by Rita Smith
As a last resort there was always prostitution to fall back on and figures from that period show that in Whitechapel alone it was estimated that 2,500 women were earning their living in this way. Though, given the private nature of the business, one can assume that these numbers were much higher. Child prostitution was rife and generally known as the white slave trade. Strange, when you think what the term “Victorian values” conjures up in our minds, that nothing was done about this until 1875 when the age of consent was raised to thirteen.
This obviously had little effect, for in 1885 William Stead and Bramwell Booth, who was to found the Salvation Army in Whitechapel Road, were able to purchase Eliza Armstrong from her father for the sum of five pounds. They did this to highlight how easy it was to procure young girls for prostitution and published what they had done. Some time later Stead, but not Booth, was charged and imprisoned in Holloway for unlawful kidnapping of a minor. Subsequent publicity forced parliament to raise the age of consent once again, this time by a further three years to sixteen, where it remains today.
Those people who were able to seek work from an employer laid themselves open to exploitation of the worst kind. Casual labour was plentiful and job security non-existent.
Frail men, their strength sapped by hunger, would attempt the heaviest unloading work in the docks for pitiful daily wages – many of them would have to seek a “sub” at midday so that they could eat just enough to give them the strength to finish the day. With no union behind them these men could be hired and fired at will, paid slave wages and treated inhumanely. Fatalities would mean the man’s family heading for the workhouse and those injured in the accidents, that happened daily, received no compensation or sick pay, just the pittance of parish relief – and that only if they could satisfy the means test inspector.
Girls and women might work for the matchmakers Bryant & May in Fairfield Road, Bow. Wages again were farcical, while the very nature of handling match-head phosphorous every day was in many cases a death sentence from day one. Though this dangerous chemical was outlawed in America and other parts of Europe, the British government refused to ban phosphorous on the grounds that to do so would interfere with private enterprise. By taking this stance they allowed many, many East End girls to be disfigured before dying of jaw and face cancer. Girls on the shop floor with the job of carrying heavy boxes on their heads could expect to be bald within the first year. Fourteen hours a day, six days a week should have given them a take-home pay of six or seven shillings. But with a harsh fine system in place this was often drastically reduced. Being ten minutes late would cost them half a day’s pay. Singing, talking, dropping matches or even going to the toilet, without first asking the forewoman, meant fines of from tuppence to ninepence, with no argument or appeal. Conditions only changed after the well-chronicled match girls’ strike in 1888.
The worst exploitation was suffered by out-workers under contract to various businesses, such as the clothing trade or again Bryant & May, for their product was in demand everywhere. One tends to put communism and Russia in the same sentence, but it was only after witnessing for himself the poverty and working conditions of the masses in the East End that Karl Marx went on to found his political philosophy.
Typical of outside matchbox-makers would be a mother with perhaps two young children as helpers, turning out five gross of boxes a day, huddled over a table in the half-light of a barely furnished room. There was no health danger in this type of work but at two pennies per gross it makes one think of that saying about feeding a horse on nothing but hay: “More energy is needed to chew and digest it than can be gained from it.”
Take away the cost of fuel for a fire to melt the glue and dry the boxes, the raw glue itself, plus string to tie them with (as per contract), take away the all too common rejection of perfectly sound matchboxes, often amounting to 20 per cent, and for her fourteen-hour day the worker could expect to clear six pennies daily.
Elsewhere this little army of mothers, the old and the sick would turn their living quarters into mini factories just to exist day by day, and be pleased they were able to earn a few pennies. Sack making, shirt making, button and button-hole sewing, waistcoat finishing – monotonous, eye-straining, finger-aching work, with the only goal being able to earn enough to buy daily food and face the rent man every Friday.
Food cupboards or larders were non-existent and unnecessary because, apart from keeping a paper twist of tea and perhaps a drop of milk indoors, all food was eaten almost immediately it was bought.
After food was taken care of – and often before – the rent was the main priority, for to be put out on the streets was the fear that hung constantly over the heads of East-Enders. This would mean the workhouse for the whole family, a spectre that haunted most – as it was intended to. This was no soft option like some might consider going on the dole to be today. The whole system was designed to deter would-be entrants. A man on his own, or to a lesser degree a woman, could feasibly get through each day and night living on the streets. Between begging for food they could catch up on their sleep under an arch or park bench for the law then said you were not allowed to sleep in a public place during the hours of darkness. After sunrise you could get your head down for the rest of the day, but as the light faded a constable would forcibly rouse you and force you to move on.
A mother with perhaps five children and a sickly husband could not consider living on the streets as an alternative so would apply to the parish for a place in the dreaded workhouse. The separation of the family would be the inevitable result, but what else could they do?
Imagine a family as they contemplated the bleak prison-like façade of perhaps Bethnal Green workhouse. Everything about its exterior was designed to crush the spirit and repel those inadequates who, through sloth and idleness had brought themselves to its door. They would not have gazed at its featureless bricks until they were inside the high walls that cut off the inmates from the outside world. Once behind the oak doors that would not have been out of place at Newgate, the family would be segregated. Children of whatever age would be taken from their parents, and husband and wife would be separated to remove them from any temptation to breed. After the statutory cold-water wash and the indignity of delousing, their clothes would be taken away and all would be kitted out in clothes suitable to the station they had been reduced to. Females, including children, were given ankle-length shapeless dresses, coarse stockings and knee-length underwear. No tailoring service here – everything fitted where it touched, and had to be tucked, pinned or tied for any semblance of dignity.
Males were given convict-style striped shirts, which matched the dresses of the women. Trousers were adjusted to length by a piece of string (supplied) tied round the knees. Vest, drawers, socks, neckerchief and jacket completed his transformation from freeman to workhouse inmate. Well, not quite. Hobnailed boots were handed out to all, but the final touch was reserved for the ragged crop of a haircut they would be given, protest or not, that would mark them as fallen outcasts until they left the workhouse and grew it out.
The time of day they arrived would determine whether they ate or were sent straight to work. Men and older boys of seven upwards would be put to oakum picking. Here they would reduce old, often tarry, two-inch diameter ropes back into an original hempen state, which would eventually be used as caulking for boats. With no conversation allowed and a daily target of at least three pounds in weight there was little chance for skiving. Allowing that these places were not prisons, infraction of the rules could mean a beating, solitary confinement or both.
Stone breaking was just as monotonous – the daily quota having to be pushed through a measured grill at the end of the building. Less painful to the fingers and arms was driving the corn mill that turned out the flour for the bread, but you needed a strong pair of legs because to drive the mill the inmates had to walk round and round a treadmill as if in some medieval dungeon.
This work was carried out on a diet barely above
sustenance level and in two shifts of five hours each. Women and girls worked equally hard and long, mainly scrubbing stone floors and steps, endlessly polishing brassware – in fact, every domestic chore necessary to running the place.
Children too young to work were supervised but given nothing to do but gaze at blank walls and cry for their mothers.
The day’s work ended at 6 p.m., but with stomachs gnawing at backbones they would have to endure one hour’s prayer before being served a meal of bread and gruel, washed down by weak sugarless tea. Bed at 8 p.m. brought little comfort, for their resting places were rough wooden boards covered with thin horsehair mattresses. Two blankets per person were thought more than adequate, even in winter, while extravagances like sheets and pillows were considered unnecessary for such people. As a matter of course it was expected that two inmates should share each bed.
The dormitory was furnished with stools and a couple of tables, while the view was of painted walls broken here and there by uplifting biblical quotes. All windows were six feet from the floor, the same as throughout the workhouse, no doubt to save the inmates from being distracted from their self-induced misery.
Total lunacy or mental illness was no bar to being housed in such a place, so one can imagine that the 5 a.m. bell for more prayers could be a welcome relief from a night hideous with the cries of the insane and the mumbling moans of your bedfellows, who were being driven the same way by such conditions.
In this merge of prison hospital and madhouse a very heavy price was paid simply to have a roof over one’s head. It would be as late as 1930 before changing conditions made Bethnal Green Workhouse redundant and it was put up for sale.
Much of what is perceived about the character of cockney East- Enders is a myth. The cheeky chappy, how’s-your-father, diamond geezer was a music-hall invention and something that has been perpetrated ever since. One could draw a simile with that of American gangsters. Before filmmakers invented their style on celluloid no doubt villains and criminals dressed like everyone else of the period. Once immortalized in films such as Public Enemy and G Men, all self-respecting gangsters had to wear the uniform of wide shoulders, crombie overcoat and snap-brim fedora, and it’s no surprise that with Ronnie’s insatiable appetite for such films, his dress sense would eventually mirror those of his screen heroes. What is no myth is the general view of East-Enders being loyal to their “own”, strong on family values and with an ability to get back up on their feet no matter how many times they are knocked down.
It is not difficult to see that with abject living conditions that were not to change until well into the twentieth century “East- Enders” had little incentive for grinning every hour of the day nor dancing with thumbs in braces at the drop of a hat.
What this way of life did was to unite all those within the boundary of Tower Hamlets against all those outside. That suspicion of people “not your own” until proven otherwise still hangs on today, as does those strong family bonds. In the popular television soap EastEnders, Pauline Fowler’s daily bleating that “family is all” might be viewed with some amusement, yet as far as it can in our more mobile society, it still holds true for many
Again much is made of the fact that Reg, Ron and Charlie grew up in the closeness of grandparents, aunts and uncles living side by side in Vallance Road. But generally this was a way of life in the East End, grouping together as they had always done so that they could all look after each other. Perhaps this was an unconscious continuation of their foreign roots. Germans or gypsies, or in fact any of the ethnic minorities that are the bloodstock of the present day East-Ender, traditionally lived in tight communities and this has been handed down even when these early ancestors were forgotten.
Something else which was very common among East-Enders, at least up until the 1950s, was the practice of taking a stranger into their home to live, not just as a lodger but as an accepted part of the family. So many of the older generation recall an Uncle Bill or Uncle Fred who occupied the back room, that it must have been an accepted part of life. The Lees were no exception to this. Why whoever it was joined them in the first place might be long forgotten. A homeless child, a friend of the old family down on their luck – whatever. It says a lot about the generosity of these people that while apparently they had nothing, this nothing could be stretched enough to help someone less fortunate.
While conditions such as these paint a grim portrait to us in the twenty-first century, we have to consider how those people who lived and worked in such times viewed their own situation. While most would be aware of the enormous gulf between themselves and the better classes, that was how life was and I am sure they did not spend their days aspiring to move into the red-brick houses of St James’s.
Money was short if not too often non-existent. Sweat, tears and occasionally blood had to be shed to gain every crumb. Infants died with regularity and every day had to be faced with fresh courage just to get through it. But then everyone else they associated with was in the same boat, none better or worse off than their neighbour.
Today, when even the weather has to be blamed on someone and most expect to be mollycoddled by the State when things go wrong, we are all striving upward and dissatisfied with ordinary life. Today, with work available at almost any level, blue collar or white, with some initiative or a small talent for warbling or kicking a ball, most of us can aim high: a villa in Spain, top-of-the-range cars and positions of either fame or power or both. Nothing is out of reach.
Victorian lower working classes had no such aspirations. Live, work, raise a family and die – that’s about as good as it would get and it was generally accepted. But living was not only about a lifeand- death struggle. At a time when you could get drunk for a ha’penny and dead drunk for a penny, pubs were on every corner, while porterhouses, beer shops and front-room drinking places filled in the gaps between.
If you wanted more entertainment than alcoholic oblivion, the streets were filled with free and colourful acts of every kind. Dancing bears, held by a chain to the nose, would be led through their paces by German-gypsy owners with a cruelty that the laughing crowd would be indifferent to. Street dancers, street singers, street organs with optional monkey, snake charmers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, clowns – the list of the talent on display is endless, each vying with the other to coerce a farthing from onlookers who had little more than themselves.
For those with a few coppers to spare, the entrance fee to theatres and music halls, which were everywhere in east London, provided a cheap respite from the summer heat and smells, and a warm refuge from winter cold and fog. There was the Garrick just off Leman Street, the British Queen in Commercial Road, the Effington in Whitechapel Road and the Pavilion nearby – not to be confused with the similarly named music hall in Vallance Road, which would be graced by Lee and Kray descendants on- and off-stage in years to come, because this was not opened until 1898.
The markets of the East End were outdoor theatres in their own right. Smithfield meat market – named after the “Smooth field” it was located on outside the city walls – was a horse market in the middle ages. This site was also a place of execution for over four hundred years. In 1666 the Great Fire of London was halted here and debris was brought from elsewhere and piled up in great mounds.
Spitalfields market took its name from the medieval hospital (Spital) and priory of Saint Mary that once stood there. Brick Lane, favourite haunt of Grandad Lee, was originally the home and workplace of Flemish brick and tile makers. Later it became a livestock market and later still a general market as it is today.
To the north was Club Row, where all manner of exotic and domestic animals could be bought. From monkeys brought in by Lascar seamen to parrots, wild songbirds and even rats caught to supply the fighting pits of local public houses.
The most well-known market by name is Petticoat Lane, yet it has not officially been known as that for a hundred and fifty-five years.With their sensitivity to any mention of ladies’ underwear
the Victorian authorities changed the name to Middlesex Street in 1846. In Elizabethan times this street marked the boundary of the City of London and the East End (which at one time was in the county of Middlesex). It was where pigs were sold, so was aptly named Hogs Lane.
A more macabre form of entertainment and one freely available was the spectacle of public hangings. These never failed to draw enormous crowds, sometimes reaching numbers of twenty thousand and more. It would be more than likely that the great grandparents of our present-day family would have been taken on such an outing, much as we might take our own children to Alton Towers. A brisk walk from the East End would have taken them to the docks at Wapping where traditionally those who carried out crimes on the sea paid the price of justice. Once the sentence had been carried out the corpse was traditionally left until three tides had washed over it, only then was it taken down and hung on a gibbet as a warning to others. When the famous pirate Captain Kidd met his end here, the rope broke on the first attempt and he had to wait while a new one was brought and fixed before he could finally be dispatched. Piracy was not the only reason for being sentenced to climb the scaffold steps. Mutiny at sea or arson within Her Majesty’s docks were other crimes that were punished with the hempen necklace.
Further along the river and a similar distance from home was Tower Hill, where they might have watched a better class of prisoner in their death throes. The majority, and run-of-the-mill murderers, would be dispatched outside Newgate Prison, which is now the site of the famous criminal court the Old Bailey – again not too far to walk from east London.