London: The Biography

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.