My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  The work at Toynbee Hall provoked argument and raised questions about why there were conversaziones, lectures on Sir Walter Scott and on chemistry, and orchestra recitals. What use were lectures on aesthetics and debating societies organized by a group of youngsters – the undergraduates who made up the community?

  There were other concerns on two, contradictory, counts about what was going on at Toynbee Hall: some considered the attitudes of those at the settlement condescending, while others suspected that the locals would start getting ideas above their station. Unsurprisingly, there was less controversy regarding the provision of classes in shorthand, arithmetic and book-keeping – such pursuits did not cause the working classes to get above themselves, but actually made them useful.

  But Toynbee Hall survived the criticism, and still does to this day, working with and for the community. Important progress has come about as a result of research carried out there, with the influence of living and working among the slums on the young William Beveridge contributing to the most significant of all social reforms during the entire twentieth century in Britain.

  However, critics such as George Lansbury, the Labour MP for Poplar, still accused the settlers of spending time in the communities as a means of furthering their own ambitions and then leaving the East End to sort out its own problems once their stay had served its purpose. This might have been true of some, but much good work was done and great personal sacrifices were made by others, among whom, Clara Grant, the ‘Farthing Bundles Lady’ of the Fern Street Settlement, stands tall.

  From girlhood, Clara Grant, who was born in 1867, had wanted two things: to teach and to live in London. Something of a revolutionary in that she abhorred traditional Victorian educational methods of rigid rote learning, in 1900 she became headteacher at Devons Road School in Bow Common.

  The area was poverty-stricken. When, in 1905, the Poplar Distress Committee took a local census of the unemployed and casual labourers, the area around the school had the worst figures in the whole borough. It became clear to Grant that these children needed more than education; they needed the basic necessities of life.

  In that same year, Grant opened a new school in nearby Fern Street and, in 1907, she established a settlement there, with a view to underpinning the children’s families until conditions were sufficiently improved for the settlement workers, who were to live in three houses in the street, to ‘render themselves unnecessary’.

  She did not believe in giving hand-outs. Some form of payment, however small, would be expected for any assistance, thus allowing people to retain their dignity. Discovering that many of the children’s mothers earned a pittance sweating, Grant set up a Work Fund and paid them a decent wage for producing clothes which were then sold through the settlement, with any profits being used to buy more cloth for them to work. The families were also invited to join the Boot Club, which sold subsidized children’s footwear. If a family could not afford even a proportion of the price, then they were allowed to pay in kind, through work of some type. Similarly, Coal, Spectacle, Cradle and even Fireguard Clubs were set up to provide part-funded household necessities – the latter following the death by burning of a local child. Hygiene and sewing classes were offered, and breakfasts and nominally priced midday and evening meals were provided at the school, as was health care at what was the first school clinic in London. The Maternity Bag loan scheme, with all the essentials for new babies, was a poignant service offered by the settlement in response to the desperation of a woman who had so little that, after having two babies die and ‘laying them out’ to be buried in their nightgowns, she was left without sufficient night-clothes for her surviving children.

  With all the good work that Clara Grant did in the area, she was still known for her questioning of the social-engineering aspects of some settlement schemes, but her belief in welfare with dignity meant that she continued to be spoken of with great fondness by those who benefited from the continuation of her work and by those who remember her for the Farthing Bundles. This was a tradition which grew from the piles of odds and ends – toys, picture cards, shells, boxes, scraps of material, whistles, beads and suchlike – that were donated to the settlement along with items for the regular clothing sales. The ever-resourceful Clara Grant decided to make them up into little newspaper-wrapped bundles and sell them to local children for a farthing. It was an immediate success, a source of treasure trove for poor children otherwise starved of such simple pleasures.

  Children came literally in their thousands, the demand for the parcels growing so fast that boys and girls had to be offered alternate weeks, and then, in 1913, the Bundle Arch was introduced. This was a little wooden structure bearing the legend

  Enter now, ye children small,

  None can come who are too tall

  under which the child had to pass without resort to stooping.

  My mother told me how magical those few scraps and bits and bobs seemed in the 1920s, when she was a child, and how she and her friends would buy their bundle and then run around the corner to swap coats and hats to try their luck at getting another turn through the arch.

  Clara Grant, who died in 1949, would be saddened but, after her long experience in the East End, probably not surprised to learn that her work there is still not finished. Being situated in one of the most deprived parts of the whole country, Fern Street Settlement and its community-based work, including luncheon clubs, affordable sales, classes, company, care and, as always, the dignity of all involved, continues to this day.

  Grant was a campaigner, but not in the directly political sense of another crusader for change in the East End, the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst.

  While studying at the Royal College of Art, Sylvia Pankhurst was given the job of decorating Pankhurst Hall, a new Independent Labour Party building named after her socialist father. It was when the club opened that Sylvia, her sisters and their mother, Emmeline, were mortified to discover that the place Sylvia had enhanced, that was given their family name and was supposedly for a forward-thinking political organization, was to be open only to men. The experience spurred them on to create the Women’s Social and Political Union, and Sylvia was to undergo prison, hunger, thirst and sleep strikes, and the horrors of forced feeding and the cruelties of the Cat and Mouse Act.

  But she was ejected from the WSPU in early 1914, when it became clear that her strongly socialist views were not compatible with the Union’s approach to the cause of women’s enfranchisement. Sylvia set up the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, targeting the work she thought most important: meeting the needs of working women by taking practical measures which could improve their lot in life, so that desperate mothers, showing starvation in their ‘patient eyes’, need never come to her again with their malnourished children.

  In March 1914, she began producing and editing The Women’s Dreadnought, which posited the objectives of the Federation:

  To Secure the Parliamentary Vote for every Woman over 21, and to promote the Social and Industrial Welfare of Women.

  She worked tirelessly to achieve those aims. The 20,000 weekly copies were sold at a halfpenny for the first four days after publication, with the remainder being given away free around the East End.

  With its opposition to war and to the exploitation of women as cheap labour, The Women’s Dreadnought carried many contributions from local women, with Sylvia making a point of not ‘tidying up’ their voices in the articles.

  She still faced opposition from those in power, however, and Bow, Bromley and Poplar refused to allow her to use their halls, so the East London Federation opened its own at 400 Old Ford Road, attached to Sylvia’s house, and made use of the traditional East End outdoor venue for rallies, Victoria Park.

  In 1917, Sylvia and the East London Federation renamed their paper The Workers’ Dreadnought, but they carried on their vigorous struggle to improve the social conditions of women. They fought for improved government relief, child centres and cost-price resta
urants; they pushed for decent provision for mothers who had been left in reduced circumstances after their husbands were conscripted, set up milk-distribution centres, health clinics, cost-price kitchens, and the toy factory and creche in Norman Grove, Bow, where the East End women who made toys for West End stores ran the factory for themselves and were all paid equally.

  The Equal Franchise Bill was finally passed on 7 May 1928, after its seventh reading, and gave women the right to vote on an equal basis to men. But despite the efforts and energy of the likes of Sylvia Pankhurst, it is still a wonder that women ever got that far when the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage had waged such a campaign, with their leaflets being available at just four shillings per 1,000 to ensure maximum distribution. They claimed the view put forward in their pamphlets was one of ‘Patriotism and Common Sense’ and urged readers of their literature:

  Don’t make yourselves and your country the laughing stock of the world, but keep political power where it ought to be – in the hands of men.

  One leaflet, c. 1912, headed ‘THINK BEFORE VOTING. A Happy Home is worth more than all the Suffragettes can get you’, made this point about the East London campaigns:

  Mr Lansbury and some of the Suffragettes may be very sincere, and talk very cleverly, but if they get their way many a now happy household will be ruined. At present a woman may differ from her husband about politics, but does not necessarily quarrel over it. But if she had to vote, and differed from him, and insisted on voting for the opposite side, you can imagine die result!

  With or without the vote, and with or without the good or bad intentions of intervening outsiders, life for East Enders was hardly easy, but despite the hardships, the poverty and the making-do, there was a cockney spirit, a humour and a vibrancy in the community which are still remembered with great fondness by those who lived there. From the turn of the century to the time of the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, there was a Golden Age recalled and cherished by the many people I spoke to, and in the next part of the book this will be described in the words and memories of the East Enders themselves.

  PART 3

  The Golden Age

  They was lovely times. They shouldn’t be forgotten.

  This section looks at the East End from the turn of the century to the slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, a period which would see many changes in both the social and the physical fabric of the area, changes forced upon it through a combination of officialdom at last dealing with the nineteenth-century legacy of overcrowding and industrialization, the traumas and destruction of two world wars and then – the major change – the dissipation of old communities and the evolution of the ones which replaced them.

  It is a period of change and, more significantly, a period of increasingly rapid change, with any evidence of the ‘old days’ swiftly disappearing as the electronic age pushed its insistent way forward, generating different concerns, desires, interests and ways of living. Even the language and accent of east London have changed. My father’s generation of East Enders – he was born in 1919 – do not speak the dull, uniform, flat-vowelled Estuary English which I – born in 1951 – speak. He will still use what is essentially Victorian idiom – phrases such as ‘daddler mooey’ and ‘fard’n face’ – and can speak the true cockney back-slang of the rookery and the street market, rather than the self-conscious, artificially created ‘porkie-pies’ type slang of the television mockney.

  Links with an even earlier period were made by older respondents I spoke with. Some still remembered the Whitechapel hay market, which, although abolished in 1928, was part of a Whitechapel still retaining rural connections that harked back to the market’s origins in pre-industrial 1708.

  This is the East End of living memory, a world when ‘we was all one’ and that was, maybe because of the more leisurely pace of life, seemingly never-changing, but then took sudden, drastic and often painful lurches into modernity. Changes came with opportunities such as those offered by Butler’s 1944 Education Act, which made the younger generation more economically and socially mobile, so that moving away was an achievable possibility; but they also came with the destruction of war, making a move out of the East End an imperative for many.

  Regardless of a few practical improvements, the living conditions at this time were not dramatically better than those of the earlier generations – we, like many others, had no bathroom until we moved away to a new housing estate in the late 1950s – yet this period, from the turn of the century to the beginnings of the sweeping post-war slum-clearance schemes, is generally looked back on with great fondness and with not a little regret at its passing. These are the memories of East Enders recalling that time, stories of a Golden Age that is no more, remembering how it used to be.

  [ 7 ]

  When I think of the East End, I think of all the warmth. Within a radius of two or three streets you had your own little community. Like a village, it was.

  There are many histories that can be written, many versions and many ways of recalling the past, but a common ingredient in all the memories which people shared with me, as they looked back and thought about how they remembered the East End, was a fondness – and a real sense of loss – for the time when ‘we was all one’. A time when you knew all your neighbours; when you sat outside your street door on a kitchen chair during long summer nights, chatting and laughing, and when you helped each other, if you had problems, without a second thought. When the person next door was more than an individual who just happened to be living close by.

  A striking example of how things have changed, in our perception of what we might expect from our local community, was seen in the response to my questions about the problems of childcare. Women either needed me to explain what I was talking about or they laughed: what need was there for such formalized arrangements when you were part of a larger whole which looked out for one another, regardless of whether they were family, friends or simply your next-door neighbour? It wasn’t an issue. If a woman worked, and many did – had to – there was always someone to keep an eye out for the kids. That’s the way it worked.

  And yet, as with many memories of the ‘good old days’, this affection for the presence of a close-knit community is probably as much a result of hindsight as a contemporary appreciation. When families were living in such close proximity, there was little opportunity for peace and quiet, and even less for privacy. But the existence of what we would now call a supportive network seems to have compensated for the lack of more material comforts.

  Even if you didn’t have any money, you always had other people. You had people, whether it was family or friends. When I look back I remember security and friends, a sort of love.

  No matter how they described their experiences, people remembered – and missed – that shared interest in their community’s welfare, a strength that ‘could get you through’ even the hardest of times.

  You know, I sometimes wonder how we managed. It was a struggle making things stretch through to the next wage packet – if you were lucky enough to have your old man in work – but we muddled through together somehow. Today, people get all worked up if the washing machine or the telly goes on the blink, but we couldn’t have imagined having so many things in the first place, let alone getting worked up about them being broke. But we had one another. And you can’t beat that. You were all in the same boat then, see, you had bugger all, and you didn’t care what the neighbours had, cos they had nothing – same as you. But if one of you needed help, they were there. You had friends. You could depend on one another, if you see what I mean.

  We lived in rows of terraced houses with just upstairs and downstairs, and a few with basements [airys or areas], wedged close together… We were much less private than we are today, but it built in us a feeling of comfortable community.

  This sense of community really came into its own during times of crisis, as will be seen in Chapter 16, when people remember living in the East End during wartime, but pea
cetime also had its share of difficulties.

  Crises, problems and emergencies were tackled with resilience and good humour, and there seemed no concept, at least in those who spoke to me, of only looking out for yourself. You were part of a self-supporting group, made up of people who looked out for one another, who had to look out for one another, in order for everyone to get by. Regardless of whether it was a matter of eking out the stew you had managed to knock up from a few scraps and a bit of barley to feed a few extra mouths or you were responding to something which required a little more heroism or initiative, there was a perceived generosity and a lack of selfishness which many felt are no longer with us.

  It was 6 January 1926, just after midnight. We’d all gone to bed, but my uncle was still out. He used to go to his young lady’s, which was over the swing bridge at Tidal Basin. You used to have to walk everywhere in them days. When he was returning home, he noticed as he was going over the bridge that the water was coming over. So he ran home, which was quite a long way, all down the North Woolwich Road, knocking on as many doors as he could. ‘Get everything you can upstairs, the Thames is overflowing!’

  When my uncle got home, ‘Come on,’ he said to us, ‘it’s coming down the street, it’ll be in soon!’ [He and] my two elder brothers put their trousers right up to their thighs, as the water was gushing down the street, and [rescued] these sleepers of wood that were coming down from Alexander’s Wharf, and roped them together to make a raft to help people who couldn’t get upstairs or couldn’t get across to a neighbour. My mum said to my eldest brother, ‘If you can manage to get down into your grandfather’s kitchen, there’s four loaves of bread on the table. Try and get them if you can.’ It would be hours before it receded again.