My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  I left school at fourteen. I got a job in a sweet factory in Stratford. I was so small they weren’t going to employ me – they didn’t think I was old enough. So I borrowed a pair of my older sister’s shoes with high heels and one of her cut-down frocks to make myself look older. I was only wrapping broken rock. I used to walk to work, along the sewers [usually known as the sewer bank, and now as the Greenway] from West Ham. Go up the steps, along the sewers, and you got to Stratford from that end. I used to hate walking along those sewers when it got dark.

  In what, according to the people I spoke to, was a comparatively rare instance, this young woman could have continued with her education and postponed beginning her working life, but she chose not to.

  Annie looked after her husband’s niece. I [was a child and] remember her as a daring teenager who wore make-up and was always out late. ‘Boy mad,’ Annie said. Sometimes she was cheeky or sullen, and clearly didn’t want to be dumped with Annie. She wanted to leave school [but] the school leaving age was being put up from fourteen to fifteen years. Pupils of fourteen, that year only, could choose whether to leave after their fourteenth birthday or stay on for another year. I remember pitched battles between the niece – who wanted to leave – and Annie, who thought she should ‘stay on and better herself’. The niece won. She got a job behind the counter in Woolworths, which I thought was ever so glamorous.

  With little spare money in most households for such luxuries as ‘staying on’, children finding paid work, even before they left school, was generally welcomed by both youngsters and adults.

  There was one lady who always needed someone to run errands. We’d go mad to go for her, as we knew she was generous, and always gave you at least a few coppers or a slice of cake. Maybe both.

  On Saturdays we would hang around the part of [our] street known as Jews’ Alley, because it was where the Jewish people lived and had their tailoring shops in the big houses. There were Lithuanians and Latvians who had come to escape the oppression in their own countries, and their religion did not allow them to do anything on a Saturday, which was their Sabbath. So they would ask us in to maybe put a piece of coal on the fire and then tell us to take the money which was left on a table, because they were not even allowed to handle money.

  As children, we were what was known as Sabbath Goys, non-Jewish kids who were happy to earn a little something by going into our Jewish neighbour’s home and turning on their gaslight and making up their fire for them on their Sabbath.

  My aunt [lived in] a small downstairs flat opposite the back entrance to West Ham football ground at Upton Park. The windowsills of the houses were about three feet away from their front walls [and], whenever there was a match at the ground, fans would come on pushbikes and leave them in the space between the windowsills and the front walls. Children were able to earn threepence for looking after them throughout the match. I begged to be allowed to do this, but my aunt would not let me. It was common, she said, and not much better than begging. She was a real lady, in my eyes. Before her marriage, she had been a ‘Nippy’ in Lyons Corner House. She’d worn neat black with a lace apron and a cap worn tidily across her brow.

  As had been the experience of earlier generations, those people who spoke to me remembered jobs as being difficult to find, and, when they did find work, it was frequently unreliable.

  I know some have got it hard now, but, believe me, we had it harder back then, especially before the war, I’m talking about. You might get a few days, but nothing you could depend on, and you still had your family to feed and the rent to pay. The kids and the landlord didn’t go on short time, did they?

  Employment was a constant worry. Very few were sure of any permanency. A craftsman with a trade could feel a bit safe, as could those we called the white-collar workers – those in council offices and postal workers. What money was given [to you] when [you were] out of work was very little, and one had to sign on three times a week, at different times, to make sure you were not employed.

  It was hard in the 1930s. We didn’t know that – the children. Well, most of us didn’t; I suppose a few poor buggers did. Dad used to go out at five o’clock every morning; stand with a group of others waiting to be called on to get a day’s work. If your face didn’t fit, you didn’t get it. And that’s how it went. But he brought us all up, all five of us. And Mum used to take in washing and do cleaning. So we could get by.

  There were periods, however, when things looked up for the lucky ones who either had appropriate skills or were simply in the right place at the right time. In 1910, for instance, West Ham was booming and, so strong was its position as a hub of chemical works, food and tobacco processing, metal and engineering plants, that the council distributed a leaflet referring to itself as the ‘factory centre of the South’. Workers flocked there and, two decades later, the area was still prosperous, with technological innovation now really beginning to benefit consumers and workers alike.

  During the 1930s industries increased as the new amenities like electricity arrived [and] with telephone and wireless expansion. The motorized van and internal combustion engine were replacing the horse and cart. Public transport was expanding, more modern buses and the trolleybus were replacing the old trams, doing away with the tramlines down the centre of the road, [and] the underground was being extended to the outer suburbs. All adding to the need for more workers, [although] at the same time some jobs were becoming obsolete. With the introduction of electric streetlighting, away went the old lamplighter’s job. With the progress of the delivery van, the horse and cart was seen less often, and with them went the driver – the carman or drayman – who managed the horses, with their gleaming brasswork. [Also under threat were] the tram driver and the canal bargees, with their string of barges carrying timber and sand. With the improved sewers and drains, the street water-cart was no longer to be enjoyed by children walking along behind with no shoes and socks. Expansion in employment, I think, outnumbered the jobs lost. I remember mine and other families feeling a better lifestyle in the later 1930s. Even though wages were kept stable, prices were steady.

  The furniture-making and allied trades had been traditional employers of large numbers of East Enders from as early as the eighteenth century, and, to a far lesser extent, they still are today.

  At the back of the yard was a big, glass-roofed shed which was used as a workshop for furniture-making, and there was a small hatch in a wall from the scullery into the shed. There was a double glue pot standing in a big open fireplace [and] work benches. On the other side of [our] street were the factory buildings. Some of them were three or four storeys high. On the corner was where they did French polishing. Then came the entrance to the woodworking shops. There was a factory that made cane furniture and another that made cardboard boxes, they used to tie them in packs and drop them out of the window for someone to catch. In the basement of the factory on the corner, they polished and bevelled mirrors, and you could watch through the basement window as they operated the grindstones with the water dripping over the glass.

  Other trades and industries, now vanished from the streets of the East End, are nothing more than memories.

  There used to be huge live turtles arriving at Lusty’s to be turned into soup at the factory there. The smell was awful.

  I was a lamplighter. I moved to the basement of a shop to be near my work, as time was important where the lamps were concerned. This was a seven-day-a-week job, and you had to light, clean and tend to 120 lamps. You had a long steel pole with a brass guard on top to protect a flame from going out. A trigger was at the bottom of the pole, about four inches up, which was fixed to a rod that actuated the gun to light the flame. I think the oil was a mixture of calza [sic] and paraffin. We had matches issued to relight the torch should it go out. We had boxes of mantles of different sizes, and a leather and scrim to clean the glass in the lamps. In summer, you went out at about five a.m. to turn out the lamps, then you picked your own time to clean them and renew broke
n mantles. Again, at ten p.m., you went round to light up. In winter, the times were earlier to light up and later to turn out. The foreman went round each man’s round to check up on his work. It took about an hour to light up once you got used to it. You also had a ladder and a safety rope which was used to prevent you falling. Some men did window-cleaning between lighting-up times. When it was foggy by day, we had to light up the main road only on the council’s orders, as the council set the time when to light up and turn off. In summer the painters painted the lamps and it was a job to clean the glass, owing to the paint on them. As my section was to be electrified, I had to leave, being the last one to join the muster of lamplighters.

  Work wasn’t important only as a means of earning a living, it also kept you out of mischief – the devil notoriously making work for idle hands.

  Grandad was in the docks, but he packed up work when he was about fifty and his wife died, said his kids could keep him. [So] he used to go out and get pissed, and would get brought home in a barrow. Mum would be out with her mates and they’d see someone wheeling a wheelbarrow down the road with her dad in it. They used to say hello to her, but she’d look the other way as if to say, ‘Nothing to do with me.’ She’d say, ‘I don’t know him, bloody bloke.’ He was always going out on the booze.

  If there was no work about, you’d get bored. Me and my mates, all young, fit fellers, we’d hang around, kicking our heels and playing cards, or stretching our last few coppers for a half a pint. I never got tempted to do nothing dodgy. I was fortunate. My old man had a regular job and used to give me a few shillings. But others weren’t so lucky and wound up getting into bother.

  Despite the idea that ‘women didn’t work then’, many, of course, did do paid work, many had to, often doing long hours of boring, back-breaking piece work, or being employed casually for cash in hand, in much the same way as their mothers and grandmothers before them.

  I used to do all odd little jobs because my husband was in the tailoring trade and didn’t earn much money. I’d do a bit of cleaning. Any little job.

  She used to go along the street, knocking on people’s doors – the ones who had paid her – to wake them up for work. I don’t know who woke her up.

  Women who didn’t go out to work [but had] outdoor work could bring a few more shillings into the home. These [jobs] were numerous and varied: feather-sorting and grooming, for the ladies’ hat trade; matchbox-making; hand-sewn gloves; and, because of the local tailoring businesses, there were many outdoor jobs to be had for the homes that managed to acquire a Singer sewing machine. [And] apart from helping with outdoor work, it was a must for the mending of clothes.

  [My brother] and I often used to play boats in the upturned lid of Mum’s sewing machine [as] the machine was nearly always in use because Mum did lots of outdoor work when she could get it, sewing shirts or blouses to help get some money. Any bits of material that were left over, she would make things for us or something to sell.

  Others did ‘proper’, regular jobs, even if they were not always treated that well by their employers, or were naive regarding the ways of the world in which they found themselves.

  If you worked in the print, you had to be in the union. We were well looked after by the publishing companies: doctors, hospitals, everything the best. Anyway, women were OK until they married, then the union chucked you out. When I rejoined the union, in another job on a trade paper after the war, some cocky union bloke found out I had been a union member and wondered why I hadn’t kept up my subs. I took great pleasure in telling him, ‘Because you chucked me out.’ They wouldn’t let married women work then, but during and after the war they were glad of us.

  *

  [My husband] would have been in his thirties then, but he wasn’t fit to go to work because of the terrible experiences and injuries he received as a fireman during the war, so, I thought to myself, I’ll have to get myself a job. They were advertising for postwomen, because all the postmen were away in the army, so I got a job in the Whitechapel post office, delivering the letters. Being a new woman, they put you down on the hardest routes: ‘You’ll deliver round X Street’ where all the prostitutes lived, all the slums.

  Well, I was a bit simple… well, I was about prostitutes. I’ve got a registered letter to deliver and you got to get their signature. So I went up these flats, right up the top, and I rat-tatted on the door, and a voice shouted, ‘Come in!’ I just stood there. ‘Push the door and come in.’ And in I went. It was one of these flats where you open the door and you’re in the room. And when I went in, there was this woman sitting up in bed. All painted: rouge on her face, hair all dyed, black eyelashes and all black under one eye. Lovely silk dress and a nice cover on the bed. But, on top of that cover, she had two great big sheets of newspaper. And she was plucking a chicken.

  I said to her, ‘Registered letter. You got to sign for it.’

  So she said, ‘I thought you was my customer.’

  So I said, ‘What do you mean, customer?’

  ‘My man friend,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting for him. I might as well pluck my chicken for my dinner while I’m sitting here.’

  I didn’t know what she meant, and when I got back to the post office I was telling one of the women there, about this woman who was all done up in bed, and she said, ‘She was a prostitute!’

  When finding work was particularly difficult, potential employees could be impressively resourceful, if not always entirely honest, in their search for a job.

  After the war, when my husband tried to get a job and couldn’t, I went up the Labour Exchange. They wanted women in the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, changing the insurance cards.

  The woman there said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll get it because you’ve got to have a very good education.’

  I said, ‘I’ve got a good education. I was very good at school.’

  She said, ‘Did you go to secondary school?’

  Well, I never, but I said, ‘Yes.’ I actually went to Ben Jonson School, but when she asked me where I went, I was going to say Raynes Foundation School, but, I thought to myself, they’ll start inquiring. I knew the school in Coborn Road was bombed a bit, so I said I went there.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can go and try for it.’

  I was scared stiff when I went there. There was all different rooms and all these men walking about with all different books and paper. I thought to myself, ‘Oh blimey, I’ll never do this job.’

  I had to go and see the manager. He was a stern-looking man but he was all right. He asked me if I was a good reader – ‘Yes’ – and what school I went to – ‘Coborn Road’. I got the job and I was good at it!

  Once they were fortunate enough to land a job, hard-up employees would have to be just as resourceful about how they got to work in the mornings.

  You’d troop through the ticket barrier at the station, all mixed up with the other passengers, and you’d say, ‘He’s got the ticket, him behind.’

  I saved money by walking to work. All the way to Stratford. A good few miles. I wasn’t so keen when it was dark and cold. But it saved the money, which was important if you haven’t got much in the first place.

  A lot of our mates did this trick. Wonder we all got away with it, but not many did it to get to work, it took too long. Still, when it was only a day to payday and you had no money left, me and Dolly would try it on. We worked together up Whitechapel, so we’d get on a bus going in that direction and do our best to avoid the conductor, dodge upstairs or downstairs – where he wasn’t. Then, when he eventually come up to us, we’d go, all innocent and flapping our eyelashes, ‘Two to Stratford, please.’

  ‘That’s the other direction, sweetheart,’ he’d say.

  We’d be all shocked and surprised, and we’d get off at the next stop. Course, what we’d do is wait for the next one to come along, and do the same all over again. I’ll have to admit, it wasn’t the quickest way to get to work.

  As well as doing th
eir paid work, women and men came home to all the domestic chores that had to be done in order to keep their households clean, fed and in reasonable shape.

  Women were always busy. Even when chatting on the doorstep they would be shelling peas or peeling sprouts.

  It was non-stop, keeping the place nice. You had different jobs for each day of the week. You couldn’t save up your washing and stick it in the machine when you felt like it, it was all a big deal. You’d have to prepare for every job. Know what you was doing. Like cleaning the mats. No vacuum cleaners. Drag them out the yard and give them a good whacking. The dust used to choke you.

  Women were tough then. They seemed to get everything done. If you think about it, today you’ve got a washing machine, a Hoover. Back then you used to have to get down on your knees and scrub your floor and scrub your step. Washing was done out the back of a Monday. And when you think about bathing the kids… You had to be pretty strong. When my mum was at work I only used to wash that bit of lino that showed round the mat. Never washed under it, just round the sides. Mind you, if you’d have polished that bit under it, you’d all have gone arse over head!

  *

  [As well as going to work] Dad had jobs mending the kids’ boots and shoes; sweeping the chimney was a Saturday morning job. It was also his job to beat the mats and carpets. With no Hoover, mats had to be hung on the line and beaten with a broom handle. One of his worst jobs was ridding the place of vermin.