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Eyewitnesses of the Blitz

Nov. 03 East End at war no comments


Eyewitnesses of the Blitz

A generation or two back, the Second World War was something everyone lived with, and had lived through. Now with it nearly 60 years distant, more and more of our information is confined to the history books and newsreels – to children today it seems like ancient history.

All the more vital then to capture the first-hand accounts of those East Enders who lived through the greatest conflict we’ve known – when for the first time not just soldiers, but every man, woman and child was touched by war.

A group of teachers and academics have been tirelessly compiling an online record* of these eyewitness accounts – before the first-hand witnesses are gone forever. A schoolboy seeing GIs for the first time; a woman having her home jerry (re)built after the Blitz; a young Jewish girl finding that Germany wasn’t the only home of anti-Semitism – the accounts are as diverse as they are powerful.

Pamela Lazarus was that Jewish schoolgirl. As she recalls: “It wasn’t much fun being a small kid at that time. It was too scary. London was a smoggy city, filled with grey skies, grey fog, rainy days and one seldom saw a blue sky or sunshine. Or so it seemed. And indoors, it always seemed to be night. Everyone had black curtains on the windows so that no light would escape into the street.”

Evacuated from the East End

And when she escaped to the countryside there were other unpleasant surprises in store. “Most of our country trips were not so exciting or pleasant. The people in the country were paid for the room and board of the Londoners, and they didn’t like us. They would come to the train station when we’d arrive, and choose the family they would take. They didn’t like fat people because they would eat too much. They didn’t like Jews because they were supposedly all the awful things that have ever been said about Jews. And we were Jewish.

”Mother had pinned a tiny Star of David to my undershirt, hoping it would work like a good luck charm to help keep me alive. One evening, the lady of the house walked into our room while mother was giving me a sponge bath, saw the Star of David and became hysterical. She told us to leave her house, screaming that we had ‘contaminated’ everything we had touched – her dishes, her knives and forks – her very air!”


Blitz on the East End

Kathleen Brockington was a young London housewife when war broke out. “For the first few days a lot of people were very frightened. I remember my mother-in-law bursting into tears and putting her gas mask on that first day. She wore it for about an hour but nothing happened and she took it off again when we gave her a cup of tea and she realised she couldn’t drink it with the gas mask on!

“The night I was bombed out my husband was away fire fighting around St Paul’s Cathedral and the East End which was getting a proper pasting.” A bomb wrecked the family home, and Kath spent an anxious few hours trying to track down her husband.

“I went home and climbed back through the window. There was dust and glass and bricks everywhere but I slept on my bed in my clothes until 6am, then went to stay with my mother. I was very shocked of course, and worried that when my husband got back from working day and night putting out fires he would go home and assume the worst. One of my mum’s neighbours had a telephone and I tried to find out where he was but around the East End of London it was a proper mess.

Rationing in wartime London

“After a few months the house was patched up by a local firm (the government paid for that) so I could live in it. A right shoddy job they made of it too, but like the wardens said, there were lots worse off and at least I was still alive.”

And Tom Holloway casts his mind back to being a nine-year-old in the London of 1942. Treats were scarce and appreciated all the more for that.
“I know there’s butter in the cupboard but that’s special. I would really really like some dripping on my bread. The jam ration is nearly gone so I have to spread it on my bread-and-marge very thinly. Bread isn’t rationed so I eat about six slices.

“Tomorrow we’ll have one of our favourite meals … Roast potatoes (that’s why I’m not allowed the dripping) and boiled cabbage with a ‘knuckle’ of bacon boiled with the cabbage.

“Yes, on the whole we’re OK. We don’t live like the King and Queen and Princess Elizabeth in the Palace, but we’re healthy and alive and maybe on Saturday I’ll get an extra boiled egg!”

http://timewitnesses.org is compiled by the Chatback Charitable Trust


The East End then and now

Nov. 03 East End book reviews no comments


The East End Then And Now* is not only one of the most exhaustive histories of east London you’ll ever read – at more than 500 A4 pages, packed with glossy pictures, line drawings, contemporary reports and recollections, getting through it could be positively exhausting!

Of course this isn’t a book to read cover-to-cover all at once. It is a painstaking encyclopedia of the most diverse and fascinating region of England. The real strength of the book is in its “then and now” approach.
It’s sometimes difficult to picture the exact spot where a murder took place, or where an old building stood – the East End suffered so badly from German bombs that new buildings and remodelled streets sometimes make it hard to get your bearings.

But – on the old theory that a picture paints a thousand words – antique and contemporary pictures have been painstakingly sought out and placed next to their modern-day equivalents. Now you can actually see what the old St Mary’s Tube station – now lost forever under the Citroen garage in Whitechapel Road – really looked like. And you can take the same position as the waiting soldiers as they look towards the siege of Sidney Street – now replaced by modern flats.

Suffragettes, Krays and the Bell Foundry



Each set of pictures is accompanied by solid chunks of historical background and, where relevant, maps showing the street layouts of the time. Interested in the old pie shops of the East End? You’ll find them in here. Want to know the names of every master founder at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry? Each one since 1420 is listed in the book. And the sheer size of the work allows the authors the luxury of going into extraordinary detail – the chapters on the Suffragettes, Oswald Mosley, the Krays and the Ripper murders are almost books in themselves.

Interestingly too, it gives scope to take a broader picture of the East End. So we get the background to the Second World War and the Munich Crisis. And, post-War, we see the movement of East Enders out to the new towns of Basildon and Harlow. We also see the gradual spread of urban east London over the Essex fields of Stratford and Leytonstone. The book brings in the broader picture of east London, rather than cutting the area off at the River Lea and Hackney.
“Docks to Docklands” is one phrase the authors use to describe the destruction and rebirth of the area, and pictures of the Isle of Dogs vividly show the growing developments.

Introducing it all is the authentic voice of a Poplar eyewitness. Over 100 pages, 90-year-old Cyril Demarne strolls back around the East End of his younger days, noting how things have changed and how much, remarkably, remains the same.
Cyril recalls the characters, buildings and stories that coloured his childhood and the history of the East End. And, using the exhaustive index, you will find yourself flicking from Cyril’s recollections to more detailed chapters later in the book. You’ll find some familiar sights and a few surprises – well, I didn’t know TV gardener Geoff Hamilton came from Stepney – but what you’ll certainly get is a read you’ll never tire of.

* ISBN 0 900913 991, Edited by Winston J Ramsey, published by After The Fire books, price £39.95


William Beveridge and Clement Attlee

Nov. 03 East End politicians no comments


William Beveridge and Clement Attlee

It was back in the years before and after the Second World War that two men living and working in the East End laid the plans for the system that would deliver a newer, fairer world for the homecoming servicemen and women.

Economist William Beveridge – born in India in 1879 and educated at Charterhouse public school and then Oxford – was a child of privilege. In 1903 he came to live at Toynbee Hall, in Commercial Street, becoming sub-warden with responsibility for educational activities, and staying in the East End until 1906.
Beveridge’s expertise in the employment – or more accurately unemployment – market was formed when he became director of Labour Exchanges at the age of just 30.

A long career as director of the London School of Economics and as master of University College, Oxford followed. But his years in academia never dimmed the memory of his early years in the East End and his first-hand experience of the horrors that faced the unemployed – and the failure of a system with no “safety net”.

There had to be a better way. And when, during World War Two, the Government approached Beveridge for his ideas on a new system to sweep away the deprivation and want of the pre-war years, the economist set to work on a report on Social Insurance and Allied Services.

The Beveridge Report appeared in 1942 and caused a stir of excitement throughout Britain, with its outline of a comprehensive scheme of social insurance. Beveridge proposed that everyone would be covered – henceforth no-one would want for food, health care or a roof over their head simply because they were poor or had lost their job. The people at home and the homecoming troops were enthralled – at last this was the fairer world the British had hoped for.


Not fair for all though. Having steered the British people through the darkest days of the Blitz, privation, shortages and six long years of war, prime minister Winston Churchill was confidently expecting a mandate for five years of Conservative government in the election of 1945. There was a hunger for change in the country, though, and to the old guard’s horror a new Labour government was swept to power, under leader Clement Attlee.

“Clem” was just four years younger than Beveridge and, like the great economist, was educated at Oxford. Like him, too, his eyes were opened when he came to live in the East End. He lived first at Haileybury House, off Ben Jonson Road in Stepney, then in 1908 became secretary of Toynbee Hall, joining the Independent Labour Party in the same year. The parallels with Beveridge didn’t end there. In 1913, Attlee started lecturing at the London School of Economics, a career swiftly interrupted by service in the First World War, when he rose to the rank of major.

On his return from war, Attlee became mayor of Stepney and quickly rose through the political ranks – serving as MP for Limehouse from 1922 to 1950 and serving in the first two Labour governments, in 1924 and 1929. In 1935 he succeeded another political giant of the East End when he replaced George Lansbury as leader of the opposition Labour Party. And, in 1942, the very year Beveridge published his report, Attlee became deputy PM to Churchill in the government of national unity.

In 1945, the new government started the most radical programme of social reform the country had ever seen, Beveridge’s ideas flowing through the creation of the NHS and the Welfare State. The last shadows of the workhouse had finally been swept away by two men who had seen the scourge of poverty at first hand – their visions forged in the East End of the early 1900s.


Three Mills and the River Lea

Nov. 03 East End and the Olympics, East End industries, Lea Valley no comments


People often argue about where the East End of London stops and east London starts. But to most East Enders the division is clear. The River Lee forms the eastern boundary of Bow, and Tower Hamlets too. To the west lies Stratford and Newham.

But long before London boroughs were thought of – in fact long before Bow and Stratford were even part of London – the Lee formed a natural break, and thus plays a vital role in the history of London.

There are arguments about the name too: is it Lee, Lea or even Ley? Until the middle ages, the spelling ‘Ley’ appeared, though since 1570 all acts of parliament say ‘Lee’. Today, the river sections are usually called Lea and the canalised parts Lee, while the general area is also known as Lee.

Early London history

Centuries ago it formed the boundary between Essex to the east and Middlesex to the west. But settlement goes much further back still.

The Lee runs from Luton right down to the Thames and its link into the centre of the country gave it enormous importance for transport, trade, and as a strategic boundary.

Evidence of Bronze and Iron Age settlements have been found along the Lee, and the Romans used it too, building Ermine Street parallel to the waterway.


In 527AD, the Saxon kingdoms of Essex and Middlesex were established, themselves becoming part of the kingdom or Mercia in the 8th century. And during the 9th century, the Lee was the boundary between Alfred the Great’s Saxon England to the west and the invading Vikings, who had worked there way from the east coast and through East Anglia.

Danes invade London

Supposedly, the Danes sailed up the Lee in 895AD, only to be stranded by Alfred building a weir and embankment by the Thames and draining the river, stranding the invaders.

By medieval times, England was at peace, Middlesex and Essex were counties rather than kingdoms, and the Lee was more important for its mills. England’s first paper mill was set up on its banks in 1494, and there were flour and gunpowder mills too.

In 1424, an act of parliament had instructed work to improve the Lee’s navigation. Gunpowder, flour, coal and malt could now be moved in quantity to London.

New canalisation technology boosted the Lee further in the 18th century, as new cuts were driven and locks built, allowing larger barges to move goods upriver from the Thames, and through into Hertfordshire.

Many of London’s ‘stink industries’ were now on the banks of the Lee. Slaugherhouses not only provided meat for Londoners but the raw material for the famous Bow bone china. Later on, gasworks and powerstations were to make the Lee one of the most productive, if not the most picturesque, parts of London.

Lee Valley, Royal Enfield and Lesney

Into the 20th century, and the Lee became home to firms making the world’s first radio valves and vacuum flasks; to the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield; and the Lesney company, makers of Matchbox cars.

The arrival of the railways killed the canals of course. By the end of the 19th century bulk cargoes were being moved by train and then by road. And with the decline in Britain’s industries in the latter half of the 20th century, much of the Lee’s banks became shabby and derelict.

In 1967, the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority was set up to develop the banks of the river. Much of the derelict industrial land now came into recreational use, and wildlife and waterbirds began to thrive again.

Memories of the Lee’s industrial past remain with the striking Three Mills at Bromley-by-Bow. But much more lies, barren and derelict.

Could it rise again? If plans come to fruition, of course, this could be the site for the Olympic Games of 2012. And with an Olympic stadium and a cross-Channel rail terminus, the Lee Valley could be back at the heart of things.


The Greathead Shield

Nov. 03 East End inventors no comments


Some ideas seem destined for success from the start – the internet, sliced bread and Velcro were ideas waiting to happen. Some looked doomed from the beginning – the Sinclair C5 and the helicopter ejector seat, among them. And some, like the videocassette and the hot water bottle just get left behind by changing technology or changing tastes.
A citywide grid of hydraulic power? Believe it or not, that was the plan for London in the 1800s – a good idea superseded by electricity. While a cramped omnibus shuttle beneath the Thames, which could transport just a dozen passengers in conditions of unbearable claustrophobia, unsurprisingly went in the dumper straightaway.

But London has a remarkable ability to repurpose its old buildings into new uses – The East End is littered with old mission houses, factories and warehouses now pressed into service as posh flats and offices. More interesting by far are two idiosyncratic structures – one at Tower Hill, another at Wapping – which are all that is left of the London Hydraulic Power Company and the Tower Subway.

Railway mania was gripping London in the mid-19th century, as companies sprung up and investors sunk their money into the ground. The infrastructure of a growing capital would be pegged to Underground railways. They were right of course – but just like dotcom madness and tulip fever, sometimes the eagerness to make money overrides commonsense. An 1868 Act of Parliament authorised a tunnel beneath the Thames between Tower Hill and Tooley Street on the South Bank. A crossing was much-needed, but after the Brunels’ gruelling experience with the Thames Tunnel, there was hardly a queue of bidders.
Step forward keen young South African James Henry Greathead, just 24 but with his own patented improvement on the Brunels’ tunnelling shield. The Greathead Shield worked too – the tunnel was finished in less than a year and the railway began running in August 1870. The service was slow, cramped and the carriages held just a dozen passengers, and the business went bust three months later.
It proved much more successful as a pedestrian tunnel, with a million Londoners passing through each year, and paying a ha’penny a time. The 1894 construction of Tower Bridge, however, just a couple of hundred yards to the east, and toll-free put paid to that though, as traffic collapsed. In 1897, the tunnel was sold for £3000 to another company whose time had come – the London Hydraulic Power Company.


London was a hive of industry, with cranes, lifts, theatre curtains and the hydraulic machinery of Tower Bridge, all needing energy. Steam power alone wasn’t really up to the job, but the city had plenty of water. Pumped straight out of the Thames and heated in winter to stop it freezing, the water was soon coursing through a 200-mile network tunnels fanning out from five power stations (including the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station) as far as Earls Court Exhibition Centre, Pentonville Road and Rotherhithe. Coal-fired steam engines powered the turbines, which in turn pumped the water around London, and the company connected south London with the City and Wapping using the Tower Subway, now hidden from the public forever.

Hydraulic power wasn’t the future, alas. From the turn of the new century, electricity began to take hold. Yet the company didn’t die. From 1923, steam was replaced by electric motors, but still water was pushed around London at 800 pounds per square inch. Remarkably, the system lasted until 1977, when the Wapping station was the last of the five to close.

Again, a new technology was waiting in the wings. The London Hydraulic Power Company had the statutory right to dig up the roads to maintain its network of pipes. This made it attractive to the first of a new breed of company ushered in by Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of British industry. It’s hard to imagine these days, when every one of us carries a mobile, and there are dozens of phone providers to choose from, but back in the early 1980s, the only way to make a phone call was from a telephone attached to the wall and operated by BT.

Mercury was BT’s first competitor, and it snapped up the LHPC’s network of pipes, running its telecoms cables along them. The claustrophobic tunnel that had once housed the world’s first tube railway now became a tangled mass of wires. For a while, Mercury tilted at BT, and its distinctive blue-and-white phone boxes sprouted on London streets. In time, it too would disappear, subsumed back into parent company Cable and Wireless, now it forms part of the DNA of T-Mobile. The cables, of course, remain. The Wapping Hydraulic Power Station would reopen in time as the Wapping Project arts centre and restaurant. New tastes, new uses, but the structures remain.

The bright young engineer Greathead would go on to be one of the major architects of what would become the London Underground (as well as the Blackwall Tunnel) constructing large parts of the Metropolitan and Hammersmith railways and then the City and South London Railway. Now part of the Northern Line, it was the world’s first underground electric railway. He would die young, at just 52, his final work being on the Central London Railway (now the Central Line).


Willy Goldman

Nov. 03 East End writers no comments


Is it overstating the case to call Willy Goldman the lost genius of East End writing? This Jewish son of Stepney, a lover of the written word, traumatised by being forced from school to sweatshop at 14, went on to write one of the great memoirs of East End Life, and was lauded by no less than TS Eliot and CP Snow.

Yet having achieved unlikely success and a measure of fame, by his early forties he had all but stopped writing.

The work for which Willy is now best known is ‘East End My Cradle’, a memoir of his earliest days as part of an ever-growing and increasingly impoverished East End Jewish family. If he fondly remembers his childhood games and playmates, it’s an unstintingly unsentimental view of life in the years after the First World War.
Everybody is in the garment trade, with the acme of ambition to claw your way up, buy a couple of machines, and kit out your back room as a workshop. Then, the next generation of youngsters can be employed in the back-breaking and tedious job of stitching together clothes for a few pennies a time.
The snobbery and hierarchy is stultifying. The man who runs the corner shop, is considered a cut above, as he has escaped the trade that everyone else is slave to. He in turn looks down at his neighbours in the rag trade. And, like some minor aristo, his son inherits the attitude of superiority – until it’s beaten out of him at the local youth club.
There are few ways out of the Ghetto. Boxing was one for young Jewish lads and Willy pulls on the gloves. His skills though are learned merely to defend himself – also one suspects, to follow his beloved older brother, who defeats all-comers and anyone who dares to bully Willy. Another method of improvement is to unstintingly dedicate yourself to your machine-work, and after many years of mindbending monotony put by enough cash to start your own sweatshop.
Or you can study, move up and out – hence the obsession with education of many Jewish parents of the day. Knowledge could mean money and freedom. Willy had graduated from Berner Street Elementary School in Stepney to win a scholarship at St George’s in the East Central School in Cable Street. He had the brains to get out. Imagine the 14-year-old Willy’s horror then when after breaking up from school for summer on the Friday, he is marched along to the sweatshop to start work on the Monday.


“It took me a long time to forgive them that,” he says of his parents. The bright and able student had been looking forward to another couple of years of schooling but it was cruelly snatched away. His parents, Romanian Jews with barely a word of English, had forced their children through ‘Kheder’, the religious school that attempted to drum the Talmud into the children whether they wanted to learn or not, but mainstream education wasn’t taken seriously. Books were mistrusted fiercely. In the end, Willy decided, there wasn’t much to choose between the two schools anyhow. Both privileged the cane over the text book.

But starting work was hard, and the blow seemed harder as his father was scarcely succeeding in business. A market trader, his fortunes had peaked during the First World War. By the mid-twenties, his habit of letting customers run up never-ending slates saw the family often going hungry. The family tried to persuade Goldman senior, who spoke only a few words of English, that he had his sales pitch wrong too. Wheeling his seafood barrow along the cobbled streets of Stepney, he would cry ‘Ripe Fish!’ To their protests, he would reply that they were his fish and he would call them what he liked.

The snobbery of the ghetto kicked in. As the family went down, neighbours began to look down on them, and Willy’s inability to hold down regular work caused endless rows. The rift with his parents saw Willy move between a succession of grim lodging houses. The real sense though is the grinding monotony of the life. Willy was born in 1910, so had the bad timing to be looking for work just as the Great Depression kicked in.

Could life get any worse? ‘East End My Cradle’ ends with a glimpse of the upturn in Goldman’s fortunes. He starts to spend time in the Whitechapel Library, educating himself about the world and starting to write. Having secretly worked on the manuscript of his ‘great East End novel’, he receives a rejection slip – a lucky escape for both Goldman and the readers he laughs. Instead, excerpts are published in New England magazine, and commissions follow from Left Review and New Writing.

The 1940s were enormously prolific. As well as his short stories, full length works were published – The Light in the Dust (1944), A Tent of Blue (1946), Some Blind Hand (1946), A Start in Life (1947) and The Forgotten Word (1948), as well as wartime play, That Thy Days May Be Long (1945). He was rejected for military service having contracted TB, and spent the duration clearing East End bomb sites.

He came second in an Observer short story competition in 1951, with Muriel Spark the winner. His best work was already behind him. By now he was married for the third time and his energies were directed to bringing up his young family, and worked at labouring jobs. Willy Goldman died in 2009, aged 99.

Pictures: book cover; Jewish soup kitchen; Yiddish theatre. – ‘The Jewish East End of Willy Goldman’s youth, where parents spoke Yiddish rather than English, is long gone. So too, thankfully, is the demand to leave school at 14 to work in a sweatshop’.


The Half Moon Theatre

Nov. 03 East End theatre 5 comments


It’s often said that the 1960s didn’t really happen until the 1970s. That was when the alternative ideas, creativity and challenges to the established order really started happening – briefly at least.

So it was that an East End theatre company began by challenging the space between theatre and street, cast and audience. It culminated in one of London theatre’s most vibrant companies and fascinating performance spaces. Yet today the Half Moon on the Mile End Road is a Wetherspoon’s pub, its courtyard space used not for the consumption of Brecht and Chekhov but the ingestion of Chicken Tikka Masala and Shepherd’s Pie … what went wrong?

The Half Moon Theatre Company, which began in 1972 in a rented synagogue in Alie Street, Aldgate, was very much a child of the previous decade. A cheap rehearsal space with living accommodation alongside would make it affordable for the group to put on pretty much any production they chose, and for the performers to exist if not attain riches. And being established right in the heart of the East End, a million metaphorical miles from Shaftesbury Avenue, it would encourage local people to get involved – the sort of people who just didn’t go to the theatre. The name was taken from the nearby Half Moon Passage.

The trio behind the plan were Mike Irving, Maurice Colbourne and Guy Sprung – the first two were unemployed actors (plenty of them in any generation) and the latter artistic director. ‘Build it and they will come’ is an optimistic mantra for any business – and at first they didn’t. A production of Bertolt Brecht’s early masterpiece ‘In the Jungle of Cities’, which wrestles with power, money, status and hatred in 1912 Chicago, might have seemed an unlikely hit, but people came to the 1972 show, and the Half Moon began to get the attention of Fleet Street and the West End.

Michael Billington is today Britain’s longest-serving theatre critic, and the authorised biographer of East End playwright Harold Pinter. But in the early seventies he was new to the reviewer’s chair at The Guardian. He was blown away by an adventurous Half Moon production of Henry IV. Already the Half Moon was thinking about the nature of the theatre space itself – ideas that would come to fruition on the Mile End Road a decade later.

He wrote: “Bill Dudley has ingeniously transformed the auditorium into a medieval loft with a raked wooden platform bisecting the audience and a mini-drawbridge being lowered from a balcony for processional entrances. This means that the actors are rarely more than about fifteen feet away from the audience; and crucial speeches, like Falstaff’s on Honour, can be addressed to individual spectators rather than hurled at a faceless throng.”

For those of us who always sit at the back during live performances, lest we get dragged on stage, it sounds a nightmare, but people loved it. Shakespeare was no longer a precious painting to be viewed behind glass, but something to be lived, experienced, taken part in. The Half Moon had anticipated modern theatre by going right back to the days of The Globe and The Theatre, with performers and audience meeting in the pit. That the synagogue held just 80 people only added to the power and intimacy.

Soon though it was too small. In 1979, the company decamped to a disused Methodist Chapel by Stepney Green (a theme was emerging here). Appropriately, they opened with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. The continuing flavour was class and agitprop theatre – you would go to the Half Moon to see Edward Bond, Dario Fo and Eleanor Marx, as well as Shakespeare. It might not be Shakespeare as you knew it though.

A 1980 production of Hamlet had Frances de la Tour in the title role. The actress, best-known to young audiences as Olympe Maxime, headmistress of Beauxbatons Academy, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is better known to their parents as Miss Jones, target of Rigsby’s unwanted affections in Rising Damp. From the late 1970s, de la Tour was a mainstay of the Half Moon, also appearing in Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay. Set amid the radical politics and economic collapse of seventies Milan) it sat perfectly amid the feeling of chaos and collapse that engulfed Britain in the dying days of Callaghan’s Labour government.

“Don’t confuse serious with solemn, though. There’s a lot of comedy and bite in these plays, and the feeling you were in the thick of it with the cast created a real tension,” remembers Jack Torode, an audience member during the seventies. Michael Canty, another fan of the Half Moon, agrees: “People don’t keep going back to serious theatre because it’s good for them … they go because it’s fun. Performances there were fun.”

The Half Moon continued to provide ‘difficult’, political theatre and to pull in the crowds – demonstrating that people are happy to be challenged while they’re being entertained. Popular theatre could be more than just re-runs of classic hits, light musicals, or pop songs strung around a flimsy narrative. By the early eighties, the company had again outgrown its home (it sat 200). Where would the Half Moon move now – perhaps a disused Catholic Church? The plans that emerged were far more ambitious.

The theatre would expand into a derelict site next door, with a new building leading naturally from the rather lovely red brick chapel. Robert Walker was now the artistic director and he had firm ideas about the use of the space.


1983 was an exciting year for the Half Moon Theatre Company. From its earliest days in a derelict synagogue, it had the funding for a purpose-built space that would change the very way theatre was used.

Architect Florian Beigel was brought in to design a theatre with no fixed seating, making for a very flexible auditorium. Walker wanted everyone to come to the Half Moon, from kids to pensioners, bringing their own work, talking about theatre and performance. The Half Moon now had a proper bar and office space for the first time. In 1985, the now theatre, funded by the Arts Council, the ILEA, the GLC and Tower Hamlets Council, reopened with a production of Christopher Bond’s Sweeney Todd.

Beigel firmly places Robert Walker as the driving force behind the new Half Moon. “He was a very inspiring guy. For him it was all about theatre in the street, theatre in the courtyard. We had a marvellous relationship and came up with the idea of a ‘scenic street’.” This ‘street’ would break the remaining barriers, sweeping you straight off the Mile End Road, into the internal courtyard and right back to the where a spy window looked onto the old Jewish cemetery at the rear. As far as possible, Beigel and Walker had dismantled the walls separating the theatre from its surroundings. The popular and political rubbed shoulders – Woyzeck one week, The Wizard of Oz the next.

The Half Moon traditions were intact though. “The design was based on the most personal, engaged forms of theatre from the past – The Globe, Italian Commedia del Arte – actors and audience together,” Beigel notes. In the garden behind was the Young People’s Theatre. The Half Moon was drawing from the past but looking to the future.

They played around with the space. “At one point we had a horse walking in from the street and right through the building,” laughs Beigel. Somebody had to follow behind and clear up the mess of course. A fine East End tradition – a generation before, local people would have been following brewers’ drays, seeking fuel for their roses. It seems a very long time ago, and a very different world now. Within just a few years the dream would be dead.

Florian affects a vagueness when I ask him his age – ‘Oh, 67, 68 … something like that’, (digging further, it emerges that Beigel was born in 1941). That, and the architect’s thick German accent, legacy of his childhood on the shores of Lake Constance, which has survived decades of living and working in London, impart a rather professorial, unworldly charm to his speech.

As a lecturer in architecture at London Metropolitan University, Florian is training the new generation who will shape London. But Beigel is primarily a working architect, always looking forward, energetically pitching for new projects. On the day we speak, he is savouring the disappointment that his company’s pitch for a project on Mile End Waste has not won the commission.

‘It’s a part of London we are always interested in … it’s very important to us,’ he says. With these visions of the future, architects are perhaps not sentimental, nostalgic people. They may always be looking to the past, but for inspiration and to draw a line to the future. Talking to Florian Beigel today, though, there is still palpable sadness and anger at what happened to the Half Moon.

By the mid-eighties financial problems were mounting. Every penny from the Greater London Arts Association grant was being used to service debts from the build. At the same time, as old faces left and new came in, the Half Moon lost its artistic bearings a little. From growing year on year, the company faced a struggle to hold its audience. All could have been overcome, had the company not suffered the body blow of having its grants cut. Not only did the GLA see its grant as being misused, but the Conservative government decreed that theatres had to be self-supporting. The company’s dream of cut-price political theatre for local people was neither financially nor politically palatable to the party of Margaret Thatcher. In 1990, the Half Moon was broke and closed its doors.

The legacy continued. The Half Moon Young People’s Theatre is still going, and has its theatre in Whitehorse Road, Stepney. The Half Moon Photography workshop evolved through Camerawork in Roman Road to be part of the Four Corners film collective. Maurice Colbourne would go on to find fame as Tom Howard in the hit BBC series Howard’s Way during the eighties, before his sudden death in 1989. Michael Irving is still a working stage and screen actor. After the Half Moon, Guy Sprung worked as a theatre director in Berlin and Moscow, before returning to his native Canada. He now lives, fittingly, in the Mile End area of Montreal.

Florian Beigel was back in the East End recently, working on that pitch for Mile End Waste. Each ride past the Half Moon pub was a painful reminder of what was. “There were plans for the Magic Circle to buy it, to use it as a library and a theatre. Lots of local people put in money to keep it going. Instead – a pub! And they’ve cut the space in half. What a waste.”

I stand outside on a Friday, trying to recapture the bustle and energy of those eighties performances. From inside, the lunchtime drinkers, hunched over pints of lager, stare out.


Lionel Jeffries

Nov. 03 East End actors 2 comments


He was known as the scene stealer par excellence, an actor whose performances were so ebulliently over the top that he could cast even a talent as towering as Peter Sellers into the shade. Lionel Jeffries, who has died aged 83, was as at home in the theatre, on the telly or on the big screen. An actor, writer and director he was a hit with kids (for triumphs such as The Railway Children and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and with their parents (for British classics such as the Wrong Arm of the Law). In nearly 100 movies, he played comedy and drama with equal aplomb, starring on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet Jeffries’ beliefs, character and sense of duty were forged a long way from the tinseltown of Hollywood (or Elstree and Pinewood come to that). In the East End of the 1930s, he absorbed the moral code of his Salvation Army parents, learning the importance of helping those less fortunate than himself, and developing a lifelong distate for the sex and violence that pervaded movies in his latter years.

Which Jeffries’ moment do you pick from the dozens of films in which he starred or supported? Is it playing Grandpa Potts, Dick Van Dyke’s irascible father in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang? Was it as the officious and useless Inspector ‘Nosey’ Parker, trying to outwit crooks Peter Sellers and Bernard Cribbins in The Wrong Arm of the Law? Or playing the deeply unpleasant Marquis of Queensberry, persecuting playwright Oscar in Wilde (1960)? In truth, the one movie that will live long after his death is one in which he didn’t even appear. Moving behind the camera to direct The Railway Children in 1970, he not only scored a massive hit, but one which would endure year after year. It’s probable that families will be settling down to watch the heartwarming hit, starring Jenny Agutter and Bernard Cribbens, long after most of us are gone. And that would have delighted family man Jeffries.


He was born on 10 June, 1926, and caught the end of World War 2, with military service in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Royal West African Frontier Force in Burma. He made captain but lost his hair – blaming the fierce humidity of the tropics for his premature baldness. Returning to London in the late 1940s, he secured a place at RADA. “I was the only bald one there,” he remembered with rueful humour. “Of course I was upset. Tried a toupee once, too, but it looked like a dead moth on a boiled egg.” He went on to win the college’s prestigious Kendal Award but was told by agents and bookers that his looks would hold him back. However, his London stage debut – in Carrington VC at the Westminster Theatre in 1949 – was the beginning of more than 40 years’ non-stop work.

By the early fifties he had moved from stage to screen. In British and American films alike, he managed the tricky feat of playing both broad comedy (often as a hapless crook or copper) and drama (frequently as uptight and officious authority figures). The prematurely bald and distinctively moustachioed Lionel now turned his appearance to his advantage, and always played above his age (in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, he was in fact six months younger than his ‘son’ Dick Van Dyke). Whether in comedy or drama, he managed to suggest the barely suppressed hysteria of his characters while not going over the top – or only when the role demanded. “Most of the people I played were caught in desperation. In their hearts they knew that they were failures – but they would never admit it, even to themselves,” he mused later.

The non-stop Jeffries made excellent choices, but his daughter had an even surer eye. The eight-year-old Martha Jeffries had read The Railway Children and told her dad: “I think that would make a good film.” Jeffries bought the rights for Edith Nesbit’s book for £2000, worked up a script and fruitlessly trailed it round producers’ offices before his old friend Bryan Forbes took on the project. Jeffries had never directed but he persuaded the moneymen to give him the job. Family movies such as The Amazing Mr Blunden and Wombling Free followed (and an enduring association with Cribbins) but Jeffries didn’t have the directorial career he deserved.

By the 1980s, despite a lifetime in the movies, and with a trio of children’s hit movies behind him as director, he couldn’t get his projects to the screen. “No one wants family entertainment any more. They want explicit sex”, he reflected sadly. He returned to the theatre and began to pop up on TV (of which he could be scathing), appearing in Lovejoy, Shillingbury Tales, All for Love and Inspector Morse.

The young, East End Salvationist remained a committed Catholic in later years. Jeffries retired from acting in 2001 and for the last few years of his life lived in a nursing home in Poole, on the south coast. He died aged 83 on 19 February this year, leaving his widow Eileen, two daughters and a son. In a business noted for its shortlived and multiple marriages, Eileen and Lionel had been happily together for 59 years.


An ‘account of the hamlet of Poplar’

Nov. 03 East End hamlets no comments


An ‘account of the hamlet of Poplar’, appearing in The Universal Magazine of June 1795 painted a picture that’s hard to conjure up from modern visits down the East India Dock Road or around Chrisp Street Market. An unnamed journalist, venturing ‘two miles from the eastern extremity of the metropolis’ finds a village at the meeting point of Essex and Middlesex. The compact cities of London and Westminster still lay well within Middlesex’s borders in those days, a century and a half before the county itself became swallowed by London.

Poplar marsh was ‘reckoned one of the richest spots of ground in England’. It raised the ‘the largest cattle’ with the lush grass even being good for restoring cattle suffering distemper. The industry and attendant development that would consume the hamlet was already evident though. The East India Company had moved from Deptford to build its own ships at Blackwall from 1614. The Blackwall Yard would go through numerous changes of ownership, through the Perry, Green and Wigram families. The nationalised British Shipbuilders finally closed the book on three and a half centuries of Thames shipbuilding in 1987, when the yard shut.

In 1795, the yard was in the ownership of John Perry, and was the largest private dock in Europe. Covering 19 acres it could accommodate ’28 large East Indiamen and from 50 to 60 ships of smaller burden’. On the south quay of the dock were four cranes, which hauled guns, anchors, quintaledges (iron weights used as ballast in the shapes), and of course the goods which the ships had transported back from the Colonies.

The eastern quay was given over to landing blubber from the whaling vessels returned from Greenland. Next door were huge coppers set up for boiling the blubber down, and next again were huge warehouses to store the whale oil and bone. The maintenance of the ships was a huge undertaking, and one building soared to 120ft in height, able to accommodate the sails and rigging of an East Indiaman fully extended. Above was machinery for masting and demasting the ships. The risks of assembling the vessels on the open water were, thus, entirely removed. The first ship to be ‘masted’ by Perry’s ingenious machine was the Lord Macartney, on 25 October 1791, when a team put the whole rig together in three and a half hours.


By the 1920s, any pretence of Poplar being a hamlet had long disappeared. Now the area was appallingly overcrowded. Shipbuilding on the Thames had long been in decline, with the yards closing or relocating to the deeper waters and more modern equipment of the Clyde. The days when Blackwall had blazed a technological trail were long gone. Now the men were there simply to serve the shipyard, and there were more of them chasing fewer jobs. Jounalist Sydney K. Phelps was a regular visitor and had a remarkable affection for the place. ‘As you approach it after a very long tram ride, and notice the fine wide road [i.e. East India Dock Road] leading to the docks, and the considerable number of open spaces – tree-planted churchyards, fragments of old gardens, and recreation grounds – it does not seem to be such a bad place after all; there must always be a touch of romance in the sight of masts against the sky.’

Yet Phelps understood that the key to Poplar now lay in its poverty. ‘To understand Poplar it is necessary to leave that wide road, to turn up one of the narrower ways which run at right angles from it, and to plunge into the network of small squalid streets which lies behind. Here is a street of the sort I mean. It is long, containing over a hundred houses, all of the same design, all ugly and mean. In the basements are two rooms, one very small, and a kitchen which leads into a strip of grimy back-yard. The ground floors have two rooms, and stand a good way above the street level, in order that the basements may have light; on the top floors there are also two rooms.’

None of the homes had electric light of course and few had water above the ground floor – so baths were rare. Work was too. One women remarked that ‘there are lots of young strong men round here who have not been able to find a day’s work in two years’. The dole had been introduced in 1911, but the poverty trap it could create was just as much of a conundrum as it is today. ‘One man is in constant work at a chemical factory, and has long hours. (His wife’s hours are even longer.) He succeeds in earning exactly 3s. a week more than his neighbour gets from the dole.’ Adding a baby to the family would earn the family a little more dole and now the working man was actually worse off. There were worse things than the dole though. The horror of the workhouse still threatened, and for another decade to come. At the other end of this nascent welfare state were old age pensions – though few lived long enough past retirement age to get much from them.

It took World War II, bombing and some radical town planning to sweep away the old and usher in a new Poplar. The 1951 Festival of Britain saw the Lansbury Estate built north of the East India Dock Road, along with a new Chrisp Street Market. Now people weren’t living in crumbling terraces but in soaring concrete blocks such as Robin Hood Gardens, Balfron Tower, Carradale House and Glenkerry House. Now everyone had electric light and decent plumbing … but would Sydney Phelps think that something had been lost along the way?


Harry Hammond, East End photographer

Nov. 03 East End musicians, East End photographers no comments


Photographer Harry Hammond came from a more gentle age, when celebrity snappers were out to make the best of their subjects – rather than catch them off guard, inebriated or partially clothed. ‘I always tried to catch the star looking their best or most glamorous,’ he explained, ‘That’s how picture editors liked their photos in those days’. And the stars were grateful. As Cliff Richard fondly recalled. ‘In the days of Harry Hammond, photographers only wanted to show the best of you – that’s why it was always such a pleasure to have Harry around.’

But although East End boy Harry found fame in the Tin Pan Alley Days of fifties London, he was already decades into a career that had begun in the Thirties, making portraits of everyone from Noel Coward, to HG Wells, to Errol Flynn. Along the way he had captured the great bandleaders of the 1930s (including Whitechapel’s Bert Ambrose) and snapped the early and sparsely attended London gigs of Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday, as well as debs and Dukes. And in a wartime departure from glamour, he had worked in reconnaissance for the RAF – a low-tech operation involving hanging out of the side of the plane with a handheld camera.

The Bow boy (his dad worked for London Transport and his mum was a dressmaker) left school at 14 and headed straight into an apprenticeship in Fleet Street – four years learning his trade at the London Art Service. He had an early brush with glamour, as he remembered years afterwards. “A dapper stranger in a sharp suit sauntered into the studio and said, ‘The model agency sent me to do the Brylcreem advertisement’. We took a few head shots of him to match the art department’s layout, which were in due course used in the national press. He agreed to the usual model fee of one guinea, and I asked his name for our files. ‘Flynn’, he said jauntily, tapping the ash from his cigarette. ‘Errol Flynn’.”

By the late thirties Harry was moving between society portraits of aristocracy and beautifully composed publicity photos of the cream of London arts, cinema and literature. The debutante season provided a new stream of clients each year, and there were publicity and press shots of the big bands, led by Ted Heath, Geraldo and Ambrose. Little wonder that Hammond displayed an extraordinary ability to adapt to his clients and make them comfortable whoever they were – an invaluable talent in a photographer.


His next gig was a major departure, though, in every way. At the outbreak of war he volunteered for the RAF and found himself taking observation pictures from planes in North Africa. This was a crude affair, which involved Harry and his pals hanging out of the plane, camera in hand. He took it with his customary charm and calm and – as a bonus – met his future wife Peggy, a WAAF fitness instructor.
Back in London he went freelance and became the house photographer for the Musical Express, recently bought and relaunched by promoter Maurice Kinn as the New Musical Express. Both Kinn and Hammond realised the old musical order was dying, but were rare among the older generation in taking rock and roll seriously. A decade or more later, Andrew Loog Oldham, then-manager of the Rolling Stones, recalled: “He always stood out away from the other snappers who loathed us, wished us no good, and couldn’t wait to get back to snapping Vera Lynn.”

Today’s photographers use digital cameras that can hold hundreds of images and slip into a pocket. But back in the early days of rock and roll, even compact film was a distant dream. Harry had to capture the best of a two-hour gig, featuring half a dozen artists, with just half a dozen plates. Hammond, though, always seemed to get the killer shot.

In the fifties, Hammond was alone in creating portraits of the American rockers who would inspire the Stones, the Beatles and the rest. Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochrane and many others were immortalised in stunning chiaroscuro shots. And when the British answer came along, Harry was on hand with camera. Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Billy Fury and the rest queued up to have their pictures taken by the man who had captured their heroes.

By the Sixties, the charming Harry, now into his forties, was the house photographer for British pop music. Those were the last days of Harry as a snapper though. From being the dominant player in a field of one in the early years of British pop music, he now found himself jostling for shoulder room with an increasing pack. That, and the inevitable collapse of a personal relationship with the artists, decided Hammond to call it a day in the mid-Sixties. He didn’t turn his back on pop music though: it says much for his empathy with pop musicians that he decided to make the move into management with the Overlanders. And in an era when managers were notorious for ripping off their charges, Harry was respected for the fairness  of his dealings.

His retirement was a long one but there was still music – his own. Not Ambrose, Sinatra or Buddy Holly this time – Harry taught himself to play the violin, as well as indulging his loves for vintage cars, poetry and chess. He died in 2009, aged 88.