moment. But Charles Darwin and Robbie Burns can step aside for a true hero of the East End this month. George Lansbury was born on 21 February 1859. He lived to see World War II, having fought alongside striking dockers, founded a national newspaper, gone to prison for his beliefs, and led the Labour Party.

A programme of events at Bow and Westminster will mark a century and a half since the birth of the man AJP Taylor called ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. Local happenings include a memorial service at St Mary’s Bow, where Lansbury worshipped for 40 years. There will be a meeting at Bromley Public Hall, addressed by Tony Benn. The connections both with family and East End politics go back a long way - Benn’s grandfather John was an LCC councillor and active in the 1889 London Docks Strike alongside Lansbury. Other speakers include Shirley Williams and Roy Hattersley - it’s obvious that Lansbury means a lot to the Labour movement to this day. But the tenor of the celebrations marks a change of emphasis, putting Lansbury’s remarkable political contribution firmly in the context of his Christian faith.

The enduring affection for Lansbury largely comes from his stubborn determination to stand up for what he thought was right: he was a constant thorn in the side of party colleagues and opponents alike. In 1886 Lansbury, at that time a Liberal, was General Secretary of the Bow & Bromley Liberal Association, but would resign over the leadership’s refusal to support legislation for a shorter working week. In 1892 Lansbury was elected to the Board of Guardians that ran Poplar Workhouse.

Bucking the principle that the workhouse should be made miserable, so miserable that people would avoid it at all costs (and so save the borough money), Lansbury and his colleagues made the workhouse a useful experience. They sent unemployed men out to the Laindon Farm Colony, near Basildon, taught them the basics of market gardening and got many back to work.

It took Lansbury three goes to win a Parliamentary seat, but having landed Bow & Bromley for Labour in 1910, he resigned his seat two years later, fighting the resulting by-election on a platform of votes for women. It was a ploy to draw attention to the plight of Suffragette prisoners, but was never likely to find sufficient popular support (women not having the vote of course). The Daily Herald he helped found in 1911 opposed Britain entering the First World War: they weren’t unique in this, but it was a boldly contrary move as the country was being whipped into a jingoistic fervour.

And in 1921 came the campaign which would define Lansbury in the eyes of many East Enders - and which would create that reputation as ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’. As Mayor of Poplar he defied government to raise the rate - again, it was to boost poor relief. Lansbury and his councillors refused to back down, going to prison for four months for their principles and inventing the word ‘Poplarism’ in the process. He would resign from Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government in 1931 (and go on to lead the Labour Party himself), and bitterly opposed Britain’s entry into World War II.

Lansbury’s politics were grounded in principle and in his Christian faith. Some would argue that such a principled refusal to compromise is the opposite of politics. But another East Ender, who succeeded him as Labour leader, neatly argued that Lansbury was not only a good man, but an effective operator. Clement Attlee called him ‘an evangelist rather than a Parliamentary tactician. Yet during those years in which he led the small Party in the House he showed great skill and powers of everyday leadership’.

The Revd Michael Peet, Rector of Bow church is leading the events that celebrate Lansbury’s life over the weekend of 21/22 February and argues “George Lansbury’s achievements in local and national politics are enormously impressive, but even more so is the sheer goodness of the man. After his death a local man said that, ‘One just could not help loving George Lansbury because there was nothing but love in his heart.’” While maintaining his political career and running the Daily Herald, Lansbury was a tireless figure in his local church, serving on its councils, running men’s and youth groups, Bible classes, the Temperance Society, supporting the church football team.

Events include a history walk along Bow Road on Saturday 21 February at 2pm, starting at Bow tube station. The memorial service is at St Mary’s Bow Church on Bow Road, Sunday 22 February at 4pm. For further information contact Nigel Whiskin on 01793 747362, 07775 630153 or whiskino6@btinternet.com.

At the start of the 20th century ‘a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police’. So wrote historian AJP Taylor about a Britain and a London where foreigners were free to come and go to an extent unimaginable in mainland Europe. It made London a particularly welcoming place for Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe and for socialists escaping political persecution just over the Channel. Within a few years though, the Tory MP for Stepney would set events in motion that would change things forever.

England had never had any solid immigration controls. Certainly, there had been periodic attacks on English Jews through history, most notably the sustained persecution by Edward I. The king executed 300 Jews in the Tower of London and in 1290 formally expelled all the Jews from England (it was more than 300 years before Oliver Cromwell officially invited them back). But this, cold comfort though it would be to the victims, was as much about Edward refilling his coffers with their confiscated cash (though it always helps an autocrat to have a scapegoat for the failings of his rule). Like Henry VIII a couple of hundred years later, the king was able to capitalise on religious differences to boost the Exchequer. London wasn’t always the friendliest of places - think of the Gordon Riots and the constant pillorying of Irish immigrants. But the principle largely stood that anybody could come to London and take their chances. That was all to change in 1905.

From the mid 19th century around two and a half million Jews had left their home on the Polish-Russian border, most for the United States but with around 150,000 settling in the East End. There were fears of overcrowding and disease in the East End, though this hardly explained Major Williams Evan Gordon’s attempts to blame the problem on the Jews themselves, still less the Stepney MP’s rather hysterical language. English families were being ‘ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders’, who were bringing ‘disease and crime with them’. In some schools ‘few English children [were] to be found’ according to Gordon. In a literally poisonous metaphor, Evans Gordon said that ‘10 grains of arsenic in 1,000 loaves would be unnoticeable and perfectly harmless, but the same amount if put into one loaf would kill the whole family that partook of it’.

The Tory Government might have done better telling their wild-eyed member to shut up - instead they set up a Royal Commission on Aliens, with Major Evans Gordon as a member. Interestingly though, the commission discounted the hysterical claims. England actually had far fewer foreigners on its shores than did mainland Europe. Those who came here tended to be sober and hardworking, with only one per cent presenting themselves for Poor Law payments. Their children were good attendees at school, worked hard and did well. Even ‘the foreign prostitute is generally far more sober than the English’ they approvingly noted.

And it wasn’t just the Right that was wrong. These were the years when socialism moved from the fringes of politics to within sight of the mainstream in England, with the development of the trades unions and the formation of the first self-styled socialist organisations, such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). A visit to the excellent ‘Engage’ blog* goes much further, digging back 20 years or more from the passing of the 1905 Act. They argue that though the Bill was raised by the Tories and made the Statute Book under the Liberals, it had its roots in an anti-semitism that had long permeated socialism in London. With a casual anti-semitism that would shock most modern readers, Justice, the paper of the SDF, claimed that ‘Jew moneylenders now control every Foreign Office in Europe’. Labour Leader, the ILP’s paper went further yet, writing “Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hooked-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbances”

By 1905, Arthur Balfour’s enfeebled Conservative Government faced a Commons that had no great desire to bring in immigration controls. There seemed to be little popular call either: Labour MP Keir Hardie said ‘there is no demand for this Bill from the working classes’. Winston Churchill worried that Britain would be surrendering its long and honourable tradition of giving shelter to asylum seekers. Even the Royal Commission was split, with two of its four members finding that things should stay as they were. Yet Balfour saw a cause on which he could unite his MPs, and a much watered down Bill came into law as the 1905 Aliens Act, barring ‘undesirable immigrants’ from entering the country.

But who was undesirable? Only steerage passengers (the poorest ships’ berths) and only if they arrived on a ship carrying more than 20 alien steerage passengers. As sceptics noted - a rich criminal could enter, but a hardworking but poor man could not, and what difference did the number of people on the boat make? It was a poor piece of law and hard to enforce, but what followed made things worse. In August 1914, the Aliens Restriction Act gave the Home Secretary power to stop foreigners landing in Britain, but it also had power to ‘control’ the many Germans already living in London. There were Germans in the East End, running shops and businesses, and some tactfully Anglicised their names (as did the Royal Family). Many still had their windows put in. Whether the Act was directly responsible or not, it could only raise the temperature and turn the focus on ‘aliens’.

‘Lascar’ and Chinese seamen who had come and gone from Limehouse for years were caught up in the provisions of the Act. Next came the 1920 Aliens Order and the 1925 Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, along with physical attacks on ‘foreign’ sailors. Many African, Indian, and West Indian seamen with British nationality found themselves registered as aliens. Most poignant of all - without the fundamental shift of the 1905 Act, many of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust would have been free to flee to London in the 1930s … and survive.

Farce, chaos or shambles. Writer Wes Whitehouse* offers a choice of words to describe the mess Labour and the Tories got themselves into when choosing their candidates for Mayor of London. 18 months before campaigning officially began, Labour found themselves saddled with a candidate they didn’t want, and the Conservatives with one who would end up in jail.

At the end of the campaign Ken Livingstone was Mayor, but had been expelled from the Labour Party. Jeffrey Archer meanwhile had been hurriedly dumped by the Tories. But if the Greater London Authority (GLA) campaign had set candidate against party, it was nothing compared to the politics of confrontation that had marked that earlier London authority, the Greater London Council (GLC).

The most famous battle took place in the 1980s of course. No sooner had Ken Livingstone become leader of London’s strategic authority in 1981 than he set the GLC on a collision course with Government. He announced his intention of using the council’s County Hall headquarters as a campaigning base to attack the Thatcher government. His activities included hanging anti-government banners on County Hall’s riverfront, in bold view of the Houses of Parliament on the other bank of the Thames. So infuriated was Thatcher at being confronted by this as she took her tea on the Commons’ terrace that she was to abolish the GLC altogether – on April Fools Day 1986.

It was the last act in a long and mixed history. Remarkably, London had no comprehensive local government until the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. Before that, the capital had been inadequately served by a hotch-potch of parish vestries, boards, commissions and justices of the peace.

But in 1855 the constant threat of cholera and the ‘Big Stink’ of a sewage-choked Thames (so bad that Parliament had to be suspended) forced action. The Board’s prime task was to provide clean water and commission a mains drainage system. Soon other duties were added: street improvements; Thames crossings; parks and fire fighting; the abolition of tolls; all came under the umbrella of the board.

In 1888 the Board was tidied up into a new London County Council (LCC). In the early years it was dominated by the Municipal Reformers (Tories), who ruled from 1907 until 1934. That was the year Labour got in, under the dynamic leadership of Herbert Morrison. Under Morrison the LCC produced its famed three-year plans for health, education, town planning, parks and housing. They were as successful as they were ambitious – building nearly 100,000 new homes by 1939, and making London a model for the world with its excellent hospitals, ambulance service, child care, clean water and 6000 acres of open space.

Reorganisation came again in the sixties. London had changed, depopulating as many moved into the suburbs and the home counties – many families had been bombed out never to return. The 1960 Royal Commission proposed an extension of London’s boundaries to cover 616 square miles (previously it had been 117), doubling the electorate to 5.5m. Middlesex was to be swallowed and with it large chunks of Essex, Kent, Surrey and Hertfordshire. The hospitals went to the young NHS and schools went to a new Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).

The new body, born on 1 April 1964 irritated some Londoners with its lumbering and expensive procedures. The new members (never councillors) had their own entrance, terrace, a grand dining room and bar. To many they seemed to be aping the MPs across Westminster Bridge.

Formality and grandeur faded a little with the election of ‘Red Ken’ in 1981. Formal dress codes were consigned to history. The new leader was universally addressed, even by junior staff, as ‘Ken’. Some old hands found it a culture shock. Whitehouse asked one lady press officer, who had served numerous previous administrations, what she made of the new bunch. ‘Well love,’ she opined. ‘Let’s face it. Bunch of w*****s aren’t they?’

Margaret Thatcher obviously agreed, and gleefully pulled the plugs on the GLC, 35 years to the day from its inauguration. London was now without a strategic voice for the first time in a century.

The Conservatives delighted in rubbishing its achievements, but supporters will point to a raft of innovations, some since discarded but some ahead of their time; some loved, some hated. The Council brought in free travel for the over-60s; it pioneered the use of wheel clamps; it was responsible for the New Towns; it rehoused needy Londoners in flats and bungalows everywhere from the Wash to Weston-Super-Mare; it turned Covent Garden from a central London wasteland to a major shopping and tourism centre; it pioneered the recycling of household rubbish; and it revitalised the Tube; it brought arts to the people; and it built the Thames Barrier.

Now there’s a new London council, and again it’s headed by a Ken Livingstone at odds with the Prime Minister. But with our ageing infrastructure creaking at the seams, will the GLA get the money and powers to rebuild London?

GLC – the inside story by Wes Whitehouse, published by James Lester Publishers, ISBN 095381713X, £14.99 hardback

The East End has elected its members of parliament for another five years – and no great surprises in our choices perhaps. So it’s strange to think that 90 years ago, Tower Hamlets was seen as not just a hotbed of political discontent, but a threat to democracy itself. In the early years of the 20th century the press and Parliament were in a state of near panic about the anarchists of the East End.
Three events thrust them into the public eye. The first was the Tottenham Outrage. On 23 January 1909, two Latvian refugees from the East End attacked a messenger carrying the wages for a Tottenham rubber factory. In the course of the struggle shots were fired and overheard at the nearby police station. A police chase ensued, and they ran the criminals to earth after a six-mile pursuit in which two people were killed and 27 injured.
Then, on the evening of 16 December 1910, a Houndsditch resident heard hammering coming from the jewellers shop next door. A group of Eastern European émigrés (and anarchists) were in the process of tunnelling through a wall to the jeweller’s safe. Several unarmed constables responded. One, Bentley, was fatally shot as he entered the building. In an ensuing street battle, Constables Strongman, Choat and Tucker were killed by gunfire. Of the robbers, Gardstein was accidentally shot and mortally wounded.
Then, on New Year’s Day 1911, came The Sidney Street Siege. The police sealed off a building supposedly hiding the remainder of the Houndsditch gang. Home Secretary Winston Churchill personally directed operations, police marksman opened fire, the building went up in flames, and the charred bodies of two anarchists, Svaars and Joseph were pulled from the embers.
Those events of nearly a century ago took place against a backdrop of panic about the influence of foreign ‘troublemakers’ upon the East End. Churchill himself later described Peter the Painter (a semi-mythical figure possibly involved in the siege) as “one of those wild beasts who, in later years, amid the convulsions of the Great War, were to devour and ravage the Russian State and people”. In the popular mind, anarchists were now thieves and murderers of policemen – but there was much more to the story than that.

The revolutionary politicians of the left had been driven from Germany and Russia and sought refuge in the East End. On Whitechapel High Street, opposite the London Hospital, a hall played host to the fifth congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (which played a key role in the emergence of the Bolshevik Party in what was to become the USSR). Stalin, of course, came to the East End and stayed in a hostel in Fieldgate Street, and Litvinov and Trotsky visited too. With Lenin paying many visits to Whitechapel, all the key players of the Russian revolution had visited Tower Hamlets during the few years before the First World War.
And with the crowned heads of Europe falling one by one to popular revolutions over the preceding decades (and most of the rest to go by World War II) it was perhaps unsurprising that Churchill and the police saw activities in the East End as a threat.
Much official interest focused on the Anarchists Club in Jubilee Street. Efforts were made to tie on of the most prominent members, Errico Malatesta, in with the Houndsditch Murders. Malatesta was an Italian anarchist who had been arrested in his home country at just 14, in 1867, or writing a letter to King Victor Emmanuel II, complaining about a local injustice.
He found London a safe haven from persecution in Italy, but soon he was attracting attention from the British police too. In 1900, Victor Emmanuel’s successor, Umberto, was assassinated, and the police began watching Malatesta. By 1909, he was under arrest, along with famed East End anarchist Rudolf Rocker, on a charge of criminal libel. He narrowly escaped deportation, when supporters organized a protest in Trafalgar Square.
And in 1910, as the police searched the Houndsditch crime scene, they found a card bearing Malatesta’s name. It was a red herring. The investigation revealed that, several months earlier, one of the thieves had contacted the Anarchists Club, and been introduced to Malatesta. The Italian anarchist was found innocent.
Britain never did erupt in revolution or anarchy. The East End revolutionaries were to return to their own lands to overthrow the ruling classes … and no threat to Crown and Parliament was to emerge from Tower Hamlets.

Many East Enders have moved on and out, and very many have gone on to greatness. But Abraham Beame, who died earlier this year, is surely unique. Beame left London, and ended up mayor of New York City.

Abraham David Beame was the son of Polish Jews who, like hundreds of thousands of others were fleeing persecution in Czarist Russia. And like many others escaping the pogroms, the Beames ended up in Whitechapel.

Abraham Beame in Whitechapel
Abraham was born on March 20th, 1906. His father, Philip Birnbaum, a socialist, went on to New York. Meanwhile, his wife, Esther Goldfarb stayed in the East End to recover from the birth. She also changed the family name to the more Anglicised Beame.
If Whitechapel had been tough on the immigrants it was good preparation for their arrival in New York, where they settled into the bustling, crowded and poor Lower East Side.

From Whitechapel to New York
The Beames saw the way out as being hard work and education. And like many an immigrant before him he went on to achieve top marks at school, while holding down evening and weekend jobs, including labouring in a paper mill and working shifts at his dad’s restaurant.
He was a born money man, winning perfect scores in his accountancy exams, before going on to teach the subject at high school and university.

He came to politics late, and was an unlikely mayor of New York. At 67 years of age, only 5ft2in tall, this self-made working class cockney was in stark contrast to the Ivy League educated career politicians who normally inhabited the office. While his rivals were at home in the upper class suburbs of New York and New England, Abraham would be calling on all friends back in the working class district of Queens, many of whom had accompanied the Beame family on the long ocean crossing from the East End to Ellis Island.

Beame as New York Mayor

When Beame entered office he inherited a $1.5billion budget deficit. The extraordinary debt had come to a head as other crises hit the city and the nation, including the Watergate investigation, protests against the disastrous war in Vietnam, terrorist bombings in New York and a city wide power failure that resulted in violence and lootings. It looked like the great city was set for collapse.

His period in office also coincided with the horrific serial killings perpetrated by the so-called “Son of Sam” (killer David Berkowitz). Beame found himself pilloried by the media for the mounting debt, though he had inherited 15 years of municipal mismanagement. At the peak of the New York City financial crisis, Beame threw out pleas for aid to New York state governor Hugh Carey and US president Gerald Ford – all were refused.

Saving New York from bankruptcy
But Beame’s financial and business sense started to pay off. He hammered out emergency plans, programs and stopgaps as well as securing state and federal loans from the heads of the state and the nation, but it didn’t make him popular. Rises in income tax, subway and bus fares were painful medicine, and cuts of city employees, wage freezes and the implementation of college tuition fees only made him less so. And Beame left office in 1978 after the election of Ed Koch with a $200 million surplus, having entered office with the city facing bankruptcy.

Abraham retired from politics but remained active in business, banking, charity and education. But the stresses and strains of public life had taken their toll. The former mayor suffered from heart troubles for a decade, including heart attacks in 1991, and in July last year. After undergoing a second major heart surgery in December of 2000, Beame fell into increasingly frail health and died on 10 February 2001.

Given the escapes and tight corners that marked his life, it was a miracle that Morry Levitas, who died last month at the age of 84, made it to the new millennium at all.
His was an extraordinary life, yet at the same time an exact mirror of the histories and battles of so many Jewish East Enders in the 20th century.
Maurice Levitas wasn’t born here at all.
His parents had fled the Tsar’s pogroms in Lithuania and Latvia at the turn of the 1900s. They first settled in Dublin, where Morry was born on February 1, 1917, and where his father and uncles became key figures in the local tailor’s union – known to one and all as the Jewish Union.
But crippling unemployment in the Irish capital forced the family first to move to Glasgow, and then to the East End of London.
The young Morry started working on building sites, though he wasn’t your average labourer. Already he’d known life in three distinct cultures, as well as the Jewish culture the family carried with them. Along with his sister and three brothers, he learned to argue and debate in Hebrew, as well as learning Yiddish songs.
His experiences as an immigrant in a period of economic depression also had a profound political effect.
Like many other cockneys of the time, he joined the Communist Party and took part in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, blocking the marching along East End streets Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts.
And, like many other cockneys, he took the fight against fascism to its heart, signing up in 1936 to fight with the International Brigades against General Franco in Spain.

Dig his own grave
He was captured in 1938, and he and his company were ordered at gunpoint to dig their own graves.
His story should have ended then and there, like many other prisoners of war. But, unaccountably, the Spanish troops relented at the last moment, and Morry instead spent a year in a prisoner of war camp.
Again, it was a miracle he survived. He was often beaten and, as a Jew, had to undergo pseudo-scientific eugenics experi- ments, as invited Nazi doctors collected information about the anatomies of their captives.
But Levitas survived to fight another war. In World War II, he signed up with the British Army and served in India and Burma with the Royal Army Medical Corps, returning to London to work as a plumber after he was demobbed.
In the late forties he retrained as a teacher and taught in London schools from 1949 until 1963.
All the time he was studying and graduated as an external student from London Univer-sity, with a degree in sociology. He began lecturing in the sociology of education at Durham University in 1964 and produced his keynote work, Marxist Perspectives in the Sociology of Education.
Despite severe tests, his faith in the Communist Party, and in Soviet communism, persisted. He opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which put a brutal end to the Prague Spring of 1968, but after retiring from his university post, went to teach English in an East German school.
And, for his last book, he edited and translated the words of the fallen and discredited East German leader Erich Honnecker – a brief which many would have avoided like the plague.
Towards the end of his life, this man of many countries and many campaigns was awarded Spanish citizenship in recognition of his status as a veteran International Brigadier.
And Morry, or Moisheben Hillel to use the Hebrew name he attached to much of his writing, died on February 14, 2001 – an Irishman, Scot, Spaniard and East Ender.

John Wilkes was an unlikely focus for campaigners demanding workers’ rights. A flamboyant and rakish figure, he married into money, and spent most of his time drinking and carousing with his friends in the West End’s notorious Hellfire Club.
But before his political career petered out he would become the figurehead for a rash of East End uprisings against poor pay and conditions.
Wilkes was born on 17 October 1725, the son of a City malt distiller. In 1747 he married Mary Meade, an heiress who owned a large estate at Aylesbury. It was a marriage of convenience and Wilkes spent most of the next ten years in London’s clubs rather than at home. Eventually, bored by his life of pleasure, Wilkes decided to try politics and in 1757 he was elected MP for Aylesbury.
But it was for his extra-parliamentary attacks that Wilkes would gain notoriety. In 1762 his weekly paper, The North Briton, began a series of attacks on Scotsmen in general and prime minister Lord Bute in particular.
Bute was a favourite of the king, George III, and after one article on 23 April 1763, George and his ministers prosecuted Wilkes for seditious libel. The Lord Chief Justice ruled that, as an MP, Wilkes was protected by privilege from the charges. The politician left the court as a champion of liberty and a huge popular favourite.
The establishment had other ways of targeting Wilkes though. Samuel Martin, a supporter of George III, challenged him to a duel that November. Martin, his skills suspiciously honed by a summer of shooting practice, hit and wounded Wilkes in the stomach. Worse was to come. A week later, Parliament ruled that privilege did not protect Wilkes from prosecution and the troublemaker was hurried off to France by friends.
In 1768, Wilkes returned to England, but was soon at odds with the Government once more. He stood as a Radical candidate for Middlesex, a constituency that included the East End. But after being elected, the new MP was arrested and taken to the King’s Bench Gaol, on the South Bank of the Thames.

For the next fortnight large crowds gathered outside the prison. On 10 May, 1768, a crowd of around 15,000 arrived, yelling “Wilkes and Liberty”, and “No Liberty, No King”. The hapless Government had, in trying to contain Wilkes’s threat, only made matters worse. Panicking troops opened fire, killing seven protesters, and sparking protests all over the capital.
Wilkes became a focus for various disenchanted groups in Tower Hamlets. In 1768, the Spitalfields weavers tried to cut the wages of their worlers. The workers paraded down Piccadilly that March, giving out pamphlets proclaiming “Wilkes and Liberty”. A month later, coal heavers marched down the Ratcliff Highway. Their grievance was the lack of lighting in their poor dwellings; “Wilkes and Liberty and coal heavers forever”, read their banners.
On 8 June that year, Wilkes was found guilty of libel for comments he had written about the St George’s Massacre, and received a 22-month sentence and a fine of £1,000. On his way to jail, the mob rescued him, and he appeared at the upstairs windows of the Three Tuns Tavern, next to Christ Church in Spitalfields, waving to his overjoyed supporters. But Wilkes realised his cause was lost, and later he quietly slipped away and surrendered to his jailers.
As a felon, he was expelled from the House of Commons but, in February, March and April, 1769, Willkes was three times re-elected for Middlesex. Each time Parliament threw out the result, and each time there was rioting in the East End. The disturbances culminated in the hanging of riot leaders John Valline and John Doyle at the southern end of Bethnal Green that December.
John Wilkes was freed from prison in April 1770, then in 1774 was elected Lord Mayor of London. And finally, he was again elected to represent Middlesex in the Commons – and at last admitted.
Wilkes spent his political career campainging for religious tolerance and parliamentary reform, demanding seats be redistributed from the old ‘rotten boroughs’ in the Shires to the new centres of industry, such as the East End.
Like many radicals, though, Wilkes’s fire cooled with age. He became more conservative, the radicals grew dissatisfied with him and in the 1790 General Election he was defeated at Middlesex. Wilkes died on 29 December, 1797.

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.

There are many extraordinary figures and high achievers in the history of the East End, but few are more remarkable than the woman who
broke down two of the
barriers to her sex – becoming England’s first doctor and the country’s first
elected mayor.
Elizabeth Garrett was born in Whitechapel in 1836, one of 12 children of Newson and Louise Dunnell. Newson was a very able businessman, and supported his sizeable family by running a thriving pawn-broker’s shop – always much
in demand in poverty-stricken Whitechapel.
In 1841, Newson made another shrewd business move, buying a corn and coal warehouse in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. The business was a roaring success and the Garretts could afford to send all 12 offspring to boarding schools.
More to life…
Young Elizabeth’s life was mapped out. After finishing school, she would stay idle in the family home until a suitable husband appeared. But she had other ideas. In 1854 she met Emily Davies, a fierce proponent of women’s rights. Emily introduced Elizabeth to other feminists, and in 1859 she met Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first woman doctor.
She decided to pursue a medical career herself but first had to win over her father. He was appalled by the idea. Elizabeth wrote later: “I asked [my father] what there was to make doctoring more disgusting than nursing, which women were always doing, and which ladies had done publicly in the Crimea. He could not tell me.
“He said the whole idea was so disgusting that he could not entertain it for a moment. I felt rather overcome with my father’s opposition, but said as firmly as I could that I must have this or something else, that I could not live without some real work.”
Newson came round in
the end, though Elizabeth’s mother never did.
“My mother speaks of my step being a source of lifelong pain to her, that it is a living death,” Elizabeth recalled.
Sneaked into lectures

Next she had to take on the medical authorities. All the medical schools rejected her, so Elizabeth became a nurse at Middlesex Hospital, sneaking into lectures for the male
doctors. After students complained, she was banned from the lecture rooms.
The persistent Garrett then discovered that the Society of Apothecaries didn’t debar women from their exams. She took her exams, passed and was made a doctor, and the Society immediately changed its rules so that no other women could follow her.
But Elizabeth was qualified and, with her father’s support, set up a medical practice in London.
In 1866, Elizabeth set up a dispensary for women, later to become the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. In 1870 she scored another first by being appointed as a visiting physician to the East London Hospital.
Still she was determined to earn her medical degree, and sat and passed her exams at the University of Paris. The British Medical Register, though, blankly refused to recognise her degree.
Marital laws
There were more battles
to come. Although her new
husband, James Anderson, supported her career, they fell out when he tried to insist he take control of her earnings – under the law of the time, a wife and all she had were the legal property of her spouse.
In 1872 she opened the
New Hospital for Women, a London infirmary entirely staffed by females, for females.
In 1902, Elizabeth retired to Aldeburgh. Her interest in the politics of change was still strong and, in 1908, she stood for mayor of the town. She was elected, the first woman mayor ever in England.
Even in her 70s, Elizabeth became active in the suffragette movement that had
its roots in the East End, and her daughter Louisa was jailed in 1912 for her militant
suffragette activities.
Elizabeth died in 1917 in Suffolk.

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).