In 1272 hundreds of Jews were hanged on suspicion of adulterating the coinage, and then eighteen years later-their usefulness at an end after the arrival of Italian and French financiers-all were expelled, beaten, spat upon or killed in a mass exodus from the city. It would have seemed that the wandering race could find no permanent haven even in the cosmopolitan and commercial city of London. London, instead, had become the very pattern of urban exploitation and aggression. But some returned, quietly and almost invisibly, over the next two or three centuries under the guise of Christians; in the seventeenth century Charles I made use of their financial skills and resources but it was Cromwell who, with a more profound biblical knowledge, allowed the right of settlement after a “Humble Petition of the Hebrews at Present Residing in this city of London.” They requested that “wee may therewith meete at our said private devotions in our Particular houses without feere of Molestation either to our persons famillys or estates.” These were Sephardic Jews who, like Isak Lopes Chillon, one of the signatories to the petition, came out of Spain and Portugal; but in the latter part of the seventeenth century, from central and eastern Europe, arrived the Ashkenazi Jews who were less affluent, less well educated, and variously depicted as “down-trodden” and “poverty-stricken.” Charles Booth has described how “the old settlers held aloof from the newcomers, and regarded them as a lower caste, fit only to receive alms.”
And here emerges the other face of the immigrant population. The newcomers were not necessarily the accepted and acceptable, not merchants and doctors, but the wandering alien, the lowly refugee, the poor unskilled migrant fit only for the “sale of old clothes or in peddling goods such as fruit, jewellry and knives.” The Ashkenazim were representative of an entire impoverished and wandering population, alternately exploited and abused by the native residents.
More Ashkenazi Jews arrived at various notable occasions in the eighteenth century; there were persecutions, and partitions, and sieges, which sent them flocking to their co-religionists already in London where the first Ashkenazi synagogue had been established in Aldgate in 1722. But they were not welcomed, principally because they were poor. It was suggested that they would “deluge the kingdom with brokers, usurers and beggars”; once more emerges the irrational but instinctive fear of being “swamped.” They were also accused of taking jobs from native Londoners, although, since they could not be apprenticed to Christian masters, the fear of their usurping available employment was a false one. But, in London, such fears have always been widely advertised and believed; in a society where financial want and insecurity were endemic among the working population, any suggestion of unfair labouring practices could arouse great discontent. Thus in the 1750s and 1760s Jew-baiting became a “sport, like cock-throwing, or bull-baiting, or pelting some poor wretch in the pillory.”
There is another problem, evinced as early as the seventeenth century, whereby immigrants are lent distinct and opprobrious identities. “As the Frenchmen love to be bold, Flemings to be drunken,” Thomas Dekker wrote in 1607, so “Irish [love] to be costermongers” or street pedlars. It is a question, in the modern term, of “stereotyping” which afflicts all migrant populations. The irony, of course, is that certain groups seem unable to escape this matrix of false expectations and misperceptions. The London Irish, for example, had always been typecast as the poorest of the poor. By 1640 parish records note the presence of “a poor Irishman … a poore distressed man from Ireland … a shroude for an Irishman that dyed … a poore gentleman vndone by the burning of a cittie in Ireland … his goods cast away comeing from Ireland … four poore women and sixe children that came oute of Ireland … poor plundered Irish.” All these instances, and more, come from the registers of St. Giles-in-the-Fields and evoke the first steps in a sad history of migration. Yet it was not quite the beginning. Eleven years before, an edict had declared that “this realm hath of late been pestered with a great number of Irish beggars, who live here idly and dangerously, and are of ill-example to the natives.” This has always been one of the cries against the immigrants of London: that they are lazy, living off hand-outs like beggars, and thus demoralising the resident population. The assumption here must be that immigrants are a threat because they undermine the will to work, and provide examples of successful idleness; they are also receiving help or charity which, paradoxically, the native population claims by right to itself. The same complaints have been levelled in recent years against the Bangladeshi population of Whitechapel, and of Tower Hamlets in general.
There were riots against the Irish, too, once more on the prevailing assumption that they were allowing themselves to be used as cheap employment-“letting themselves out to all sorts of ordinary labour,” Robert Walpole wrote, “considerably cheaper than the English labourers have.” There were masters who took them in “for above one-third less per day.” Few observers stopped to consider the measure of poverty and desperation which would encourage them to accept almost starvation wages; instead there was open hostility and violence directed against them, committed by mobs which “arose in Southwark, Lambeth and Tyburn Road.” There were assaults upon the Irish in Tower Hamlets, Clare Market and Covent Garden. During the Gordon Riots, in 1780, under the lambent cry of “No Popery!,” Irish dwellings and public houses were indiscriminately attacked and pulled down. Another familiar component of these actions against the immigrants was the prevailing belief that many of them were criminals come to prey upon unsuspecting Londoners. One city magistrate, in 1753, argued that “most of the robberies, and the murders consequent upon them, have been committed by these outcasts from Ireland.” Just as the Jews were receivers, so the Irish were thieves. London was “the refuge” where dangerous or depraved immigrants “seek shelter and concealment.” The meaning of “refuge,” then, can subtly change from haven to lair.
Among these riots and alarms there was another group of immigrants who, if they stirred little outrage, excited even less sympathy. They were the Indians, the forgotten ancestors of the twentieth-century arrivals, who came to London as servants or slaves; some remained in employment, while others were summarily dismissed or ran away to a vagrant life. There were “hue and cry” advertisements in the public prints-a guinea for the recapture of “a black boy, an Indian, about thirteen years old run away the 8th ins. from Putney with a collar about his neck with this inscription, ‘The Lady Bromfield’s black, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.’” Other advertisements were placed to discover an “East India Tawney Black” or a “Run-away Bengal Boy.” Other Asian servants were “discharged” or “dumped,” having attended their employers on their passage from India, so that they were reduced to a life upon the streets. One Indian visitor wrote to The Times in order to complain about the presence of Indian beggars who were “a great annoyance to the Public, but more so to the Indian gentlemen who visit England.” The Public Advertiser in 1786 observed that “those poor wretches who are daily begging for a passage back, proves that the generality of those who bring them over leave them to shift for themselves the moment they have no further occasion for their services.” These were the unwilling immigrants.
Although the general number of European immigrants increased throughout the nineteenth century, the Jews and the Irish remained the targets of public opprobrium. They were the object of derision and disgust because they lived in self-contained communities, popularly regarded as squalid; it was generally assumed, too, that they had somehow imported their disorderly and insanitary conditions with them. Philanthropic visitors to the Irish rookeries discovered such scenes “of filth and wretchedness as cannot be conceived.” Somehow these conditions were considered to be the fault of the immigrants themselves, who were accustomed to no better in their native lands. The actual and squalid nature of London itself, and the social exclusion imposed upon the Irish or the Jews, were not matters for debate. The question-where else are they to go?-was not put. Similarly the fact that immigrants were willing to accept the harshest and most menial forms of employm
ent was also used as another opportunity for clandestine attack, with the implied suggestion that they were good for nothing else. Yet the Jews became part of the “sweated” system, in order to make enough money to move out of the unhappy situation in which they were placed. They no more appreciated the noisome conditions of Whitechapel than did philanthropic visitors. Their poverty became the object of pity and disgust, while their attempts to transcend it were met with hostility or ridicule.
The popular prejudice against another Asian group is representative. By the late nineteenth century the Chinese, of Limehouse and its environs, were considered to be a particular threat to the native population. In the newspapers they were portrayed as both mysterious and menacing, while at a later date the dangerous fumes of opium rose in the pages of Sax Rohmer, Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. A cluster of associations was then reinforced. These particular immigrants were believed to “contaminate” the surrounding urban population, as if the presence of aliens might be considered a token of disease. Throughout the history of London there has run an anxious fear of contagion, in the conditions of an overpopulated city, and that fear simply changed its form; the fear of pollution had become moral and social rather than physical or medical. In fact the Chinese were a small and generally law-abiding community, certainly no more lawless than the residents by whom they were surrounded. They were also disparaged because of their “passivity”; the spectre of the eastern habit of opium-smoking was resurrected, but in fact the Jews had also been characterised as the “passive” recipients of scorn and insult. It was as if the native London tendency towards violence were somehow provoked or inflamed by those who eschewed violence in their daily intercourse. The enclosed nature of the Chinese community in turn provoked a sense of mystery, and suspicions of evil; there was particular concern about the possibility of sexual licence in their “dens of iniquity.” Once more these are characteristic of more general fears about immigration and resident aliens. They emanate in hostile attacks upon Russian Jews at the start of the twentieth century, against Germans during the world wars, against “coloureds” in 1919. These anxieties were directed against Commonwealth immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s, and were in turn followed by hostility against Asian and African migrants in the 1980s and 1990s. The pattern changes its direction, but it does not change its form.
Yet with fear, on certain occasions, comes respect. This is nowhere more evident than in the sometimes grudging attention paid to the fact that a variety of immigrants retained their fidelity to a particular religion or orthodoxy. Their imported faith was in such contrast to the generally disaffiliated or frankly pagan inclinations of London’s native population that it was often a matter of remark. The faith of the Jews, for example, was regarded as providing a strong moral presence and continuity in the East End; ironically it was seen as one method with which they withstood assault and opprobrium from other Londoners. The Protestant faith of the Huguenots, the Catholic faith of the Irish and of the Italians in Clerkenwell, the Lutheran faith of the Germans: such religious practices were also considered a redeeming feature. “Then he would catch sight of one of the old, Jewish black garbed men, venerable and bearded”-so runs one narrative of the East End, The Crossing Point by G. Charles-“now so few in the quarter but occasionally to be seen, and his heart would lift with a kind of passionate nostalgia as if through such men he could still touch the certainty, the vitality, the rough, innocent, ambitious, swarming life of those early immigrants with so much before them of promise.” This passage evokes those other aspects of immigrant life which, in the context of great and overwhelming London, are often disregarded; there is “nostalgia” for the certainties of an old faith, but also a fascinated attention to that “vitality” and “ambition” which have helped to create the contemporary multiracial city.
The Notting Hill Carnival, of Trinidadian origin, takes place in mid to late August, exactly as the old Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield did. It is an odd coincidence which emphasises the equally curious continuities of London life, but it throws into relief one of the strangest stories of urban immigration when black and white confronted the mystery of each other’s identity within the context of the city. In sixteenth-century drama “the Moor,” the black, tends to be lascivious, prone to irrational feeling, and dangerous. His appearance upon the stage is of course a consequence of his entry into London, where colour became the most visible and most significant token of difference. There were Africans during the long existence of Roman London, and no doubt their successors by intermarriage continued to live in the city during its Saxon and Danish occupations. But sixteenth-century trade with Africa, and the arrival of the first black slaves in London in 1555, mark their irruption into the city’s consciousness. If they were heathen, did they possess souls? Or were they somehow less than human, their skin the mark of a profound abyss which set them apart? That is why they became the object of fear and curiosity. Although relatively few in number, most of them watched and controlled as domestic slaves or indentured servants, they were already a source of anxiety. In 1596 Elizabeth I despatched a letter to the civic authorities complaining that “there are of late diverse blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kinde there are already here too manie,” and a few months later the queen reiterated her sentiment “that these kinde of people may be well spared in this realme, being so populous.” Five years later a royal proclamation was announced, in which “the great number of begars and Blackamoores which are crept into this realm” were ordered to leave.
Yet, like all such proclamations touching upon London and London’s population, it had little effect. The imperatives of trade, particularly with the islands of the Caribbean, were more powerful. Africans arrived as the slaves of plantation owners, or as sailors free and unfree, or as “presents” for affluent Londoners. In addition the increase of traffic with Africa itself afforded open access to the ports of London where many black crews found temporary homes in the eastern suburbs. Black servants also became popular, and fashionable, in the households of the nobility. So the population grew and, by the mid-seventeenth century, blacks had become unremarkable if still unfamiliar members of the urban community. Most of them were still indentured or enslaved and, according to James Walvin’s The Black Presence, “consigned to the status of sub-human property”; the evidence of their existence in London is thereby confined to “decaying headstones, crude statistics in crumbling parish registers, cryptic advertisements.” This of course is also the destiny of most Londoners, and it might be said that these black immigrants-seen, as it were, by a reverse image-represent in emblematic form the inflictions of London itself.
On 11 August 1659, an advertisement in Mercurius politicus concerned “A Negro boy, about nine years of age, in a gray Searge suit, his hair cut close to his head, was lost on Tuesday last, August 9, at night, in St. Nicholas Lane, London.” Those who were “lost,” or ran away, found themselves upon the mercy of the streets. One German observer noted, in 1710, that “there are in fact such a quantity of Moors of both sexes … that I have never seen so many before. Males and females frequently go out begging.” The most significant abuses occurred, however, among those who were in more orthodox employment; until a famous trial in 1772, the Somerset case, established that the English courts would not recognise slave status, they were still slaves labouring for their masters. The London Sessions reported a case, in 1717, of a black immigrant, John Caesar, who with his wife had worked as a slave “without wages for fourteen years” for a company of printers in Whitechapel. As late as 1777 an advertisement appeared concerning a “black servant man about twenty-four years of age named William of a brown or tawney complexion” wearing “a parson’s great coat, blue breeches, white Bath flannel waistcoat, yellow gilt shoe buckles, and a beaver hat with a white lining.” He had run away and, although his appearance seemed fashionable and exemplary, the advertisement noted that “He is also the property of his master, and has a burnt mark L.E. on one of his shoulders.” This was
the brand not of infamy but of inhumanity; it was a way in which the blacks could be marked out as something less than human. In a commercial city, they became part of its movable property. Thus in the eighteenth century there were a large number of notices advertising their sale-“To be sold a negro boy aged eleven years Enquire at the Virginia Coffee House in Threadneedle Street … his price is £25, and would not be sold but the person he belongs to is leaving off business.”
And yet the condition of London bears another witness to their fate. These commercial transactions were undertaken by the wealthy or the well connected; there can be little doubt that the “gentlemen” who purchased and sold their little slaves would have been quite happy to see the “lower orders” of London generally consigned to such servitude. In that sense the fate of the black slave was representative of civic and administrative oppression on a larger scale. That is why the London crowd treated the black population with a certain amount of sympathy and fellow-feeling. It is a manifest expression of that native egalitarianism which has already been defined as one of the moving spirits of London life. That egalitarianism, to be seen at its most profound among the poor and wretched, is evinced in the life of a “black one-legged violinist” named Billy Walters who was nicknamed “the King of the Beggars.” It was said that “every child in London knew him.” It has often been observed how the prophets of racial conflict in London have been proved false; the voices crying doom, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, have since fallen quiet. We may find the causes of that relative harmony and tolerance, between black and white, in the general urban sympathy for the mistreated black immigrants of the eighteenth century.
London: The Biography Page 84