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Comparisons between the Lea Valley and Venice may seem somewhat fanciful. Venice is, after all, one of the world’s major tourist destinations, arguably the world’s most romantic city, and is resplendent with treasures such as the Basilica di San Marco, the Rialto Bridge and the Doge’s Palace. The waterways of the Lea Valley, meanwhile, are flanked by wasteland and disused factories. The canals of the Serene Republic echo to the songs of gondoliers, while on the Lea you’re more likely to hear gaggles of anglers discussing the weather and West Ham’s prospects for next season.But these waterways were once the lifeblood of the East End, the trade routes of their day, before more than a century of neglect set in. That could be set to change, with the Water City Initiative aiming to bring the neglected docks, rivers and canals of east London back to life. With the River Lea and the Regent’s Canal at the heart of 250 hectares of new and improved public open spaces, linking the Lea Valley to the Thames, Stratford to Canary Wharf. Up to 40,000 new homes are planned to be built and 50,000 new jobs created, most in a huge new shopping and office complex, dubbed Stratford City.

It’s an enticing idea. The miles of waterways are largely unseen by most of us, hidden behind walls and factories, perhaps glimpsed from a train window or as we pass over a bridge. The plan is to turn our focus back toward the canals. London Development Agency chair Mary Reilly said Water City could help turn waterways which “currently divide the area, into a major asset”. And if that sounds fanciful, well it’s not so long since Docklands was rotting and forgotten and many Londoners never set foot on a Thames towpath.

Centuries back the Lea or Lee (or historically the Ley) was the home of Bronze and Iron Age settlements, while the Romans built Ermine Street parallel to the watercourse. The river rises around Luton in Bedfordshire before flowing down to the Thames. By the sixth century AD it was the boundary of the Saxon kingdoms of Essex to the east and Middlesex to the west. Always strategically important, by the ninth century the Lee was the last bastion between Alfred the Great’s Saxon England to the west and the Vikings (who had worked their way towards London via the east coast and through East Anglia) to the east. One story has Alfred marooning the Vikings by building a weir and thus draining the waters - certainly remains of Viking ships have been found further up river in Hertfordshire.

By the Middle Ages, the invaders were Englishmen and women themselves, England was at peace, and Middlesex and Essex were counties instead of kingdoms. Now began the all-important industrialisation of the Lee. What had been a strategic barrier now became an essential way of getting goods in and out of the capital, while the water from the river itself became crucial in manufacturing. The ’stink industries’ were to grow up along the banks, including tanning, tallow making and slaughterhouses, and this was the site of Britain’s first paper mill.

As early as 1424, government was recognising the importance of the route, instructing an act of parliament to improve navigation on the river. Deepening of the watercourse and canalisation of the banks meant flour, coal, malt, gunpowder and other vital supplies could now be moved quickly and in quantity into London. By the 18th century, engineering had developed apace, and new canalisation techniques saw locks being built and new cuts carved out, so larger barges could take goods right from the Thames Basin to Hertfordshire. From here they would join the wider canal network or be taken by road to the North and the Midlands.

And industry grew up along the banks - obvious as this was where the raw materials from around the world were landed. Bow China, the most famous maker of which was Thomas Frye, was manufactured here. In 1744, one Edward Heylen bought a property on the London side of the Lea, at Bow Bridge, and the Bow Porcelain Manufactory of New Canton went into business, becoming a huge success. But even as the Lea grew and developed, there was a new enemy on the horizon - the railways.

The history of the Victorian East End is more susceptible to myth-making and exaggeration than most. The horror of contemporaneous politicians, do-gooders and the popular press made it hard for the Victorian Middle Classes to establish facts about ‘the Great Wen’, ‘the Abyss’, ‘the City of Dreadful Night’. If life there were other than an endless round of gin-fuelled prostitution, crime, miserable labour and early death, then the respectable Victorian was hardly going to visit to find out. And for the modern reader, fuelled on endless speculation about the identity of Jack the Ripper and blood-curdling images of sweatshops and brutality towards women and children, a real picture of East End lives can be similarly hard to establish.

William Fishman went a long way to putting this right with his 1988 book* looking at the East End of exactly a century before. 1888 was a significant year. Income from the docks was collapsing (the lifeblood of many East End families), while the previous decade had seen an influx of people from Essex and East Anglia, driven by the agricultural depression of the 1870s. Workers’ and radical movements were sweeping Europe, and the tumult the authorities feared had erupted in the Bloody Sunday demonstration in Trafalgar Square the year before. The protest against the abolition of trial by jury in Ireland had struck a chord with many east London workers, one of whom had been killed by police in the demo. A parade of 120,000 people was to follow the funeral cortege from the West End to Bow Cemetery in December of 1887, hearing William Morris deliver the eulogy to martyr Alfred Linell.

Significantly too, the very term ‘East End’ had recently been coined ‘about 1880 … [and] was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. The box of Keating’s bug powder must be reached for and the spoons locket up’. The East Enders, then, were a race apart.

East End 1888 tried ‘to present an overall picture of life among the labouring poor of East London in Victorian times. To achieve focus, I concentrate on a single year, 1888, and a single borough, Tower Hamlets.’ The picture Bill Fishman paints in an elegant, scholarly, but above all compellingly readable book is no less horrible than the ’shock, horror’ stories of the yellow press of the day. The Reverend Samuel Barnett, who was to be instrumental in so many improvements in the East End, including the founding of Toynbee Hall and the Whitechapel Library and Art Gallery, feared for the moral well being of children daily exposed to the public slaughter and ill-treatment of animals in Spitalfields. Fishman writes that ‘Aldgate, city entrance into Whitechapel, is plagued by open slaughterhouses in the main and side streets … with blood and animal innards spattered on the sidewalks.’

Of course the horrors were real, not simply aesthetic, and many East Enders were treated little better than animals themselves. Slums like the Jago and Old Nichol saw families crowded into filthy, pestilent and often subterranean rooms, with no light and often only body heat. Carving through this netherworld, the vast new arches of the railways coming in to Liverpool Street and Broad Street - themselves bringing in new East Enders from East Anglia - dwarfed the dwellings (while the developments made many more homeless, people who then had to squeeze into ever-more crowded accommodation). Attempts to improve things with the ‘new improved dwellings’, and clean, modern tenements often involved the clearing of more slums - whose occupants could not afford the rents in the new flats - and so the process continued.

‘East End 1888 was not the sort of place where one might live long … many lives would be very brief and death could be quite public,’ and the dehumanisation didn’t stop there. The London Hospital (itself as feared as the workhouse, as once in you were unlikely to return) had no mortuary. Bodies, including those of children, were housed in a shed. The disposal of ‘excess’ cockneys was equally brutal. We have children of nine ‘consenting to emigrate to Canada’ - the process was called ‘disposal’. Some found it difficult to discern humanity here at all. Professor Julian Huxley opined ‘I have seen the Polynesian savaging and in his primitive condition, before the missionary … got at him … He was not half so savage, so unclean, so irreclaimable, as the tenant of a tenement in an East London slum.’ Beatrice Webb initially found many East Enders ‘low looking, bestial, content with their own condition’. Yet there were many more who sought not to blame, but to change the environment that led to such social evils. Fishman focuses on Samuel Barnett, the Reverend Osborne Jay and unfashionable heroes such as Dr Barnardo, Frederick Charrington and General Booth - people who tried to change things for the better.

As Bill Fishman observes in his landmark work ‘East End 1888′, the area may only recently have got its name (’coined about 1880′) but the mythologised horror of the area had swiftly taken root. This vision of an abyss, a netherworld ‘was rapidly taken up the new halfpenny press … a shabby man from Paddington, St Marylebone or Battersea might pass muster as one of the respectable poor … the same man coming from Bethnal Green, Shadwell or Wapping was an “East Ender”. Dirty, feckless, amoral and above all criminal, the East Enders were different.

Fishman carefully and methodically strips away the hype by focusing on life as it was actually lived by our forebears. Significantly, once we’ve dealt with ‘The Image and Reality’, the first chapter proper is ‘Housing, Health and Sanitation’. If people weren’t sleeping rough, and most East Enders at least had a roof over their heads, then the reality was that accommodation was getting worse in the 1880s. Millions of people poured into London in search of work but there was no concerted programme of housebuilding to match, so subletting was the answer: families crammed into single rooms, with a subsequent increase in squalor and disease. Sharp investors cashed in with the lodging houses. Middle class investors employed wardens to police these houses, and the wardens themselves were often abusive of their power. The investors themselves were often blissfully unaware (or chose to be). They might only be a mile or two away in the West End, but they were unlikely ever to set foot east … and returns were good. For the poorest there wasn’t even that option - there wasn’t enough return in letting to those at the very bottom.

The Oxford English Dictionary first listed the word ‘unemployed’ in 1882, ‘unemployment’ entered its pages in our year of 1888. It’s a fair bet the words had been in currency in the East End for a while before that. ‘The Unemployed and the Sweated’ captures the desparate condition of East End labour. The docks, the garment factories, breweries and bakeries to feed all the new bodies … all had grown from nowhere to employing many thousands of East Enders (and all putting pressure on existing building stock of course). But there was no employment legislation. Casual labour meant a worker didn’t know, on finishing work on Monday night, whether there would be another payday on Tuesday. This fear lead to ’sweating’: a workshop with poor, unhealthy and unsafe conditions, rates of pay being ever driven down, as hours got longer and longer. Argue and you’d be out of a job.

Meanwhile politicians and priests were lecturing the East Enders on their lack of providence, of failing to save, of failing to build a decent future for their children. The East London Observer reacted with fury to the dismissive attitude of Lord ShaftsburyMargaret Harkness (a sympathetic observer) wrote: ‘First they grow reckless, then become hopeless, finally they take to drinking … to let thousands of men and women in enforced idleness is dangerous’. Here lay the great fear, that revolution was brewing. As the East London Advertiser wrote: ‘If our governors do not settle the question soon, the governed will adopt measures of their own to solve it.’

Meanwhile people fell - into the workhouses or ‘Bastilles of the poor’, or onto the street. In our year, East London ‘proper (Tower Hamlets, Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney) had 17,000 in the workhouse. Harkness describes Jo in Out of Work. Arriving at the workhouse he is stripped naked, washed in a common bath, and led to a cell measuring 8ft by 4ft. There, written on the walls, is scrawled ‘I’ve served my Queen and country for 15 years, and this is what I’ve come to.’

Of course there is ‘Leisure’ too. ‘To portray the East End as one sombre mass of unmitigated woe would be a travesty,’ admits Fishman. Even the much-maligned pubs sold wholesome food, and would hire out backrooms for piano concerts and dances. The new mutual and friendly societies would meet in these de facto village halls - while MPs might lecture and hector, many East Enders were already embracing ’self help’. The political parties would hold their meetings in the pubs and clubs; there were even Bible classes. And though there is a particularly gruesome description of a bunch of lovable urchins beating a cat to death with sticks, there were healthy outdoor pursuits too. The new ‘lads clubs’ were organising trips out to take the greenery of Epping Forest and the healthy salt air at Southend, and ‘muscular Christians’ in the Oxbridge settlements were teaching young East Enders to box and play football. Fishman fully recognises the contribution of these often-mocked do-gooders.
East End 1888 by William J Fishman, Five Leaves, £14.99, ISBN 0907123856

Many actors have a crucial moment when the magic of the stage and screen captures them. For a four-year-old Terence Stamp, sitting in an East End cinema during World War II with mum Ethel, it was watching Gary Cooper in Beau Geste. For the next decade and a half, Stamp wanted to be Cooper.

But if the desert seemed impossibly exotic, stardom and Hollywood might as well have been on another planet. The young Terence was the oldest of five, born in Bow (and later living in Stepney and Plaistow). Dad Tom was away in the merchant navy for months at a time, and the close family unit saw the kids looked after not just by mum Ethel, but by his grandmother and a coterie of aunts.

Gary Cooper may have been an inspiration, but it was a huge handicap too, as Stamp later recalled, saying he was ‘poisoned’ by the unattainable fantasy of being a glamorous leading man, such as Cooper or Cary Grant - how on earth could he leap from his East End existence to that? The truth was, he didn’t really know what to do. ‘My mother was an unusually strong woman. I remember her once telling me I should be a journalist … that was toaly out of the question because I was so bad at school!’

So, shelving his ambitions, he found work on leaving school as a runner for an advertising agency in the West End. It took the emergence of a new generation of screen idols to free Terence’s ambitions again. In a West End cinema one cold New Year’s Eve in the mid-fifties, Stamp saw James Dean in East of Eden. ‘I was 17 and overwhelmed by him,’ remembered Stamp. ‘He was doing it … I was just dreaming about it … he was the first guy I ever saw that was not so removed. I thought “I’m like that.”‘

Fate intervened in the shape of Stamp’s feet - an earlier operation was enough to persuade the Army he was not fit for National Service. He had just been handed back two years of his life and realised that if he tried drama school and failed, he would be no further behind than his mates coming back into Civvy Street. He enrolled at the Trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, alongside fellow East End hopeful Stephen Berkoff.

The turn of the sixties saw Stamp honing his craft on the stage, where he assumed he would stay. Notable roles included that of Private Whittaker in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, during which he became friends with the young Michael Caine. ‘To be a young man, in London, in this career, at the turn of sixties … it couldn’t be any better, it was heaven,’ he laughed. But things were about to get better. In 1962, Stamp landed the role of Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov’s movie and became an overnight sensation. Working class actors were the darlings of the press in the newly egalitarian sixties. ‘The star from Stepney’ and ‘Tugman’s son: the boy with the Stamp of a star’ shouted the headlines in the Evening News and Evening Standard.

Stamp and Caine were now sharing a flat. The roles (and the women) came thick and fast. Stamp played Alfie on Broadway, but turned down the film role, which went to Caine. Iconic movies followd such as William Wyler’s The Collector and Far From the Madding Crowd. His girlfriends included Julie Christie (they were immortalised as ‘Terry and Julie’ in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset) and Jean Shrimpton. Meanwhile, younger brother Chris Stamp, an East End mod, was making his fortune as co-manager of The Who.

But as the sixties drew to a close the golden touch failed him. Antonioni replaced Stamp at the last minute with David Hemmings as the lead in Blow Up and Shrimpton left him for another man. A devastated Stamp took off for an ashram in India. His search for answers would take him away for nearly a decade, including a spell working on an organic farm in Ibiza.

When he rejoined the circus in the late seventies, it couldn’t have been in more dramatic fashion. Stamp was recruited as evil General Zod for the Superman movies. The eighties saw one terrific role. In The Hit, Stamp plays a sixties cockney who emerges from years of hiding, much the wiser in spiritual matters.

Stamp had, as he readily admits, made his share of duds. But the nineties saw a couple of classics. The former sixties poster boy shone as a transsexual in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Then, in The Limey, he brought superb menace to the role of Wilson, an ageing Cockney villain in Los Angeles. The tireless Stamp was also launching his own range of gluten-free foods, The Stamp Collection, and penning a cookbook of the same name.

The new century saw Stamp ‘homeless’ after leaving his long-time base in Piccadilly’s Albany apartments for a life in hotels, going where the work took him. On New Year’s Eve 2002, Stamp finally married, to 29-year-old Elizabeth. The boy from Bow had come a long way but had no wish to stop. ‘It’s still the most fun thing I can think of in which to make a living. I’ve never wanted to become a politician, I’ve never wanted to become an interior decorator, I’ve never wanted to speculate and make a load of money. I just wanted this. It’s fun!’

Charles Booth famously expended a dozen years of his life, between 1891 and 1903 compiling his mammoth Life and Labour of the People of London - 17 volumes exhaustively documenting the jobs, habits, lives and deaths of the cockney working classes. But if it hadn’t have been for Henry Mayhew, a half century before, the epic work may never have been started.

For before Mayhew turned his pen to them, nobody had paid too much attention to the poor of London’s East End. And yet the man was no philanthropist, politician or philosopher, rather a popular journalist picking up on the spirit of the times. This was the 1840s, and Friedrich Engels was writing about the appalling conditions of the working classes in Manchester, that ‘the working class and the bourgeoisie are like two radically dissimilar nations’. Benjamin Disraeli had just published his novel ‘Sybil, or The Two Nations’, laying bare the shameful state in which working people lived.

London had mushroomed in size from under a million souls in 1801 to being the world’s most populous city, with 1.6m people in 1831. By 1851, it would number more than 2.4m as trade and industry pumped ever more money and manpower into the capital - with the East End and docks growing most of all. And yet most of it was uncharted territory, unplanned housing, the people with no fixed jobs and often no fixed abode. The vast mass of the workers were effectively invisible to those in Westminster. Mayhew sensed that there were stories to be told about the millions who made up the other of the ‘two nations’

Mayhew may have been an unlikely social chronicler: he was joint founder of the satirical magazine Punch in 1841 with Mark Lemon and engraver Ebenezer Landells. Educated at Westminster School, he had worked as a lawyer in his father’s practice for three years, a stormy relationship that say Mayhew abandon the law for journalism in 1831. As well as writing he had an entrepreneurial streak, but he was a better wordsmith than businessman: Punch struggled to sell 6000 copies a week while 10,000 were needed to break even, and the title was sold in 1842. Severing his connections with ‘The London Charivari’ in 1845, Mayhew attempted to hop aboard the craze for railways with the launch of ‘Iron Times’. It lost so much cash that in 1846 he ended up in the Court of Bankruptcy.

His life took an unexpected turn in 1849, when an outbreak of cholera, a continual problem in Victorian London, killed a probable 13,000: the exact number was, of course, never known. Mayhew was still writing as a freelance for the Morning Chronicle (along with contemporaries Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill) and he wrote a piece on the outbreak. Mayhew saw the disease as one of poverty, centred as it was on the poorest and most crowded parts of the capital; it would be another five years before Dr John Snow would observe the common water pump in Soho’s Broad Street and make a further connection, that the disease was borne by dirty water.

Mayhew suggested to his editor, John Douglas Cook, that the paper should carry out an investigation into the state of the working classes in England. It would turn into a long-running and exhaustively researched project, fully feeding the Victorian reader’s obsession with detail, statistics and empirical ‘proof’. Cook assigned three reporters to help Mayhew: Angus Reach was sent off to the industrial towns of the north (he would die exhausted from overwork before he made 30), with Charles Mackay and Shirley Brooks.

Mayhew headed into the East End, where he interviewed milliners and millers, prostitutes and publicans, sawyers and smiths, tinkers and tailors … every conceivable profession in fact. The team produced an article every day for the rest of 1849 and most of 1850. It was a remarkable quantity of words, and the detail bordered on the obsessive. The minutiae on people’s religious and domestic practices, habits and working hours seems extraordinary to modern readers, with our myriad distractions and, perhaps, shorter attention spans, but it was meat and drink to the earnest and worthy Victorian readers, who loved facts and figures. And the Victorians, with long nights at home under the gaslight like to read. With no other media to distract them, these were Londoners who found light relief in the wordy tomes of Dickens and Walter Scott.

So we find out what the mudlarks who scoured the Thames foreshore were dredging up in the 1840s. Mayhew watches in horror as people draw drinking water from an open sewer ‘more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink’. He painstakingly asks interviewees their wages and their detailed outgoings (and logs the shortfall). He cross references censuses, police reports and his own researches, to work out how many street traders are operating per square mile. He works out the margins tea traders are making on their cheaply hawked goods … the detail is remarkable.

The unexpected bonus for modern historians, of course, is that Mayhew and his team piled up a huge amount of original source material, telling us exactly how East Enders lived a century and a half ago. Next week we’ll see what they discovered about our forebears.

Last week we saw how Henry Mayhew and his team of reporters set out to chart the lives of the labouring classes of England and Wales - but what exactly did the inexhaustible founder of Punch discover when he ventured east of Aldgate?

An example of Mayhew’s staggering attention to detail, almost comical to modern eyes, is his attempt to quantify the excessive drinking habits of the various East End trades. In ‘The curiosities of drunkenness’ (one of the dozens of pieces that would appear during 1849 and 1850), Mayhew interviewed the coal whippers and coal backers employed in the Pool of London - the men who did the backbreaking job of hauling the coal out of the holds of ships. One of the men tells Mayhew that it ‘was an absolute necessity that the men … though earning only a pound a week, spend at least 12 shillings (60p) on beer and spirits to stimulate them in their work’.

In classic style, Mayhew sets out to test this thesis, interviewing men who drink, men who had signed the pledge ‘and kept it without any serious injury to their constitutions’ and those who had signed the pledge ‘but had been induced to violate their vow in consequence of injury to their health’. To the modern reader it may seem obvious that large quantities of water might be a better option than booze, but at least alcohol didn’t give you cholera and to Victorian East Enders beer was about as safe as liquid got. Mayhew prevents us with a magnificent table of those professions that are above the average for drunkenness (button makers top this, for some reason, with one in every 7.2 of them being a drunk). Toolmakers, surveyors, paper makers and brass founders come in close behind. Among the most sober professions are clergymen, grocers, book-binders and artificial flower makers.

Thomas Heath, a weaver of 8 Pedley Street, Spitalfields, gives Mayhew a detailed account of his earnings. ‘The sum of the gross earnings for 430 weeks is £322 3s. 4d., being about 15s. a week. He estimates his weaving expenses at 4s., 11s. net wages. He states his wife’s earnings at about 3s. a week. He gives the following remarkable evidence:

“Have you any children?” [asks Mayhew].

“No. I had two, but they are both dead, thanks to be God … I am relieved from the burden of maintaining them, and they, poor dear creatures, are relieved from the troubles of the mortal life.”‘

A woman is forced into prostitution to make ends meet. ‘I used to work at the shirt work - the fine full-fronted white shirts; I got 2d. each for them. There were six button-holes, four rows of stitching in the front, and the collars and wristbands stitched as well. By working from five o’clock in the morning till midnight each night I might be able to do seven in the week. Out of this the cotton must be taken and that came to 2d. every week. I had a child, and it used to cry for food.

‘So, as I could not get a living for him myself by the needle, I went into the streets and made out a living that way. I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labour that drove me to prostitution.’

As Mayhew says in a speech to a meeting of London tailors in October 1850: ‘Morality on £5,000 a year in Belgrave Square is a very different thing to morality on slop-wages in Bethnal Green.’

Those who weren’t forced to sell themselves scraped what they could where they could. Tea traders adulterate their product with used leaves, grass and dirt; ‘pure finders’ gather dog faeces to sell to tanners; and of course the mudlarks and toshers dredge anything of value from the riverbanks and sewers.

The journalism of Mayhew and his team became hugely influential, gathered together in book form as London Labour and the London Poor, in three volumes in 1851, then a fourth ten years later. Christian Socialists such as Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and FD Maurice seized on the work, as did Radicals and Republicans (a growing worry for the Government of Victorian Britain). And that other great chronicler of the East End, Charles Dickens, drew on his colleague’s work for inspiration. Henry Mayhew died in 1887.

London Labour and the London Poor: Selection
by Henry Mayhew, published by Penguin, £12.99, ISBN 0140432418

Like other East End politicians, the convictions of John Benn weren’t just forged by observing the poverty and suffering of others, they came from bitter personal experience.

In the 1860s, Will Crooks had been forced into the Poplar workhouse with his siblings. In the early 1900s, George Lansbury would return from a failed emigration to Australia, angered by the falsely rosy picture of what lay there for Britons seeking to improve themselves. He poured his disappointement into political activism. And back in the 1850s, John Benn had seen his father Julius removed from his job because of debts from failed investments. There were other curious parallels: both men would found dynasties that encompassed both socialist politics and Hollywood. The Benn story was more remarkable yet - including a bloody murder that lay concealed for a century.

John was born in Manchester in 1850, the son of Julius and Ann. His parents soon moved to run the London City Mission in Stepney, and then opened the Home in the East, a school for homeless boys in the East End. This refuge, a converted rope factory nicknamed “The Star in the East”, makes an appearance in Sketches by Boz.

The institution was such a success that the Government invited Julius to head up the first Reformatory and Industrial School in Britain at Tiffield in Northamptonshire. Success again, but Julius’s attempts to supplement the meagre family income of around £100 a year (and with eight children to support) ended in disaster. He invested in an agricultural equipment supplier, which went bust taking the family’s money with it. Julius, heavily in debt, was forced to resign.

Returning to the East End, he became a missionary with the East London Congregational Evangelistic Association, saved hard, and paid back the debt - it took him 17 years to do so. Public service and self-help were equally important in the Benn household and John, who received his schooling at home from his parents, was expected to help with the finances. He set up a stamp business and by 14 he had posted a profit of £80.

By 17 he was working for wholesale furniture company T Lawes & Co, first as a clerk and then as a designer. At 23 he had married Lily Pickstone, a distant relative of the Wedgewood pottery clan, and was earning £300 a year as a designer and manager of the company. John and Lily had a large family, the start of a clan at the heart of British politics to this day.

John had the touch for business that had eluded his father. He returned from a visit to the 1878 Art and Industrial Exhibition in Paris having penned an article on the show, and sent it to The Furniture Gazette. Stung by their refusal to publish it, he put £800 of his life savings into starting The Cabinet Maker. Launched in July 1880 the magazine grew to become the main journal for Britain’s furniture trade (it’s still going strong), and established the company of Benn Brothers in the process.

But tragedy was to strike the family. John’s brother William married Florence Nicholson in December 1882, but before his honeymoon was over he was warning his family that he feared for his sanity. He arranged for several weeks leave from his job as a shipping clerk, but in January suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to Bethnall House (a private asylum in Cambridge Heath Road). The superintendent, Dr John Millar, was a leading light in the Employment and Relief Association, a charity with close connections to East End churches. He advocated rest cures rather than confinement and, crucially, was very discreet. But Millar’s approach was to lead to disaster.

After six weeks, William was released back into the care of Julius - now pastor of the Gravel Lane Congregational Meeting House in Wapping. Julius took his son for a vacation to Matlock Bridge in Derbyshire. Matlock was ‘the Switzerland of England, with healing waters and thermal baths, a haven for convalescents. On the Sunday of their stay, the Benns failed to emerge from their suite of rooms at George Marchant’s boarding house. Pushing open the door at noon, he found William in a blood-soaked nightshirt, blood spattering the floor, ceiling and walls, and the sheets soaked with blood. Julius lay dead on the bed, his head broken by a single vicious blow from the enamel chamber pot. The dazed William had attempted to slit his own throat with a tortoise-shell penknife, a wound which local GP William Moxon stitched, before allowing Police Constable Smith to charge him with murder.

In the weeks leading up to the inquest William was under suicide watch - on one occasion flinging himself 17 feet from the window of Derby Infirmary (his police guard was temporarily distracted by pulling on his boots), but only broke an ankle. John Benn headed the family group at the inquest, defending William against accusations of religious mania from newspapers excited by the Benns Noncomformist religious background: ‘His brothers explicitly repudiate the notion that he was actuated by any of that excitable religious fervour which characterises the Salvation Army,” reported the Derbyshire Advertiser and Journal.

William was, however, unarguably insane. At his committal he insisted on addressing the magistrate as ‘Pontius Pilate’ and was sent to Broadmoor, where he would remain for nine years.

Meanwhile, brother John was devoting himself in equal measure to business and charity work in the East End. His son, William Wedgewood Benn (his middle name a nod to his mother’s ancestors) remembered walking to chapel and seeing a man with a placard reading ‘I have suffered a great injustice’. John commented ‘Will, I have suffered many injustices … let’s give him a couple of shillings.’ It made a deep impact on his son. And John was increasingly becoming involved in politics, accepting the Progressive Party candidacy for East Finchley for the inaugural London County Council in 1889. Sons Ernest and William, though just 14 and 12, helped run his campaign.

The Progressives (formed by a grouping of Liberals and Trade Unionists) swept 70 of the 118 seats, their number including such future Labour figures as Sidney Webb and Will Crooks. The same year Benn became involved in the London Dock Strike, hosting meetings at his home. The successful paralysis of the East End docks would lay the foundations for mass trade unionism in Britain.

In 1891, Benn was adopted as Liberal candidate for Wapping. That same year, he was told his brother had recovered from his mental illness; John approached the Home Secretary and asked that William be released into his care. William joined his wife in Balham - she had written to him every day, and twice on Sundays, during his incarceration. He changed the family name to Rutherford and the following year the couple had their only child, Margaret, who years later would become one of Britain’s best-loved actresses.

The dynasty continues

John Benn won Wapping in the 1892 General Election. He now handed over running of the family firm to son Ernest and devoted himself to public transport - with a particular interest in developing an efficient tram system for London. But the 1895 Election saw him lose his seat to the Conservative, Harry Marks, by a mere four votes. Benn argued that Marks had bribed, cheated and bought the seat. He brought the case to court, lost and had to pay legal costs of £6000. He was also banned from standing for Wapping for seven years. Still on the LCC, he threw his energies into public transport, and in 1903 London’s first electric trams were introduced.

In 1904 He returned as MP for Devonport and in 1906 was joined by his son William. Elected for his father’s old seat of Wapping the 28-year-old William Wedgewood Benn was ‘Baby of the House’, the youngest member in the Commons. William was already grounded in politics and dissent. As President of Union Debating Society at University College London he had argued furiously against Britain’s involvement in the Boer War - and been hurled out of a window by angry students. In Parliament he accused a Conservative, Percy Simmons, who voted against the 1906 School Meals Act, of being ‘against the feeding of children’. Simmons sued for libel and won £5000. Father John managed to pay off the debt.

William also maintained his support of the trade union movement, upsetting fellow ministers - by now he was Junior Lord of the Treasury - when he helped raise funds for the 1912 London Dockers Strike. When war was declared in 1914, Lllyd George put him in charge of the National Relief Fund. With the help of the Fleet Street papers he raised over £1m in ten days. War service was another thread that ran through the family. Resigning his seat William joined up, training as a pilot and winning the DFC, the Croix de Guerre and the Italian Military Cross. And although 62 at the outbreak of World War II, Benn signed up again, as a pilot officer, flying operational missions for the RAF. Now he was joined by two of his sons Tony and Michael, both pilots, though Michael was to be killed, tragically young, in a flying accident.

He was still a politician, by now switched to the Labour Party in protest at Lloyd George’s leadership of the Liberals. Son Tony joined him there in 1950, succeeding Stafford Cripps as MP for Bristol South East. At 26 he was, like his father before, ‘Baby of the House’ and with soft left views that owed much to the families Liberal and Noncomformist history. In later years he would move firmly to the left (though would justifiably argue that the Labour leadership had moved much to the right).

William died in 1960, leaving Tony an unwelcome legacy. He inherited the title Viscount Stansgate (which had been intended for brother Michael, who was to have become a clergyman and sat in the Lords). The family plan was that Michael could argue for the family from the Lords and Tony from the Commons, but in an unexpected twist, the younger brother was now barred from entering the Lower House. He even fought the by-election caused by his elevation … and the voters of Bristol re-elected him, though he had to give the seat to runner-up Malcolm St Clair. Three years later he would finally win his fight to renounce the peerage, and St Clair sportingly took the Chiltern Hundreds, triggering a further by-election, which he won.

A Benn was back in Parliament and Anthony Wedgewood Benn served with honour and controversy in equal measure, under Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and finally as a backbencher under Tony Blair. Often at odds with the leadership and his fellow ministers, Benn oversaw the opening of the Post Office Tower, the launch of Commemorative stamps, the Concorde project and took charge of Britain’s energy policy. He became an outspoken critic of British war policy, most recently as a member of the Stop the War Coalition. ‘All war is a failure of democracy’ is one of his quotes. He is, unsurprisingly, no fan of Tony Blair; his retirement in 2001 from Parliament, as Labour’s longest-serving MP, allowed him to ‘devote more time to politics’. His son Hilary had followed him into politics as the fourth generation of Benn MPs and now serves as Secretary of State for International Development.

Amidst it all, the family had been a source of strength for the Benns. The sprawling, activist, teetotal and tea-drinking Benn clan had always found great strength in the home, but in 1983 the Benns had a nasty shock. A lurid book by Margaret Rutherford’s son-in-law had splashed the story of the murder of Julius Benn, a hundred years before.

‘It was all over the News of the World.’ Benn recalls. ‘They’d hired someone to investigate my ancestry, and identified my connection with Peggy Rutherford and Julius Benn. I was worried that it would be politically embarrassing, but the only person who ever referred to it was a cab driver who said, “sorry to hear about your uncle’, as if it had happened last week.”

The closure of St Clement’s Hospital in Bow Road - with a move to a new purpose-built complex at the Mile End Hospital in Bancroft Road is one of the final (and long overdue) breaks with the asylums of Victorian times. The new centre, with its quiet areas, lounges, landscaped garden and family visiting rooms could hardly be in greater contrast to the dread hospitals of a century and a half ago. In those days, the line between mental hospital, workhouse and prison was blurred at best - and that can be seen in the genesis of St Clement’s.

The original buildings of the St Clement’s Hospital were raised in 1848-49 as a workhouse, for the Board of Guardians of the City of London Union. The workhouses, the first of which opened in the 17th century with the last not closing its doors unitl the early 1930s (the workhouse system was abolished in 1929), were the last safety net for the poor. Designed to be as unpleasant as possible (there was a fear among the powers that be that any raising of the minimum standard would see the working classes giving up on work and opting for ‘poor relief’ instead) they were loathed and feared by the ordinary people. Oliver Twist may have given a highly coloured picture of the workhouse, but maltreatment was not uncommon - and of course entering the workhouse meant the family was split up.

Extraordinary then that a workhouse should have been thought suitable for transformation into a psychiatric hospital - but then the care of those suffering mental illness was a very different thing in Victorian London. The world’s first psychiatric hospital was in the East End of course, the Bethlem Royal Hospital was established in 1330 on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station. Restraint rather than cure was the order of the day and progress was slow. Nobody really knew what mental illness was. The afflicted were called ‘lunatics’ from a primitive belief that their maladies were caused by the cycles of the moon (from which the werewolf legends also descend of course), and there was a not so fine line between mental illness and demonic possession in the minds of many. and things hadn’t moved on much by the 1800s, though by 1700 the ‘lunatics’ were at least being called patients.

From 1725, Bethlem apparently accepted that some patients could be helped, opening a ‘curable’ ward which - more ominously - was followed by an ‘incurable’ ward. But what was wrong with these unfortunates? Morality and sanity were confusingly conjoined, with ‘moral insanity’ being a common diagnosis. Deviation from the sexual mores of the time was a common reason for committal - some of the patients at St Clement’s might have done nothing more than have a baby out of wedlock and failing to conceal the fact.

And not for nothing did Bethlem become corrupted to ‘Bedlam’. Well into the 19th century visitors could pay a penny to watch the peep show - the sane Londoners amusing themselves by observing the very perversions and aberrant behaviour for which they’d locked up the unfortunate lunatics. Antics of a sexual nature were particularly popular of course, and during 1814 there were 90,000 such visits to Bethlem. In our more civilised times we take our voyeuristic pleasures at one remove … William Hogarth (currently showcased at Tate Britain) in his celebrated panel piece ‘A Rake’s Progress’ shows his dissipated hero finally ending up in the Bethlem asylum.

When St Clement’s opened in 1848, Bethlem had been recently demolisehd and moved to Lambeth (in what is now the Imperial War Museum). The sexes were now separated (the censorious Victorians were more wary of sexual freakshows) but the regime was still brutally harsh, with many being punished for their sexual incontinence. The workhouse was converted into an infirmary for the City of London Union [workhouse] in 1874, and in 1912 was reopened as the Bow Institution for the chronic sick.

Workhouses went in the early thirties and the hospital, renamed St Clement’s in 1936 became an exclusively psychiatic unit. It survived major bomb damage in 1944, and became part of the London Hospital in 1968. The treatment of mental illness has moved on and the site of St Clement’s is to be used (probably) for social housing.

Life wasn’t easy in the seventeenth century East End of London. ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ may be a cliche but it accurately described existence in the Tower Hamlets of the 1800s and after. Infant mortality, arcane illnesses, early death and the risk of ending your life at the end of a rope were just some of the hazards.

The ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by the various parishes, were begun in the early 1600s. In this era of continual epidemics, they were intended as an early warning system, the local clerks logging where and when each death had occurred and posting the results on a weekly basis. One wonders what effective action a casual worker in Wapping, living from day to day just above the poverty line, could have taken to escape the cholera in his parish in any case. But what it does do is provide a fascinating picture of what ailed and killed those East Enders of a couple of centuries back.

The information is fine up to a point. The problem was that the people listing the information were not doctors but parish clerks, whose ‘diagnosis’ of what had seen the unfortunates off was vague at best. Certainly, the greatest number of deceased were simply ‘aged’ (though ‘age’ not being an illness nobody actually dies of it). Likewise, ‘bedridden’ and ‘lethargy’ are barely adequate as symptoms let alone diagnoses.

Medical science was far more primitive than today of course, and some illnesses cover a multitude of ailments today. ‘Ague’ for instance, was a condition of alternating hot and cold sweats with fever: sounding very much like modern-day malaria. ‘Quinsy’ was simply an infection caused by untreated tonsilitis, while ‘apoplexy’ (still used metaphorically today) would nowadays be diagnosed as a stroke. ‘Dropsy’ meanwhile, referred to a collection of lymphatic fluid (the modern-day oedema).

And some of the diseases had spectacular titles. St Anthony’s Fire would later be known as Ergotism and was a spectacularly nasty disease caused by fungal contamination of the grains used in baking. Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhoea, paralysis, itching, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hallucinations similar to those of an LSD trip … followed of course by death. In earlier times, the illness might even have been seen as evidence of demonic possession. ‘Rising of the Lights’ would be a disease of the lungs, with ‘Headmouldshot’ a catch-all for illnesses of the brain, such as encephalitis or meningitis.

Entertaining to read (though certainly not to suffer) are entries over the years that include bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s disease, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck. The latter again emphasises the persisting belief that Man’s moods and even sanity were at the mercy of the planets (moon struck would be a variation).

Sad too to see how mundane were many of the illnesses that saw people off. Until recently we’ve complacently thought of measles and chicken pox as childhood diseases to be overcome with a few days off school. But then (as in many parts of the world today) they were real killers. Colds would see off many (especially the young and old of course). The London of the 1700s was not a city of old people, and many of the young didn’t reach maturity. In the 1700s, around 150 or every thousand infants born failed to reach a year old - and things had barely improved a century later. The table below shows just how many mothers died in childbirth too.

LONDON BILL OF MORTALITY 1775
Natural deaths
Abortive and stillborn 529
Aged 1297
Ague 5
Apoplexy, suddenly & planet struck 215
Asthma & tissick 286
Bedridden 6
Bleeding 9
Blood flux 3
Bursten & rupture 9
Cancer 54
Canker 9
Childbed 188
Chicken pox 1
Cold 18
Colick & Twisted gut 70
Consumption 4452
Convulsions 5177
Cough, chin & whooping 206
Diabetes 2
Dropsie 865
Evil 11
Falling sickness 1
Fever, scarlet, purple spotted 2244
Fistula 9
Flux 9
French pox 71
Gout 69
Gravel, stones 36
Grief 3
Griping in the guts 1
Horseshoe head, head made hot, water on the head 19
Headache 2
Jaundice 120
Impostume 11
Inflammation 114
Itch 1
Leprosie 1
Lethargy 6
Livergrown 2
Lunatick 52
Measles 283
Miscarriage 4
Mortification 169
Palsie 65
Quinsie 4
Rash 1
Rheumatism 6
Rickets 1
Rising of the lights 1
Scald head 4
Sciatica 1
Scurvy 2
Sore throat 4
Smallpox 2699
Sores & ulcers 9
St Anthony’s fire 2
Stoppage in the stomach 10
Surfeit 1
Swelling 1
Teeth 694
Thrush 77
Tympany 1
Vapours 1
Vomiting & looseness 5
Worms 1

Non-natural causes
Bite - mad dog 2
Broken limbs -
Bruised 1
Burnt 8
Choked 1
Drowned 104
Excessive drinking 2
Executed 24
Fools etc 64
Found dead 2
Frighted 1
Frozen 1
Murdered 3
Overlaid 4
Poisoned 1
Scalded 1
Shot 1
Smothered 1
Stabbed 1
Starved 2
Suffocated 4
Suicide 29

Last week we saw how East Enders of preceding centuries were beset by illness. Cholera and typhoid and the rest were the diseases of the overcrowded city, and they had a dramatic impact on life expectancy. The census of 1851 recorded half of Britain’s population as living in towns (the first time ever, anywhere on the planet). Death from sickness was now at a level not seen since the Black Death in the 14th century, and things had been getting steadily worse. A child born in London in 1820 could expect to live to 35. by the 1830s, life expectancy had fallen to 29. To give a comparison: a man born in 1960 could expect to live to around 68. If he’s still around today, he can expect to get past 80.

The pattern, since the late 17th century, meant that although London was becoming biggest and most populous city on the planet (overtaking Paris), it also had a population shortage. After steady growth during the 1600s, numbers had topped half a million by 1700, and reached a million by 1800. Numbers doubled again by the time of that 1851 census. London would look strange to us now, with few old people (though a less healthy populace would undoubtedly appear older) and with relatively few children. Infant mortality was over 50 per cent, and in any case people weren’t having many children.

In the late 1600s, people were marrying late for one thing - Londoners struggling to survive financially were perhaps less likely to want the additional financial burden of children, or perhaps even to survive long enough to bear them. Illegitimacy was a stigma, so there were relatively few children born outside wedlock. The London population was barely even replacing its numbers.

As ever with London, this huge growth was largely fuelled by immigration, mostly from a good distance. Certain districts of London were predominantly Scottish, Irish or Yorkshire. And Spitalfields was fast filling with Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in mainland Europe. As fertility and reproduction declined, so the numbers rose - there was lots of work but not enough new Londoners to do it. As the 1700s wore on, so immigration increased from around the capital. The rise of extensive farming (fewer people needed to farm larger estates) meant many were forced from the land of the home counties, and fetched up in the ever-growing conurbation east of Aldgate. By one estimate, around a sixth of England’s population had lived in London at one time.

By the early 1700s there were Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazim from Poland and Germany settled in Whitechapel and Petticoat Lane, while the Irish were creating ‘Little Dublin’ in St Giles in the Fields. The end of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the American War in 1781 saw black immigrants from Africa, America and the Caribbean settle in numbers in London. By 1800 there were probably between 5000 and 10,000 black people in London.

And social patterns changed. From the 1730s onwards, the marriage age began to fall (to below 25) and illegitimacy increased too. Of course infant mortality accounted still for around half of all births. And still, the London population couldn’t replenish itself ‘organically’ - still immigrants poured in. By 1841, less than two thirds of Londoners had actually been born here. French, Poles, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews and Blacks were all common sights on London streets. London grew rich on trade (for the lucky few at least). For the rest, pouring in from Essex and beyond, there were always jobs in service, on the docks or in the burgeoning ‘manufactories’.

And by the 19th century there had been another interesting turn. Infant mortality was dropping. There were more children about just as life expectancy was plummeting to below 30. The result, was more orphans, and more of street children seeking any way to survive that they could. In rising panic, the toffs of the West End identified the young urchins, pickpockets and cutpurses who made traversing the streets of the City such a risk. The records of the Central Criminal Court of the time identify two thirds of defendants in trials as being between 14 and 30. Not too much of a leap from here perhaps to the ‘thieves’ kitchens’ that journalist Charles Dickens observed on his journeys through the East End of London - the characters redrawn as The Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes and the rest.

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.

‘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.