Stepney

The average rent in the larger part of the East End is from four to six shillings per week for one room, while skilled mechanics earning thirty-five shillings per week are forced to part with fifteen shillings of it for two or three pokey little dens, in which they strive desperately to obtain some semblance of home life, and rents are going up all the time.

in one street in stepney the increase in only two years has been from thirteen to eighteen shillings in another street from eleven to sixteen shillings and in another street from eleven to fifteen shillings while in whitechapel two-room houses that recently rented for ten shillings are now costing twenty-one shillings east west north and south the rents are going up when land is worth from twenty thousand to thirty thousand pounds an acre some one must pay the landlord mr w c stedman in the house of commons in a speech concerning his constituency in stepney related the following this morning not a hundred yards from where i am myself living a widow stopped me she has six children to support and the rent of her house was fourteen shillings per week she gets her living by letting the house to lodgers and doing a day's washing or charing that woman with tears in her eyes told me that the landlord had increased the rent from fourteen shillings to eighteen shillings what could the woman do there is no accommodation in stepney every place is taken up and overcrowded class supremacy can rest only on class degradation and when the workers are segregated in the ghetto they cannot escape the consequent degradation a short and stunted people is created a breed strikingly differentiated from their master's breed a pavement folk as it were lacking stamina and strength the men become caricatures of what physical men ought to be and the women and children are pale and anaemic with eyes ringed darkly who stoop and slouch and are early twisted out of all shapeliness and beauty to make matters worse the men of the ghetto are the men who are left a deteriorated stock left to undergo still further deterioration for a hundred and fifty years at least they have been drained of their best the strong men the men of pluck initiative and ambition have been faring forth to the fresher and freer portions of the globe to make new lands and nations those who are lacking the weak of heart and head and hand as well as the rotten and hopeless have remained to carry on the breed and year by year in turn the best they breed are taken from them wherever a man of vigour and stature manages to grow up he is hailed forthwith into the army a soldier as bernard shaw has said ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations shelter and clothing this constant selection of the best from the workers has impoverished those who are left a sadly degraded remainder for the great part which in the ghetto sinks to the deepest depths the wine of life has been drawn off to spill itself in blood and progeny over the rest of the earth those that remain are the lees and they are segregated and steeped in themselves they become indecent and bestial when they kill they kill with their hands and then stupidly surrender themselves to the executioners there is no splendid audacity about their transgressions they gouge a mate with a dull knife or beat his head in with an iron pot and then sit down and wait for the police wife beating is the masculine prerogative of matrimony They wear remarkable boots of brass and iron, and when they have polished off the mother of their children with a black eye or so, they knock her down and proceed to trample her, very much as a western stallion tramples a rattlesnake.

a woman of the lower ghetto classes is as much the slave of her husband as is the indian squaw and i for one were i a woman and had but the two choices should prefer being a squaw the men are economically dependent on their masters and the women are economically dependent on the men the result is the woman gets the beating the man should give his master and she can do nothing there are the kiddies and he is the bread-winner and she dare not send him to jail and leave herself and children to starve evidence to convict can rarely be obtained when such cases come into the courts as a rule the trampled wife and mother is weeping and hysterically beseeching the magistrate to let her husband off for the kiddies sakes The wives become screaming harridans, or, broken-spirited and dog-like, lose what little decency and self-respect they have remaining over from their maiden days, and all sink together unheeding in their degradation and dirt.

sometimes i become afraid of my own generalisations upon the massed misery of this ghetto life and feel that my impressions are exaggerated that i am too close to the picture and lack perspective at such moments i find it well to turn to the testimony of other men to prove to myself that i am not becoming overwrought and adulpated frederick harrison has always struck me as being a level-headed well-controlled man and he says to me at least it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold that ninety per cent of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week have no bit of soil or so much as a room that belongs to them have nothing of value of any kind except as much old furniture as will go into a cart have the precarious chance of weekly wages which barely suffice to keep them in health are housed for the most part in places that no man thinks fit for his horse are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade sickness or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism but below this normal state of the average workman in town and country there is found the great band of destitute outcasts the camp followers of the army of industry at least one-tenth the whole proletarian population whose normal condition is one of sickening wretchedness if this is to be the permanent arrangement of modern society civilization must be held to bring a curse on the great majority of mankind ninety per cent the figures are appalling yet mr stopford brooke after drawing a frightful london picture finds himself compelled to multiply it by half a million here it is i often used to meet when i was curate at kensington families drifting into london along the hammersmith road one day there came along a labourer and his wife his son and two daughters their family had lived for a long time on an estate in the country and managed with the help of the common land and their labour to get on but the time came when the common was encroached upon and their labour was not needed on the estate and they were quietly turned out of their cottage where should they go of course to london where work was thought to be plentiful they had a little savings and they thought they could get two decent rooms to live in but the inexorable land question met them in london they tried the decent courts for lodgings and found that two rooms would cost ten shillings a week food was dear and bad water was bad and in a short time their health suffered work was hard to get and its wage was so low that they were soon in debt they became more ill and more despairing with the poisonous surroundings the darkness and the long hours of work and they were driven forth to seek a cheaper lodging they found it in a court i knew well a hotbed of crime and nameless horrors in this they got a single room at a cruel rent and work was more difficult for them to get now as they came from a place of such bad repute and they fell into the hands of those who sweat the last drop out of man and woman and child for wages which are the food only of despair and the darkness and the dirt the bad food and the sickness and the want of water were worse than before and the crowd and the companionship of the court robbed them of the last shreds of self-respect the drink demon seized upon them of course there was a public-house at both ends of the court there they fled one and all for shelter and warmth and society and forgetfulness and they came out in deeper debt with inflamed senses and burning brains and an unsatisfied craving for drink they would do anything to satiate and in a few months the father was in prison the wife dying the son a criminal and the daughters on the street multiply this by half a million and you will be beneath the truth no more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the awful east with its whitechapel hoxton spitalfields bethnal green and wapping to the east india docks the colour of life is grey and drab everything is helpless hopeless unrelieved and dirty bath-tubs are a thing totally unknown as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods the people themselves are dirty while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce when it is not pitiful and tragic strange vagrant odours come drifting along the greasy wind and the rain when it falls is more like grease than water from heaven the very cobble-stones are scummed with grease here lives a population as dull and unimaginative as its long grey miles of dingy brick religion has virtually passed it by and a gross and stupid materialism reigns fatal alike to the things of the spirit and the finer instincts of life it used to be the proud boast that every englishman's home was his castle but to-day it is an anachronism the ghetto folk have no homes they do not know the significance and the sacredness of home life even the municipal dwellings where live the better-class workers are overcrowded barracks they have no home life the very language proves it the father returning from work asks his child in the street where her mother is and back the answer comes in the buildings a new race has sprung up a street people they pass their lives at work and in the streets they have dens and lairs into which to crawl for sleeping purposes and that is all one cannot travesty the word by calling such dens and lairs homes the traditional silent and reserved englishman has passed away the pavement folk are noisy voluble high-strung excitable when they are yet young as they grow older they become steeped and stupefied in beer when they have nothing else to do they ruminate as a cow ruminates they are to be met with everywhere standing on curbs and corners and staring into vacancy watch one of them He will stand there motionless for hours, and when you go away you will leave him still staring into vacancy.

It was like the fear of the sea, and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.

"Stepney, sir.

Stepney Station," the cabbie called down.

I looked about.

It was really a railroad station, and he had driven desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all that wilderness.

"Well," I said.

He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable.

"I'm a stranger here," he managed to articulate, "and if you don't want Stepney Station, I'm blessed if I know what you do want." "I'll tell you what I want," I said.

Our last stop.

Elizabeth dies in March 1603, and shortly after her funeral, plague breaks out again in Stepney.

By the time it's done, somewhere between 23,000 and 35,000 Londoners are dead, about a fifth of the city.

The theaters are shut for nearly a year, and King James goes ahead and gets crowned on the 25th of July, 1603, right in the middle of it.

Outside, the street had begun to fill.

At Myrdal School in Stepney, the children were assembling at five in the morning, in the half dark.

At an infant school in Hackney, they gathered at 7.

The pavements filled with small figures in good coats, carrying paper parcels and cardboard boxes, moving in lines towards their own school gates, marshalled by adults wearing armbands who had volunteered for a job nobody had ever done before.

It had become, in the hall, the whole of what was known about a child being chosen.

And now, at last, It turned outwards and did the opposite job.

It carried an address back the other way and connected a house in Stepney to a cottage in Devon by nothing more than a line of ink and a stamp that had already been paid for.

That thin line was the entire relationship for a great many families for years.

Jabotinsky, who had that day been gazetted to a lieutenancy in the battalion, must have rejoiced to see the fruit of all his efforts.

After a reception by the Mayor of Stepney, the march was resumed to Camperdown House, where the men were inspected by Sir Francis Lloyd, GOC London District.

He complimented them on their smart and soldierly appearance and made quite an impressive speech reminding them of the heroism and soldierly qualities of their forefathers, and concluded by saying that he was sure this modern battalion of Jews now before him would be no whit behind their forebears in covering themselves with military glory.

An excellent lunch was provided for the men in Camperdown House, where speeches were delivered by the Chief Rabbi, the Mayor of Stepney, Mr. Kiley MP, Mr. Joseph Cowan, the Chairman, and other friends of the battalion.

Afterwards, the troops proceeded amid more cheering to Waterloo, where before they entrained for Southampton, they were presented by Captain Fredman with a scroll of the law.

My new adjutant, Captain Ledley, who came to take the place vacated by Captain Neal on promotion to Major, had only just joined us on the morning of our march.

It was like the fear of the sea, and the miserable multitudes, street upon street, seemed so many waves of a vast and malodorous sea lapping about me and threatening to well up and over me.

"Stepney, sir.

Stepney Station," the cabbie called down.

I looked about.

It was really a railroad station, and he had driven desperately to it as the one familiar spot he had ever heard of in all that wilderness.

"Well," I said.

He spluttered unintelligibly, shook his head, and looked very miserable.

"I'm a stranger here," he managed to articulate, "and if you don't want Stepney Station, I'm blessed if I know what you do want." "I'll tell you what I want," I said.

The first of these women was Mary Ann Nicholls, known locally as Polly.

She was born in 1845 to a family of domestic workers in Stepney, and her mother had died when Polly was only fourteen.

Nicholls's last night was ordinary.

She went down to the frying-pan pub, returned home drunk, and then vanished into the damp alleyways that would soon become infamous.

Which part?

Stepney.

You're Whitechapel.

Whitechapel.

They were closed in 1981, but these docks were once packed with ships and provided work for thousands of labourers.

They wake in Woolwich, Silvertown, Barking, Limehouse, Stepney, and the Commercial Road, converging by bus, bicycle, tram, truck, train, and finally on foot.

Dockers, tallymen, checkers, stevedores, hatchmanmen, gangers, tractormen, coopers, bank riders, weighers, dockwatchmen, dredgemen, launchmen, needlemen, jetty clerks, warehousemen, measurers, coal trimmers, lightermen, lumpers, and just as you think you've named them all, up goes a crane driver to his seat in the sky.

There was strict demarcation of labour in the docks.

he hoped so his mother says that his example would fire the minds of others and so topple over the very pedestals of governments and law it was absurd he held for a few men to war against society but he added the affection he laboured under was catching he trusted that one day london and the great cities of europe would lie in ruins but i interposed this is fanaticism or rather madness it is a disease bred by an effete form of civilisation is this all the wily anarchist plotted for well it's a pretty large all is it not by the way he had one persistent craze the belief in some invention which was one day to place society at his mercy so awkward that for society We talked for some time longer, when I called my appointment to mind, and tearing myself away from my kind friends, sallied forth into the street.

It was not easy to refuse the ex-commissioner's invitation to dinner in view of Burnet's dismal parlour at Stepney.

Still, I was not a little interested in his guest, and anxious so far as was possible to keep Burnet himself out of mischief.

hitherto he had been a mere theorist with a very kindly side and there seemed no reason why with care he should not remain one but he required so i thought watching with these thoughts uppermost in my mind i hailed a hansom and ordered the driver to drop me in the east end in a road running hard by the anarchists house i can recall my entrance into that parlour most vividly burnet had let me in with his usual caution whisking off my coat i followed him to the parlour there was a bright fire burning in the grate and the gleam of the flames the only light in the room lit up a whisky bottle and some glasses on the table and ever and anon revealed the rude prince on the walls and the rough deal shelves heaped with books everything smelt of the practical In the place of the Louis XIV furniture of the Northertons, only a wooden table and some three or four deal chairs met the eye, the sole article rejoicing in a cushion being a rudely carved sofa in the corner.