eastlondonhistory.com

The kitchen sink drama is a staple of late 1950s and early 1960s cinema, with gritty northern dramas such as ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. A new social realism was joiining the escapist, glossy movies of the mainstream, as pictures explored the realities and the hardships of working class life in Britain.

The East End was to chip in with ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ in 1962, which took the drama out of the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, living room or bedroom onto the streets and into the pubs of the East End. The Theatre Workshop production was improbably penned by Stephen Lewis (Blakey from ‘On the Buses’), though heavily improvised like all the group’s pieces. And it used lots of location filiming, offering modern viewers a fascinating glimpse of Limehouse, Stepney and Stratford in the early sixties, as well as cameo appearances by Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

But the whole movement was anticipated a decade earlier by ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. The film, set on one Bethnal Green sunday in 1947 was an exercise in tedium, frustration and anger at the poverty of life in post-War Britain (and not just in the financial sense). Yet it still manages to grip the viewer. Rarely has boredom been so interesting.

The story has former barmaid Rose Sandigate trapped in a joyless marriage with an older man. Life in bombed out Bethnal Green is hard, with rationing still in place, little money and less to do. Into this dull, reliable existence bursts her former lover, who has broken out of prison and begs Rose to hide him. The tough housewife softens and hides him in the air raid shelter. The strain is intolerable, with family life intruding and the police net swiftly closing. Eventually he flees, to be hunted down in railway sidings by police sergeant Fothergill.

And if it’s sometimes melodramatic (and a touch unlikely) it does evoke the East End of the later forties, not least because real East Enders are in it. Not Rose - she is played by the impeccably posh Googie Withers. Nor escaped convict Tommy Swann (played by Googie’s Australian husband John McCallum). But Jewish East Ender Sydney Tafler, who was a stalwart of British cinema in the fifties and sixties, often playing spivs and crooks, appears as Morrie Hyams. John Slater, who built much of his career on playing cheery cockneys, was another East Ender playing largely to type, as Lou Hyams. Sgt Fothergill is played by Bow’s Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green of course). And the character of Dicey is played by Alfie Bass, born Abraham Basalinksy in Bethnal Green.

Of course a decent actor should be able to play the part wherever he or she comes from. But the authenticity of much of the cast may well have pleased the writer. The film came from a novel written by Arthur Bern, who also wrote ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, later adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock as the movie ‘Frenzy’. La Bern called himself ‘a gallic cockney’ having been born in the East End of French parents. He was a prolific writer, combining a career as a journalist on the Evening Standard, the Evening News (a former competitor to the Standard), the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, with a steady stream of novels. His East End roots and his job as a Fleet Street crime reporter provided plenty of material. Arthur’s books may have been page turners and were regularly adapted for the big screen (other movies included ‘Good Time Girl’, ‘Freedom To Die’ and ‘Dead Man’s Evidence’) but they ranged from gruesome to downright miserable.

‘Nightmare’ follows Roland John Raine QC, whose wife has run off with a gangster, while his daughter ministers to dossers in the East End. The barrister attempts suicide with a bottle of pills and a jug of whisky, but wakes up in a mental ward. The trouble is just beginning though, as Mrs Raine’s gang boss lover is found murdered. The prolific La Bern had a profitable sideline writing biographies of famous murderers, such as Brides in the Bath killer George Joseph Smith and Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh, so he had plenty of material to draw on.

And take ‘Frenzy’, which tracks a serial killer as he rapes and strangles his way around London. Though to be fair to La Bern he hated Hitchcock’s movie so much that he felt compelled to write a letter of protest to The Times, bemoaning not just the ‘distasteful’ content but the hatchet job Hitchcock and his writer Anthony Shaffer had done on ‘the authentic London characters I created’. He described the dialogue as ‘a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce [and] Dixon of Dock Green’. For La Bern, if you were going to do the East End you had to do it right.

ONE thing we all take for granted today is clean, fresh water and – barring the next Thames Water hosepipe ban – plenty of it.
But until just a century ago, East Enders were more likely to be killed by their water than revived by it.
In the 1800s, as Tower Hamlets multiplied in size with the influx of immigrants from the countryside and abroad, cholera became a chronic threat to human health.
Look left out of the train window as you travel from Bromley-by-Bow to West Ham and you will see the distinctive rococco form of Abbey Mills pumping station.
It may look like something from a horror film but, in its day, it made the East End a safe place to live and work, as it carried sewage out to the Thames.
London had a problem getting rid of its rubbish for centuries, and for a long time the East End benefited. There was no mains drainage in the middle ages – instead excrement would be stored in cesspits under the houses.
This ‘nightsoil’ would then be carted away to ‘laystalls’, and then from there to the new market gardens around the Essex villages of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Bow.
If that sounds unsanitary, it was an improvement on the earlier system in the City, where a gulley down the middle of the street would be awash with rubbish and human excrement.
The lack of concern of Londoners was shown by Samuel Pepys observation in his famous Diary, recording how his wife “stooped down in the street to do her business”.
The Tower Hamlets market gardens may have flourished, but by the mid-1800s they had been buried under bricks and mortar, and cholera epidemics were sweeping the borough.
In desperation, the newly- formed Metropolitan Commis-sion of Sewers decreed in 1847 that cesspits were now banned.

The move was a disaster, as the main sewers and underground streams now discharged their filth straight into the Thames. A decade before, salmon had still been seen jumping in the river at Wapping. By the 1850s nothing could live in what had become a huge, stinking open sewer.
The matter came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1858. Wapping windows had to be draped with lime chloride soaked curtains, and tons of chalk and carbolic acid were tipped into the Thames.
But nothing could mask ‘The Great Stink’ as it became known. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli himself described the river as “a Stygian Pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
It was the last straw, and in that year a Bill for the purification of the Thames was passed – but the first step was to find an answer to the removal of the human waste of three million Londoners.
One plan was proposed by the painter John ‘Mad’ Martin. Rather unfairly named, his plan was to pipe the filth out to Essex to propagate land – pretty much what the East Enders had previously done for their farmland.
But the task eventually fell to the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He constructed a huge system of sewers running east from London Bridge for a distance of eleven miles, assisted by pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.
When Bazalgette was finished, London boasted 1,300 miles of sewers, along with the London Underground, one of the great engineering marvels of his age.
And as with the Under-ground, many of the same tunnels are still serving East Enders today. Others, like that beneath Stratford’s Greenway, have now gone out of service.
But all were part of the hidden network that saved the East End from the cholera-ridden hell it was a century ago.

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.

If you wake up on a Monday morning cursing your job and moaning about your boss, spare a thought for the East Enders of Victorian times – and thank your lucky stars you don’t have to scrape a living as a tosher, a mudlark, a scavenger or a riverman.
The Tower Hamlets of the 1800s was a byword for poverty and degradation, inspiring words and actions from some of the greatest world figures of the day.
William Booth was spurred by his work among the poor in the area to set up the Salvation Army, Karl Marx was inspired by his observations on the causes and solutions of poverty in east London to pen the Communist Manifesto. And itinerant Californian novelist Jack London was driven to write his best-selling novel about Docklands life after staying in Wapping. The title – People of the Abyss – says it all.
Between the day work on the docks and piecework in the sweatshops making garments, matches and the like, a whole raft of occupations grew up seeking to make some profit from the detritus of society.
The recent TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend paints a picture of the people who made a living from the Thames but the reality was, if anything, even worse.
Mudlarks were mostly children who prowled exposed Thames mudflats at low tide looking for bounty that had been dropped or washed into the river. Coins and jewellery were the greatest prize, but even items of clothing or driftwood were worth collecting. Clothes could be cleaned up and sold on to the rag-and-bone men, or totters, driftwood could be dried and sold on as firewood.
But if the mudlarks had a messy and dangerous job – many were swept away by the tides or became marooned in the soft mud – the rivermen chose an even nastier way to scrape a living.

In those days, bodies floating down the Thames were not an uncommon sight. London was a more dangerous and violent place than it is now and it was not uncommon for cutpurses to murder their victims and toss them into the river. The bodies of sailors were often washed up, who had died after drunken fights in the docks or after falling over the side of the hundreds of ships moving up and down the waterway.
Rivermen would operate from the banks in flat-bottomed boats, hauling the corpses from the water with long boating hooks, rifling through their pockets, then tossing back the raided bodies.
A load of rubbish
And scavengers, as their name suggests, would rummage through the rubbish tips and markets of the East End searching for coins, rags and old pieces of rope which could be sold on for a pittance.
Meanwhile, many of the rag-and-bone men, the forerunners of Steptoe and Son, grew rich. The rags could be sold on to rope and garment makers, the bones to pet-food or fertiliser manufacturers who would grind them down for bone meal.
But the worst job of all was probably that of the tosher. Much of the bounty that ended up in the river was washed down there through the sewers.
The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings.
Reek of the sewers
Unsurprisingly, the toshers were not popular with the neighbours. Many became rich, but carried a constant reek of the sewers. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.
One unexpected side-effect of the sewer work was that they built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos.
The word “tosh” for rubbish entered the language, though toshing – and the other dirty jobs of the era – have long since gone.

Anyone starting a history of the great British practice of philanthropy could do worse than start in the East End.
Dr Barnardo, Fred Charrington and General Booth were just three of the worthies who threw their lives into improving the lot of one of the most poverty-stricken quarters of England.
Less renowned, though equally lauded locally, was a young teacher who moved to the East End in 1894.
Her canny idea for a way to relieve poverty – while also removing the stigma of charity – became such a roaring success that it was only 14 years ago that her scheme was discontinued.
Clara Grant was born in Frome, Somerset, in 1867 and moved to Wapping 27 years later to take up a teaching post.
At the turn of the century, Clara was made head of Devons Road Infant School – re-christened Clara Grant School in 1993.
But though she could give the East End kids the knowledge that would serve them through their lives, Clara became painfully aware that they were going without the things she had enjoyed as a child – toys, picture books and the like.
She had watched the work that the Reverend Samuel Barnett had been doing at Toynbee Hall and, taking that as a model, she set up the Fern Street Settlement – her aim, to bring a little pleasure into what could be a hard childhood.
One important principle was that the scheme shouldn’t be seen as charity.
Though Clara was soon receiving generous donations of clothes, books and toys from the well-to-do, the decision was taken that all the families benefiting from Fern Street should pay a token amount for what they received – and at the same time this would pull funding back into the settlement.
Many of the donated items were deemed unsuitable for the main sales so, in the classic Victorian tradition of thrift and frugality, she put together “farthing bundles” for the kids.
“Farthing bundles are full of very human things such as children love,” explained Clara. “Tiny toys of wood, or tin, whole or broken, little balls, doll-less heads or head-less dolls, whistles, shells, beads, reels, marbles, fancy boxes, decorated pill boxes, scraps of patchwork, odds and ends of silk or wool, coloured paper for dressing up, cigarette cards and scraps.”

Her parcels were an instant hit. The kids would start queuing at quarter to seven in the morning, though the bundles would not be on sale till eight.
In fact, the scheme was such a success that the settlement had to find some way of limiting numbers. First they accepted boys and girls on alternate weeks, but by 1907 they were still selling more than 2,000 parcels.
And so in 1913 the famous “little oak arch” was introduced. The idea was that no child over a certain height could take part, and the arch was emblazoned with the legend: “Enter now ye children small, none can come who are too tall.” The kids would walk under the arch “without stooping” and could then buy their bundle.
Clara Grant could never have guessed how long her success would outlive her. She died in 1949, but in 1976 a new Fern Street Settlement was started and opened for business in 1980. Astonishingly, the farthing bundles were only discontinued in 1984.
Her name lives on, not only in the school but in Clara Grant House, Mellish Street, E14. And every time the little oak arch is ceremonially brought out, the memories of generations of East Enders are stirred, as they recall their farthing bundles.
Many thanks to Howard Bloch and Graham Hill and After the Battle Publications.

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.

September means the end of summer, going back to school, and the nights starting to draw in. But for generations of East End women and their kids it meant something more – hop-picking.There were many reasons why so many families made the annual journey down to Kent. Like with any other harvest, a lot of work had to be done in a short time, so lots of extra bodies were needed out in the fields, from dawn to dusk, to bring in the crop.

For the women, it might mean a break from a tedious job in the East End. Much work was casual and could be easily taken up again when they returned in the autumn – many simply packed their jobs in. It might mean a welcome paid holiday in the sunshine and the fresh air of the countryside. And for many London kids it was seen as a rest cure, a rare chance to build themselves up and get some clean air into their lungs. As one Canning Town woman remembered: “The birds never sang there, they coughed!” And a Kent farmer recalled: “The first few days here, the kids would be coughing from the fresh air, and every time they coughed, they’d be coughing out soot.”

The really efficient pickers could take advantage of the piecework nature of picking, and store away some much-needed cash to tide them over for the rest of the year. But perhaps the main reason for the exodus was the camaraderie that echoed around the hop fields. The hoppers would be roused by a blast on the farmer’s horn, and start work around 7am.

The usual method in the Kent fields was for families to work in a group, stripping the hop cones off the bines – the rough, vine-like stems of the hop plant – and into the hop bins. A long day pulling the prickly, resin-sticky hops would end at 5pm, when the cry “Pull no more bines” would go up, and the family would sit round the faggot-fuelled camp fires, sharing tea, stories and songs with their friends and temporary neighbours. From the 19th century on, summer conversations in the East End would revolve around the question “Have you got your letter yet?”

The letter was the sign that you and your family had been accepted by the farmer for another season’s picking. The traditional letter, confirming your job, your accommodation and when the picking would start, developed from the practice of London agents providing letters of recommendation to show to the Kent farmers. It was intended as a way of preventing a mass invasion of the peaceful Kent countryside by the supposedly rowdy Cockneys.

The disruption the Londoners caused may have been overstated but there was still friction between town and country long into this century. There was a running argument between the Kent and London County Councils, with Kent moaning that the influx of Londoners – especially the “economically unproductive children” – put a strain on the medical and other services. London, of course, made the counter argument that the families wouldn’t have been there at all if Kent hadn’t been so desperate for their labour.

But by the 1950s and 60s, mechanised picking was taking over the hop fields of Kent. Times were less hard and East Enders now usually had jobs which gave them paid holidays. For many, a trip to the seaside or holiday camp was preferable to an autumn of back-breaking labour. The machines tackled the shortage of labour, but ended up killing off hand-picking altogether. The annual migration of a quarter of a million Londoners was at an end and the call “Pull no more bines” would be heard no more.

For further reading, see Pull No More Bines, by Gilda O’Neill, published by The Women’s Press. See too, London History, 100 Faces of the East End by John Rennie.

Amid the debate about standards in the NHS, it is easy to forget that what we now see as a great British institution is a mere 50 years old. Many readers will remember the time when a trip to the doctors was an expensive luxury and when the days before universal inoculation meant epidemics of diseases like scarlet fever and diptheria were a serious threat.
Go back a further generation and a poor and crowded East End suffered badly as life-threatening diseases swept the big cities, taking a heart-rending toll of the youngest and weakest.

The hardship of life for many East Enders is chronicled in the book Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970. It tells of the August 18, 1890, entry in the Cubitt Town School diary, where the headmistress wrote that the milk was having to be boiled to combat the scarlet fever spreading among the pupils. By September 5, she was logging an epidemic of measles as well and by October 6 the school was threatened with closure. Six years later measles, today a curable and preventable hazard of childhood, was keeping 120 kids out of the school – eight of them died.

It was a pattern repeated throughout the East End as families struggled amid crowded and insanitary conditions – conditions perfect for diseases to take hold and spread. Local man James Mee, who was born in 1915, writes: “They were only little houses… three families in some of them. Places were bug-ridden, not because people were dirty, but if you’ve got people living and sleeping in one room how could they keep decent?” Often the answer was to send sick children right away, for the protection of the rest of the family as much as themselves.

Catherine Lerpiniere was born in Wharf Road on the Isle of Dogs in 1897, the youngest of nine. Hit by scarlet fever then rheumatic fever, she was sent across the river to Shooter’s Hill fever hospital. She was relatively lucky. Many infected East Enders were simply put aboard a tug at North Pier, in Coldharbour, and taken to one of the fever ships moored in the Thames for isolation and almost certain death. John Gaskin was born in 1891 to Robert and Clara of 79 West Ferry Road, Millwall. In 1901, he contracted smallpox and was taken to an isolation ship. He died shortly afterwards, within sight of his Island home. The ten-year-old’s body was buried at sea.

These days, when overeating is an increasing health problem for children, the standards of nutrition in the early 1900s make shocking reading. James Mee recalls school dinner being a slice of bread and marge. He writes: “Miles of kids around the age of three and four could hardly walk because they had rickets – that’s a thing you never hear of now.” For further reading see Memories of Childhood on the Isle of Dogs 1870-1970, published by the Island History Trust, Island House, Roserton Street, London E14 3PG. Tel: 0171-987 6041.