eastlondonhistory.com

Edward VI crowned King of England this day in 1547. The son and heir of Henry VIII, he reigned for six years (under two regencies) before dying, probably of tuberculosis, at the age of just 15 in 1553. Due to his father inventing the Church of England, the young Edward became England’s first Protestant monarch. After his death, and the shortlived reign of Lady Jane Grey, Edward’s half-sister ‘Bloody Mary’ would reinstitute Catholicism with a vengeance.

Also on 20th February, Jimmy Greaves was born in 1940 in East Ham. The England team’s third highest goalscorer, sometime Sun columnist and one-time TV football commentator (’it’s a funny old game Saint’), Greaves was one of the most superlatively strikers the English game has seen.

In 1819, William Smith who was born in Northumberland but captained cargo vessels out of Wapping, was sailing round Cape Horn as he skippered the vessel ‘Williams’ from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso.  Spotted an archipelago which he dubbed the South Shetland Islands. In 1820, the Royal Navy sent Smith and Williams back to survey the islands, discovering the Antarctic Peninsula as they did.

In 1985, the first episode of TV soap ‘EastEnders’ is broadcast, documenting the everyday life of rape, murder, arson and general unpleasantness that typifies life in the imaginary East End borough of Walford (an amalgam of south London’s Walworth and east London’s Romford).

Two London actors born on this day. In 1717, the great actor-manager David Garrick (who gives his name to both a West End street and theatre). His great grandfather, David Garric was a French Huguenot family, who fled Europe after the Edict of Nantes in 1685, first to Spitalfields in the East End. Somewhat in contrast, Ray Winstone was born in 1957 in Homerton - Scum, Sexy Beast, Quadrophenia, I’d like to have seen Garrick take a pop at those.