London History

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!’

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

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.

Is truth stranger than fiction? The tale of ‘The King of Lampedusa’ would suggest so. The play, the story of East End orphan Sydney Cohen and his capture of the tiny Italian island, started a record breaking run for a Yiddish play when it opened at the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre in Commercial Road in the 1940s. It was a true story, but no Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared to make it up.

20-year-old Syd was working as a tailor’s cutter when he was called up to the RAF in 1941. He began his flying career at North Weald in Essex, before moving on to Malta. And it was from there that he was sent to search for survivors from a German plane that had, reportedly, crashed into the Mediterranean.

Cohen’s compass started playing up and, unwittingly, he struck a course directly away from Malta. Fuel began to run low. ‘We had to make for the nearest land,’ he remembered later. It turned out to be Lampedusa, a tiny speck of an island covering just 25 square kilometres of the Mediterranean. Belonging to Italy it’s far closer to Africa in fact, lying 205km south of Sicily and 113km east of Tunisia. In 1941 it was the base for a dispirited battalion of Italian soldiers.

‘As we came down on a ropey landing ground we saw a burnt hangar and burnt aircraft around us,’ Syd recalled. ‘A crowd of Italians came out to meet us and we put our hands up to surrender but then we saw they were all waving white sheets shouting, “No, no - We surrender.” The whole island was surrendering to us!’

An unnerved Syd put on a brave face and asked to see the commander. As he entered the commandant’s villa an air raid began. ‘Everybody suddenly dashed from the room. I concluded that the nerves of my hosts were a bit jagged! They asked me to return to Malta and inform the authorities of their offer to surrender. They gave me a scrap of paper with a signature on it.’

Sgt Cohen took on fuel, fixed his compass and the crew set off home to Malta, where he delivered the surrender document, confirming the capitulation of the 4300 Italian troops.

The story quickly spread - it was great morale boosting stuff back home in the East End. ‘London Tailor’s Cutter is now King of Lampedusa’, trumpeted the headline in the News Chronicle, while the Sunday Pictorial gave Syd a front page headline on 13 June, proclaiming ‘Lampedusa Gives In to Sgt. Cohen’. Young Syd his lightweight Swordfish biplane and a small crew had instigated the first step in the collapse of one of the major Axis powers. But the story was to get stranger yet.

SJ Charendorf was a Czechoslovak-American journalist and London correspondent for the ‘Jewish Morning Journal of New York’. He picked up on the popular tale doing the rounds in London and was off to wire his story back to base when he realised that Syd’s adventure would make a terrific play. Rather than continuing to the telegraph office at the Ministry of Information he headed back to his flat, whipped out a pen, and began to write ‘The King of Lampedusa’.

Syd Cohen became Sam Kagan in the play, and the orphan acquired parents and a fiancee. Otherwise the story was straight from life. In November 1943, Meir Tzelniker, the actor, producer, director and force behind the Grand Palais Yiddish theatre in Commercial Road, commissioned some music, wrote the lyrics himself and put on the play. He and daughter Anna had the lead roles and the musical had its premiere on New Year’s Eve.

The musical wasn’t a hit at first, but Charendorf was an ace at drumming up press support, and the play went on a record run. BBC Radio picked it up and broadcast (this time in English) with Sydney Tafler as Syd/Sam. Even Nazi propagandist William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) mentioned it in his nightly rants from Berlin, saying: ‘The Yids at the Grand Palais should not be laughing for much longer at the ridiculous play The King of Lampedusa because they are earmarked for a visit from the Luftwaffe.’

Syd finally saw his story in a Hebrew production at the Hamatae Theatre in Haifa at the end of 1944 when he was on leave from Malta. Life cannot imitate art with its happy endings though. Syd was flying home to a life on Civvy Street on 26 August 1946 when his plane was lost in the Straits of Dover. The King of Lampedusa was never found.

pictures:
A Fairey Swordfish similar to the one Syd would have flown
Lampedusa courtesy of Google Earth [note to subs: as long as we credit Google Earth there is NO problem using the image]

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.

East End writer and actor Marty Feldman was never going to qualify for leading man roles. With a sizeable and skewed, and manic bulging eyes, the cockney comic was strictly built for comedy. The pity is that he’s nowadays mainly remembered for his remarkable looks, obscuring the huge contribution he made to British radio and TV writing from the 1950s on.

Martin Alan Feldman was born on 8 July 1933 in the East End, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who had travelled from Kiev to Whitechapel. Youthful enthusiasms included boxing and playing the trumpet. He left school at 15 with a broken nose and ambitions as a jazz musician. These came to nothing, and he drifted into a succession of dead-end jobs including a messenger boy for an advertising agency, a kitchen porter. There are extraordinary stories from these years. On has him being deported from Paris for vagrancy; another working as a greyhound track tipster; a third has him being introduced to poet Dylan Thomas, who advised Marty that he had writing talent. Whatever the truth of the stories, by the early fifties he was in London, working in variety. He ventured into comedy as part of the Morris, Marty and Mitch trio, who made their TV debut on BBC’s ‘Showcase’ in 1955. But it was as a writer that he would taste real success.

The year before he had teamed up as a writer with Barry Took, who he had met working in variety, the prolific pair contributing scripts to TV and radio hits of the time including The Army Game. Marty also worked on the huge radio (and then TV) hit Educating Archie with Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney (later to have huge smashes with On The Buses and The Rag Trade).

During the 1960s, Feldman was astonishingly prolific and diverse. As well as conventional sitcoms, such as the Army Game spin-off Bootsie and Snudge, starring another East End favourite in the shape of Alfie Bass, he was collaborating with Took on the innuendo-laden Round The Horne, providing superb material for performers Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick as the outrageously camp Julian and Sandy. The writers drew heavily on ‘polari’ (or gay back slang) for dialogue. At the time homosexuality was still illegal in Britain. He was chief writer on the satirical Frost Report, which mixed the new generation of Oxbridge comics (including future members of Monty Python and the Goodies), with more established writers such as Barry Cryer, Frank Muir and Feldman. The famed ‘class’ sketch starring John Cleese and the Two Ronnies was co-written by Marty.

By now, Feldman was moving away from the mainstream, more attracted by the surreal antics of his younger cohorts. He collaborated with Cleese and Graham Chapman on ‘At Last the 1948 Show’ in 1967. The show saw an unwilling Feldman back on screen too, where he was an immediate hit. The manic eyes were the result of an operation to correct a thyroid complaint, and he used them to great comic effect. The next year, the BBC gave him his own sketch show, ‘Marty’, which he co-wrote with Took. A succession of hit vehicles followed and Feldman proved popular in Europe too, The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine winning the Golden Rose at Montreux in 1972.

He was emboldened to move into films, and despite the flop of this first (British) movie, ‘Every Home Should Have One’ (written with Took and Denis Norden) he pursued a career in America with much more success - initially at least. Mel Brooks used him superbly in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Silent Movie’ (Feldman was often most effective silently mugging to the camera). But ‘The Last Remake of Beau Geste’ in 1977 and ‘In God We Trust’ in 1980, both written and directed by Marty, flopped badly. You don’t often get a third chance in Hollywood, and Feldman returned to performing, writing and directing for TV.

His last role was as ‘Gilbert’ in the movie ‘Yellowbeard’ penned by Graham Chapman and Peter Cook and with a mix of Pythons, established British actors such as James Mason and Michael Hordern, plus American comics Cheech and Chong. On location, he told a journalist that he was ‘too old to die young, and too young to grow up’. A week later, he died in his hotel room of a massive coronary, brought on by shellfish poisoning. Leaving behind Lauretta, his wife of 23 years, he was just 49.

The career of East End actor Stephen Lewis is defined in the popular memory by two long-running parts. To lovers of gentle, Sunday evening comedy he is Smiler in Last of the Summer Wine (the joke is that, no, he doesn’t smile very much). Thirty something years ago, those same viewers knew him as Inspector Blake in On The Buses (catchphrase ‘I ‘ate you Butler’) delivered at least once per episode to hapless, skiving bus driver Stan Butler - fellow East End comic actor Reg Varney.

It’s not surprising that the two roles have obscured Lewis’s other work - On The Buses racked up an extraordinary 74 episodes, over seven series in just four years from 1969-1973; when ITV had a hit in those days they weren’t shy about exploiting it. And he’s served 17 years so far in Last of the Summer Wine - though that makes him a relative newcomer in a show that’s been running since 1973.

Stephen Lewis has a prouder and more diverse theatrical pedigree though. In the late fifties and early sixties, the Londoner was a merchant seaman working out of the East End docks. His shore leave took him to the Theatre Royal Stratford, home to the explosively creative (and often very difficult) Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop.

Littlewood famously encouraged improvisation, loathing the actorly sheen which performers would apply to their performances. Work by the group included the British première of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children (1955), which she directed and in which she also played the lead. Lionel Bart came in with Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be; there was Oh! What a Lovely War (1963),and A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney (1958). Much of the work ended up on TV and many actors followed, becoming household faces (and occasionally names): Yootha Joyce, Brian Murphy (the pair better known as George and Mildred), Barbara Windsor, Glynn Edwards and Harry H Corbett.

Part of the deal at Stratford was that the audience were invited to discuss the play with the actors afterwards - no room for fragile thespian egos here. On one occasion, at the bar, Littlewood heard Lewis criticising the play. ‘If you’re so clever, why not do it yourself,’ she replied, a typical Littlewood ploy. Lewis took the bait, but infuriated her by returning to sea afterwards. ‘I had no intention of being an actor’ he explains.

But he returned to Stratford with a friend a year or two later, and was invited to have another go. This time the bug bit. He stayed with the company as they went into the West End with ‘The Hostage’ and ‘Mrs Wilson’s Diary’. There was no going back to sea now.

His real claim to fame came in 1960 when he wrote Sparrers Can’t Sing for the company (though an important thing to remember here is that all the Workshop’s pieces were improvised, so the concept of playwright is somewhat fluid). The piece moved from the Theatre Royal into the West End and then, in 1963, was made into a movie. Littlewood worked hard at keeping things real despite the pressures to produce a commercial success. The film was made in location in Limehouse, Stepney and Bethnal Green, with the Kray brothers appearing on set. Scenes shot in pubs and cafes took the rich local mix of rhyming slang, Yiddish and unadultered cockney accents and put it straight on screen. A minor concession was to retitle the movie ‘Sparrows Can’t Sing’ but it was all a bit too real for the New York Times who remarked ‘This isn’t a picture for anyone with a logical mind or an ear for language. The gabble of cockney spoken here is as incomprehensible as the reasoning of those who speak it.’

Lewis worked his way through the 1960s in a succession of minor theatre and TV roles, his hangdog ordinary bloke looks seeing him cast as a succession of caretakers, lorry drivers, servicemen and police officers. But it was with his casting as Inspector Blake in On The Buses (alongside fellow actor from ‘Sparrows’ Bob Grant) that he came to fame. Lewis and Grant went on to write several episodes of the sitcom. Three feature films accompanied the series, and when the idea eventually ran out of steam, LWT squeezed out a spin-off series, Don’t Drink the Water, with Lewis as Blakey retiring abroad.

Art imitated life as he appeared in the movie The Krays in 1990 but comedy was always the perfect situation for his gloomy looks, with roles in One Foot in the Grave and 2point4 Children (as a driving instructor, naturally) among others. The sitcom Oh, Doctor Beeching saw Lewis as a lugubrious railway worker in 1995 … by which time he’d already started his long stint in the Yorkshire Dales.

A CONSERVATIVE councillor hoping to be the next London Mayor has submitted a planning application to replace Ken Livingstone’s house and garden with flats. Bromley Councillor Simon Fawthrop submitted the application to highlight issues with Ken Livingstone’s planning policy.