eastlondonhistory.com

TALK about British comedy and there is a name that stands head and shoulders above the competition. The Carry On series ran for 30 years – from the gentle post-War approach of Carry On Sergeant to the ironic alternative comedy of Carry On Columbus.
The films are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank.*
And for East Enders, the films have a special resonance – Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor are just two locals who went on to star in the series, and they have been celebrated in East End History in the past. But the Cockney connection goes far deeper – for the man who penned those first few Carry Ons was a Tower Hamlets boy.
Norman Hudis was born in Stepney in 1923. He always had a sharp mind and a gift for words and, on leaving school, he landed a job as a local newspaper reporter, working on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
War came, and Norman served with the RAF in the Middle East, turning his hand to writing for Air Force News. And like so many of the entertainers who came to dominate British comedy in the ’50s – such as Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and the Goons – he sharpened his comedy pen writing for the concert parties and camp concerts organised as a tonic for the troops.
It was tougher in Civvy Street however. Back in London after the War, Norman decided to throw in journalism and try his hand as a playwright. He was certainly prolific, but not successful. However one of his works, Here is the News, got good reviews.
These caught the eye of the producers at Pinewood. At the time, south-east England had a thriving film industry, at Pinewood, Ealing and Shepperton, and the money men were always on the lookout for young talent to turn out the features needed to fill Britain’s bustling cinemas.
It was production line stuff – many of the films were destined to be ‘B’ features to the big American movies. But after two years at Shepperton, and with not one film produced, Norman was fed up, and decided to go freelance.

His years of apprenticeship paid off, and he was soon churning out successful scripts. The quality was sometimes iffy, not surprising as at one point Norman was working on three scripts at once!
Fortune took a lucky turn when he bumped into Peter Rogers in 1957. Rogers was already an established producer on the UK film scene, he went on to make more than 100 movies, and he was working on a biopic of the rock and roll singer Tommy Steele. Norman was offered the job of scripting Rock Around the World.
The film was a hit, and Norman was immediately drafted in to pen a swift follow-up, after all, no-one knew how long the singing ex-seaman’s chart career would last! But The Duke Wore Jeans was another success for the pair, this time with director Gerald Thomas on board.
Rogers and Thomas were working together on a production of RF Delderfield’s novel The Bull Boys, and called in the reliable Hudis to rewrite the book for the screen. Dumping the original title as too flat, they selected one of the final lines from the film as a name. And “Carry on Sergeant” was a massive hit.
Norman went on to pen five more Carry Ons. Carry On Nurse was the top-grossing UK film of 1959. Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising followed, one a year, each charting the battles of a crew of bunglers who come through against all the odds.
But by 1962, the team felt the formula was wearing thin. Hudis was replaced by Talbot Rothwell, who took the films in a bawdier and more farcical direction.
The Stepney writer took off for pastures newer and more lucrative. Throughout the ’60s he worked on TV and film in California, eventually moving there full time in the seventies. Episodes of CHiPs, The Wild Wild West, Marcus Welby MD, The Man From Uncle and Buck Rogers are just a few to have flowed from his typewriter.
But of all his writing, the Carry Ons remain closest to his heart. Back in London recently for the 40 Years of Carry On celebrations, he remarked that it was his core of irreverent, risque East End humour that made those comedies. Best of all, 40 years on, people are still laughing!

You may know him as the suavely evil gangland boss Victor Maitland, who torments Eddie Murphy in the 1980s smash movie Beverly Hills Cop. Or the villainous Russian General Orlov, Roger Moore’s adversary in Octopussy.
You may know him better for his own plays, drawing deep on his childhood and teenage memories of East End life, to write and produce East and West. Or maybe as the producer and director of 30-odd years of pedigree avant-garde theatre, adapting and bringing new life to the plays and books of literary heavies like Kafka, with The Trial and Metamorphosis.
Steven Berkoff is a tough talent to pin down – which is probably just how he’d want it – but his road to becoming an international movie star and successful producer and director starts back in the 1930s enclave of East End Jewish immigrants, and an endless succession of dead-end jobs.
Berkoff was born in Stepney in 1937. Berkoff’s father Abraham (Al) ran a tailor’s shop in Leman Street, from which the talented cutter would turn out lavishly-made zoot suits for the West Indians who were already settling in London.
He also catered for East End boxers who were making a name for themselves – Jewish fighters like Ted Kid Lewis and Kid Berg, both world champions.
After the war, the Berkoffs returned to the East End following an ill-fated attempt to settle in the US. Home now was two rooms and an outside loo in Anthony Street, off the Commercial Road.
With chickens in the back yard, it was a far cry from the glamour of New York, but there was plenty to entertain the young Steven.
The Troxy Cinema in Poplar was the local venue for Saturday morning films, and there was the Palaseum at the end of the road for the Sunday afternoon film.
Steven was enrolled at Raine’s Foundation in Arbour Square – a first-rate school – where he was a near-contemporary of fellow playwright Harold Pinter.
And his physical welfare was taken care of by regular dips in the lido at Victoria Park in summer, and at Betts Street Baths, off Cable Street, in the winter.

The East End was a fascinating playground, and the young Berkoff would spend hours in Petticoat Lane market, transfixed by the wares at the stamp collectors’ corner and examining the animals in the now-defunct Club Row livestock market for signs of ill-treatment.
It was a world Berkoff would dip into time and again in his later work.
After a succession of aimless jobs in the fabric and garment trades, miserable stints in West End clothes shops, and a spell working in the US Army PX’s in Germany, Berkoff studied drama in London and Paris.
He worked in rep, appearing on TV in 1960s favourites like The Avengers, before forming his own company, the London Theatre Group, in 1968.
Drawing on his East End memories, Berkoff penned his first original stage play, East, first presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975.
West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch, Acapulco, Harry’s Christmas, Lunch, Sink the Belgrano, Massage, Sturm und Drang and Brighton Beach Scumbags followed from the writer’s prolific pen.
Meanwhile, the energetic Berkoff was mounting plays and adaptations in Japan, Germany and Los Angeles – Richard II and Coriolanus for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and touring with his one-man show in Britain, the US, South Africa, Finland, Italy, Singapore and Australia.
But to many he was better known for his film portrayals of sinister heavies, revisiting the East End for his role as murder victim George Cornell in the film of The Krays.
And, at 61, the former East End boy is still busy, with his new book of short stories, Graft, now in the shops, and a run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Shakespeare’s Villains.
Graft – Tales of an Actor,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN:1 84002 040 7, £12.
Free Association:
An Autobiography,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN: 0 571 19629 6, £7.99.

“I didn’t invent Alf Garnett, I just grassed him up.”
Johnny Speight, who died last week at the age of 78, always maintained that his most famous creation was as much documentary as fiction.
“I get most of the material for Alf standing around in pubs, all I really am is a recorder,” claimed the man who made Wapping famous.
His sharp ear for East End dialogue and wit was honed as a boy in east London, and a lifetime of observation.
And if he despised the spoutings of bigoted Alf – in later years, misguided critics would criticise the show itself as racist – he realised that the best way to puncture prejudice was through the common sense and humour of his cast of cockney characters.
Speight was born in Canning Town on June 2, 1920, the son of a London docker, and left school at 14.
“I hated school,” he said. “We used to think you were lucky if you got TB because it got you off. If one of the
kids had it, we’d get him to breathe all over us, or spit in our sandwiches.”
The obstinately healthy Johnny was soon out at work in a variety of jobs, working for East End firms while practising his real love, jazz, in a succession of bands at night.
He played drums in the Syncopated Rhythm Boys, Howard Wynn-Jones and his Big Broadcast Band and Johnny Speight and his Hot Shots before war intervened.
Back in London in 1945, he returned to a succession of hated jobs – among them a spell as an insurance salesman – before he fell, almost by accident, into his true love, writing.
Johnny had become a voracious reader and was constantly coming across the witty sayings of writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw.
“They were so funny, I imagined him to be a stand-up comic, like Tommy Trinder!” he admitted.
But one day, leafing through Canning Town Library, he came across a whole shelf of books by the prolific author.
“I thought: ‘Blimey, he writes books too!’” he laughed.

He started devouring Shaw’s work.
“It was like a divine revelation,” Speight recalled. “It was as though a light had been turned on and every dark recess lit by sweet reason.”
Johnny’s reading now turned to the modern classics of Chek- hov, Ibsen and Strindberg and he wrote a succession of worthy but very dull plays on the evils of capitalism before finding his true place in literature.
He began writing for the new generation of radio comedians, most, like himself, recently returned from active service.
Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Arthur Askey, Morecambe and Wise. The list of artists who benefited from his sharp comic eye was endless.
And he began to work with Galton and Simpson, writers for the immortal Tony Hancock and creators of Steptoe and Son.
A bigot is born
But it was in 1964, with a one-off play in the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse series, that Alf Garnett was born and Speight found fame and riches.
The resultant series, Till Death Us Do Part, ran in various guises until the BBC scrapped the final series of In Sickness And In Health in 1995, bowing to complaints about Alf’s foul language
and his utterings on lesbianism and Aids.
Many of the people who watched Alf never really got the joke and neither did the BBC.
Dennis Main Wilson, producer of the first series, said: “There was something about the way the studio audience laughed at certain lines. It’s likely a large proportion of the 20 million who watched did so for the wrong reasons.”
But Johnny resolutely defended the need for Alf. After the show was cancelled, he said: “It was legislating against people’s thoughts … all debate was being stifled.
“I didn’t invent Alf, he was created by society. Unfortu-nately, the world is full of Garnetts, not just in the working classes, in the middle and upper classes too.
“If you make fun of them, people are more inclined to think about it. If you never mention it, it just goes on.”
It was a dash of East End plain-speaking and common sense the BBC would have done well to listen to.

In 1889, a strange bequest set up a ‘people’s library’ at that home of East End culture and education, the People’s Palace in Mile End.
But the story of how the people got their store of improving literature is a strange tale of infidelity, false identities and Victorian morality.
Author Wilkie Collins was born in 1824, wrote 25 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and more than 100 articles for newspapers and magazines.
One of the superstars of Victorian fiction, Collins was a close friend of Charles Dickens until his death in 1870.
Like Dickens, Collins took a keen interest in the East End, often visiting Tower Hamlets to research his books and pieces for newspapers.
Secret life
But while he was a celebrated man of letters, there was another side to his life, a side he had to keep hidden in sexually straight-laced Victorian London.
For almost 20 years, Collins shared his private life with two women – and married neither of them. And to complicate matters further he had a home with each.
In 1854, when he was still a young and unknown writer, he met Caroline Graves, a 24-year-old widow with a young daughter called Elizabeth.
It was a covert arrangement – they lived together, disguising Caroline’s status behind the term ‘housekeeper’ – but it was one which lasted for the rest of Collins’ life.
Matters were complicated further when Wilkie met Martha Rudd in the mid-1860s.
By now he was in early middle age, a famous and successful writer. She was just 20 and unmarried. But in the late 1860s she moved to London and Collins set her up in her own home. The couple had three children and this domestic set-up was to remain for the rest of Martha’s life.
But the stigma of extra-marital sex could have destroyed Collins’ career. With Martha, he assumed the character of William Dawson, barrister at law, and she became Mrs Dawson.
The children were christened Dawson, and Collins lived in constant fear of their exposure, with all the stigma of illegitimacy that that would bring. Two of his novels, No Name and The Dead Secret, deal with just that subject.

By the time Wilkie died, he was successful and wealthy. But in an age when wives did not automatically inherit their husband’s estate, his double life made things more complicated.
But Collins had planned for his death with the same precision he ran his double life. His estate was valued at £10,831, 11 shillings and threepence. Caroline and Martha received £200 each, the furniture in their respective homes, and each received an annuity of £200 a year. On Caroline’s death, the balance would go to Martha and her children.
Secret life
Sadly, and in a sinister echo of Wilkie’s best-known book The Woman In White, young Elizabeth’s unscrupulous husband, Henry Powell Bartley, made off with Caroline and Elizabeth’s half of the estate. And when Harriet died, there was nothing left for Martha.
While he lived, Wilkie’s will was a secret between himself and his lawyer. As soon as he died, the details became public property and an outraged Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s refused to sanction a monument to the great writer being erected in the cathedral.
But the city’s loss was the East End’s gain. Collins had spent his whole career trying to bring literature to working people and, fittingly, the £300 Collins had set aside for the statue, a huge sum then, went to set up the People’s Library.
Collins’ gift of literacy to the East End was probably a tribute he would have approved of. A century on, the People’s Palace is but a memory. And the library books? Their whereabouts is a mystery.

Many thanks to Paul Lewis at the Wilkie Collins Home Page www.deadline.demon. co.uk\

Antiques dealer, best-selling author, playwright, screenwriter and entrepreneur – Wolf Mankewitz, who has died aged 73, was a man of many parts.
But his twin loves – of literature and turning a profit on a deal – were forged in his childhood memories of his dad selling books from a barrow in Brick Lane.
In the 1950s and 60s, Mankewitz would gain fame and fortune as the writer of the hit musical Expresso Bongo, the best-selling novel Make Me An Offer and the science fiction thriller movie The Day The Earth Caught Fire. But as a boy, money was always hard to come by.
His parents were Russian Jews, just one couple out of the thousands of immigrants who poured into Whitechapel in the late 1800s and early 20th century, escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe.
Like many others, his dad struggled to make a living. But what he did have was industry and the thing he knew well was books. And it was a book on his father’s stall that persuaded a young Wolf where his destiny lay. He picked up a copy of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and was hooked – he decided to be a writer.
His parents were determined their son should get the chances they had not had. And when Wolf won a scholarship to Cambridge University his father sold all the stock from his barrow to pay his way.
The £90 allowed Wolf to take up his course. But seeing the sacrifices his parents had to make made him determined never to suffer such privations again. For the rest of his life he would combine the vocation of writer with a buying-and-selling dealer’s brain that owed a lot to his father’s example.

Graduating from Cambridge at the precociously early age of 19, his first move was to set himself up as an antiques dealer. It quickly made him a good living, especially as he could combine it with his love of writing.
His expert knowledge of Wedgewood china allowed him to pen the book Wedgewood, an informed guide to judging and buying pieces.
But as the 1950s drew on, Wolf was to find fame not as a dealer, but as a successful writer. The best authors always write about what they know, they say, and he next turned to a fictionalised account of the antiques trade.
The very title of Make Me An Offer paints a picture of the deal-making stall traders Mankewitz would have been surrounded by as a boy, and it described the wrinkles, tricks and occasional dodgy dealings of the trade.
Writing of his roots
Many cinemagoers of the time will remember the movie of his hit story A Kid For Two Farthings, a poignant tale of a lad who is conned into buying a one-horned goat on the pretext that it is a unicorn.
And The Bespoke Overcoat again drew on his roots, telling the tale of an East End Jewish tailor.
He found notoriety, too, disrupting an edition of famed 1960s satire programme That Was The Week That Was with a verbal attack on critic Bernard Levin, who had had the temerity to attack his work. Mankewitz hammered home his point by having a tiny coffin – tailormade for the diminutive critic – delivered to his Daily Express office.
It was a colourful life – toward the end of it he became the honorary Panamian Consul to Dublin!
But as far as he travelled, his hallmark was always the eye for a deal, a razor sharp eye developed at his street trader dad’s barrow in the Whitechapel of the 1920s and 30s.

The Victorians loved their poetry, the longer, the more epic, the better. Tennyson and Browning fulfiled the need for lengthy verses – which father could recite to his attentive family on drawing room evenings – dealing with the great subjects of love, death and the lost golden age of England.

But the third of Victorian poetry’s “Big Three” dealt with much more mundane, though no less important, themes – the misery and poverty he found as inspector of schools in the Bethnal Green of the 1850s.

Matthew Arnold in Bethnal Green

Matthew Arnold was born into a life of solid respectability and educational excellence. He was the son of the renowned headmaster of Rugby public school, Dr Thomas Arnold.

Arnold senior was passionately absorbed in educational reform, and his work was the model for the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Matthew was to continue his father’s work, but not as a teacher to the sons of the rich. Like many mid-Victorians, the righteous Arnold felt that he had a mission to bring the improving medicine of education to the poor.
Schooling was the key to the working classes dragging themselves into ‘respectability’. And where in more need of education and respectability than London’s East End.

Arnold becomes school inspector

In 1851, he became an inspector of schools in Bethnal Green and his experiences provided fuel for his poetry. In 1867, he penned the poem East London. In it, he describes a summer walk through Bethnal Green and Spitalfields.

“Twas August and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen, In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited.”

All poets have their big themes. Arnold wrote movingly on nature, the city and how men and nature were often crushed by the hustle and bustle of East End life.
In A Summer Night, Arnold describes the men and women he sees as he goes about his day’s work in Bethnal Green.

“For most men in a brazen prison live
Where in the sun’s hot eye,
With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly
Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give.”

Bancroft Road Local History Museum

Arnold also set down his thoughts in a long series of letters to Rosella Pitman, the headmistress of Bethnal Green’s Abbey Street School and sister of Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand. This insight into Victorian thinking can be read at the local history museum in Bancroft Road, Bethnal Green.
Arnold’s literary reputation was sealed when he was named Professor of Poetry at Oxford University in 1857. But he never forgot the work and squalor of the East End that was the inspiration for his greatest poetry.

Many readers will know that the battle scenes for Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket were shot not in war-torn Vietnam, but just down the road from Tower Hamlets, in Beckton.
But east London’s connection with Vietnam-inspired Hollywood movies does not end with Stanley Kubrick’s bloody epic.
For the greatest of them all, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, was born in the reminiscences and romance of an exiled Eastern European writer – as he gazed on the misty River Thames from his adopted East End home.
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857, in Berdichev, in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
His parents, Apollo and Evelina, were fierce Polish patriots and were swiftly exiled by the autocratic Tsarist regime.
It was the first step in a journey that would take the young Jozef halfway round the world, before he settled in Whitechapel.
His parents died in exile, leaving the child Jozef an orphan. His uncle Thaddeus adopted the boy and, in 1874, conceded to his burning desire to go to sea. Jozef set off for Marseilles in search of a ship.
Journeys round the world followed until, in 1878, Jozef joined a British merchantman, winning his Master’s certificate.
Name change
He got on well with his shipmates, quickly rising through the ranks. But Jozef’s one problem was his name which, try as they might, the English-men just could not master.
In frustration at hearing their tortuous attempts, Jozef decided if you can’t beat them, join them, and changed his name to the more manageable Joseph Conrad.
Suitably Anglicised, he decided to make his home in England. The East End was already a second home to him – he made his first stay at the Sailors’ Home and Red Ensign Club in Whitechapel, while serving on the Duke of Sutherland.
While he was on his long voyages, Conrad would while away the time by writing stories and, in 1885, he had his first success, when The Black Mate was published in Titbits magazine.

In 1894, Conrad left the service, deciding to concentrate on writing. But his passion for the sea permeates his books.
His journeys in and out of the Pool of London inspired the memorable opening scenes of Heart of Darkness which, almost a century later, Coppola would update and transform into Apocalypse Now.
The book evokes a lost East End of bustling docks, sailors’ flophouses and schooners waiting for the next high tide and fair wind. And the story unfolds from the cold, misty and lonely Thames Estuary to the final horror in the heart of Africa.
Many more novels followed – ironically, Conrad came to be one of the greatest novelists in the English language, some achievement as it was his third tongue, after Russian and Polish.
His was a colourful life but also one touched by tragedy. In 1878, in one of his sporadic bouts of depression, Conrad shot himself but survived. In 1904, his wife became an invalid and his son Borys, often sick in childhood, was gassed in the trenches in France.
But by the early 1920s, Conrad was a celebrated English- man of letters. So English in fact that in 1924 he was offered a knighthood – the naturalised Briton declined the honour.
In the same year Jacob Epstein, one of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century completed Conrad’s bust. It was to be the final memento of the Polish East Ender. On 3 August that year, he died of a heart attack.

Jewish immigration to the East End produced a melting pot of businessmen, entrepreneurs, writers, artists and musicians.
Among them was one writer who was unique – he not only grew up in the East End of East European Jews, he took it as the subject of his work. And in doing so he brought the story of the mass immigration to a much wider audience.
Israel Zangwill was born in 1864 at 10 Ebenezer Square, Stoney Lane, in the City of London – growing up in the streets off Brick Lane, living first in Fashion Street and then in Princes Street.
Israel’s father was a poor peddlar from the tiny country of Latvia, later to be swallowed up by the USSR.
Israel was to make his fame by turning out a series of popular novels on the theme of immigrant Jews – in successive years publishing Children of the Ghetto (1892), Ghetto Tragedies and The King of Schnorrers.
How he came from being the son of an impoverished immigrant to a popular and successful writer was a testament to the self-improvement ethic of the incoming Jews.
Triple honours
Israel became a pupil at the Jews Free School in Bell Lane, Spitalfields, and then became a teacher.
While still teaching he set aside his evenings to study for a degree at London University, eventually passing with triple honours.
And the energetic Zangwill was not content with work and study. While teaching in Bell Lane he was working on his first book, Motza Kleis, or Matzo Balls.
This lively account of market days in Spitalfields brought him an enthusiastic and loyal audience – and Zangwill never looked back.
Novels and plays followed, all richly observed slices of East End life. One of his most popular works was The Big Bow Mystery.
A huge cast of characters knock against each other trying to solve the mystery behind the strange death of Oliver Constance, one of the most prolific orators of his day.
Zangwill had a great flair for storytelling but, more than that, the mystery is a thoughtful satire of Victorian England, set “in London’s picturesque Bow district”.
But Israel’s interests in the history and future of his people had long been leading him beyond simply writing fiction.
He became a leading member of the Order of Ancient Maccabeans, a Zionist society established in 1891.

The Zionist movement was working toward the establishment of a Jewish homeland, a dream that became a reality with the birth of the nation of Israel in 1948.
And When Zionist leader Theodor Herzl visited London in 1896 he met Israel to discuss the plans for that state. Argentina and Uruguay were two of the venues proposed for the new homeland, as well as the eventual Israel of the Holy Land.
Defiant gesture
Zangwill attended the First Zionist Congress, supporting Herzl’s Uganda Territory plan. It was rejected, and a defiant Zangwill led the “Territorial-ists” out of the Zionist organization in 1905.
He swiftly established the Jewish Territorialists Organi-zation (ITO) whose object was to acquire a Jewish homeland where possible.
Following the securing of the Balfour declaration, named after the British political leader backing Jewish calls for a solution to the Arab Question and the forming of a Jewish state, the ITO fell into decline and by 1925 it was officially dissolved.
Zangwill was never to see the setting up of modern Israel. He died in 1926 in Preston, having laid much of the groundwork for his dream of a homeland – a future for the displaced Jews of Europe.
But a visit back to his books paints a rich picture of those people in the century before – and of the lives they lived in their long journey from eastern Europe on their way to the new Promised Land.

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.

“Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green.
“Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence.
“Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”
When the reporter and novelist Sax Rohmer wrote those words 80 years ago he was obviously not advancing the cause of racial tolerance too far.
Fear and mistrust
But in his portrayal of the evil criminal mastermind, he tapped into a strong vein of fear and mistrust of the Chinese community in the East End.
And in the novels and Hollywood films that followed, Rohmer not only made the mysterious Dr Fu-Manchu a worldwide name, he gave fame to Limehouse – the shadowy quarter from which the bad doctor sprung.
Rohmer first visited the East End in 1911, doing groundwork for a piece for the Daily Sketch. His brief was to discover the mysterious “Mr King”, a criminal boss who supposedly had tentacles in all the organised crime of the area but who had never been seen.
Rohmer never found Mr King, but claimed that tucked away in the labyrinthine streets of old Limehouse, he had met Fu-Manchu. That “meeting” was to make his name and his fortune.
Myth, intrigue, and a strong fictional tradition was closely linked in the public’s mind with Limehouse. The area had been a centre of barge and ship building for 500 years.

And over those centuries, one of the East End’s oldest villages built up a large “Lascar” population. That was a catch-all term for the Asian seamen who, having worked a passage to London, were often paid off as soon as they hit port. Many worked their way back but many stayed.
Limehouse Chinatown really got established around the 1860s and soon worked its way into popular fiction. Sherlock Holmes pursued his quarry here, and found rich young men slumming it in Limehouse opium dens.
Oscar Wilde’s dissolute Dorian Gray did the same and Hollywood producer DW Griffith travelled the area, researching his film Broken Blossoms.
The Victorian newspapers played it to the hilt, with reports of the yellow peril, of inscrutable orientals running their opium dens.
Young white women were, of course, always at risk of being drugged and spirited away into the white slave trade!
Certainly, by the turn of the century, opium could be bought over the counter and was openly smoked, not just by locals but by the wealthy coming down from the West End to taste the mysteries of oriental Limehouse.
During the First World War around 4,000 Chinese people were living in the East End but the numbers were soon to dwindle as fear of the visitors translated into an ugly backlash.
Anti-Chinese riots broke out in 1919, as locals swallowed the yellow peril scare stories in the papers.
Deportation
The Government came down hard on the Chinese – hard labour followed by deportation was a typical sentence for possession of the now outlawed opium. Many were deported for far less, such as gambling on the game of puck-apu.
In 1934, more brutal action was taken. The Council widened Limehouse Causeway, sweeping away the maze of houses and shops that gave the area its mystery. The Blitz did more damage – many Chinese names are on casualty lists from the bombing raids in 1940.
And the building of the Limehouse Link finally destroyed the atmosphere and topography of the old hamlet. The fog-bound labyrinth of Limehouse was swept away – and with it the ghosts of Chinatown.