London History

Possibly the first serial to be printed in English. ‘The London Spy’ caught the attention of London’s masses through a witty and unvarnished view of life in the city. The London Spy ran for 18 months during a time when most periodical features were quickly snubbed and replaced. Its endurance helped to popularize the “spy narrative” for the rest of the 18th century. it’s author was Ned Ward (also known as Edward Ward) (1660 or 1667 - June 20, 1731), a satirical writer and publican in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century based in London. The Spy was published in 18 monthly instalments starting in November 1698 and was described (by the author) as a “complete survey” of the London scene. It was first published in book form in 1703. Ward himself was born in Oxfordshire and ran the King’s Head Tavern, next door to Gray’s Inn, London from 1699. His first publication was The Poets Ramble After Riches (1691), and he published at least 70 more books including The Wooden World Dissected - an unreliable account of the Royal Navy; Vulgus Britannicus; A Trip to Jamaica (169 - based on personal experience; Hudibras Redivivus (twelve monthly parts 1705-06) - a bitter attack on the Whig government of the day that resulted in the author being put in the pillory twice, at the Royal Exchange and Charing Cross; and the Satyrical Reflections on Clubs - which contains one of the first descriptions of gay clubs in London.

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

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.

Archaeologists investigating the London 2012 Olympic Park construction site have uncovered evidence of the role the area played in defending London during the Second World War.

Fire today ravaged the Cutty Sark, turning the 19th century tea clipper, permanently moored in south London and one of Britain’s most important maritime treasures, into a blackened wreck. Despite the apparent damage, however, experts who have been leading a broad restoration project on the 138-year-old ship said an initial inspection indicated a section of its structure remained intact and it could perhaps be restored.

The tide is out in London, and in the midst of all the urban intensity, I’m beachcombing. Like kids on a scavenger hunt, David Tucker and I pick through the pebbles. I find a fragile, chalky white tube and hand it to David, who explains it’s no big deal, just the stem of a 19th century clay pipe.

Check out our piece on Mudlarks and Toshers … for some people this used to be a living!

Life wasn’t easy in the seventeenth century East End of London. ‘Nasty, brutish and short’ may be a cliche but it accurately described existence in the Tower Hamlets of the 1800s and after. Infant mortality, arcane illnesses, early death and the risk of ending your life at the end of a rope were just some of the hazards.

The ‘Bills of Mortality’ published by the various parishes, were begun in the early 1600s. In this era of continual epidemics, they were intended as an early warning system, the local clerks logging where and when each death had occurred and posting the results on a weekly basis. One wonders what effective action a casual worker in Wapping, living from day to day just above the poverty line, could have taken to escape the cholera in his parish in any case. But what it does do is provide a fascinating picture of what ailed and killed those East Enders of a couple of centuries back.

The information is fine up to a point. The problem was that the people listing the information were not doctors but parish clerks, whose ‘diagnosis’ of what had seen the unfortunates off was vague at best. Certainly, the greatest number of deceased were simply ‘aged’ (though ‘age’ not being an illness nobody actually dies of it). Likewise, ‘bedridden’ and ‘lethargy’ are barely adequate as symptoms let alone diagnoses.

Medical science was far more primitive than today of course, and some illnesses cover a multitude of ailments today. ‘Ague’ for instance, was a condition of alternating hot and cold sweats with fever: sounding very much like modern-day malaria. ‘Quinsy’ was simply an infection caused by untreated tonsilitis, while ‘apoplexy’ (still used metaphorically today) would nowadays be diagnosed as a stroke. ‘Dropsy’ meanwhile, referred to a collection of lymphatic fluid (the modern-day oedema).

And some of the diseases had spectacular titles. St Anthony’s Fire would later be known as Ergotism and was a spectacularly nasty disease caused by fungal contamination of the grains used in baking. Convulsive symptoms include painful seizures and spasms, diarrhoea, paralysis, itching, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and hallucinations similar to those of an LSD trip … followed of course by death. In earlier times, the illness might even have been seen as evidence of demonic possession. ‘Rising of the Lights’ would be a disease of the lungs, with ‘Headmouldshot’ a catch-all for illnesses of the brain, such as encephalitis or meningitis.

Entertaining to read (though certainly not to suffer) are entries over the years that include bladder in the throat, breakbone fever, canine madness, commotion, eel thing, frogg, gathering, grocer’s itch, hectic fever, kink, milk leg, screws, stranguary, stuffing, rag picker’s disease, tympany, worm fit, wolf, and being planet struck. The latter again emphasises the persisting belief that Man’s moods and even sanity were at the mercy of the planets (moon struck would be a variation).

Sad too to see how mundane were many of the illnesses that saw people off. Until recently we’ve complacently thought of measles and chicken pox as childhood diseases to be overcome with a few days off school. But then (as in many parts of the world today) they were real killers. Colds would see off many (especially the young and old of course). The London of the 1700s was not a city of old people, and many of the young didn’t reach maturity. In the 1700s, around 150 or every thousand infants born failed to reach a year old - and things had barely improved a century later. The table below shows just how many mothers died in childbirth too.

LONDON BILL OF MORTALITY 1775
Natural deaths
Abortive and stillborn 529
Aged 1297
Ague 5
Apoplexy, suddenly & planet struck 215
Asthma & tissick 286
Bedridden 6
Bleeding 9
Blood flux 3
Bursten & rupture 9
Cancer 54
Canker 9
Childbed 188
Chicken pox 1
Cold 18
Colick & Twisted gut 70
Consumption 4452
Convulsions 5177
Cough, chin & whooping 206
Diabetes 2
Dropsie 865
Evil 11
Falling sickness 1
Fever, scarlet, purple spotted 2244
Fistula 9
Flux 9
French pox 71
Gout 69
Gravel, stones 36
Grief 3
Griping in the guts 1
Horseshoe head, head made hot, water on the head 19
Headache 2
Jaundice 120
Impostume 11
Inflammation 114
Itch 1
Leprosie 1
Lethargy 6
Livergrown 2
Lunatick 52
Measles 283
Miscarriage 4
Mortification 169
Palsie 65
Quinsie 4
Rash 1
Rheumatism 6
Rickets 1
Rising of the lights 1
Scald head 4
Sciatica 1
Scurvy 2
Sore throat 4
Smallpox 2699
Sores & ulcers 9
St Anthony’s fire 2
Stoppage in the stomach 10
Surfeit 1
Swelling 1
Teeth 694
Thrush 77
Tympany 1
Vapours 1
Vomiting & looseness 5
Worms 1

Non-natural causes
Bite - mad dog 2
Broken limbs -
Bruised 1
Burnt 8
Choked 1
Drowned 104
Excessive drinking 2
Executed 24
Fools etc 64
Found dead 2
Frighted 1
Frozen 1
Murdered 3
Overlaid 4
Poisoned 1
Scalded 1
Shot 1
Smothered 1
Stabbed 1
Starved 2
Suffocated 4
Suicide 29