eastlondonhistory.com

Clive Wright is an East End lad who left Bow a full 80 years ago … yet returned every Sunday with his family to worship at Liberty Hall in Lincoln Street, Mile End. Liberty Hall is no more (though the building still stands), and Lincoln Street has now been renamed Brokesley Street. Yet for Clive, many of the memories are as fresh as in those pre-War days - and he is on a quest for information. It all turns on Clive’s uncle, Wallace Hancock, and his journey from the trenches of World War I to becoming a conscientious objector in World War II. Clive takes up the story.

“My parents were born in the late 1890s and grew up in Bow. My mother’s family lived in Merchant Street; my father at Bow Common Lane then Lichfield Road. As a child my mother, Rose Plantin, attended Sunday School at Bow Wesleyan Church next door to the house in which she lived. My father, Tom Wright, was a choirboy at Holy Trinity Church, Mile End, which was the church where they were married in 1923.

“I am not sure when or how my parents became members of the Liberty Hall Mission. They were certainly involved when my father returned from four years in the trenches of the Western Front. His active service came to an end after he was blinded for weeks by gas in August 1918. My mother’s sister, Lily Plantin, and her future husband, Wallace Hancock – another survivor of four years in the trenches – were also members of Liberty Hall.”

Wallace joked about his time in the trenches, writing home that the rock buns the folk at Liberty Hall had sent him could have been used as shells with which to bombard the Germans. But the horror of war seems to have had a profound effect. In modern parlance, Hancock was ‘politicised’ by his experiences of the First World War and after. During the 1920s, Wallace worked for the Poplar Board of Guardians during the Poplar Rates Rebellion, led by George Lansbury in 1921. And, at the outbreak of World War II, pacifist Wallace became a conscientious objector.

As the 1920s drew on, Liberty Hall was very much the focus of the family’s social life. Clive’s father, Tom, was a keen member of the church’s football team, alongside Mission founder, Albert Green. The Greens’ home, at 54 Antill Road in Bow, became a home from home to church members. “I remember the interior as crowded in the Victorian fashion, heavy dark furnishings, chairs stuffed with horsehair which pricked the bare legs of little boys like myself,” recalls Clive. “I am pretty certain that on the wall was a framed list of friends killed in the Great War. The First World War, and the terrible grief that was its legacy to the 1920s and the 1930s was a calamity from which my parents’ generation and the founder members of Liberty Hall were never quite to recover.”

But if there was sorrow, there was a lot of joy too. “Mr Green and his wife Win were very hospitable and lunches at their home were a meeting occasion for friends. Mrs Green, a florid-faced woman, was the epitome of the hard working housewife and she devoted herself to providing food to huge numbers of people, either in her home or at parties in Liberty Hall. She seemed always to be toiling at domestic tasks.” To the Wright family, making their long Sunday pilgrimage from South Harrow to Mile End, 54 Antill Road was a welcome place to rest.

At the heart of it all was the energetic, slightly terrifying figure of Albert Green. Universally referred to as ‘Boss’, he was “a vigorous and forceful man, with a large hooked nose, a loud voice and a dominating personality”. This lively speaker vigorously asserted the importance of Liberty Hall remaining non-denominational and nonconformist, and was scathing about the Church of England’s status as the established church. At Liberty Hall, religion inevitably had a political dimension. Speakers were invited from local surrounding churches, invariably nonconformist organisations. One was Rev Ted Sorensen, a Unitarian minister who was later an MP and became Lord Sorensen of Leyton. The mission had the energy so typical of nonconformist churches of the day. Each week was a blizzard of activity - three services on Sundays, Scouts, Girl Guides, the Junior Christian Endeavour group, concerts and more.

Like so much in the East End though, the initial grouping dissolved in a gradual diaspora of members - in this case hastened by bombing and evacuation. Just as the Wrights had moved out, so their friends followed, and by the end of World War II Liberty Hall was no more. The community spirit persisted though, as Clive recalls. “The post-war reunions were very jolly events with huge quantities of food (provided presumably by the indefatigable Win Green) and with members supplying entertainment by songs, recitations and monologues or by playing musical instruments. One of the stars of these entertainments was the daughter of one of the Liberty Hall stalwarts, Gladys Cronmire, who had a fine and strong voice. My own sister played the piano on one occasion. My father did recitations and played the one-stringed fiddle. My mother helped in the kitchen. These hearty get-togethers were the final flowering of Liberty Hall and took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s.”

Today of course, most of the congregation are long gone. Among them were Ashley and Emily Cronmire and daughter Gladys. “Ashley worked on the railways and had a dreadful impression on his forehead in which the corner of a crate or box that must have fallen on him could be clearly seen.” There was fireman Tom Sweeney and wife Elsie; the prolix speaker Harry Pike; Frank Willson, an LCC employee and Secretary of the Hall, and who moved his family out to Kent after World War II; schooteacher Bill Berger and wife Lil and son Martin. As Clive describes them: ‘modest and typical East Enders’. Now Clive is digging back into that history while there are still (we hope) some people around who remember it. If you have any recollections of his uncle Wallace, please contact us at East End Life.

Wedgewood, Meissen, Delft – all are world famous names in the world of pottery. But 250 years ago it was Bow pottery that was drawing the eyes of the world, and all thanks to a young Irish painter who settled in the East End. Thomas Frye had been born in Dublin in 1710 and, having won acclaim in his native Ireland as a painter,came to London in 1734. One of his first coups as a portraitist was his commission to paint the Prince of Wales, for the Saddlers’ Company. Among the other specialities of the multi-talented artist were miniature painting, mezzotint, engraving and enamel work.

But Frye was also a keen inventor and his love of art and love of discovery came together when he devised a method of producing porcelain, the beautiful translucent china pottery as popular in the eighteenth century as it is today. Porcelain may have been popular at the time but there were two big problems. First it was very fragile and second, with all the pieces coming from abroad, it was very expensive. Frye had a solution. As a result of his experiments with china clay he discovered a method of making porcelain out of bone ash. This not only produced a porcelain of brilliant whiteness and luminescence but one of extraordinary durability. The second solution was obvious – he would set up a factory in London to manufacture his new china.

In 1744, Frye and his partner, Edward Heylen took out a patent for the production of artificial soft-paste porcelain. The inventors and manufacturers of porcelain in England called their product “New Canton”, a nod to the pottery from the Far East with which they hoped to compete. The next step was to set up a factory. Frye had attracted the interest of the rich and powerful Peers family. They owned huge tracts of land across Bromley, Bow and Stratford. They were also directors of the all-powerful East India Company, mainstay of Britain’s overseas trade at the time, and whose great ships unloaded their imported wares on the Isle of Dogs, near the mouth of Bow Creek. The Court Book of 1744 shows that Edward Heylen acquired a property on the London side of the River Lea, at Bow. On 7 July 1749, an insurance policy was taken out for the new works. And, with the backing of the Peers family, the china factory was set up near Bow Bridge in 1749, with Fry running the operation. The Bow Porcelain Manufactory of New Canton was ready to start work.

Business was good. By 1750, Frye and Heylen were in partnership with John Wetherby and John Crowther, who owned a wholesale pottery business at St Katherine by the Tower. Frye’s work was down to earth from the word go, concentrating on “the more ordinary sorts of ware for common use”. That didn’t please the purists. One expert has described Bow porcelain as “a peasant art which appeals to an unacademic sense of beauty rather than taste.” Still, what do experts know. Very soon the demand was so great that another factory was opened, this time on the Stratford side of the River Lea. But despite his success Frye was still toiling long hours in the factory furnaces as well as designing new lines. Eventually the long hours and gruelling work took their toll. Frye died in 1762, at the age of just 52, and is buried in Hornsey Churchyard. The work went on, but without his driving force and energy, quality slipped. Their was another 13 years of production at Bow, but towards the end products were underfired and lacked their earlier translucence and in 1776 the works closed. Frye’s legacy remains. His processes changed pottery forever and one of his daughters went on to work for Wedgewood. And the fact you will still find Bow porcelain today – tough enough to last 250 years – is testament to Frye’s vision.

Further reading: Bow Porcelain, Adams and Redstone (Faber and Faber.)