1. HARRIET SALISBURY
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If you look at a map, you will see that the Thames in the
West End has bridges crossing it at regular intervals. From
Battersea up to Tower Bridge, the focus is on keeping the flow
of people and traffic moving back and forth over the river.
Corralled into embankments in the nineteenth century, the
western Thames is harnessed to flow swiftly and neatly
through its designated course in central London, creating
pleasing backdrops for scheduled monuments. Beyond Tower
Bridge, the river seems to wriggle free of constraints, twisting
into its signature loop around the Isle of Dogs, after which it
starts to swell; wild, wide and open. It is no longer an easily
fordable water feature. With no linking bridges, the far side of
the river ceases to appear close, like the other side of the road;
it looks more like another country.This is not a river for pedes-
trian crossings (at least, not until the arrival of technology that
could bore tunnels underneath the river in the nineteenth
century), it is a river for boats, a major artery carrying traffic
to the heart of London, with the convenience of bridges aban-
doned to the cause of the all-important river traffic.
When England began amassing its empire, any ship bring-
ing dutiable imports into London had to unload at one of the
twenty legal quays authorised by Elizabeth I between the
centre of London and Tower Bridge; these were later supple-
mented by sufferance quays further east, and on the south
bank of the river. London’s earliest docks were for building
and repairing ships rather than unloading cargo, but eventu-
ally a system of enclosed docks was built – largely to prevent
huge losses of revenue through theft. In 1800, the value of
floating property on the river was estimated at £75 million,
with river pirates, night plunderers, scuffle hunters, mudlarks
and a host of other criminals making off with easy pickings as
ships moored in the river waiting for a space on the limited
quays. The West India Dock Act of 1799 authorised two par-
allel docks which sat across the top of the loop that almost
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2. THE WAR ON OUR DOORSTEP
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encircles the Isle of Dogs; this was followed by the London
Docks at Wapping, where wine, port, dried fruit, ivory, wool,
spices and tobacco were stored in warehouses behind high
walls, and the East India Dock, where valuable goods such as
silks and carpets were sped swiftly to safe warehouses at
Cutler Street in the City, along the newly built Commercial
Road. As the nineteenth century progressed, these enclosed
docks were supplemented by the extension of the Surrey
Docks, St Katharine Dock, the Royals (Victoria and Albert),
and Millwall Docks. This both enabled and fuelled an explo-
sion in river-borne cargo, which led to London becoming the
world’s greatest and busiest port. London’s East End was right
at the heart of this great engine of commerce.
All alone I went a-walking by the London Docks one day,
For to see the ships discharging in the basins where they
lay,
And the cargoes that I saw there, they were every sort of
kind,
Every blessed brand of merchandise a man could bring
to mind;
There were things in crates and boxes, there was stuff in
bags and bales,
There were tea-chests wrapped in matting, there were
Eastern-looking frails,
There were balks of teak and greenheart, there were
stacks of spruce and pine,
There was cork, and frozen carcasses, and casks of
Spanish wine,
There was rice and spice and coco-nuts, and rum enough
was there
For to warm all London’s innards up and leave a drop
to spare.
Nitrates by Cicely Fox Smith
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3. HARRIET SALISBURY
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Cicely Fox Smith’s 1920 poem conjures up some idea of
the extent and importance of London’s docks in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. It is hard to imagine
now, when office blocks and airplanes punctuate skies that
once bristled with masts, and the few remaining pieces of
dockside machinery look like modern art sculptures reflected
in the still waters. But the 1901 census listed more than three
hundred ships in the various London docks (the census
counted only ships with crew on board). The fifty ships in the
Pool of London and St Katharine Docks included four-masted
barques that plied the wool trade from Australia, and ships
that brought Norwegian ice to London. In the East and West
India Docks were fifty-six large vessels, one of which laid the
cables under the Atlantic for the Eastern Telegraph Company,
as well as Thames pleasure steamers laid up for the winter.
Among the seventy craft in the Surrey and Millwall Docks
were vessels that carried Jewish immigrants from the Baltic,
and Scandinavian timber boats from Norway. Referencing
the poem above, the largest was a four-masted steel barque,
the Lindfield. She transported nitrates mined in the deserts of
Chile, initially for use in making fertiliser; later, during the
First World War, in the manufacture of the explosives that
would have such a devastating effect on the East End. More
than a hundred ships waited in the Royal Victoria and Royal
Albert Docks (the final Royal, the King George V Dock, was
yet to be built), including the Lady Jocelyn, built for East
India trade, then employed to carry troops and emigrants,
then refrigerated cargo, before finally, in the dock strikes,
becoming a floating barracks for strikebreakers. In 1901,
there were only twenty-nine ships further downriver at the
Tilbury Dock – its day was yet to come.
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The Voices of the East End
The War on our Doorstep is the story of the East End as told
by East Enders; a story of a camaraderie born of poverty and
hardship, of children who forged lifelong allegiances to each
other and to the streets where they grew up. It tells how this
close-knit community hung together through the heaviest
aerial bombardment Britain has ever seen during the six years
of the Second World War and how they were betrayed by the
promise of progress when successive well-meaning policies,
plans and schemes finished off the destruction that the Blitz
had started.
The pages to follow are packed with voices from those very
streets. They were recorded by a variety of oral history proj-
ects, now held by the Museum of London, some of them
dating back more than thirty years, to a time when the avail-
ability of simple, affordable recording equipment meant that
academics and study groups could tape and preserve memo-
ries that would otherwise have been lost. This gave labour and
social historians a tool for amassing information about groups
and individuals – particularly women, the poor and members
of minority social and ethnic groups –whose accounts were
often left out of traditional written histories.. These tapes,
either transcribed or re-recorded to preserve the precious orig-
inals, form a valuable archive of memory. To put on a pair of
earphones and listen to the distinctive cadences, rhythms and
laughter of someone born in the 1890s is an extraordinary
experience, and one that I hope will be recreated as the pages
of this book reveal the many and varied personalities whose
voices I have been privileged to encounter.
Drawn from a number of sources, the original interviews had
a variety of agendas, often to do with patterns of work or living
conditions in particular areas. Few of the interviewees were
recorded for the purposes of providing a neat comprehensive
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5. HARRIET SALISBURY
xxvii
history of the East End. This has meant that in arranging the
material, some considerations and constraints had to be taken
into account. As so many interviewees had vivid memories of
their childhoods in the early years of the twentieth century, Part
One of this book, entitled‘Life in the East End before the Second
World War’ is full of childhood memories from home life,
through school, to the working lives of young girls and appren-
tices and their subsequent journeys into the wider world.
Many aspects of these early experiences remained the same
from the later decades of the nineteenth century right through
to the 1930s, interrupted only by the strange, vivid and terri-
fying events of the First World War which seemed to prefigure
the Blitz, with Zeppelin air raids, blackouts, rationing and
shelters. The struggle against poverty and oppression, and the
fight for better pay and conditions runs through this period of
the East End’s history,from theVictorian era of the Matchgirls’
Strike to the General Strike of 1926, until a greater enemy
appeared in the form of Hitler and his territorial ambitions.
When considering the Second World War and the East End,
the question that fascinated me was not ‘What happened?’,
but ‘Who did it happen to?’. We have all heard of the Blitz
spirit but there are varying explanations of how this phrase
came about. It has been attributed to contemporary govern-
ment propaganda and to later wishful nostalgia, as well as to
a genuine and spontaneous reaction to the experience of
having your family, home and neighbourhood bombed. With
a clearer idea of who the people of the East End were, and
where and how they lived, I hope readers will be able to draw
their own conclusions about the hearts and minds of East
Enders during those terrible years.
The changes that took place in the East End may have
begun with Hitler’s bombs but they continued for many years,
influenced by politics, labour relations, modern ideas about
architecture and planning and the very basic human desire for
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