There was Once a Street in Bethnal Green

By Derek Houghton

Derek Houghton was born and bred in London’s East End, Bethnal Green, when horses and carts were just as predominant on its streets as motorised vehicles. It was at a time when National Health was not even a dream, or any kind of benefit existed, the only benefit available was by taking the “Means Test” (Dole Money) that most East Enders were too proud to take. Poverty was never any stranger to their doors, unemployment was rife, and the pawnshops did a roaring trade. People then could walk the streets in safety, the streets were the children’s playgrounds, where they played unhindered. As hard as times were, neighbours showed great compassion in helping each other. Each street was like a village, where everybody knew everyone else. World War II was to bring about an even stronger bond with each other. Above all, it was the love of a street – “Our Street.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398440395

Book preview

There was Once a Street in

Bethnal Green

Derek Houghton

Austin Macauley Publishers

There was Once a Street in Bethnal Green

Dedication

Copyright Information ©

Acknowledgement

Preface

Chapter One: The Beginning

Chapter Two: The Death of a Street St Peter’s Avenue. E2

Chapter Three: The Bethnal Green I Lived and Loved

Chapter Four: Street Wise

Chapter Five: Voices from a Street

Chapter Six: Picture Palaces, Bug ’Oles, Flea Pits

Chapter Seven: The Jiving Bug

Chapter Eight: Boozers and Breweries

Chapter Nine: The Evacuee

Chapter Ten: The War Came to Bethnal Green

Chapter Eleven: A Life on the Ocean Waves

Chapter Twelve: A Brief Walk Back into Our History

Dedication

To My Houghton Girls

Sheila, Arlene, Emily, Averil & Amelia

What would I do without them.

Copyright Information ©

Derek Houghton 2023

The right of Derek Houghton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398440371 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398440388 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398440395 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

I would like to give my very special thanks to the following people for contributing their time and effort. With a further thank you to the organisations and individuals who supplied me with photos and historic data to make this book possible. Many photographs contained in this book are my own, several have been provided by friends and relatives, further to this licensed copyright has also been obtained from the London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlet

Archives, Hackney Archives and the Imperial War Museum Archives

Keast (Scofield) Sheila

Kendall Doreen

In gratitude, any profit made from this book will be donated equally to Cancer Research and The British Heart Foundation.

To the best of my knowledge, and the sources of all images published in this book, permission has been requested, and licenses for copyright where appropriate have been granted.

Preface

I write of an era spanning several decades of living through the 1930s to stretching well into the 1970s in Bethnal Green’s East End, and beyond. Its past history was one of overcrowding, epidemics, starvation, lack of sanitation, and unemployment. Emblematic conditions of the time, it held its place in history as the epitome of the slums While its citizens remain just as they did then, patriotic to the core, displaying selfless acts of kindness, compassion, and loyalty towards one another in harsh impoverished times, yet remaining quick, alert, humorous and high-spirited people. It is a remarkable achievement to be applauded.

Each street had a story to tell of its characters and of the personalities who inhabited them. Regrettably, the Bethnal Green that I knew and loved, has since disappeared. Several streets and buildings have been eradicated through slum clearance and the passage of time. Thankfully, some of it still remains; a small reminder of how things were. Bethnal Green has changed considerably, both culturally and environmentally since then. However, it is still the place I have such happy memories of.

The writings and the illustrations are for the most part of the Bethnal Green that I knew. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, poverty in the East End lay at practically every threshold, and the struggles and hardships of many were no stranger. Progress and advancement are wonderful things, but they also have a downside. For now, we are left with something only to reminisce. Yet even though it was an impoverished existence of yesterday, I would gladly return to them rather than those of today. Strange as it may seem, We were a lot happier.

Chapter One

The Beginning

As far as my memory takes me, it all began in a small box-room of a three-up and a three-down terraced house in the East End of London. It was in a borough, incorporated into what has become Tower Hamlets, but to me, it will always be Bethnal Green.

That tiny box-room was where my mother, father, sister, and I slept on the floor, in a wee recess beneath a small sash-framed window looking out over the scullery’s sloping orange terra cotta tiled roof. The roof had a large glass tile situated in the centre, to give extra light into the scullery below. A small garden extended from the scullery’s walls with an adjoining outside toilet, overshadowed by a wood yard that stretched practically halfway down the lower end of St Peter’s Avenue.

In my young years, I never gave it a thought as to why we were sleeping on the floor. I never knew, or for that matter realised, that we never had a bed to sleep on. Later on, I came to the conclusion that we had been down and out, and that, it was only through the kindness and generosity of our grandparents, who had given us a place to live; when the house was already full. I learned that I had a brother Andre who died from meningitis at eighteen months. Shortly before I was born.

The lower floor of our house comprised of a parlour that grandmother kept locked, only to be opened on special occasions. That room was absolutely sacrosanct. A narrow corridor known as the passage, never the hall, and beyond the parlour was our grandparent’s bedroom. That passage led on directly into a room known as the kitchen.

God only knows why it was ever called the kitchen, since it didn’t contain one item of kitchen furniture or, for that matter, a kitchen utensil. A small framed window looked into a whitewashed brick-walled yard. Whitewashed from time to time to reflect extra light into the kitchen. The whitewash was made from crushed white hearthstone, which looked like a small piece of rock and came in two colours: either white or green. Which most East Ender’s used on their doorsteps to enhance their thresholds. The more affluent ones of the street would apply red cardinal. I considered those using red cardinal to be wealthy, as it was more expensive to buy and it appeared to look that much smarter.

The yard leading into a small picket-fenced garden had a mangle that I used to swing on its handle and, in my young devilment years, would put my cousin’s blonde plaits into its rollers and leave her there. There was also a green-painted food cabinet, known as the safe. Its door and sides were panelled in a metal gauze to keep the air flowing through. Though keeping food fresh during the summer months was not very effective. No one possessed a refrigerator in those days.

Beyond the picket fence was grandfather’s garden. When he wasn’t imbibing at his club in Pollard’s Row, or at the Shakespeare in Bethnal Green Road, I think the garden was his sanctuary. His only real interest; other than reading a newspaper. I never knew him to have read a book in his entire life. The area of his garden was paved in multi-coloured marble pieces of different shapes and sizes, that my aunts would scrub with a birch broom periodically.

It had a trellised archway in the plumb centre with a small handmade wooden figure on top, a painted man that turned a windmill each time a gust of wind blew. Most Sunday’s he would go to the Flower Market in Columbia Road, two streets away from where we lived, to replenish his plants and flowers. At weekends, it was nothing unusual to see him arrive home late in the evening three sheets in the wind.

One of my weekly visits would be to the The Oil Shop. Though that’s what we called it, it was actually a hardware shop. It stood at the corner of Warner Place and Hackney Road. It was also where we would buy the hearthstone, have our wireless accumulator charged and buy our gas mantles. That Oil Shop sold just about everything, but the kitchen sink.

Our kitchen was mainly used for eating, though for the best part it was used as a lounge. Lounge was hardly a fitting word, since no real comfort ever existed. One recess took up a whole fitted dresser, extending to yet many shelves. In order to sit beneath them, you had to bend your head, most difficult when having a conversation. The hearth contained a small blackened cast iron oven with a coal-burning grate. It was the only form of heating in the house, apart from Christmas time, when the parlour was opened, and a fire was lit.

Photo image by kind permission of Linda Wilkinson. Singer’s sewing machine shop 340 Hackney Road, and the Oil Shop, opposite Warner Place, 1900.

At the corner of Warner Place, queues formed at Temples the Tailors. No longer Singers Sewing Machine Shop. 1953.

Gas was the only form of lighting and was never used in the rooms upstairs. Coal was kept in a cupboard under the stairs. Its door was situated in the kitchen. The doors at both ends of the kitchen were heaped with clothes hanging from hooks. It was a wonder that with the weight of the clothes hanging from those doors, the doors were never pulled off their hinges.

How I hated Mondays, when the bagwash was collected from the Magnet Laundry at the corner of Warner Place and Bempton Street, and hung over the fireguard to dry. The laundry had an unusual smell when drying, and the steam rising from the damp washing always had a depressing effect on me. Grandmother’s washing seemed endless. Having such a large family, many a time I would see her standing over a metal tub in the yard, even in the depth of winter, her arms re-draw, scrubbing away on a washboard, rinsing, then putting the washing through the mangle.

They don’t make them like that anymore. Not one house on our street possessed a bathroom. Our tiny scullery had a paved stone floor, whitewashed walls, a gas stove, a stone sink with a cold-water tap and copper. It served as the bathroom, a galvanised tin bungalow bath. That throughout the week was kept hanging up on a wall in the yard, until Friday nights, when the best part of the family took a bath from the water heated from the fired copper. A handful of soda crystals were thrown into the bathwater, as every aunt or uncle stepped in. With an extra saucepan of water added from the gas stove as the bathwater became cooler.

The soap used was from my grandmother’s charlady job in the Strand. A soft dark brown oozy unperfumed substance that was used for both body and hair. For drying the body we had overused soft fibered non- absorbent laundry bag that never dried, but ran directly over the body, leaving fibres from the bags stuck to your skin. Emerging from that bath with your face inflamed by the caustic reaction from the soda.

One of our grandmother’s jobs; and she had several, was box making for the Stanley Box Company in Hackney Road. Her work involved having a pot of glue permanently on the gas stove, the stench of glue permeated all of the ground floor. Very often my sister and I had to cut the corners of those boxes until our fingers blistered. When the boxes were finished, it was our task to take them by pushchair to the Stanley Box Company in Hackney Road, obtain payment for the work and be given a new batch of work.

Grandmother informed us not to bring home pen boxes because they were too small and fiddly. We could never refuse what the box-making company gave us, resulting in us getting a telling-off when we returned home. She had two office cleaning jobs, one at Shell-Mex in the Strand, the other at the Lion Mills in Hackney Road. I would often accompany her to the Lion Mills, helping her shift the office furniture. One day she handed me a wad of A4-sized blank white paper and said, Stick them up your jersey, and take them home. Naturally, I did as I was told.

Walking back home along Hackney Road, passing the Police Box outside Hadrian Estate, that wad of papers dropped away from me, flying in all directions. Two policemen ran out and commenced picking the papers up for me. It took every effort to remain composed. I thanked the constables for helping me and proceeded home feeling blessed! It may well have been poetic justice; she was sacked from the Lion Mills two months later for sloshing too much water around.

The Lion Mills, Hackney Road.

Sickness in our family was taboo. Regardless of how we felt, we had to work. Colds, tonsilitis, sore throats, and a thousand or more other forms of sickness were dismissed. The usage of old-fashioned remedies was applied; and told, You’ll go to bed when you get home from work, you’ll feel much better in the morning. There certainly was no empathy or tenderness around when it came to illness. The remarkable thing about our grandparents, and may I say that there must have been many others like them; that they never had a holiday in their entire lives. Even if for a day out in Southend, they couldn’t get home fast enough.

It was our maternal grandparent’s house. Although, like most people in the East End of London, they never owned it, they rented. The very thought of owning your own home was something that never entered one’s head. To own your own home would have been a million years away. It never occurred to me how overcrowded we were, or how we ever managed. At a very young age, I grew up in an environment thinking that this was the norm. Apart from our parents, my sister and I, my mother’s brothers, sisters, and my grandparents, totalling fourteen, all lived under one roof.

Our maternal grandparents, Bill and Lizzie Cunningham in their garden at 74 St Peter’s Avenue. We could never repay them.

Mother had a gas stove installed in that tiny room, to eat and sleep. Living like that for God knows for how long, until her brothers and sisters began to marry off. Finally we, at long last, had a bedroom of our own. Like the majority of menfolk during this period, unemployment was rife, poverty was practically at everyone’s doorstep, and hardship and suffering went hand in hand. It was of no surprise that crime accelerated due to the dire conditions of the times. Father was also unemployed, very often, as tiny tots he would walk us from Bethnal Green to Clapton, some two and a half miles away. I don’t think he could afford the bus fare.

Marriage was certainly not his metier. Having taken matrimonial vows at the age of twenty-two and mother at the age of twenty-one, their passion, I feel, overruled their logic. Although, refined, well-spoken, well-read and well-mannered, the one thing he was never capable of was, that he simply couldn’t handle responsibility. Very much a loner, he liked to live the life of a gentleman, without ever having the means to be one.

Somehow, he could not succumb to living in overcrowded conditions like ours. Having come from a home where he had led a comparatively serene life, in a household of orderliness and tranquillity. I think I must have been about six or seven years of age; when a heated argument developed with my mother, and without further ado, he decided to walk out on us. I vividly recall my mother chasing after him up the street, berating him as I trailed behind them crying my eyes out. Our mother was to repeat what our father did by disappearing during the war, leaving my sister in an air raid shelter during an air raid.

East End’s views regarding separation, divorce or children born out of wedlock, were regarded as something sinful. Growing up without a mother or a father made you feel slightly alienated from other children. Had it not been for our grandparent’s generosity, we could easily have finished up in an orphanage. Nothing, I feel, could ever repay them for the sacrifices they made to raise us.

In those early days of my childhood, I was too young to realise the hardships and suffering that people in the East End, and many other places around the country, were going through. No work meant no money. The only thing available to them was the National Assistance Board, which most East Enders frowned upon. Reluctant to take the awful Means Tests, and those that did, were considered to be scroungers.

The Means Test must have been about the most demeaning thing for anyone to undergo. A detailed inventory was taken of the contents of your home, including, cash, furniture, clothing and anything of value. One chair was allowed for every occupant of the home and non-essentials were removed.

Chapter Two

The Death of a Street

St Peter’s Avenue. E2

It wasn’t just any old street in the East End of London. I often wondered what was it that made it so special. Hard to define in a nutshell, yet you were oblivious to the fact that you had become part of it and it had become part of you. The feeling of belonging, something you could sense, smell, and yes, almost taste. What was it I wondered, as I grew older, that made Our Street so extraordinary? It had a mystical quality that held you like a moth drawn to a candle’s flame.

Once a street of elegant, terraced houses that had stood the test of time since its conception in 1840, standing proudly undisturbed for over a hundred and twenty-five years. It began at the Southside of Hackney Road, situated between Warner Place and Mansford Street. The important buildings in the street were the cinema at the very top end of the street, with its main entrance in Hackney Road, St Peter’s Church and immediately behind the church was our Church of England School, St Peter’s. Alas the school closed shortly after the outbreak of the war.

St Peter’s Avenue ran directly from Hackney Road to Bethnal Green Road, divided by the crossroads of Old Bethnal Green Road, Gosset Street and Pollard’s Row. The lower section of the street was Pollard’s Row. In 1938 it was originally intended to change the name of Pollards Row to St Peter’s Avenue, at the same time when St Peter’s Street became St Peter’s Avenue. The dwellers of our street felt rather elevated to become an avenue, while the residents of Pollards Row raised strong objections to the renaming of their street to St Peter’s Avenue, thus, it so remained.

A pre-war map showing St Peter’s Avenue.

A devastating notification arrived to inform the residents of the street that their homes were to be demolished. 1965 was the year of Bethnal Green’s slum clearance programme; a death warrant had been signed on the homes of residents that had lived there for generations. It was to be obliterated forever.

The Oxford dictionary defines the word ‘slum’ as a squalid overcrowded urban street inhabited by poor people, a house un-fit for human habitation. The housewives of our street would look at this interpretation with utter disdain. They were house-proud ladies who scrubbed, swept and polished both inside and outside their homes, as regular as clockwork; never a dirty windowpane nor doorstep was ever seen. Standards in home cleanliness both inside and out were high in comparison to many other of its surrounding streets. It stood out like a beacon.

St Peter’s Avenue looking towards Hackney Road.

A very young Christine Jones on a bicycle outside her home. No.43. St Peter’s Avenue looking towards Hackney Road on collection day for the dustbins.

Mansford Street opposite Finch’s Yard.

Warner Place looking towards Hackney Road.

Old Bethnal Green Road cottages pre-war.

Pollards Row with its cobbled street and terraced houses.

To this day, I find this an unforgivable senseless act. Homes that could have been so easily modernised, a whole way of life of a street loved by so many, to be obliterated from the face of the earth, gone forever, never to be seen again. The pride and satisfaction its neighbours had taken in their homes and gardens, to be uprooted and transported to ugly behemoth concrete blocks in unacquainted surroundings, without any say in the matter.

I looked upon the street as a Shakespearean play, portraying comedy and drama. Each household experiences its tragedies and laughter, good times and bad, its births and deaths and a whole kaleidoscope of events occurring day in and day out. Sounding out a pulsating rhythm that beat out its throbs from morning until night.

It began early morning with a horse-drawn milk cart, a yodel from the milkmen delivering bottles of milk to the doorsteps of those terraced houses. The rattle of milk bottles clinking and clanging, as his horse moved along slowly from door to door, the animal knowing the route blindfolded. An entourage of tradesmen and peddlers would follow throughout the day, offering their services or selling their wares. Their cries and shouts with intentions to lure people out from behind closed doors.

The cortege of hawkers and peddlers would continue, the coalman would appear. The larger houses in the street had a circular iron plate adjacent to the basement grid where the coal was dropped down. We called the basement grid an aerie. Young girls skipping would sing a little song of, One, two three a lairie, my balls gone down the aerie. The terraced houses at the lower end of the street would have their sacks of coals brought into the house, usually deposited in a cupboard under the stairs.

The postman would follow the milkman. We had the same postman for years, Mr Styles of 86 St Peter’s Avenue, it felt as though we had known Mr Styles for an eternity. I was always intrigued by a huge swelling, almost like a miniature football at the side of his neck. I was never quite sure whether it was a carbuncle or a goitre? The devil in me would question whether it would deflate if I should prick it with a pin?

A few weeks of the year there would be the arrival of the onion sellers from Brittany. Usually riding down the street on their bicycles, wearing their so very French berets, and Breton-lined jumpers. Their onions strung over their shoulders.

Gypsy women would come knocking at your door, offering sprigs of heather and wooden clothes pegs. Many housewives would be threatened if you didn’t