London: The Biography

But other visitors saw other realities. The Czechoslovakian playwright Karel Capek, observing the East End at first hand in the early twentieth century, suggested that in “this overwhelming quantity it no longer looks like an excess of human beings, but like a geological formation … it was piled up from soot and dust.” It is an impersonal force of dullness, the total aggregate of labour and suffering among the soot of ships and factories. It is a “geological formation,” perhaps, to the extent that the area itself seems to emanate waves of frustration and enervation. At the turn of the nineteenth century Mrs. Humphry Ward noticed the monotony of the East End in terms of “long lines of low houses-two storeys always, or two storeys and a basement-of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same smoke, every doorknocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in the same way, and the same corner ‘public’ on either side, flaming in the hazy distance.” George Orwell noticed it, too, in 1933 when he complained that the territory between Whitechapel and Wapping was “quieter and drearier” than the equivalent poor areas of Paris.

This is a familiar refrain, but it tends to come from those upon the outside. The autobiographical reminiscences of East Enders themselves do not dwell upon monotony or hardship, but upon the sports and clubs and markets, the local shops and local “characters,” which comprised each neighbourhood. As one old resident of Poplar put it in a recent history of the area, The East End Then and Now, edited by W.G. Ramsey, “It never occurred to me that my brothers and sisters and I were underprivileged, for what you never have you never miss.” This is the experience of the East End, and of all other impoverished parts of London, for those who live in them; the apparent deprivation and monotony are never realised, because they do not touch the inner experience of those who are meant to be affected by them. Any emphasis upon the uniformity or tedium of the East End has in any case to be seriously modified by the constantly remarked “merriment” or “cheerfulness” of its inhabitants. There was “a valiant cheeriness full of strength,” Blanchard Jerrold remarked after reciting a litany of sorrowful mysteries to be found upon the eastern streets, “everywhere a readiness to laugh.” He also observed that “The man who has a ready wit will employ his basket, while the dull vendor remains with his arms crossed.”

Thus emerged the figure of the Cockney, once the native of all London but in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries identified more and more closely with the East End. This was the character heard by V.S. Pritchett with “whining vowels and ruined consonants” and “the hard-chinned look of indomitable character.” The creation of that chirpy and resourceful stereotype can in some measure be ascribed to another contrast with East End monotony, the music hall. The conditions of life in Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and elsewhere may have predisposed their inhabitants to violent delights; the penny gaffs and the brightly illuminated public houses are testimony to that, as well as the roughness and coarseness which were intimately associated with them. But it is also significant that the East End harboured more music halls than any other part of London-Gilbert’s in Whitechapel, the Eastern and the Apollo in Bethnal Green, the Cambridge in Shoreditch, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square, the Queen’s in Poplar, the Eagle in the Mile End Road, and of course the Empire in Hackney, are just the most prominent among a large number which became as characteristic of the East End as the sweatshops or the church missions. By the mid-nineteenth century, the area roughly inclusive of the present borough of Tower Hamlets harboured some 150 music halls. It is perhaps appropriate that Charles Morton, universally if inaccurately known as “Father of the Halls” because of his establishment of the Canterbury in 1851, was born in Bethnal Green. In one sense the eastern region of the city was simply reaffirming its ancient identity. It has been mentioned before that two of the earliest London theatres, the Theatre and the Curtain, had been erected in the sixteenth century upon the open ground of Shoreditch; the whole region outside the walls became a haven for popular entertainment of every kind, from tea-gardens to wrestling matches and bear-baiting. So the music halls of the East End represent another continuity within the area, equivalent to its poor housing and to its “stink industries.”