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An interesting little book wings its way to us for review this week, in Paul Talling’s ‘Derelict London’. We become used to new towers of glass and steel soaring above the East End, while scarcely a day seems to go by without earth being broken on a new development of luxury flats. But what about the bits in between, the buildings that get forgotten.

For years now, Paul Talling has been photographing ‘Derelict London’ on his website of the same name. What he finds isn’t the picturesque London of the guidebooks - though the buildings are often very beautiful if sadly decayed. Now Derelict London has gone into print and, sadly perhaps, the East End has more than its share of entries.

There are houses, flats, docks, factories and shops. Pubs and cafes rub shoulders with public baths and cinemas, schools, hospitals and the odd fire station. There are boats and trains and the grand Victorian cemeteries of London.

Some of the structures are hidden and easy to miss though. A pillbox in Bow, next to the River Lea, is one memento of World War II. The Lea itself is, of course, as a mystery to many East Enders - just part of the labyrinth of waterways that snakes around the eastern edge of the borough. Bow Creek too is a mess of derelict factories. The Pura vegetable oil works is captured in the book, but is now gone. Sitting on the fringes of the Olympic site, the area is to go under concrete with the building of 2500 new homes. And Pudding Mill River, one of the Bow Backs, is a sad sight, chockful of old car tyres. It is though a habitat for swans, pike, eel and the black redstart, one of Britain’s rarest birds.

Other buildings have gone through changes before eventually becoming redundant. The VIP Garage in Limehouse was originally built in 1869 as a sailmaker and ship chandler’s warehouse. From 1889 it was the home to Caird & Rayner, who built boilers for Royal Navy ships, before ending its days as a garage. An attractive building, with cast iron window frames and double loading doors, it will nonetheless be demolished to make way for flats.

And some buildings are failed ventures in the last great wave of East End regeneration. Tobacco Dock is a beautiful brick building with fine ironwork, built in 1812 to store tobacco coming off the ships in Wapping. The moribund building was converted into a shopping centre but never took off and today stands eerily empty. Outside, meanwhile, are two defunct red telephone boxes. Removed by BT, then brought out of mothballs, and finally killed off by the ubiquitous mobile phone. A public toilet in Poplar is another reminder of a utility that once seemed to be everywhere … but now is very hard to find!

The docks, canals and rivers of the East End, which played such a vital role in trade and manufacturing, appear over and over again. There is the Chisenhale Works in Bow, built by Morris Cohen in 1943 to produce parts for Spitfire and Mosquito aircraft. There is the Tate Institute in Silvertown, founded by Sir Henry Tate to allow the workers in his sugar factory to enjoy some leisure and self improvement time.

Pubs are closing all over the country of course, but there’s still something plaintive about a blacked-out London boozer, especially when it’s a building as fine as The Crown and Shuttle in Shoreditch. Brick Lane’s last pub, the Seven Stars, is now boarded up too, perhaps a casualty of the changing population of the area. And the marvellously named Flying Scud now stands empty, the ubiquitous flyposters papering every available surface.

You can’t help but mourn the passing of certain buildings. Couldn’t Poplar well do with a public baths … Poplar Baths has stood empty for 23 years now.

Sometimes the buildings are saved, though often only a facade remains. The result can be seamless though occasionally it can be bizarre, as in the Providence Row Refuge and Convent in Spitalfields. A swift double take of the Victorian facade reveals new, yellow brick offices lurking behind the empty window frames. And the irony of the regeneration of Tower House, one of the original Rowton House hostels built to provide decent accommodation for working men, is striking. The derelict building is accommodation for London workers again, though this time luxury flats at hundreds of pounds a week.

Just a taster. Paul Talling has hundreds more on his website, and from the rest of London too, with new photos being added all the time. Check it out at www.derelictlondon.com.

In the late 1500s, the Isle of Dogs was a marshy wasteland, rather given to flooding and more commonly known as ‘Stepney Marsh’. But in 1597 the name gained infamy, as the title of an early play by Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe. So scandalous was the content that the play was immediately banned and Jonson and his actors imprisoned. But what could have been so terrible about words on a stage that the whole force of the state had to suppress them?

Jonson, born in London in 1572, was one of the great writers of the English Renaissance, and one of England’s greatest dramatists and poets. He was also a contemporary of William Shakespeare, being one of the coterie of writers who would gather, drink and talk in the Mermaid Tavern, among them Ford, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, Dekker, Chapman and Marston. Like most of them, including Shakespeare, he was an actor first (if not a very successful one). He had been apprenticed as a bricklayer in his Westminster youth, and became a soldier in the Netherlands, by his own account killing an opponent in single combat. Jonson had far more life experience than many of the young playwrights, he was also ferociously well read though not universally liked - colleagues and opponents found him arrogant and prickly, and he was notoriously quick to take offence. Indeed his plays, political satires and comedies, were peopled with two-timers, financial tricksters, and had Byzantine plots in which Jonson’s private scores were settled.

His plays were often set in London (though like Shakespeare he would occasionally stray abroad) and he wasn’t frightened about putting the boot into the foibles of his fellows. And his targets were often all too recognisable. In ‘Isle of Dogs’ he may have struck too close to home. The first theatre in London had only been established 20 years before, and a nervous Government saw Shoreditch playhouses The Theatre and The Curtain, and Bankside’s Globe as dangerous places of mockery and dissent … they were watching the activities of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest very carefully.

So, in 1597, ‘Isle of Dogs’ came to the attention of RIchard Topcliffe. Topcliffe was an extraordinarily unpleasant character during this bloody and turbulent period of English history. Trained as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn he led a peaceful life into his early forties, managing his estates in Yorkshire. But promoted to the Privy Council in the 1570s, he launched enthusiatically into his role of pursuing ‘Recusants’. These were those who refused to accept the primacy of the state religion, the Church of England. That meant Catholics largely, who lived under constant suspicion (not entirely unfounded) that they were plotting to overthrow England’s Protestant Crown and Government. Topcliffe nursed a fanatical loathing of Catholics and their Church. So fond was Topcliffe of torturing his suspects that he had a private torture chamber built in his home in London. He also personally supervised the hanging, drawing and quartering of victims, and was known to have raped one of his prisoners, Anne Bellamy.

Little wonder that Jonson and Nashe were horrified to find themselves on the wrong side of the psychopathic and perverted Topcliffe. Nashe already had plenty of previous with the authorities. He was a friend of Kit Marlowe, wrote pornographic poems and his works freely poured petrol on the religio-political rows of the day. The duo’s new work, a satirical comedy, was first performed by Pembroke’s Men at the Swan Theatre in Bankside in July or August of 1597. It was immediately reported to the authorities as ‘a lewd play full of slanderous matter’, and the location of the Isle of Dogs, opposite the Greenwich palace where the Privy Council sat (the Cabinet of its day), may have been a deliberate provocation. Contemporaries suggest that the Queen and her court was being satirised. Among the many legends surrounding the name of the peninsula is that the Isle of Dogs had been King Edward III’s kennels - perhaps the pair were drawing a parallel between the sycophantic courtiers and a pack of kept dogs. Certainly Nashed had already used the metaphor for his ‘Summer’s Last Will’: “Here’s a coyle about dogges without wit. If I had thought the ship of fooles would have stayed to take in fresh water at the Ile of dogges I would have furnished it with a whole kennel of collections to the purpose.”

Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury, chief spy for the Queen, and member of the Privy Council, acted swiftly. Jonson was sent to Marshalsea gaol in Southwark, along with actors Gabriel Spencer and Robert Shaa. Nashe fled home to Yarmouth, writing later that he had given birth to a monster and ‘It was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it.’ The nervous playwright tried to distance himself from the piece, claiming he had written mere fragments.

Job done, the authorities let the matter drop, and Jonson was out of jail in weeks. He would go on to write his great satirical comedies in the early years of the 17th century, with ‘Volpone’, ‘The Alchemist’, ‘Bartholomew Fair’ and a clutch more, as well as some of the finest poetry in the English language. Nowhere near as prolific as Shakespeare he was, during the 1600s, arguably more influential on English drama. If Jonson’s career was only beginning with ‘Isle of Dogs’, the young Nashe’s was already drawing to a close. Though he had written numerous poems and 11 plays in the decade leading up to ‘Isle of Dogs’, he would produce only one piece of work after it. The year and circumstances of his death are a mystery - though he was certainly dead by 1601. He was just 34 and his most famous work is lost forever.

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

If your idea of Christ-mas is mince pies, sleigh- bells in the snow, and a family feast round a roaring fire, then you’re dreaming of a Dickensian Christmas.
For all the elements of what we now think of a traditional Old English Yuletide were largely the invention of that greatest of English writers, Charles Dickens, in his 1847 masterpiece A Christmas Carol.
Ebenezer Scrooge huddles alone and miserable, hiding as a solitary youngster “gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold” sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen through the old miser’s keyhole.
Throw in that other great Christmas invention of the Victorian era, the Christmas tree – imported from Germany by Prince Albert – and you have all the elements of an English festive season.
Dickens, of course, took as his greatest source of research the people and places of London. And for Dickens, that meant the colourful characters and stories, cheerful despite the poverty and adversity they grew up in, who lived in the East End he visited as a child.
His first encounter with “this most colourful corner of the city” came with his childhood visits to his godfather, Christopher Huffam, who lived in Church Row, which became Newell Street, in Limehouse.
And Dickens’ childhood provided plenty of material for his later books such as Oliver Twist, with its hero cast out of a life of comfort and love into a horrific Thieves’ Kitchen.
In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens’ hapless father John lost his job as a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. He was swiftly imprisoned for debt, joined in Marshalsea Prison by his wife and children.
With the exception of Charles that is. He was put to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory. It only lasted a week, but the experience scarred him for life.
And when he drew on it for Oliver Twist he also drew on his knowledge of the East End, placing the home of the evil Bill Sykes in Bethnal Green.
In 1829 Dickens became a reporter, and would spend the rest of his days dividing his time between a prodigious output of journalism, fiction and punishing lecture tours.

He continued to draw on his knowledge of the East End. Nicholas Nickleby’s family live in “a little cottage at Bow” – an interesting historical snap of 19th Century rural Bow, before the new estates snaked out across the farmland from Bethnal Green and swallowed up the old village.
David Copperfield has his first sight of London and stays at an Aldgate Inn. Our Mutual Friend pulls heavily on Limehouse as the home of many of the characters. And the Grapes pub, which stands in Narrow Street today, was used by Dickens as the model for The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters tavern.
For his journalism too, Dickens returned again and again – journeys in Mile End, Wapping and Limehouse are detailed in The Uncommercial Traveller.
Dickens punishing workload took its toll and after a series of minor strokes he suffered a fatal attack, on June 8, 1870, after a full day’s work on The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
The unfinished last novel, researched by the author in visits to the opium dens of Shadwell, appeared posthumously that September.
Dickens was buried in Westminster Abbey but his memorials were all around his beloved East End.
The hospital in Glamis Road, Shadwell, was financed by public contributions after Dickens’ heartrending picture of an East End in the throes of a cholera epidemic appeared in McMillan’s Magazine.
Today he is remembered by Charles Dickens House, Mans-ford Street, E2. But for most of us, his legacy is a Christmas of carol singers tramping through the snow, horsedrawn carriages racing cross-country, and a family exchanging gifts around a roaring fire.

What does the East End mean to you? Is it communal bath houses and stewed eel sellers proffering their wares on street corners? Doing a moonlight flit to avoid the rent-collecting landlord, or bread and jam for tea?
Or is it the steel and glass towers of Canary Wharf and a Docklands of upmarket houses rather than docks? Or a profusion of curry houses, tower blocks and council estates?
And where does your East End finish? Is it the Tower Hamlets area covered by East End Life or do you include Hackney and Stratford in your map?
Gilda O’Neill’s new book, My East End: A History of Cockney London, asks as many questions as it poses answers.
Not merely a sentimental skip through the Cockney cliches, it questions how much of the East End has
disappeared with the dispersal of its people to Canada, New Zealand… and Essex, and how much those people still carry the East End within them.
Gilda O’Neill is a successful novelist, with seven titles in print, but she is as well known as a historian – born and bred in Bethnal Green and the East End is her
subject.
The strength of her previous two works of non-fiction: Pull No More Bines: An Oral History of Women Hop Pickers and A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having Fun, lay in the eloquent
first-person testimonies O’Neill faithfully collected and transcribed.
My East End is O’Neill’s most ambitious history yet. She traces the history of the area from its earliest times - “liquid history, as it begins with the River Thames”, through its growth as the world’s biggest port in the chapter “Feeding the Imperial Powerhouse”, and the collapse of Tower Hamlets into the hellish Victorian slums detailed by William Booth’s In Darkest England.
There is plenty of colour too, though often of a grim and morbid hue. The East End boasted the first person to be murdered on a British train. Thomas Briggs, taking a trip on the new Fenchurch Street line on July 6, 1864, had the misfortune to encounter his nemesis, Franz Muller, between Bow and Hackney Wick.

It’s all fascinating stuff, irresistibly written and painstakingly researched - the bibliography alone stretches to three pages, enough to keep East End history fans in reading for the rest of their days. But where My East End really kicks in is with the first-person testimonies, largely limited, naturally enough, to the 20th century.
There are tales of the pleasures and pains of knowing your neighbours and living in each others pockets. “People didn’t shut their front doors because it was usually shared accommodation, so you had to leave it open. But the front door was also left open because your neighbour would say, ‘I’ll come round and have a cup of tea with you at four o’ clock.’ I think if you didn’t ask your neighbours for help, they used to think you were being standoffish.”
Living so close-knit could cause problems. “Some people, to save the expense of the sweep, would set fire to the chimney, a dangerous thing to do, and the whole street would be covered in soot and the washing ruined.” Feuds were always going off as “each street had its noisy family, its dirty one”.
That was The Golden Age, as the chapter title would have it. O’Neill finishes with a look at the Post War, Post Imperial, Post-industrial, Postmodern periods which were worrying times for east London. Two years after the government was trumpeting the new Docklands as “the greatest opportunity for the reconstruction of London since the Great Fire of 1666”, the Financial Times of 31 July 1978 was charting the area’s collapse into dereliction.
But what comes across in O’Neill’s vox pops of ordinary people is hope, pride, humour and a relish in the diversity of the East End.
And while that still burns,
so does hope in the East End’s future.

My East End: A History of Cockney London, Gilda O’Neill, Viking Penguin, £16.99.

Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bengal, the son of an Indian government official. He was educated at a Sussex prep school and then Eton. And his pre-ordained path in life was to follow his family’s traditional steps into the colonial civil service or the Church of England.
But Blair was to carve out quite a different career – founding a reputation as one of the century’s greatest writers, George Orwell, who gained inspiration for much of his writing by weeks spent in a Poplar dosshouse.
Blair left Eton in 1921 and, instead of taking up a place at Oxford or Cambridge, decided to return to the sub-continent, joining the Imperial Indian Police. But after seven years stationed in Burma, he was growing restless. He found the climate unbearable, the health problems that were to dog the rest of his life had begun, and – most of all – he was starting to have severe misgivings about British rule in India.
His stirring political sense combined with his urge to write. And in 1928 he resigned his post, returning to Europe with the idea of writing about the urban poor.
Down and out
The next three years of his life were spent among the down-and-outs, first of Paris, and then with a return to London. Landing at Tilbury, the almost penniless Blair pawned his suit and made his way to a lodging house in Pennyfields, Poplar.
It was an eye-opener for the young writer: “Two or three of the lodgers were old age pensioners. Till meeting them I had never realised there are people in England who live on nothing but the old age pension of ten shillings [50p] a week.”
Blair spent much of his time among the down-and-outs compiling material for this journalism, talking to his fellow dossers, and killing time in the East End street.
He wrote: “All day I loafed in the streets, east as far as Wapping, west as far as Whitechapel. It was queer after Paris; everything was so much cleaner and quieter and drearier. One missed the scream of the trams and the noisy, festering life of the back streets.”
The people of the East End looked different too. “The crowds were better dressed and the faces comelier and milder and more alike, without that fierce individuality and malice of the French. There was less drunkenness, and less dirt, and less quarrelling and more idling. Knots of men stood at the corners, slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two slices [of bread and marge] that the Londoner swallows every two hours.”

As an aspiring novelist should, Blair spent most of his time just watching. “The East End women are pretty (it is the mixture of blood, perhaps), and Limehouse was sprinkled with Orientals – Chinamen, Chittagonian Lascars, Dravidians selling silk scarves, even a few Sikhs.”
And he saw the men of God making their appeals on every street corner, the Salvation Army in East India Dock Road, and the Mormons at Tower Hill. In Middlesex Street he watched in amazement as a parent berated her ungrateful child. “Enjoy yourself!” yelled the mother. “What yer think I brought yer out ‘ere for and bought y’a trumpet an’ all? You little bastard, you shall enjoy yerself!”
Poor health
By 1932, Blair had had enough of the streetlife. His health wasn’t good, and he took a job as a schoolteacher. A year later, his tramping diaries were published by Victor Gollancz as Down and Out in Paris and London. Fearing that their failure would damage his literary ambitions, the books came out under the pseudonym George Orwell.
But they were a huge success, and the pen name stuck. Over the next 18 years, Orwell’s reputation grew with novels like Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and a return to the horrors of poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier. Signing up to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell collected the material for Homage to Catalonia.
He finally achieved huge success with the anti-totalitarian fable Animal Farm, in 1945, and retired to Jura in Scotland to pursue writing full time.
His most memorable work was to be his last though. In 1949, he explored further the horrors of totalitarian government with the novel 1984. But his health was failing. His weak lungs, damaged by his years of rough living in Paris and the East End, failed on 21 January 1950, and Orwell died of complications arising from chronic tuberculosis. He was buried in the village churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.

EARLY on Sunday September 2 1666, the wholesale destr-uction of London began.
A fire started in the house of Thomas Farynor, the king’s baker, in Pudding Lane.
Sparks from the burning bakehouse fell on hay and fodder in the yard of the Star Inn in Fish Street Hill and, just six hours later at 8am, fire was halfway across London Bridge.
The wooden buildings, stretching across the streets so their roofs almost touched, made ideal tinder for the fire.
Five days later an area measuring one-and-a-half miles by half a mile lay in ashes, 87 churches were razed along with 13,200 homes. The city that Shakespeare had known had gone for ever.
But little of this would be known today were it not for the work of a Whitechapel woman’s son, and for the safekeeping of the world’s most famous diary in Bethnal Green at the height of the blaze.
Samuel Pepys had been born in Fleet Street in 1633, the son of tailor John and Margaret, the sister of a Whitechapel butcher.
During the English Civil War, the young Samuel was sent to the Huntingdon countryside, much as East End kids were evacuated centuries later. But he returned to London to study at St Paul’s School.
Returning from Magdalene College, Cambridge, he entered the service of Edward Mountagu as his secretary and agent.

Pepys was also building a career in naval administration, winning government posts and addressing the Commons on maritime matters.
The year he started his diary, 1660, was a turbulent year. Charles II returned to the throne following Oliver Cromwell’s death two years earlier, and our knowledge of Restoration Period England is largely down to Pepys.
But it was his recording of the Great Fire that provides our most vivid image of the history of the time. He was one of the first on the scene and quickly hurried to Whitehall, returning with a royal warrant to allow houses to be demolished to create a fire break – Lord Mayor Bludworth had dithered, frightened that he would be held responsible for rebuilding costs.
As the fire spread, Pepys journeyed to Bethnall House in Bethnal Green, the home of his friend Sir William Ryder, and deposited his diary for safe-keeping.
The diaries ended in 1669, the year his wife Elizabeth died of a fever, and are only a brief snapshot of a long and successful career. Pepys went on to have two turns as Master of Trinity House in Stepney, a job as Secretary to the Admiralty, and he also became President of the Royal Society in 1684 and Member of Parliament for Harwich a year later.
But by 1669, although only 36, the terrible headaches brought on by his writing and re-reading made Pepys fear he was going blind, and he closed the book forever.
They might have been lost for good too, for Pepys wrote in an arcane code, perhaps fearful of political opponents.
But in 1825 the code was finally cracked, although it was not until 1970 that the entire diaries were published.
Pepys died on May 26 1703, aged 70, leaving no children. His only heir was his diaries.

These days you’d be hard-pushed to be a hermit in Bethnal Green. But 300 years ago, when it was a sleepy hamlet, buried in the countryside a couple of miles east of the London wall, it was a different matter.
For the East End was home to a recluse who became an inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter, whose strange tale brought together Alice in Wonderland and Oliver Crom-well, religion and astrology and medicine and fortune telling.
Roger Crab was originally a Buckinghamshire man and a soldier. He enlisted in the English army, what was to become the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell, in 1642.
England was in a state of turmoil, embroiled in the series of battles running from 1639 to 1660 which would become collectively known as the English Civil War.
The very hands-on rule of Stuart king Charles I was infuriating Parliament, as was his habit of levying direct taxation without the permission of the Commons.
Crab signed up in 1642, just as Parliament and Charles had fallen out yet again, this time over who should raise an army to put down the Irish rebellion.
The King, affronted at the challenge to his authority, tried to marshal the provinces against a London heavily favouring the Roundheads. He failed, and it was Cromwell who raised the force to viciously suppress the Irish.
Terrifying giant
Crab was a good soldier. Stand- ing a full 6ft 7in – a giant by today’s standards, let alone those of the 17th century – he terrified the men he fought against.
Over the next few years, he travelled with the Roundheads as they viciously crushed revolts in Ireland and Scotland and, for the first time, England totally dominated the British Isles.
But the next challenge was to come from within England. There were constant battles between Royalist and Republican forces, especially following the execution of King Charles in 1649.
The battles of Edgehill, Naseby, Newbury, Marston Moor and the rest peppered the 1640s. But it was probably in the course of the battle for Colchester in 1648 that Crab received the knock that was to change his life forever.

The soldier escaped with his life but was badly stunned by a blow on the head from a Royalist soldier. The injury led to early discharge from the army and he returned to his home town of Chesham, where he set up in business as a hatter.
He was a success but the blow on the head was affecting Crab. He sold the business and gave his money to the poor, opting for a solitary life, living in a tree near Uxbridge.
The formerly strait-laced puritan began to dabble in astrology and ‘physic’ or natural medicine. His philosophy was rather confused but had its roots in a rejection of conventional religion. The former man of war became a pacifist.
He now moved to the secluded village of Bethnal Green, where he subsisted on three farthings a week, eating grass, mallow and dock leaves.
Crab now developed a talent for telling the future. Ironically for a former Roundhead, one of his visions was that the monarchy would be restored and, in 1660, the son of the executed Charles took the throne as Charles II.
And the diet of grass did the old man’s health no harm. He lived to the ripe age of 79, dying in 1680. He is remembered on his tomb in Stepney’s St Dunstan’s churchyard with the following epitaph.
“Through good and ill reports he past, oft censured, yet approved at last … a friend to everything that’s good.”
And he was remembered again, 200 years later, when Lewis Carroll based his Mad Hatter character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Crab.

Whatever you think of Shoreditch, you’re unlikely to consider it the root of London’s Theatreland. Yet, back in 1576, it was home to the capital’s first playhouse.
Throughout the Middle Ages, plays became hugely popular. But the actors, minstrels, jugglers and the like didn’t perform inside. Instead, troupes would travel from town to town, taking the entertainment to a new audience every day.
They would perform religious mystery plays on church steps, the more ribald productions in inns and taverns.
But the growing popularity of the more formal, many-act plays which were now being produced by the likes of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson meant that cash could be spent on a permanent playhouse.
In 1576, the great tragic actor Richard Burbage, who was running his Lord Chamberlain’s theatre company out of Shoreditch, raised the cash to build the capital’s first proper theatre.
The Theatre, as it was imaginatively dubbed, lay at the corner of New Inn Yard and what is now Great Eastern Street and it was a huge success.
William Shakespeare joined the company when he arrived in London in 1592 and, in the six years following, Shoreditch saw debuts of the Bard’s earliest work – Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet and many more.
Globe timbers
The Theatre was demolished in 1598, its timbers taken to construct the world-famous Globe Theatre at Bankside, which was uncovered again in the 1990s.
But Shoreditch’s theatrical story was just beginning. By now Burbage’s Curtain Theatre was doing a roaring trade at Holywell Lane, opposite the west end of Bethnal Green Road.
Shoreditch itself had started life as a religious, rather than a theatrical, hamlet. Like many villages it was born at the crossing of two Roman roads – in this case Kingsland Road and Old Street.

First mentioned in 1148 as Scoredich, it was the site of the new St Leonard’s Church in the 12th century, and in 1152 the Augustinian priory of Holywell.
But by the late 1500s, Holywell priory was gone and the theatre was built on its redundant grounds. Colourful characters began to replace the holy men who had sought sanctuary from the City.
Many of the players are buried in St Leonard’s churchyard. And in 1598, Ben Jonson fought a duel with Gabriel Spencer in Hoxton Fields, killing him. Spencer’s body lies in the churchyard in Shore-ditch High Street, alongside that of Burbage, and Henry VIII’s jester, Will Sommers.
Around the 1680s, Shore-ditch changed again. Most of the actors had migrated west and it became the focus for charitable works, as men made rich by the City looked to bequeath their wealth.
Geffrye Museum
In 1695, Robert Aske endowed the Haberdashers almshouses and a school in Pitfield Street. Then in 1715, London mayor Robert Geffrye built the Ironmongers almshouses in Kingsland Road – now they house the Geffrye Museum.
By the 1850s, as London’s population boomed, Shore-ditch had a population of more than 100,000. Today it’s the slightly scruffy north-west corner of the East End.
But wander round St Leonard’s churchyard and you can almost see the ghosts of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest of London’s first theatre community.

As we approach a new century, few of us today have any links with World War I. The old soldiers at the Cen-otaph get fewer every year, and we are left with images of trench-bound madness and sadness at the millions of young lives wasted.
But there is a legacy peculiar to the First World War – that of a group of young men who combined vivid, first-hand accounts of the horror with a rare poetic skill. Today, the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke is widely read. But there was one who could have been the greatest of all.
The irony was that the war, having pulled the best work out of Isaac Rosenberg, would snuff out his life before he had the chance to enjoy the certain fame that awaited him.
Unlike the rest of the war poets, Rosenberg died a private. The others were officers, children of comfortable, middle-class English homes. Isaac’s story was very different.
Rosenberg’s family had fled Lithuania at the end of the 19th century, settling first in Bristol, where Isaac was born in 1890, then quickly moving on to the East End of London, lodging at 47 Cable Street.
He was a pupil at St Paul’s School, in Wellclose Square, Whitechapel, moving to Baker Street School in 1900, when
the family moved to Stepney’s Jubilee Street.
Rosenberg was already showing a precocious talent
for drawing and painting – Mr Usherwood, the headmaster at Baker Street, fixed up extra art classes for the lad at Stepney Green Art School. He was also showing skills at verse, composing poetry from the age of 14. His guiding light was Morely Dainow, the librarian at Whitechapel Library, who would recommend books to Isaac, encouraging him and firing his imagination.

But unlike Owen and company, there was no public school and university in which to hone his skills – money had to be made. At 14, Isaac left school to take up an engraving apprenticeship at Carl Hent-schel’s firm in Fleet Street
It may have been a job, but the skills learned at Hentchel’s and further developed at evening classes at Birkbeck College refined his drawing skills. In his time at Birkbeck he won prizes for his nude studies in pencil and then in oils.
Rosenberg’s life was running on parallel lines to that of
fellow artist Mark Gertler – another artistic genius who blossomed from a poor, Jewish, East End family. And in 1911, just like Gertler, Rosenberg finally managed to study art full time, with a scholarship at the coveted Slade School.
Also like Gertler, he suffered ill health throughout his life. In Rosenberg’s case, lung problems brought on by the London smog led him to a rest cure first at Bournemouth, then in the healthy dry heat of South Africa.
In 1914, Rosenberg was recovering at his sister’s home in Cape Town when he heard the news that war had broken out in Europe.
Isaac was slowly finding
success. A commission in July that year from Sir Herbert Stanley paid him £15 for one painting – £15 being the price of a ticket from Cape Town. He could have sat the war out and concentrated on his work, but he immediately set sail for London.
Gertler’s most famous painting, ‘The Merry go Round’ was an outsider’s view of the meaningless madness of the Great War. Rosenberg would view it at first hand.
Most of the young artist’s paintings were lost overboard in a storm in Cape Town harbour. And his luck seemed no better in London, where he applied unsuccessfully for a series of rent-paying jobs.
The irony was that, while struggling to make ends meet, he was now finding renown as a poet as well as a painter.
He signed up in the army in 1915, but before going to the front he published a small volume of poems, ‘Youth’. Both
T S Eliot and Ezra Pound admired Rosenberg’s poetry. Some critics suggest that, had he survived the war, he might have rivalled those two poetic giants in reputation.
He produced some of his greatest work in the long
hours in the trenches. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and ‘Marching’ compare with the best of Owen and Sassoon.
But on April 1, 1918, Private Rosenberg, 22311, 1st King’s Own Royal Lancasters, was killed on dawn patrol, leaving the art and poetry critics to wonder what might have been.