Corny and nostalgic? Maybe, but it’s a way of life that many remember and a way of life that some wish they could still enjoy.
If I had to say what I miss most, it would definitely be that gaslamp we used to play on in Mossford Street. In fact, I have such nostalgia for it, as does my sister, that we went back a few years ago just to take a look at it. Of course, it was gone.
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I look back still and, it doesn’t matter how old I get, I’ll always remember – the swish of the skipping rope, the games of tin-can copper, the Gaiety Girls, the sights, the smells, the laughter, and not many tears. But I’ll remember it. I’ll be seventy-six next birthday and if I live any longer I know I’ll never forget those days when I was young and just had everything to look forward to. We won’t mention the bad times that the East End had during that bloody turn-out [the war], but this I know: whoever went away from this island, from the East End, and didn’t come back will always be remembered. I’ll remember them all. I hope you’ll excuse me, my dear, I won’t even tell you my name, because there’s no need for that. I’m just an old East Ender who has looked back. The East End is where I was born and I’m proud of that.
Thank you all for sharing your stories. I hope I have done them justice.
1. The Whitechapel hay market, 1899. A legacy from the eighteenth century which continued until 1928.
2. The Waller family outside their butcher’s shop in Watney Street, c. 1910, with a display guaranteed to horrify today’s ‘food police’.
3. Evans’s dairy in Poplar High Street, c. 1928, offering a typically wide range of provisions with some almost forgotten brand names.
4. A view of the ‘LaBo’, the La Bohème cinema, c. 1931, at the junction of Mile End Road and Burdett Road, viewed from Grove Road, where I lived (at number 109) as a child.
5. Abraham Cohen’s barbers, Ellen Street, Stepney, c. 1930. Small businesses such as Mr Cohen’s once provided an important focus for local communities.
6. George Gardens, Bethnal Green, 1903. A terrace of houses with the ‘luxury’ of having somewhere to hang out the washing.
7. Drying racks in the Sophia Street laundry, 1931. With few of today’s labour-saving devices, public wash houses were a boon.
8. Victorian dustmen. Refuse collection using a tip-up cart in Old Montague Street, c. 1895.
9. The drudgery of ill-paid homework, c. 1900. Mrs Robinson of Bethnal Green stuffs a palliasse with straw; for each completed mattress she was paid the equivalent of 5p.
10. Child victims of poverty in the East End. Members of a family of nine photographed in July 1912.
11. My father, Tom (circled), aged five, in 1924, with the rest of Mrs Chalkley’s form at Alton Street School, Poplar.
12. Making their own fun. Children enjoying a game of leap-frog, 1905.
13. Using the tin bath as a makeshift paddling pool in the backyard of 109 Grove Road. I am in the middle, with my brother Tony on my right and one of his friends, c. 1954.
14. Celebrating peace by ‘slipping the slip’ at the English Fair, Poplar recreation ground, 1919.
15. The children’s ward in Poplar Hospital, 1906.
16. Poplar High Street, c. 1900. The labouring poor, the elderly and the infirm dreaded having to go into the workhouse.
17. Victoria Park, 1908. A place of both leisure and public protest, ‘Vicky’ has witnessed, over the years, the building and demolition of its glorious 1920s lido, gatherings of demonstrators ranging from Chartists to Blackshirts, and local people simply enjoying its many pleasures.
18. A family day out. Front row from left, ‘Old Mrs Cooper’ with baby Harry and son Percy; next seated, Maggie Cooper (Jamie Redknapp’s great-grandmother) with daughter; standing, my grandmother Bridget Knight, pregnant with my dad, with daughter Sally, and the driver (Mrs Cooper’s eldest son). Back row from left, Mrs Cooper’s brother, Gerry Brown (Jamie Redknapp’s great-grandfather), and William Griffiths, my grandfather.
19. Above Posing, 1934-style, at Poplar Baths.
20. Right The Russian vapour baths at 86 Brick Lane, c. 1910. Being opposite the Great Synagogue, they were very popular with the local orthodox Jewish community.
21. Bethnal Green, 1904. Following the Huguenot tradition of songbird and pigeon fancying, the Club Row and Sclater Street Sunday bird market was always packed. Wild birds, particularly goldfinches, which had been trapped in the Essex countryside, were sold illegally.
22. In the 1920s the Nastri family of Railway Street, Poplar, also sold ice-cream and ice, like the family shown here. They used a truck to tour the streets and in winter transferred their interests to the coal and coke business.
23. ‘Chinatown’: Pennyfields, Limehouse, 1927.
24. A different world: before the docks became Docklands. Dunbar’s Wharf, Narrow Street, c. 1900.
25. A ‘dock copper’ checking that a dock worker isn’t leaving with more than he arrived with.
26. The Royal Artillery unloading a ship during a dockworkers’ strike in July 1949 at the Royal Albert Dock.
27. London Docks, 1961. Built at Wapping in 1805, they handled much of the valuable tobacco, wine and brandy imports.
28. Royal Docks, 1942. Despite the bombing and the danger, vital food imports still had to be unloaded.
29. Sheltering from the bombs for the night became a part of wartime family life.
30. The docks, vital to the life of the country, were continually targeted by enemy bombers.
31. Royal Docks, 1944. Admiring a consignment of canned meat from the United States during the hard days of rationing and shortages.
32. ‘Bombed out’: Lydia Street, 1940. Moving whatever could be salvaged from the wreckage.
33. VE Day celebrations, 8 May 1945. After nearly six long years, the East End was readv to celebrate.
34. Women enjoying a chat in Whitechapel, 1938. Note the ‘uniform’ of cross-over aprons and hairnets.
35. Teatime, Whitechapel, 1938. Having a professional photographer in the home meant a nice cloth and the best china would be brought out.
36. Scrubbing the step ready for the Coronation party, 1953. Beware anyone foolish enough to actually put a foot on a freshly scrubbed step.
37. Like most other turnings in the East End, Morpeth Street held a weekly collection to pay for the food and Coronation souvenir china for their street party, June 1953.
38. Attracting the punters, Petticoat Lane, 1936.
39. Attracting the punters, Petticoat Lane, 1998.
40. Likely lads, 1951, by an advertisement for the ever-popular Troxy.
41. celebration ‘kneesup’ at Bill Cannon’s ‘pigeon do’, 1960s. My mother, Dolly, is on the right, and next to her is my aunt Doll.
42. Using a length of rope, a lamppost and their imagination, two girls, without benefit of expensive toys, delight in their shared game, c. 1950.
Appendix: The Docks
From the end of the eighteenth until the mid-twentieth century, London’s port, with its East End docks and close-knit communities, was the most important in the world. How, and why, this position was sacrificed is a disputed, controversial and often sorry tale that, eventually, might be seen by some as having a positive outcome. For others, though, it will never be anything other than a personal and a community tragedy. To say that controversy has surrounded the project to reconstruct the docklands is to misunderstand what has actually been the destruction of a whole way of life. It must be acknowledged that something had to be done, although exactly what is open to question.
There is a lot of bitterness about what happened, and a whole library could be written on the details without beginning to tell the complete story, but these are the bare bones of the events from a number of different angles.
The post-war period could have been seen as an opportunity for extensive modernization of the bomb-damaged docks, but failure to meet the challenge of increased containerization and the extension of the facilities downstream at Tilbury meant that the moment w
as ripe for a concerted assault on the power of the trade unions, and what was to become the lamentable, but inevitable, decline led to the transformation of the once-great docks into the Docklands.
In 1967, McKinsey and Co., Management Consultants, told the Port of London Authority (PLA), the main landowner in the docks, that containerization was the way forward and, as the inner London docks were not of a suitable size, that Tilbury should be expanded at the expense of the upstream facilities.
To understand how the docks came to be the centre of a prolonged battle needs the historical context briefly restating. As was described earlier, the docks were built in the nineteenth century as a direct result of the pressures which came with increasing imperial trade. Not only was more quay space required, but it had to be secure. The Committee of the West Indies Merchants founded the West India Dock Company and opened their dock on the Isle of Dogs in 1802. Other dock companies quickly followed, all keen to profit from the burgeoning business based on the importing of cheap raw materials and the export of an ever-growing variety of manufactured and finished goods.
The old quays were now replaced by massive enclosed docks and, as had happened with the historical riverside trades, new dock-related industries and services soon appeared to process raw imports such as chemicals, oil, sugar, rubber, cereals for flour and animal feed.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the old ship-building trades were becoming obsolete as steam power came to dominate, and increasing mechanization in the ever larger companies, keen to exploit economies of scale, saw many workers unemployed or forced into casual work.
The exploitation of labour in the docks which resulted from this casualization reflected the experience of many other trades and industries throughout the East End in the nineteenth century, where the cheap, subjugated pool of workers were being abused in the sweated trades, with women and immigrant labour usually faring the worst.
As profits rose, there was a series of dock mergers and, with the increasing competition between the newly enlarged companies, the need was seen for an overall authority to settle disputes and to introduce order. The PLA (Port of London Authority) was set up in 1908. The first board was elected by merchants, wharfingers (wharf owners and managers) and the ship owners, each having one vote for every £10 of trade. The ship owners clearly dominated.
The PLA became well established and continued to operate into the twentieth century, but, having no subsidy, it depended solely on revenue and by the middle of this century that was declining. With investment and business increasing downstream at Tilbury, the PLA looked towards its considerable upstream property assets and took McKinsey’s advice. Massive ships, being dealt with in a fraction of the time, became the future prospect.
A comment at the time, attributed to Bernie Steer, a shop steward with the National Association of Stevedores and Dockers, was that the PLA was acting as an estate agent rather than as a port employer.
But dock-workers also knew that, without change, closure was inevitable. A man I spoke to who had followed the family tradition of working in the docks most of his adult life was saddened by, but resigned to, the changes.
The reason the docks had to close was because the ships were getting bigger and bigger. The trouble with these docks was that every one [of the ships] had to be locked into them. Take their turn to be locked into the docks. Sometimes that used to take a full day. The same going out. If they went to Tilbury, where they had more water, bigger ships, well, they could go straight away. It was a matter of modernizing the docks or else. They could also have spent money straightening out the river, taking away that bend, the one you see at the beginning of EastEnders. And the cranes could lift five tons, whereas the containers coming in from abroad were weighing twenty tons. So, what we had to do on the ship was dismantle the cargo, take it out of the container, send that ashore, then send the empty container on to the shore, where they would repack it. Whereas down at Tilbury, they’ve got a big crane that can pick the whole lot up and put it on the quay. We [some of the dock-workers] went to Rotterdam for a week and they were even more modernized. The ships come right alongside, and, as they do, they get worked on straight away, right round the clock.
I’ve only been back down there a couple of times – to the Docklands – and I was amazed. Down the bottom of the lane, where the Connaught used to be, they’ve got a railway there that goes up over the top round to Woolwich. You can lose yourself there.
Containerization had an appeal for the employers other than that of economies of scale, however.
In 1947 the Dock Labour Board Scheme was set up, with each port having its own board jointly controlled by the employers and the unions. Workers who registered with their board were hired out to the employers on a casual basis. This continued for twenty years and then, in 1967, the work was decasualized and dockers were paid a regular wage. The boards were not popular with the employers; they objected to the 50 per cent power granted to the unions and to the levy they were expected to pay to their Dock Labour Board to finance the registration scheme. Containerization offered an alternative. Easily shifted by road, the containers could be dealt with outside the actual port area by non-registered workers and could also be shipped to non-scheme ports such as Felixstowe, lowering costs for the employers. The non-scheme ports made the upstream PLA ports even more uncompetitive, as they were forced to raise their charges to cover pay for the growing pool of surplus labour.
It was what happened during the late 1960s and 1970s that resulted in the 1980s jobs crisis in east London. The ill-feelings of the dock-workers were clear.
Everything finished. I came out of the docks because I thought, ‘I’m going to be the last one here and all the jobs will be gone. There’ll be nothing. Fifty-eight I was when I came out. I should have been sixty-five. You could retire at fifty-eight, but on a reduced pension. My reduced pension when I first came out [in the 1970s] was eleven shillings a month. Now it’s near enough £32 a month. Each October, I get £169 as a lump sum. That’s through the National Dock Labour Board. It pays my television licence.
In 1967 there were 22,815 registered dock-workers and associated lighterage personnel employed in the Port of London. In 1980 there were 7,120. By the end of 1981 the last remaining enclosed upstream docks – the Royals – ceased to be operational, and with their closure came the job devastation in port-related local trades and services.
The social and financial cost to the old dockland area began in east London, with the London Docks being closed in 1969 and St Katharine’s following. In south London, the Surrey Docks were shut in 1970, then, back on the north side, the East India Docks went in 1971 and the West India followed a few years later. The furthest east of the docks, the Royals, were the last to go. But the question remained: who, exactly, was benefiting?
In January 1973, Tower Hamlets had 6,200 people on its housing waiting list, at the same time that Taylor Woodrow were about to start work on the luxury development at St Katharine’s Docks. Being on a waiting list is a very different matter from having your relative speak to the landlord about finding you a room or two to begin your married life, and locals on the list were interested to find that, when the development was completed, a prominent Member of Parliament moved in there.
A1974 satirical pamphlet by Alun Gilbey of the Basement Writers illustrated what locals feared would be the future of east London’s docklands, that there would be a moat separating ‘trendies’ from the ‘genuine’ East Enders, with the Isle of Dogs being used as a camp for deposed locals whose homes had been bulldozed to make way for glittering skyscrapers, fancy marinas and totally unaffordable housing.
What Paul Beasley, leader of Tower Hamlets Council in 1976, identified to a local reporter was, for locals, a glaringly obvious truth:
If the docker has got no work then everybody else is idle. This is one of the last base industries we have left.
And to quote Mr Rogg, who owns a delicatessen in Cannon Street Road:
I
n those days [when the docks were operating] the dockers were good customers. They earned a pound, they spent a pound. Their sons and grandsons were the same. The real dockers, not like that lot over in Docklands now. People ask me what’s happened round here. I say, ‘The people are different.’
The Docklands Joint Committee, made up of members from the five boroughs affected (Tower Hamlets and Newham on the north bank, and Southwark, Greenwich and Lewisham on the south) and from the Greater London Council (GLC), plus government-appointed figures picked, some might say, from the usual suspects, organized the Docklands Development Team to work out a plan to decide what should be done with the area. Transport was rightly identified as being vital, and the Joint Docklands Action Group (JDAG), financed by the GLC and made up of all the local action groups, pointed to the ridiculous under-use of the river, and even how barges could be utilized to make containerization a viable way forward in the existing inner London docks. JDAG also came up with a plan which proposed that, rather than letting the workshops and factories crumble – almost a way of guaranteeing their future sole sale potential as yet more development land – they should, instead, be renovated, with existing skill bases kept and encouraged to develop.
My East End Page 33
