An East End Legacy

Essays in Memory of William J Fishman

Colin Holmes, Anne J Kershen, Colin Holmes, Anne J Kershen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317301141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Fascisme et totalitarisme

An East End Legacy is a memorial volume for William J Fishman, whose seminal works on the East End of London in the late nineteenth century have served as a vital starting point for much of the later work on the various complex web of relations in that quarter of the capital.

A variety of leading scholars utilise the insight of Fishman's work to present a wide range of insights into the historical characters and events of the East End. The book's themes include local politics; anti-alienism, anti-Semitism and war; and culture and society. In pursuing these topics, the volume examines in great depth the social, political, religious and cultural changes that have taken place in the area over the past 120 years, many of which remain both significant and relevant. In addition, it illustrates East London's links with other parts of the world including Europe and America and those territories "beyond the oceans."

Thisbook will prove valuable reading for researchers and readers interested in Victorian and twentieth century British history, politics and culture.

1
FROM EAST END 1888 TO EAST END 2016
A Cartographic and Demographic Journey in the Life of an Inner London Borough

Anne J. Kershen

This chapter was inspired by Bill Fishman’s literary excursion into the turbulent year of 1888 in his tour de force, East End 1888: A Year in a London Borough among the Labouring Poor.¹

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The themes that Bill Fishman wove to produce the tapestry that is East End 1888 are timeless and yet specific to the period in question. It was the severity of the conditions and the social and political reactions to the East End of 1888 that began the processes of change – and eventual amelioration – for those whom E.P. Thompson categorised as the “losers” of history.² The issues and images that created “the overall picture of life among the labouring poor of East London”³ more than a century and a quarter ago, are just as pertinent halfway through the second decade of the twenty-first century as they were then. Inequity in the provision of housing and extremes of overcrowding, the presence of a large migrant population, local and national politics, high levels of unemployment, the exploitation of vulnerable members of the local work force and the fictionalisation of the East End – 1888 or 2016? This is not to suggest that the meanness and bleakness which was life for the poor in Tower Hamlets at the end of the nineteenth century is exactly replicated one hundred and twenty-eight years on. Rather than eradicated, time has changed the constituents.

Fishman devoted his book to the nine themes which enabled him to paint the portrait of what today is the area of London known as the Borough of Tower Hamlets.⁴ It is impossible in one chapter to follow the course of all nine through the following years; rather I have chosen to focus principally on the cartographic and demographic records relating to the Borough in order to emphasise the continuity as well as the changes that have taken place in the East End.

Before exploring the East End in the years beyond 1888, one needs to consider the geographic and linguistic parameters of the East End and East London; locations and designations which are frequently interchanged and considered by some as coterminous. The East End is now commonly accepted to be the area lying within the boundaries of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, though some contend its spread is wider, extending to Hackney, Shoreditch, Hoxton and even parts of Newham. In contrast, using a much smaller parameter, Fishman, in his The Streets of East London focused on Whitechapel – “the East End in the East End.”⁵ The area which by the mid-nineteenth century had become known as the East End, evolved from the cluster of hamlets which had, centuries earlier, grown up on the outer edge of the eastern boundary of the City of London; established by those who did not fulfil the required conditions of citizenship but serviced the needs of those who did. Over the centuries the hamlets expanded and fused to become one “place” – the East End. Proximity to the capital’s heartland led to the area’s becoming a first point of settlement for immigrants and refugees and a pattern of immigrant settlement was established by Huguenots and Jews from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. By the close of the nineteenth century the East End was considered by outsiders to be both exotic and hazardous; in the eyes of some analogous with the African Jungle. Writing of the time he spent there in 1902, the author Jack London recounted having been told, “You don’t want to go down there … there are places where a man’s life isn’t worth tu’pence.” It was, according to London, in its darkest corners, an “abyss.”⁶

Today’s East London was spawned in the early eighteenth century by the growth of Britain’s industry and empire. The docks, the railways, ship building and light industry all spread eastward from the City of London, far beyond the limits of the East End. In 1963 Greater London was formally created an administrative county.⁷ By the close of the twentieth century Greater London had expanded well beyond its original boundaries and East London became too large to consider as a single entity. Sub-regions were established and the northern area of East London became a sub-region, one of the five within Greater London, as designated in the 2011 London Plan. The northern sub-region currently extends over an area which covers the boroughs of Barking & Dagenham, City of London, Hackney, Havering, Newham, Redbridge, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest. It is a far cry from the East End where Bill Fishman grew up during the 1920s and 1930s.

Whilst we can clearly define both the East End and East London spatially, linguistically the task is far harder. In the minds of some, the “cockney” is synonymous with the East Ender, for others the cockney is a true working-class Londoner, born and bred within the sound of Bow Bells in London’s Cheapside, having, as Gareth Stedman Jones explained, “a metropolitan pattern of speech, a species of humour and repartee associated with street markets and East End pubs.”⁸ Thus we must acknowledge the confusion associated with any attempt to tie the “cockney” by specific spatial boundaries, to the East End. The label Cockney is believed to have been derived from the usage of the term “Cock’s Eggs,” the derisive name given by rural people to Londoners. By the nineteenth century the appellation cockney and the use of the cockney language was considered to be a defining characteristic of someone who lived within five miles of St Mary-le-Bow Church. The exact location and image of the cockney has not been static. Stedman Jones suggests it was not until after the Second World War that the cockney “became firmly located in the docklands areas and the East End.”⁹ This spatial definition was reinforced in the 1960s and 1970s when television soaps such as Till Death us do Partand East Enders adopted the location. In his essay on “Cockney and the Nation,” Stedman Jones suggests that the appellation cockney was not just figuratively used to denote a contribution to musical comedy; it had a political and social dimension that, he argues, has never been fully explored.¹⁰

While the remnants of cockney remain as a spatially identifiable pattern of speech, more recently others have taken the stage. Though not specifically tied to the East End, “Multicultural London English” has emerged from the capital’s migrant population. Those whose home languages have their roots in different countries and continents, for example, the Caribbean, African, Indian and Bangladeshi, have created a creolised way of speech, one which heralds a distinct and important type of community language change. The East End input being from the Bengali community whose presence in Tower Hamlets, as will be shown below, is significant.¹¹ The geographic spread of East London has also had a linguistic impact, and a new pattern of “language” emerged in the 1980s – Estuary English.¹² Here again East London has enfolded the East End, this time linguistically.

Cartography and Demography

One of the celebrated characteristics of Bill Fishman’s historiographical writing was the way in which he put meat on the bones of the people and places he wrote about. His descriptive passages brought the streets of the East End to life. In order to appreciate the changing nature of those streets and the population of East London, we need to consult the maps and demographic data that illustrate the evolution of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets over the past one hundred and twenty-eight years.

Cartography

The closing decades of the nineteenth century were ones during which, rather than accept poverty as a fact of life, early social scientists began to investigate its causes and effects. One of those was Charles Booth who sought, not to determine how “things come to be as they are,” but rather to show “how things are” and, by so doing, provide grassroots-based aids for social reform.¹³ One of those aids was his maps of poverty, the first of which appeared in 1889;¹⁴ it covered the East End, at that time an area deemed to be one of the poorest places in England. Booth’s Map of Poverty, produced in collaboration with the map maker George Arkell, colour-coded the streets of East London in gradations of wealth and poverty through a spectrum of colours descending from yellow/orange to black. Yellow conveyed an aura of wealth, indicating the upper-middle class; however, there was little, if any, of it visible in the East End. In contrast, the profusion of black and dark blue which coloured the streets at the western end of Tower Hamlets, created what the Manchester Guardian called, “a physical chart of sorrow, suffering and crime.”¹⁵ Booth’s allocation of colours provided map readers with an instant graphic representation of the levels and volume of poverty in the East End. It was a visual, and in terms of poverty, shocking rhetoric. Black was used to represent the lowest class; vicious semi-criminal, “people living the life of savages.” Dark blue denoted the very poor, in chronic want, whilst light blue signified those designated as living on the edge of Booth’s twenty-one shillings a week poverty line – in reality they came within an income level of between eighteen to twenty-one shillings a week. The 1889 Map of Poverty was not the first map to alert the public, and more importantly politicians, to contemporary social hazards. John Snow’s cholera map of 1854 graphically revealed the correlation of cholera cases to a dubious water pump in the St James district of Westminster.¹⁶ But, significantly, Booth’s was the first to draw attention to the inequities – and as some saw it threat – of late nineteenth-century society in a location which was only a stone’s throw from the centres of government, finance and the Crown.

Booth’s map provides us with a cartographical starting point from which to explore Bill Fishman’s East End of 1888 and beyond. Booth’s survey of the East End and the Descriptive Map of London Poverty which accompanied his two-volume Life and Labour of the People of London, was published in 1889 and concentrated solely on the East End.¹⁷ The map was revised and extended ten years later to accompany his far more extensive nine-volume second edition.¹⁸ By comparing and contrasting the 1889 and 1899 maps of the East End we can begin to appreciate the changes that took place in that one decade. The later map reveals that the area originally coloured black and dark blue around Flower and Dean and Thrawl Streets in 1889 was now coloured pink,¹⁹ indicating that the newly built Rothschild Buildings, which had replaced the labyrinth of rookeries that previously covered those streets, was now occupied by residents in receipt of a regular wage, the latter a prerequisite of occupying a flat in The Buildings. The inhabitants were accordingly classified at a higher level of society. The 1899 map also shows the Boundary Estate, the nation’s first council estate, which was in the throes of being built. Here again there is a significant change. What had been one of the most notorious slums in London, the Old Nichol, the rookery portrayed in East Ender Arthur Morrison’s book, A Child of the Jago (1896), had metamorphos...