eastlondonhistory.com

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).

The year was 1381 and England was on the brink, not just of civil war, but of a revolution that would rend the very fabric of society.
But a meeting at Mile End between the King and a peasant preserved the fragile social structure of the realm.
London in the mid-1300s was a booming city. Banks were doing good business funding new enterprises like breweries and tanneries, and to staff the growing firms of the capital, people were pouring in from Essex and Kent.
By the 1350s, the population of the City touched 80,000, doubling in 50 years, and the populace was squeezed into an overcrowded, dirty and in-creasingly diseased square mile.
Filth piled up in the streets and, in 1348, bubonic plague reached London. By the start of 1349, 200 bodies a day were being shovelled into the plague pits of the City and Smithfield, and over the next two years, almost half of those 80,000 souls died of the dreadful disease.
By the 1380s, London’s population had recovered a little but not enough to man the still thriving economy. More people were sucked in from the farms around London and that’s when the English social structure started to unravel.
Feudal society
In the early Middle Ages England was still a feudal society – farm workers were tied to the gentry and nobility who owned the farmlands, indeed they were more or less owned by their masters themselves.
But as the City filled up, the farms depopulated, and peasants found themselves expected to work harder. At the same time, they were hit by new taxes, including the hated poll tax.

It was only a matter of time before they discovered their power. An army of rebelling peasants, led by Wat Tyler, marched on London. They had no quarrel with King Richard II, but were out for revenge on the fat cats, the wealthy landlords and corrupt men of the Church, who they saw becoming rich at the expense of the sweated peasants.
And chief villain was Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Peasants’ Revolt coalesced on Blackheath, where Tyler rallied his men and marched on London. They made for Lambeth Palace, still the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury today, and set it on fire.
The now-roused rabble crossed the Thames. Many more joined the band in London and soon the streets of the Square Mile were littered with corpses.
Sympathisers opened the doors of the Tower itself, and the peasants murdered the Archbishop and his men, removing their heads and spiking them on London Bridge.
The band then moved out of the City to set up camp. It was there, at Mile End, the worried king came to negotiate.
Rather than challenge them head on, Richard played to their sympathies and announced himself as their ally. He asked the band to follow him to Clerkenwell where he would address their complaints.
In the narrow and winding City streets it was simple for the king’s men to pick the peasants off.
By the time they reached Clerkenwell, and the spurious conference, many were dead and the rest had fled. And Tyler, who had led his men to the brink of revolution, lay dead, a soldier’s sword in his back.

The East End has been renowned for many trades down the centuries – home for what was once the biggest docks on the planet, the sweatshops of the London garment trade, further back it was even the market garden for the neighbouring city.
Few people, though, picture Tower Hamlets as a refuge for those engaged in the quiet and introspection of religious devotion. But in the Middle Ages the area east of the City was home to many of London’s monasteries and nunneries.
Seeking escape from the noise and disease of the capital, the monks, sisters and friars had built their establishments in what was then countryside.
In the few short years between 1535 and 1540 they would all be swept away, as Henry VIII and his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, set about dissolving the monasteries, casting their members into the streets and plundering their wealth for the royal coffers.
Henry changed the social and religious fabric of his country in the process. But in the decades beforehand, the old English social order of power vested in the competing religious orders, their fabulous wealth housed in the monasteries, was seen in miniature in Tower Hamlets.
Debauchery
The Augustinian, or Austin Friars, were a mendicant, or travelling order of friars, and had first come to England from the Continent in 1248. Augustine himself had become bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396AD, after renouncing his earlier life of debauchery and self-indulgence. His order was founded on its leader’s fierce opposition to heresy.
By the Middle Ages the Augustinians had become a familiar sight on the streets of London, begging money to continue their charitable works. And by Henry’s time their work on the street had been so successful they had funded both a friary at Aldgate and an Augustine nunnery at Shoreditch.
St Benedict was born in 480 in North Italy, and this Catholic priest invented the whole monastic way of life.

By the Middle Ages, the Benedictine monasteries were largely responsible for the spread of education, the copying of religious scripts, and the teaching of reading in Europe – they founded several Oxford colleges.
The Benedictine nunnery at Bishopsgate was therefore a beacon of learning in the Dark Ages of medieval London.
The third major order vying for the charitable pennies of the East Enders of the time was the Franciscans.
Their founder, St Francis of Assisi, may have eschewed material possessions to live in poverty with the animals, but by the 1500s the Franciscan nunnery at Minories was very rich indeed, as its Greyfriars, or Friars Minor (from who Minories took its name) did their work of soliciting funds on the City’s streets.
Add to the list St Mary’s Hospital at Bishopsgate and St Mary Bethlehem – the notorious Bedlam hospital on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station – and much of the wealth of the nation resided in Tower Hamlets.
Divorce
Henry had a pressing practical need to subvert the power of the Catholic Church – he was seeking a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and legitimisation of his new wife Anne Boleyn and their children, and the Pope was refusing to play along.
But just as important to such a proud king was that the London monasteries possessed wealth to dwarf his own treasury – and the leaders of those monasteries and nunneries looked to Rome for their authority, not to England’s King.
In 1530, the brown and black-habited mendicant friars were a common sight on the streets of the East End. In 1534, Cromwell’s Acts of Supremacy demanded that all religious orders pledge their allegiance to the Crown instead of the Pope, and made him head of the English Church.
Many agreed. Many didn’t and were executed. But by 1540 the monasteries were gone. Henry had rifled £140,000 in the process – a huge sum, the normal Crown income being only £100,000 a year.
The medieval Tower Hamlets, with its religious authority, was dead. From now on the power and wealth in the East End would rest with the merchants, as Britain’s new fleets brought riches back from all over the globe.