Francis Frith on the East End
A century ago the streets of the East End were very different to today, with a vibrant community of street traders, beggars and confidence tricksters employing any and every manner of business to drag them out of poverty. It’s a colourful world that would be lost to us were it not for an astonishing and immense photographic archive, compiled over three decades by one of the great pioneers of the camera.
Of course Francis Frith didn’t only snap the East End. Amazingly, this devout Quaker, former grocer and ace businessman set himself the project of photographing every city, town and village in Britain, as well as undertaking exotic and perilous photo-expeditions to Africa. But it is his pictures of the bootblacks, knife sharpeners, organ grinders and cake sellers of Whitechapel that provide a vivid history lesson in the nature of Victorian poverty.
Frith had established a thriving grocery business in Liverpool by 1855, but had always yearned to travel. He sold up for the enormous sum of £200,000 – around £15m at present values. A man of leisure, and captivated by the new science of photography, he set out to see the world.
He spent the next four years travelling to Africa, using a specially designed wicker carriage that doubled as sleeping quarters and dark room. He laboured for hours in his sweltering dark room, but the results were spectacular. Back in London, he exhibited to the Royal Society and was rapturously cheered.
Frith may have been an artist, but he was ever the businessman, and he spotted an opportunity in the increased leisure time of the Victorians. Bank holidays and half-day Saturdays had been made law by an Act of Parliament, and Frith reckoned that the new tourists would want souvenirs to commemorate their days out. The idea of the picture postcard was born, and Frith set out on his epic journey round Britain. It was to take the remaining 30 years of his life.
His pictures of the East End weren’t pretty mementoes of course. But deliberately or not, the sheer number of shots Frith took leaves us with an amazing photo-documentary of life on east London’s streets in the last years of the 19th century. The street traders were often grindingly poor. Selling a few lucifer matches was often a pretext for begging. Bryant and May of Bow employed 700 girls to sell their matches on London’s streets, and Frith’s picture of a shoeless and emaciated Bryant and May vendor paints a thousand words.
His pictures say a lot about the poverty of that age and the wastefulness of ours. Nowadays, we wouldn’t employ knife sharpeners, chair menders and street cobblers – we would simply throw away and buy new. And the growth of casual wear means there would be no employment today for the hundreds of shoeblacks who plied their trade in Tower Hamlets.
East Enders had a bewildering number of morning and evening London papers to choose from – and there were paper sellers on every corner.
Between the 1870s and late 90s, Frith wandered the East End streets with his camera, capturing the baked potato sellers, muffin and gingerbread men, strawberry vendors and the rest who have long disappeared. He also amassed an archive of shots of the bustling Thames, with steamers and good ships putting in and out of the Port of London.
Frith died in 1898 at his villa in Cannes, his mammoth project still growing. The Frith Archive continued to grow for another 70 years, in fact, by 1970 containing more than a third of a million pictures.
You can see more pictures of the East End at the Frith archive on the web, at www.frithbook.co.uk, or contact The Francis Frith Collection, Frith’s Barn, Teffont, Salisbury, Wiltshire, SP3 5QP for details of books and prints. Tel: 01722 716376. Email: uksales@francisfrith.com.