London History

It stands marooned at the meeting of Houndsditch and Aldgate High Street - a very superior traffic island hardly noticed by the thousands of cars and buses that zip round it each day. Like so many City and East End churches, it has remained in place while all around has been bulldozed and developed.

St Botolph without Aldgate has a number of claims to fame. It possesses the oldest surviving organ in any English church. Here it was, too, that Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe got married. Geoffrey Chaucer was a parishioner and Isaac Newton lived opposite. And Thomas Bray, the founder of SPCK, was Rector here between 1706 and 1730.

Most famously in recent times, the church crypt was the birthplace of the St Botolph’s Project. Beginning as a soup kitchen for local homeless people, it grew to a charity with a yearly turnover of £2.5m, helping 3000 people a year with training, education and a bed for the night. Sadly, in 2004, the charity went into insolvency, squeezed out of an increasingly crowded sector of charities for the London homeless.

There has been a church for more than a thousand years at the ‘ald’ or ‘old’ gate at the eastern edge of the City of London. Look around England and you’ll find more than 70 churches to St Botolph and they’re very often found at city gates. Botolph, a Saxon who probably lived in Suffolk in the seventh century became the patron saint of travellers and so it made sense for arrivals at the city to give thanks to Botolph. The City of London had no fewer than four of them, with the surviving St Botolph without Bishopsgate and St Botolph Aldersgate, and St Botolph Billingsgate lost in the Great Fire of 1666. There’s a certain logic that the church became a shelter for homeless and rootless travellers within the city too.

The first certain record of the Aldgate church was when it was received by Queen Matilda’s Holy Trinity Aldgate Priory in the early 12th century. In 1418, the old Saxon building was enlarged and then almost entirely rebuilt during the 1500s. By 1740, surveyor George Dance was being called in to advise on the church’s state of dilapidation. His advice was simple - knock it down and start again, and so in 1741 St Botolph’s was pulled down.

Dance’s new design, raised between 1741 and 1744 is the building we see today. A handsome brick building with stone quoins and window casings, it has a distinctive combination of square tower and obelisk spire. It came in at a cost of £5,536 two shillings and eight pence. Remarkably, the new church was built around the existing organ, which had been endowed by Thomas Whiting in 1676 and built by the great organ maker in 1702-04. The organ was extended and improved for the new building, and was to be enlarged several more times during the 19th century. At the close of the 1800s the interior of the church was remodelled by JF Bentley (who had built the sumptuous Westminster Cathedral). He added a carved ceiling, decorative plasterwork, put in new pews and created a chancel by adding side screens.

German bombs seriously damaged the church during World Wars I and 2, but Bentley’s work escaped unscathed. In 1941 a bomb went through the roof above the organ but failed to go off - otherwise England’s oldest church organ might be no more. And in 1965 a mysterious fire necessitated a further renovation. The church’s official reopening was attended by the Queen Mother and the Lord Mayor of London. The organ, meanwhile, underwent its most recent refit during 2005-2006. 300 years on, the St Botolph’s keyboards are still going strong.

Many actors have a crucial moment when the magic of the stage and screen captures them. For a four-year-old Terence Stamp, sitting in an East End cinema during World War II with mum Ethel, it was watching Gary Cooper in Beau Geste. For the next decade and a half, Stamp wanted to be Cooper.

But if the desert seemed impossibly exotic, stardom and Hollywood might as well have been on another planet. The young Terence was the oldest of five, born in Bow (and later living in Stepney and Plaistow). Dad Tom was away in the merchant navy for months at a time, and the close family unit saw the kids looked after not just by mum Ethel, but by his grandmother and a coterie of aunts.

Gary Cooper may have been an inspiration, but it was a huge handicap too, as Stamp later recalled, saying he was ‘poisoned’ by the unattainable fantasy of being a glamorous leading man, such as Cooper or Cary Grant - how on earth could he leap from his East End existence to that? The truth was, he didn’t really know what to do. ‘My mother was an unusually strong woman. I remember her once telling me I should be a journalist … that was toaly out of the question because I was so bad at school!’

So, shelving his ambitions, he found work on leaving school as a runner for an advertising agency in the West End. It took the emergence of a new generation of screen idols to free Terence’s ambitions again. In a West End cinema one cold New Year’s Eve in the mid-fifties, Stamp saw James Dean in East of Eden. ‘I was 17 and overwhelmed by him,’ remembered Stamp. ‘He was doing it … I was just dreaming about it … he was the first guy I ever saw that was not so removed. I thought “I’m like that.”‘

Fate intervened in the shape of Stamp’s feet - an earlier operation was enough to persuade the Army he was not fit for National Service. He had just been handed back two years of his life and realised that if he tried drama school and failed, he would be no further behind than his mates coming back into Civvy Street. He enrolled at the Trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, alongside fellow East End hopeful Stephen Berkoff.

The turn of the sixties saw Stamp honing his craft on the stage, where he assumed he would stay. Notable roles included that of Private Whittaker in Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, during which he became friends with the young Michael Caine. ‘To be a young man, in London, in this career, at the turn of sixties … it couldn’t be any better, it was heaven,’ he laughed. But things were about to get better. In 1962, Stamp landed the role of Billy Budd in Peter Ustinov’s movie and became an overnight sensation. Working class actors were the darlings of the press in the newly egalitarian sixties. ‘The star from Stepney’ and ‘Tugman’s son: the boy with the Stamp of a star’ shouted the headlines in the Evening News and Evening Standard.

Stamp and Caine were now sharing a flat. The roles (and the women) came thick and fast. Stamp played Alfie on Broadway, but turned down the film role, which went to Caine. Iconic movies followd such as William Wyler’s The Collector and Far From the Madding Crowd. His girlfriends included Julie Christie (they were immortalised as ‘Terry and Julie’ in the Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset) and Jean Shrimpton. Meanwhile, younger brother Chris Stamp, an East End mod, was making his fortune as co-manager of The Who.

But as the sixties drew to a close the golden touch failed him. Antonioni replaced Stamp at the last minute with David Hemmings as the lead in Blow Up and Shrimpton left him for another man. A devastated Stamp took off for an ashram in India. His search for answers would take him away for nearly a decade, including a spell working on an organic farm in Ibiza.

When he rejoined the circus in the late seventies, it couldn’t have been in more dramatic fashion. Stamp was recruited as evil General Zod for the Superman movies. The eighties saw one terrific role. In The Hit, Stamp plays a sixties cockney who emerges from years of hiding, much the wiser in spiritual matters.

Stamp had, as he readily admits, made his share of duds. But the nineties saw a couple of classics. The former sixties poster boy shone as a transsexual in The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Then, in The Limey, he brought superb menace to the role of Wilson, an ageing Cockney villain in Los Angeles. The tireless Stamp was also launching his own range of gluten-free foods, The Stamp Collection, and penning a cookbook of the same name.

The new century saw Stamp ‘homeless’ after leaving his long-time base in Piccadilly’s Albany apartments for a life in hotels, going where the work took him. On New Year’s Eve 2002, Stamp finally married, to 29-year-old Elizabeth. The boy from Bow had come a long way but had no wish to stop. ‘It’s still the most fun thing I can think of in which to make a living. I’ve never wanted to become a politician, I’ve never wanted to become an interior decorator, I’ve never wanted to speculate and make a load of money. I just wanted this. It’s fun!’

What is London’s dirty big secret? What does a cup of sugary tea have to do with a terrible crime against humanity. And what commodity links millions of enslaved Africans and London’s dockers? The answer (and a few more questions for every Londoner), are at the Museum in Docklands, which has launched its new permanent gallery ‘London, Sugar & Slavery’.

You realise something is going on as soon as you reach the front door of the museum on West India Quay. A shroud of black cloth conceals the statue of Robert Milligan beneath. Milligan was a wealthy merchant and ship owner who was instrumental in building the West India Docks, and so his statue stands proud on the quayside. yet nowhere on the docks (until now) is the truth acknowledged … that the wealth of Milligan and his friends was largely built on the slave trade. For generations, West Africans were forcibly taken to work and die on the sugar plantations of the West Indies.

Indeed, the very building in which the museum stands is an old sugar warehouse. It wouldn’t be here but for slaving, and curator Dr Tom Wareham candidly admits that the museum missed a trick when it opened back in 2003. ‘We believed the story was of London as a port … we didn’t focus at all on London’s role in the slave trade.’

Indeed, people tend to think of Bristol and Liverpool when it comes to Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. But London, the biggest port in the world during the 18th and 19th centuries, was also the fourth largest slaving port. The new gallery redresses the balance, joining the dots ‘between ordinary Londoners, arch capitalism, despoiled West African civilisations and the thriving multicultural city we enjoy today’.

There are superb African artefacts pre-dating Europeans’ arrival on the continent, including a bronze leopard from Benin and the beautiful bust of a Yoruba King. In brutal contrast are the punishment collars and manacles, the whips and chains of the slave ships. And there are the newly acquired papers of Thomas and John Mills, who owned plantations in Kitts and St Nevis, giving us a glimpse of the lives of both slave and slaver.

There is the Buxton table, at which the terms of the Abolition Act were hammered out. But debunking the simplified history that has slavery being abolished by William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp and a few others, the names of lesser-known names are projected onto the surface. Africans such as Ottobah Cuoano and Olaudah Equiano are reinstated in their rightful place at the table. It’s just one example of an imaginative use of ’son et lumiere’ and film in the gallery. A disembodied voice asks us to imagine being taken from our home, our family, losing our freedom, our name, our children … it’s extraordinarily effective in putting you, the visitor, in the place of those stolen Africans.

And as you enter the gallery, a stunning film by Stephen Rudder (himself a south Londoner whose family came to London from Barbados) makes the point that this is the history of all of us. A succession of Londoners, white and black, voice the words of a captured slave against images of London, west Africa and the West Indies. Artefacts abound showing ordinary black Londoners in the 19th century and before.

It dispels forever the myth that London was a white city to which Black people arrived from the 1950s onwards. Catherine Hall, Professor of History at University College London advised on the gallery, and observed ‘It has helped me think about my city, how the fruits of slavery are built into the environment in which we live, and how relationships between people, right into the present, have been shaped by that history.’

It becomes even clearer with the museum, a former sugar warehouse, standing in the shadow of the towers of Canary Wharf - which is now home to banking giants such as HSBC, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays. These are the titans of global capitalism, a system built on the blood, sweat and tears of those sugar plantations in Jamaica and cotton fields in the United States. Robert Milligan and his cohorts, the wealth of America and transatlantic trade, the docks and dockers of the East End, the slaves and their descendants, and indeed every Londoner - all are inextricably and forever linked.

Getting there

Museum in Docklands
West India Quay
Canary Wharf
London E14 4AL
www.museumindocklands.org.uk

Museum entrance is two minutes walk from West India Quay. There is an NCP car park behind the Museum on Hertsmere Road. Free admission for under 16’s, NUS card holders and disabled carers;Annual adult ticket £5; Concessions £3 (over 60s and unwaged) allowing unlimited readmission for a full year.

Tower Hamlets has its share of blue plaques, though not as many as some of us would like. That imbalance will be redressed slightly next week, when a plaque to Thomas Fowell Buxton is unveiled at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.

It’s unusual to find memorials for father and daughter though - and facing each other on opposite sides of the street. In Vallance Road, Bethnal Green (better known for another family operation with less lofty aims) you’ll find Hughes Mansions, remembering Thomas Hughes. Right across the street is a blue plaque to Mary Hughes, his daughter - and mementoes to Mary are found scattered around the borough.

Thomas Hughes was one of that English band of muscular middle class reformers that seemed to thrive in Victorian England. A QC, judge, MP and author, he had been a star of the cricket team at Rugby School under the famous headship of Dr Thomas Arnold (a friend of his father’s from Oxford) whose religious and reforming zeal left a lasting mark on the young man.

Hughes was born in 1822. Though he left school before the sixth form (his final act being a school cricket match at Lord’s Cricket Ground), he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, was called to the bar in 1845, became an MP for the emerging Liberal Party in 1865 and was made a county court judge in 1882. We know him best today for his then-shocking novel ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’. He also wrote a number of non-fiction works, with meditations on faith including ‘Religio Laici’ and ‘A Layman’s Faith’. Perhaps his most remarkable venture though was the settlement he founded in America. Rugby, Tennessee was ‘an experiment in utopian living for second sons of the English gentry’. It wasn’t a success.

Mary Hughes, meanwhile, was less concerned with the slightly distressed sons of the gentry, and much more with the appalling lot of the East End working classes. Mary, born in 1860 had the social concern typical of many Victorian daughters of the gentry. She would drive to do her work in a comfortable carriage and be driven home afterwards. But something deeper was stirring within her - a sense that her privileges were deeply unfair and that the whole class system was wrong.

It wasn’t an idea guaranteed to endear her to her contemporaries, but Mary went further. She became more immersed in the ideas of the Christian Socialists and of Quakerism (of which more again next week). She decided to live with the East End poor and to become one of them. In 1895 she moved in with her sister and brother-in-law, the curate of St Jude’s in Whitechapel. By the time she moved on in 1915, to Kingsley Hall in Bow, she had become a ’shabby and sometimes verminous woman’, totally committed to helping those around her. During her time there, she met Gandhi during his sojourn in London.

Soon she had become a Quaker herself, though still attending Anglican services (a so-called ‘Quanglican’). She put her ideas into practice with the Dew Drop Inn, opened in 1826 in a former pub at 71 Vallance Road. The name was a pun, inviting anyone passing and in need to drop in. Quaker architect Malcolm Sparks did the conversion work, and S Grylls Wilson (an Anglican architect, thus neatly completing the set) did further work in 1928, looking after the building for the rest of Mary’s life.

And it was a long one. Mary had undertaken her grand and humble mission at the age of 66, yet her energy was a legend. ‘At the end of a long day, if the rest of the hostel was full, the old lady would push papers and old clothes aside and sleep in a bed chair,’ wrote one contemporary observer. The Inn had rooms for ‘lodgers’ (some people came and never went), Christian Socialist religious services, rooms for the study of sociology (the local poor made good research material), and for trade union meetings.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, the eccentric and hardline Mary had little truck with the compromises her Labour Party had to make as a (now major) political force. George Lansbury commented that ‘Our frail humanity only produces a Mary Hughes once in a century.’ The defeat of the General Strike in 1926 and Ramsey MacDonald’s money saving cuts in the dole in 1931 loosened the ties further.

Mary died, aged 81 in 1941. German bombs were falling on a London she had first seen in a Victorian era of horse and cart rather than powered flight. Four years later, the last V2 rocket attack on the capital would hit Hughes Mansion, that memorial to her father, killing 133 people. Mary’s name is also remembered in the Mary Hughes Building at 22 Underwood Road (off Vallance Road), an ante-natal clinic and later centre run by Tower Hamlets Council. Mary Hughes

William Blake would have been astonished to find anybody celebrating the anniversary of his birth so long after his death. For when he was alive nobody paid much attention.

Most people at the time just didn’t get this London painter, poet and printmaker. His work, drawing heavily on mysticism and with grotesque cartoonish figures was just too odd. The fact that he publicly proclaimed that he was inspired by his conversations with angels and Old Testament poets made it easy to consider Blake simply mad.

William Blake was born in Broad (now Broadwick Street) in Soho in 1757, dying in London in 1827. A Londoner to the core, he nevertheless was painfully aware of the effect of the filth, business and disease of the city on the souls of its inhabitants. During his lifetime too, he saw the rise of industrialisation and he didn’t like it much.

Most people who know anything about Blake know that he wrote the poem ‘Jerusalem’, which was latterly put to music and became one of the nation’s hymns - a much-misunderstood one by those who lustily sing what they believe is a patriotic paean to England (an England spoiled by ‘dark satantic mills’) but a beautiful piece no less. Generations of children have also learned his poem ‘Tyger, Tyger’.

And Blake has a number of curious connections with the East End, namechecking Stratford and the Isle of Dogs in his epic ‘Jerusalem’ (a different poem to that of the hymn). He also inspired legendary Mile End musician Jah Wobble. And while the East End marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade it is appropriate that Blake should pop up once again. Through his art and poetry he was a devastating critic of slavery (though being Blake his expression of this was rather more esoteric).

The mighty ‘Jerusalem’, (subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion) is typical of Blake’s elaborate and complex work, blending visual art and poetry. He produced the poem between 1804 and 1820, and it consists of 100 etched and illustrated plates. With a cast of billions, and allegorical figures representing ‘War’, ‘Reason’ and ‘Inspiration’ it’s not the simplest of narratives, but (in simple terms) tells the story of the fall of Albion or England. His description of the East End and the docks, which he certainly visited, shows his despair:

‘He came down from Highgate thro’ Hackney & Holloway towards London
Till he came to old Stratford, & thence to Stepney & the Isle
Of Leutha’s Dogs, thence thro’ the narrows of the River’s side,
And saw every minute particular, the jewels of Albion, running down
The kennels of the streets and lanes as if they were abhorr’d
Every Universal Form was become barren mountains of moral
Virtue, and every Minute Particular harden’d into grains of sand
And all the tendernesses of the soul cast forth as filth and mire.’

Blake’s lifespan also coincided with the fight against the slave trade and it’s from here that some of his most powerful pictures come. He was certainly aware of the slave trade through the London docks, and in the 1790s he was commissioned to create a series of engravings illustrating the experiences of Captain Stedman, a mercenary soldier in Surinam. Among these is the horrific ‘A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows’, which is part of an exhibition by the Hayward Gallery which is currently touring the country. For Blake, any slavery and enchainment, whether mental or physical, was a horror keenly felt. It was an attitude that often got him into trouble. He was taken to court for treason in 1803 for uttering ’seditious and treasonable expressions against the King’ (though the charges were thrown out). And he was a vocal supporter of the American Colonies’ fight for independence from Britain.

One of the most interesting things about Blake is his influence today, when other poets and engravers, more celebrated in his day, are long forgotten. One of Blake’s latterday fans is John Wardle (aka Jah Wobble). The Stepney-born bass player with John Lydon’s post Sex Pistols group PiL has become a legendary producer and experimenter in music. A deep beliver in the blending of music and spirtuality, he has acknowledged Blake as a major influence on his work and his way of thinking. In 1996 he released ‘The Inspiraton of William Blake’, a stunning blend of poetry and experimental music. It’s a journey that led to him taking a degree in Music and Philosophy a few years back. Lover of freedom, scourge of authority, and oblique observer of the East End … his shadow still falls across contemporary life.William BlakeWilliam Blake

Mile End’s Queen Mary is one of the numerous colleges that make up the University of London. Under its many changing names it has been an integral part of the East End from its beginnings in the People’s Palace, back in 1886. Other colleges have been absorbed by Queen Mary over the years: the London Hospital Medical College, Barts Hospital medical school and Westfield College.

But for the early part of that story (the London Hospital Medical College was founded in 1785) women played almost no role - they simply weren’t permitted as students. An exhibition* at Queen Mary this autumn (marking the 120th anniversary of the founding of Queen Mary College, and the 125th anniversary of Westfield College) shows how pioneering women students changed all that, and helped form the unique history of the college.

It was nigh on impossible for women in the 19th century to get a propert education, while jobs were the preserve of the working classes. A middle class girl was expected to learn the piano, and to acquire the basics that would allow her to converse amusingly in company, but her path was clear: she would only leave home to marry and have children. Anything else simply wasn’t respectable, but as the century progressed many women began to challenge these views. A group of educational pioneers (led by Emily Davies, founder of Girton College, Cambridge), saw education as the answer to women’s lack of progress and rights (at this time women not only could not vote but had very limited property rights, being effectively the chattels of their husbands.

Constance Maynard studied at Girton before founding Westfield College in 1882. It was London’s first residential women’s college, and Maynard’s mission was to offer higher education based on Christian doctrine, and teaching of arts and sciences, including mathematics and botany.

Arts was one thing, medicine quite another. Elizabeth Blackwell had come to study at Barts in 1850, having been the first woman to get a medical degree in America. She was an inspiration to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who was born in Whitechapel. The young Elizabeth Garrett met Blackwell and Emily Davies in the 1850s and resolved to study medicine too, training at the London Hospital in the 1860s and becoming the first woman to gain a medical qualification in Britain.But it was hard for other women to follow these trailblazers. There was hug opposition to women in medicine: Ellen Colborne registered to study at Barts in 1865, but her presence so upset the male students that lectures were disrupted and a petition was started to throw her out. Colborne withdrew from the course.

But the scope of the exhibition goes far beyond women in medicine. There are other figures, less celebrated but no less important in the history of Queen Mary. Minnie James (1865-1903) was appointed assistant librarian at the People’s Palace for East London in 1887, and became head librarian in 1889. She would play a vital role in building the People’s Palace Library. Her mission was to bring literature to the library’s working-class clientele, whom she tried to accommodate with opening times that fitted around their working day, by the acquisition of novels and other light reading.

There is Mary Stocks (1891–1975), Principal of Westfield College from 1939 to 1951. A suffragette in the early years of the century (until the vote was won in 1918), she later joined the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), persuaded them to adopt birth control as part of its platform, and helped establish the first provincial birth control clinic in Manchester in 1926.

And the exhibition takes in a number of themes, including the woman physician, the impact of the Great War, The World War 2 evacuation of the college, and Women in medicine and dentistry 1946-1959. The exhibition includes material from 1850 to the present day, including early photos of women students and teachers, alumnae memorabilia and a history of women in higher education. Audio recordings bring visitors voices from across the decades.

*Women@QM Exhibition
www.women.qmul.ac.uk
8 October 2007 - 20 December 2007
The Octagon, Queen’s Building
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
Email: womenatqm@qmul.ac.uk

It’s a windy Sunday morning in August 1878. Off the coast of Portsmouth lies the British Fleet, waiting to be reviewed by the Queen. The band is playing the jolly musical number from HMS Pinafore, satirising the ‘ruler of the Queen’s Navee’ when suddenly, from the east, two vessels, quite like any other the crews of the battleships have seen, come speeding toward the fleet at unusual speed.

A cheer goes up from the crews, recognising the daring of the voyage the little craft have taken from the Thames to the Solent - a journey that many feared would split the lightweight vessels in two. They are the first torpedo boats to navigate in open waters, and onboard are their builder, Alfred Yarrow and his wife - the pair have refused to expose their crews to dangers they wouldn’t themselves face.

At 38, Alfred Fernandez Yarrow had already come a long way from a humble Stepney childhood. By the time he died, aged 90, in 1932, he was Sir Alfred, the first Baronet of Homestead, and had seen Yarrow and Co become one of the world’s great shipbuilders.

Alfred was born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish mother and nonconformist Protestant father. His first schoolmaster astutely noted a ‘talent for engineering’, and Alfred won a scholarship to University College School.

At 15, he moved across the river to Greenwich, to begin an apprenticeship with Messrs Ravenill Salkeld, Marine Engineers. The hours were long and hard, but when the working day ended, Alfred remained in the workshop, studying and working on his own designs. He befriended another boy, James Hilditch, and together they developed a number of original inventions and took out several patents. Among them was a plough, put into production by Coleman and Sons, of Chelmsford. The young Yarrow soon became a London rep for the company.

They were an extraordinary pair, installing the first overhead telegraph line in London between their two homes, and developing a steam traction engine, put into production by Greenwich firm TW Cowan. They even set up their own Civil and Mechanical Engineers Society, with some 30 members, and Yarrow as the first vice president. When Hilditch left to join his father in the north of England, Yarrow decided to set up in business. He was just 23 when he opened his first yard, Yarrow and Hedley (a partnership) at Folly Wall on the Isle of Dogs. After a shaky start, the two became successful building steam river launches. Some 150 vessels were built between 1869 and 1875 including the boat used by Henry Morton Stanley to search the Congo for David Livingstone.

By the 1870s the firm had moved into building military vessels, designing torpedo boats first for the Argentine and Japanese navies, and then for the British Navy. Alfred dissolved the partnership with Hedley and the firm became Yarrow and Co. Yarrow was an entrepreneur and salesman as well as a brilliant engineer, and the dramatic meeting with the fleet in Portsmouth that day was a most effective way to end the furious and often acrimonious debate in Parliament over the worth of the boats. The masters of Her Majesty’s Navy were notoriously slow to accept innovation, so Yarrow took his design straight to Her Majesty.

Later that day, Victoria sent a message to Yarrow, via the Admiral of the Fleet, that nothing in the Review had impressed her so much as these new craft. With a suitable sense of theatre, Alfred and his crews had escorted the Queen from Cowes to Portsmouth, one boat on either side of the Royal Yacht. A few days later, the future King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, made a trip in one of the boats alongside Alfred. He loved the speed of the boats, and their future was assured. The boats, designed to ram enemy vessels with a torpedo on a stake, and escape under cover of the explosion, became a feature of HM Navy. As a young naval officer, Prince George (the future George V and the son of Edward VII), would command one of the craft.

Technology moved on though, and Yarrow was ever alert to the changes. In 1892 he called on Admiral Sir John Fisher at the Admiralty and told him of the new, super-fast ‘torpedo boats’ which were being built for foreign navies. Yarrow was commissioned to come up with his own - not difficult as the Yarrow yard had already built the Kotaka, for the Japanese Navy, effectively the world’s first ‘torpedo boat destroyer’. The result was the HMS Havock and the HMS Hornet, delivered in 1893. At 180ft long and speeding at 27 knots, they were the Royal Navy’s first destroyers, delivering torpedoes but much larger and more seaworthy than the earlier torpedo boats.

In 1898, Yarrows moved out of the Folly Yard to London Yard, but in 1906 followed the rest of the London shipbuilding business out of the Thames. By 1916, he was Sir Alfred, and developed at taste for philanthropy, contributing toward a convalescent home for children on the Isle of Dogs, and towards medical research at Whitechapel’s Royal London Hospital, among numerous other causes.

Alfred Yarrow died in 1932 at age 90, with the company in good health. It would go on to be swallowed by GEC in 1974, and eventually by BAe Systems Marine.

Of all the strange footnotes in East End history, none is much odder than the single-handed efforts of David Anidjar Romain, one of the governors of the Bishopsgate Institute to suppress the Minute Book of the First International. In a doughty attempt to stop Red Revolution in England, Romain cast the book into the vaults of the Institute, decreeing that it would never be seen again.

The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) was an international socialist organisation founded at a meeting in St Martin’s Hall, in London in 1864. The aim was to pull together the disparate socialist and trade union groups scattered around Europe. Congresses followed over the next few years in Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels and the Hague. The IWA’s official journal claimed a membership of 8 million. Though this is thought to be an optimistic count, the IWA certainly had at least 1.2 million members at its peak. At its heart and at its head was Karl Marx, who had based himself in Soho. Many other European socialists had, of course, taken refuge in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Whitechapel.

The grouping was bewildering to outsiders. A loose confederation of French Mutualists and Blanquists, Italian Republicans, English Owenites, and the Collectivists of Mikhail Bakunin. The IWA became known as the First International, gained new members and expelled others, increasingly becoming polarised into two camps - one supporting Marx, the other Bakunin. A weary Mark increasingly lost patience with the IWA - he was engaged in his epic writing of ‘Das Capital’ - and he encourage the International’s move to New York City in 1872. Four years later, at the 1876 Philadelphia conference, the First International was disbanded.

The minutes of those early meetings covered the years 1866-69. By the turn of the century they had entered the collection of George Howell, who had been MP for Bethnal Green North East in the 1880s. An early trade union leader, Howell’s collection of papers on the labour movement was one of the finest in private hands. Howell had planned to write a history of the IWA. It never came about and in 1905 the papers were acquired by the Bishopsgate Institute.

In 1919, Raymond Postgate, the son in law of George Lansbury, sat with the minute book in the library at the Institute. The journalist, novelist and social historian was writing a history of the Builders Union, which would eventually appear in 1923. But once the book was returned Romain insisted that any requests for the book (the Bishopsgate Institute operated a bizarre ‘closed access’ system, so readers were unable to browse the shelves for themselves) be turned down. Perhaps he was mindful of the recent revolution in Russia, perhaps of the constant fear of anarchism, communism and revolt that had beset Establishment London in the 1890s. Whatever his reasons, so frightened was Romain of the journal’s effect on readers that he ordered the minute book be locked in the Institute’s strongroom.

Banning the book only added to the mystique of course, and to demands to see it. But Romain’s decree held firm for 14 years. Then, during his absence on holiday in 1933, the other governors decided to rid themselves of the problem by giving the book to the British Museum. Romain returned in a fury - the offer boldly contradicted his order that nobody, anywere, should ever see the seditious tome. He angrily called the book back and had it locked in the vault of a City bank.

Finally, in 1941, the book emerged. The Soviet Ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky made a plea through the News Chronicle newspaper to see the book. As ever, the request was flatly refused. He then went to the top. Britain and the Soviet Union were engaged in a common battle against Nazi Germany, and the threat of revolution in London probably seemed a slight matter by comparison. Prime minister Winston Churchill wrote a stern letter on behalf of Britain’s Russian allies, and there was a swift change of heart by the board of governors. Maisky’s wife and a secretary then spent several years transcribing the book, and it was eventually published in Moscow in 1950.

Red revolution in England had been averted, though how much of that was down to the enthusiastic censorship practised by Mr Romain was open to question. With the IWA minute book in the hands of the Russians, Soviet Communism persisted for another four decades.

* For further reading go to Karl Marx by Francis Wheen, ISBN-10: 1841151149.

What do Paul McCartney, Ernest Shackleton, Edward Elgar, the London Topographical Society and the City of London Boy Scout troop have in common? The answer is a striking building which, amid the massive changes around Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate over the last few years has presented the same face to the world (pretty much) for more than a century.

Now the Bishopsgate Institute is to embark on the most important stage in its history. A large-scale capital programme will transform the building into a state-of-the-art Institute for the 21st century. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has already shown its support for the project with a £1.5 million grant. The Renewal campaign launches on 5 February 2008 at 7pm, with many of the campaign patrons, including the Viscount Churchill OBE, Professor Dan Cruickshank, Baroness Hilton of Eggardon and former labour MP Stan Newens in attendance.

Today, the Institute offers short leisure courses for adults, a cultural events programme, a specialist library devoted to London’s East End and radical history, and a grants programme for local organisations. Over the years it has hosted musical concerts, old-time dancing, table tennis and more besides. That it exists at all is down to the vision of one man, who swept together the funds from dozens of moribund charities to create an institute for the working person in the City.

The Shoreditch side of Bishopsgate was a slum in the late 19th century. The railway companies had carved out Liverpool Street, Broad Street and Bishopsgate stations and the lines that served them, casually destroying hundreds of homes. Their residents had no choice but to cross into overcrowded Shoreditch. As so often in the Victorian East End, a far-sighted local vicar stepped into the breach. Rev William Rogers, Rector of St Botolph’s from 1863-96 had already founded schools for the poor, including the Bishopsgate School for Girls, in Spital Square.

But Rogers’ magnum opus was to be the Institute, and it was a triumph of will that he made it happen. Rogers was an expert at winkling out funds - he had squeezed £7500 from the railway companies for their demolition of All Saints Church in Skinner Street. Now he turned his eye to the myriad small charities that had been established over some four centuries in the City. Sometimes it seemed that every City worthy who died had left cash to fund a foundation in his or her name. By the late 1800s it was a mess, and there were mutterings in the City that funds had been misappropriated or diverted from their original purpose.

There was the sum of £2 left by Joan Ford in 1644 to establish a ‘love feast’ at which warring neighbours could meet and be reconciled. By 1878 this had expanded into a ‘charitable dinner’ costing around £60. There was an endowment to provide flannel petticoats. The Reverend Pitt had provided for 60 penny loaves to be distributed to the poor of his parish each Whitsunday from his grave in Elwin’s Garden, Broad Street Buildings (which by now was under Liverpool Street Station. In all, 52 charities, the oldest from 1481, the most recent from 1862, were folded into the Bishopsgate Foundation under the auspices of the practical Rogers, who noted ‘It is not that we scatter shillings, deal out soup tickets and write orders for flannel petticoats. We do neither these things nor the like of them.’

A board of local businessmen, traders and other worthies set aside £1014 for pensions for 39 poor of the parish, £400 for emergency medical relief for the poor and £260 for rents. The rest would go to the new institute. Land between Bishopsgate and Brushfield Street was bought for £28516, and a similar sum again on a building by architect Charles Harrison Townsend. The hybrid of Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles shocked many, though history has treated the design well. Townsend would go on to design the Whitechapel Gallery and the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, south London.

The foundation stone was laid on 13 May 1893 by Rev Rogers; 18 months later the Institute was opened by prime minister, Lord Rosebery. The building had a lending library with 20,000 volumes in place and a reading room, strictly segregated and with porters patrolling the centre to make sure the sexes never met. The Institute had its eccentricities - not least a ‘closed-access’ lending system, whereby the librarians fetched the volumes for readers. Autocratic librarian Charles Goss, who would run things for 44 years until retiring in 1941 at the age of 77, opined that the readers ‘can never make up their minds and merely get in each others’ way’. They also had a nasty habit of stealing the books.

The Institute offered evening lectures, with big names such as Hilaire Belloc and Ellen Terry. There were classes in book keeping, languages and shorthand. And lunchtime concerts and organ recitals became popular, with the magnificently names Reginald Goss-Custard at the keyboard. During World War II the ARP would meet at the Institute for target practice, and around the same time the City Music Society was established in the building. The Bishopsgate Club, born in 1947, brought snooker, table tennis and old-time dancing.

Today, the Institute offers more than 120 courses in languages, leisure, performing arts, self development and exercise. The debates and lectures are a must for anyone interested in East End history - upcoming subjects in 2008 include Sylvia Pankhurst, Fascism in London between the Wars, the East End Underworld, and the 1921 Poplar Rent Strike. There are lunchtime classical music concerts, and of course there is the library. And over the next five years, a £7m project will equip the Institute for the next century, with new learning spaces, a cafe, classrooms, studios and much more.

You can find out more at www.bishopsgate.org.uk. The Bishopsgate Institute and Foundation is at 230 Bishopsgate, EC2M4QH.

We read an awful lot of what life was like in the East End during World War 2, but not so much about the immediate aftermath. John Hector sets that right in his new book, ‘After 1945′. Last week we saw John struggling to keep an East End steel company going under enemy bombing. He was to find peacetime also as great a challenge.

With plenty of demand for the luxuries (and necessities) lacking during the war, plus a flood of returning servicemen and women, factories looked forward to working at full tilt. But the UK economy was badly broken, and there was no returning to normal. The East End was suffering from a chronic shortage of housing, and the reuniting of families saw a swift population boom. Prefabs, still seen, dotted around London, were a quick and cheap solution, and they could be built on swiftly cleared bombsites, so families could remain close to home. High-rise flats were to be the longer-term solution, though disasters such as Ronan Point would sour that idea.

Furniture was needed for these new homes, but materials were scarce, so the Government set standards for ‘Utility Furniture’, which swept away weight and fussiness in favour of designs that were remarkably minimal - and which are fashionable today. And if you wanted something fancier, as John required for the boardroom at the works, it was there if you knew where to look. The delivery arrived at dead of night, with £100 on the books and £900 as a cash payment - an astonishing sum.

Feeding the workers who manned the factories was a major challenge, and the London County Council set up ‘Londoners’ Meals Centres’, subsidised canteens to provide food off the ration. A shilling and ninepence bought the fuel to get a day’s work done. The eateries became known as ‘British Restaurants’ and continued well into the fifties and eventual demise of the ration.

The Black Market was as big as it had been during wartime. Though frowned upon, the Spivs and Wideboys who ran the rackets could argue that they were doing an essential job, efficient as they were at getting goods direct to the customer … by any means. Many tins of food were knocked off on their way to barracks. This euphemistically entitled ’surplus’ would often be unlabelled. The mystery of opening these cans which had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’ or were ‘water damaged’ was whether they would contain pineapple chunks, carrots or something impossible to identify.

Many things were changing for the better too, a shining beacon being the establishment of the NHS, born on 5 July 1948. Diseases which had once ravaged the East End, such as measles and scarlet fever, were now held at bay through inoculations of youngsters. Now, nobody had to fear getting sick because of the expense of seeing the doctor. There were improved old age pensions and, as the fifties wore on, the slow appearance of new consumer goods. Now families had their first television or Dansette record player. Even, undreamed of luxury, a motorcar such as the new compact Ford Anglias and Morris 1000s.

The mines were to be nationalised too. It’s difficult to imagine now how big a role coal played in London life. But with every house and every factory running on the stuff, hundreds of coal merchants dotted around the city, and London living under a pall of pea-souper fogs, it was an ever present.

John’s sympathies were with the miners. As a boy during the General Strike he had watched the miners march down to London, and seen the heavy handed use of troops to break things up. He had tipped two pennies into the cap of a striking miner and, on a school trip years later, had gone down a working Derbyshire mine. Nationalisation came, though, just as the industry headed into decline. Nuclear power and pit closures would be the story of the following decades.

Nationalisation of the railways comes even less well out of John’s analysis, with a bureaucratic British Rail struggling to make a profit from the huge and rambling network it was trying to knit together. Brutal cuts would ensue in the early sixties under Dr Beeching, and whole swatches of Britain would be left without railway lines.

But it’s over the nationalisation of the steel industry that John really feels the Government got it wrong. Steel was John’s business, and he watched aghast as the British Steel Corporation, launched in 1967, set out on a 32-year programme of underinvestment and neglect, culminating in its buying-out by Dutch company Corus in 1999. The docks too were looking like a sunset industry after the war, and the business steadily moved out to Tilbury and Southend.

From Collis Browne and coke fires, to the internet and the glittering towers of Canary Wharf, John Hector views it all with fascination and good humour, though these days through sadly failing eyesight. His new book offers a fascinating first-person glimpse of those ‘forgotten years’ after World War 2.