As well as finding work in Beckton, the newly resettled Germans opened bakeries and butcher shops, and organized the German bands which were a familiar sight to those who lived in the area up until just a generation or two ago. The German influence, in trades like chemical-processing and glass-manufacturing, was so great that West Ham council actually provided material in English and German for businessmen interested in setting up in the locality. But the presence of immigrants was not always seen as bringing an economic bonus to the neighbourhood.
In 1901 a German manufacturer who chose to ‘import’ 150 of his highly skilled countrymen as glassblowers upset members of the local labour force considerably. In addition to the usual suspicion of foreigners, there was now massive resentment that they were the ones being employed, that they were taking our jobs.
According to a report in the East Ham Echo, dissatisfaction with the employment of outsiders was still being voiced a year later, this time at a public meeting held ostensibly in protest at the employment of foreigners at the Beckton Gasworks. A Mr Tuckwood, who was both a London County Councillor and a member of the Royal Commission on the use of ‘alien’ labour, spoke
… at some length on the state of affairs as they existed at Stepney, Poplar and other places in the East-End of London, owing to the large and increasing influx of Russian, German and other foreigners… A resolution calling upon the Government to introduce a Bill to stop the importation of aliens into the country was carried unanimously [at the end of the meeting].
The Aliens Act, aimed at preventing increasing numbers of immigrants coming from Europe – as well as being a populist move to win political seats – became law in 1905, but the problem of ‘importing’ workers still exists in the East End. I asked someone at a Docklands-based company about the numbers of locals employed by them and was told:
I couldn’t take on locals in the office. They’re too ignorant. Not educated. I tried interviewing one. She didn’t even know what the Home Counties were.
The person had herself been born and brought up in east London, although she certainly did not count herself as one of them. It seems that it is always one of us who should be employed; an odd paradox, in this case, when you have started out as one of them.
The objections not only to foreign labour but to foreigners per se also continued. In January 1903 the Evening News reported on the ‘British Brothers’ League’, a ‘tiny band of East End patriots’ who held regular meetings in Stepney, and whose object was
… to stem, if possible, the great flood of alien immigration that threatens to wash all remnants of previous English occupation out of East London.
As if there was such a thing as an East Ender without some sort of immigrant connections. This fear of the newcomer, the outsider, as has been seen, was neither a new nor a selective phenomenon. Even Jack the Ripper, the perpetrator of the grisly Whitechapel murders in 1888, was said to be foreign, as, so the argument went, only one of them could do such a thing, not only murdering but actually butchering women in the streets of Whitechapel.
Prejudices against the evil foreigner were further inflamed by events that occurred during the winter of 1910–11, when members of a revolutionary cell committed a series of crimes which culminated in the deaths of several police officers, a full-scale siege involving the armed forces and the fire brigade, and the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, arriving in person to take charge. The end of the siege saw the charred remains of the revolutionaries being carried from their burnt-out rooms, and the siege of Sidney Street, with its cast of dastardly but, most importantly, foreign anarchists went down in East End history.
Attacks on foreigners – verbal and physical – did not come only from the indigenous community. On 12 October 1806, The News carried a story about a riot which had broken out between a group of Lascars and a crowd of Chinese seamen at lodgings in Angel Gardens. The Lascars, known for their timidity, had retreated under attack into their building, but the Chinese faction had, according to the article, failed to understand that ‘an Englishman’s [sic] home was his castle’ and had gone in after them. The row escalated and spilled back outside on to the Ratcliff Highway. After several violent clashes, the sides had swelled until the original twenty-five Chinese numbered over 300, and the now 150-strong Lascar camp had been joined by a supporting group of ‘sailors and Irish labourers’. It was then that the authorities intervened, and more material was made available for the press to sensationalize.
There are many similar reports of trouble breaking out between sailors staying in lodgings by the docks throughout the nineteenth century; probably a lot to do with fit young men coming ashore after a long trip, the availability of alcohol and the absence of the restraining influence of wives and families.
The Irish, another of the immigrant groups who initially settled close to the docks, also suffered their share of prejudice. They comprised, at first, a small community of those who had left their homeland during Tudor times, dispossessed by the English plantations. Their numbers gradually increased throughout the seventeenth century and, by the eighteenth, there were Irish settlements in the riverside hamlets of Shadwell and Wapping, and in Whitechapel, particularly around Rosemary Lane – now Royal Mint Street – a rough, tough area housing the famous Rag Fair, a place where second-hand clothes and goods, often of dubious provenance, were bought and sold with no questions asked.
With continuing problems in Ireland – regarding ownership of land, rapid population growth, ongoing economic underdevelopment and then the horrors of the famine, the Irish were being ‘pushed’ from their homeland as much as they were being ‘pulled’ by the lure of London. When their community had expanded until it was one of the largest colonies of foreigners in east London, their presence became increasingly conspicuous, causing growing resentment among the locals, who referred to the roads around Rosemary Lane and Cable Street by the derisive nickname of Knockvargis – a play on the name of Carrickfergus, the port where William III landed before the Battle of the Boyne.
The work the Irish undertook was mainly casual: in the docks, factories and sweatshops, and as navvies – the labourers who excavated the docks and constructed the railways and canal systems.
Many of the Irish arrivals were young, single men who sought their entertainment and company around the Thames-side ale houses and dockside taverns close to their lodgings, and they soon found themselves with a reputation for low living and drunken carousing which, even in the twentieth century, was being perpetuated in a shockingly careless way. The secretary and librarian of the Institute of Historical Research could speak about what he called, with an astonishing lack of analysis, the ‘Irish invasion’ at a lecture in Stepney, reported in the East London Advertiser in November 1930, claiming that Irish immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
… caused a social problem of great magnitude… They were not very popular, and did not deserve to be. They had a lower standard of living than most men, and would work for a lower wage than Englishmen, and were riotous and extremely violent.
He went on to talk about the Spitalfields Riot of 1736, when poverty-stricken workers were pitted against one another by employers wanting to pay the lowest possible rates. When the Irish workers underbid the locals, rioting broke out; ironically, the Irish weren’t labelled as drunken, lazy wastrels this time, but were accused of being hard workers prepared to labour for a pittance.
In fact, the accusation, repeated throughout the nineteenth century, that the Irish kept down wages was often true, but they did so, like other immigrant groups and low-paid workers before and after them, from desperation grown out of poverty and dispossession, which actually left them open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
With so much ill-feeling, combined with worsening poverty, the East End was ripe for anger to erupt into action.
[ 5 ]
If a history of labouring people, and their struggle for fair pay and conditions, was being written, the East End could provide
enough material for several volumes, just using the big, headline events, ranging from the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt to the News International print-workers’ dispute at Wapping in the 1980s. The livelihoods of those who depended on the vagaries of casual employment, particularly in the docks and in the sweatshops, were always tenuous, and it is no wonder that labour relations became more antagonistic as workers realized the power of organization.
There were strikes in many East End trades during the nineteenth century, but it was not until the success of the match-girls’ strike at Bryant and May in 1888, when the fight for reasonable pay and conditions was won, that the beginnings of the so-called New Unionism could be detected. In the following year, two further landmark actions – by gas- and dock-workers – resulted in similar triumphs, which would prove to be turning points in the history of industrial relations.
The Gas Workers’ and General Labourers’ Union successfully negotiated the precedent of an eight-hour working day for its members, and the Great Dock Strike won the battle for the Dockers’ Tanner.
Working in the docks had, until the 1980s, been a tradition in many East End families, and one of the people I interviewed told me about his father’s links with the 1889 strike:
My dad was on Tower Hill sitting on his dad’s – my grandfather’s – shoulders during a meeting at the time of the Dockers’ Tanner strike. One of the leaders of the strikers reached up and gave my dad a half a crown. Ben Tillet it was, who gave it to him. Half a crown. I’ve still got it.
The fact that industrial unrest spread through late Victorian London is unsurprising: work was unreliable, lives diminished, and, according to Charles Booth’s calculations, 35 per cent of Londoners were living in poverty. But rather than anybody questioning the social, political and economic environment which had spawned this overcrowded, industrialized, insanitary quarter of London, with its ever-ready pool of cheap, casual labour, the poor themselves were usually blamed for their own deprivation.
It was believed that a minority were deserving of help but that the rest were feckless, reckless or simply bad, happily opting for a life of crime. However, the terrible conditions which existed in the most deprived parts of the East End, such as the Old Nichol or around Rosemary Lane, left the inhabitants with few options.
While the more successful, skilled workers would have had sufficient means to bolster themselves against difficult times, the lowly casuals, who supported the manufacturing industries and the services which grew up alongside them, were badly hit by even subtle changes in demand for labour. Jobs disappeared overnight and workers, especially those with no community or extended family network on which to depend, would be left destitute.
A hotbed of criminality and hatred of foreigners – be they from the Essex marshes, where the night-soil barges dumped their stinking loads, or the more exotic-looking newcomers, such as those getting up to their evil business in Chinatown – was being seeded in the slums of east London.
The area had now lost its more affluent residents and what had once been the grander end of the housing stock was split into multiple dwellings, inhabited by an almost separate race of threatening creatures who took raucous pleasures in the pub, the penny gaff and the cheap tart, paid for with the fruits of their illegal dealings. But while small-time, petty thievery could make the difference between a penny loaf and a starving child, there were also violent criminals who preyed on the weaker members of their own communities; some exceptional events excited the attention of pamphleteers and national newspapers, including ‘celebrity’ cases that involved personalities who grew in the public imagination as they were presented as amusing, if shocking, diversions.
An early example of an East End criminal who gained celebrity through a brisk trade in pamphlets describing her activities was Mary Compton, the so-called ‘baby farmer’, whose neglect and abuse of the children she was supposed to be caring for on behalf of local parishes made her notorious. The literature tells the story of
the Bloody and most cruel midwife of Poplar who, in 1693, was, with a daughter and another accessory, tried for felony and murder, in destroying, starving to Death and famishing several poor infants and babes
complete with gory details of the tiny bodies found in the cellar, the guilty verdicts and the women’s subsequent capital punishment.
In the same century, popular tales circulated about the capture of Judge Jeffreys, the hated hanging judge of the ‘Bloody Assize’, who was apprehended in a riverside pub at Wapping as he waited, in disguise, for the boat in which he planned to flee the country. There were many ghoulish versions of his story, but in all he ended his life in the nearby Tower of London.
Entertainment and titillation were derived not only from hearing or reading such narratives but also from actually witnessing the punishment of felons. For instance, 20,000 people attended the execution of Elizabeth Herring, a Wapping woman who murdered her husband with a dinner knife after first sharing a meal with him in a pub in King Street.
But ghastly reports of violent crimes remained popular; tales of prostitutes being killed by customers, their bodies robbed of everything including their clothes; of poor widows murdered as they sat innocently by their very own firesides; and of unsuspecting victims being coshed to death in shadowy alleyways for little more than the few coppers they had in their pockets.
One event which really captured the public imagination, nationally as well as locally, was the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, which had the added poignancy of being committed close to Christmas time. A shopkeeper, his wife, their baby and servants were all killed by an intruder – the infant while still in its cradle. This outrage was followed just days later by the murders, in the very same neighbourhood, of a publican and his complete household.
At the other end of the century, street gangs, the original hooligans, erupted on to the streets during the Bank Holiday of 1898, focusing the public’s gaze on the horrors and seemingly random violence which existed in the world of the cockney Londoner. But it was a series of crimes which had occurred a decade earlier, the Whitechapel murders, committed by the mysterious figure of Jack the Ripper, that became for ever associated with the Victorian East End, and indeed continue to be documented, pored over and fictionalized more than 100 years on.
Even the first person to be murdered on a British train was apparently a victim of East End crime. On 6 July 1864, Thomas Briggs stepped on to a train on the new Fenchurch Street to Hackney Wick line; only one other person was on the train, Franz Müller, a young German tailor. At Bow station, when other passengers joined the train, all they found was a bag, a chain, a hat and lots of blood. Briggs’s body was found later on the track between Bow and Hackney Wick.
By detective work that would not have shamed Sherlock Holmes, Chief Inspector Tanner of the Yard, with the assistance of Sergeant George Clarke, tracked Müller to New York via a series of obscure clues, which included noting the design of a watch chain and the provenance of the hat that had supposedly belonged to the victim. Müller was hanged for the crime later that year.
From the presentations of crime, in ballads, poems and as melodramatic tales, it is difficult to assess whether they were intended to touch social consciences or were simply as entertainment. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, much as it is with the reporting of crime in today’s print and electronic media. The self-righteous breast-beating that followed the murder of young Charles Fariere, for instance, would probably be just the same today.
Charles was a small Italian boy who spent his days begging on the streets of east London, with a little cage of white mice hanging from a strap around his neck to attract attention and maybe the odd copper from a generous passer-by. He was murdered by three men for his body, which they then sold to King’s College medical school in the Strand for nine guineas, after being knocked down from twelve. In media terms, the story ‘had it all’: child abuse, pathos, corruption in the medical profession, the death sentence for two of the perpet
rators and transportation for life for the other. High profits were made by the vendors of such tales.
But the majority of crimes committed were of a far less villainous or excessive nature, being more to do with getting by than with brutal murder, and if they kept it that way, and knew their place, the labouring classes were just fine – working for little more than slave wages, entertaining their ‘betters’ out slumming by performing in the boxing ring or the music hall, and offering more ‘specialized’ talents in brothels.
But life in the Victorian East End was not all misery, crime and prostitution. There were the almost bucolic pleasures to be had in the newly accessible Victoria Park, opened up to the riverside slum parishes by the construction of Burdett Road, and there was an energetic working-class popular culture that, while it might not have appealed to some of London’s more self-satisfied residents, was vibrant and affordable.
Traditions and enthusiasms, inherited from the Huguenots, of songbird- and pigeon-keeping and a love of bright, flowering plants which cheered up even a gloomy, shared lodging, thrived throughout the area. The packed Columbia Road sold everything from single wallflowers to full-sized shrubs; the bustling bird market in Sclater Street displayed cage after cage of home-bred canaries, and goldfinches and other songbirds trapped in the Essex countryside; and pigeon lofts, with both racers and tumblers, sprang up throughout the slums, with the young squabs being bought, sold and exchanged in pubs and markets throughout east London.
Markets were – and are – an important centre of social life, a place to meet friends and to appreciate the free entertainment provided by the irreverent banter of the stall-holders. According to Mayhew, there were 30,000 men, women and children working as coster-mongers in the middle of the last century – their name deriving from the sellers of costard apples, a variety known since the thirteenth century and one of the first fruits to be sold by London street traders. Added to the official costers were the large numbers of casual poor who would try their hand at selling oranges, when they were in glut, or cheap ribbons and knick-knacks, or anything else that might find a buyer. Whatever the actual figures, it is clear that market life was booming in Victorian London, with cheap food, second-hand clothes and the occasional treat being snapped up by eager customers, or lifted by the light-fingered who were either unwilling or unable to pay.
My East End Page 8