Saturday was the busiest day, with markets staying open late into the night. Full of brightly lit stalls, the more humble barrows and even makeshift pitches with goods displayed on a scrap of cloth, the markets would spread out over many streets, and they all had their pubs, as did practically every little turning.
With one on just about every corner, pubs were another hub of social life in a neighbourhood, and there were also street entertainers with barrel organs and model tableaux to be enjoyed; outings to be saved for and looked forward to, with maybe a day trip on the Bank Holiday that had been introduced in 1871; boxing booths with bare-knuckle prize fights that could provide an evening’s amusement for as little as a penny; and ratting contests between terriers that were free, with the added draw of an opportunity for some illicit gambling. Then there were the more costly, though still-affordable delights of the music halls, and, cheaper though no less fun, were the penny gaffs.
The gaffs were favourite places of entertainment, particularly with the younger members of what Victorian society considered to be the rougher element. These were set up on a temporary, usually unofficial, basis, in empty shops or small warehouses, by a theatrical troupe or impresario, in much the same way as so-called ‘Cheap Jacks’ nowadays open Everything-a-Pound shops in premises awaiting new lease-holders. The shows were flamboyant and melodramatic, with saucy songs, bloodthirsty playlets and, if patrons were lucky, a bonus in the form of a ‘freak’ or wax show to further thrill them. The audiences were as rowdy and raucous as the performers, and, so it was widely believed, were of a generally criminal inclination, which was only exacerbated by the inflammatory dramas they were witnessing on the impromptu stage before them. In fact, much the same fears and arguments were being advanced about the undesirability of the penny gaffs as have been voiced by parents and social commentators in the late twentieth century regarding ‘video nasties’. A more acceptable pastime, but one which was also to degenerate somewhat in the eyes of the middle classes, was the tradition of the Fairlop Boat Fair.
The boat, not actually a seagoing craft but a contraption mounted on wheels and drawn by horses, was used to transport the workers of Daniel Day, a generous ships’ block- and pump-maker of Wapping, on their annual treat: a day’s outing to his weekend retreat at Fairlop in Essex. The practice began in the early eighteenth century, when Day announced that he would meet the cost of the trip and a dinner to be held at his house, but he stipulated that all those who wanted to go to the fair had to make the journey from the workshop in Wapping to his place in Fairlop by boat, a completely landlocked journey.
Day’s hope was that this intriguing requirement, met by his provision of the strange vehicle, would popularize the idea of an annual beano with not only his own workforce but also other benevolent employers.
The fair, celebrated on the first Friday in July to commemorate the anniversary of Day’s purchase of his country haven, became such a popular event that crowds lined the route to cheer the revellers and their eccentric transportation on their way.
When Daniel Day died in 1767 the fair continued, and even when the land on which it was held was cleared in 1853 under the Enclosures Act it still took place, close to the original spot in a field opposite the Old Maypole Inn. When that site was no longer available, it was moved again to a space near the Bald Hind Hotel at Chigwell. But wherever it was sited, the fair always began in the same, time-honoured way, with everyone assembling at Blackwall Cross – the junction of Poplar High Street and Robin Hood Lane – and then processing to the setting-off point in Grundy Street.
By the 1820s the fair had grown into a full-blown event, with commercial stalls and entertainment booths offering a whole week of distractions, and drawing far more Londoners than those originally intended to benefit from the fresh Essex air. They arrived in lines of brightly decorated vehicles, all following the boat, which was still drawn by the traditional six horses complete with smartly turned-out postilion. With the hugely increased numbers and the proximity of a pub, the proceedings became quite lively and, as the fair had no official charter, attempts were made to put a stop to what had become a considerably more unrestrained event than the original day’s outing had been.
One effort to abolish it altogether was made in 1840 at the Ilford Petty Sessions, but all this succeeded in doing was reducing it from a week to a single day. But there was no holding back East Enders intent on having a good time and the fair soon returned to its inflated, week-long self. There were also police attempts, recorded in 1846, to dismantle the illegal booths and stalls, but they too failed when faced with so many objectors. It was only in 1853, with the deforestation of Hainault and the closing off of the site to the public, that the fair was actually stopped. But not for long.
By 1899 it was back, this time at the Maypole, and it had expanded even further, now including a mechanical fairground with swings and roundabouts, as well as all the other attractions. The idea of an annual beano had become a traditional part of the East End philosophy that ‘we made our own fun’, whether it was a charabanc outing to the Derby, a day’s train trip to Southend or a brake ride to Hoddesdon Weir.
There was nothing peculiar to the Fairlop Boat Fair which frightened the establishment; bawdy behaviour and unlicensed goings-on have always caused concern among those not involved, or who do not get the joke, or do not themselves appreciate a particular pastime. And they probably always will. As late as the 1940s, a survey carried out by the London Diocesan Church of England Temperance Society, and the Churches’ Committee on Gambling, blamed funfairs for being the direct cause of delinquency among the young.
But there was one particular leisure pursuit associated with east London that might have held more appeal for those who would have banned the fair. These were the Whitebait Dinners held in the Thames-side inns famed for their delicious fish.
The custom of giving Whitebait Dinners was started in the eighteenth century by an engineer, Captain Perry, who, during his work repairing the river embankment at Dagenham, had bought a waterside home called Breach House. A lake in its marshy Thames-side grounds became a select fishing club to which the Captain invited his friends, who afterwards shared a meal with him. When Sir Robert Preston of the East India Company took over Breach House, he continued the tradition of the suppers, inviting guests, including William Pitt the Younger and various of his Tory colleagues, to his ‘fishing cottage’. The trip to Dagenham was not always possible for the Prime Minister, so the host, Sir Robert, moved the event to the Artichoke, a tavern at Blackwall noted for its whitebait. Even though salmon was easily caught on that stretch of the river, it was the quality of the much smaller fish that was widely praised, with newspapers carrying lengthy reports recommending them as a delicacy.
The event continued after the deaths of both Pitt and Preston himself, but the guests were now exclusively members of the Cabinet and the once Dagenham-based angling trips followed by a meal were now distinguished by the title of the Ministerial Fish Dinner.
Whitebait suppers were, of course, on offer to ‘ordinary’ members of the public, but by the mid-nineteenth century the Brunswick Hotel’s reputation for the excellence of its food attracted so many members of ‘high society’ – from the Duke of Cambridge to the American philanthropist George Peabody – that it was no longer only newspapers which were praising the experience of eating at the riverside taverns of Blackwall. Thomas Love Peacock actually composed a poem in its honour.
A bill for dinner at the Artichoke in the 1840s comprising four fish dinners, followed by fruit, washed down with a bottle of sherry, two bottles of port and a brandy, and including a two-shilling tip for the waiter, boat hire there, coach hire back and a boat to the wharf, came to the grand total of two pounds six shillings and sixpence.
Less expensive and more active pursuits were more widely enjoyed in the East End. In the 1870s roller-skating, imported from the United States, immediately became a craze. Within a year of its arrival on British shores, there were fifty
rinks in London alone, with a theatre in Shoreditch, the Royal Standard, being gutted and especially refitted as a skating arena. Ice-skating was also embraced and a massive centre in the Cambridge Heath Road, the Victoria, was packed out with an eager public.
Spectator sports were also popular, with many of the London football clubs having their origins in this period, the Football Association having been set up in the 1860s to oversee the regulation and development of the game. Millwall, for example, started life as a works team from Morton’s jam factory – a place were seasonally unemployed match-girls could find summer jobs – and West Ham evolved from a team known as the Thames Ironworks, while Tottenham Hotspur were the football-playing element of a rather older cricket club.
But even innocent pleasures enjoyed by the locals, such as having a few drinks in the pub with your pals, gambling on a street corner on the flip of a coin, having a boisterous night out at a penny gaff or hollering yourself hoarse at a football match, could all be viewed very differently by outsiders, and especially by those who sought to improve the East Enders and steer them from their wicked ways.
[ 6 ]
In the introduction to his Working-class Stories of the 1890s P. J. Keating noted that it is ‘difficult to exaggerate the degree of interest in the East End shown by settlers, philanthropists, religious missionaries, journalists, Salvationists and sociologists during the [1880s]’.
Necessary as it was for someone to do something about conditions in the slums, the motives, attitudes and intentions of these reformers, crusaders and radicals might at times seem questionable, and aspects of their work could certainly be condemned with modern-day hindsight. But they must be seen in their historical context, and even if some were patronizing, paternalistic do-gooders, at least they were doing something to relieve the deprivation of the most poor and neglected.
Thomas Barnardo was one advocate of change who was actually criticized by his contemporaries and for rather more than being patronizing. Recently arrived in England to study at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, the young Irish doctor was shocked by the deprivation he witnessed, and went on to dedicate his life to rescuing children and providing homes for them, declaring that no destitute child would ever be denied admission to his shelter. No other group in the East End had a greater need for welfare provision, however rudimentary, than the youngest and most vulnerable who found themselves living on the streets.
From his early, humble efforts, Barnardo’s homes were to become internationally renowned, but, at the time, there were those who questioned both his reasons and his methods. There were allegations of financial improprieties, suggestions that the photographs of desperate children, with which his cause was publicized, were faked to increase donations, and, worst of all, accusations of cruelty to the youngsters in his care. Although nothing was proved, contemporary doubts regarding the doctor remained, but his work spoke for itself.
Like Barnardo, William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, understood the need for publicity to promote his beliefs, although he was not so much condemned by his contemporaries as mocked and taunted by them. But there were occasions when the ridicule turned to violence, when mobs turned on him, enraged by his tub-thumping brand of religion, as he carried out his crusade to help the poor and to save their souls with his banner-waving, tambourine-rattling, military style of revivalism.
But when Booth wrote In Darkest England, the book horrified the country with its portrayal of the squalor and poverty in Victorian London, and he went on to gain much admiration for his fearless campaigns against child prostitution and the exploitation of sweated labour.
One reformer who seems to have puzzled rather than angered people was Frederick Charrington, who, because of his anti-drink and anti-vice beliefs, gave up all his rights to the massive family brewery fortune and committed his life to working in the East End. Charrington was proud of all the brothels he managed to close, using legislation which rewarded those who identified the so-called case houses to the authorities, but his obsession with the notion of evil led him to be suspected as being the person responsible for the Whitechapel murders; not of being Jack the Ripper himself, but of hiring someone to do the horrific killings to drive out the prostitutes. There has even been a suggestion that Charrington’s anti-brothel offensive was a cynical move to empty out properties which he could then buy, in an area where land was at such a premium. This, however, is now one of the least popular theories about the murderer’s identity, along with the idea that the Ripper was a midwife – a profession that would have provided a perfect cover for a bloodied appearance – extracting revenge following her remorse at carrying out abortions for the prostitutes.
Regardless of the actual identity of Jack, the Whitechapel murders certainly turned the spotlight firmly on to the East End, shedding little light but a great deal of heat, which generated a whole new wave of interest from charities, missions and the simply curious. One of the lasting legacies of this Victorian drive for improvement has been the university settlements.
It is most likely that the idea of establishing settlements originated with Edward Denison, the son of a bishop, when he moved to the Mile End Road in 1864. He was, like most nineteenth-century, middle-class newcomers to the East End, dismayed by what he saw. Believing that charity was not the solution, Denison wanted to show the impoverished masses a better way of life by encouraging educated individuals to establish a residential community amidst the slums where, through example, they would instil their manners and culture in their less-well-off neighbours.
His theory attracted much attention, although he himself did little to put it into practice. That was left to the Reverend Samuel Barnett, who was to set up what is probably the best known of the East End settlements, Toynbee Hall in Commercial Street.
Barnett moved from a West End parish in 1872 to become vicar of the socially and economically very different St Jude’s in Whitechapel, his bishop having warned him that his new home was
the worst parish in the diocese, inhabited mainly by a criminal population, and which (he feared) has been much corrupted by doles.
Unlike those privileged souls who lived just a few miles away from the privations of the East End, and who were appalled and shocked by the lives of the poor but did nothing, Barnett, who was now in the middle of it, reacted very differently. He went to Oxford and spoke on ‘Settlements of University Men in Great Towns’ to an invited group, emphasizing that people should not be saying that something must be done but asking, ‘What can I do?’
What Barnett did was persuade some of his friends to help him establish a settlement which would carry out the vision of ‘active citizenship’ which he shared with Arnold Toynbee, a history tutor from Oxford who had died tragically young and for whom the settlement was named. This involved creating a place where ‘settlers’, university teachers and students, could live and work for a specific period, and where they would, according to his stated intention, both learn from their research and investigations and teach their new, temporary community.
Toynbee Hall, a rather grand structure, affecting the style of an Oxbridge college, was opened at the end of 1884. A similar group from Oxford had already opened a more formally religious settlement in east London, Oxford House, in October 1884, but it was Barnett’s Toynbee Hall which came to be known as the ‘Mother of Settlements’ and was a model for the many similar foundations that were to be created not only in east London but throughout the world.
Barnett’s settlement concentrated on what he considered to be instructive and improving activities. He was instrumental, for instance, in setting up the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the library, but he and his wife were also involved in practical matters. They campaigned for universal pensions and the improvement of poor relief, and were advocates of educational reform; they were also responsible for the establishment of the East London Dwelling Company, which originally provided basic accommodation for working men, but eventually opened up to accommodate families.
/> An East Ender born in 1903 remembered living in one of the Dwellings as a boy:
These buildings were old… but were built solid, owned by the East London Dwelling Company. The rooms: one front, two bedrooms and a scullery with a toilet out on the landing. The scullery was distempered in red. There was a black iron sink, cold water, of course, and a large coal box. The landing had stone stairs and was lit by gas jets. There was no hall as such, you just walked into the living room.
Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, continued to be energetic workers in their new parish, being concerned as much with the social as the spiritual needs of his flock. Events, societies and clubs were organized, including the Children’s Country Holidays Fund, an annual art exhibition and the Association for Befriending Young Servants; and, importantly, they encouraged influential people to visit the area to see, at first hand, the many problems which so desperately needed addressing.
Barnett was undoubtedly well meaning in that he recognized that the East End was not simply an amorphous mass but was made up of different types of people with different needs, and also that an integrated approach to change was a better way of dealing with social problems than imposing piecemeal schemes here and there, but he still believed that his middle-class friends and colleagues should come in to act as leaders amongst the local people, standing, for instance, in local elections, as he considered them more suited to such tasks because ‘the change for good’ required ‘men of culture’.
My East End Page 9
