London's East End - my grandmother's life

My paternal grandmother’s descriptions of living in the East End of London were fascinating, but I never knew how accurate her memories were. And there was no way I was going to discover details about my grandmother by reading about royal, noble or wealthy families, from army or church records or even from newspaper clippings.

So for me, the most interesting part of reading historical census documents was discovering how ordinary people lived, people who were born, worked and died without any fuss being made. A 1901 census re­turn succintly described the living conditions in­ King Edward St Whitechapel. Then in the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, the house gave a safe haven to five families, all the adults being immigrants from what is now Russia, Belarus, Ukraine or Poland.

This should not surprise us. The 1901 Census noted that Jewish families were desperate to leave Russia's Pale of Settlement and that 90% of Britain’s 150,000 Russian and Polish Jewish newcomers settled in London’s East End.

Jewish Soup Kitchen, Brick Lane, Spitalfields

opened 1902.

Today the sandstone facade and sign are original, but the building itself has been converted into luxury flats

The building was divided into flats, but there were still only eight rooms in total. Sarah and Max S shared their two rooms with their two children and a lodger. Jacob and Heide B had one room. Elijah and Florrie S shared their room with their child. Isidor and Rebecca P and their six children squeezed into two rooms. Isaac and Rosa H, six children and Isaac’s adult brother fitted into the final two rooms in the house. 27 human beings!

Census unformation was given about every resident’s name, gender, age, country of birth and occupation. And for that I am grateful. But wouldn’t it have been useful to known if all five families shared one kitchen, bath and wash-house? Did any of the adults in the house speak English? Did the adults have any other language in common with each other eg Yiddish, German, Polish or Russian? How long did each family live in King Edward Street, before they moved on to a bigger flat? Did the 27 human beings roster the one toilet across the alley, to avoid overcrowding?

Conditions at home may have been appalling, but community facilities were booming. I know there were four synagogues and at least one school within easy walking distance from the Whitechapel house. A soup kitchen was founded in Brick Lane and a Temporary Shelter was opened in Leman St, mainly for new comers. Social clubs included Russian tea rooms and libraries. Sick visiting organisations supported struggling families and a Jewish burial society tended to the bereaved. From the late-1890s, Pavilion Theatre (later demolished) in Whitechapel Road showed Yiddish language plays to enthusiastic audiences.

Of all the facilities and activities available, my grandmother remembered The Pavilion Theatre, music hall and pantomimes most fondly.

Jews' Temporary Shelter

in Leman Street, Whitechapel

opened 1886.

The marriages must have survived because my grandmother later found herself surrounded by four more healthy siblings, supported by their father’s salary as a boot finisher. One sibling went eventually to live in Chicago and established himself independently of his family. (Was he in trouble with the law, or did he made someone pregnant accidentally?) The rest of the family emigrated to Australia just as the outbreak of WW1 was stopping all civilian shipping.

Actually it wasn’t very different for my grandmother when she arrived in Australia, at least regarding external toilets. Pan closet toilets in Melbourne’s crowded inner suburbs generally backed onto a lane and were emptied weekly by a nightman. And like the UK, the toilet was generally built as far from the house as possible, to avoid spreading infections. But there WAS a big differ­ence. Inside the family’s own back yard in Melbourne, the one toilet was used exclusively by the one family.

London slum

Photo credit: History Zone

The Whitechapel Boys was a group of young men that went on to become some of my favourite English writers and artists of the era. I will mention only three: Mark Gertler (1891–1939) was born and raised in Spitalfields, Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) moved to Stepney as a school boy and David Bomberg (1890–1957) grew up in Whitechapel. From their intensely impoverished but acculturated world, The Boys used the Whitechapel Library as a meeting place, their discussions contributed to the founding of British Modernism. Strongly iconoclastic, the painters and sculptors in the group began to experiment with dynamic form and abstraction while the writers and poets searched for innovative prose to express their philosophical and political views. My grandmother (also born 1890) didn't remember them but she would have been proud of how her exact contemporaries overcame the constraints of living in the impoverished East End to become a vibrant avant garde.

Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel Road, 1905

See excellent maps of old Spitalfields, and old Whitechapel. The former includes Mark Gertler's house, the Princelet St Synagogue and the Jewish Soup Kitchen. The latter includes the Yiddish Newspaper House, the mikveh/ritual bath, the youth club and Isaac Rosenberg's home.