London History

Martin Pugh gives the lecture at the Bishopsgate Institute on Tuesday 18 March, 7pm. Fascinating and essential for anyone who thinks British Fascism of the period begins and ends with Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. http://www.bishopsgate.org.uk.

www.bishopsgate.org.uk

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

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.

It may be produced in Wapping, but it’s hard to imagine any other connection between the Sun and legendary East End politician George Lansbury. Britain’s best-selling paper may have backed Tony Blair in recent years, but that hardly represents a commitment to the left.

Strange to think that The Sun started life as a ‘labour movement daily’, brainchild of Lansbury and Bethnal Green union man Ben Tillett. More ironic still (given the later war at Wapping between Murdoch and the print unions), this new paper sprung from a daily strike bulletin printed by the London Society of Compositors (LSC) - the printers trade union engaged in a bitter struggle to win a 48-hour working week.

Tillett was a leading figure in the London Dock Strike of 1889 and by the 1890s was one of the leaders of the Labour movement, pivotal in the founding of the Labour Party and president of the General Labourer’s Union.

In December 1910, London printers were locked out by the newspaper publishers for demanding a 48-hour week. The owners were hardly going to put the printers’ case on their pages, so Tillett, Lansbury and other Labour leaders produced a strike sheet, The World. An important recruit was Australian Will Dyson, arguably the best and most popular political cartoonist of the day. Dyson’s biting satire gave the new paper a unique flavour. The next month, the tyro publishers retitled their paper the Daily Herald. The first issue of 13,000 copies sold out straight away, and sales grew over the following weeks.

By April 1911, the strike was over, but Lansbury and Tillett were encouraged enough to believe there was a permanent market for a Labour paper. Funds were raised, and the Herald was relaunched on 15 April 1912. The shortlived launch editor was William H Seed and Dyson was given a full page to fill (occasionally even the front page). Eminent contributors included GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, causes supported by the paper include women’s suffrage, British rule in Ireland, and workers’ struggles everywhere. Sales nudged up to 230,000 a day.

The paper was democratic, with readers forming local branches of the ‘Daily Herald League’, with a say in the running of the paper, but all was not well between the Herald and its fathers. Dyson was attacking the Labour Party for being too conservative, and he mercilessly lampooned Ramsay McDonald in his cartoons. The Christian Lansbury was disturbed by Dyson’s representation of capitalists as ‘devils’, while the board felt the paper’s attacks on individuals (rather than systems and conditions) were far too personal. By late 1913, when Charles Lapworth was asked to resign, the paper had lost four editors.

By 1914, Lansbury was in control, but the First World War, which split the left, hurt the Daily Herald badly. The paper opposed Britain fighting, and sales (already between 50,000 and 150,000 a day) slumped further. It’s a hard job being an anti-war paper when many readers have elected to support the troops ‘right or wrong’. Will Dyson, meanwhile, had decided to do his bit, and had joined the Australian Army. The paper went weekly before returning to a daily sale in 1919. In 1922 the TUC took over publication, appointing Henry Hamilton Fyfe (a respected Fleet Street man) as editor. Fyfe recruited well, but never felt free of interference from his masters, opining that ‘the Herald never escaped entirely its first days as a strike sheet’ He resigned in 1926.

With new editor Frederic Salusbury in charge, the Herald was about to change yet again. In 1930, the TUC sold a 51 per cent share to the Odhams Press, publisher of The [Sunday] People. The synergy was obvious: the TUC needed a professional publisher to push their ailing paper, while the Sunday paper publisher was looking to employ its presses seven days a week. Odhams launched a huge promotional campaign and by 1933 the Herald was the world’s largest-selling daily paper, hitting 2m a day. That signalled war to the conservative opposition such as the Daily Express. Competition grew fierce and it was the Herald that suffered, limping through the forties and fifties losing money.

In 1961, Mirror Group bought Odhams, and found itself with an oddity - owning 51 per cent of a paper, the other ‘half’ of which was owned by the TUC. Until very recently the paper had been tied to supporting Labour Party policy … right or wrong. The paper did still sell 1.4m copies a day, but it didn’t make a profit, and the ageing, working class readership didn’t help the paper sell its ads. In 1964 the publishers went for broke, reformatting and relaunching the old Labour paper as The Sun, a mid-market, left-leaning daily. The obvious problem was that it was head to head with the Daily Mirror, and in 1969 the publishers (now reinvented as IPC) sold the title to Rupert Murdoch. Resized as a tabloid, taken downmarket and with the addition of Page 3, any vestigial links to its inky Labour past were finally broken. And, irony of ironies, the print unions, which had created the paper 60 years before, were largely supportive … the incoming owner had promised them their jobs were secure. The Wapping dispute was still 17 years away.

A curious ceremony marked the end of major building works at Bow Church last Sunday - when the Rector re-interred human remains from the churchyard, disturbed during the relaying of the drains.

At 11.30am last Sunday, 6 May, after the normal Communion Service, the Reverend Michael Peet conducted a short burial service to lay to rest once again the mortal remains of several local people who were originally buried here about 1800, when Bow was still a village in the Middlesex countryside east of London. In the spirit of the early 19th century, the Revd Peet used a Common Prayer Book that once belonged to the splendidly named Hamlet Harrison (Rector of St Mary’s in 1809). He also donned robes appropriate for that period.

The recent work on the roof, gutters and drains of the church, which has been supported by grants from English Heritage and the Historic Churches Preservation Trust, is the first step in a programme of restoration and refurbishment of the building in preparation for the 700th anniversary of the foundation of Bow Church in 2011 and for the Olympic Games the following year. When the games commence, St Mary’s will be a major sight on the ‘Olympic Boulevard’, which will run from the City to the Olympic site at Stratford.

Not everything turned up in the excavations was quite so venerable of course. The builders unearthed a small metal shield which first thoughts had down as a 17th century coffin plate. Scraping away the earth, they the inscription: ‘The public are requested to place waste paper and orange peel in this basket’. A rather charming relic of Victorian times (and manners), buried when the church tower was bombed in 1941.

Further reading:
* The Olympic Boulevard: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk
* The church’s history: www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?History.

Horror of the workhouse

It’s never easy being jobless, but for unemployed East Enders in Victorian times there was another insult to add to the injury of poverty. Victorian politicians - preaching the doctrines of philosopher Bentham and his creeds of utilitarianism and political economy decided that charity degraded the poor and that every person should help his or herself.

Will Crooks piece.

Bill Fishman on East End workhouses.

British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust

The East London History Society, (founded 1952) exists to further interest in the history of East London, namely the London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham. As well as the East London Record the Society publishes two newsletters a year and organizes a program of talks. It also arranges two coach outings a year.