May Flack in Limehouse
‘In a small house at the bottom end of that windswept street in London’s Chinatown, known as Pennyfields, you may find a woman with an incredibly white face, eyes which have taken on something of Oriental stolidness, and lips which are accustomed to tactful silence.’
So began the Sunday People’s serialisation of the memoirs of May Flack in 1932, ‘a Worcestershire woman who, after 21 years in Limehouse, has become the uncrowned queen of that romantic district.’ As a boarding house landlady from the early years of the century, May saw at first hand the changes in Chinatown.
And despite an initial sprinkling of spice - in her early years in Limehouse ‘opium smoking, gambling and White Slave Trafficking were rampant here’ she reports - she gives a resolutely fair account of a people she came to treat as friends. Dismissing the ‘yellow peril’ stories, May is rather more scathing about the English toffs who come down to Limehouse for a thrill. The white slave trafficking is almost certainly nonsense, though a popular fantasy of the time, and there is certainly no evidence of it from the rest of her tale. One wonders whether it was more an excitable reporter or sub-editor giving the People what it wanted.
Amidst the tales of her disarming knife-wielding Tong members and pitched street battles, men ’scrambling over roofs and rfiring revolvers from behind the chimeyes, others engaged in a running knife fight in the street’ May identifies the point at which Chinatown started to die. Having a foot in both communities allowed her to see how the community was being slowly squeezed. ‘Young English girls married to Chinese sailars brought their troubles to me. The greatest agony was in the days after the Opium Laws of 1914. Chinese seamen were dported by the dozen, leaving wives and children.’
And yet all the while Chinese were being deported for opium (even for gambling), many tourists from the West End were using Limehouse as a playground. One of the most famous casualties was actress Billie Carleton who ‘went to Limehouse a mere curiosity monger. Her insatiable curiosity led her to try “just one shot of cocaine” … After cocaine she learned to smoke opium … Could anything be more tragic? Here was a young and beautiful girl, earning £20 a week as the leading lady of a West End revue, a promising career before her.’ May takes it upon herself to steer sensation seekers away from the opium dens of Limehouse, returning one young society beauty to her grateful parents. ‘I found her in a hovel … I shall never forget the picture. Pale as death, one arm haning limp and motionless. Her fair hair haung loose about her shoulders. One glance and I knew she was drugged’. Frustratingly May ‘cannot reveal her identity … a few years ago the girl make a fine marriage to a well-known sporting personality’.
May helps the Chinese in trouble too. Though not always with such happy endings. Ching Loo San is being pursued by a rival Tong. Opening his house in Birchfield Street for gambling he has been accused of stealing business from another man. He flees to China, but is never seen again. His English wife simply receives his pigtail in the post - telling her that he has been killed. The closest we get to ‘white slaving’ is the story of Ah Ling Jee, the ‘Red Dragon of Chinatown’ who has three English girls working as his servants and messengers. ‘The day would assuredly have come when he would have demanded more of them than the mere carrying of messages’. One of the most romantic stories is of the arrival of three priests from Fuchow, ‘bearded, dignified figures in skull caps and loung ecapes of gorgeious golden hue … across the distant seas they had come, in search of the sacred Token of Serpent’. The local man who has stolen this scrap of cloth from their temple is terrified - they have crossed the planet to track Ah Tsin down. He hands the token to May for safe-keeping, flees and is never seen again.
Today of course, Limehouse is much changed, with a busy trunk road carving a swathe through what was Chinatown. Pennyfields and the Limehouse Causeway are still there of course, though much changed. Gazing down from the Sunday People’s modern offices, on the 23rd floor of 1 Canada Square, you can just pick the streets out on the other side of the Limehouse Link.