eastlondonhistory.com

Last week we saw how the unlikely trio of master mariner John Harriott, magistrate Patrick Colquhoun and philosopher Jeremy Bentham were responsible for the formation of the Marine Police Force on the River Thames. Having swiftly proved to Parliament that his new river force was saving the docks a huge sum in pilfered goods, Colquhoun found himself in charge of a publicly funded police force.

The Marine Police took a lease on a riverside site at Wapping and set about appointing permanent officers, with a Superintendent of Ships Constables in charge of five Surveyors, men who would patrol the river by both day and night, rowed in open galleys by Thames Watermen. A further four Surveyors would visit ships being loaded and unloaded, while Ship Constables would watch over the dockers. There was also a Surveyor of Quays with two assistants and 30 Police Quay Guards.

It was an unwieldy setup, and it was hard and dangerous work, but by the 1830s, the Marine Police had grown to having three stations (Waterloo and Blackwall had been added) and 15 boats. In 1829, Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan Police and in 1839 the new force amalgamated with the river force, which was now renamed Thames Division.

A disaster in 1878 was to force change from the river police’s use of rowing boats … though it was a long time coming. On 3 September that year, iron ship the Bywell Castle ploughed into the pleasure steamer Princess Alice at Galleons Reach. The paddle boat, returning with 800 holidaymakers from a day trip to the Kent coast, was snapped in two and sank with the loss of more than 600 lives. It was the greatest ever loss of civilian lives in UK waters. The inquest found that Thames Division were woefully underpowered with their rowing galleys, and the first two steam launches came into service in the mid 1880s. By 1898 there were eight more, but it was 1905 before the 28 row boats were finally phased out. In 1910, motor launches joined the fleet.

The late 20th century had its own river tragedy, and again it forced a change in how the Thames was policed. At ten minutes to two on the morning of 20 Auguest 1989, the dredger Bowbelle collided with the pleasure boat Marchioness close to Cannon Street Railway Bridge. The river police were swiftly on the scene, getting to the collision inside six minutes. Four police boats, assisted by the passenger boat Hurlingham plucked 87 people from the waters of the Thames, but 51 people died, and the inquest that followed demanded change.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency ( MCA ), the Port of London Authority ( PLA ) and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution ( RNLI ) worked on setting up a dedicated Search and Rescue service for the tidal River Thames, taking over at least part of the role that the River Police had fulfilled for more than two centuries. And on 2 January 2002, the RNLI opened four new lifeboat stations at Gravesend, Tower Pier, Chiswick Pier and Teddington. And the river police (now called the Marine Support Unit or MSU) work in tandem on rescues with the RNLI, the Coastguards and a London Fire Brigade boat.

Today, the job of protecting the London Docks from pilfering is no more - because of course the London Docks are no more, having long since moved downriver to Tilbury. But to this day the river police operate out of the same Wapping High Street address that has been their home for more than two centuries, and now has 22 boats in its fleet. The beat of the MSU covers 14 miles of river, between Hampton Court and Dartford Creek. Above Hampton Court, the Surrey Police patrol the river along with the Environment Agency. Below Dartford, the Essex and Kent Police take over, with an Essex marine unit based at Burnham-on-Crouch police station.

Two of the founders of the river police have been remembered in the names of police launches. The John Harriott was in service from 1947 to 1963, while a Targa duty boat currently bears the name. Police launch Patrick Colquhoun patrolled the Thames from 1963 to 2003. Jeremy Bentham, strangely, has never been thus commemorated. Perhaps his ‘auto icon’ sat on display at University College London is memorial enough.

The Marine Policing Unit at Wapping is a sophisticated and unique branch of the Metropolitan Police. The men and women in boats have to liaise with the Port of London Authority, Special Branch, Customs and Excise, the Coastguard service, London Fire Brigade and Immigration. And their motor launches are a familiar sight, speeding from the Wapping River Station that has been its home for more than 200 years.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of the unit, when officers ventured into the docks in rowing boats, and often had standup fights with dockers … who resented the new coppers curtailing their ‘bonuses’. For the story behind the river police is of theft from the docks on a grand scale, and a curious genesis involving Spitalfields philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham was a fascinating and contradictory figure. A lover of freedom, he also famously he devised the panopticon - a prison where the inmates could be observed at all times (while never being aware that they were being watched. His philosophy of utilitarianism is brilliant but controversial. To put things simply, the theory says that the worth of an act is judged by its contribution to the sum total of human happiness: many have argued that, logically, utilitarianism could lead to great individual unhappiness for the individual. Yet he was startlingly liberal for his day - a proponent of animal rights, equal rights for women, gay rights and an end to both slavery and the death penalty.

But we’re not here to argue philosophical theory, we’re talking about ships and crime. Bentham also saw himself as an intensely practical philosopher - hence the panopticon. Hence too his interest in the problem of thievery at the docks, where merchants in the Pool of London were losing half a million pounds in filched cargo each year. The great thinker was persuaded to work on a solution by Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun, alongside Essex Justice of the Peace and Master Mariner John Harriot.

Within weeks, Colquhoun had a plan to put to the merchants. Armed with £4200 put up by the West India Merchants and the West India Planters Committees, the magistrate recruited 50 men to police the 33,000 dock and river workers - Colquhoun claimed 11,000 were on the make, a figure surely plucked from the air.

So was born England’s first professional police force, and they were hated. Just like the earlier Bow Street Runners (founded in 1749) and the later Metropolitan Police, they would be considered an infringement of Londoners’ liberties; the idea of a police force seems to have been viewed by many rather as identity cards are now. The Marine Police Force was pilloried as an idea suitable for France or Germany, but not for the free men and women of England.

Colquhoun’s ‘11,000′ may not have been far off mind. Soon after the force began its work on 2 July 1798 a mob of 2000 attempted to burn down the Wapping Police Station with the officers inside. The fight that ensued saw the first English policeman killed in the line of duty, with the death of the unfortunate Gabriel Franks. One of the forces’s current launches is named ‘Gabriel Franks’ in his memory.

The crux of Colquhooun’s plan was in giving his men a salary, unlike the Bow Street Runners, who relied on a (rather erratic stipend). By putting the river men on a regular wage he could make them full time, demand higher standards of professionalism and, arguably, reduce the likelihood of corruption. The brilliance in involving Bentham in this plan was that the founders used utilitarianism to sell the marine force to local businesses. They used a cost-benefit model, effectively saying ‘for every pound you cough up to fund our police force’ you’ll make more than a pound back’.

And it worked. A year in, Colquhoun reported back that his men had ‘established their worth by saving £122,000 worth of cargo and by the rescuing of several lives’. Possibly some made-up figures again there from Mr Colquhoun, but the authorities figured that such furious resistance must mean the police were hitting a nerve, and Government acted to transform the freelance agency into a public police force. Colquhoun had not only invented the idea of the publicly funded police force, he had also introduced the idea of crime prevention (rather than simply capture and punishment) for the first time. Again, this rankled with many, who argued that a free Englishman should be free to commit crimes and then be caught, rather than being snooped on by officers. But the authorities loved it of course, and the model was copied around the world.

Next week: Fights, rescues and tragedies … how the river police developed.

Momentous days indeed as the United States elects its first black president. And, while it may seem a little presumptuous for the East End to claim Barack Obama as one of their own, the President Elect did reveal earlier this year that he was a West Ham fan - a legacy of a trip to London a few years back.

East End connections with the office of President of the United States and with America itself go back a lot further of course, with one First Lady being born on Tower Hill and another president being the scion of an East End family. Indeed the very roots of the United States stretch back to Wapping. Of course there are numerous competing claims as to who were the first Europeans to ‘discover’ and then to settle in the Americas. There is evidence that the Vikings beat Columbus to it by 500 years or so, with Leif Ericson and his Norsemen stumbling across what would later become Newfoundland.

Columbus famously ‘discovered’ the Americas in 1492 (bringing the gift of European diseases, which would wipe out huge swathes of the indigenous population). In 1513, the Spanish conquistadors were the first to reach the mainland of the modern US, in Florida. Subsequently, the English made 18 failed attempts to settle America, failing each time. The most famous and mysterious attempt was the Roanoke settlement, organised by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1587, but then left without supplies for three years. The colony would yield the first English child to be born in the Americas, but when the English eventually returned, the settlers had vanished without trace.

East Enders enter the picture 20 years later, making the first permanent settlement in America. Captain John Smith’s expedition made landfall in what is now Virginia, on 26 April 1607. The ships Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery had set off from Blackwall Stairs on 19 December 1606. The colony was beset by illness, bad water, quarrels with the Native Americans and rotten planning. But they somehow survived and the English-speaking America was born. East Ender John Laydon was the father of the first child born of a Protestant wedding in the territory - she was fittingly baptised Virginia.

In 1667, William Penn left his home on Tower Hill, to found the Province of Pennsylvania. The state founded by the Quaker (a pacifist of course) was a beacon of democracy, religious freedom and unusually good relations with Native Americans. Voltaire praised the province’s government for its respect for minority rights, and the city of Philadelphia became a melting pot of races and religions, as people settled from all over Europe. The London man had set a template for the later America, and partly inspired the American constitution, where ‘all men are equal under God’.

These were the years that America was fighting for independence from Britain, though that didn’t stop them returning to London for a focus for their fight. The Liberty Bell, with its inscription “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” was commissioned from the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1751. The bell still hangs in the Philadelphia State House steeple today.

One of the Founding Fathers inspired by Penn’s example was Thomas Jefferson. He was the principle author of the Declaration of Independence, and become in turn the third President of the United States. Jefferson was born in Shadwell, Virginia, the settlement being named after the East End area where his mother had been born. Jane Randolph had left Shadwell and Wapping in 1735. Jefferson served as President from 1801 until 1809.

Another interesting London link centres on the church of All Hallows, the oldest in the City of London, dating in part back to 675 AD, and from the tower of which Samuel Pepys had watched the Great Fire in 1666. Just a year later, Penn would leave for the Americas, but he had been baptised in All Hallows in 1644. In 1797 John Quincy Adams (who would become the sixth President of the US) was married in the church. His wife, Louisa, had been born at Tower Hill, and it was another four years before she set foot in America. Adams’s political enemies forevermore directed the ultimate insult at the only First Lady to have been born outside the United States - that she was ‘English’.

When Scotland met Poplar: Two hundred years ago, the area east of the City was still farmland and market gardens, with villages such as Bow and Bethnal Green, Stepney and Limehouse among the fields. Ribbon developments were snaking out along the main highways, such as the Whitechapel and East India Dock Roads, and soon the green would be engulfed by a tide of concrete, mortar and brick.

To the people living there in rural Middlesex, soon to become ‘East Enders’ it must have seemed like a new street was thrown up every week. Perhaps it was a little quicker than that - in 1801 there were 900,000 Londoners, by 1901 more than six million. There was just one problem for the builders racing to erect terraces to house the new workers - finding unused names for all their new streets. Sometimes it was children’s names, famous poets, sometimes places from far flung corners of the Empire, and sometimes towns from across the British Isles. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases were plucked from the shelf and pored over in a desperate search for new names. Take a trip out along the Romford Road to Ilford and you see one estate where the builders appear to have given up in despair. You drive past 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue and all the way through to 8th … hardly names to stir the imagination.

When Scotland met Poplar: And one little part of Poplar, delimited by the Docklands Light Railway to the west, the Limehouse Cut to the north, the River Lea to the east and the East India Dock Road to the south, became forever Caledonia. For the many Scots who headed south to work in the docks, it must have been strange to see names of rural Scottish villages, rivers and valleys cut and pasted onto the templated rows of east London streets. This area had been the Bromley Marsh, but with the development of the riverside, and particular the construction of the East India Docks at Blackwall in 1802, the scrubby land suddenly had potential … though it was a long time before it was realised.

In 1813, the whole area was bought by ‘contractor and excavator’ Hugh McIntosh from the East India Company, his main employer. It was still rural for a long while, with maps of the time showing ‘McIntosh’s Farm’ at the northern end of McIntosh’s Lane. By 1849, his son David seemed to have had an eye on the future sprawl of London east towards and then beyond the River Lea, having a clause on road widening inserted in the Commercial Roads Continuation Act, which was working its way through Parliament.

But it was only with Hugh McIntosh’s grandson, another David, that the streets started going up. By now, the docks and factories of Canning Town were creating a demand for workers’ housing, and Bromley Marsh was an island of green amid the new building. Perhaps the McIntosh’s took their Scottish antecedents as inspiration for the naming, though the estate proved too big for one firm. In 1873, McIntosh sold the land east of 375 East India Dock Road to a manufacturing chemist called John Abbott, of Forbes & Abbott. That firm had its base at the Iceland Wharf Works in Old Ford Road.

Abbott continued the naming convention begun by McIntosh, with a web of streets bearing Scottish place names from A to Z. It wasn’t quite as neat as that - there weren’t 26 streets, and the letter ‘Z’ proved a problem, as detailed below. But within a few years the streets were up, and the two developers were happily sold out and collecting ground rent. Mr Abbott, in an expression of ego, had named the longest road in the development after himself. The area was radically changed in the 1890s with the construction of the Blackwall Tunnel, and the Approach Road would later slice right through this little Caledonia. And to latterday residents of the Aberfeldy Estate, the green fields of Perthshire must have
seemed very far away.

When Scotland met Poplar: those street names … and where they come from

Aberfeldy
Lying on the River Tay in Perthshire, the town features in Robert Burns’s poem ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy’. With a population of less than 2000 people, it has an 18-hole golf course and the Black Watch Memorial.

Ailsa
From Ailsa Craig, an island formed by the plug of an extinct volcano, lying 10 miles west of Girvan in the River Clyde. Ailsa is uninhabited though it has a lighthouse.

Blair
From Blair Atholl, a little town in Perthshire, a rare flat area in the midst of the Grampian Mountains, and recently incorporated into the Cairngorms National Park. The town’s most famous feature is Blair Castle.

Culloden
A village three miles east of Inverness and site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 - the final meeting of the French-backed Jacobites and the Hanoverian British Government during the Jacobite Rising. Protected by the National Trust for Scotland.

Dee
The River Dee rises in the Cairngorms and flows to the North Sea at Aberdeen, via Braemar, Ballater, Aboyne and Banchory. A stunningly beautiful area of the Highlands.

Ettrick
In the county of Selkirk, in the Scottish borders. Once covered by the Royal Ettrick Forest, now farming country.

Findhorn
A village in Morayshire and on the southern side of the Moray Firth. Traditionally a fishing village, it’s now arguably most famous to outsiders for the Findhorn Foundation spiritual community.

Leven
A seaside town in Fife, which has suffered badly from the closure first of the coal mines then the docks. Has two golf courses.

Lochnagar
A mountain in the Grampians range, Beinn Chiochan in Gaelic. Setting for the story ‘The Old Man of Lochnagar’ written by Prince Charles for his little brothers Andrew and Edward. The area produces Lochnagar malt whisky.

Oban
Seaside resort on the Firth of Lorn, on Scotland’s west coast. Flanked by the mountains of Morvern and Ardgour. Attractions include the Cathedral of St Columba, a brace of castles and the Oban Distillery.

Spey
The fastest flowing river in Scotland, and the second longest. Famed for salmon fishing and the number of whisky distilleries along its banks.

Teviot
A river in the Scottish Borders, flanking Dumfries and Galloway and then flowing north past Hawick and Roxburth to Join the River Tweed near Kelso.

Zetland
Arguably, our builder cheated a little here. After all, you try to find a place in Scotland beginning with the letter ‘Z’. ‘Zetland’ is the archaic spelling of ‘Shetland’, the far flung archipelago way off the north east coast of Britain.

Tags: East End of London

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.

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.
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. 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.”
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.
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 death of Reggie Kray on 1 October , 2000 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. Now, 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 (Cornell was played by East End actor Steven Berkoff in the Krays movie), 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 Broadmoor 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.

More stories on the Krays.