My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  The local moneylender was another, if more expensive and often disliked, means of making ends meet.

  There was an old girl who lived in the airy [basement] of the house opposite. Dooky, her place was. Absolutely rotten as a pear. But she was loaded. Moneylender, see. A lot of us depended on that old girl in them days. She knew how to charge us and all. She must have hoarded a fortune over the years. Certainly never looked like she spent any of it. Not on herself, anyway.

  The housewives [coped] with grinding poverty, resorting to borrowing two and six from the ‘Lady’ opposite, to pay that three shillings [for rent] on Friday.

  Popping something with Uncle or paying a less desirable visit to the moneylender was preferable to going through the demeaning experience of a visit from the Relieving Officer, but some families didn’t have a choice in the matter.

  Before the DSS, if people were destitute they could go to the Relief Office. There you would be supplied with tickets for food, made out for a week’s supply. These tickets were handed to the shopkeeper, who supplied them with goods according to the value of the tickets.

  They didn’t even give you the dignity of having a few bob in your pocket. Bloody tickets they give you. Right show-up, having to take them in the shop. Like being a beggar, going cap in hand, so’s your family could eat.

  When things got really bad and you fell behind with debts and you needed help, this man would assess what home you’d got, what you could sell. They used to come round and say, ‘Well, you can sell this. You can sell that.’ If you had nothing you could sell, you got free coal, you got free dinners. We used to have free breakfast. We used to come from where we lived to another school that was set aside for the free breakfast. It was quite a walk. And we got the free dinner, which was good, because we wouldn’t have survived. It’s not like if they can’t get a job now – they stay on the dole, but then the dole money was so poor. It wasn’t through choice. You got the RO. That was a pittance. And demeaning. And my mum, being the person she was, it really took her down, thinking she had to depend on it.

  Despite the general view that poverty was a common state, not everyone I spoke to agreed that times were all that hard, although the following point was made by someone who lived in the comparatively affluent area of East Ham, and he and the person speaking after him both note that expectations have changed over time and that poverty is always relative.

  It all depends on what you call poverty. If we lived now the way we lived in the 1930s we would think we were living in poverty. But I don’t think we thought then we were living in poverty because we had one bath a week… or just bread and jam for tea. In fact, it was probably better for us… In the late 1930s you could always work. There were plenty of jobs. You did not have to be hard up. My father was just over eighty and he was working up to a week before he died. I think poverty in this country is a matter of individual choice.

  Compared with today’s standards we were suffering, but most of the country was in much the same boat. We managed, we had to, and enjoyed it if a few extras came our way. Because we were more or less all in the same boat, there was not a lot of scope for envy or jealousy of other people’s possessions.

  Your family did not have to experience poverty, however, for you to be aware of it in the community in which you lived and worked.

  I was born in 1911 and have lived all my life in Plaistow and Canning Town, but, when I come to think about the East End, I feel I was almost a bystander. My father was a master baker from the First World War until after the second war. During that time he built up a business in Canning Town. But the poverty in those days impressed on me. They talk about the poor nowadays. To people then, they would have been well off.

  You’ll find this hard to believe after what I told you about my childhood, but I was considered well off by most of my mates. My family had regular meals. Nothing fancy, but regular. The poverty then was poverty.

  The most vulnerable, as always, suffered the greatest during times of hardship. The following was the reaction to the financial and emotional poverty found by a nurse who, as a young woman, came from the country to work in London.

  I remember most of all the bitter cold of that winter, 1947, the coldest and longest winter we have ever known; the lack of fuel; the food shortage – food was still rationed and the rations had become smaller since the war ended. I was seventeen that January, [the hospital] had been badly bombed during the Blitz and I had to thread my way between the stark, broken walls of the abandoned buildings to reach the wards where our children spent their entire lives… The walk was dark and creepy. I imagined the ghosts of all the people who had been killed in the bombing waiting to jump out as I hurried past in the dark. In those days before the Children Act, unwanted and abandoned children spent the most part of their young lives in their cots, or sitting on potties – it always seemed to be ‘potty time’ – and they suffered cruelly with prolapsed bowel. We young nurses were not encouraged, nor did we have the time, to cuddle or show love to our small charges. Their ages ranged from two weeks to four years, and I presume after that they were moved on to some other equally unloving regime. The ward sister was kind in her way, and at Christmas bought them little woollies and socks. These we proudly dressed them in, but sadly, when they went to the laundry, they all came back stiff and unwearable, because they had been boiled along with everything else.

  While I was there, there was an epidemic of dysentery. Sister detailed me to take a baby to [another] hospital in an ambulance which collected several of us. When we arrived they told me it was dead. Everything was sad at that time. I had a mouth full of ulcers, a head full of lice, and split and bleeding fingers from the constant cold water we had to wash them in. I had chilblains on my feet and legs. The lice I caught from two children who were brought in suffering from neglect. They screamed continually for their mother, who was in prison. We had to bath all new admittances in carbolic and cut off their hair.

  Some were driven by their poverty to resort to crime and, while deprivation is not an excuse for all who took this path, there are memories of desperation as sad as those in the historical court records, which show cases like that of the East End mother who was deported for life for stealing a single reel of sewing silk in order to feed her hungry children.

  When [my dad] was about sixteen or seventeen, [his mother] was so desperate for money she tried to commit suicide by swallowing bleach, and [his sister] saw her being carried off as she arrived home from school. To help out, my dad stole a radio from a shop and legged it along the street. He wasn’t fast enough and was sent to Brixton Prison for three months’ hard labour. It was there that he heard a man being birched and the memory never left him. I have his school testimonial and it’s really glowing. Apparently, his headmaster was desperate to get him to grammar school but the money was never going to be there.

  Stealing something to eat, that wasn’t thieving. Well, we didn’t call that thieving. Not when you looked at the poor buggers who had nothing. What was a few tomatoes? Suppose it was wrong now we look back. Suppose nowadays they’d want to screw everything down. But it wasn’t bad then. Not too bad. People understood. I’d go as far to say, if you wanted anything and you didn’t have work, you had to nick it. And there wasn’t a lot of work about. I’m talking more about for the older fellers, not us kids. [Sighing] That’s how it used to go on.

  The local copper might even cock a deaf ’un if he knew that someone wasn’t doing any harm. I’m not talking about crime now, I’m talking about feeding your kids.

  Less poignant than turning a blind eye to the activities of the distressed poor, less exciting than tracking down big-time criminal gangs, the day-to-day routine of most police officers involved keeping some sort of order within their own communities, whether carting off a drunk too far gone to walk home to the police station on a canvas litter, or making sure that local kids didn’t take too many liberties.

  I regret to say that from the age of around eight, nicking beca
me a way of life. Sweets from a local shop, fruit from the market. In those days the police were feared, if not respected. It was always thought that they kept marbles in their white woollen gloves, [making] a clip round the head for a misdemeanour quite painful. And I should know!

  There is a romanticized view of crime in the past: that people lived in a totally drug-free world; that they were always safe in their own homes – ‘we had so little, who would bother with us?’; that gang violence was exclusively limited to hard men sorting out ‘their own’; and that robberies were perpetrated only on those who could afford to be robbed.

  People didn’t take from their own. They took from people who had money and was well insured. Not from people that had nothing and couldn’t cover their loss.

  I cannot remember any burglaries – there was nothing for a burglar to take. No videos, no televisions.

  You hear them talk about the gangsters, but ordinary sort of people like us could walk the streets without any trouble whatsoever. In fact, it was safer, if you want to know the truth.

  But there were also recollections of it having been tougher then.

  We might not have had that much to pinch, but they’d still have your brass candlesticks off the mantelpiece. There’s always wrong ’uns, in every walk of life, who’ll have whatever you’ve got from under your nose.

  Bloody gas-meter bandits, that’s what we called them. They’d break in when they knew you was down the pub or round your family’s or somewhere, and they’d bust your meter open. Little bastards. You usually knew who it was, if you had any brains, and you’d go and have ’em.

  You had to be careful in the markets, that was where they’d have your purse. I’m not admiring what they did, taking off their own, but they were clever all right. My aunt had her Loan Club money, one Christmas, and she was holding on to her bag, knew she had to be careful down the Lane, but they still had it off her. She was heartbroken. It ruined her Christmas. I hope their fingers dropped off.

  Course there was crime, how else could you have bought a bit of this and that off someone down the pub?

  *

  It wasn’t only pickpockets, thieves, burglars and fences who operated in east London. There were organized gangs committing armed robberies in banks and post offices, and carrying out raids on goods being ferried to and from the bonded warehouses, and the Leman Street police station was equalled only by West End Central and Paddington in the amount of vice charges it dealt with after the war, when it became notorious for its red-light district.

  After the war, when the Maltese pimps moved in around Cable Street, there were these twenty-four-hour cafés – so-called cafés. They were more of a front for the pimps, who would sit there drinking tea for hours on end so they could keep an eye on their girls. And girls was the right word, no more than children some of them.

  A man was murdered off Cable Street. He was a very nice, obliging man who had a general shop that was open, literally, twenty-four hours a day. I used to chat to him, buy fruit and beigels off him. You couldn’t get contraceptives easily in those days, but you could there. The toms – as the prostitutes were called – used to go to his shop for them. I don’t think they ever found out who did it.

  Up from Gardiner’s Corner there was waste ground where all the toms used to hang out. Police used to go round there in twos, and they used to call it the ‘rubber heel’ because they’d wear very quiet shoes so the girls wouldn’t hear them coming along.

  It wasn’t just prostitution round there, there was the gambling clubs, and where there’s money there’s violence, and there was plenty of both. You kept yourself to yourself if you had any sense.

  There were other sorts of trouble that local people made sure they kept away from.

  [When we moved in] we were warned by the couple who lived underneath us to be careful of this one couple. ‘You want to watch him, he’s got a record. Have you seen his place?’ His house was about three down from ours. ‘Look on his line.’ I couldn’t believe it: [hanging] on the line was all the fur from where they’d got hold of cats and skinned them.

  But sometimes you couldn’t help becoming involved.

  My brother got done over by some Teddy Boys and my mum went crazy. He was about fourteen. Anyway, the police were called, but my mum and dad had already gone looking for them. They found them and Mum gave one a good fistful, just as the police arrived. Mum really thought she would be in trouble, but the police said, ‘That’s all right, missus, have that one on us,’ and marched the boys away.

  You’d hear of fights or a row between a husband and wife which would lead to violence, when the police would be called by a neighbour.

  Or you thought you couldn’t.

  I wasn’t out looking for trouble, but it was a time when there wasn’t much else on offer for me. Too old to do a boy’s job on the cheapest wages, but too young to warrant a man’s wage, and when you see these fellers with their flash clothes and pockets full of money down the pub, treating everyone to drinks… It was too tempting. Why would I go and be a messenger boy the rest of me life? Once I did have a chance to do something else – someone offered me the chance to set up in business with them – that’s what I did. [Laughing] I went back on the straight and narrow. There’s a lesson there, eh? And I didn’t do too bad. Earned a living for the old woman and the kids.

  There is a joke that the Kray family must have owned the original multistorey car park, because it seems that every other man over fifty in the East End brags that he used to drive for the ‘Firm’. But not everyone considers that an association with the likes of them was something to brag about.

  Everyone knew the name Kray. It was all over the place. Public. All that business about the Blind Beggar, where George Cornell was shot dead, becoming a tourist attraction. The film and all the books and that. But they were just one family. One family who spent a lot of time inside. There were plenty of others, more successful if you like, the ones what never got caught, never did much time, and never for nothing serious. Ones who are still around now, ones the public probably never heard of. Names I’d rather not mention.

  Whoever the gangs were, it was by running illegal gambling clubs – the spielers – and protection rackets, committing armed robbery, living off prostitution and, later, pornography that they flourished.

  The [X] family had a club next to our pub – it was a spieler, not a drinking club. All the boys [the known faces] used to go in there. I said to my husband that they’d got a right club there, but my husband was well liked and he never got aggressive with them when they came into our pub.

  He’d say to me as they walked in, ‘Trouble’s here,’ but if they turned a bit nasty he’d go over to them, put his hand on their shoulder and say, ‘Come on, boy, you’ve had enough now. You don’t want to get in a row with the missus, do you? When you come in tomorrow, don’t forget, the first drink’s on me.’ He’d turn to me and say, ‘Don’t forget, when he comes in tomorrow, the first drink’s on the house.’

  They never paid for anything, but they always said, ‘Your pub will never get broken up or gutted.’

  I’d cook a ham for the pub; used to sweat myself up in the kitchen, breadcrumb it, egg it. Great big ham. I’d come down and it’d be gone.

  I’d ask my husband where it had gone and he’d say, ‘I cut it up for them two boys to take home to their wives.’ We never made anything in that pub, but we never got broken into or smashed up. Never had to call the police once.

  Others weren’t as fortunate with the ‘protection’ of their property.

  The pub next to the station, that was run by cocky people.

  They’d say, ‘Piss off, we don’t want your sort in here.’

  ‘Don’t you? Right.’

  All the tables went into the cabinets, all the spirits and bottles smashed. Everything turned upside-down. Another pub, a little way along, she wouldn’t stand them a drink or anything. They broke in in the middle of the night, and that was that.

  They
took liberties with us. If you’re ‘friends’ with the likes of [them] you’ve got to hold the candle to the devil. On Sunday, we might have a couple of pork or lamb chops. We’d be open Sunday and they’d turn up from one of the spielers after being out all night gambling and losing their money, come in the pub and say, ‘Come on, we want something to eat.’

  ‘I haven’t got any sandwiches today, fellers,’ I’d say. ‘It’s Sunday.’

  ‘Give us a cut off the joint then.’

  ‘I never had a joint, we’ve got chops today.’

  ‘Well, find us something.’

  And my husband said, ‘For God’s sake, find something.’

  And all of a sudden I’d have to come down with egg, bacon, tomatoes and fried bread. And they’d sit there and eat it.

  It wasn’t only local business people who were drawn, unwillingly, into the illicit world of the criminal.

  It was as difficult, I think, being married to a police officer in that area as it would have been being married to a criminal. The way of life for them was almost the same. They had to mix with what has been called the underworld, do all their business in pubs. After years of that, the only difference is, one lot have the money from all their crooked dealing and the other lot wind up divorced because their families can’t take it.

  But there was a lighter moment in the life of this east London police officer.