Saucy Jacky

Five – The East End

Five – The East EndIt was an interesting walk back to my lodgings – to say the least. Not on account of any particular event that took place. Merely for all that was happening inside of me. Forgive me, if I fail utterly in reporting it clearly. I shall try.

First, I must say, I struggled physically all the way home.

I wanted to run. Charged with energy, exhilarated, I wanted to run and shout. But, of course, that was out of the question. The last thing I should or would have done at that moment would have been to draw attention to myself. Still, despite the insanity of it, my whole inner being was thrilled and wanted to shout it to the world. So I concentrated, like a child learning how to walk, like a cripple regaining his legs, like an accident victim wobbling to his feet from the depths of unconsciousness, I concentrated mind and soul on walking normally.

I wanted to stay in the shadows. The cold cruel darkness of the East End was suddenly my friend. But I knew it wise to fight that friendship as best I could. Flitting from shadow to shadow would, too, give me away. I needed to stay true to a course, a fellow out for a stroll following a long night at work. Out for a think and a breath of air.

People passing… nothing there. Always people in the streets of Whitechapel, day or night. Ignore them. Hands in pockets. Head down. Watch the pace. Walk. Don't let your good work show on your face. Much better. I felt so much better now, on my way back to my lodgings.

So much less confused.

After all the turmoil, Emma Smith – and her ilk – finally made sense in my world. I had found purpose. I'd discovered my place. Don't misunderstand, I make no claim to having moved comfortably into my future with that single event in George Yard. But I knew I had found my niche. I was at home with myself – and would make a special home for myself in this East End.

I already said, I'm a reader. And so, as I take that walk again in my mind, I offer a short but necessary history lesson:

The East End is the urban area of the Tower Hamlets (and was before it was the East End), its earliest residents owed military service to the Tower of London and the crown for their existence. While the term East End did not appear until recently, the first written reference to the area as an entity (I said I am an obsessive and attentive reader) appeared in John Strype's 1720 'Survey…', where he described London as being comprised of four parts: the City, Westminster, Southwark, and 'That Part beyond the Tower'. The bulk of my story concerns only 'That Part beyond the Tower'; specifically, the parishes of Whitechapel, Spitalfields, St George-in-the-East, and Mile End Old Town as they existed in 1888.

While there are no universally accepted boundaries to the East End, and probably never will be, it is generally thought to commence outside the eastern (ancient Roman) city walls, running with the old roads leading from Bishopsgate and Aldgate, and along and north of the River Thames; in other words, part of Central London, East London, the London Docklands, and the East End (once all marshland). The Aldgate Pump, on the edge of the city, was the symbolic start of the East End. On the river, according to some, Tower Bridge served that function. To close the loop it should be mentioned, I suppose, the various channels of the River Lea are considered to be the eastern boundary. That debate rages and, for my tale, doesn't matter a jot.

The East End has always been a no man's land.

In medieval times most trades in London-town were carried out in workshops in or around the owners' homes. By the time of the Great Fire (in 1666), many of those trades were growing to become industries. And, as many were unpleasant or noxious (they offended the posh noses), they needed to be removed from society. Examples? Certainly. Processing urine for tanning stank like hell and London's prevailing winds traveled west to east. The East End put those occupations downwind of the high and the mighty. Huge amounts of space, vast tentergrounds, were required for cloth dying and rope making. The wide open moorfields to the east were the perfect answer. The manufacture of gunpowder, and the proving of weapons, were decidedly dangerous and had to be conducted away from the masses. Lead making, soap making, china making, gilding, slaughtering and butchering; one by one, all of the unpleasant but necessary activities of city life were moved east. Likewise, the marshes along the Thames to the east and south called for the docks and their industries, the transportation, warehousing, and distribution of… Well, of everything.

Everything the toffs would deem necessary – but outside of polite society. With all this awful industry, and the awful peoples supporting it, it had always been the most productive of London-town, also the least, the lowest, the poorest, and the worst. That was the East End.

Now an even more brief history of the rabble who inhabited her. As barbarism was driven east from the city, so too went the barbarians.

The hardest work often brought the least pay. Many East Enders worked in lowly but respectable occupations; slaughterers, porters, costermongers, labourers in every dirty trade. Sadly, with the low pay also came the shiftless, the untrustworthy, and those who thrived in and contributed to their own continued poverty. Then, of course, there lived and worked the criminal class.

When the filthy southeast slums and rookeries, made famous by Charles Dickens, were demolished in 1827, for the construction of St Katharine Docks, over 11,000 port workers and their families were displaced (without compensation). What choice did they have but to create new slums in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. More overcrowding, more disease, more criminality, with a healthy dose of bitterness.

A major theme of the East End has always been migration (from within) and immigration (from without). The rural poor flooded in from all over England, while foreigners slammed the shore from Europe. The Huguenot refugees swamped Spitalfields in the 17th century. Then came the Irish weavers. Then the Ashkenazi Jews. Now the Russian and Polish Jews. In the past twenty years so many Jews arrived that over 150 synagogues had been built.

The population of the East End greatly increased during the 19th century. House building could not keep pace. This influx of peoples only added to the notorious deep poverty and the overall misery; and helped to contribute to the social upheaval. The immigrant inspired socialist riots of Bloody Sunday the previous years. The strike of the Bryant and May matchgirls over working conditions. The constant strikes by the dock labourers. The trade union uprisings. Any wonder Londoners viewed the residents of the East End with fascination and fright?

Do-gooders moved in with feigned concern – to steal the farthings from dead men's eyes. With organisations like Oxford House and Tonybee Hall masquerading at helping, encouraging university students to experience the slums, to live there, to work to alleviate the misery, while pushing their social and political agendas on a half-million people willing to sing for their suppers. Poverty made for a receptive audience.

True civility reached periodically into the darkness. A committee to promote 'Cleanliness among the Poor' (in 1844) built a laundry and bathhouse in Glasshouse Yard, East Smithfield. In three years, at a penny a wash or a penny a bath, the facilities were serving over 4,000 people per annum. That great success led to an Act of Parliament encouraging other East End districts to construct like-centres. But the fingers of those helping hands were often bitten and, while many slum residents desired cleanliness, many more were happy to stay filthy.

William Booth organized his 'Christian Revival Society' (in 1865), preaching in a tent erected in Thomas Street. His mission to help the poor grew and, in August of 1878, Booth's 'Salvation Army' came into being at a meeting in Whitechapel Road. Occasionally a barbarian or two were rescued, but it was always a battle. God was in the East End, but so was his adversary.

Dubliner Thomas Barnardo came to London Hospital in 1866 to train as a medical missionary to China. Soon after, a cholera epidemic swept the East End. Three thousand died. Families fell destitute. Thousands of orphans were enslaved in factories or forced to beg for bread in the streets. Many slept there as well. China would wait. Barnardo stayed in England and, in 1867, started a 'Ragged School' to help educate the little bastards. He opened a home for boys three years later. When one died after being turned away (no room at the inn), the policy became 'No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission'.

It wasn't all gloom. The do-gooders had made some progress. Novelist Besant's dream of a concert hall for the downtrodden to hold fêtes and dances, his 'Palace of Delight', had in one form or another met and married philanthropist Currie's notion of an East End 'People's Palace'. Subscriptions were sold, trusts robbed, and acreage secured on the Mile End Road. Victoria herself had come down from her thrown to christen the resulting 'Queen's Hall' last year. But that's what it was, a hall. The 'palace' didn't appear, the 'people' were left out of the name, and the 'delights', like the proposed winter garden, library, swimming pool, and gymnasium failed to materialize. That's the rabble.

Now for the coppers who protect them.

There were no police in London before the 1750s. Crime was punished, and social order kept, by local magistrates and volunteer parish constables backed by government militias. Paid constables were introduced by 1792; they were few and their authority yet derived from magistrates. These organized crime fighters had nothing to do with the protection of the citizenry or their personal property. They existed solely to protect the docks.

England was an island, London its capital. From earliest times, the welfare of the city and country depended upon the importation and exportation of goods via the docks. The only labour that mattered to authority was that which supported those cargo shipments. The only crime that mattered was that which threatened same. It made sense the first coppers in England, formed in 1798, were the Marine Police Force (based in Wapping High Street) to prevent the looting of ships anchored in the Pool of London and the lower reaches of the River Thames. Beyond the river, and particularly in the slums, crime was a personal problem.

The regular coppers, as we know them today, didn't come about until 1829 when the Metropolitan Police Force was formed under the direction of Sir Robert Peel. Hence the terms used throughout the eastern districts to refer to the constables on foot patrol; bobbies and peelers.

The Met was now a force of a thousand men; seventeen divisions, each with its own superintendent ordering about four plod inspectors, sixteen sergeants and, obviously, one-seventeenth of the total bobbies (or peelers) to pound the pavement. Each and every one, at the time of their recruitment, under thirty-five years of age, at least five foot seven, well built, literate (if not well-read), and of good character. All organized to keep watch of the streets within eleven kilometers of Charing Cross.

Financed as they were by a levy on ratepayers, the coppers were always widely disliked. And, it goes without saying, it took the force another twenty-plus years for their patrols to reach the dark and scary streets of the East End.

The Metropolitan Police formed a 'Dockyard Division' for Thames River shore patrols in 1841, a Department of Detectives in 1842 (later the Criminal Investigations Department), and 'J' Division in Bethnal Green in 1865. That's law and order.

Now for the real problem.

One of the greatest (by which I mean largest) industries in the East End, servicing the downtrodden workers of the district and, especially, the seamen moored off the Pool of London, was prostitution. For over two hundred years that abomination was tolerated. But in this modern 19th century, attitudes needed to change. I was not alone. William Acton described whores as a 'horde of human tigresses who swarm the pestilent dens by the riverside'. The Society for the Suppression of Vice estimated over 1800 prostitutes between Houndsditch, Whitechapel, and Ratcliffe; and nearly a thousand more between Mile End, Shadwell and Blackwall. (Who could count the whores in the Spitalfields rookeries?)

The social reformers called them victims; blamed their circumstances, lack of a welfare state, high death rates of men in dangerous low-class jobs leaving destitute wives and daughters. Some of which was true. But when the women choose, of their own free will, to bathe their struggles in alcohol – they forfeited all rights to consideration.

Society had attempted to repair the w***e problem. Religious reformers introduced 'Seamen's Missions' to the docks to see to seafarer's needs while helping to save them from the temptations of women and drink. The passage of the Contagious Diseases Prevention Act (in 1864) allowed the coppers to pull the whores off the street and hold them in hospital. But the formation of a Ladies National Association (by agitating feminists) led to the repeal of the act two years ago, once more setting the drunk and diseased women free upon unsuspecting males.

That's where I come in. The East End was the machine that made the City of London live. The East End did not live itself. It got by, it survived, by hook or by crook, by sweat, by tears. For some… by blood. Like everybody else in London's East End, I'd been forced to find my niche. Now that I had made a start, I had no choice but to carry on.