East Enders

My birth certificate says I was born in Limehouse in 1932. Until I joined the army at the age of 18 I lived most of the time in Old Ford, Bow, E.3.

The ‘East End’ has always been the poorest part of Britain, it’s been mythologised over the years as it has fascinated sociologists, criminologists, writers, missionaries, welfare workers and latterly film and TV makers. From Victorian times to the present day the world has been absorbed by the plight and the crimes of the people and the area.

In 1910 a famous American writer, Jack London ventured to London to find out for himself if the stories of poverty and appalling slums in the area were true. His account of his stay was published under the title ‘People of The Abyss’ it is a ghastly account of the lives of those that inhabited this miserable place. It described a world of human beings shuffling through their world like downtrodden ghosts, poor, starving and oppressed by their poverty.

What was especially shocking about this account was that London at that period was the capital city of the richest and biggest Empire that had ever been.

Conditions must have improved by the mid thirties because I had a very happy childhood even during the war despite being evacuated for a few short periods. There was still poverty, lots of kids never had a toothbrush or had seen a hankerchief. Shoes, or more likely boots, were rarely new and were often stuffed with cardboard as they wore out but most of us had a roof over our heads and never starved.

In my day the East end started at Aldgate and ended at Bow Bridge. It comprised, at the very heart, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Mile- end, Bow, Poplar and Hackney, the rest were east Londoners, not ‘East-enders’, over Bow bridge was regarded as the suburbs. Nowadays they even count people from Dagenham as East enders this wasn’t true a few years ago. Even the speech was different, ‘Cockney’ as spoken by a true native was richer and much less harsh and whiney to that spoken on the fringes and what has now evolved through television and radio as ‘estuary english’ a very ugly version of London accented speech.

Even the clothes were different , we had all the best Jewish tailors in our areas from the well known Maxie Cohen of Aldgate and Myers of Hoxton to the expensive Les Miller in Whitechapel, Francks of New road and Charles Stevenson of Brick Lane, and the girls had all the best fashion shops as well. We frequented the ‘Lane’ on a Sunday morning gathering round ‘Solly’s’ the record stall in Wentworth street it was where anyone who had ‘style’ went.

Weekends we went to the Lyceum and danced to the sound of Oscar Rabin, we belonged to Youth clubs like the Repton and now and again went to pubs like the Hospital Tavern in Whitechapel or the Coach and Horses in Mile end or the Deuragan in Hackney.

In the mid sixties most of my London was still recognisable, still lots of shops, still lots of businesses run by the same people and families that had been there for years, same Jewish tailors, Jewish restaurants like `Blooms’ and ‘Goldwaters’ and Mr Marks still serving smoked salmon, beigels and latkas from his delicatessen in Wentworth street. Roman road was still a thriving family market with Butchers selling hot saveloys or faggots with pease pudding as a sideline along with all the different meats. The greengrocers, bakers, cook shops and pie, mash and eel shops and fish stalls whose families had been coster mongers for a 100 years they were still there the backbone of the area.

But if we know our history change is inevitable and when one reads Shelley’s great poem ‘Ozymandias’ it hammers home the message that nothing is forever and so it has proved with my ancestral home.

In the late 40’s we had lots of immigrants from the Caribbean, this was to fill a need, there was full employment and many jobs in transport and the hospitals were hard to fill so Railway, Bus and Hospital authorities advertised in the West Indies, but the newcomers, despite much racism and some resentment, fitted in well enough, taking to our institutions like the pub and the church so things didn’t alter that much. There were some ‘race’ riots in Notting Hill but not in our neck of the woods. The East-end have always had many people from different lands, there was a sizeable black population around the docks, always lots of seaman from the West Indies in the Cable street area and lots of what we called Lascars in their seamans dress of blue dungarees, as well as the Chinese in the original ‘Chinatown’ of Limehouse.

However in the 70’s Uganda’s President, Idi Amin, decided to throw all the Asians out of his country. Many of these were prosperous and well educated Indians, mainly Muslim, and though they were stripped of all their assets they came to this country with a wealth of knowledge, education, professionalism that other immigrants had lacked. People who emigrate do it to better themselves, in this case they were forced out of a country of which they were the main middle class. Many of these settled in London and started small businesses, there was also an influx of people from Bangladesh when that troubled land went through periods of disaster, floods and famine and also Pakistan was a major source of cheap labour, gradually Whitechapel in particular started to change, most Jewish businesses packed up and left their places being taken by Asian entrepreneurs who easily filled the vacancies in the garment trade and started their own shops and restaurants and opened Mosques to cater for the mainly Muslim element. Of course this alienated local populations far more than the Caribbean influx because fathers and mothers and even grandparents followed children to this land and they were seen, true or not, to be a drain on our already over stretched social services and hospitals. Many East enders at that time moved to places like Basildon, Harlow and Debden, lots of streets were knocked down and replaced with new dwellings that were mainly occupied by newcomers and so to people of my generation the East end was becoming a very different place.

In 1985 a series, ‘East enders’ started on BBC television. It proved very popular and is still going to this day although I watched a few episodes and snorted my derision in common with most people of my background we all thought it was so unreal and I have never watched it since. If I was to watch it nowadays it might reflect life in that part of London I only know that back in the 80s’ it bore very little relation to the life we lived. The Mitchell brothers two garage mechanics were ludicrous as so called gangsters and hard men. Dirty Den was just not believable, Angie the landlady was a more plausible figure, there were many glamourous landladies in pubs but the rest were not true to life.

However, life imitates Art and many of the actors in soaps are now full blown ‘celebrities’ and they are seen in fashionable night clubs and restaurants along with footballers and pop stars and lots of young people seem to aspire to their way of life and probably East end young people copy what they see on the soap and ape the actors dress and speech so it’s probably a fair representation of the area it tries to dramatise.

The ‘Essex’ boys and girls whose parents or grandparents were from East London no longer go ‘down the lane’ they’ll go to the new super shopping malls like Lakeside or Blue Water or night clubs in Epping, Gants Hill or Chigwell, some of the more ‘progressive’ will make a pilgrimage on Friday or Saturday night to Shoreditch which has an abundance of bars and pubs much to the annoyance of the long term residents and I doubt any of them go to ‘Tubby Isaac's’ for a bowl of jellied eels after their Friday night pint as we used to.

As an old East ender I still have much affection for the place and I still visit the area as one of my sons lives there and, thank goodness, they still have some pie and mash shops, but I don’t think I could live there anymore, many areas are alien to me, I quite enjoy the bustle and colour of places like Brick Lane and Green street near Upton Park, and, if I was younger, the liveliness of the bars, clubs and pubs would appeal to me, I also like the diversity that the multitude of races bring, there seems to be representatives of everywhere on earth living in East London, there are Arabs, Australians, Austrians, Belgians, Brazilians, Canadians, Chileans, Danish etc. etc., one could go through the alphabet, recently I asked a waitress in a restaurant in Shoreditch where she came from as I couldn’t place her accent I was quite surprised when she said Northampton.

It does no one good to see the future but in terms of the cosmos it wasn’t long ago when London’s population was numbered in thousands rather than millions, it is now one of the great cities of the world and still attracting migrants by the hundreds of thousands and a big percentage are drawn like magnets to the hub of East London, I remember it as being at it’s best fifty years ago I wonder what will it be like fifty years hence?