Dad wasn’t always in [paid] work because of the slump, [and so] he did a lot of decorating, wallpapering and painting. I can still see him sitting on a chair in the kitchen with a roll of wallpaper over his knees, with a big pair of scissors cutting off the unprinted edges of the paper. It took ages to do the amount of rolls it took to paper a good-sized room.
The docks and their allied trades were still thriving right up until the beginning of the transformation of the great port and its docks into the Docklands of today (see Appendix, pages 309–18). So busy were the docks that, in the mid-193os, my father, in a fit of pique after arguing with his mother that he wanted fish and chips for his tea rather than the stew she had made for the family meal, was able, literally, to run away to sea. He met up with a cousin, went down to the docks and found himself a job on a ship that same night. And I, born in 1951, can remember being on the Isle of Dogs, looking along a side turning that led to the water and seeing a massive ship looming up as though it were parked at the end of the street.
In 1948 I went into the docks for twenty-two years. My dad and my grandfather were in the docks before me. My uncle as well. Call-on was at quarter to eight every morning, or afternoons at quarter to one. Stevedores were called on outside the docks. A stevedore was a man who worked on the ship, and the docker worked for the stevedore. Eventually, I worked on the ships as well as on the quay. My dad was in the docks, so he went through his branch for me. There was a bit of a fiddle about that, I think. A year and a half and we hadn’t heard anything. I talked to my brother, he belonged to the same branch, number 5 branch of the Stevedore and Dockers’ Union, which used to meet near the docks. It was a blue union, called that to separate it from the white union, the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He found out that people that had put their names in after me had got their names down, but I was still waiting. It came all of a sudden, after he made inquiries. It seems to me that a lot of people had been getting backhanders, that had been the hold-up. You know, even if you got prosecuted for theft or something, you could still go back afterwards and work in the docks. All sorts of people worked there. Once you were in a gang you were guaranteed work. There were twelve of us in a gang. The top hand, who does the signals to the crane driver; the crane driver; perhaps two of us would be on the quay doing the loading; and the rest of them would be down the hole.
My family came from the docks. It was well-paid work but you had a job to get in unless you already had a family member in there. These things sort of passed down through family members. My uncle wasn’t liked by any of the rest of the family, so he never got in. No one would ever put his name forward or give him a ticket for work in the docks. He had to go on a day-to-day [casual] basis. When he got there, they’d all line up, but if they didn’t get the day’s work, they didn’t get in.
There was no one to beat the London dockers for tonnage. We were working eight o’clock till seven o’clock at night with an hour’s break. Eleven hours a day, five and a half days a week. Sometimes Sunday as well. We were earning what was perhaps two weeks’ money in a week. It was hard work. I used to put a handkerchief covering my face, Vaseline up my nose and in my ears to stop the asbestos we were working on, going down my chest. Even doing that, I used to have to go to East Ham to have my chest X-rayed for years.
My brothers and me father used to go to the docks and stand in line, waiting to be chosen [for a day’s or half a day’s work]. My dad was better off because he was a stevedore, and my eldest brother was able to pass off as eighteen when he was fifteen to work on the ships as a stoker. When the other boys were old enough, if they couldn’t find work, they’d join the ships and go abroad.
There were plenty of stories about how well the dock employees did for themselves, many from people with no family association with the work but who knew all the gossip and the rumours, and probably wouldn’t have minded the opportunity to have been involved as one of the recipients of such bounty.
When whisky was being unloaded, it was arranged for bottles to be broken on purpose and the dockers would rush forward with enamel buckets and catch the liquid. Later they strained it carefully and a good time was had by all.
During the war, when tins of scarce items were being unloaded at the docks, some were dropped and badly dented. No prizes for guessing who took them home.
In an echo of the old song ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’, this man remembers his first trip working as a seaman.
One January morning, I’ll never forget it, I had the pleasure of joining one of the ships I used to watch as a boy. I joined it at Woolwich. I was rowed out by a boatman. The ship hired him, I never had to give him nothing, and he dumped me on the ship and that was it. And before we knew where we was, we was going. Sailing down that London river. To where? I didn’t know at the time. But I knew I was leaving the East End behind me. I looked back and I could see familiar landmarks going by as we was going down the Thames. I remember thinking, the East End all lies back there. This will not be East End where I am now. I’m going out towards the sea, leaving the East End behind. All my mates, Mum, Dad, brothers, sisters. I was leaving them all. Where the hell I was going, I didn’t know. I soon found out, and, nine months later, we was coming back. I knew the East End would still be there, but I knew I had changed. I’d seen things that I never thought possible. I’d seen parts of the world I’d only dreamed of, or had seen in the geography books in school. I’d had so many experiences and I was still only fifteen. I knew the East End wouldn’t have changed, but I had. How would I ever be able to settle down again after seeing all them wonders, places and people? It was remarkable, marvellous, how a snotty-nosed kid like me… from the East End of London. What was I doing on bloody Copacabana Beach? Or Rio Harbour? Or bloody Buenos Aires? Montreal? New York? It was unbelievable.
But the East End itself did change, and not only because of the dismantling of the docks. The two world wars were to cause irreversible changes in both the place and its people.
[ 16 ]
The war changed everything.
The closure of the docks would eventually cause a radical transformation of the whole social and physical fabric of the East End, but before that the defining moment of change was the devastation brought about by the Second World War.
As in the Great War, the docks, railways and high-density population made east London an obvious target for German bombers, and very quickly anti-aircraft measures, including barrage balloons, searchlights, guns, air-raid shelters and the blackout, and evacuation were introduced. The East End was under threat.
That Sunday morning in 1939 when the Second World War was declared, I was ten years old. The news on the radio, and then the sounding of the air raid siren was so frightening. That sound still turns my stomach.
When war was declared, we’d all gone out to an all-night party up in Stepney Green, and everyone ran out into the street because the siren had gone off. They were all shouting, ‘I haven’t got me gas mask!’ We all thought we were going to get gassed that same morning.
Yet with all the precautions and the initial fears of air raids and even of imminent invasion, life in the period which would become known as the Phoney War soon settled back into a routine, returning almost to normal.
[It] started very quietly; rationing began but still no expected air raids of any strength, so it began to lead us into a false sense of security. Men continued to be called up – I received my papers to start at the beginning of February – but it was the Phoney War. Life seemed to go on as usual, although rationing began to bite, and industry was fighting to retain key workers, which, in a lot of cases, was allowed if they were reserved occupations. It was a shame for these men, who felt self-conscious with so many other men around in uniform.
The attitude of my generation was different from that of my parents’. While they had experienced the first war, we, in our ignorance, were treating it as a new experience, and, with our indoctrinated, childish
pride in the nation and our Empire, and not knowing what war was all about, we had a kind of sang-froid attitude towards it when called to the colours. Like the young of all times, [we were] full of our own importance. The wives shed a few tears, but were soon just as embroiled as their menfolk. So, the 1930s ended with uncertainty as to the future, but with changes minimal compared with what was to come.
Many homesick cockney children and their mothers were happy to return from the strangeness of evacuation in the ‘sticks’ to the familiarity of their own London streets and homes.
I hadn’t wanted Jimmy, my youngest, to be evacuated in the first place, so, when it seemed safe, I fetched him home. It might not have been the right thing to do, to keep him with me once that bombing started, but I didn’t want him to be away with strangers. But the bombing did get bad.
She was not exaggerating. The bombing, as anyone who lived through it knows, was more than bad. On 7 September 1940, on a clear summer’s day, the Blitz began to wreak its vicious havoc on the men, women and children of London’s East End.
If the war changed everything, then it was the Blitz that changed the war.
The Blitz was the most traumatic thing of my life in the East End. My school was in East Ham [and] because where I lived [was] in such close proximity to the docks and Beckton Gas Works, it was number-one danger zone for the aerial bombing which was expected. They closed the school within weeks of the war starting. I was nearly thirteen years old when we evacuated, but no Blitz had started at that stage [and] things were so bad where we went that Mum brought us back. Because there was no school and we were so close to leaving at fourteen years, the town hall said we would have to go into the ARP. We were employed on filling sandbags and looking after the stirrup pumps. This was around the chemical factory, Beckton and the docks, or wherever they decided to send us. The Blitz had still not started. That summer, up to the September, when they bombed the docks, we were filling sand buckets and having a good time, a lot of lads together. The bombing of the docks and Beckton was horrendous. I was there when it started. I ran home at about four p.m., absolutely terrified. We had an outside toilet and I sat in it and cried. I would not come out. That was the beginning of the real war for us. As a family, Mum and Dad decided we would stay together.
While we were in London [on ‘holiday’ from evacuation] the Blitz was starting in earnest. With raids every night, we had to more or less sleep in our clothes to be ready to dash to a shelter. We ran along the street to a neighbour’s house, where they had built an Anderson shelter in their yard. One night, the siren went and we dashed along to the shelter, but as we were running through the house we heard some ‘screaming bombs’ coming down and stopped in the back doorway until they had landed and gone off. They were a frightening weapon, designed to cause panic. They had things attached to the fins which made this screaming noise as they rushed through the air and they sounded as though they were about to land just in front of you.
The docks, a primary focus for the Luftwaffe, were attacked relentlessly: 400 German aircraft bombarded the area, in full view in the bright sunlight, with a further 250 bombers returning after dark. They came in wave after wave, leaving homes, docks, warehouses and factories burning. These sustained attacks lasted into October – fifty-seven days of bombing – with surface shelters offering little protection.
When you saw the damage that high explosives could cause, you just knew those flimsy surface shelters would have been as good as useless.
We either went to Bethnal Green tube or the surface shelter they had built just outside our house. I preferred the tube, because you could buy a baked potato under the railway bridge at the Salmon and Ball, or you could sometimes buy crisps in the shop in the tube. Not only that, it was much warmer than the surface shelter. [But] the surface shelter saved my parents’ lives one day. They heard the siren and were just going out of the front door when a German plane swooped down and started machine-gunning the street. They managed to run behind the wall of the shelter and the bullets went all along the pavement in front of the house.
People flocked to underground stations, cellars beneath local factories and, if they had them, shelters in their backyards. But there were stories of the domestic shelters being little more than death traps for those who entered them.
My older brother took our house when we moved, with his wife and two children. They were lucky. They had the Anderson shelter in the garden and it got a direct hit. All they found was my sister-in-law’s knitting, but they were out shopping in Stratford. They were very, very lucky.
On my eighth birthday, my mother’s sisters and brothers came to tea. There were jellies and a cake… In the middle of all the laughter and fun, the siren sounded and we all trooped down to the shelter in the garden. [My] auntie laughingly said, ‘You know what it is – Hitler’s heard it’s your birthday and he’s sending you a birthday present, a bomb with your name on it.’ I took her seriously. I really believed that Hitler was being particularly malicious because he knew it was my birthday. It almost did have my name on it. A huge shell exploded about 200 yards from our house. It made an enormous crater. If it had hit our house and garden, being in the Anderson shelter would have been no help.
It might seem odd, but for those who were children at the time many memories of the war were of the excitement at the tumult that was going on around them. The disruption of normal schooling, sleeping in air-raid shelters, kindnesses shown by strangers who quickly became friends, and even the novelty of queuing for rations were all remembered with childlike wonder.
Adults were very good at helping children feel OK and not terrified at what was happening all around them. I have good memories of air-raid drill in class, where we all squatted under our desks, and of sing-songs and games, I-Spy and reciting the multiplication tables in the school shelter. It even had a piano in it! Everything was made light of, so that sitting in the damp shelter at home, with a candle in a flowerpot, comments were made about the feebleness of Jerry’s aim as shells whistled down and exploded nearby. We got used to the blackout, to glass with criss-crosses of tape on them, but I was sorry when the bus windows were fitted with obscure safety glass. I liked to sit in the front and ‘drive’ the bus. How could I ‘drive’ when I couldn’t see out?
One of the buildings that got blasted and couldn’t be used again was a pub called the Crocodile. In the pub was a stuffed crocodile, which the kids managed to get out. It was around the streets for a good few weeks. Then we had the bright idea of leaning it against someone’s door when it was dark and then knocking and running a safe distance away to listen to the shrieks as the person opened the door and the crocodile fell in on them.
Our spare room was filled with gas masks, which [my father] fitted and issued to all the families in our street and those close by. People came to try them on, bring them back and so on. I had one in a case that I took to school; my brother had a toddler’s one in coloured rubber with Mickey Mouse ears. My baby sister’s was a closed box like a carrycot with a lid, a grey, wrinkled hose pipe with a pump that was meant to be worked by an adult. I remember wondering if a reliable adult would be around should we ever need it.
When war came in 1939, shelters appeared in the streets and gardens. We went to shelter in the railway arches near Cable Street and also in the Free Trade Wharf, sleeping on orange boxes. I was never afraid – you don’t know fear at the age of seven. Coming from the shelters in the early mornings, the streets were always different from the previous night: houses were just a pile of bricks, craters, dust and glass, and there was always a smoke haze.
One of my most vivid memories is of German bombs accurately hitting an old ammunition dump near our house. Every piece of glass and china in the house broke. We spent the rest of the war drinking from jam jars. My mum mourned the loss of her wedding present cut-glass bowls. I was lifted from my glass-filled bed by a fireman, without a scratch. The blast had made wardrobes and sideboards, cupboards and tables all fall over. But we wer
e alive and OK. I remember the fireman carrying me outside. Even though it was dark and cold, the bedroom was brilliantly lit from the oil-dump fire. The fireman held me and we stood and looked at it, great plumes of smoke and fire lighting up the sky. It was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. I cried when they took me away from it. Dad was praying, thanking God we were all alive and safe, [but] Mum was furious – angry for ages – because of all we had lost in the blast.
I was a twelve-year-old boy being bombed. I saw aircraft plunging out of the sky, on fire and in bits.
I remember the incendiaries coming off the roof when I put my head out of the shelter. My father wasn’t there with us because he was running around Whitechapel, driving an ambulance. I saw many a dog fight in the Blitz. You could hear their guns firing overhead.
Every self-respecting kid had a collection of motley metal pieces – shrapnel from exploded bombs or falling aircraft. Once, when I was visiting my grandmother, I was playing out on a bomb site with my youngest uncle when we found an unexploded bomb. We took it home to Nanny and showed it to the adults, who screamed at us. It was put in a galvanized bucket of cold water – as if that would have prevented an explosion – and carried by my uncles to the police station, where they confiscated it, much to the relief of the adults.
Among the excitement and adventures, of course, there were the tragedy and horror that even a child could not avoid seeing around them.
There had been a direct hit in the night at the end of our road, and there was rubble and chaos everywhere. Ambulances stood quietly and the firemen were frantically scrabbling at the rubble, trying to rescue whoever was entombed in it. I dared not be late for school, so I only stopped to watch for a few seconds. My eyes lighted on the pavement. They had found a severed arm and it lay there, mutilated.
My East End Page 27
