The dwindling of the Roman Empire saw London disappear from recorded history in 457. But when it did reappear, it was as England’s administrative centre. It also showed a distinctive trait that will be familiar to current East Enders – of welcoming outsiders from every corner of the known world while remaining fiercely independent.

In 597AD, St Augustine arrived in England as the very first Archbishop of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory to bring Christianity to the heathen Britons. Augustine’s success was patchy at best. The Roman Church’s missionary policy was to convert the kings and queens of Europe, finding their people would follow suit. He had no problems with the people of Kent and Essex, but London was a harder nut to crack. In 604AD, the old Londinium had regained sufficient importance for Augustine to appoint Mellitus the first Bishop of London; he even built a cathedral – the very first St Paul’s. But the staunchly heathen Londoners drove the bishop out of town.

It was a spirit that was to prove essential in the centuries that followed. The next invaders to target London were the Danes, the first wave of Vikings. They burnt the last of the old Roman buildings to the ground in 851. King Alfred, the closest thing to a national sovereign England had, decided that London’s restoration was crucial to the resurgence of the country. Its spirit and defiance was a totem, as well as the city being in a hugely important strategic position at the shallow crossing of the Thames. By now the old name of Londinium was long gone – cockneys were calling the city Lunduntowne.

The Vikings may have been feared at first, but like those before and after, the early invaders soon became part of the city. By 1016, England even had a Danish king, Cnut or Canute, and Danes settled east of the city, in what is now Wapping. More settled along the River Lea at Hakon’s Ea (Hakon’s Isle), what was to became Hackney.

In 961, a terrible fire destroyed that first St Paul’s Cathedral, and 20 years later another blaze destroyed the last of the Roman city.

But in 1060 the foundations of another city were lain, to rival London. Edward the Confessor left his Wardrobe palace next to St Paul’s and built the first Palace of Westminster, on what was then a remote and bramble-infested island.

The royal family of England was soon to change of course. When William the Conqueror arrived, he realised he needed protection from the native Londoners as much as from abroad. He set to building the White Tower, later the centrepiece of the Tower of London, on a safely raised position at the east of the city – Tower Hill. Until fortifications were complete he retreated to the safety of Barking in Essex, ‘while certain strongholds were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace’.

Even when the White Tower was built, the Norman kings feared for their safety in the capital. The Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, quickly relocated to Westminster, and that became the seat for the monarchy thereafter. And that set the pattern for London’s development – a rich, diverse, bustling city, yet with a healthy disregard for its mistrustful rulers a mile to the west. London was a melting pot for all European nations and goods. Traders arrived with garlic, wine, spices and fabrics from around the continent.

And then again, in 1087, fire destroyed the city and St Paul’s. In 1135 it happened again. Each time London and its people rose from adversity. One problem never to face them again was that of invaders. With William in 1066 had come the last invading force ever to set foot on English soil. And yet over the next millennium, London would become the greatest melting pot of peoples, products and ideas the world had ever seen.

For further reading see London – the biography of a city by Christopher Hibbert, published by Penguin, ISBN 014005247X

London Compendium

Lord Macaulay, that great early-Victorian historian, claimed to have walked down every street in London. Sam Weller, according to Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, had a knowledge of London both ‘extensive and peculiar’. And Sherlock Holmes, according to his narrator, Dr Watson, had ‘an exact knowledge of London’.

Most of us can’t boast of being so well walked in London – and there are considerably more streets in the metropolis of 2003 than there were in Victorian times. But it was the inspiration of these three characters that led writer Ed Glinert to walk across the capital, from Lambeth to Limehouse, from Whitechapel to Whitehall. And the results of Glinert’s foot-slogging are poured into his mammoth new book The London Compendium, an attempt to ‘unravel the mystery of London’, relating its most fascinating stories not as a chronological list of events but through the physical reality of the place – its areas, streets and buildings.

The East End plays a major part of course, and the encyclopaedic tour of the area’s streets conducts you through a breathtaking cavalcade of facts, figures and faces, where Clement Attlee rubs shoulders with Quentin Crisp, and Bram Stoker (creator of Count Dracula) passes George Lansbury in the road.

Take Fieldgate Street for example. We open with a quote from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell reporting that ‘the best lodging houses are the Rowton Houses [in Fieldgate Street] where the charge is a shilling, for which you get a cubicle to yourself, and the use of excellent bathrooms’. We learn that they were built by Benjamin Disraeli’s private secretary; read Jack London describing the Houses as ‘the monster doss house’ in The People of the Abyss; that Joseph Stalin stayed here as a 28 year old; and that the building is now ‘closed … awaiting redevelopment’.

We move quickly onto Goulston Street, home to Tubby Isaac’s seafood stall, and a notorious housing blackspot in the 19th century (a Whitechapel sanitary inspector once found 20 people living in one house and 12 chickens feeding under a bed). We read novelist Israel Zangwill’s observations on the street ‘a pandemonium of caged poultry, clucking and quacking and cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese were bought alive, and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by the official slaughterers’. And we discover that here a policeman discovered the notorious graffiti on the night Jack the Ripper’s fourth and fifth victims were found. ‘The Juwes are not the men That will be Blamed for nothing’ read the confused and confusing message (quickly and controversially erased by the attending officers). So Glinert leads us expertly through the area, throwing up unanticipated links between poverty, chickens and the world’s most infamous serial killer.

Links pop up all over the place of course, so the author takes a quick trip out of the area. The Sidney Street Siege in E1 has a little arrowed pointer to the Houndsditch Murders (turn to the City section). Columbia Market (E2) has a little pointer sending you to read up on Petticoat Lane in E1. Coming (almost) up to date, the 1999 Brick Lane bomb has pointed links to the bomber’s other atrocities in Soho and Brixton. There are also pull-out boxes on areas that need a little more expansion – the Kray twins, the Battle of Cable Street, George Lansbury and Poplarism and many more.

The East End is broken down into chapters on E1, E2, E3 and E13 and the remaining chapters cover central London, the City, the West End, Whitehall and Westminster, the River Thames, North London, North West, South East, South West and West London.

Confused? You won’t be, because the book is not only expertly organised but has a superb index, and ties the whole of London together into a sprawling, complex yet contiguous whole. ‘One of those books destined to be read until they fall apart’ according to that chronicler of London, Iain Sinclair. And it has the unexpected bonus of a cover design by painter of London landscapes (and former Clash bass player) Paul Simonon. Buy a copy, don a stout pair of walking shoes … and explore.

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert, published by Penguin, ISBN 0713 996889, hardcover £25, in the shops from the 30th October.

London is a many-layered city. With two millennia of development and redevelopment, new roads and buildings, and accelerating expansion over the past couple of hundred years, nothing stays untouched or unchanged in London for long. Landmarks such as the Tower of London stand as perennial landmarks, but who could say for sure where the old Whitechapel St Mary’s tube station stood, could place the sites of the Jack the Ripper murders, or confirm where the Bedlam Hospital was?

In a fascinating marriage of ancient and ultra-modern, London Revealed puts dozens of old London landmarks back on the map. The book employs Get Mapping’s aerial photos of the capital (Get Mapping’s Millennium Map took aerial shots of every inch of the UK) and then overlays them with the old sites. Though there can be shocks in store – finding out that your seventies semi stands on the site of a mediaeval plague pit for example – the themed chapters build a fascinating picture of how new London overlays the old.

The East End more than plays its part, over a succession of chapter titles as diverse as Protests and Riots, Museums and Art, Green London, Dickens’ London and many more. The Story of Docklands centres on a detailed view of the Isle of Dogs, pinpointing Billingsgate Fish Market, the London Arena and of course Canary Wharf. Tellingly, most of the notable sites here date from the last 30 years – the post-docks era.

Photo-maps place the multitude of riots and disturbances that have scarred and enlivened London life over the past centuries. The Gordon Riots famously kicked off in 1780 with burnings of Catholic houses and chapels in Poplar and Spitalfields, before the protagonists moved in to the City itself, the sacking of the prisons and then drunken chaos. And in 1517, Evil May Day had seen artisans and apprentices attack the property of foreign workers in Stepney – 135 Flemings were killed. A modern map paints an altogether more comfortable picture of different races and cultures living together in London. We see the current pattern of East End settlement by Bangladeshi and Somali immigrants – and dozens more languages and cultures in Tower Hamlets.

The aerial photograph of ‘Green London’ shows just how badly the East End needed Victoria Park. The nineteenth century creation emerges as just about the only green space of any size east of the City and west of the River Lea – in marked contrast to the west of town with vast expanses such as Richmond Park and Wimbledon Common, and the West End’s Hyde Park, Green Park and Regent’s Park. Of course new parks have emerged since, often from unlikely sources. The Dead and Buried chapter features plenty of retired cemeteries, including Tower Hamlets Cemetery: opened in 1841, closed in 1966 and now a much-loved green space and nature reserve in the shape of the Cemetery Park.

Death of course was ever-present for earlier generations of East Enders. The Plague map shows how badly Tower Hamlets was hit by the Great Plague of 1665. The highest concentrations of mortality (measured at more than 3000 deaths per 478 sq yards) were in Spitalfields, along the Ratcliff Highway and around the Wapping Docks. The cholera epidemics of the mid-1800s were both imported by incoming sailors via the docks, and fed by the fetid water and cramped conditions of the East End. In February 1832 cholera broke out in Limehouse, and it was to strike again in 1848 and 1854. There were other dangers in Victorian London of course. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 are pinpointed on a detailed aerial photograph of Whitechapel and Spitalfields.

The book charts the development of London, from prehistoric, through Roman, Norman, Mediaeval, Tudor and Victorian London to the present day. We see the gradual sprawl of the East End at the City’s eastern wall, with market gardens, monasteries and then ‘stink’ industries butting up against London proper. And in Victorian times we see London burst its ancient boundaries, as the East End appears in wave after wave of tenements and terraces. The chapter on the Boundary Estate displays the technique of old diagrams on modern photographs at its best, dramatically showing how the new improved housing cut across the old street plan.

This is a book to pick up, flick through and spend hours jumping from chapter to chapter. You may be horrified or delighted to find what lies beneath your home.

London Revealed by is published by Collins, ISBN 0007166389, £17.99 hardback. See also www.getmapping.com.

Many great institutions have been born over a drink. Lloyds Bank and Lloyds of London both owe their names to the Lloyds Coffee House where their founding fathers met to discuss business.

And the world’s first football association, the English FA, was started on October 26, 1863, when members of the main clubs and schools met at the Freemasons’ Tavern, in Great Queen Street, Holborn, to thrash out a structure.
But there can’t be many hospitals that have been founded over a pint. But that’s how the London Hospital began, when seven men met at the Feathers Tavern in Cheapside one night in 1740.
The guiding light was a 22-year-old surgeon John Harrison, a new member of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company – this was in the days when your hairdresser practised rudimentary medicine too.
The seven leased a house in Moorfields, the first of a series of short-lived homes. In 1741 the London Infirmary, as it was known, moved to Prescott Street near the Minories.
The infirmary seems a curious hospital to modern eyes. No deaths were recorded and the only discharges were for misdemeanours. From 1755, released patients were classed as cured or relieved, and had to return to their parish churches to give thanks to God. Any who failed to do so were blacklisted and never treated again.
Professional bug destroyers would continuously delouse the wards – there was no running water, while excrement and removed body parts were carried out at night by the orderlies and dumped in the street.
Filthy streets
Hygiene was a huge problem in the filthy streets east of the City – and the Minories was a hotbed of brothels and gin palaces. But in 1753 the governors had raised sufficient cash to build a grand new hospital, among the green fields of Whitechapel.
The London Hospital was the finest in the capital, boasting running water and flush toilets. And it attracted the finest surgeons.
Until now, the hospital had refused to take students but, under Sir William Blizard, the pre-eminent medical man of his age and founder-president of the Royal College of Surgeons, the first London teaching hospital was set up. Until now the profession had been taught in private schools.
The new school opened in 1785, boasting a chemical laboratory, the now-famous museum and a dissecting room.
Throughout the 19th century the hospital became the most famed in England.
In 1854, a new medical school was set up, and in 1876, Queen Victoria opened a new wing. The hospital now had 790 beds – it was the biggest in the country.
The dominant figure of the early 20th century was Sydney Holland. He became Chairman in 1896 and, until his death in 1931, raised huge sums of money for the hospital. By the time he died, the Boulton Mainwaring building of 1857 had been completely rebuilt.
War damage
The London suffered major bomb damage in World War II but, beneath the rebuilding, and the 1990 addition of a helicopter pad, Mainwaring’s Georgian building remains, at the heart of a group of hospitals which since the 1960s has also encompassed St Clement’s Bow and Mile End Hospitals.
And it was in 1990 that the London changed its name. The infirmary which had once housed 30 beds in a rented house, leased by a barber turned surgeon, became the Royal London Hospital and the Queen marked 250 years of history with a royal visit.

Sometimes you don’t see what’s right under your nose. And it often takes strangers to our city to spot its hidden treasures.

A stranger was just what Geoffrey Fletcher was when he set about chronicling disappearing London 35 years ago.
The young journalist from Bolton was a keen student of the Victorian gems of London architecture – and a fierce critic of the carbuncles which were fast replacing them.
His book, The London Nobody Knows, swiftly became a classic and then a successful film, starring James Mason.
Now updated and reprinted, the new edition casts another eye on disappearing London, with a chapter dedicated to the East End. But, as Fletcher laments, much has been swept away since his book first appeared.
“The East End is lived in by the friendliest people in the world,” says Fletcher, as he travels around Limehouse, centring on the small area around St Anne’s Church.
He takes us round the Victorian funeral parlour of Francis and Chris Walters, on the corner of Commercial and Burdett Road, an over-the-top rococco masterpiece, with its ornate black, gold and purple shopfront.
He stops off at the pub next door, the Star in the East – “a great gothic pub, full of mirrors and retaining its lamps outside on the pavement” – and crosses the road to the church.
Hawksmoor built many churches in London, many to replace those destroyed by the Great Fire, but three of his finest are in the East End. St George in the East, Wapping, Christ Church, Spitalfields and St Anne’s were needed to serve the population of an East End that was already becoming overcrowded.
St Anne’s, built between 1712 and 1730, is “imbued with baroque rhythms, yet massive and solid, like Johnson’s prose.”
Fletcher strolls along the river, the source of all this development after all, and reminisces on old photographs of the Limehouse shoreline – “a place of curious houses and boatbuilders yards, sailing ships and masts made a sort of petrified forest.”
The last remnants are in Narrow Street, adjoining the Bunch of Grapes pub, from whose verandah customers can “watch the ships that pass in the night.” This is the pub that Charles Dickens re-christened The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters and immortalised in Our Mutual Friend.
Fletcher is less impressed with Poplar, which “architecturally has rather a low rating,” but mentions its status as a small isolated village up to the building of the East and West India Docks, the birthplace of Brunel’s great white elephant of a ship, the Great Eastern.
As he travels round London – from Pimlico to Rotherhithe, from Camden Town to Bermondsey, Fletcher’s eye is caught not by the hustle and bustle and the monumental blocks that are continually being thrown up, torn down and replaced by even bigger ones.
He spots the tiny details – the Victorian public toilet, the sewer gas ventilating lamp in the Strand, an art nouveau pub or a jellied eel emporium.
This beautifully-written and illustrated book – Fletcher’s line drawings bring each chapter to life – will make you look at your town in a different way. But don’t hang about – this London is not only hidden, it’s disappearing fast.

London under London

It seems like the streets of the East End get busier every day, as cars, buses, lorries and pedestrians rush frantically about their daily business.
But if London seems busy on the surface, there is another world, a subterranean world we only see glimpses of. As much is going on beneath the streets of the city – and a new edition of a fascinating book scratches away at the London clay to uncover the complex world that lies beneath our feet.
Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman’s London Under London leaves no stone unturned, as the pair look at East Enders being driven underground by the Blitz, the lost and buried rivers of London, the intricate network of water, hydraulic power and gas pipes that feed our city, tunnels under the Thames, underground railways, civil defence… and ‘oddities’.
Many of these oddities are underground systems that have been made redundant by progress and the passage of time – the subterranean tram system proposed by a Royal Commission in the early 1900s but never adopted; the ghost Underground stations, such as St Mary’s Whitechapel, which were left behind by population shifts, ruthless competition, or just rank bad planning; and the disastrous attempts to join east and south London by tunnels under the Thames.
We see the often shambolic progress of Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel – 18 years and several bankruptcies in the construction, it claimed the lives of several workmen and, ultimately, that of the broken Brunel himself.
The tunnel, like many under-London schemes, adapted to the times, becoming first a footway, then the route of the London to Brighton railway, before finally settling into its role as the conduit of the East London Line between Wapping and Rotherhithe.
Of course, much of the tunnelling was essential to protect the life of London as a city. The East End was sinking under a tide of filth and sewage before Joseph Bazalgette built his new sewage system in the 1800s, and we follow the progress of London’s fresh drinking water eastward – in fact only the pipes that run from the River Lea’s reservoirs go against this flow, pumping water westward and back into the East End.
And if you think London is overcrowded today, take a look at Victorian street scenes – if possible, the traffic moves even more slowly. It was in response to this Dickensian gridlock that underground railways were first proposed – boring through the East End soil in the case of the Central Line, but causing much more chaos in the construction with the cut-and-cover District Line and wholesale destruction of streets and houses.
Some tunnelling is more secret than others of course. The book charts the building and appropriation by tunnels of generations of governments, ministries and essential utilities, as they built bolt holes against terrorism, insurrection and nuclear war
And we see how the undermining of London continues into our new century, as ever more traffic competes for a finite amount of space – the Isle of Dogs, already carved to pieces a century or so ago to accommodate the ocean-going goods ships, is now holed beneath the surface too, as the Jubilee Line extension snakes under the borough.

London Under London: a subterranean guide by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman; published by John Murray ISBN 0719552885; £15.99.

The death of Reggie Kray wrote the final chapter in one of the most enduring stories in the annals of East End crime. For nearly 30 years, Kray brothers Ronnie, Reggie and Charlie had either been campaigning for release from prison, or trying to stay out of it.

But in the course of five short years, all three of the notorious founders of The Firm have died. Just five months after attending older brother Charlie’s funeral, Reggie died of cancer at a hotel in Thorpe St Andrew, Norfolk.

At his trial for the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie, the judge recommended he serve no less than 30 years. An embittered Reggie Kray was still in prison 32 years later feeling, with some justification, that a man with a lesser reputation would have been freed years earlier.

Reggie’s final incarceration in 1969 brought an end to a career of crime that had stretched over 20 years. The twins had grown up in Burdett Road, raised by tough matriach Violet, while their dad Charlie spent much of his time away, working around the country.

They may have had their disagreements with their dad, but one thing they inherited from him was a taste for boxing. Charlie Snr had been a successful bare knuckle street fighter and the twins, along with their father figure, Charlie Jr, soon excelled in the boxing ring.

By the early fifties they were making a living in the East End protection rackets – a profitable business that was interrupted by their being called up for national service.
They were hardly ideal recruits, spending as much time in the glasshouse for fighting as they did on the parade ground. Back on Civvy Street, they took over the Regal billiard hall on Mile End Road.

They were soon making their name with their own spectacularly brutal brand of violence. When a Maltese gang tried to cull protection money from Ronnie, he cutlassed them. Word and fear quickly spread.
By 1957, the brothers had their own club, the Double R, in Bow Road.

They protected their growing assets with a ring of fear, recruiting a band of Scottish and Cockney hardman who would feed the Kray mystique. Such was the fear they generated that, when Ronnie shot George Cornell dead in the Blind Beggar pub in 1966, the police could initially find not a single witness.

It was a pointless killing and another was to be the brothers’ undoing. Jack The Hat was a petty crook who had supposedly been badmouthing the Kray family. In revenge, the twins lured him to a party in Hackney, where Reggie stabbed him to death. The twins were sent down. Ronnie was to die in Broad-moor and Charlie was sent back to prison in 1997 for his part in a cocaine smuggling plot. Ironically, Reg was the only one of the three to die on the outside.

The pair grew in fame and notoriety as the years went by. First there was a musical, then the film The Krays starring brothers Gary and Martin (EastEnders) Kemp. There were innumerable books, and celebrity ‘friends’ by the score.

Prison certainly gave Reg time to reflect on his life. He spent his latter years embracing Christianity and working on his writing. He wanted to be remembered, he said, ‘first as a man, then as an author, poet and philosopher’. Most of all, he craved freedom and a home far from the East End.

But when the last in a long line of intransigent home secretaries did finally free him, it was in recognition that Kray was a dying man. Reggie had long dreamed of seeing out his declining years in a beautiful country cottage, saying recently: “I want to be able to sit out and smell the fresh air, then I will really feel free.
“I might not have long left to enjoy my freedom but that will mean I can die happy. I will savour every moment.’

There weren’t too many moments to savour. Reggie enjoyed just 35 days of freedom after his 32 years in jail.

The definitive Krays website

The Krays website provides an excellent historical overview of the members of the family and the key figures who surrounded them, such as Frank Mitchell, Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie, Leonard Nipper Read, the Richardson Family et al.

With the death of Charlie Kray on April 4, London’s most notorious gangland family is now down to one, with Reggie Kray serving out his life sentence in Parkhurst Prison.
Charlie died an inmate, too. He returned to jail at an age when most of us would be playing with our grandkids and tending the garden – caught out by a pension plan that involved smuggling illegal drugs into Britain.
But who was this lesser-known third member of ‘The Firm’? The dapper figure who appears as a sidekick in David Bailey’s classic 1960s photos of the twins. An older brother who lived in the youngsters’ shadows. The brains behind a brutal gangland machine. An organiser and businessman who professed to hate violence.
On the ‘knock’
Charlie and Violet Kray had their first son in 1926 and named him after his dad. It was a tough time, when the East End was ravaged by the Depression. Charlie Senior led a peripatetic lifestyle, working on the ‘knock’ – travelling the country, knocking on doors, and buying and selling the antiques, gold and silver the owners would show him.
But if money was tight, the family’s house in Gorusch Street, Hackney, was always spick and span. And young Charlie was always well turned out for his classes at Laburnum Street School.
Charlie was raised on his grandad and dad’s tales of boxing. Grandad Lee was a bare-knuckle fighter in Victoria Park, and Charlie Senior would take his son to local bouts. As he grew, Charlie, who was a natural athlete, became a keen fighter himself, as well as playing in the school football team and becoming an accomplished runner.
Proud
Charlie had a little sister who tragically died, but he could not have been more pleased when his mum gave birth to twins. The seven-year-old would push Ronnie and Reggie round the East End streets in their pram, and loved it as people bent over the pram to admire the pair.
In 1939, the Krays moved to 178 Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, and – apart from a year as evacuees in Suffolk – that remained their home. Charlie Senior was now even more absent than before: much to his disgust he had been conscripted into the Army and quickly went AWOL. The Kray family soon got used to the police knocking on 178 in
the early hours hoping to catch the deserter.
It was probably then that Charlie first took on his mantle of man of the house – a paternalistic relationship to the twins that he never really let go. He was now working as a messenger at Lloyds in the City, and giving as much cash to Violet as he could.
Retired boxer
Charlie joined the Navy, boxing for the Senior Service at welterweight, but terrible headaches led to him being medically discharged due to chronic migraines. His boxing career was coming to an end, too. Back in Civvy Street he lost a professional bout and promptly retired, devoting himself to managing his
brothers’ fighting careers.
Charlie already knew there was something different about these boys, saying: “Sometimes they looked up at me in a strange, adult sort of way, and I’d have this weird feeling
that they knew all about me and what was going on
around them.
“Their dark eyes seemed to lack that childlike innocence. It was as if each boy knew more than he ought. The mental and physical relationship between them was intense.”
The brainy brother
In their 1960s heyday, Charlie was always the brother in the background – organising, handling the money, the brains behind the operation according to many.
Detective Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, who put the three away in the late 60s, said: “When the twins were in trouble, Charlie was the first person they’d turn to. He was clever but never violent. All he had to say was he was Charlie Kray, and
people looked over his shoulder and wondered where the twins were.”
But Charlie got sucked in to the violence, being jailed for 10 years as an accessory to the murder of Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. A murder charge on Frank Mitchell was dropped.
Drug smuggling
Out of prison he reinvented himself as a businessman, brokering the deal for the 1990 Krays movie, starring Spandau Ballet stars Gary and Martin Kemp. Martin, now a star in BBC soap EastEnders, said: “We would not have been able to make the film without him.”
But the money was quickly spent and, in desperation, Charlie got involved in drug smuggling. It was a disastrous decision and, in 1997, he went back to jail as Britain’s oldest top security prisoner, protesting his innocence.
The calling of ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser as a character witness failed to sway the judge; neither did his own counsel describing him as “a pathetic old has been”.
Charlie died peacefully, his family around him, and shortly after a visit from his beloved younger brother Reg.
He will have a traditional East End state funeral at Chingford Cemetery on Wednesday, April 19.

The definitive Krays website

The Krays website provides an excellent historical overview of the members of the family and the key figures who surrounded them, such as Frank Mitchell, Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie, Leonard Nipper Read, the Richardson Family et al.

The two Kossoff brothers took their different routes into showbusiness. But over long lives and careers, in film, TV and radio each would become friendly and familiar voices to generations of Britons.

Alec Kossoff was the older by some 11 years. Born in October 1908, he was the son of Louis and Anne, who like many others had fled persecution in the pogroms of Russia for a new life in London. And like so many others they ended up going no further than Whitechapel. Louis ended up working in the East End rag trade – a tough and badly paid profession that Alec and his younger brother David were determined to escape.

The young Alec won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), winning a silver medal on graduation. With his newly Anglicised stage name, Alan Keith, he went on to the stage: one of his earliest roles saw him in George Bernard Shaw’s own production of ‘Major Barbara’, in the West End. He also worked as a stand-up comic at the Windmill Theatre … a tough gig with the comedians filling the gaps between the nude performers that all the punters had really come to see.

But it was on radio that Alan was to become a star. He was already a fixture on the BBC by the mid-thirties. Then in 1959 he came up with a beautifully simple idea that would define the rest of his career. Your Hundred Best Tunes, was first broadcast on the Light Programme, (later to become Radio 2) on 15 November 1959. The show was slated for a 13-week run but was an immediate hit. Alan Keith OBE was still presenting the Sunday night show in March 2003, when he died at the age of 94.

Alan selected the tracks from the BBC music library – generally popular classics. A listeners’ poll in 1997 showed a typical selection, with Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers coming in at Number 1 just ahead of Finlandia by Sibelius. His criteria were simple: “A tune must be popular, and it must be good of its kind – even if it’s only a Cockney ballad it must have class.”

The younger Kossoff, David, was born in 1919, and unlike his older brother had no immediate ambitions to go on the stage. His first concern was to get a better-paid job than his father. After leaving school he went to art school and decided to be an interior designer, mostly of furniture. Years later, he would renovate his own London home … and make the furniture. At the beginning of the Second World War, he was working as an aircraft draughtsman.

His first stage appearance was in November 1942, playing Juan Rojo in a Unity Theatre production of Spanish Civil War play The Spanish Village. He stayed with the left-wing theatre group for three years, directing and performing in plays put on to entertain Londoners in the communal air raid shelters during the Blitz.

Kossoff was to find his roots useful as he began to establish himself on stage and TV in the fifties, specialising in Jews and Russians.

He became a much-loved figure on TV playing Peggy Mount’s hen-pecked husband in sitcom ‘The Larkins’. And, using his prematurely grey hair as a prop to act older than his years he appeared in two of Wolf Mankewitz’s finest movies. In ‘A Kid For Two Farthings’ the 36-year-old David played an elderly Jewish tailor, trying to keep a cockney boy’s dreams alive. In ‘The Bespoke Overcoat’ the following year he was, once again, a Jewish tailor.

Kossoff himself wasn’t an especially religious man and had married outside the Jewish faith. But his next big role saw him reinterpreting the Bible on BBC radio, retelling stories in a friendly, homespun way … Kossoff was a masterful storyteller. The Book of Witnesses (1971) was a TV series in which he turned the Gospels into pacey monologues. He penned the prayer book ‘You’ve Got A Moment, Lord?’ and published ‘Stories From A Small Town’, based on 19th-century Jewish-Russian folk tales.

The final stage of his career was the most poignant. In 1976 his son Paul, lead guitarist with rock band Free, had died of a heart attack brought on by drug abuse. He was just 25. Kossoff spent the rest of his days using his performing talents to warn young people of the dangers of drugs: touring his one-man show ‘The Late Great Paul’ round schools and universities.

East Enders have always known how to go out in style. Whatever the financial privations they suffered during their lives, they have made a tradition of mounting lavish funerals to rival those of kings, queens and heads of state.

A new book, The London Way of Death, looks at a century of change in how Londoners have chosen to make their exit. Not surprisingly the title, by Brian Parsons, focuses heavily on East End funerals.

One of the most spectacular funerals in recent times followed the death of Ronnie Kray in 1995. “Aerial photographs of his horse-drawn hearse and twenty three limousines snaking their way over the Bow Flyover appeared on the front cover of a number of tabloids the following morning,” writes Parsons.

These modern funerals draw their style and scale from Victorian tradition. Victorian funerals were characterised by their “extravagance and pretension”. And Charles Dickens, that keen observer and chronicler of East End life, was hugely unimpressed. His books contain scathing descriptions of the expense and the mercenary behaviour of the undertakers.

The Victorian era had seen a revolution in the London way of death. By the 1830s, the East End had become so crowded that the old churchyards were running out of space to bury people. A cordon sanitaire was built round the (then) outskirts of London to deal with the problem. Highgate, Kensal Green, Brompton, Norwood, Nunhead and Tower Hamlets made up the ring of necropolises – Tower Hamlets now living on as the Cemetery Park. And the Metropolitan Interment Act of 1850 closed metropolitan graveyards to new customers for good, throwing the responsibility entirely onto these new urban cemeteries.

But the impressive processions to the grave continued, and the East End had more than its share of the great and the good to mourn. Tower Hamlets benefactor Dr Thomas Barnardo died on 5 September 1905. His coffin lay in state at the Edinburgh Castle Mission in Limehouse. Then a lengthy procession, headed by the band of the Stepney Boys’ Home, preceded the coffin to Liverpool Street Station for the journey to Barkingside.

Just months later, Angela Burdett-Coutts died at the age of 92. The philanthropist, who had built Columbia Market, and given her name to Burdett Road, was interred in Westminster Abbey – her funeral and procession attended by numerous East Enders who had benefited from her generosity.

The East End had its own aristocracy to mourn. When Charlie Brown, ‘the uncrowned king of Limehouse’ died on 5 June 1932, he was famed around the world. The publican of the Railway Tavern, opposite the gates to the West India Docks, had turned his pub into a treasure trove of curios over his 36 years in charge. Visitors from around the globe – including the King of Spain – came to see the collection of antiques, worth a reputed £30,000. Appropriately enough, the procession to Tower Hamlets Cemetery was fit for a king.

And could any state funeral at Westminster Abbey compare to the interment of George Lansbury in 1940. The grandfather of actress Angela Lansbury had been a member of the Labour Party for 50 years, served as Mayor of Poplar, and been MP for Bow and Bromley since 1922, and his influence and renown outstripped that of many ministers of state. The funeral service, at St Mary’s Church Bow, was attended by national politicians and dignitaries from around the world. But most important, it was packed with ordinary East Enders, saying goodbye to one of their own.

The London Way of Death by Brian Parsons is published by Sutton Publishing (www.suttonpublishing.co.uk). ISBN 0750925396, £10.99.