Jo'Burg Days: Fair Stood The Wind – Part Four – Life And Working Conditions In The East End Of London In The 1800s
...My memory is quite fresh as to a Marshall Haynau, an Austrian I believe, who was reputed to have flogged women, or had them flogged. Well, he came on a visit to England, and amongst other places, visited Barclay & Perkins Brewery. By some means the employees found out who he was, and if the police had not been called in he would scarcely have escaped with his life.
“Chase him, boot him, pelt him well,
Make his back and his sides to swell,
And that will show how very well
We like the man that flogs the women”...
Continuing her richly detailed family history Barbara Durlacher quotes from the memoirs of her ancestor William James Symons.
Despite the depressed labour market in Europe after the Crimean War, life in the East End of London during the mid-1800s appears not to have been too uncomfortable. William James records that the area was a very respectable part of London, home to retired Sea Captains and men of similar standing. He mentions how sad he was to see the extent to which the area had deteriorated when, many years later, he paid a return visit. He found the formerly neat and respectable homes run-down and filthy and says it distressed him to see a sign, “English Spoken Here,” in a shop window. It was an intimation of the changes the area had experienced over the passing years.
On 27th May 1914 the East London Daily Despatch printed these interesting reminiscences of septuagenarian William James Symons.
...“The East End of London, England, sixty to seventy years ago, was a thriving locality, supporting thousands of citizens and their families, who found employment in the ship-building yards on the Thames.
I can remember the following, in some of which as a boy I was employed: Scott Russell, the builder of the Great Eastern, C.J Mare & Co. (the head of the firm, was MP for Plymouth) who built most of the Peninsula & Oriental boats, U Green and Wigraw & Co.
I was born and passed the first 17 years of my life in the locality, but when the engineers’ strike occurred, the ship-building trade left for the Clyde, and I much regretted to see on a visit home that the locality had now become a home for foreign aliens, and homes I had known in my youth to be clean and respectable were now filled with dirt and squalor.
I recollect the cholera appearing amongst us. It was a terrible time. Some of the streets were barricaded and traffic stopped. Close to where my home was, an engineer left his home for his work at 6am, was taken bad, and was dead and buried at 3pm.
In ’48 we had great excitement with the Chartist agitation, and things looked very black, but the Duke of Wellington met the excited crowds with guns and artillery on one of the bridges and in various streets, and the Chartists thought discretion the better part of valour, and they broke up their masses and dispersed.
I, and others of about my age, used to quite enjoy the excitement of hearing the cry, “The Chartists are coming,” and the sudden closing of all the shops by putting up the shutters, as several shops had been broken into and bread stolen, which was hardly to be wondered at, as it had risen eleven pence the four pound loaf...”
It is a pity that as a young boy he was unaware of the aims of the Chartists, and that his response along with the other lads, was only excitement at the prospect of seeing “a bit of a dust up.” Perhaps if he’d realised that these early protest meetings represented the first of the long struggles of the working men to make their voices heard in their fight to be given the right to vote, he might have viewed these mass meetings with more understanding and sympathy. However, one must make allowances for the youth of the lads, and their natural predilection to seeing others getting their heads battered rather than their own.
The Chartists’ principal demands included equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, payment of MPs, abolition of the property qualifications for the franchise, universal manhood suffrage, and vote by secret ballot. At this stage all their meetings were broken up by mounted police armed with batons; protests were brushed aside and the authorities ignored claims for personal injury or property damage. It took many years before their demands were listened to and the vote was finally granted.
Another entry in his memoirs reads... “I have no doubt some of your readers have seen mention in the English periodicals of the custom of a widow whose son went to sea but never returned, putting a hot cross bun aside for him. This was at a small beer-house at Bromley-by-Bow, called the “Widow’s Son,” which at the time I write of was surrounded by market gardens, in which flowers for the London market were the principal product. The school I attended was not far off, and we youngsters often used to go and look at the buns hanging from the ceiling and hazard conjectures as to how many there were.
My memory is quite fresh as to a Marshall Haynau, an Austrian I believe, who was reputed to have flogged women, or had them flogged. Well, he came on a visit to England, and amongst other places, visited Barclay & Perkins Brewery. By some means the employees found out who he was, and if the police had not been called in he would scarcely have escaped with his life.
“Chase him, boot him, pelt him well,
Make his back and his sides to swell,
And that will show how very well
We like the man that flogs the women”
This was one verse of a ballad sung all about the streets at the time.
Fifty-one, the year of the Great Exhibition, I shall never forget. I had seen several Lord Mayors’ shows, but none to approach the one for that year. There was a large car with Brittania seated on a throne with four females below, one at each corner, representing, if my memory serves me, the four quarters of the globe. The lion (a stuffed one) lay at Britannia’s feet. We were told that the actresses in the pageant were circus performers, if so, they were remarkably handsome women.
Another feature (it being about the time of the gold discovered in Australia) was a couple of what we know here as Scotch carts drawn by oxen, which of itself was a novelty to Cockneys. But the great feature was in each cart a miner in a large billy-cock hat, with a red shirt, bare armed, and by his side a large piece of some material gilded to represent gold with a cradle, pick and shovel as the implements of his trade.
The Exhibition caused a tremendous excitement, and of course led to street singers, one of the songs containing the following verse:
“Foreigners will be there, with mouths as big as Temple Bar,
And noses as long as Saffron Hill,
But what a bit of fun, to grind old people young,
There’s a new-fashioned cast-iron mill.
So come and see the wonders of the day,
See the eights and the carriages so gay.
The strangers come, and the foreigners run
To the Grand Exhibition in May...”
