My East End

by Gilda O'Neill

  I was amazed when I transferred to Thames Division [the river police] at Wapping. Instead of people throwing abuse or a punch at me, they were standing on the bridges waving down at us!

  There were, of course, people who lived in the East End who were neither poor, deprived nor criminal, and who lived in comparatively idyllic conditions.

  I finished up [living] down by the football ground. That’s where we faced, all across the green. All the football pitches. We looked out on to trees. For the East End of London, that was living in luxury.

  The majority, however, could only dream of such pleasures, living as they did far from grass and trees, and close to the polluting emissions of factories and chimneys, workshops and railways. With the additional burdens of poverty and poor housing, their health suffered accordingly.

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  Our parents would pay half a crown if a doctor visited. I know one thing, nobody called a doctor unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Before the introduction of the National Health Service in 1948, sickness caused not only anxiety because of the ill-health of either yourself or one of your loved ones but also financial distress. When someone had barely enough to be able to pay the landlord and put a family dinner on the table, it was unlikely that they would have money to pay for the doctor or the midwife.

  Even after the NHS was established, some older people recalled, the idea of going into hospital still caused real panic. My own grandmother, for instance, born in the 1880s, used to tell me how she would always associate the hospital with being absolutely, desperately ill, as bad as going into the workhouse, as you would be prepared to spend some of your precious food or rent money on medical attention, or accept help from the ‘parish’, only if you were so sick you were as good as ‘on your way out’ anyway. Like many, she would often prefer to employ do-it-yourself, home remedies.

  If you had whooping cough they’d take you to where they were tarring the roads and make you breathe in over the tar barrels. Wonder we survived.

  The time was when my parents had to pay the doctor a shilling for a visit, and most cures were old-fashioned remedies, some outrageous. My grandmother carried a petrified potato to prevent rheumatism, and the stocking filled with hot bran around the throat for mumps. Most seemed to be effective – either that or it was mind over matter…

  There were all sorts of home remedies, I suppose because of the cost of going to the doctor. Some I didn’t mind, like chewing the liquorice sticks or drinking the liquorice water [from the sticks being steeped all week] of a Friday – mums seemed obsessed with you being regular – and a spoon of malt was more like a treat. But if you had a cold, that was it, a spoonful of Fenning’s bloody Fever Mixture. God, it was horrible. It made your teeth go all furry. It came in a clear bottle with a sort of red wax-covered cork, and had a label with loads of little writing on it that claimed it could cure just about everything you could go down with.

  There was this gear my nan kept on her shelf. You wouldn’t dare say you had a gippy tummy or felt sick or you’d have a spoonful of this vile stuff shoved down your throat.

  Some home therapy was remembered as being far more pleasant.

  If we weren’t well that was the only time we got to sleep with Mum in her double bed. We always had to go against the wall so we wouldn’t fall out. Sleeping with Mum was better than all the medicine. You didn’t get much of a look-in when you were one of so many. But when you weren’t well you always got plenty of cuddles.

  Doctors, accustomed to the poverty of the community in which they worked, understood their patients’ situation and, at times, were prepared to forfeit their fee.

  I was born during the First World War and I can remember Dr Jelly, who used to ride the streets of Hackney on his horse, which he tied to the railings. He charged you a shilling – if he thought you could afford it.

  But where an adult could decide to forgo a doctor’s visit for the sake of the few shillings it might cost them, a sick child was a different matter. With today’s Health Service – no matter how we fret about it, it is still there – with the availability of antibiotics, vaccinations, decent housing conditions and nutritious food, it is easy to forget how even common childhood illnesses could be deadly.

  Mums would panic and call for the doctor for their little ones, but they’d suffer in silence when they were ill.

  I was only a child myself but I used to look after a little girl after I’d been to school. She had diphtheria and they never told me. I’d got home from school and they’d said, ‘The little girl’s upstairs, she’s not well. Go and sit with her.’

  I sat by her bed and I cuddled her and that. The next day when I went they told me she’d gone away to hospital. Two days after that I couldn’t talk, I was choking. I had diphtheria as bad as you could have it. It affected all the back of my nose. They had to take all one side of my nose away.

  My mum was crippled with arthritis and I had to look after her as a child, but I don’t remember any of us going to the doctor’s very often as we had to pay [in the 1930s] for a consultation. I don’t know how much it cost when I was admitted to Hackney Isolation Hospital during the diphtheria epidemic.

  There were ways of making a visit from the doctor or a stay in hospital more affordable, but you needed some spare income to be able to make provision in the first place.

  We belonged to the HSA – Hospital Savings Association – also the Hospital Saturday Fund. These organizations contributed to any costs incurred. Both my sister and I developed pneumonia in the early 1930s, and Mum was happy with the contribution [they] provided.

  It was little wonder that susceptible groups such as children and the elderly were often sickly. But the poor housing conditions, the burning of solid fuel, both domestically and in factories, and the proximity of so much other industrial pollution all contributed to the health problems of anybody living in the East End.

  We used to get a lot of fog. It would just seem to appear. It was so thick that you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. It was so black and dirty that, if you blew your nose, your handkerchief would be black. I am quite sure the weather was a lot colder years ago, because I constantly had chapped legs when I was a little girl. I would have to have Vaseline put on to soothe them.

  A woman I knew worked in a chest clinic – there was a lot of TB around in them days. Consumption we used to call it. And she told me that when the fog was really bad you couldn’t see to the end of the ward she was in charge of. Because of the fog! And it was a chest hospital! I know you sometimes couldn’t see the screen properly at the pictures – I’m talking about the 1940s and early 1950s now – but not seeing the end of the ward?

  There was a lot of TB about. The boy who lived downstairs [it was a typical, multi-occupancy house] contracted it and we all had to go to the hospital to be tested. Luckily nobody else in the house got it.

  Oral testimony always throws up a range of views on any issue, and, according to this woman, the comparatively basic living conditions before the changes following the slum clearances actually had some real health advantages.

  We didn’t have carpeting, so didn’t have dust mites and didn’t have hay fever because they didn’t have anything to live on. Everywhere got scrubbed and disinfected, you never had bits and pieces about. You was better off. Your scullery floor was concrete and that used to get scrubbed. None of these places that harbour everything. All these curtains and fitted this and fitted that. The vacuum cleaner doesn’t get up half so much as a scrubbing brush.

  Housing conditions apart, the great change in health care came, of course, in 1948. As with the reprivatization of the water supply, it is difficult to understand how, when we can remember the agonies that resulted from being unable to afford a visit to the dentist, we can stand back and watch the reprivatization of dental care.

  When the National Health came in, I couldn’t wait to visit the dentist, free! I was born with chalky teeth, they were all broken and needed to come out well bef
ore the NHS, but there was no way my parents could have afforded to pay.

  They reckoned I lost all my calcium while I was carrying my first baby. Always had trouble with them. So, as soon as it came in free, I had all my teeth out, the lot. False teeth are a lot less trouble. Got rid of the lot of them.

  Opinion again varied when I asked people about the benefits of the NHS and some of the views were rather robust, to say the least. One man claimed that it had created a nation of hypochondriacs who were never actually ill but were always ‘a bit poorly’, and another believed that it simply allowed anyone to spend their entire working life ‘on the panel’ (signed off sick). But widespread ill-health was a genuine problem in the East End and, before the introduction of universal health care, local authorities did what they could to improve matters by circulating public information on issues such as food hygiene, the care of babies and children, and the promotion of general well-being. One leaflet, produced in an effort to ‘Help Your Council to Help You!’ urged residents, as part of the National Campaign against Rheumatism, to go to the Poplar Baths on the East India Dock Road to:

  partake of a Zotofoam Remedial Bath to rid the system of excess acids – the cause of rheumatic suffering – and expel the poisonous secretion through the open pores.

  The treatment might or might not have been beneficial, but it was not free, although the council did stress, ‘It pays in the end’, just as did eating good, well-prepared food, which was also beyond the pockets of too many East Enders.

  The following memories of the food people actually ate might not impress nutritionists, as what was put on the table was more a matter of what you could afford than what you thought would benefit you and your family’s health and fitness, but that did not stop it being tasty.

  They’d stand there, down the Lane, with a big pole stacked high with beigels and a barrel full of pickled herrings on the side of the pavement. And they’d dip their big old red hands right down into the barrel and pull out the herrings and then stick them in a cone of paper with the beigels. All wrapped up for you. Not very hygienic, when you think about it, but they tasted lovely. Mind you, food used to then.

  East London, like any area with a population of largely poor, working people, had a tradition of meals being produced from a few basic ingredients, but with great ingenuity. Trying to satisfy the empty bellies of a hungry, often large family when there wasn’t very much in the cupboard, and even less in your purse, was a constant battle, and paddings of one sort or another – suet, split peas, bread, potatoes and so on – were used to stretch an otherwise skimpy meal into a filling plateful for everyone.

  My favourite food when I was a child was boiled stew with dumplings. The dumplings were made of suet and I used to save some for after dinner and have sugar on them – yuk! Bacon pudding with pease pudding was another favourite. Pickled herrings were a big treat with my grandparents. We often had bread and dripping and also sugar sandwiches.

  My nan was amazing. She could make a dinner out of nothing. A few bacon scraps and slices of onion rolled into suet pastry then wrapped up in a muslin cloth and boiled – lovely. She could stretch next to nothing to make a fantastic filling meal. None of this prepared stuff. What she could get for a good price down the market – that’d be what you’d have. And she made corned-beef hash; bread pudding; cut us great big doorsteps and toasted them, then smothered them in the jelly bottoms from the dripping pan. It was filling and cheap, but it was smashing. She’d tell us how, when she was a little girl, kids were sent round the back of the London Hospital with basins to collect dripping from the big roasting dishes they left out to cool by the kitchens.

  The one thing I never liked, that she always had, was the sterilized milk. It used to come in tall, thin-necked bottles and have a cap on it like a beer bottle. It was sort of a creamy colour and tasted sweet. I didn’t like it at all. And she used to have a big cut-glass bowl on a stem, full of sugar, on the table. She’d have loads of sugar on stuff, even sprinkled on bread and marge. I suppose sugar had been in short supply during different times in her life and she was making the best of it now. It was like under her sink she had this cupboard, and she used to have tins of food, bags of sugar and that, as if it was all going back on the ration and she’d have to do without.

  Visits to ‘proper’ restaurants might have been a rarity, but people did eat out quite regularly.

  We went to pie and mash shops, but we never went out to a proper restaurant for a meal, except very, very occasionally to Lyons Corner House, where you could have the most glorious ice-cream sundae, a Knickerbocker Glory.

  There was the coffee shop [in the 1930s] which had marbletopped tables in separate cubicles where my grandfather would take us for a meal sometimes. They served wonderful moist individual steak and kidney puddings, and, after the meal, he would take me round to the grocer’s and buy me a penny ‘Buzz’ bar, which was a biscuit covered in chocolate, and with it I would get a toy which was a cardboard bee on a string tied to a short stick, and when you whirled it around it made a buzzing sound.

  My family used to run a pie and mash shop. They used to make the liquor [parsley sauce to go with the pies and hot stewed eels] from the juice the eels made when you cooked them. You’d eat the pies with vinegar and loads of salt, always with a spoon and fork, never with a knife. It was a big deal when they started making tea in the pie shops, never mind the soft drinks and the fruit pies and custard, and the vegetarian pies they do in some of the pie shops now. That would have amazed people like my nan. The days of Nan storing the big enamel bowls of jellied eels under her bed have long gone. Can you imagine what the European people would have to say about that? It would make worrying about straight bananas and wrong-sized apples look like the joke it all is. I still love pie and mash, and if I’ve been up to London, I’ll get a load and take it home to Kent. We all love it. It’s a real treat. Daft when you think of the opportunities we have to go to some really lovely places nowadays, but pie and mash wins every time.

  I’ve always loved pie and mash, but I don’t eat meat now, I’m a vegetarian. But I take the meat out of the middle. My daughter washes out the inside of the pie for me. I couldn’t bear the thought of not having pie and mash any more.

  The pie shops were marvellous places, with their marble table-tops and huge etched mirrors with pictures of eels and seaweed and shells, and outside they had a stall with great metal trays of live eels all wriggling about. You’d sit on wooden benches, all bunched up together, with all your mum’s shopping under the table between your feet.

  Fish and chips were also a favourite, although, like saveloys and pease pudding, they were originally sold for home consumption rather than for ‘eating in’.

  Chris [Chrisp] Street market used to have this stall that sold the best saveloys in the world. They used to steam them in this big silver urn thing. And they were proper saveloys, real meaty sausages, not like you get now. And you’d have a scoop of thick pease pudden and a couple of roasting-hot faggots. You can’t believe how tasty they was. Really peppery, sort of spicy. All hot and fresh. Lovely.

  Fish and chip shops had no tables then, they were only for take-away.

  The fish and chip shop near us was always packed. You would queue for ages for your penn’orth and ha’p’orth [penny’s worth of fish and a halfpenny’s worth of chips].

  If you only had a farthing you could get a pile of crackling [the batter left in the fish-fryer] that you could cover with onion vinegar, left over from the pickled onions, and loads of salt. Really tasty, that was.

  While our mums and dads were down the pub, all my brothers and sisters used to sit on the stairs or along the passage with all our mates from down the turning, with our coats over our legs to keep us warm, and we’d have bags of chips and crackling between us. Makes me feel hungry thinking about it!

  If there was the money available, the boat would be pushed out on a Sunday.

  Sunday was lovely, Sunday was roast dinner. Roast beef and Yo
rkshire pudding. They always had to put it on at a certain time and it used to take for ever. It never takes that long now. Why did it take so long? You had your dinner at least two or three hours after it was first put on. They did use to put those old vegetables on! And then the men would go down to the pub for their pint, and come home at about half-past two, and only then was the dinner put on the table.

  My favourite Sunday dinner was salt pork or salt beef with pease pudding and carrots and boiled onions. It seemed to be a massive meal. I would try and join up the rings of fat floating on the top of the gravy with the tip of my fork.

  Sunday was the one day we ate well. We always had to wait until Dad came back from the pub, because he had to carve. Us kids had to go out to the scullery [to eat] because there was only room round the table for the older ones.

  Sundays, in your Sunday best [and] after church going to see Gran. She would have a big tray of lovely crispy roast potatoes in the oven for all us grandchildren. And we would have them all hot and floury. She made the most delicious creamy rice pudding and we would have some of that. She used to say, ‘Don’t tell your father.’ It was our secret, and I’d go home and still eat all my dinner. My father’s two young sisters used to take me out sometimes to Petticoat Lane [on Sunday mornings], and they would give me all sorts of forbidden things like cockles, pomegranates, and I’d spit the pips out, and they’d say, ‘Don’t tell your father.’

  I loved Sunday tea, where the table, which almost filled the living room, was laid with small plates, each with a needle or pin on it and, in the centre, a pile of winkles and a large plate of bread and butter. When I was tiny, my aunts and uncles would remove the curly meat from the winkle shells and put them on my bread and butter.