London History

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.

Born in Docklands the end of the First World War, John ‘Jack’ Hector was perfectly placed to see the effects of two world wars on the East End. As an infant, John suffered a serious injury that left him with a paralysis that still affects him today, in his early nineties. It kept him from active service in World War II, working in the East End steel industry, and gave him a unique perspective on the ‘land fit for heroes’ that Britons expected in the wake of the war.

In his new book ‘After 1945′, John describes the gradual sense of disillusion that spread through the East End as - far from a brave new world, or at least a return to the relative affluence of the pre-War years - Londoners had to endure privation, upheaval, and another nine long years of rationing.

In December 1930, just after his 14th birthday, John began work at WB Bawn, a long-established cylinder and tank makers in Limehouse. Like the majority in those days, he started at the bottom, as office boy to the works manager and assistant to the works foreman. It was to be a long apprenticeship, and in 1937 he moved to Fraser and Fraser, in the same line of business with a whopping pay hike of a pound a week. John was now earning £3, 10s a week, plus a bonus each March, and was understudying the Buyer and Transport Manager, who was coming up for retirement. A difficult job in peacetime, but things were about to get much harder.

First came the declaration of war in September of 1939. Most of the staff moved out to the Home Counties, with John ducking and diving to keep the operation turning over. It was a strange time, with hostilities declared but no sign of action. That was to change with the end of the ‘phoney war’in May 1940.

The heroes weren’t just overseas. The docks and their factories were a prime target for Luftwaffe bombs, and John had to somehow fulfill orders while the quarter-mile-long workshops suffered continual bombing. Government money helped to rebuild the works in 1945, and Frasers looked forward to getting back to business.

Easier said than done. Orders flowed in for ‘boilers for the tea and coconut oil plantations … for mooring buoys from Trinity House … orders for the Turkish Admiralty’ and many others. But getting the raw materials was tough; rationing for steel, at least, had been removed. ‘Bribery and not so much what you know but who you know’ became vital tools of the trade. To make things harder, peacetime had brought a vast new cadre of bureaucrats, with new rules on what, how and how much of various items could be manufactured. A devastating fire, razing the works’ stores, only piled on the pressure.

Supply was the problem, not demand, and many companies went bust with order books full to bursting. Frasers survived though, and in 1954 John was plucked from his role to be Buyer for the parent company Brown and Tawse. The demand for steel and the possibilities that brought were huge: the whole of Britain was being rebuilt, with a huge housebuilding programme, whole new towns planned, and civil servants getting involved in planning every aspect, from furniture design, to nationalising the railways and the mines, to creating a new health service.

But while the public were only looking forward, and beginning to impatiently wonder why rationing of food was still stubbornly in place, the Government was looking nervously across Europe. The last thing on East Enders minds was another war, they had endured two in two generations, but the new Labour administration had severe doubts about Britain’s erstwhile Russian allies.

Much of the money that Britons assumed was going into rebuilding their country was actually going into fortifying it against World War 3. The fear was that the Russians wouldn’t stop with the Eastern Bloc, but would sweep across Europe, not stopping until Britain was invaded. So started the ‘Cold War’, and millions spent on developing the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) at Harwell, Oxfordshire. While East Enders were waiting for the end of the ration, the Government was developing a bigger, better bomb, and it was to make London life very hard for a few years yet.

Next week: After 1945, how the peacetime unfolded.

After 1945 by John Hector, published by Melrose Books, ISBN 9781906050368, hardback, £12.99.

A history of London and the people who made it. The thieves, charlatans, seers, architects, revolutionaries, poets, artists, sportsmen, soldiers, sailors, politicians, inventors and entrepreneurs who built the East End of London. Pen pictures of Attlee, Captain Cook, Sir Walter Raleigh, Stalin, Gandhi, Lew Grade, Steve Marriott, Fu Manchu, Sylvia Pankhurst, Lionel Bart, The Tichborne Claimant, John Wesley, Terry Spinks, Joseph Conard and dozens more…

London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. In one hour’s walk from west to east, London revealed a cavalcade of life chances - from all the prizes that civilisation could offer on the one hand to a barbarous struggle for existence on the other. As William Blake put it, London was ‘a Human awful wonder of God’. Jerry White’s extraordinary, 600-plus page opus attempts to map it.