My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  With rents for decent housing too high for too many – even if they could satisfy the residence qualifications – and the streets or the workhouse hardly representing a reasonable choice, it is little surprise that so many found themselves living in the overcrowded, dangerously insanitary, multi-occupied slums of London’s Victorian East End.

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  With the majority having to get by without private facilities, public baths and wash-houses played a vital role in the health and well-being of the citizens of the East End. One of the first to be opened was in Goulston Street, Whitechapel, in 1847, paid for with the aid of donations from a group of City businessmen concerned for the welfare of their less well-to-do neighbours.

  Similar establishments were soon being built all over the East End and were surprisingly well equipped, with baths complete with soap, hot water and towels, and laundries with washing troughs, boilers, drying horses, irons and mangles. These were a boon, but they were not free, and the benefits of having clothes cleaned, dried, ironed and aired away from the cramped conditions of home were not the lot of the less well off. Rather than having the luxury of doing their laundry elsewhere, poorer women would take in the dirty linen of others, and would somehow manage to launder it in their already restricted rooms. It was grinding, steamy drudgery, done without the benefit of even the most basic labour-saving technology, but it was a means of getting by; the difference between having nothing and something, no matter how small.

  An 1888 advertisement, issued by the Poplar Baths and Wash-houses, set out their regulations and asked customers to:

  extend the benefits of the Public wash-houses as much as possible [and] earnestly request you will recommend your friends and neighbours to use them, instead of washing in the rooms they live in; Time, Money, Labour and Trouble will thereby be saved; Health will be promoted, and their families will avoid the discomfort of washing at home.

  It concluded with two mottoes exalting cleanliness: ‘Sickness is often brought on by having a Dirty Skin’ and ‘Dirty Clothes are like a Second Dirty Skin, and help to make the body sickly.’

  Important as personal hygiene might be to a decent quality of life, the availability of water for drinking played a more significant part in the well-being of East Enders. The high likelihood that, in the more insanitary past, water was contaminated meant that beer, which had at least been processed, was used to slake the thirst. By the eighteenth century, however, gin had taken over as the favoured drink of the labouring classes, with more than half of all grain sold in the capital being distilled into alcohol. As the contemporary phrase had it, you could be ‘drunk for a penny, and dead drunk for tuppence’. Investigations into the problems caused by this appetite for gin resulted in little more than a series of ineffective attempts to control its abuse, accompanied by a continuing rise in its consumption.

  By the late 1820s, the situation was reaching crisis point and, in 1830, the government responded by scrapping the duty on beer and allowing ale houses to operate without a justice’s licence. Such moves finally helped lure drinkers away from the seductive splendours of the opulently mirrored and tiled gin palaces to the more prosaic, but much cheaper, ‘beer shops’.

  London’s lack of decent water was highlighted on the occasion of the Great Stink of 1858. This occurred after a misguided public health decision was taken to outlaw the use of all the cesspits sited under the capital’s buildings. In itself, this was no bad thing, as they continually overflowed, spilling out on to the lower floors, but no provision was made for an adequate alternative and the Thames was suddenly serving as both London’s primary water source and its main sewer. The river quickly became so polluted with effluent from homes and factories, slaughterhouses and chemical works, as to be almost unbearably ripe.

  When the Houses of Parliament could no longer function without draping soaked cloths at the windows to try to alleviate the stench, a bill was passed ordering the cleaning up of the river, and the go-ahead was given to the engineer Joseph Bazalgette to begin work on his London-wide sewerage system. But these ambitious plans did little to improve the immediate lot of the cockney.

  Standpipes and uncovered butts filled from water carts were the inadequate source of their unhygienic supply, coming predominantly from the East London Water Company, an organization which would cut off the already sporadic provision as soon as a tenement’s landlord failed to pay their rates, regardless of the hardships it caused the tenants.

  In 1894, after years of failing and intermittent supplies, the East End experienced such a dangerous water shortage that wealthier consciences were at last pricked. Letters were written, articles appeared in national and local newspapers, cartoons were drawn and even poetry composed. Some sections of the press were keen to show the consequences of the drought and what happened when any dribble of water that did get through the standpipes was stinking and full of insects – according to the Daily News, ‘All sanitation came to an end’ in East London in the summer of 1894 – but not everyone was as sympathetic to the East Enders’ difficulties.

  Punch carried a drawing of an East London Water Company official informing a filthy-looking bunch, standing in a grubby street by a barely trickling standpipe, that they shouldn’t

  … go a wastin’ all this ‘ere valuable water in washin’ and waterin’ your gardens… or you’ll get yourselves in trouble…

  And a slightly later piece, written in the autumn, appeared in the East End News and Dock Directory and was equally flip about the situation:

  The East Londoner has so long been used to oppression in various forms, that the latest, the stoppage of his water supply, does not seem to worry him.

  The suppliers’ interests were, of course, commercial, and they were not inclined to act, even though they had, in 1892, assured the Royal Commission that the East London Water Company would supply the area with plentiful water for the next forty years. Following the cholera outbreaks which had had such devastating effects on the East End, this had been an important, if hollow, promise. There were suspicions that the company was selling water intended for Mile End Old Town to the expanding, wealthier suburbs of East and West Ham, but, whatever the cause of the shortages, people were dying and the death rates were rising fast. When the drought reached its worst, the company was finally forced to obtain water from other suppliers. This was 1898, four years after the problem had begun.

  As a result of this fiasco, all of London’s water provision was taken over by the Metropolitan Water Board so that an adequate supply would be assured for the whole population. The present-day return to privatized water supplies, almost exactly 100 years later, is worrying. If this harking back to ‘Victorian values’ sees history repeating itself, it will, of course, be the poorest who suffer yet again.

  When water shortages were a regular occurrence, or at least a recent memory, drinking fountains and horse and cattle troughs were highly valued throughout east London, a prized public service supplied by philanthropists such as Baroness Burdett-Coutts.

  At the turn of the century there were twenty-three fountains and nine troughs in Stepney alone, and when, in 1912, the drinking fountain outside the East India Dock gates was scheduled for removal as part of a road-widening scheme, it provoked such local anger that it had to be re-erected close by. But the provision of fresh water for the masses was sometimes motivated by morality rather than concerns about refreshment and hygiene. An undated Victorian poster announcing a meeting to discuss the construction of a public drinking fountain in Bow read as follows:

  [It shall] commemorate the useful life of the late Mr Joseph Dawson, and promote the great cause of Temperance so much neglected in this town and neighbourhood.

  In the Victorian East End, some drinking water was actually available from natural sources other than the polluted Thames, just as it had been from the earliest times and still continues to be so.

  Up until the Second World War, Shadwell underground station was an unlikely venue for those wishing to ‘t
ake the waters’. A constantly flowing stream, emerging through a retaining wall, could be sampled in a cup supplied expressly for that purpose. It probably emanated from the same source as the mineral spring discovered in the mid-eighteenth century in nearby Sun Tavern Fields, a piece of land which would have been roughly bounded by today’s Highway, King David’s Lane, Glamis Road and Cable Street.

  A pamphlet, written in 1749, by D. W. Linden, MD, tells of the value of the Sun Tavern Fields spa water, taken either internally or bathed in, citing it as an

  … approved cure for almost every disorder incident to the human frame… It has been found very serviceable as an antiscorbutic, and in all cutaneous disorders.

  Either he is trying to blind his patients with science or they were maybe better educated in those days. He further praises the water’s special properties:

  … even [in] some leprous cases, it has proved effective in the cure of the itch, scabs, tetters, and the scald-head; and in the sarcy and grease in horses: and, as a powerful dryer, repellent, and somewhat escharotic, has cured sistula’s, stubborn ulcers… and sore eyes [and] in stopping inward bleedings.

  Something for everyone there. Maybe he should have bottled it, as the Tower Hamlets local authority is talking of doing with the mineral water that was recently discovered coming from a spring in Mile End Park.

  Despite water shortages, health risks, poverty and the squalid housing conditions in its eastern quarter, this area of London was still part of the great port, the gateway to the world, the heart of the Empire, and as such continued to be a magnet for people from all over Britain and much of the rest of the globe.

  By the nineteenth century, the East End was becoming truly cosmopolitan, a beguiling, if often empty, honeypot around which disappointed bees would buzz. But newcomers such as the Jews were as likely to be escaping from tyranny as they were to be drawn by stories of the rich pickings to be had on the gold-paved streets, and they arrived in ever greater numbers.

  Familial, social, geographic and economic factors determined where people settled; the presence of a friend or family member able to speak to a landlord, or to an employer, gave a newly arrived person a start in the area. Or it could be the existence of affordable accommodation close to the docks which attracted newcomers, like the young sailors – maybe from China, Somalia or the Yemen – looking for a bed for a few nights while their vessels were in port. Some of those seamen, tempted by opportunities better than those to be found with the shipping lines, or back home, ‘jumped ship’ and stayed, putting down tentative roots which, in some cases, resulted in the organic growth of a close-knit community, such as that in Limehouse which came to be known as Chinatown.

  Originally employed on East India Company vessels, the Chinese were prepared to work for very low pay, but with little to spend and generally no English they were doubly badly off while on shore leave in the slums which surrounded the docks. Even so, until their ship made her return journey or they managed to secure a job with another line, the sailors had little choice but to be patient and to manage the best they could.

  With alternative work sometimes presenting itself during the enforced shore leave, a Chinese settlement began to emerge, with new arrivals gravitating to the district where they either knew or had introductions to someone living there. Families stayed put for several generations, but, when they were in a position to do so, most moved out to the more affluent suburbs, as generations of immigrants before and after them had done and would do.

  As a community, Chinatown was never much more than a few streets around Pennyfields, but as strange-looking shops and businesses were established, and more of the curiously garbed individuals arrived with their robes and pigtails, the area became a focus for all sorts of outlandish rumours and sensationalist reporting, involving everything from white-slavery rackets to the indiscriminate morals of those who supposedly ran vice dens. The experience of people living in the area was, no doubt, influenced by the common prejudicial stance taken against any outsiders, but the opium and gambling dens certainly existed. My own great-uncle Tom was, in the 1920s, a minder for Daddy Lee, the owner of one such club, which was frequented as much by locally born East Enders who wished to avail themselves of the exotic facilities as it was by the Chinese.

  Another group of incomers left to their own devices by their employers were the Indian servants and nannies, the ayahs, who, from the eighteenth century, had accompanied British employers returning to England. On arrival, they were not always given the return fare they had been promised. If they could not secure another job with India-bound passengers, they had little option but to remain in London, the port where their ship had docked. By the 1870s, the problem had become so acute that an Ayahs’ Home was established in Aldgate to give the abandoned women shelter.

  The majority of those arriving from the subcontinent in this period, however, were men. From the eighteenth century, a few Indian sailors – known by the catch-all term of Lascars, which was assigned to any dark-skinned, Asian, Arab and even, sometimes, to Chinese sailors – were taken on by the East India Company, and their numbers grew throughout the nineteenth century because, like the Chinese, they would do hard, dirty work for lower rates than any British seamen. Despite action by the government throughout the nineteenth century, in the form of Merchant Shipping Acts, to stop foreigners jumping ship and settling by the docks, some still managed to do so, and other communities, such as that of the Somalis, took root.

  Further east it was a slightly different story, as the Royal Docks did not open until 1855, but from that date foreigners certainly became a more familiar sight in what is now the London Borough of Newham, and, by 1896, they were present in sufficient numbers to merit the setting up of a dedicated mission in Canning Town for sailors from overseas. One group who planned to come – some to stay, others en route for the United States – with hopes of a safer and better life, were the Jews fleeing the pogroms and persecutions which followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

  It has been estimated that between 1881 and the beginning of the First World War nearly three million Jews fled eastern Europe, and that the Jewish population in London increased from the 1881 level of 45,000 to an approximate peak of 150,000, with their East End population spreading over two square miles of Jewish homes and businesses.

  These nineteenth-century Jewish newcomers, the Ashkenazim, not only came in greater numbers but had, on the whole, very different social, economic and cultural backgrounds from their more sophisticated and financially successful Sephardic predecessors. But the existence of a Jewish infrastructure, coupled with cheap housing and the possibility of work in Jewish businesses, made the East End an attractive place to stay. This, however, was to change.

  By the late 1880s, the pressures of the unprecedented population growth, deepening economic problems, growing unemployment and the additional burdens on an already inadequate housing stock saw increasingly vocal anti-Semitism, as more newcomers arrived from eastern Europe. Efforts were made – some more sympathetic and defensible than others – by their established, better-off co-religionists to help them assimilate into their new, host community, or to find somewhere to settle away from the overcrowded East End.

  From the mid-nineteenth century, the German community also experienced a large and rapid increase. They too had been driven from their homeland by poverty, revolutionary political upheavals, failed harvests, encroaching urbanization and the pressures of a menacingly high population rise in their homeland. But it was economics, rather than the German establishment or local prejudice, that eventually saw the dispersal of their community.

  Most of the newcomers settled in what was already known as Little Germany, an area skirted by the Whitechapel Road, Cannon Street Road, the Highway and Leman Street, making the community at that time one of the largest of all the immigrant groups in London.

  There were intellectuals and professionals among the German immigrants and they did well for themselves in their new home,
but, as with the Jewish arrivals, the majority of the more recent residents of Little Germany were people from agricultural communities who had few appropriate skills to offer and were ill-suited to cosmopolitan life. They took the worst of the casual jobs at the meanest rates of pay, many in skin-dyeing but mostly in the massive sugar bakeries – the dangerous, debilitatingly hot sugar-refining plants which loomed like cathedrals over the Victorian Whitechapel slums.

  At the height of the community’s strength, the German labouring classes could worship at a choice of German churches, study in German schools, buy goods in German shops, spend their childhood in a German orphanage, have their health needs catered for in their hospital in Dalston and spend their final years in their own old people’s home.

  As populous as it had once been, by the late 1870s, with the disintegration of the sugar-baking industry and the hike in rents, Little Germany had begun to shrink. Some residents returned to their homeland and some moved on, making their way, like their Jewish counterparts, to the United States of America, but others stayed in London, moving further east to the increasingly urbanized and financially secure suburbs of what is now Newham.

  There they played an important role in the economic success of the area, becoming involved in the rapid industrialization which occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century. This, along with the creation of Beckton, was to totally change the face of the area.

  Beckton had come into being when the Gas, Light and Coke Company set up a massive works by the side of the Thames, in what was then Essex, choosing the riverside site to make easier the unloading of coal barges arriving from the north-east of England. It took two years to complete the vast range of buildings which comprised the works and the purpose-built estate to house the company’s employees.

  Named after Simon Beck, the head of the company, Beckton produced its first gas for public consumption in November 1878 and was soon prospering. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it became the leading supplier of gas in the whole of London.