Not Quite Murder Mile
In the third of her stories Linda Wilkinson recounts Columbia Rd’s history of violence and death
Angela Flanders, the perfumer of Columbia Rd, believes Zodiac signs are manifest upon the earth as well as in the stars. Her belief is that Columbia Rd represents Cancer the Crab and it draws people to its bosom in a fond embrace. This is as much to do with the shape of the road as the fact that, for centuries, half of Columbia Rd was called Crab Tree Row, much latterly being united with Birdcage Walk to become Columbia Rd as we know it today.
In total, the road is just eight-hundred and fifty yards long, far short of the traditional length of a ‘murder mile’ yet, even so, it seems that the cancerous motif signals not a welcome but something more akin to dark alchemies.
The overspill of the weaving industry from Spitalfields gave rise to the first recorded murders for – although the deaths were sanctioned by the powers that be – the hangings of John Doyle and John Valline in 1769 were murders nonetheless. They were weavers who had fought for a better wage and had the temerity to belong to a Union. They were hung in Bethnal Green outside the Salmon & Ball Pub.
With the collapse of the weaving trade, Cancer the Crab in the guise of Crab Tree Row, saw the affluent summer houses of the wealthy Huguenot weavers crumble in the late eighteenth century and fall into disrepair and squalor. In the early nineteenth century, law reform led to a dearth of hangings and it was this which, strangely, brought new murders to the Crab itself. In 1831, the ‘London Burkers’ murdered three – possibly more – people and sold them for dissection to the London medical schools when, quite simply, there were not enough stiffs for the students to study.
Living opposite the Birdcage Pub, on the infamous Nova Scotia Gardens and next to a dung heap of enormous proportions, John Bishop and accomplices moved on from ‘resurrecting’ corpses to drugging and drowning their victims in a well in the garden. Their crime became known as the ‘Italian Boy Murder,’ even though the boy in the case was not Italian and there was more than one death.
They too, hung for this but the murder – or worse – of a young girl in 1900 was never solved. As reported at the time, “A man dressed in ragged clothes and wearing a bowler hat took a girl of about five years, into a lavatory on Columbia Rd, Bethnal Green, stripped her of her clothing, leaving the clothing behind.” In spite of a report that a man was seen with a sack on his back with a young child’s leg sticking out of it, she was never found and what her fate might have been can only be surmised.
Just before this grim event, in 1898, two young women from Columbia Rd committed suicide together in a lake at Wanstead, leaving a note that they should be buried together.
Then, in the next century, on the 7th September 1940, literally on the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder,’ a million-to-one-chance saw a fifty kilogramme bomb enter the air vent to a vast underground bomb shelter beneath old Columbia Rd market building where it exploded, killing fifty-three people and injured many more. This shelter had become a home to beleaguered East Enders – a place where marriages were performed, religious worship took place and a piano entertained locals and troops alike, until it became awash with their blood.
Times remained hard on Columbia Rd post-war. In the nineteen-sixties, there were at least two suicides of long-term residents and, of course, the Kray twins treated the street as their playground. Every Sunday, they held court in the Globe pub, collecting protection money and intimidating those who refused to pay. Firebombing was their preferred method of persuasion for recalcitrant business owners. Gang crime spiralled out of hand and a high-speed (for those days) car chase by the police saw the criminals’ car crash outside the Royal Oak pub where a gun was pulled on a curious passer-by.
Although the Krays went down for their crimes in 1969, the next year Mrs Beber, an old lady who ran a confectioners on Columbia Rd was murdered in her shop, leaving her ninety-year-old husband a widower, and the crime remains unsolved to this day.
Is the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder’ cursed? In August 2007, a frenzied knife attack saw a girl of four years old, her mother and her uncle hacked to death in Sivill House, which is built on the site of Nova Scotia Gardens and the bomb shelter that saw so many deaths. Another murder of an old lady called Nora by a drug addict took place in the same building not long after.
All told, in eighty hundred and fifty yards, there have been ten murders, not counting the fifty-three bomb deaths, at least four suicides and five people hung as a consequence of local crime. Of the murders, three remain unsolved.
The crossroads at the Salmon & Ball pub where Doyle and Valline were hung in 1769
May, Bishop & Williams in the dock
John Bishop’s house in Nova Scotia Gardens
The huge dust heap that dominated Columbia Rd
The Birdcage pub, 1930
The Black Buildings of the Columbia Market Complex after a bombing raid in 1941
Now the Stringray, the Globe pub was once a Sunday haunt of the Kray Twins
Report on the still-unsolved murder of Mrs Beber in 1969
Sivill House was built on the site of the ‘Italian Boy Murder’ and has seen a few incidents itself
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Billy Frost, the Krays’ Driver
On Saturday 7th September 1940, the Columbia Market Bombing
A fundraising pub quiz for the Columbia Market War Memorial is taking place on Monday 24th November 8.30pm at Ye Olde Black Bull, 13 Broadway, Stratford. E15 4BQ. £3 per person entry with teams of up to six people accepted. There will be a prize for the winning team and a raffle. Donations to Treasurer, Columbia Market War Memorial Group, c/o Dorset Centre, Diss St, E2 7QX.
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 10
Crinolines & Cholera
In her second story, Linda Wilkinson explores the Victorian origins of the Mildmay Mission
The first Mildmay Mission operated from a warehouse in Cabbage Court in the Old Nichol in 1866
One morning in 1866, a letter arrived at the table of the Rev William Pennefather who, in 1857 with his wife Caroline, had set up the Association of Female Workers based at Mildmay Park, Newington Green in North London. The Association provided an outlet for the energies and abilities of women who had a social conscience. Women were trained in a variety of subjects, one them being nursing. Known as the ‘Mildmay Deaconesses,’ they were self-funded women predominantly from the upper classes.
The letter that arrived that day was from James Trevitt, the Vicar of St Philip’s Church in Mount St (now Swanfield St), which lay at the edge of the infamous Nichol rookery, just west of Columbia Rd. He asked if the Deaconesses could come down and help in the terrible crisis being played out there. Death carts were rumbling all night, people were dying like flies and the stench was terrible – cholera was raging unchecked.
Mildmay Park may have been a little run down but Bethnal Green was the slums where thieves and robbers lived, an area in which the police would not venture alone. It was a place of prostitutes, drunkenness, violence, nefarious street urchins and filth – not quite what the young ladies had signed up for.
Later that year, two women – one Gertrude Villiers Stuart, the other anonymous to this day – emerged from Shoreditch Station wearing crinolines and bonnets to do their duty, as they believed their God wished.
It is unlikely that they had any influence upon the lives of the cholera sufferers for, although the water-borne transmission of the infection was known, any meaningful treatment remained unavailable. Eventually, the epidemic burnt itself out but the Deaconesses kept coming, every day, to Bethnal Green.
A base for their work was established in Cabbage Court (Little Bacon St), south of Bethnal Green Rd, where they set-up a Soup Kitchen, a Lads’ Institute, a Men’s Lodging House and a Mothers’ Meeting Club – offering a sewing class for factory girls and eighty meals a day for destitute children. Unsurprisingly, in a short while they were able to walk freely around the area without any fear of molestation.
In 1874, a Mildmay Medical Mission was established, moving around the corner in 1877 to a derelict warehouse in Turville Sq, in the heart of the Old Nichol. This was the first and, today, the only remaining Mission Hospital in London.
The appalling conditions which existed in the Old Nichol led to it being the first area cleared by the newly formed London County Council in 1891. In light of the impending demolition, it was decided that a new hospital should be built in a quieter situation. Austin St was chosen and, in 1892, a fifty-bed hospital was opened which served the local community until 1982.
Sadly, the ability of the Deaconesses to wander the streets alone dissipated. By the early nineteen-hundreds Kemp, the Head Porter, would be informed of the housebound sick by relatives and friends. It was he and his colleagues who would carry the patients to the hospital using blankets, bath chairs or even slung over their shoulders, if needs be.
Like the dispensaries of St Saviour’s Priory in Haggerston and Queen Adelaide’s Dispensary in nearby Pollard’s Row, the maladies treated at Out Patients were those of the poor – tuberculosis, typhoid, accidents at work and home, scabies, pneumonia, bronchitis. The dispensaries had little in their armoury to offer other than cough mixtures, cod liver oil and carbolic lotion for nits.
Yet the Mildmay offered a civilised way to die – in a clean bed, with the security of a warm meal and care from women who were referred to as ‘Angels’ right up until the nineteen-sixties. More recently, as an AIDS hospice, it has provided succour to those who contracted HIV and today a new hospital is being built on the site, ensuring that the Mildmay tradition of care goes on.
One of the original founding stones of the Mildmay
Emily Goodwin, the first matron at the new Mildmay Hospital, 1892
Sister Louise Blakeney, First Theatre Sister, 1909.
Miss Mulliner & Dr Gauld in the hospital pharmacy, 1909
Mildmay Outpatients
Mildmay Female Ward
Mildmay Casualty
In the hospital kitchens
Queen Mary mobbed by locals as she visits the Mildmay Hospital in the thirties
The Mildmay Hospital with extra wards in Nissen huts during World War II.
Mildmay staff in 1966.
Detail, showing the Milmay cat.
Miss Stockton, Elizabeth Willcocks (Matron), Sister Edwin and Dr Buxton at the Mildmay in 1964
Many famous faces visited the hospital during its time as an AIDS hospice. The young man with Liz Taylor died soon after this photograph was taken.
Find out more about the continuing work of the Mildmay International today
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On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 9
Return To Columbia Rd
It is my great pleasure to introduce the first of seven stories about the culture and history of Columbia Rd by Linda Wilkinson, the distinguished historian of Columbia Rd. Linda is author of Watercress But No Sandwiches: 300 Years of the Columbia Rd Area & Columbia Rd – a Strange Kind of Paradise, and her family have lived in the East End for more than four centuries. Thus I leave you in Linda’s safe hands while I take a rest until my return on Monday November 17th.
It is hard to believe that when I first returned to Bethnal Green in 1986, taxi drivers would not enter Columbia Rd after dark. In those days, work colleagues and friends, almost universally, had no idea where it was – assuming that, with “Green” in the title, it was somewhere way out in Essex or near Wood Green.
By then, I been out of the area for twelve years so the fact that nobody knew where it was came as no surprise. Bethnal Green had always been a hidden place – a place where, at some points in history, the Police simply would not venture. The taxi situation though was new. Cabs and cabbies had been a way of life. Many cabbies, even today, declare their Bethnal Green roots, sometimes a little ad nauseam, truth be told.
What had changed? In short, the old demographic had shifted. The trading street that was Columbia Rd had gone. It was no longer a place of butchers, grocery stores, greengrocers, haberdashers and boot menders, and much of it was boarded up. A few traditional shops were hanging on – the newsagents, chemist shop and the fabulous Lee’s Seafoods were all that were left of a once-vibrant street. At night there was no life, it was as desolate as a desert.
The nadir of that period did not last long, however. If nature abhors a vacuum, London does even more so. Cheap rents brought in a new band of people who have renewed and reinvigorated not only Columbia Rd, but East London in general.
Although I was born in the now-defunct Bethnal Green Hospital, I was really hatched on Columbia Rd. Over the years, I moved from being a scientist to a playwright and a local historian. In tandem with research into my most recent book, Columbia Rd – A Strange Kind of Paradise, I looked into my family history.
I suppose it should have come as no surprise that we have been in the area for some years. I had returned to live just around the corner from where I was born for a reason. For years something had been missing from my life, a sense of place.
It turns out that my father’s family have been in the immediate area for around one hundred and fifty years. I have traced parts of my family back to Wapping in the sixteen-hundreds to a shipwright called John Homan, who built and repaired the small boats that plied the Thames.
At Christmas 1985, I came with Australian friends to the Flower Market. I had not been back since my parents had left the area some years before. I recall sitting in the Royal Oak Pub and being in tears. I knew then that I had to come home.
As much as the past informs the present, my stories this week are going to be about the glorious and eclectic nature of my part of the East End both then and now.
The empty shops and desolate thoroughfare have gone. People with vision and drive brought forth that change. I like to call them pioneers because, back in the seventies and eighties, east of Liverpool St was still a foreign land to most. Dangerous, dark and dingy but to those of us who knew it – it truly was a strange kind of paradise.
Isabel Rios has been feeding Columbia Rd since 1982. Originally from Galicia in Northern Spain, she took over the shop from the Davis family who had run the local dairy for many years. At first, Isabel ran it as a delicatessen, but moved on to opening a Tapas bar and then the restaurant Laxeiro which we know today.
Joe (Yusuf Gulamali) is the latest in a long line of newsagents at number 154. He came to the street in 1988 when the area had a bad name for racism and he had tried to avoid coming here, but was told on day one, “You look after us, and we’ll look after you.”
Angela Flanders arrived on the street in 1984 with her daughter Kate Evans, several cats and a tortoise. She moved from working on decorative paint finishes to drying flowers and making pot pourri. She is now a renown perfumer who still works from her original shop in Columbia Rd and has recently acquired a second outpost in Artillery Passage, Spitalfields.
Penny has lived in the area since 1984 when she was a teacher. In the late eighties, she decided to branch out and create The Garden Shop which sells unusual decorative goods for home and garden.
Jackie Bryant is not quite on Columbia Rd, but she is an institution in her own right. She came from Hoxton in the eighties to settle on the Jesus Hospital Estate. She is our dog walker and pet carer extraordinaire, and a great friend to two legged and four legged creatures alike.
Les is Penny’s partner seen here outside Organics in Ravenscroft St
For many years, the family at Lees Seafood supplied the area with fish, particularly the shellfish beloved of East Enders. This photograph from the eighties shows how popular it used to be.
Nick Smith was an antiques buyer for Liberty of London and has been selling interesting furniture at number 116 since 1986. He believes that those people who arrived in the eighties were visionaries who chose to express their creativity in a place that was a cultural desert.
Simon Rees started selling his jewellery in 1993 in the greengrocers at 160 Columbia Rd. He rented the space on Sunday mornings, and recalls the smell of potatoes and cabbages which accompanied his sales. Today, his workshop and studio are next to Angela Flanders’ shop, and she was instrumental in bringing him and his family to the street.
Steve for a goodly while in the eighties and nineties was known as ‘Video Steve’ because he rented films from number 146. Today he has a space from which he sells World Maps at the back of that same shop. Like Jackie, he is a stalwart of Columbia Rd, and also decorates and renovates the ageing buildings in which we live with love and care.
All portraits by Carol Budd except Isabel Rios by Eduardo Paris Rios
Watercress But No Sandwiches: 300 Years of the Columbia Rd Area & Columbia Rd – a Strange Kind of Paradise can be both purchased online direct from the author at www.lindawilkinson.org
On The Bishopsgate Goodsyard, 8
Towers Over The Goodsyard – Rough Cut
Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney has been conducting interviews in recent weeks to make this short documentary film which examines the Bishopsgate Goodsyard Proposals and explores what people like about Spitalfields & Shoreditch today. Here, I am publishing his rough cut as an exclusive preview for readers of Spitalfields Life.
We have decided to show this version today, upon the official deadline for the pitifully inadequate twenty-one day consultation period. However, The East End Preservation Society confirms that local authorities will accept objections until the New Year.
In a few weeks, we will reveal the completed film – updated with latest reactions to the development – but, in the meantime, we welcome your suggestions and contributions on this work-in-progress.
[youtube tdsr1BnGTzk nolink]
Click here to read the East End Preservation Society’s guide to how to object effectively
