Spitalfields Life

Norah Pam first came to Spitalfields in August 1931 and made a return visit recently, just to see how things were ticking over in her old neighbourhood eighty years later. Here you can see her standing outside 11 Victoria Cottages, where her great-grandparents Lewis Carr, a silk dyer, and his wife Louisa came to live with their three children, shortly after the terrace was built in the 1860s. Norah was delighted to see that the gardens are well kept – just as she remembers them in her childhood in the 1930s.

By 1881, the family had moved to the flats at the rear of the cottages, known as Albert Family Dwellings and it was there that Norah grew up. She still has vivid memories of these formative years in Spitalfields, even though she only came to live in the Dwellings at the age of six and left in 1940 at the age of fifteen when the bombing of London made it too risky to stay.

It was my pleasure to introduce Norah to Spitalfields resident Mavis Bullwinkle who also grew up in Albert Family Dwellings in the 1930s, which was the cause of considerable mutual excitement since – although Mavis does not remember Norah – Norah, being seven years older, remembers seventy-nine year old Mavis being born. “You were such a little baby,” she recalled sweetly, causing Mavis to blush, “I remember when your sister was born, she had golden curls and blue eyes and everyone doted on her, and my mother said to me, ‘Pay some attention to the little girl standing at the side of the pram,’and that was you.”

This was a cause of great amusement to Mavis, who shrieked with girlish delight to confirm this unexpected recollection. “Yes, that’s right” she exclaimed in surprise, “My hair was was straight as die!” Yet all these years later, this conversation was evidence that Norah had taken notice of her mother’s instruction. “I can see you now coming down the stairs beside the pram,” she added, thinking back across time, on the occasion of meeting someone she had not seen in more than seventy years.

We all sat in a garden at Victoria Cottages and enjoyed a sunny morning chatting together, while Norah brought out her family photographs, which span dizzying amounts of time, and beguiled us with her account of her Spitalfields childhood.

We moved into a flat in Albert Family Dwellings to be close to my grandmother – the family had been in Spitalfields since the 1840s.

I went to All Saints School in Buxton St. Some of the children were quite poor. I had a friend whose father was a ganger – a roadworker – and if it rained he got no work and he had no money. Several children had parents who were builders, they couldn’t work in bad weather either. Some were railway people, and if they had big families they couldn’t manage. My friend’s family worked in the parcels office, they were comfortable, they even had a holiday because they got free travel. There was a lot of poverty because in 1931 all public service workers had a pound cut from their pay – a wage of three pounds and five shillings a week went down to two pounds and five shillings a week. It was a significant amount of money and people had to cut back.

I wasn’t allowed to play outside. I was an only child and very protected, but I caught Scarlet Fever. I was taken to Homerton in the fever ambulance which was grey. My parents weren’t allowed to visit. They would bring a parcel each week and stand outside. The flat was sealed and the bedding taken away for fumigation, and my father had to have three days off work because it was so contagious. Then after six weeks, they said I had Nasal Diptheria and I had to stay another six weeks, so it was very harrowing for all of us. My mother cried when people asked how I was.

When the war came, everyone was evacuated but, because I had been seriously ill, I pleaded with my parents to let me stay at home, and there was no school, so I had a heyday. I remember the bombing of the docks. On that day, I went on my own to Dalston on the bus to buy a skirt at Marks & Spencer. The air raid siren went at two o’clock and we were told to get off the bus and go to a shelter. Then, at four, I bought my skirt and walked back to Spitalfields.

I wanted a pair of silk stockings to go with my skirt and in Hanbury St there was a little shop that sold everything. The owner was Noah Cohen, so I went to his shop and there was this little old lady and her daughter who was in her thirties. Noah let them go into the back to change and he told me their story. The girl had been in the bath when the air raid siren went and her mother called her to go to the Anderson shelter. The house was in Jamaica St and it got a direct hit, but they were saved by the shelter and all she had left was the dress she put on when she got out of the bath. Her mother had come to buy her a set of underwear to go to a night shelter in a school, and he let her change into her new clothes. I often wondered what happened to that woman because a lot of the schools were hit.

I went home and, by the time I got to the Cottages, I was running because I could smell the fires burning at the docks. And, as my mother opened the door, the people upstairs were coming down for safety. We sat in the doorway and my mother made tea while the bombs fell. The German planes made a particular noise. They got nearer and nearer and nearer, and you heard the bombs dropping, and you thought, “This is us,” and then they went over.

The people in the building across the road all left, and they set their cats and dogs loose. We found a dog in the street and my mother called it “Victory “because she said, “We’re going to have victory! They can continue bombing but we won’t give in. They can do what they like.” We kept him for seven years and he died on 31st May 1946, on my twenty-first birthday, in his sleep.

Then, in 1940, a landmine fell on the Crown & Leek in Deal St and they evacuated a mile around, and that’s when we all decided to leave. But even after we moved out, I was always coming back to see my friends. I missed by friends. And my father said, “But I thought you wanted a house with a garden?!”

Today, the Albert Family Dwellings have long gone, demolished in 1975. Mavis Bullwinkle who lived in the Dwellings until the end and now lives a quarter a mile away, told me she had not been over to this area of Spitalfields for thirty years, “Because I miss them so much.” The pair of terraces named Victoria and Albert Cottages, and St Anne’s Church, are all that remain now of the world that Norah and Mavis knew in their childhood. Yet for a couple of hours it came alive again, as they sat in the garden and shared recollections of the two old ladies who ran the sweetshop across the road – gone more than half a century ago – the mission hall that moved to Bethnal Green in 1935, and of the teachers at Sir John Cass School where they were both pupils before the war.

In contrast to the general assumption of poverty in the East End, Norah and Mavis’ history reveals a more complex social picture of people of different incomes living in close proximity. Norah and Mavis were also keen to emphasise the self-respecting ethic they grew up with.“They think we were all prostitutes and drunks, and we were dirty, but our working class morality was strong,” declared Mavis, turning passionate, “We didn’t think we were poor, we had enough to eat and we never wasted anything.” A statement which prompted the exchange of a glance of unity between the two women.

Then it was time to say goodbye – once Norah Pam and Mavis Bullwinkle had swapped numbers, because a new friendship had been kindled that morning. Norah took one last glance at the gardens of Victoria Cottages, where her great-grandparents lived one hundred and fifty years ago, and looked up to the space in the sky where Albert Family Dwellings once stood. “I had a happy childhood here,” she said.

Norah’s great grandparents, Lewis and Louisa Carr, and their children, Lewis, Louisa Ann and George – the residents of 11 Victoria Cottages, Spitalfields. On the reverse of this photograph Norah has written, “When my great-grandfather became a widower, he went to lunch each Sunday with my gran, always arriving wearing wearing a tall silk hat.”

Norah’s great uncle, Lewis Carr. He became a vaccination officer for Smallpox and lived on Cheshire St.

Norah’s grandmother, Louisa Ann Carr as a young woman. She worked at home sewing waistcoat buttons for Savile Row.

Norah’s grandmother, Louisa Ann, as an older woman at Albert Family Dwellings.

Norah’s parents’ on their wedding day.

Norah’s father Edward Samuel Simmonds in 1939.

Norah’s mother, Violet Louisa Simmonds, with their dog Victory.

Norah’s class at All Saints’ School, Buxton St in 1934.  Nine year old Norah is in the check dress with spectacles, third from the right in the first row seated on chairs. Norah’s glasses were from Mr Stutter, the optician in Bishopsgate.

Norah in 1940, aged fifteen.

Norah and Mavis both grew up in the Albert Family Dwellings in Deal St that were demolished in 1975.

The last May Queen at Sir John Cass School in 1939, Mavis is third from the right in the front row of girls standing.

Mavis’ Aunt Ada and her mother Gwen in Deal St outside the Albert Family Dwellings in the 1920s.

Norah Pam & Mavis Bullwinkle at Victoria Cottages.

You may like to read my profile of Mavis Bullwinkle, Secretary

and A Walk with Mavis Bullwinkle

At the bottom of Anchor & Hope Lane, you will find the last lighterage company on the upper reaches of the Thames. Begun in 1896 as William Cory & Sons, delivering coal to London and filling the empty barges with rubbish for the return journey, today Cory Environmental is a vast corporate endeavour, compacting the capital’s waste, transporting it downriver by barge and incinerating it at Belvedere in Kent.

These “rough goods,” as the lightermen term them, are now the only commercial cargo transported on the Thames, once the primary thoroughfare of our city. Yet in spite of all the changes on the river, the task of the lighterman has remained essentially unchanged for centuries. Originally, each barge or “lighter” was rowed or punted by one lighterman with a boy to assist, lightening the cargo of merchant ships delivering to the Port of London. In the nineteenth century, the introduction of steam powered tug boats allowed the lighters to be towed in multiples, but the equation of one-lighterman-one-lighter persisted. And when I joined John Dwan – skipper of the tugboat Recovery – for a day, his crew consisted of mate, engineer and two lightermen to go aboard the barges, manoeuvring and leashing them as required.

We set out upriver from Charlton Pier under an overcast sky, with barges of empty containers in tow for delivery to the depots at Walbrook in the City of London, Cringle in Battersea and Wangas in Wandsworth. “It’s a contact sport! You don’t put your hands in your pockets – that’s the first thing you learn,” John declared with relish when the sturdily-built tug lurched and rolled as the barges were shunted around prior to departure, bouncing off the rubber enforced sides of the boat and clanging together with a boom which resonated like thunder. Starting on the river at age fifteen, becoming a skipper at twenty-one, John has held licences as both waterman & lighterman since 1972, like his father Albert, and grandfathers Gosso Williams and Charlie Dwan before him. And going back as far as he knows – for at least four generations – all the men in John’s family worked afloat. “Most of the people you speak to on the Thames will have ancestors who worked on the river.” he promised me.

Once we reached central London, the clouds parted and – apart from occasional passenger boats – we had the expanse of sparkling water to ourselves. Coming under Hungerford Bridge in the small tugboat just above water level, the Wheel loomed over us on the left while Big Ben and the houses of Parliament rose up to the right, seemingly to create a theatrical spectacle for our sole enjoyment, at the centre of the river. “It’s the best way to see London,” said John in understatement, thinking out loud for my benefit.

We were joined by mate John Hughes, John Dwan’s long time accomplice on the river. They were at school together, started out afloat together as pleasure boat skippers at the age of twenty-one, and now both have sons working on the Thames. With a riverine ancestry as long as his partner, John Hughes can talk of his great-grandfather who was in the great docks strike of 1889. “Years ago there were thousands of us lightermen, if we weren’t happy, the docks shut down. We didn’t really worry what we said, but these days we’ve had to tone it down a bit.” he confided to me with a playful grimace. “The older lightermen could navigate their way in the fog by smell, there were three hundred miles of wharf space then and every one smelled differently. I remember, when I was a boy, coming out of Barking Creek once at three or five in the morning and sitting in the back of the boat, when I looked behind me it was daylight while in front of me it was night, pitch black, like the end of the world. When it was cold, the skippers used to give you a tot of gin…”

Thus a pattern was set for the day – of leisurely discourse and wondering at the ever-changing spectacle of the river, punctuated by bouts of intense activity, shunting the barges at each depot. Every barge has tethering posts at either end and on each side, permitting them to be shifted in any direction by a tug boat. Yet such manoeuvres were rarely straightforward, with plenty of work for the lightermen, walking up and down perilously narrow ledges along the sides of the barges with ropes – attaching and reattaching them to different corners of the barge so the tug could pull the vessels in different directions and thereby achieve the desired position.

Dexterity in handling boats is a prerequisite in this job and these men have been doing it their whole lives, coaxing five hundred ton barges to travel in exactly the right direction. London’s Victorian bridges were built for the fifty ton barges of their day which gives John Dwan little margin for error when towing several of his vessels through at once. Although he makes it appear effortless, it was apparent that the consequences of an error would be disastrous. “The industry hasn’t changed, the barges just got bigger!” he quipped.

“We’re river men and we don’t want to go to sea.” John Dwan informed me, speaking for his crew, outlining how the lighterman gets to enjoy life afloat and go home to his family at the end of the day. “The only difference between us and a lorry driver is the road don’t change.” he proposed unconvincingly.

As we returned down the Thames with full containers, I looked up at the city workers crossing bridges. We were within metres yet they did not see me, because we were in separate worlds – and I understood how the life of a lightermen encourages a propensity for independent thought, observing life from the water. We passed Charlton, where we set out, and travelled on through the afternoon to the vast complex at Belvedere in Kent, where red cranes like giant spiders lifted the containers from the barges. Even six months ago, London’s waste had been creating landfill at Mucking but now, after incineration, the metal can be recycled and the ashes are used to manufacture breeze blocks, which can return to rebuild the city.

After so many generations, the lightermen feel the loss of all the wharves which once lined the Port of London, leaving nowhere to unload even if someone wanted to return to river transport for freight. River transport should be the ideal way to take lorries off the road and transport commodities into London, but the removal of the infrastructure makes such a move impossible, at present. “We’re sliding into history,” John Hughes told me, shaking his head as we sailed in the lone vessel down the empty river where once was the busiest dock in the world. Yet the lightermen are still here for the foreseeable future, and keeping their hands in, lest the tide should change in their favour.

John Dwan, skipper of the tugboat Recovery

John Dwan & John Hughes – both watermen & lightermen – they were at school together and worked on the Thames over forty years.

William Cory & Sons now known as Cory Environmental, London’s last lighterage company.

Outside the Anchor & Hope

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