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A WEEK or two back, we read of the desperate early years of Arthur Harding, raised in the Nichol and seemingly fated for a life of crime. His autobiography (and its subsequent adaptation and expansion by Raphael Samuel) certainly doesn’t go easy on its subject.

But though Harding became renowned as a career criminal, and a vicious one at that, what shines through the pages of his first-person

account is a craving for order, for respectability … for a job. He loved his time at Barnardo’s: he got a regular meal of course, but he also got his education, and enjoyed it. He writes of his envy at the blokes who can land work in the breweries (in the early 1900s there was Truman, Hanbury and Buxton in Brick Lane, and the Watney brewery on Whitechapel Road), but they are all fit, brawny country lads; there’s no place for cockneys from the Jago. He craves the security of working on the railways or being a City Corporation street cleaner (the ‘shit rakers’ or ‘sparrow starvers’). Both of them jobs for life, and neither of them likely to be given to a guttersnipe from the Nichol. And he loves his brief weeks in training in the army, with its discipline and order … before his detested father drags him back to supplement the family income.

They may be the selective memories of an old man (Arthur was well into his eighties by the time he wrote all this stuff down) but a life of crime seems to have chosen him as much as the other way round. On several occasions he is arrested ‘as a suspected person’ – not actually having committed a crime, but looking as if he might be a likely candidate*. Of course Arthur was guilty of plenty of things, but between 1901 and 1922 he achieved 27 acquittals, invariably conducting his own defence. It’s a remarkable tale: a ‘street Arab’ from London’s roughest estate taking on a criminal prosecutor and frequently winning. Building on his schooling at Barnardo’s he became a voracious autodidact. During his many months in prison in his late teens (he unfortunately lost almost as many cases as he won) he taught himself criminal law and devoured novels such as Oliver Twist and Les Miserables, which must at least have reminded him of home.

He was receiving another kind of schooling too. Prison had made him ‘fitter, stronger and taller’. Emerging from one stretch in 1903, he sought out a married couple who had beaten up his mother (now a hopeless drunk) and thrashed them and their son senseless. The educated street Arab was establishing a terrifying reputation for violence. He was also developing a varied criminal repertoire. His gang would pickpocket around Brick Lane, run protection rackets and – equipped with Webley army revolvers, many of which had been liberated by soldiers returning from the Boer War – they would hold up spielers (Jewish social clubs). While many of his gang turned to pimping, Arthur specialised in snide-pinching, buying counterfeit coins from forgers and laundering the currency through local shops.

And when Brick Lane got too hot, the boys would go on tour – taking ferries to Newcastle, to Buxton, Manchester and to Wales – picking pockets and passing Harding’s snide coinage; his sister would post packets of coins to post offices around the country for Arthur to pick up. The one town they avoided was Liverpool, which was famed for having an efficient and ruthless police force.

It was now that Harding and his boys began to run the north end of Brick Lane, with Isaac Bogard running the south. A Brick Lane shopkeeper of the time described how they would operate, saying: ‘My corner is a very convenient corner for them, because they can see four ways. They throw out scouts in every direction, and they use dumb motions, they do not talk to each other. When they steal goods they get small boys to take the parcels away, and they take them in different directions. It is very difficult for us tradesmen to carry on our business. Brick Lane has got a very bad name, and it is the men of Harding’s class that give the neighbourhood a bad name.’

But his own bad name was catching up with Arthur. He spent the whole of the First World War in Wormwood Scrubs; a reformed Bogard joined up and became a decorated war hero. By the twenties Harding had had enough, and resolved to go straight … ish. He settled down and married Milly, 15 years his junior, and the two settled in a cottage in Gibraltar Gardens, off Bethnal Green Road, with Arthur turning out furniture, tables, easels and boards. He still had a fearsome reputation. One day, a younger criminal called Dodger Mullins knocked on his door demanding protection money. Arthur grabbed a loaded revolver and chased the gang up the road. Again, Harding used the courts to his advantage, seeing Mullins sentenced to six years for demanding money with menaces. He also got a bung of £60 from the gang for withholding elements of his evidence and decided to seek the quieter life.

But maybe there was a thirst for confrontation and danger that crime had previously satisfied. In 1926 he was leading gangs scaring dockers back to work during the General Strike. In the 1950s he became a cohort of Oswald Mosley (the Blackshirts called him ‘uncle’) though he professed to detest racism. And he became something of an elder statesmen to the Krays. By now he was comfortably off. In the thirties he had toured the country, knocking on doors and buying gold jewellery at knockdown prices from innocent punters. During World War II and after he had dealt in stolen ration books. After the war he made a mint buying and selling secondhand clothes. Comfortably retired to Leytonstone, he put crime to one side and spent 43 years with his beloved Milly: the pair had six children.

There was an interesting postscript to Arthur’s life. A few years back, Diana Rowbury went along to the Bishopsgate Institute to talk about her extraordinary grandfather. It emerged that she had known nothing of the name ‘Harding’ until Raphael Samuel’s book went into print. In later years, Arthur had re-adopted his original family surname of Tresadern – while his mother had come from Norfolk, his father had been a Cornishman. The retired villain theorised that cockneys had trouble pronouncing the unusual moniker, so shortened it to ‘Adern’ and then corrupted it to ‘Harding’. Perhaps Arthur was trying to go back to a childhood before crime had taken over, but over decades of peaceable retirement, he had buried infamous East End villain Arthur Harding.

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*This draconian law was still being used with some enthusiasm by the Met 30 years ago, and was one of the factors blamed for the riots that swept English cities in the summer of 1981.

References:

The Life of Arthur Harding http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/content/1196/The-Life-of-Arthur-Harding

East End Underworld by Raphael Samuel:

http://tinyurl.com/a6ezl59

A RATHER timely twist to BBC’s Sunday night offering Ripper Street this evening – with the slums of Whitechapel being cleared to make way for the new Underground railway. Suffice to say, there won’t be any judicial reviews and compensation for the poor souls whose homes lie in the way of progress … the wrecking crew is coming through and there’s little to stop them.

Timely, because it’s hard to open a newspaper at the moment without a piece about the Tube;  for it was on 9 January 1863 that the first underground journey took place between Paddington and Farringdon on the Metropolitan Railway.

Train travel had come to London in the early 19th century, with rail routes criss-crossing the country and converging on the capital, termini being built on the edges of the metropolis at Euston, Paddington, London Bridge, Kings Cross, Waterloo and (hard by Whitechapel and Brick Lane) at Bishopsgate. Today, of course, these termini are in the heart of a much larger London than that of the early 1800s. Only one terminus was within the City of London itself, at Fenchurch Street. Bishopsgate is long gone, operating as the terminus on the eastern flank of the City only from 1840 to 1874, when it was replaced by Liverpool Street. The station, which still operated for goods trains, was finally closed by a fire in 1964 and the buildings were demolished to make way for the new Shoreditch station on the East London Line extension (which in turn is part of the new Overground line which encircles London, and popularly known as the ‘Ginger Line’ by many Londoners). Incidentally, visitors to Whitechapel should take a detour east off Brick Lane, where they will find the original Shoreditch station, an abandoned shell since it was closed in 2006. Of course you won’t see any of these locations in Ripper Street, which is actually filmed in Dublin, but if you’re in the area…

And of course all this building wasn’t without cost, as Ripper Street suggests. The clearing of slum dwellings to drive the mainlines through London displaced thousands of people, just as new cottages were being raised to house the railway workers (many of them immigrant labour from Ireland). And the fact that the new Underground railway ran, well underground, didn’t minimise disruption on the surface. The construction of new stations at Whitechapel, Whitechapel St Mary’s (another of the Tube’s ghost stations) Aldgate, Aldgate East and the rest, necessitated the demolition of whole streets, even whole neighbourhoods.

Needless to say, unrest about the demolitions and the construction of the new Underground railway is merely a backdrop to yet another grisly event in Ripper Street – the uncovering of a body. But yet again I have to be impressed by the efforts of the writers to weave some genuine East End history into this sensational tale of London circa 1889. Some of the language might be less than accurate in its contemporaneity, but the historical tropes are (give or take things being moved a decade or so) soundly in place.

 

THE CRIMES of Victorian London seem as popular as ever, with Ripper Street and Sherlock Holmes, and even Dr Who getting in on the act of late. But it was in Edwardian Whitechapel that gang war was to really explode – most famously in the vicious turf wars between Isaac

Bogard and Arthur Harding. Many of the accounts we receive are apocryphal, as underworld figures become semi-legendary and grow in the mythology.

But with Arthur Harding we have a rich seam of first-person evidence to mine. For not only was this career-criminal surprisingly long-lived (born in 1885, three years before the Whitechapel Murders, he lived until 1981); he committed that life to paper. And so began a fortuitous sequence of events.

Harding, by now in his eighties, had an extraordinary life to draw upon as he sat down to write in the late sixties. He also had, it seems, almost perfect recall. His memoir My Apprenticeship to Crime was unflinching in its depiction of a brutal and dirt-poor childhood. He sent a copy both to the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and to his local MP, Stan Newens (then the Labour member for Epping). Newens was both an East Ender and a history graduate and he loved what he read. “It was four o clock the next morning before I could tear myself away and retire to my bed,” Newens wrote later. “I was totally hooked”.

Newens passed the manuscript on to his friend Raphael Samuel who, crucially, was not only fascinated by East End history (his family had been Jewish immigrants to London) but by “history from below”. The Marxist historian had eschewed conventional academic histories with his endeavours at the History Workshop and at Ruskin College, encouraging ordinary working people to compile their own stories. Samuel was transfixed by Harding’s story of pickpocketing, protection, razor attacks and rubbing shoulders with the Blackshirts. And over a six-year period in the 1970s, sat down with Arthur to tirelessly and patiently commit his story to tape.

The result was the remarkable East End Underworld: chapters in the life of Arthur Harding, which would be published in 1981 (Harding got to read the finished work just before he died). The story is compelling, if not always pretty. Arthur is born in the Jago to a mother crippled by a runaway milk float and shackled to a father (Flash Harry) who is either idle or drunk, and frequently violent. His mother is forced to support the family with piecework, making matchboxes at Bryant and May in Fairfield Road (now the Bow Quarter) and Arthur is mainly raised by big sister Harriet (nicknamed ‘Mighty’). Meals are hit and miss, with Arthur often begging passers-by for food.

The family move to Hoxton (“about the worst bloody place they could have gone to”, according to Arthur). With the family of six now sharing one room, Arthur frees up space by sleeping rough. He is eventually rescued by a policeman who delivers the filthy, starving boy to Barnardos. The next three years are “the happiest of his young life” and provide Arthur’s daily bread and education. How do you escape such a grim existence? Arthur tries on several occasions to join the army, but each time is deemed either too young or too unfit. In 1900 he finally succeeds (he is still only 14 but the army, desperate for troops to fight in the Boer War, are less picky this time). To Arthur’s fury, his father refuses to let him go … the little bit of money the boy brings in is crucial to the family budget. Arthur becomes increasingly sucked into a life of crime.

All young villains served an apprenticeship. He is first nabbed at 14, then arrested at 15 for helping the colourfully named ‘One-Eyed’ Charlie pinch a bail of rags – that offence earning him 12 months hard labour.

In the hands of Samuel, the story becomes a compelling mix of first-person narrative and historical background. Harding’s detail on the Jago is superb – from the Shoreditch Hat Shop located strategically next to the Royal Standard Theatre in Norton Folgate (“owned by a German…He must have made a packet, all the comedians used to buy their hats there”) to the Jane Shore pub in Shoreditch High Street (“where my dad worked, for 2s (10p) daily from 6am to midnight”).

Harding is a less than loveable character at times. He divides the populus into Jews, non-Jews and Half Jews; his criminal rival Isaac Bogard is referred to throughout as “the Coon” (not just offensive but inaccurate); and his stock in trade is to pre-empt any trouble in the pub by smashing a glass into the face of any potential challenger. His criminal pragmatism is perfectly illustrated as he talks about the famous ‘Vendettas’ for which he was eventually jailed. He recalls: “Alf Simpson…wasn’t a thief but a hooligan, stabbing people and all that sort of thing. He didn’t make any money at it, it was just terrorism, the instinct of the savage.” Over the following decades, Harding will mature from vicious young criminal to elder statesman and a pal of the Krays. He will even become an (almost) respectable businessman.

Next week: Fit-ups, prison and respectability

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About Raphael Samuel

 

Raphael Elkin Samuel was born in London on Boxing Day 1934. Although described as “one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation” and graduating from Balliol College, Oxford he avoided academic advancement, pouring his energies into the History Workshop at Ruskin College. His mature students, largely trade unionists, produced collections such as Village Life and Labour and Miners, Quarrymen and Saltworkers. A Communist who left the party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Raphael retained a lifelong fascination with the successes and failures of the Left, in later years writing Theatres of the Left and The Lost World of Communism. He only took a university post in the last years of his life, at the new centre for the study of community in the East End, based at the University of East London: it was renamed the Raphael Samuel Centre after his death in 1996, and is now a partnership between UEL, Birkbeck and the Bishopsgate Institute. You can find more details, and access Samuel’s archive, at /www.raphael-samuel.org.uk. There is a digitised version of Harding’s memoir at http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk/content/1413/My-Apprenticeship-to-Crime (Arthur’s wallpaper-bound original is at the Bishopsgate Institute) and of East End Underworld at http://tinyurl.com/arzsu7r .

 

AS I watched the trailer for Ripper Street, BBC1′s new Sunday night slice of primetime for stay home round the telly winter’s nights, a succession of troubling and random thoughts cascaded through my mind. But before we get there, let me recap on what happens (or you can simply click the link above – thanks youtube, thanks BBC). We open on a shot of the glistening new Olympic Stadium, artfully retouched to blur out all the nasty grubby bits of East London that stubbornly

refuse to disappear, no matter how much Olympic flavoured fairy dust is sprinkled upon the area. The camera pans down through a bank of thickening cloud and when we emerge below we have been transported back to 1889, cheerful guttersnipes run down cobbled streets delivering coal and turnips (be quick lad, Victorian Whitechapel’s life expectancy means you’re unlikely to make it past 14) and the adults occupy that strange ground beloved of Jack the Ripper tourists, where everyone is either a prostitute, drunk or both. Respectability for men is conferred by the wearing of a bowler hat. A voice solemnly intones that, Olympics over, it’s time to go back to a colder, darker, scarier age. Clever stuff – visually grabbing and the BBC manages to yoke its new drama to the back of its hugely successful 2012 Games coverage, while reminding everyone of how solidly the Beeb stands for everything good in British drama and sport, and giving a heads-up to the American audience (they’re hoping Ripper Street plays big in the US) as to where exactly Whitechapel is. (That’s London, England sir).

Except, the pedant in me cries that if you panned down thus-wise you’d be in West Ham, not Whitechapel, as the perspective on the site is from due East. My second random thought was ‘won’t my team look nice playing in there’. I’m a West Ham fan you see – no glory hunting for me. My next was how the cosy Sunday night viewing has changed on the BBC. Crime has always been an element, strangely. But where we once had Hamish McBeth, Pie in the Sky and Lovejoy we now have the ritualistic evisceration of sex workers recast as family viewing. Onto my fourth thought, ie, how the hell are they going to do Jack the Ripper again. It’s a story that’s been, ahem, done to death, and as we all know, he never gets caught, so very unsatisfying as a procedural. But here is where I was derailed, because this isn’t Jack the Ripper, it’s the Whitechapel Murders as a franchise. A year later the East End is still in a state of febrile terror – has he finished, will he be back? And every murder or sex crime (of which the East End of 1889 had its share) whipped the terror up again. So we have Matthew Macfadyen as Inspector Edmund Reid, desperately trying to damp down panic and speculation. We have newspaper reporter Fred Best (David Dawson) excellent as he was in Edwin Drood a year ago, mischievously redecorating murder scenes to make them appear the work of Jack the Ripper. And we have glum Inspector Fred Abbeline (Clive Russell playing the sole genuine historical character) still mightily pissed off that he never nailed Jack, and working with Best to keep the public interest bubbling (the Met and Fleet Street getting over-cosy is obviously nothing new).

And so Jack the Ripper becomes merely a device, a starting point from which to spin off a whole other raft of tales about Victorian London’s surfeit of death, misery and prostitution. Episode 1 was actually rather good. Again, the pedant in me finds it hard to watch Victorian Whitechapel street scenes that don’t look anything like Whitechapel, but then you’d have a hard job filming down Brick Lane these days and maintaining any historical illusions – too many curry restaurants and Shoreditch hipsters in monocles and spats. Ungentrified Victorian Dublin will fit the bill just fine for most viewers, just as Chatham did in Call the Midwife.

Ripper Street trailer from BBC TV

The interesting twist was in pursuing a line from Victorian prostitution to the early days of photo-pornography and thus to snuff movies. Historially accurate? I’m not sure – and certainly the brothel and its staff all seemed suspiciously squeaky clean and jolly. But historically interesting for sure, and tied nicely together with the tech-savvy Reid using photographic evidence, and even knowing how darkrooms work. And our American cousins even get an ex-Pinkerton detective as a medical examiner. Everyone is superbly flawed, as per every detective procedural, though it came as a disappointment to see that Reid wasn’t a bent copper but was merely fixing bare knuckle boxing matches as an elaborate entrapment … He still looks troubled, though that might just be Matthew Macfadyen’s face. But how refreshing, in this post-Sweeney world to see a policeman (Jerome Flynn as Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake) not merely questioning a witness but beating the words out of him till he can barely mumble them. Drake then surpasses this by not simply restraining the guilty man in the final act, but running him through with a sword. None of your namby pamby rehabilitation there. We look forward to tonight’s thrilling instalment.

John Rennie