London

by Peter Ackroyd

  Fresh generations, with their songs and customs, arrived at least as early as the time of the Roman settlement, when London was opened up as a European marketplace. The working inhabitants of the city might have come from Gaul, from Greece, from Germany, from Italy, from North Africa, a polyglot community all speaking a variety of rough or demotic Latin. By the seventh century, when London rose again as an important port and market, the native and immigrant populations were thoroughly intermingled. There was also a more general change. It was no longer possible to distinguish Britons from Saxons and, after the northern invasions of the ninth century, the Danes entered the city’s racial mixture. By the tenth century the city was populated by Cymric Brythons and Belgae, by the remnants of the Gaulish legions, by East Saxons and Mercians, by Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, by Franks and Jutes and Angles, all mingled and mingling together to form a distinct tribe of “Londoners.” A text known as IV Aethelred mentions that those who “passed through” London, in the period before the Norman settlement, were “men from Flanders, Pontheiu, Normandy and the Ile de France” as well as “men of the emperor: Germans.”

  In fact London has always been a hungry city; for many centuries it needed a permanent influx of foreign settlers in order to compensate for its high death-rate. They were also good for business, since immigration has characteristically been associated with the imperatives of London trade. Foreign merchants mingled here, and intermarried, because it was one of the principal markets of the world. On another level, immigrants came here to pursue their trades when denied commercial freedom in their native regions. And, again, other immigrants arrived in the city ready and able to take on any kind of employment and to perform those tasks which “native Londoners” (given the relative nature of that phrase) were unwilling to perform. In all instances immigration corresponded to employment and profit; that is why it would be sentimental and sanctimonious to describe London as an “open city” in some idealistic sense. It has acquiesced in waves of immigration because, essentially, they helped it to prosper.

  There were, however, occasions of criticism. “I do not at all like that city,” Richard of Devizes complained in 1185. “All sorts of men crowd there from every country under the heavens. Each brings its own vices and its own customs to the city.” In 1255 the monkish chronicler Matthew Paris was bemoaning the fact that London was “overflowing” with “Poitevins, Provençals, Italians and Spaniards.” It is an anticipation of late twentieth-century complaints that London was being “swamped” by people from Africa, the Caribbean, or Asia. In the case of the thirteenth-century chronicler there is an atavistic and incorrect notion of some original native race which is being displaced by others. Yet other forces are at work in his attack upon the foreigners; he was not wholly sympathetic to the commercial instincts of the capital, and felt himself alienated or removed from its heterogeneous life. Thus to single out foreign merchants was a way of neutralising or challenging the city’s commercial nature. Those who attacked immigrants were in effect attacking the business ethic which required the constant influx of new trade and new labour. The attack did not succeed; it never has succeeded.

  The immigrant rolls of 1440–1 provide an absorbing study in ethnicity and cultural contrast. An essay by Sylvia L. Thrupp in Studies in London History, “Aliens in and around London in the Fifteenth Century,” offers interesting parallels with other periods. Some 90 per cent were classified as Doche; this was a generic term including Flemish, Dane and German, but more than half in fact came from Holland. The evidence of their wills suggests that their common characteristics were “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group,” an observation which could equally be applied to more recent immigrants from, for example, South Asia. These fifteenth-century immigrants tended to settle into defined trades such as goldsmithery, tailory, haberdashery, clock-making and brewing. They were also celebrated as printers. Others mingled within the broader urban community as beer-sellers, basket-makers, joiners, caterers and servants within London households or at London inns. Evidence from the guilds and from extant wills also “indicates that English became the means of communication within this group,” again a characteristic and often instinctive response of any immigrant community. In the city wards the Italians comprised “a commercial and financial aristocracy,” although there were differences within the group. There were Frenchmen, and a number of Jews; and “Greek, Italian, and Spanish physicians,” but the underclass of that period seems to have been Icelanders who were commonly employed as servants.

  There was a period of sustained suspicion in the 1450s, when Italian merchants and bankers were condemned for usury. But the imbroglio passed, leaving only its rumours as confirmation of the fact that Londoners were particularly sensitive to commercial double-dealing. The “Evil May Day” riots of 1517, when the shops and houses of foreigners were attacked by a mob of apprentices, were dispelled with equal speed and without any permanent effect upon the alien population. This has been the custom of the city over many centuries; despite violent acts inspired by demagoguery and financial panic, the immigrant communities of the city have generally been permitted to settle down, engage with their neighbours in trade and parish work, adopt English as their native language, intermarry and bring up their children as Londoners.

  A wave of immigration in the mid-1560s, however, when the Huguenots sought refuge from Catholic persecution, provoked a general alarm. On 17 February 1567, there was “a great watch in the City of London … for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the city.” The Huguenots were accused of trading secretly among themselves and of engaging in illicit commercial practices such as hoarding. They “take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses [and] take into them several lodgers and dwellers”; thus they were held directly responsible for London’s overcrowding. Even if the children of these immigrants “born within this realm are by law accounted English,” they remained foreigners by “inclination and kind affection.” Once more it is a familiar language, adopted by those who were uneasy at the presence of “aliens” in their midst. There were also charges that they pushed up the prices of London properties.

  It was perhaps inevitable that, at times of financial recession or depression, the onus fell upon the supposedly unfair or restrictive commercial practices of the “aliens.” In similar manner, at times of growth and expansion, the presence of the same traders was greeted as an indication of the city’s munificence and varied wealth. Addison, on viewing the polyglot assembly at the Royal Exchange, remarked that it “gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so much an Assembly of Country-men and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.” There is no Jew-baiting or Francophobia in this account.

  In 1850 William Wordsworth, writing of his earlier residence in London, reflected upon the fact that within the city crowd he had found

  every character of form and face:

  The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,

  The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote

  America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,

  Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese

  And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.

  He also mentions the “Italian … the Turk … the Jew” and can thus be said to provide a comprehensive survey of the immigrant population. It provides a now familiar insight into the character of a city which contains many nations within itself, but in the nineteenth century there came a fresh movement of political as opposed to religious refugees. Carlyle noticed their presence in London when he observed that “one might mark the years and epochs by the successive kinds of exiles that walk London streets and, in grim silent manner, demand pity from us and reflections from us.” The Russian revolutionary Kropotkin celebrated London as the haven for political refugees from all over the world,
and indeed it has been claimed that by the close of the nineteenth century the city had become the most significant arena for the dissemination of political ideas, for the creation of political ideologies, and for the promulgation of political causes. So there were Spanish refugees in Somers Town—“you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare coats; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St. Pancras New Church.” They became conspicuous in 1825 and then, like many other such groups, vanished almost as suddenly as they had first arrived. In the spring of 1829, according to a diarist of the period, “there was an abrupt increase in the numbers of French in London”; as political agitation and civic uprisings fluctuated in intensity, so did the numbers of the French. London became the political barometer for the whole of Europe. Garibaldi and Mazzini came, as did Marx and Engels; in 1851 Herzen and Kossuth arrived, the one a Russian, the other a Hungarian; so did political refugees from Poland and Germany. England, and in particular London, was the place most welcoming to exiles.

  The history of any one group is filled with profound interest. There were Jews, Africans, and representatives of most of the European races, at the time of the Roman settlement. It is not too much to claim that their lives have haunted London ever since. The mystery of difference and of oppression has been played out over the centuries, touching upon the need to define oneself or one’s race and implicated in the pride or susceptibility of a “native” population. This narrative has been largely conceived in terms of acceptance and assimilation, but no known human history is without its victims.

  The Jews suffered early from prejudice and brutality. Refugees from the Rouen pogrom arrived in the city in 1096, but the first documentary evidence for a Jewish quarter emerges in 1128. They were not permitted to engage in ordinary commerce but were allowed to lend money, the “usury” from which Christian merchants were barred; then of course they were blamed or hated for the very trade imposed upon them by the civic authorities. There was a murderous assault upon their quarters in 1189 when “the houses were besieged by the roaring people … because the madmen had not tools, fire was thrown on the roof, and a terrible fire quickly broke out.” Many families were burned alive, while others fleeing into the narrow thoroughfares of Old Jewry and Gresham Street were clubbed or beaten to death. There was another pogrom in 1215, and on certain occasions the Jews took refuge in the Tower in order to escape the depredations of the mob. They suffered from the noble families who were indebted to them, also, and in strange anticipation of a later destiny they were obliged to wear a sign upon their clothes in recognition of their race. It was not the Star of David, but a tabula or depiction of the stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments were supposed to have been miraculously inscribed.

  In 1272 hundreds of Jews were hanged on suspicion of adulterating the coinage, and then eighteen years later—their usefulness at an end after the arrival of Italian and French financiers—all were expelled, beaten, spat upon or killed in a mass exodus from the city. It would have seemed that the wandering race could find no permanent haven even in the cosmopolitan and commercial city of London. London, instead, had become the very pattern of urban exploitation and aggression. But some returned, quietly and almost invisibly, over the next two or three centuries under the guise of Christians; in the seventeenth century Charles I made use of their financial skills and resources but it was Cromwell who, with a more profound biblical knowledge, allowed the right of settlement after a “Humble Petition of the Hebrews at Present Residing in this city of London.” They requested that “wee may therewith meete at our said private devotions in our Particular houses without feere of Molestation either to our persons famillys or estates.” These were Sephardic Jews who, like Isak Lopes Chillon, one of the signatories to the petition, came out of Spain and Portugal; but in the latter part of the seventeenth century, from central and eastern Europe, arrived the Ashkenazi Jews who were less affluent, less well educated, and variously depicted as “down-trodden” and “poverty-stricken.” Charles Booth has described how “the old settlers held aloof from the newcomers, and regarded them as a lower caste, fit only to receive alms.”

  And here emerges the other face of the immigrant population. The newcomers were not necessarily the accepted and acceptable, not merchants and doctors, but the wandering alien, the lowly refugee, the poor unskilled migrant fit only for the “sale of old clothes or in peddling goods such as fruit, jewellry and knives.” The Ashkenazim were representative of an entire impoverished and wandering population, alternately exploited and abused by the native residents.

  More Ashkenazi Jews arrived at various notable occasions in the eighteenth century; there were persecutions, and partitions, and sieges, which sent them flocking to their co-religionists already in London where the first Ashkenazi synagogue had been established in Aldgate in 1722. But they were not welcomed, principally because they were poor. It was suggested that they would “deluge the kingdom with brokers, usurers and beggars”; once more emerges the irrational but instinctive fear of being “swamped.” They were also accused of taking jobs from native Londoners, although, since they could not be apprenticed to Christian masters, the fear of their usurping available employment was a false one. But, in London, such fears have always been widely advertised and believed; in a society where financial want and insecurity were endemic among the working population, any suggestion of unfair labouring practices could arouse great discontent. Thus in the 1750s and 1760s Jew-baiting became a “sport, like cock-throwing, or bull-baiting, or pelting some poor wretch in the pillory.”

  There is another problem, evinced as early as the seventeenth century, whereby immigrants are lent distinct and opprobrious identities. “As the Frenchmen love to be bold, Flemings to be drunken,” Thomas Dekker wrote in 1607, so “Irish [love] to be costermongers” or street pedlars. It is a question, in the modern term, of “stereotyping” which afflicts all migrant populations. The irony, of course, is that certain groups seem unable to escape this matrix of false expectations and misperceptions. The London Irish, for example, had always been typecast as the poorest of the poor. By 1640 parish records note the presence of “a poor Irishman … a poore distressed man from Ireland … a shroude for an Irishman that dyed … a poore gentleman vndone by the burning of a cittie in Ireland … his goods cast away comeing from Ireland … four poore women and sixe children that came oute of Ireland … poor plundered Irish.” All these instances, and more, come from the registers of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and evoke the first steps in a sad history of migration. Yet it was not quite the beginning. Eleven years before, an edict had declared that “this realm hath of late been pestered with a great number of Irish beggars, who live here idly and dangerously, and are of ill-example to the natives.” This has always been one of the cries against the immigrants of London: that they are lazy, living off hand-outs like beggars, and thus demoralising the resident population. The assumption here must be that immigrants are a threat because they undermine the will to work, and provide examples of successful idleness; they are also receiving help or charity which, paradoxically, the native population claims by right to itself. The same complaints have been levelled in recent years against the Bangladeshi population of Whitechapel, and of Tower Hamlets in general.

  There were riots against the Irish, too, once more on the prevailing assumption that they were allowing themselves to be used as cheap employment—“letting themselves out to all sorts of ordinary labour,” Robert Walpole wrote, “considerably cheaper than the English labourers have.” There were masters who took them in “for above one-third less per day.” Few observers stopped to consider the measure of poverty and desperation which would encourage them to accept almost starvation wages; instead there was open hostility and violence directed against them, committed by mobs which “arose in Southwark, Lambeth and Tyburn Road.” There were assaults upon the Irish in Tower Hamlets, Clare Market and Covent Garden. Duri
ng the Gordon Riots, in 1780, under the lambent cry of “No Popery!,” Irish dwellings and public houses were indiscriminately attacked and pulled down. Another familiar component of these actions against the immigrants was the prevailing belief that many of them were criminals come to prey upon unsuspecting Londoners. One city magistrate, in 1753, argued that “most of the robberies, and the murders consequent upon them, have been committed by these outcasts from Ireland.” Just as the Jews were receivers, so the Irish were thieves. London was “the refuge” where dangerous or depraved immigrants “seek shelter and concealment.” The meaning of “refuge,” then, can subtly change from haven to lair.

  Among these riots and alarms there was another group of immigrants who, if they stirred little outrage, excited even less sympathy. They were the Indians, the forgotten ancestors of the twentieth-century arrivals, who came to London as servants or slaves; some remained in employment, while others were summarily dismissed or ran away to a vagrant life. There were “hue and cry” advertisements in the public prints—a guinea for the recapture of “a black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old run away the 8th ins. from Putney with a collar about his neck with this inscription, ‘The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’” Other advertisements were placed to discover an “East India Tawney Black” or a “Run-away Bengal Boy.” Other Asian servants were “discharged” or “dumped,” having attended their employers on their passage from India, so that they were reduced to a life upon the streets. One Indian visitor wrote to The Times in order to complain about the presence of Indian beggars who were “a great annoyance to the Public, but more so to the Indian gentlemen who visit England.” The Public Advertiser in 1786 observed that “those poor wretches who are daily begging for a passage back, proves that the generality of those who bring them over leave them to shift for themselves the moment they have no further occasion for their services.” These were the unwilling immigrants.