Chinatown in Limehouse
London’s Chinatown today occupies a prime position in the West End, around Shaftesbury Avenue, Lisle Street and Gerrard Street. Brushing aside the occasional lurid restaurants about triads and gambling, most Londoners will have visited at some point, to enjoy the restaurants or New Year celebrations.
But the old Chinatown, which existed until the early 1930s in Limehouse, was a far scarier proposition for Londoners - whether for good reasons or simply because the press of the time were less cautious about sensational and racist headlines.
By the time the Sunday People started a series of pieces on May Flack, the ‘White Woman Ruler of Chinatown’ on 17 April 1932, the area’s heyday was over. Nonetheless, the readers of the Sunday tabloid thrilled to a weekly diet of how May had, for 21 years, been ‘the uncrowned queen’ of the quarter. ‘May Flack has stopped knife fights and revolver battles and lives to tell the tale’, boasted the paper.
Limehouse had always had immigration. As a port and centre of boatbuilding since medieval times, one of London’s oldest ‘villages’ built up a ‘Lascar’ population. This was a catch-all term for Asian sailors who, having working a passage to London, were often paid off (and marooned) when they got to Limehouse. Many stayed, but Chinatown really became established around the 1860s. By 1890, there were two distinct communities in the East End. Shanghai Chinese were settled round Pennyfields, Amony Place and Ming Street (between the present Westferry and Poplar DLR stations). And Chinese from southern China and Canton lived around Gill Street and Limehouse Causeway. By 1911, the whole area had been dubbed Chinatown.
From Victorian times, the East End had been feared as a place of poverty and depravity by the rest of London, and Chinatown was thrown into the mix, with lurid tales of opium dens, white slaving and reckless gambling. Sherlock Holmes discovered rich young white men slumming it here; Oscar Wilde evidenced the corruption of Dorian Gray by showing him in a Limehouse opium house; DW Griffith researched his movie Broken Blossoms here; most famously, Sax Rohmer invented Fu-Manchu “the yellow peril incarnate in one man”. The newspapers lapped it up, running stories of the ‘Yellow Peril’: and Rohmer had first visited Limehouse as a reporter, researching such a piece for the Daily Sketch.
The truth of course was rather different. Novelist Arnold Bennet visited Limehouse in April 1925 and saw: “On the whole a rather flat night. Still we saw the facts. We saw no vice whatever. The Inspector of Police gave the Chinese an exceedingly good character.” This was, in fact, a settled, segregated and quite small community. There were Chinese sailors serving in both Merchant and Royal Navies, and a good deal of intermarriage with English women.
The People’s reporter had a long talk with Mrs Flack, who had come to the area from Worcester 21 years before. “To her door come Chinese, Lascars, Germans, Scandinavians and other stray nationals washed up on the dock areas by itinerant shipping from the seven seas … May never fails them.’ May’s tale of disarming fighting men (sometimes literally) and facing down angry mobs, certainly makes stirring reading: the reporter acutely describes her tale as “like a page from a romantic novel”.
Rather disappointingly for The People, amidst all the tales of pitched battles and blood feuds, May admits that “opium smoking and heavy gambling have more or less been stamped out in Limehouse. The law has got a hold on Chinatown at last”. Her words conceal a darker truth. Chinatown had been targeted for years. The Chinese population peaked just after World War I at around 3000. In November 1918, actor Billie Carleton was found dead in her bed, possibly from an overdose of cocaine, possibly purchased in Chinatown.
There were calls in Parliament for the deporting of all Chinese; the Pictorial News wrote again of ‘the yellow peril’. There were anti-Chinese riots in Limehouse in 1919, but it was the Chinese who felt the full force of the court system: possession of opium now earned a sentence of hard labour; some men were deported for gambling on the popular game of puck-apu. And just two years after May Flack revelations, the local council would take a brutally radical approach to the ‘problem’ of Limehouse.