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Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564

There are many ways to explore the history of the East End of London. Walking the streets is one of the best. And if you can punctuate your walks with visits to some of Tower Hamlets more historic hostelries, all the better. Especially as East End pubs frequently have fascinating histories of their own. Often, in areas redeveloped beyond recognition, the pub is the oldest building left standing.
In the first of an occasional series, we’re going to look at the pubs which stretch out from St Katharine Docks, through Wapping and Limehouse to the Isle of Dogs. This could provide a good (though depending on your refreshment of choice, increasingly unsteady) afternoon’s walk. In months to come we’ll be looking at pub routes in other parts of the borough.
Ironically though, our route starts with a pub that has only stood in its present site for 30 years. The Dickens Inn, in St Katharine Docks is an odd mix of historical accuracy and 20th century conservation. The timber pub, originally a brewery and built in 1793, was discovered by builders demolishing a later brick-built warehouse in Docklands. The warehouse had been used to store spices. It was moved to its present site in 1974, as part of the regeneration of St Katharine Docks, themselves built in the 1820s. In 1976, Cedric Charles Dickens, grandson of the great novelist, officially opened the ‘old’ pub, now clad in modern weatherboarding but with its 18th century interior more or less intact. Today this 18th century building, with a 20th century façade, named after a 19th century author, and plonked in its present site in the mid 1970s, is a favourite with tourists who want to see what a real, old London pub is like.

Heading east, The Town of Ramsgate, on Wapping High Street, is one of Britain’s oldest surviving pubs – in fact it was probably serving beer during the War of the Roses in the 1440s. Tradition has it that Judge Jeffreys was caught here as he tried to escape to France. The Hanging Judge had of course despatched 300 or more East Enders, guilty and innocent, on the gallows behind the pub. He’d sentenced 800 more to transportation.
Just a few yards to the east of the Town of Ramsgate is the Captain Kidd, another Wapping pub with a bloody and criminal history. This inn was named for pirate William Kidd who, in 1701, was hanged in the streets of Wapping, then covered in tar and hung in chains at Tilbury – a grisly warning to other would-be pirates.
From here you can gaze across the river to the Mayflower at Rotherhithe. Another pub with a terrace backing onto the river, the Mayflower was the place where the Pilgrim Fathers moored their ship before setting off for America in 1620.
Heading further east to Wapping Wall we come to the third of the trio of historic Wapping hostelries, the Prospect of Whitby. Former regulars include the painter William Turner (famous for his seascapes and Thames pictures of course), diarist Samuel Pepys and Judge Jeffreys again. The Prospect of Whitby has a number of claims to fame in East End history – some stand up to scrutiny, some wither fairly quickly. Coming up to its 500th anniversary, the former Devil’s Tavern was a meeting place for smugglers and cutpurses. It’s also the home of one of the East End’s more fanciful myths … that the first fuschia in England was sold here by a sailor on his return from the Far East.
The Barleymow, in Narrow Street, isn’t as ancient as its Wapping neighbours but is an interesting bellwether of changing times in Docklands. Once the dockmaster’s house it has been pressed back into service, providing food and drink to the new Docklanders.
In Our Mutual Friend, a novel featuring the lightermen and dockers who worked on the Thames, Charles Dickens wrote of a riverside pub called The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. Tradition has it his description was based on the Bunch of Grapes public house in Limehouse, known today as the Grapes.
‘The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building … Externally, it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water … The available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger.’
Take a break in the cosy Narrow Street pub today and you’ll see that not that much has changed in the last 150 years.
Heading east again, you’ll find that Canary Wharf is, unsurprisingly, short on historic pubs, but the Henry Addington nods at the past, being named after the Prime Minister who opened the West India Docks in 1802.
A better bet is the Gun in Coldharbour, on the eastern edge of the Isle of Dogs. This was a trysting place for Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton. It was also a traditional rest and refreshment spot for Thames lightermen waiting to dock their barges in the West India Docks.

The East End of London certainly consumes its fair share of beer – though the days when there was a pub on every street corner have gone forever.
But though you’ll find plenty of ale brewed in Burton, Germany or Holland, you’d be hard pressed to order a pint produced in Tower Hamlets itself.
It’s all a far cry from the days when the East End had a powerful reputation for making some of the best beer in the country, and was home to three big breweries turning the stuff out.
London’s name for fine ales goes back centuries, with references cropping up in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
One of the oldest East End breweries was the Black Eagle, at 91 Brick Lane.
Builder John Stott had acquired the land for development in 1660. He set to laying out the gridwork of streets which still forms Spitalfields today.
Joseph Truman sublet the land and started his brewing business, handing over to his sons, Joseph and Benjamin.
When Joseph Jr retired in 1730, the business fell to Benjamin, who made Truman the success it continued to be until the latter part of the 20th century.
The Black Eagle works became renowned for its porter, a drink not unlike modern stout.
Sampson Hanbury took over on Ben’s death in 1780, and by the time of his death in 1835, the Black Lion was producing an awesome 200,000 barrels of porter a year.
Thomas Buxton had joined the firm in 1808 and, having converted the works to steam power, took over the reins after Hanbury’s death.
The company went from strength to strength and, by 1873, Truman Hanbury and Buxton was the biggest brewer in the world.
In 1989, though, brewing ended at Brick Lane.
Less than a mile away, at 333 Whitechapel Road, stood the Albion Brewery. The first brewer, in 1808, was one John Hoffman, but things really began when Philip Blake and James Mann took over in 1819.
Robert Crossman and Thomas Paulin joined the firm in 1846, and in 1899 Mann, Crossman and Paulin introduced the first bottled brown ale in England.

The firm was folded into Watney, Combe Reid in 1959 and ceased brewing at the Albion site in 1959.
The last of the three great East End brewers did their work at the Anchor Brewery in the Mile End Road.
In 1757, Westfield and Moss shifted their brewery from Bethnal Green. The new site was much more handy for the farm carts bringing in barley and hops from Essex and Kent.
Nine years later, John Charrington bought a third of the company, taking over completely in 1783.
Charrington was an all-powerful figure in London brewing at this time, being Master of the Brewers’ Company in 1785.
The firm stayed in the family, passing down through his son Nicholas, then grandsons Charles and Frederick.
The Charringtons were nothing if not traditionalists. Though they installed a revolutionary new steam engine in 1828, they didn’t use electricity until 1927.
And until 1946, the old dray horses could still be seen hauling wagons, laden with kegs, to pubs around the East End.
In 1967, Charrington amalgamated to become Bass Charrington, and the brewery shut for business in 1975.
Now East End drinkers quaff fizzy lagers, with foreign names, made on licence in the Midlands. The traditional porters and brown ales are a thing of the past, as is the label “Brewed in Tower Hamlets”.

IT is a familiar landmark to East Enders driving back from Essex, and anyone taking the M11 up to Stansted will have passed over it. But where did the Charlie Brown’s roundabout, one of London’s busiest intersections, get its unusual name?
The roundabout was
certainly not christened after the hero of the Peanuts
cartoon, but after a larger-than-life Limehouse man, who was just as famous in the 19th century as Snoopy’s master was 100 years later. Yet how did the bland and featureless junction come to be connected with one of the East End’s most colourful characters?
The story begins in the 1890s when Charlie Brown, a former boxer, took over the ownership of the Railway Tavern.
The Limehouse pub stood on the corner of Garford Street and the East India Dock Road and it was a popular watering hole for the sailors and dockers who made up most of Limehouse’s
population at the time.
Even among his noisy and outspoken clientele – many of whom were colourful characters with tales to tell – Charlie managed to stand out.
In fact, he was such a loud and extrovert landlord that he managed to stamp his
personality on the pub itself.
As Charlie’s reputation grew, so did the contents of the pub. Sailors would return from their travels with mementoes from every corner of the globe and bring them back to a delighted guv’nor, who would hang them on the wall of the tavern.
And as the collection grew, its fame spread throughout the capital. People would make the trip down to infamous Limehouse, which in the early 1900s was synonymous with Chinatown, white slaving and opium dens, just to view his map of the world.
In June 1932 Charlie Brown died and the ‘uncrowned king of Limehouse’ was laid in state in the pub that had been his palace.

His funeral procession was fit for a king too as 16,000
people went to Bow Cemetery to say goodbye to Charlie.
Charlie Brown’s legacy was a lucrative one, and both his children ran pubs. His
daughter Esther kept the
existing hostelry, while Charlie Brown Jr was the landlord of the Blue Posts, directly
opposite the Railway Hotel.
Both of them erected signs saying that their pubs were the genuine Charlie Brown’s.
In 1938 Charlie Jr gave up on the East End to move to leafier Woodford, taking the name with him of course. The new Charlie Brown’s lay at the end of the Southend to London road which was to become the A127.
But in 1972 the road that had given the pub its reason for being also became the cause of its demise, when the road
intersection was extended and the pub was demolished.
Young Charlie had salvaged many of the famous
mementoes from his dad’s pub, and legend has it they passed on to the Greyhound pub in Harlow, though there is no trace of them today.
By a weird coincidence, it was transport that created and destroyed the original Charlie Brown’s too. The Railway Hotel had been built to serve the old London and Blackwall Railway in the 1800s.
Despite the rebirth of the line, when the Docklands Light Railway was built in 1989,
the Railway Tavern stood
in the way of the Commercial Road extension and so was demolished.
Today, all that remains of the world-famous character, three pubs and a confusion of names is a traffic blackspot on the fringes of London.

He gave his name to one of the most famous, or infamous, pubs in Britain, and is now a byword for the East End, even for people who have never been here. But who exactly was the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green?
The story itself is shrouded in legend, and set in a Bethnal Green vastly different from the chaotic and overcrowded slum it became in the 19th century.
Bethnal Green is first mentioned in an Eighth Century deed. One Mathilda le Vayre of Stepney is listed as having a home in ‘Blithehall’, and making a grant of the house’s courtyard.
By the Middle Ages, however, Bethnal Green was rather isolated from London, a quiet little village and rather grand. There were manor houses and mansions in the surrounding countryside and cottages cluster- ed around the green itself.
In the 1200s, one of those manor houses belonged to Simon de Montford – the young lord who is today remembered by Montford House, a red-brick block of flats on the north side of Victoria Park Square.
His story, and how he went from landed gentry to poor beggar, became hugely popular in early Tudor times, and was given a new lease of life by Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which was published in 1765.
Simon was a soldier in the service of the king, and fought at the Battle of Evesham, in the West Country, in 1265. According to the legend, he fell at the battle and was found wandering, blinded, by a nobleman’s daughter. She nursed the wounded soldier back to health, they fell in love and were married.
In time a daughter arrived, but although Besse was beautiful she couldn’t find a husband – the problem being her father. Besse was courted by four suitors; a rich gentleman, a knight, a London merchant and the son of an innkeeper.
Most of them withdrew their suit when they met Montford to ask for the old soldier’s consent to the marriage.
Montford’s reduced circum-stances were related through a popular song of the time:
“My father, shee said, is soone to be seene
The siely, blind beggar of Bednall-green,
That daylye sits begging for charitie,
He is the good father of pretty Besse.
Hie makrs and his tokens are knowen very well;
He alwayes is led with a dogg and a bell;
A seely old man, God knoweth, is he,
Yet he is the father of pretty Besse.”

In a predictably medieval twist, the courtly knight was the only man who could see past the seeming lack of a decent dowry to the woman he loved.
He received his reward, as the couple received a dowry of £3,000, plus £100 for Besse’s wedding dress. The benefactor? Grandfather Henry, who was still a rich man.
The legend persisted. Samuel Pepys visited fashionable Bethnal Green to stay with his friend, Sir William Ryder; Ryder’s house occupied the very same spot as the Montford mansion. The great diarist records the occasion on June 26, 1663:
“By coach to Bednall-green, to Sir W Ryder’s to dinner. A fine merry walk with the ladies alone after dinner in the garden; the greatest quantity of strawberries I ever saw, and good. This very house was built by the Blind Beggar of Bednall-green, so much talked of and sang in ballads.”
By 1690, the Bethnal Green beadle bore the badge of the Blind Beggar on his ceremonial staff. And in the 18th century every pub in the area bore the image of the beggar on their signs. Even Kirby’s Castle, a lunatic asylum, was dubbed the Blind Beggar’s House in 1727.
Kirby’s Castle was demolished to make way for post-War redevelopment, Montford’s House is buried in mystery, and today only one pub bears the sign of the Blind Beggar.
But Besse is remembered in Besse Street, the mayor bears an image of Simon and Besse on the borough’s ceremonial badge and, most famous of all, in 1966, the Kray twins and the unfortunate George Cornell sealed the Blind Beggar in the nation’s folklore forever.
With thanks to London’s East End: Life and Traditions, by Jane Cox, Phoenix Illustrated, ISBN 1-85799-956-8, £9.99.

Daniel Farson’s fame in the East End is, these days, largely down to his tenure of the Waterman’s Arms on the Isle of Dogs. The photographer and TV documentary maker was host to a shambolic though entertaining couple of years in the early 1960s, when the former Newcastle Arms became packed every night and celebs – Lord Snowdon, Tony Bennett, Clint Eastwood, Shirley Bassey, Groucho Marx and William Burroughs to name just a few – visited for a drink.

The venture was to end in headaches, hangovers and debt. But Farson’s life in Tower Hamlets was far more than a brief stint at the Waterman’s. He had arrived in Limehouse in the late 1950s, driven from the West End by the impossibility of finding somewhere affordable to live, and to the East by the possibilities of finding a house by the hustle and bustle of the river.

He found it in Narrow Street. A flat was being converted above a barge repair yard, part of the premises of barge owners, the Woodward Fishers. Farson moved in and began roaming Docklands with his camera, documenting a waterside that has, in the last few decades, disappeared completely. And as he did so he started to uncover the history of the East End. He discovered that his house was Elizabethan, and that it had once been a pub called the Waterman’s Arms. It was a name he was to co-opt for his business venture a few years later.

But it is his photographs that tell the true story of the East End in the 1960s*. When he moved there it was as unusual as emigrating – his mother and friends certainly didn’t approve – and it was before the invention of ‘Docklands’ made Tower Hamlets a popular and pricey domicile for incomers. Though he was a curiosity at first, his evident love of the area sound made him friends – and that made it possible for him to get the uninhibited and intimate photographs of normal East Enders going about their work, travelling on the river, and most of all drinking in the pub.

Farson loved a drink, as did his subjects. But he managed to keep a steady hand and had a remarkable knack for getting right into his subject’s face – catching a mood or a moment, sometimes with the subject unaware of his presence, often posing for impromptu portraits.

There are snaps from the making of Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (Farson had a small role as a navel officer, which was unceremoniously dumped on the cutting room floor by his friend Littlewood. There are striking black-and-white images from Petticoat Lane, where the stall holders and punters are far more colourful and interesting than anything on the stalls themselves.

And there are the drinking scenes. Of course it’s far easier to make subjects forget the camera when there is plenty of drink inside them, and these are largely pictures of East Enders having a laugh. Music figures large too. Part of Farson’s grand plan for the Waterman’s Arms was to give a boost to the great East End tradition of singing in pubs – the roots of that other cockney invitation the music hall. And in its brief life, the Waterman’s stage hosted local talent, such as the man who sang Mule Train, banging his head with a tin tray in time to the music; a docker who impersonated Frankenstein’s monster; a cabbie who sang Jolson; and a girl in glasses known as the ‘white mouse’ who sang so off-key she was greeted with cheers whenever she took the stage. The laughter in the pub crowd comes across in every picture.

A photo of Shirley Bassey on stage gives just a taste of artists who joined in. George Melly, Ida Barr, Annie Ross and, on memorable occasion, Judy Garland, all sang at the Waterman’s Arms.
*Limehouse Days – A personal experience of the East End, by Daniel Farson, published by Michael Joseph ISBN 0718132564