eastlondonhistory.com

The kitchen sink drama is a staple of late 1950s and early 1960s cinema, with gritty northern dramas such as ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. A new social realism was joiining the escapist, glossy movies of the mainstream, as pictures explored the realities and the hardships of working class life in Britain.

The East End was to chip in with ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ in 1962, which took the drama out of the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, living room or bedroom onto the streets and into the pubs of the East End. The Theatre Workshop production was improbably penned by Stephen Lewis (Blakey from ‘On the Buses’), though heavily improvised like all the group’s pieces. And it used lots of location filiming, offering modern viewers a fascinating glimpse of Limehouse, Stepney and Stratford in the early sixties, as well as cameo appearances by Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

But the whole movement was anticipated a decade earlier by ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. The film, set on one Bethnal Green sunday in 1947 was an exercise in tedium, frustration and anger at the poverty of life in post-War Britain (and not just in the financial sense). Yet it still manages to grip the viewer. Rarely has boredom been so interesting.

The story has former barmaid Rose Sandigate trapped in a joyless marriage with an older man. Life in bombed out Bethnal Green is hard, with rationing still in place, little money and less to do. Into this dull, reliable existence bursts her former lover, who has broken out of prison and begs Rose to hide him. The tough housewife softens and hides him in the air raid shelter. The strain is intolerable, with family life intruding and the police net swiftly closing. Eventually he flees, to be hunted down in railway sidings by police sergeant Fothergill.

And if it’s sometimes melodramatic (and a touch unlikely) it does evoke the East End of the later forties, not least because real East Enders are in it. Not Rose - she is played by the impeccably posh Googie Withers. Nor escaped convict Tommy Swann (played by Googie’s Australian husband John McCallum). But Jewish East Ender Sydney Tafler, who was a stalwart of British cinema in the fifties and sixties, often playing spivs and crooks, appears as Morrie Hyams. John Slater, who built much of his career on playing cheery cockneys, was another East Ender playing largely to type, as Lou Hyams. Sgt Fothergill is played by Bow’s Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green of course). And the character of Dicey is played by Alfie Bass, born Abraham Basalinksy in Bethnal Green.

Of course a decent actor should be able to play the part wherever he or she comes from. But the authenticity of much of the cast may well have pleased the writer. The film came from a novel written by Arthur Bern, who also wrote ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, later adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock as the movie ‘Frenzy’. La Bern called himself ‘a gallic cockney’ having been born in the East End of French parents. He was a prolific writer, combining a career as a journalist on the Evening Standard, the Evening News (a former competitor to the Standard), the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, with a steady stream of novels. His East End roots and his job as a Fleet Street crime reporter provided plenty of material. Arthur’s books may have been page turners and were regularly adapted for the big screen (other movies included ‘Good Time Girl’, ‘Freedom To Die’ and ‘Dead Man’s Evidence’) but they ranged from gruesome to downright miserable.

‘Nightmare’ follows Roland John Raine QC, whose wife has run off with a gangster, while his daughter ministers to dossers in the East End. The barrister attempts suicide with a bottle of pills and a jug of whisky, but wakes up in a mental ward. The trouble is just beginning though, as Mrs Raine’s gang boss lover is found murdered. The prolific La Bern had a profitable sideline writing biographies of famous murderers, such as Brides in the Bath killer George Joseph Smith and Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh, so he had plenty of material to draw on.

And take ‘Frenzy’, which tracks a serial killer as he rapes and strangles his way around London. Though to be fair to La Bern he hated Hitchcock’s movie so much that he felt compelled to write a letter of protest to The Times, bemoaning not just the ‘distasteful’ content but the hatchet job Hitchcock and his writer Anthony Shaffer had done on ‘the authentic London characters I created’. He described the dialogue as ‘a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce [and] Dixon of Dock Green’. For La Bern, if you were going to do the East End you had to do it right.

When Coutts moved into Canary Wharf Tower recently, the posh people’s bank was simply renewing its aquaintance with the East End of London. For, a century ago, long before the Queen’s bankers had to worry about the size of Fergie’s overdraft, one of their number was spreading the family cash in a different fashion – by helping the Tower Hamlets poor. Angela Burdett-Coutts had everything going for her and no need to lift a finger. In 1837, at the age of just 23 she inherited a vast fortune from grandfather Thomas Coutts, the banker, and promptly became one of the world’s richest women and the object of many keen suitors. The Victorian era is infamous for the obscene gap between the hugely wealthy and the desperately poor. But for every exploitative factory owner or businessman there was a philanthropist, desperately trying to improve the lot of the working man, woman and child.Coutts Bank and charity
Angela ignored the offers of marriage and the comfortable life that awaited her and threw herself into her religious faith and using her cash to fight for social reform and education for the poor. She didn’t turn her back on the family firm though. With amazing energy she not only threw herself into setting up charities, projects for housing the poor, childcare schemes, fighting for work for women – she also took a keen interest in the running of Coutts Bank, becoming a sharp businesswoman and a key part of the family firm.

London poverty in 19th century
The East End of the nineteenth century may have been the hub of the British Empire’s trade but many of its people lived in terrible poverty. Coutts set about making things better. She supplied funds to build the church of St John’s in Vincent Street, Limehouse, later to become Halley Street. She set up a sewing school in Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields and women came to learn sewing skills. Many East End women were driven into prostitution by poverty. Charles Dickens became a firm friend of Angela and helped her to set up a house of rescue for young prostitutes. He later marked her philanthropic works for Londoners by dedicating his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, to Coutts. Not all her work was so successful. A big problem for working people was getting affordable fresh food. London markets had to pay tolls, which racked up the price of the goods on sale.

Building of Columbia Market, 1886
£20,000 paid for the building of the Columbia Market, in Bethnal Green. It had room for 400 stalls but the market never made money. Various schemes were tried, including a go at running it as a fish market, but in 1886 the market shut. A revolutionary figure, Angela was recognised for her energy and works. She was the first female “freeman” of the City and the first woman made a peer in her own right. When Baroness Burdett-Coutts died in 1906 she left a lasting mark on the East End, with huge schemes like the building of model tenements in Columbia Square, Bethnal Green, and with her name – which lives on in Angela Street, Baroness Road and Burdett Road.

Further Reading: The Tower Hamlets Connection, Harold Finch, Tower Hamlets Libraries and Stepney Books; Made of Gold, D Orton, Hamish Hamilton; Lady Unknown, E Healey, Sidgwick and Jackson.