In those pre-politically correct times, others recalled the street dancers as going by the name of the Nancy Boys, or, more prosaically, as the Jazzers. Not everyone was agreed about the virtue of such talents, not liking the fact that they were ‘posh’ or from ‘snooty’ backgrounds, and one person actually expressed vehement opposition to their behaviour.
After the 1914–18 war ended, jobs were virtually non-existent. Looking back, I recall with loathing the number of exservicemen who, in order to survive, dressed themselves up in outlandish women’s clothing and, with the help of a barrel organ, sang and danced in the streets for the odd coins [that] others, in not dissimilar situations, were able to spare.
But during times of high unemployment, such as the inter-war years, many performers were eager to take their talents round the East End streets and even further afield, knowing that it was probably the only way they could manage to earn those vital few shillings that would keep the wolf from the door.
There was plenty of street entertainment such as the barrel organ, which some of the children danced along to, though one man who came round would chase the kids with a stick if they started singing or dancing. Then there was the one-man band, who had a drum on his back, with the stick connected to his arms with string and cymbals on his knees, a mouth organ, a guitar and various other instruments around his body. Another group would take over a section of the road and perform an Egyptian sand dance or do a routine similar to snake-charming, but instead of a snake there would be a string of sausages coming up out of a tin can. All the audience would sit on the kerbstones at the side of the road and traffic would just about cease while the performance was on. Accordion players often went round playing outside the pubs in the evening, and I remember one artiste who played what he called a nose harp.
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One or two artistic types would set up a stand in the street – usually in the market – with a board and a big wodge of putty or clay. You’d pay them a penny and they’d do your face, make your likeness out of it. It would amuse us. It might not seem that special now, but we loved it.
My dad was a boxer. Not a professional [but] he used to go to different parts of the country for these exhibitions. They didn’t get money because they weren’t allowed to pay amateurs then. But he used to bring home different gifts and things that were worth money and that made things a lot easier for Mum.
Even though the majority of the people were not well off, and there were not today’s commercial pressures inducing them to spend money, Christmas was still a special season when every effort was made to have a particularly good time. There were the same feelings of anticipation as the big day approached and of excitement when the morning itself eventually dawned.
We used to know it was Christmas in the East End when we used to start making paper chains in school out of bits of paper. Glueing them together – what a job that was. I don’t remember seeing a Christmas tree then [in the 1920s] but you’d also know Christmas was coming because of the smell of the oranges and the fruit being brought up the river in the boats, and when the dockers unloaded them.
Christmas morning, [laughing] we’d wake up to a big old army grey sock hanging on the bottom of the bed, with an apple, orange and a couple of nuts. Maybe a few sweets. And that was Christmas. But the one thing I remember, always, even now, at seventy-six years of age, there wasn’t one Christmas, not one, that I went without a toy. I don’t know how Dad done it, but he did. I had a tank one year. I remember that tank – bloody thing was made in Germany and all! Still, I had Christmas. I got a train set, clockwork. Couldn’t have been electric then anyway, it was all gas in our house with pennies in the meter. My parents never let us go without. Dad used to just have his pint. And Mum… I don’t know what Mum had, she never had a lot. But we never went without. We would sit round the fire and Dad would have his jug, warm the poker up and stick it in the beer. ‘Have a drop of that, boy,’ he’d say. [Laughing] Oh, God, we used to sit round that fire and we’d sing some old song me mother knew!
Do you remember the paper that oranges used to come wrapped in? We’d have orange tortoises made out of them at Christmas time. Dad would screw the four corners of the paper into little legs so it made the tortoise’s shell, then put it over the orange and roll it, scuttling on its way, across the lino.
The spending might have been modest compared with our present frenzied seasonal consumption, but just providing a few simple toys and putting a decent spread on the table still entailed a big outlay. To help spread the cost of the celebrations, Christmas savings schemes and Loan Clubs were set up in church halls, pubs and corner shops. A few pennies a week, more if you could afford it, would make all the difference.
We had a neighbour who used to come round on a Sunday morning selling sixpenny savings stamps so at the end of the year you had a few bob for Christmas.
The Loan Club was an ideal way of saving as you could take a sub out during the year, pay it back and you’d get interest. It worked out well, as it wasn’t someone earning out of you, you were making money for yourself. The couple who ran it made a bit, but that was only fair.
But sometimes Loan Club administrators weren’t always so fair and were not satisfied with making just ‘a bit’.
Just before the Christmas pay-out, my friend’s dad ran off with the Loan Club money. The whole lot. And all those families that had been saving with him all year so they’d have a bit extra for Christmas… It was awful. Her family were so ashamed. But people got by somehow.
And they did, some of them on very little. The idea that pleasures were simpler ‘back then’ is well illustrated by this childhood memory.
We didn’t live far from Spitalfields Market and I’d go with Dad with a sack. He’d have just a few bob and we’d mooch about the stalls, get a bit of cheap fruit, a few nuts, apples, tangerines and that, or a few oranges. Used to make a bag up, you know. For three or four bob you could get a decent bit of fruit then. Then we used to come away from the market and cross over the road to this big pub. I used to sit outside on the step with an arrowroot biscuit and a glass of lemonade. [Laughing] Dad used to be in there knocking it back, his couple of pints. Why not? Five o’clock every morning except Sunday he’d get up. He earned it. Why shouldn’t he have a drink?
Drinking has always been an East End leisure activity, although not all drinking was done in the pub.
As a kid, your mum or dad would send you down the Bottle and Jug – that was like the off-licence bar – to get a jug of beer for them to have indoors. We used to call it the four ale bar as well. Seems strange now, letting a kid go in a pub and buy beer. We used to run errands for cigarettes as well. [Laughing] ‘Dad said can he have twenty Players, please?’ Nothing was said, it wasn’t thought strange then. My friend who went to school over Canning Town way used to go out at dinner time to get her teacher a jug of mild from the pub over the road! The mothers’d all be up the school complaining if they tried that today.
If you wanted to go out for a drink, with a pub on almost every street corner you were always in walking distance of somewhere you could go in for a pint of mild and bitter or a glass of port and lemon, as well as some entertaining company.
I spent many hours waiting outside for my parents. This was not as bad as it sounds. We actually used to enjoy it. The doors were always opening and you could see and hear all the fun going on inside. There was live music, [with] some relative or other who would get up and sing. Every few minutes we would call a family member to get us some crisps or a drink of lemonade. Outside the pub there was a stall selling jellied eels and cockles.
Pubs, or beer shops as we termed them, [were] divided into several bars, each one with a name. There was the private bar, the public bar, saloon or lounge, and a snug used mostly by the women. There was also a Jug and Bottle, for take-away beer. The different bars would tend to classify its drinkers: workers and labourers in the public; shopkeepers and council workers in the private; bosses and councillors in the lounge
or saloon.
There was always the chance of a hand of cards or some other game of chance you could take part in, then, at chucking-out time, there was the opportunity to go on to a do – a knees-up – with your neighbours.
You could always have a game of cards, darts, shove ha’penny, or a game of crib – that was always popular with the old boys. Didn’t matter if you had no money, you’d play for matchsticks, but you’d take it just as seriously.
Many homes had a piano, and most women and many men could knock out a tune on the old joanna. These parties were never prearranged, they mostly erupted from a Saturday night meeting of friends and relations in a pub. [At closing time] they were in the mood to carry on, so, off to the nearest home for a sing-song.
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You didn’t even have to go to the pub first, or at least the women didn’t. They might stay at home, getting things ready, while the chaps nipped out for a ‘swift half.
I remember being in the front room of my nan’s house. The radiogram was on and Kay Starr was singing ‘Wheel of Fortune’. All the adults were dancing, and us kids were sitting out in the passage on the stairs, peeping in at them. We were supposed to be up in bed with all the coats, but I don’t think they’d have minded. The men had been up the corner to the pub for a few pints and had brought back crates of ale, while the women were in the kitchen making sandwiches, all laughing. It was lovely to see them dancing. Not in pairs, but in a big circle, with all their arms around one another’s shoulders, heads back, singing at the tops of their voices.
It wasn’t sort of private then. We all got involved. You wouldn’t think your neighbour was a nuisance cos they were having a party – you’d be in there with them. You’d be part of it. It was your party as much as it was theirs.
But drinking alcohol wasn’t to everyone’s taste.
[My dad] was a strict teetotaller. Having seen the damage caused by alcohol in his own family, he took the pledge early on. So, although he was my mother’s parents’ first son-in-law, he wasn’t the most popular one. Everyone else brought a bottle of spirits or some beer for Grandad when they visited, but my dad, of course, did not. I think Mum’s family found it a little difficult to relate to this gentle, serious young man who was uncomfortable at an East End knees-up and who didn’t enjoy a drink.
Parties were not the only indoor entertainment, there was plenty of other fun to be had in the home, some of it with the latest innovation – the wireless set.
We got a wireless. My uncle was a nutter on anything like that; he had what they called a Cat’s Whisker. You would touch something and you’d hear it: ‘Two, hello. Two, hello.’ Gawd knows what they was on about, but I was a kid and it was all a wonder to me. Like going up in a bloody rocket now, I suppose. Then we bought a wireless. Where the hell Dad got the money to buy a wireless from I don’t know, still, that was his business. I’ll never forget, it was called a Cosser. And it run off a battery, an accumulator. He had it on a shelf in the corner of the room and he messed and fiddled and buggered about with it for hours and couldn’t get a bloody thing on it! In the finish he sent over for my uncle – he was the mechanic in the family, the old ‘Two, hello’ man with the Cat’s Whisker. If he don’t know, who do? Anyway, over he come. And they was still messing about, both going at it now. And we’re all sitting here waiting. And waiting. And waiting. All that bloody night. All of a sudden – bang! – ‘Here it is! Got it! Got it!’ What was it? They was playing ‘God Save Our Gracious King’! It was bloody twelve o’clock, it was going off! Me uncle shot out of the room. He knew what was going to happen. He done his nut, the old man. Messing about all night and the bloody thing’s gone off! [Laughing] They was the days eh? Bloody accumulators!
We were fortunate that Dad had managed to afford a radio set. It was a Cosser which had to have an accumulator and two batteries to make it work. One battery was a Winner 120 volt, the other was a Grid Bias, and the accumulator had to be taken to Glickman’s when it ran down, to be exchanged for a fully charged one. One evening [my brother] and I wanted to listen to Monday Night at Eight but as we were living in the kitchen at the time and the radio was in the front room, Mum said we would have to sit and listen in the dark, because she couldn’t afford to light the gas in another room. The first item on the programme was ‘Sid Walker’, a character who was a rag and bone man who was always solving crimes. They first played his signature tune: ‘Day after day, I’m on my way, singing, rags, bottles and bones.’ Then there was a crash of glass and a scream, which sounded as though it was just outside the window, and we both rushed for the door back to the kitchen, scared out of our wits, deciding that it was better to be in the warm and the light and with Mum.
At a time when you usually ‘made your own fun’, even a potential disaster could provide a few hours’ free, and highly memorable, entertainment.
Me and a few friends, mates, you know, we got on top of this big building, where you could see right over the top of the railway. And we stood there and we watched the Crystal Palace burning. In the 1930s, it was. We could see from where we were in the East End of London across the river to Crystal Palace, right across on the other side. Blimey, what a fire that was.
The night of the Crystal Palace fire, my father and I went to watch with lots of other people. I was in tears, remembering a wonderful day there earlier in the year, when I was among hundreds of schoolchildren who were there for ‘A Festival of Song’. We were all dressed in white, and it was marvellous, singing our hearts out, ending with ‘Jerusalem’, which has remained my favourite even to this day.
Annual outings and beanos – for which you would pay in every week at your local pub or social club and which involved taking a charabanc to the coast or the countryside, with crates of ale on board to provide refreshment for all the stops you would make on the way – might have been less spectacular than watching burning buildings but were just as diverting, and not only for those who were privileged enough to be going on the trip.
Holidays, for the people of the East End, were something to look forward to with great enjoyment [even though] the majority could only enjoy the odd day’s outing to the nearest coast, like Southend. They were charabanc outings run by the local pub, usually either all women or all men. These were a great time for the kids of the neighbourhood to gather round and shout, ‘Chuck out your mouldies!’ when a shower of halfpennies and farthings would be thrown from the charabanc. The children had a chance to visit the countryside with the Country Holiday Fund. Mother would pay what she could afford, but I think there was some kind of means test involved. People living in the country would offer to take one or two London children for a week.
Another annual event which was recalled with enthusiasm was a visit to the funfair, which would pitch up and stay for a week of gaudy diversion and entertainment. With its exotic travelling fairground people, running their hoop-la stalls and rifle ranges, boxing booths and the Wall of Death, brightly painted steam gallopers and reckless dodgem drivers, the fair was a wonderland of twinkling lights and danger.
It seems horrible when you think about it now, but at the fair we used to go to of a Bank Holiday there’d be these booths. They would have, well, freak shows. Bearded ladies. Two-headed animals. Mermaids. All that sort of thing. All made up, I suppose, but when you think about paying money to see people just because they’re really ugly or they look nasty… Makes you ashamed of yourself. But we would queue up to see them. Same with the bare-knuckle boxing booths. Not very nice at all, really. But we loved it all. It was sort of magical at night, with all the lights and the smell of all the food and the oil on the machinery.
These were places of free fun. Even if you had no money, as was often the case, there was no entrance fee, so you could get enjoyment watching the people taking part in the amusements, and wander around the roundabouts and carousels, all being driven by a great big steam engine that played pipe music at the same time.
There were more solemn annual events in which people too
k an equally enthusiastic part. These were celebrations for St Patrick’s Day and the huge Catholic parades held on your local church’s saint’s day which wound round the streets of the east London parishes, drawing crowds of many thousands of spectators.
The processions went all round the streets, carrying the statue from the church, and with all the kids from the Catholic school dressed in white, with coloured sashes, and carrying flowers and wreaths with banners across them, and holding on to ribbons tied to the statue. All the women from the Catholic families would set a shrine up outside their street doors. They’d cover a table in a nice lace cloth and then put a crucifix, any religious pictures they had of Mary or the saints or the Sacred Heart and that sort of thing, their rosaries, and a nice bunch of flowers, and the priest would bless it and their home as the procession passed through their street. It was a bit of a competition between the women. Who made the best shrine, had the whitest lace cloth, that sort of business. But it was a marvellous thing to see, all those little children. The mothers must have saved hard to buy their outfits. Thousands of people, and I mean thousands, lined the streets to watch them. It was a really big do, you know.
St Patrick’s Day was celebrated, very enthusiastically according to my dad, by my Irish paternal grandmother. She was a clever woman, but unable to read or write, and did not know her date of birth, so she had, a bit eccentrically, picked on the movable feast of ‘Pancake Day’ to commemorate it. Apparently, her annual birthday merrymaking was just as exuberant as that which marked her homeland’s saint’s day.
My East End Page 24
