Yet in another sense the halls represented the extension and intensification of East End life in the nineteenth century. Many emerged and prospered in the 1850s-the Eagle Tea Gardens, the Effingham and Wilton’s are of that period-by including burletta performances as well as variety acts and orchestral music. Among those who played here were the “lions comiques,” Alfred Vance and George Leybourne, who sang such Cockney songs as “Slap Bang, Here We Are Again” and “Champagne Charlie.” Vance in particular was known for his “coster” songs written in a “flash” or Cockney dialect, among them “Costermonger Joe” and “The Chickaleary Cove” where humour and bravado are easily mingled. Such songs as these became the folk songs of the East End, animated by all the pathos and diversity of each neighbourhood, charged with the circumstances and realities of the entire area. They remain powerful because they are filled with a real sense of place, as tangible as Artillery Lane or Rotherhithe Tunnel. When Charles Coborn sang “Two Lovely Black Eyes” at the Paragon in Mile End, he recalled “parties of girls and lads of the coster fraternity, all of a row, arm in arm, shouting out my chorus at the top of their voices.” The identification of performer and audience was paramount, so that when Lively Lily Burnand sang about the housekeeping of the poor at the Queen’s in Poplar she was touching upon a familiar subject:
Don’t forget the ha’penny on the jam jar …
The landlord’s comin’ in the mornin’
An he’s so par-ti-cu-lar …
In this instance, it was the importance of earning the halfpenny on the return of the jam jar to the shop. The common elements of privation, and poverty, were lifted into another sphere where they became touched by universal comedy and pity; thus, for a moment at least, was misery transcended. It would not be too much to claim, in fact, that the halls provided a boisterous and necessary secular form of the Mass in which the audience were themselves identified and uplifted as members of a general community.
In early twentieth-century memoirs of the East End that life is recorded with what, in retrospect, looks like the precision of all lost things. Along Poplar High Street there were, Horace Thorogood wrote in East of Aldgate, once “little shops of various shapes and heights and sizes” interspersed with small houses “with polished brass numbers on the doors.” Here might be found “a parrot-cage shop, a musical instrument shop,” and, characteristically, “rows of little one-storeyed houses standing a few feet back from the pavement behind iron railings.” In Shadwell the children went barefoot and wore rags but “that was just Irish slovenliness, they never wanted for food.” In the East End, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the public houses “were open from early morning till half-past midnight” with gin at fourpence halfpenny a quartern and “beer a penny for a half-pint. Women would come in at seven in the morning and stay till three in the afternoon.” The East End was also famous for its markets-Rosemary Lane, Spitalfields, Chrisp Street, Watney Street-when the thoroughfares “swarmed with people, and at night flared with naphtha light … you could have walked on the people’s heads all the way from Commercial Road to Cable Street.”
A fierce and protective sense of identity marked out the East End in these decades. The inhabitants of Limehouse called the people to the west those “above the bridges,” and there was a great deal of “inbreeding” which sprang from territorial loyalties. One isolated corner of Poplar, beside the Leamouth Road, in the 1920s had a population “numbering about 200 men, women and children,” according to The East End Then and Now, who were “members of no more than six families, among whom the Lammings, the Scanlans and the Jeffries were the most numerous. These families tended to marry within their own circle … the community had its own school, two pubs and a small general store.” It was noticed, too, that the Chinese residents of Pennyfields married girls from Hoxton rather than those from Poplar. “Poplarites were against mixed marriages,” according to one observer in the 1930s. It might be surmised that since Hoxton is closer to the City, and to the rest of London, it has avoided that peculiar sense of territoriality or insularity.
When East Enders became more affluent, they moved out. The clerks of the nineteenth century, for example, took advantage of the burgeoning transport system to migrate into the more salubrious areas of Chingford or Forest Gate. The population of Middlesex grew 30.8 per cent in ten years; Wembley grew by 552 per cent and Harrow by 275 per cent. Only the poor remained in the old centres of the East End, their numbers increasing as their fate grew more desperate. This in turn established precisely the sense of separation and grievance which has not yet been dissipated.
The cost of labour, in human terms, was very high. The East End tended to wake up earlier than the rest of the city, and at dawn the area became a great plain of smoking chimneys. The factories kept on coming, in search of cheap labour, and by 1951 it contained almost 10 per cent of the city’s working population. In the early years of the twentieth century, Horace Thorogood came upon one East End “cottage” under a railway where he “found a family of six living in one upper room, the window of which had to be kept closed, otherwise sparks from the trains flew in and set light to the bedclothes.”
The effect of the Second World War surpassed those few disagreeable sparks, and great swathes of the East End were destroyed; approximately 19 per cent of the built areas of Stepney, Poplar and Bethnal Green were razed. Once more the East End was adversely affected by its industrial history; the German bombers sought out the ports, and the factory areas close to the Lea Valley, as well as using the inhabitants of the East End as an “example.” It suggests the importance of the East, in the whole process of the war, that the king and queen visited Poplar and Stepney immediately after the celebrations of VE Day in May 1945. It was, perhaps, one method of controlling or ascertaining the mood of a populace which since the nineteenth century had been considered mysterious.
Even as late as 1950 whole areas were still characterised only as “bomb-sites” where strange weeds grew and where children played. A temporary housing programme authorised the construction of Nissen huts and prefabricated single-storey dwellings, but many of these prefabs were still in use more than twenty years later. There were other schemes to house the residents of the East End, not least the “Greater London Plan” of Professor Abercrombie who wished to relocate many city dwellers in satellite towns beyond the newly established Green Belt. The proposal was to disperse a large number of residents from Hackney and Stepney and Bethnal Green, yet the whole history of London suggests that such exercises in civic engineering are only partially successful. An equivalent emphasis was placed on the rebuilding and replanning of the devastated East, as if its character might be thoroughly changed. But it is impossible to destroy three hundred years of human settlement.