Trade

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The Silvertown Explosion

Posted by The Ripper on November 23, 2014
Posted in: Culture. Tagged: , , , , , .

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Just before 7pm on the evening of Friday the 19 January 1917, with Britain firmly in the grip of WWI, the people of Silvertown were settling down to their evening meals. Suddenly, the winter’s night lit up and the howl and roar of an enormous explosion rent the East London sky apart. Debris was strewn across much of London: a gasholder across the river in Greenwich exploded, igniting over 7 million cubic feet of gas, and windows were reportedly blown out of the Savoy Hotel on the Strand. Red hot lumps of rubble fell from the sky and began to cause numerous fires in the surrounding areas. What on earth had happened?

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The Silvertown explosion wrecked the docks

Silvertown is an area of London just to the south of the Royal Victoria Docks, on the far eastern fringes of the East End. It has long been an area of industry and was named after Samuel Winkworth Silver who established a factory there in the 1850’s and who went on to make some of the first of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephones there in the 1880’s.

As Silvertown just fell outside the boundary of the 1843 Metropolitan Building Act, many factories were built there that dealt with products that were unpleasant, noxious or even downright dangerous. Chemical factories abounded and manufactured or processed petroleum, caustic soda, creosote and even sulphuric acid. All this on the outskirts of the busiest metropolis on earth. Small terraced properties filled the gaps between the docks and these housed the factory workers.

As the First World War progressed, a caustic soda factory owned by Brunner, Mond and Co was ordered by the government to begin the manufacture of trinitrotoluene, commonly known as TNT, used in a wide range of munitions for the British troops fighting in the trenches. The company protested at the time, as the effects of handling TNT were well known. A large number of workers found that their skin would begin to turn yellow and they began to suffer from chest pains and nausea. However in September 1915 the company surrendered to growing government pressure and their factory began turning out TNT at the rate of nine tons a day…

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A house wrecked in the Silvertown Explosion

On the evening of the 19 January, it seems that a fire broke out in the melt-pot room. Despite frantic efforts to put it out, some 50 tons of TNT ignited – with devastating consequences. The resultant explosion completely destroyed a large part of the factory and the properties in the surrounding streets, sending up a massive fireball and starting fires in the capital that could be seen as far away as Kent and Surrey. The sound of the blast was reportedly heard as far away as Norfolk. Flour mills on the southern side of the Royal Victoria Docks were flattened and other parts of the dock and warehouses were torn apart.

Those people who could, responded rapidly, but the unusual geography of this part of East London hampered rescue attempts. Seventy three people lost their lives and close to four hundred were injured, many seriously. Around seventy thousand buildings were damaged and the financial cost was estimated at £250,000 (an enormous amount at the time). Ironically, the death toll could have been so much more, given the level of devastation. Because of the time of day, many workers had left the factory, but had not yet retired for the night. This action may have saved hundreds as it was the upper floors of the properties that bore the brunt of the damage.­ A number of firemen lost their lives as their station was one of the properties brought crashing to the ground by the explosion.

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Silvertown Fire Station after the explosion

The day following the explosion, the local authority took steps to oversee the rescue work and begin rebuilding their shattered community. Within two weeks, over 1700 men in the area were employed in repairing housing and as a result, by August of 1917, much of their work was complete.

An enquiry into the incident was set up and reached the conclusion that Silvertown was a totally unsuitable place to build a TNT manufacturing plant, and went on to criticise Brunner, Mond & Co for negligence in the running of the factory and for failure in looking after the welfare of their workers. The Government report remained secret until 1950…

Charles Jamrach

Posted by The Ripper on July 7, 2014
Posted in: Characters. Tagged: , , , , , , .

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People in the East End in 1857 were an impassive and stoical lot. The area along St George’s Street, formerly Ratcliffe Highway, was already infamous for the series of ghastly murders that had taken place there 45 years before (more here), but despite its notoriety, the two women peering at the jewellery in the pawnbrokers shop next door to Mr Charles Jamrach’s Menagerie had other things on their minds. Suddenly, one of the women noticed a strange reflection in the shop window, and turned. She stifled a scream and pulled her companion into the shop doorway, as a fully grown Bengal Tiger padded past them, carrying a small boy in its mouth…

Charles Jamrach was born in Hamburg, Germany in March 1815 where his father, Johann Gottlieb Jamrach, was chief of the Hamburg river police. As part of his job, Jamrach Senior would find himself having to board vessels on the busy waterway and he soon built up a reputation amongst the sailors for purchasing any exotic creatures they had brought back with them from their travels. He rapidly established himself as a dealer in birds and wild animals – and set up branches in the great ports of Antwerp and London.

Young Charles was fascinated by the myriad animals, birds and insects in his father’s shop and following his father’s death in 1840, Charles Jamrach moved to take over the London branch of the business, developing the existing premises into a bird shop and museum in St. George Street known as ‘Jamarch’s Animal Emporium’, a menagerie in Bett Street, and a warehouse in Old Gravel Lane, Southwark.

Jamrach's Menagerie

Jamrach’s Menagerie

The business thrived, partly due to Jamrach’s location, close to The London Docks and partly due to his ever expanding customer base – the London Zoological Gardens had been loaned an Elephant which he was confident they would buy, and following a devastating fire at P.T Barnum’s Circus in 1864, it was Jamrach’s Menagerie who was responsible in restocking it with animals.

A Mr John Edward Gray who was keeper of zoology at the British Museum also named a snail that had been forwarded to him by Charles Jamrach Amoria jamrachi in his honour.

A reporter visiting his premises wrote that “The museum includes tropical beetles glorious with shards of green and gold, and tropical butterflies like tropical blossoms, or costliest satin and velvet embroidered with creamy lace, and be-dropt with precious metals and precious stones”…

As one can imagine, Jamrach’s stock varied considerably, dependant as it was on the ships that were docking in London, but a contemporary article of the time shows the extent and prices of the animals on offer.

Zebras – £100 – £150 each
Camels – £20
Giraffes – £40
Ostriches – £80
Polar Bears – £25
Other Bears – £8 – £16
Leopards – £20
Lions – £100
Tigers – £300

On one fateful day in 1857, Charles Jamrach had just taken delivery of a large number of animals which had been brought in on ships arriving in London Docks from their voyage to the East Indies. The animals were taken to the Bett Street repository with Jamrach himself overseeing operations. To ensure that the fully grown Bengal tiger in one crate had no opportunity to maul his workmen, Jamrach instructed that the wooden crate containing the beast was placed with its barred opening facing the wall. However, the strength of the animal had been underestimated – and as another crate containing leopards was being unloaded, Jamrach and the workmen were horrified to hear a crash and to discover that the tiger had pushed out the back of the crate with its hind legs and was now prowling around the yard.

Jamrach and the Tiger

Jamrach and the Tiger

The tiger stalked its way into the street where a curious boy, around nine years of age, reached out to stroke the back of the strange creature that had appeared before him. In an instant, the tiger whirled and gripping the boy’s shoulder in his jaws, ran off down the street in the direction of the docks.

Jamrach dashed after the animal and upon catching up with it, grabbed the tiger by the loose skin of its neck and tried to wrestle it to the ground. He succeeded in tripping it by putting his own leg under the tiger’s hind quarters, but the animal would not relinquish its hold on the now terrified boy. It was not until his workmen arrived and dealt the animal several blows to the head, that the stunned animal finally let go of the child. Shaking itself free, the tiger then turned tail and headed back to the menagerie yard and the relative safety of an empty crate, where it was recaptured.

The event is commemorated by a statue that stands near the entrance to Tobacco Dock today.

The boy was taken to hospital but, astonishingly, found to be virtually unharmed save for a severe fright and a few scratches. Jamrach offered the boy’s father compensation of £50, but the father rejected the money and decided to bring a court action against him for damages.

At the trial the judge sympathised with Jamrach, saying that, instead of being made to pay, he ought to have been rewarded for saving the life of the boy, and perhaps that of a lot of other people.

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The Boy and The Tiger Statue, Tobacco Dock

The judge, however, had to administer the law as he found it, and reminded Jamrach that he was responsible for any dangerous consequences brought about as a result of his business. He suggested, however, as there was not much hurt done to the boy, to put down the damages as low as possible. The court subsequently set a penalty of £300, of which £240 went to the lawyers as costs!

News of the tiger’s escape and notoriety soon got around, and within a few days of the end of the hearing, Jamrach was able to sell the animal to a Mr Edmonds, of Wombwell’s Menagerie for £300.

Charles Jamrach died in Bow on 6 September 1891, leaving two sons, Albert and William. The business continued for some time, but began running into difficulties during the First World War, and after his son Albert died in 1917, the firm finally closed its doors in 1919.

The final words are from an article written by a journalist in 1879 who had been invited to visit Jamrach’s Menagerie and who wrote “I have nothing further to state, except to assure my readers of naturalist tastes that, for whatever they want, from a hippopotamus to a humming-bird, Jamrach’s is the very place to go to”.

Petticoat Lane Market

Posted by The Ripper on April 6, 2014
Posted in: Places of Note, Trade. Tagged: , , , , , .

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Walk a short distance from Spitalfields Market on a Sunday between 9am and 3pm, and you will stumble upon another world famous East End Market – and one of London’s oldest – Petticoat Lane.  Originally called Peticote Lane, the area around Petticoat Lane was decimated by the Great Plague of 1665, when London lost a fifth of its entire population.

The existing market has been operating in its current location from the mid 1700’s and was named after the Petticoats and Lace that were sold in the area by the Huguenot weavers who had populated Spitalfields after fleeing their native France. Another interpretation of the name is that unscrupulous traders would “steal your petticoat from you at one end of the market and sell it back to you at the other end…”!
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Petticoat Lane Market was not formally recognised as a trading area until an Act of Parliament was passed in 1936 but its relationship for being populated by ne’er do wells and fraudsters made it unpopular with the authorities and a popular way of disrupting the market was for emergency vehicles such as police cars and fire engines to be driven from one end of Petticoat Lane to the other with sirens blaring and bells ringing!

Nowadays, the market has a more salubrious reputation, selling items such as leather jackets at the Aldgate East end, whilst the rest of the market is largely given over to bargain clothing. A large selection of fashion items are always on sale with many end of season lines being made available at knock down prices at almost a thousand stalls.

Other items such as bric-a-brac, electrical good and shoes are also readily available, and whilst many visit the market for the items sold on the stalls, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the lane itself is lined with shops selling a huge range of highly coloured African and Asian fabrics.

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So, where exactly is ‘Petticoat Lane’? The sign at the top of the article is a bit of a misnomer as due to the prudishness of the Victorians, Petticoat Lane was renamed Middlesex Street in 1846 – the thought of a lane being named after ladies undergarments was deemed far too racy!

Spitalfields Market

Posted by The Ripper on March 17, 2014
Posted in: Trade. Tagged: , , .

Spitalfields Market
Spitalfields Market in the East End first came into being when Charles the First granted a licence for ‘flesh, fowl and roots’ to be sold on the Spittle Fields – a field adjacent to the hospital and priory of St Mary’s Spittel – which then was an area of London that had remained relatively rural until the Great Fire of London.

Traders had begun operating beyond the city gates – on the site where today’s market stands, following the Great Fire in 1666.

The market was re-founded in 1682 by Charles II as a result of the necessity of providing fresh produce to the ever growing population of the new suburb of London.

Spitalfields Market was a huge success and was open for six days a week throughout most of the eighteen century, but the market began to fall into decline after 1876.

A market porter, Robert Horner, decided to do something about the situation. He bought a short lease on the whole market, and began work on developing new market buildings.

These buildings were sited on the rectangular patch of open ground which retained the name Spittle Fields: Nowadays, the area covered is defined by Crispin Street to the west, Lamb Street to the north, Red Lion Street to the east and Paternoster Row which later became known as Brushfield Street to the south.

Spitalfields Market Floor

However, the market’s popularity was instrumental in its downfall – due to its location, deep in the heart of London; the narrow streets made traffic congestion a real problem. Finally, in 1991, the market was moved to Leyton over in East London, and it seemed that Spitalfields Market was destined to be a name consigned to the history books.

Nevertheless, following almost two decades of careful restoration and regeneration, the market now houses a new collection of artisans. Independent retailers now rub shoulders with restaurants and vintage clothing stalls, bringing this part of the East End back to vibrant life…

The Rag Trade

Posted by The Ripper on March 8, 2014
Posted in: Trade. Tagged: , , , , , .

The Rag Trade
The area of the East End known as Spitalfields has been home to clothing manufacturing businesses (often referred to as ‘The Rag Trade’) for over 250 years.  Started primarily by the Huguenots, religious refugees from Eighteenth century France, the Rag Trade has dominated the area ever since.

Spitalfields represented the most concentrated Huguenot settlement in England and it was said that you were as likely to hear French being spoken in the streets of the East End as the mother tongue of English. In fact, the amount of Huguenot migration from France was so great (estimated at almost twenty five thousand individuals – a huge amount given the population at the time) that it is believed that amongst the current population in the South East of England, more than 90% may have Huguenot ancestors.
Huguenot Wever in the East End

The Huguenots were talented weavers who became very successful and their businesses soon boomed. They invested the money they made to construct the tall, impressive town houses that line the streets of the Brick Lane area (for a chance to glimpse into their world, see the article on Dennis Severs House on this website). With their long windows to let in the maximum amount of light, a factor essential for a weaver, together with their high ceilings, these properties are now highly sought after.

By the nineteenth century the weavers had long gone (primarily due to the joint factors of employment restrictions and mechanisation) and the properties had started to fall into disrepair. The once grand Huguenot homes were then turned into lodging houses where London’s poorest and most desperate could spend the night for a penny. Those who could not even afford the cost of a bed would end up sleeping whilst sitting upright on a bench, their tired and weary bodies held in place by a rope.

The properties became filthy, flea-ridden doss houses where petty crime was rife. Home to gin soaked Whitechapel prostitutes, these sorry individuals would have slept in these common lodging houses whilst Jack the Ripper committed his horrendous murders in the streets outside.

As the French weavers moved out another group of settlers began to move in. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the persecution of Jews in Russia became even fiercer, and a wave of pogroms swept across Russia and neighbouring countries. Many Jewish families fled Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914, prompted by economic hardship and increasingly ferocious persecution and moved to the East End for a fresh start.

A large numberJewish Tailors in the East End of Jews who landed in England were actually intending to make their way to America, but about 120,000 stayed in this country. Attracted by the East End’s reputation as a place for cheap living, (and by the fact that it had been home to a Jewish population in previous decades), large numbers of Jews settled in Spitalfields, often finding work in the ‘rag trade’. Indeed, by the end of the Nineteenth century, Jews represented about 95 per cent of the population in the Wentworth Street district of Spitalfields and had also settled around Whitechapel, Aldgate and Mile End.

Eventually, the Jewish community moved further out to the suburbs, such as Golders Green and Hendon, and in their wake, the clothing trade was taken over by another ethnic group, that of Bengali Muslims, who remain to this day. Indeed a visit to Brick Lane nowadays finds the senses assaulted with the sights, sounds and smells of the Indian sub-continent.

The London Docks

Posted by The Ripper on January 25, 2014
Posted in: Trade. Tagged: , , , .

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The London Docks occupied a total area of about 30 acres (120,000 m²). They consisted of the Western and Eastern docks which were linked by the short Tobacco Dock. In turn, the Western Dock was linked to the River Thames by Hermitage Basin (in the south west) and by Wapping Basin (to the south).

The Eastern Dock joined the River Thames via the Shadwell Basin to the east. The principal designers of these docks were the architects and engineers Daniel Asher Alexander and John Rennie, who had done so much sterling work on the English Canal Network.
Lumber

As a major inland port, situated in the heart of London, the docks were used to land and distribute high-value luxury commodities such as ivory, spices, coffee and cocoa as well as wine, wool and tobacco for which beautiful warehouses and wine cellars were constructed, alongside the wharfs.

In 1864 the London Docks were amalgamated with St Katharine Docks. Strangely the dock system was never connected to the railway network, and therefore the cargos that were handled from all around the world began their journey to the heart of the Empire by road. In common with the rest of the enclosed docks, the London Docks were taken over by the Port of London Authority in 1909.

Slightly further down the River Thames are the site of the West India Docks, a collection of three docks, the Northern most of which was the Import Dock, the middle which was the Export Dock and the lower South Dock . The docks were accessed via Blackwall Reach on the Thames, with boats able to pass through the Isle of Dogs and re-join the Thames at Limehouse Reach.

The Import Dock originally comprised of 30 acres (120,000 m2) of water and was 155 metres long by 152 metres wide, whilst the slightly smaller Export Dock covered 24 acres (97,000 m2) and was 155 metres long by 123 metres wide. By having separate docks for loading and unloading, it was hoped to avoid vessels taking up valuable quay space for long periods of time. Between them, the two docks had a combined capacity to berth over 600 vessels, and locks and basins at either end of the Docks connected them back to the River Thames.
West India Docks

The design of the docks allowed a ship bringing cargo in from the West Indies to unload in the northern dock, sail round to the southern dock and load up with export cargo in a fraction of the time it had previously taken, given the heavily congested and dangerous upper reaches of the Thames.

Initially the docks dealt solely with produce from the West Indies, with the exception of tobacco, and supervised the loading and unloading of vessels as decreed by Parliament.  As a result, West India Docks mainly traded in rum, molasses and sugar. Imported and exported cargoes were wide ranging and included such commodities as Jute, Coir, Oil Spirits & Wine, Shell, Horn, Cork, Indigo, Spices, Baggage, Coffee and Hardwood.

During the 20th century, the docks also handled grain and, as refrigeration became common, meat, fruit and vegetables also became regular commodities.

The docks closed to commercial traffic in 1980 and the Canary Wharf development was built on the site

Pearly Kings and Queens

Posted by The Ripper on January 19, 2014
Posted in: Culture. Tagged: , , , .

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Many people associate the East End with Pearly Kings & Queens.  The Pearlies developed from the ‘Coster Kings & Queens’, who originated in the 18th century. The ‘Costers’ in turn began life as ‘Costermongers’, London’s street traders, who have been around for over a 1000 years

The Costermongers have been an important feature of London life since the 11th century and for most of that time they were unlicensed and itinerant. Like some market traders of today, they would shout out to attract customers to view their wares – although, in doing so, they would often upset some of London’s better off society. The costermongers began to adopt an innovative method of attracting attention to themselves. Many would have a row of pearl buttons, each the size of a penny, sewn to their outside trouser seams from the ankle to the knee. Other went further with more pearl buttons on the flaps of their waistcoat and coat pockets and the front of their caps.

Pearly

At that time, Victorian London was riddled with social problem. The poor or those too sick to work enjoyed no healthcare provision, and the welfare state was a long way off. For many, the Workhouse was the only way of food or lodgings, but it was considered the last resort among the poor as treatment was harsh and conditions almost as squalid as life on the street.

It was into this environment that Henry Croft enters the story….

Henry Croft was born in 1862 and raised in a Victorian workhouse orphanage in Somers Town Market, Chalton Street, King’s Cross.

Henry decided to go one better and decided to have a suit totally covered in pearl buttons. He then used to wear this to collect pennies and halfpennies to help out the children in the orphanage where he had been raised. He soon became a great attraction, and he was approached by many charitable organizations to help collect money for the poor, or disabled.

Pearly Kings and QueensThe costermongers had always had a tradition of organizing a whip-round for any of their number who had fallen on hard times, and Henry now asked them to help him with his charity work. They adopted the same style of costume, and as a result, the pearly monarchy and its tradition of raising money for charity began.

When Henry died in 1930, 400 pearly kings and queens attended his funeral in their costumes. There are fewer than that now, but the Original Pearly Kings and Queens Association still looks after Henry’s grave – a representation of a top hatted figure of Henry Croft that was originally situated  in the St Pancras & Islington Cemetery – until repeated vandalism caused its replacement…