eastlondonhistory.com

It’s the lot of politicians to be famous, or infamous, in their lifetimes, but swiftly forgotten once they are gone. Major sixties figures like Crossman, Driberg, Butler and Grimond soon become half-remembered names.
Of course many of them dream of immortality. But for once, with the naming of a new school in Bromley-by-Bow, the memorial is a fitting tribute to a lifetime’s service, not merely a posthumous ego trip.
Ian Mikardo School, in Talwin Street, opened the doors to its first intake of pupils last January, after relocating from Weavers Fields. Its namesake was an East End Labour MP for over 40 years, serving Poplar, Bethnal Green and Bow during his long career.
Baby Ian was born in 1908, the son of Jewish emigrants from eastern Europe. His parents arrived in Britain during the mass exodus of Jews in 1900. His mother came from the Ukraine and his father from the Polish town of Kutno, near Warsaw.
Like many others, the Mikardos arrived with nothing but the clothes they wore, their accessories for prayer and a handful of Russian roubles – not much use in Stepney!
The family moved on to Portsmouth in 1907, and Ian was born a year later. But it was a testament to just how hard Jewish emigrants found it to integrate that when he began school, at the age of three, his paucity of English words made him the butt of jokes – and meant he had a lot of catching up to do.
Years later as an East End MP, Mikardo said that those early days of bafflement in a Portsmouth classroom gave him a deeper understanding of the language problems of his Bangladeshi constituents.

The young Mikardo studied hard to overcome his problems, and it was his proud mother’s ambition that he should become a rabbi. Ian gave it a go and started at a Portsmouth college for the training of Jewish divines.
He soon realised the life of a cleric was not for him however, and the bright pupil transferred to Portsmouth Grammar School, spending his leisure hours watching Portsmouth FC – even when the club’s glory days had gone he retained an encyclopedic knowledge of all their matches.
60 years wed
In 1930, two major changes were to occur which shaped Mikardo’s life. First he met and married Mary Rosette – they were to be together for more than 60 years.
In the same year he joined the Labour Party and in 1935, the socialist returned to his roots, moving back to Stepney.
During the 1930s, Mikardo worked in factories, marketing and distribution. It was experience which was to serve him well during World War II, when planning of production and distribution became vital to the war effort.
With the end of hostilities, the aircraft factories where he had served his country scaled down production. But the lessons of centralised planning were now being applied to civilian life, as the new government began the huge task of rebuilding a peacetime economy and finding jobs for thousands of returning men.
By the mid-1940s, Mikardo wasn’t content merely implementing industrial policy, he wanted to make it too, and from 1945 to 1959 he served as Labour MP for Reading.
He lost the seat in 1959. But in the epoch-breaking victory of Harold Wilson in 1964, Mikardo was swept back into Parliament for Poplar. Boundaries came and went over the years and he represented Bethnal Green and Bow, then Bow And Poplar. He served as an East End MP until his retirement, in 1987, at the age of 79.
Ian Mikardo died in 1993, aged 85. During his lifetime, he wasn’t without his critics. George Orwell accused him of being a “fellow traveller”, a covert communist who didn’t have the courage to declare his convictions.
Others would point to decades of solid service to the public, and it is for this that one of the true personalities of post-War British politics will be remembered – and fittingly marked by Ian Mikardo School.

The East End was built by the industry and endeavour of generations of immigrants – Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Bangladeshis and more.
But just as fascinating are tales of the youngsters who left the poverty of east London in search of a better life and made their fame and fortune abroad.
One lad who was a product of both these tides of immigration was Samuel Gompers. Though born into a poor Dutch family in Spitalfields, he would go on to dominate US trade unionism for almost half a century.
Gompers was born in Tenter Street, Spitalfields, on 26 January, 1850. He got his education at the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane but his school days were shortlived. Young Sam was apprenticed to a shoe- maker at the tender age of ten.
He soon swapped trades, becoming apprenticed to a cigar maker at a wage of just one shilling (5p) a week. It was a humble start, but one that was to dictate his fate.
Many people were emigrating to the New World in search of a better life and Samuel and his family decided to try their luck in America, boarding a ship to New York in 1863.
But if the Gompers’ were expecting a land of milk and honey upon arrival at Ellis Island, they were in for a shock.
Life was tough in the slums of New York, swollen as they were by millions of immigrants in search of work. For the Gompers’, descendants of Huguenot immigrants, it must have seemed like the Spital-fields story all over again.
Young Sam, eager to take up his trade, found that there were few large cigar factories in the city. Instead, most of the work was done in thousands of sweatshops – often the workers rolled the cigars in their own tenement blocks. The echoes of the East End and its sweated match and garment workers were hard to ignore.

By 1885, Gompers had become an expert at his trade and was working in one of the larger shops.
And with trade unionism rising in power throughout the western world – back in the East End, the dockworkers and matchgirls were at last rising up against their appalling pay and conditions – Gompers realised that collective action was the only way forward.
He was respected by his fellow workers, most of them Germans, and they elected him president of Cigar Makers Union Local 144 (his local branch). Unpaid organisers like Gompers fought furiously to keep the union together under attack from mechanisation and the flooding into New York of new immigrants – most of them from Bohemia in eastern Europe.
This was only the start for Gompers, who realised that if more workers got together, they would grow stronger. In 1886, he was elected president of the new American Feder-ation of Labor, a kind of TUC.
Much work, little pay
Working out of a tiny shed, with his son as the office boy, Gompers laid the foundation for organised labour in the US. With a budget of $160, he described it as “much work, little pay and very little honour!”
Just four years later, the AFL had signed up a quarter of a million workers.
For 38 years, with just one year out, Gompers headed up the AFL. His influence didn’t end in the US.
At the end of the First World War, he travelled to peace negotiations in Versailles, where he helped set up the International Labour Organ-isation, a world-wide TUC.
Gompers died in Texas in 1924. Look around Tower Hamlets and you won’t see a street named after one of the borough’s most influential sons. But if you ever travel to Chicago, you might remember an East End lad made good with a visit to Gompers Park on the Northwest Side.

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.

The England of the early 1900s was a country of rapid change. The old queen had died, the telephone, electric light and the motor car were revolutionising the face of the capital – and the First World War was about to change people’s lives forever.
But for many East Enders it must have seemed as if they were still mired in the Victorian era. Sweated labour, poor money and bad housing meant their lot had, if anything, worsened.
Things were particularly bad for the Jews who worked in the rag trade. And it was to take the influence of a German immigrant to break from the past.
Rudolf Rocker was born in 1873 in Mainz, Germany. His Catholic parents died young – but they had already given Rocker the liberal views that would early on infect him with a passion for politics.
After leaving his Catholic orphanage, Rocker became an apprentice bookmaker, spending his spare hours working for socialist parties.
Rocker was soon expelled, though, for not following the party line – but already his readings were pulling him in the direction of anarchism.
His interests were by now attracting the keen attention of the police, and in 1892 he fled to Paris to escape harassment.
Like many revolutionaries of the time, he was quickly attracted to England, where the authorities took a slightly more tolerant view of political activists.
And so, in 1895, the German found himself living at 33 Dunstan House in Stepney Green. There he found a fertile ground for his ideas – a disaffected and exploited workforce.
Rocker had by now learned Yiddish and lived as one of Mile End’s Jewish community. He was a popular speaker in the East End, but he had something more permanent in mind.
In 1906, his group took over the disused Salvation Army hall in Jubilee Street, Mile End, turning it into a social club.
People from all sectors and creeds of the East End flocked to the centre, using its library and reading room – he had set up one of the earliest adult education centres in the country.
Rocker’s work was growing but he was not going unnoticed by the Government.
His leadership of the garment and dock strikes of 1912 may have been his finest hour but, in 1914, for the authorities at least, he at last went too far.
Rocker bitterly argued against both sides in the First World War and found himself imprisoned. Suspicion of foreigners was at its height and his Worker’s Friend paper was suppressed.
Most cruelly of all, the Jubilee Street centre was closed – and in 1918 Rocker was deported to Holland.
His work wasn’t over, though. Back in Germany he led the fight against a new threat – the Nazis.
In growing danger from the new regime, Rocker had to flee Germany once again – but this time to the United States.
Rocker lived out his long life there, finally dying in 1958 in Crompond, New York.
Along the way he had fallen out with some old friends by backing the Allies in World War Two, while remaining the most famous anarchist in a country where it was a dirty word.
For a generation of East Enders, his greatest legacy would always be those few years of the Jubilee Street Club – and the power he gave them to read, to learn and to change their lives forever.

November 1947, and out of the ashes of World War II, the Holocaust and the bitter conflict in Palestine, a new state was about to be born in the Middle East.
A special committee of the United Nations had decided that the answer to decades of religious and territorial conflict in the area lay in separate Jewish and Arab states being set up.
For once, the USA and the USSR both agreed and, on November 29, the UN passed a special resolution – just months later Israel would come into being.
And for an ageing and ailing figure in Bethnal Green, it was the fruit of a lifetime’s work.
Sir Wyndham Deedes was an unlikely figure as one of the creators of the new Zionist state – but then he had spent his whole life charting his own, idiosyncratic path.

Deedes the governor of Malta

Deedes had been born in 1893 in Kent, the son of East Kent gentry who for four centuries had owned and farmed the land between Hythe and Ashford. But the young Deedes turned his back on a life of farming and shooting to join the army. He was a voracious consumer of knowledge – philosophy, religion and history and, finding himself with time on his hands in his posting as ADC to the Governor of Malta, learned Turkish in his spare time.

Constantinople, Gallipoli and Egypt

It was to prove more than a hobby and, in 1910, his command of the language earned Deedes a posting to Constantinople.

Postings to Gallipoli and Egypt swiftly followed. In Gallipoli, he was held in awe for his ability to carry on working, oblivious, while Turkish shells rained around him – it was a coolness that would serve him well half a lifetime later in the Blitz on Bethnal Green.
Sent to Palestine in 1920, Deedes took up the role of chief secretary, a pivotal figure in the new administration which was to take over from the occupying British Army.
The young brigadier-general made an instant impact on colleagues with his ability to get straight to the heart of a problem.
The deeply religious Deedes also displayed his genius for bringing conflicting sides together – no mean task in the Middle East. And his work persuaded him that a Jewish national state must be established in Palestine.
But Deedes had a different mission and, despite the pleas of his boss, Viscount Samuel, he wasn’t to be deflected.
In 1923, he returned to England – not to the comfortable life of a country squire, but to gruelling and unpaid social work in one of the poorest quarters of London.

William Deedes of the Daily Telegraph

Bill Deedes, later a Tory MP and editor of the Daily Telegraph, was Wyndham’s nephew.
Between 1931 and the war, he shared University House in Bethnal Green with his uncle, accompanying him around the borough on a tireless crusade of social work.
“He contrasted the strong loyalties, local pride and personality of Bethnal Green with other, less fortunate, London communities,” wrote the man immortalised as “Dear Bill” in Private Eye.
“In Dagenham he had a mission, in Bethnal Green he was at home.”
And Deedes threw himself energetically into serving his new home.
Overcoming the suspicions of many locals, he became a councillor, served on the education committee, became chairman of the London Council of Social Service and, during the War, became chief air raid warden of the borough.
Bill Deedes recalled how his uncle’s evenings were taken up with visits to the poor and the sick, a lecture at the bookshop in Bethnal Green Road or a British Legion meeting.

Return to East End and Oxford House

In 1946, severe illness forced him to retire from his important East End work. A sick man, he returned to Hythe to see out his years in the frugal single room he chose for himself. The much-travelled squire’s son had journeyed full circle.
And Bill Deedes’ return to Oxford House this month, to unveil a plaque marking his uncle’s work, will ensure a lifetime’s dedication to the East End is properly remembered.

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.

Cable Street occupies a pivotal position in local history as the site of east enders’ great stand against the fascists of Oswald Moseley. But almost a century before Blackshirt violence failed to drive the Jews out of the East End, another immigrant population was fighting off persecution.

By the middle of the 1800s, Knockfergus, as the eastern end of Cable Street was known, was an Irish colony. This was the hothouse age of British industry. Most settlers worked in the booming coal industry that flourished around the docks, as steam replaced sail and the railways gradually snaked over the whole of the British Isles. Irish immigrants may well have been attracted by the name – an ironic twist since it was called Knockfergus by English soldiers of Elizabeth I’s army, returning in the 1580s after their invasion of Gaelic Ireland.

In the 18th Century, the influx of Irish people, with a different religion and language, had already led to conflicts with some local people and in 1736 there were riots in Spitalfields. In 1780 came the Gordon Riots – the most violent yet. The Government had passed the Relief Act in 1778, removing the harsh anti-Catholic laws of the late 1600s. Riots in Glasgow and Edinburgh persuaded the Government not to extend the law to Scotland, but in London there was strong anti-Catholic feeling too.

The Protestant Association got up a petition and persuaded the eccentric MP Lord George Gordon to head a march on Parliament to present it. On the same day, Catholic chapels across London came under attack. Two in Stepney were wrecked, as clashes between protesters and the 12,000 troops called in by the King spiralled out of control.

London was in turmoil for ten days as the houses of Catholics and supposed sympathisers were burned to the ground. When the smoke cleared the scale of the horror became apparent. 700 were dead, 450 arrested and 160 of those indicted. 25 people were executed for their role in the riots, the Lord Mayor of London was fined £1,000 for criminal negligence and Gordon tried for High Treason. The MP was acquitted and carried on his maverick way, converting to Judaism before being imprisoned in 1787 for a libel on Marie Antoinette. He died in Newgate Gaol in 1793, a broken man.

But Gordon’s bloody riot hadn’t purged anti-Catholic feeling in London. By the mid-1800s, Europe was in the grip of revolution, with the crown heads of Europe toppling at the guillotine and the scaffold. For some, foreigners equalled Catholics equalled revolution. The Irish, meanwhile – with centuries of history as a staunchly Catholic country and of resistance against often brutal British rule – were moving to London in their thousands to escape the ravages of the Potato Famine. The 1851 census showed 3,444 Irish immigrants living in the slum parish of St George’s in the East.

The England of the time was obsessed with religion. Its poetry, art and literature reflect the fears of some that Catholicism was going to usurp the established Church of England. But as the century drew to a close, Catholicism became part of English life once again – and the east end of Cable Street just one more part of London with a strong Irish tradition.

Thomas Cromwell rose from humble beginnings as a Putney blacksmith’s son to become the second most powerful man in England. Yet having overseen the first English “revolution” from his home in Stepney Green, Henry VIII’s right-hand man met the same fate as many courtiers of his time – the executioner’s block on Tower Hill. The young Cromwell gained his experience in the field, with his colourful early career in Europe as soldier, traveller and merchant. The details of this early life were – perhaps deliberately – obscure, but the smith’s son had picked up an education on his travels.

On his return to England in the 1510s, Cromwell began practising law. In 1514, at the age of 29, he became collector of revenue for Henry’s Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell’s success in squeezing money out of the monasteries to swell the king’s coffers did not go unnoticed. When Wolsey fell from favour, in 1529, victim of his engineering a costly war against France, Cromwell quietly moved into his old mentor’s place. His power swiftly grew, as he became royal councillor in 1531, master of the jewels and the wards in 1532 and king’s secretary in 1534. Here began what many historians describe as Cromwell’s revolution. The king needed a way out of his marriage problems but Rome was unhappy with another request from England’s serial husband. Cromwell found the way out – drafting the 1533 Restraint of Appeals Act, banning Catherine of Aragon from appealing for the assistance of the Pope. In the process he established royal supremacy of the monarchy over the Church. The dissident Church of England was about to be born.

In 1535 he became vicar-general and vice-gerent in spirituals and exercised the new royal powers over the Church. Working with Archbishop Cranmer, the zealous Cromwell set about radical reform of the clergy. The two set about the dissolution of the monasteries, using the skills Cromwell had gained under Cranmer to break the priests’ power and further stock Henry’s treasury with gold. Then, in 1536, Cromwell once more took a hand in Henry’s marital affairs, securing the demise of his former friend and ally Ann Boleyn. He showed again that career always came before friendship for the master power-broker. As chancellor of the exchequer and lord privy seal, the many-talented Cromwell was now making his power felt in Parliament too, doing his own will as well as the King’s and changing so many laws that the 1530s is sometimes referred to as the ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’.

In 1536, though, Cromwell and the King had a real revolution to contend with. In Lincolnshire, discontent with the economic strain Henry’s high taxation was putting on the populace, combined with anger at the dissolution of the monasteries, saw a popular rising threaten to topple the Lord Chancellor. But the master player finally came unstuck with his third hand in Henry’s marriages, when he brokered the wedding with Anne of Cleves, in 1540. As the daughter of a powerful Protestant duke, Anne suited Cromwell’s political and religious game plan. But there was one problem – the King didn’t fancy his fourth wife and, six months on, the marriage was annulled. Thomas seemed to survive even this, and was made 1st Earl of Essex in the same year. But his influence with Henry was fatally damaged and a plot by conservative churchmen and courtiers had him arrested on trumped-up charges. And Cromwell left his beloved home, the Great Place, by St Dunstan’s Church in Stepney, for another, less welcome part of the borough – the Tower of London.