David Charnick delves into some of the shadows of the history of the East End. If you want to discover more by joining him on one of his tours of the area, his current schedule can be found here.

In recent times there have been attempts to sanitise our communities from the taints of history. There was an unsuccessful move in 2016 to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College, Oxford, after one was removed from Cape Town University in 2015. In 2018 an anti-Churchill protest at the coffee shop Blighty backfired spectacularly by affording the café free positive publicity. Also in 2018, but more successfully, students at Manchester University replaced Rudyard Kipling’s inspirational poem If, printed on the wall of their students’ union, with Maya Angelou’s reflection on prejudice Still I Rise.

In the East End some items of ‘dark heritage’ have disappeared recently, not though because of protest but because of ongoing development.

Although various Jack the Ripper guided tours take often huge groups to the sites of the five ‘canonical’ murders, continual development means that there is now literally nothing to show there. However, until 2017 there were fragments remaining of two of the murder sites, tangible links to one of the darkest periods of the East End’s story.

At about twenty to four in the morning of Friday 31 August 1888 the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found at the entrance to Brown’s stableyard on Buck’s Row – now Durward Street – in Mile End New Town. A carter called Charles Cross made the shock discovery when he got down off of his cart to pick up what he thought was a tarpaulin. Until recently part of the stableyard wall was still standing, incorporated into the playground of the adjacent school, but work on the Crossrail extension of Whitechapel Station has seen it demolished.

Nichols was one of two Ripper victims to be found at the entrance to a stableyard. Elizabeth Stride’s body was found at one in the morning of Sunday 30 September 1888 in the entrance to Dutfield’s stableyard on Berner Street – now Henriques Street – by Louis Diemschutz, steward of the International Working Men’s Educational Club across the road.

The other remaining fragment of a Ripper murder site was the old pavement and setts of Mitre Square, Aldgate. These were lifted recently so that a new open space could be created to the immediate north of the Sir John Cass Primary School. It was at the southwest corner of Mitre Square that the body of Catherine Eddowes was found at a quarter to two in the morning of Sunday 30 September 1888, forty-five minutes after the discovery of the body of Elizabeth Stride.

The murders of Stride and Eddowes are known as the Double Event, and the absence of mutilation on Stride’s body is understood to show that the killer was interrupted. This is taken as an explanation of the savagery of the mutilation committed on the body of Eddowes, the timing of whose murder also testifies to the killer’s frenzied state of mind. We know that she was killed and mutilated within a mere five minutes.

This pair of murder site fragments offered tangible links to the darker side of the East End’s story, as did two other more substantial items lost recently, two small buildings in Bethnal Green which bore witness to the activity locally of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The success in Bethnal Green of the BUF was down to the large middle class contingent of traders and manufacturers there, who abandoned their support of the local Liberal Party after their disastrous defeat in the local elections of 1935.

So successful was the BUF in Bethnal Green that the original branch, established in 1935, was joined in April 1937 by a second branch. Both branches carried on until the BUF was proscribed under Defence Regulation 18B and prominent Fascists, including Mosley and his wife Diana Mitford, were imprisoned.

The second branch was established upstairs in a former local dairy turned market barrow store at 64 Squirries Street. It stayed there for just a couple of months before moving westwards a few streets to 12 Gibraltar Walk. 64 Squirries Street then became a market barrow workshop until 2016. Subsequently it has been demolished and the site developed.

The other lost building with BUF connections was the Blade Bone, known locally as ‘The Mosley Pub’, at 185 Bethnal Green Road. The pub closed in 1999 and was converted to Noodle King, a reasonably priced noodle restaurant. Noodle King closed in 2016; subsequently the building was demolished and replaced with a small block of flats with a more upmarket restaurant at ground level.

The building dated from a London County Council slum clearance in the area in 1946-8 which resulted in the Avebury Estate on the pub’s north side. This new building replaced an 1823 pub known originally as the Three Jolly Weavers, the name changing to the Blade Bone in the 1860s.

The BUF connection was established in the 1930s when activists would sound off at the Cheshire Street market to the south, an extension of the famous Brick Lane market. It was a Sunday market to accommodate Jewish traders, and the speakers would condemn what they saw as the pernicious presence of the local Jewish community. Afterwards they would head to the Blade Bone to wet their whistles.

Although this was the original Blade Bone, on two occasions in the 1960s the replacement pub welcomed Sir Oswald Mosley himself across its threshold.

On Sunday 12 September 1965 Mosley came to speak on Wood Close, off of Cheshire Street, to promote his Union Party. Despite his local supporters preparing the pitch from half past four in the morning, the loudspeakers on top of the Austin Mini van failed, and he was reduced to using a hand-held loud-hailer. After this less than successful moment, he and his followers retired to the Blade Bone.

Subsequently, in October 1968 the BBC aired an episode of the documentary programme Panorama which was a profile of Mosley’s life and political career. This followed the publication of Mosley’s autobiography My Life. The programme featured a get-together of Mosley and a number of his supporters which was held in the Blade Bone. This episode was watched by some nine million viewers.

These tangible reminders of the grimmer side of the East End’s history have disappeared not because of protest, but because of development. They may not be missed by most. However, history is not always sweet; we must confront the dark facts that lurk in our past as well as celebrating our achievements. After all, the shadows continue to haunt us in different forms, and ‘reclaiming’ history will not disperse them. Perhaps there is room for the shadows as lessons from history?

Photo Credits

Cecil Rhodes, Oriel College – http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk

Durward Street (Buck’s Row), 2007, and Mitre Square, 2008 – Wikimedia Commons

64 Squirries Street, 2017 – https://kingsbury-consultants.co.uk

Noodle King (the Blade Bone) – https://whatpub.com