Farther up the street at No. 38 was George Robert Bullard, a 47-year-old from Suffolk employed at the docks by HM Customs and an army pensioner following a long military career. Having enlisted in the Essex Regiment at the age of 18 in 1880, George was posted to Cork in the far south of Ireland, where he met his wife Mary Ellen Kenny, and they were married in Cork the day before New Year’s Eve 1882. Within two years he was in the East Indies and then spent two years in Burma from 1885, followed by four years in India. George arrived in Silvertown at the turn of the twentieth century as drill sergeant for the Institute of Volunteers begun by Colonel Hugh Adams Silver in the 1860s. Mary is listed as a general stores shopkeeper while their son, who went by the unusual name of Ivy Osborne Edward, aged 20, was a general labourer at the Co-op. Ivy was Bengal born and shared his unusual name with his uncle. Ivy had sought to follow his father into the army in 1909, leaving his job as bath attendant at the Tate Institute a couple of hundred yards east of Silvertown (set up by Henry Tate as an alternative social venue to the pub for his employees) with glowing references. Unfortunately Ivy would last barely three months in the military, being discharged on discovery of the heart condition that would kill him at home in Constance Street in 1913 at the age of 24, while George would also lose his wife Mary at home to illness the same year. Another son, Albert, like Ivy born in Burma, had also enlisted in the army in 1909 and would die, buried in a dugout hit by a shell in France, at the end of June 1916.
In many ways the Bullards exemplify Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular: their employment looks in both directions, towards the factories and the docks as well as establishing a business in Constance Street itself. They had arrived in Silvertown by a circuitous route with a family whose birthplaces ranged from Faisalabad to Warrington. The Bullards have a tantalising back story that spreads way beyond Silvertown’s watery confines of dock and river across the world, while the family, and George in particular, would know great tragedy and premature death. The Bullards’ was a very Silvertown story.
All along the street are labourers, car men, dockers, gas fitters, instrument makers and their families. The wives seem generally to stay at home but the children, male and female, all seem to be at work by the time they are 14. Other than a couple of domestic servants, the young girls tend to do similar jobs to the boys: factory hands, messengers and packers.
For most of the men the title is ‘general labourer’, the unskilled, the untrained, those with little more than the strength of their backs and the power in their arms to sell, whether it be ‘on the stones’ outside the dock gates looking for the call to work or making themselves useful in the factories, moving crates or stoking furnaces, exiting the factory gates or the dock gates every night sweaty, filthy and exhausted, maybe, if they’ve a few spare coins in their pockets, calling in at Cundy’s for a glass of beer on the way home.
The Railway Hotel, for all its description by Dickens’s correspondent as a ‘grim’ place, was a fine, sturdy Victorian building. Standing on the corner of Constance Street and Connaught Road it was an imposing sight. The bar was L-shaped and the room was high-ceilinged, with flamboyant coving and plaster moulding on the ceiling. The first reference to the Railway Hotel is to be found in a local directory from 1855, with the landlord named as William Owston. This seems curious as both Silvertown Station and Constance Street were still nine years away.
The Railway Hotel would come to be known by another name. Simeon Cundy, the son of a Nottinghamshire coal dealer, had taken over the pub with his wife Elizabeth around 1887. When there was a major strike at the rubber factory the following year the pub became the headquarters of the strike committee, with Eleanor Marx herself attending meetings in the function room upstairs. Mrs Cundy apparently even persuaded the brewery to make a donation to the strikers’ hardship fund.
Whether the landlord and landlady’s support for the local working people was the reason is long forgotten now, but from those tumultuous days onward the pub was always known as Cundy’s. The Cundys seemed unlikely radicals: Simeon was from a well-off business family and his elder brother John ended up owning swathes of local properties and died a very rich man. Simeon’s name would remain over the door until his death in 1914 when his son, also Simeon, took over until the twenties, when it passed into Mrs Cundy’s family the Saddingtons. But Cundy’s it remained, right into the twenty-first century.
In 1912 industrial unrest had returned to Cundy’s. The docks were out on strike and the dockers were on the lookout for strike-breakers, known as blacklegs. When Fred Clark walked into Cundy’s one August Saturday afternoon to buy four bottles of beer to take back to his colleagues at the Albert Dock, he was stopped on his way out by a striking docker named Billy Clark. Billy pulled one of the bottles from Fred’s pocket, stood between him and the door and said, ‘You’re blacklegging, aren’t you? Taking the bread from my mouth. Show me your card.’
Fred, a foot shorter than Billy, swallowed nervously, fumbled in his inside pocket and pulled out his insurance card.
‘Not your buggering insurance card,’ spat Billy. ‘Show me your union card.’
Fred stammered that he wasn’t a member of the union.
‘Well in that case,’ said Billy, ‘I want a pint of beer.’
He stepped back to allow Fred to get to the bar and stood at his shoulder. Lizzy Cundy, who hadn’t heard the exchange, came over to serve him.
‘Yes, love, more bottles, is it?’
‘No, er, a pint of beer for this gentleman, please,’ said Fred, trying to sound as assured as he could. Billy leaned in behind him and spoke directly into his ear.
‘And one for my friend here,’ he said.
‘Can you make that two, please?’ called Fred.
‘And my other friend, over there,’ continued Billy in a low, menacing voice until Fred had ordered four pints. He paid the money and turned to go.
‘I haven’t finished with you yet,’ said Billy Clark through gritted teeth, then grabbed Fred by the shoulder and thrust him hard against the wall.
‘Put your hands in the air,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll bloody kill you!’
Drinkers within earshot fell silent and turned to look as Billy Clark went through Fred’s pockets, pulling out coins and a pocket knife.
‘Sit down,’ he said to the petrified Fred, who did as he was told.
Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own knife. He turned it over in his hand and ran his finger along the blade.
‘I’ve a good mind to kill you.’
‘Hi, you!’ called Lizzy. ‘We’ll have none of that in here! Leave that man alone!’
Billy swung round to face her.
‘But … he’s a blackleg!’
More men turned to face the confrontation and a few moved towards Billy Clark.
‘He … he’s not in the union,’ said Billy, suddenly uncertain, looking from face to face, appealing to the men to share his burning sense of injustice. Two men jumped forward and grabbed Billy’s arms. The knife dropped to the floor.
‘I couldn’t care less if he’s Blackbeard,’ called Lizzy from behind the bar. ‘You don’t pull out a knife in Cundy’s.’
The men bundled Billy out of the door. A couple of minutes later they returned and one of them handed Fred his knife and his money.
‘Thank you,’ said Fred, breathing hard. ‘I think you just saved my life.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said one of the men. ‘Now get out of Silvertown, you fucking blackleg.’
This, then, was Silvertown on the eve of the First World War, an island of the disparate, a hellish insular outpost of fiery furnaces, giant boiling vats, noxious fumes, belching chimneys, dirty smogs that made your eyes run and your nose sting, a metropolis of clanking, screeching machinery and a raw, quick-witted, downtrodden populace, raised on inequality and with little to show for their long hours of endless toil beyond a couple of dank rooms in a house where the air is always damp, fungus grows through the wallpaper and
there are four children to a bed.
On the face of it this was a slum among slums, streets of houses with no roads, no pavements, no gas and little lighting. So damp was Silvertown as the buried marshes tried to rise to the surface again with, the thoroughfares a permanence of puddles, that some people wondered whether Silvertown folk at the turn of the twentieth century had webbed feet. It was almost as if the place had risen from the depths and could be drawn back down again, back among the drowned of centuries.
Yet magical, world-changing things happened in Silvertown, most of it achieved via the hands and broad backs of the dockers and labourers of the locality, the people who’d come from near and far to settle in that choking, muddy place by the river. These were proud people, strong people, people whose lifelong struggles had taught them to stick together, to look out for one another. Their collective experiences, whether in the shipyards of Scotland, the steelworks of South Wales, the flat farmlands of East Anglia or beyond, had taught them all that together they were strongest. Their accents might differ and their trades might differ, but the people of Silvertown were always united.
These were island people, people of the water – two of the main businesses on Constance Street in 1914 were even run by families called Marsh and Reed – bound together by their half-natural, half-artificial shoreline as much as their shared histories and experiences.
War was coming. Just as Silvertown and Constance Street had begun to find themselves, to assert an identity, a chain of events was underway that would challenge everything.
Oh, and the Greenwoods were on their way.
Chapter Eleven
Nell Painter had always had a good, sensible head on her shoulders, even as a child. ‘Bright as a button, this one,’ her father would say as he sat her on his knee and rubbed the tip of her nose with his forefinger. ‘Reckon she’ll go far.’
Nell was his favourite; that was clear, and had been since the day she was born at home in Stratford, then a burgeoning railway town on the eastern outskirts of London around four miles north of Silvertown, in the freezing January of 1878. Billy Painter could rough and tumble a bit with his baby sons Christopher and William, but he doted on Nell. As soon as he came through the door at the end of the day he’d seek her out, lifting her from whatever she was doing and carrying her to the chair, the plaster dust getting up her nose and making her sneeze.
Her mother Harriet would scold him for not changing his clothes as soon as he came in, or at least not brushing himself down before he came through the door, but nothing would come between Billy Painter and his Nell.
‘Been thinking of you all day, gel,’ he’d say, brushing the curls away from her forehead. ‘Thinking, “I’ll make these walls as smooth as my Nellie’s cheek,” I was.’
In his eyes she could do no wrong.
‘Sometimes, Billy Painter, I think you love that girl more than you love me,’ Harriet would complain.
‘Sometimes, Aitch, I think I do,’ he’d smile.
Nell’s childhood was hard but happy, typical of the times. The relentless, steamroller progress of the industrial revolution showed no sign of abating and, with thousands being drawn to the cities in search of work, houses being built across the east end of London in unprecedented numbers, Billy was never short of plastering work. ‘Stratford’s the place to be,’ he’d say. ‘There’ll always be work around here. It’s the railway, see? The station brings people here, the depot gives them work. We’ll be all right here, Aitch.’ Billy was a good plasterer, reliable, skilled and well thought of, and sometimes had to turn work away as he was so busy.
Harriet wouldn’t disagree, being a Stratford girl herself. She was a couple of years older than Billy and they’d married three years before Nell was born, but after Christopher had arrived, something that hadn’t endeared her to her family at the time. She took in a bit of laundry for some extra money now and again, initially for something to do, but the children took up so much time and with Billy’s job paying so well she concentrated mainly on bringing up the family.
Nell enjoyed school and the teachers seemed to like her, inasmuch as her answers would receive a prim nod rather than the outright derision meted out to most of her classmates. Wanstead Flats were close by, where she and her friends could go and explore, but she enjoyed helping her mother at home. The permanent cloud of plaster dust in which Billy moved meant the Painter dwelling took more cleaning than most, and Saturday being laundry day meant Nell was usually to be found kneeling over a wooden barrel in the yard, scrubbing, dunking and scraping the dirt from the family’s clothes and linen, her hands pink and raw, her face a picture of concentration, singing the songs her mother had taught her quietly to herself as she did so.
Even as she grew up she always looked forward to her father coming home. He made her laugh, he was funny, his friends often said he’d have been great in the halls but he always countered that the only way he’d ever work in a music hall was if they needed some plastering done. Nobody made Nell laugh like he did; sometimes he only needed to give her a look and she’d be gone, doubled up with laughter.
Harriet had a beautiful singing voice – ‘my Whitechapel nightingale’, Billy sometimes called her – and her father would tell Nell she’d inherited her mother’s vocal talents and would one day make all their fortunes for them. The music halls were reaching their peak in the 1880s and the east end of London was the beating heart of this entertainment revolution. Billy would take Nell to the halls sometimes, which she found absolutely magical. The heat, the smells, the laughter: her senses were overloaded. But the singers, their smiling faces lit from below by the lime footlights, left her open-mouthed in wonder. She was entranced by Marie Lloyd – when she sang ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ Nell would well up with emotion at the simple beauty of it – and especially captivated by the male impersonator Vesta Tilley. All the way home she’d memorise the songs as far as she could, and then sing them by the fireside at her proud father’s encouragement.
The Painters’ world fell to pieces the day Billy died. Nell came home from school singing ‘The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery’ to find her mother sitting bolt upright in the kitchen, as white as a ghost. He’d had a stroke at work, just collapsed as if someone had turned out a light, they said, and never regained consciousness.
On her father’s death Nell’s immediate future was both erased and confirmed. She was always going to have to leave school at the first opportunity, but now, with no money coming in, it was a matter of urgency. She was 12 years old and barely had time to grieve. Elder brother Christopher was already apprenticed to a plumber but that brought little in. There was no time for the family to ponder upon their loss: there were bills to be met and three young mouths to be fed. She was growing into a young woman already wise beyond her years, a serious expression set on a strong jaw line, her brown hair tumbling down her shoulders and deep brown eyes that reflected deep thought beyond; eyes whose corners dropped slightly towards her cheeks and gave her a faintly melancholic countenance.
The Painters left the house on Norman Road and moved half a mile east to a couple of rooms in a house in David Street, Forest Gate, a poorer area, a hotchpotch of back lanes and alleyways. Harriet took whatever domestic cleaning jobs she could, sometimes walking as far as Stepney to the big old merchants’ houses where the pay was better but the days very long.
A neighbour worked in a butcher’s shop and it was arranged that Nell would work five mornings a week and twelve hours on a Saturday, going to school in the afternoons until she could leave and go full-time. The butcher’s shop was on Stratford High Street and Nell was put to work sweeping, mopping, running errands and occasionally taking orders. The regular customers soon took to her ready smile and immaculate appearance and Nell enjoyed the work up to a point, but she was always happy to get back to school in the afternoons. One morning at the butcher’s she accidentally gave a woman far too much change. Fortunately the woman noticed and handed it back, chuckling and sa
ying, ‘You’ll have the place bankrupted, Nellie.’
The butcher saw the exchange, thought for a moment, called Nell over, took a piece of paper, wrote something on it, folded it three times and handed it to her, telling her to take it to another butcher at the other end of Stratford High Street. Used to similar errands, she nodded, reached up and took her hat from the peg and walked out of the door.
It was a Saturday so the street was busy and filled with the noise of commerce. Horses clopped along the cobbles, men manoeuvred hand carts laden with crates and boxes of vegetables, telling her, ‘Mind out there, you’ll lose your ankles.’ Shoppers strode with determined gaits and Nell was forced to sidestep and check herself, hopping off the pavement into the kerb among the dirty cabbage leaves and horse dung as she negotiated the crowds. Finally she reached the butcher’s, told him where she’d come from and handed him the note. He read it, looked at her, read it again, folded it up and handed it back to her.
‘It’s not me you want,’ he said. ‘You want Randall’s on Leyton High Road. You’d better look lively about it, too.’
Nell left the shop and turned north towards Leyton. It was a good twenty minutes’ walk to Randall’s, she thought. Plus coming back. The crowds thinned slightly but the High Road was still busy and it took longer than she expected. It was a warm day and she felt the sweat prickling against her hatband and she reached Randall’s a little out of breath. She presented the note and once again the butcher took it, read it, read it again, folded it up and handed it back to her.
‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid, love,’ said Randall. ‘I know someone who can, though. Christopher’s in Walthamstow. Do you know it?’
Nell shook her head.
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