Plucky, witty cinematic heroes During the Second World War... the plucky Cockney, who would see Hitler off with a sarcastic comment and a boot up the backside, was everywhere in patriotic films. see below History Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com Search for Cockney clichés reveals snobbery and racism BY JOHN RENNIE THE Graphic was one of a host of illustrated newspapers that sprung up in London in the latter years of the 19th century, as more efficient printing processes and the abolition of newspaper taxes and duties on paper made the mass production of newspapers profitable. The mainstay of the editorial was crime, intrigue and scandal… not much has changed in the British public’s tastes in a century and a half. Colour came from the illustrations – expertly dashed-off impressions of the Ripper’s latest victim, or the Tichborne Claimant in the courtroom. The lurid pictures were only matched by the highly coloured (if sometimes low-tone) copy. And the East End was a happy hunting ground for The Graphic’s reporters. With its mix of races and cultures, squalor, crime and desperate people living on the margins, there was always sensation to be found. One of the most fertile sources of stories were the police stations and courts, and in a lavishly illustrated piece of 1887, the paper painted a picture of the people gathered in and around the police station in Arbour Street, “sandwiched, as it were, between the two great East End arteries: Whitechapel Road and the Commercial Road East”. There the reporters went searching for the true East Ender. But who was this ‘Cockney’ who was apparently so distinct from the respectable Londoner? “They are of all aspects – an amphibious and fish-like aspect, a riverside Rogue Riderhood aspect, a Whitechapel thieflike aspect, and a stolid costermonger-like aspect. They are Saturday night faces that one sees not in Belgravia.” They were, in fact, a perfect cross-section of the Whitechapel population, “men from the docks and wharves, broad and burly and fierce, with wonderful whiskers and fur caps. “Here are foreigners with rings in their ears and knives at their girdles… stranger looking, clad in indescribable garments, from the tattered overcoat of a modern Fagin to the reach-me-down finery of the East End exquisite.” It’s all there. The mix of fascination and horror with which respectable London viewed the East End, rather like a proxy visit to a carnival freak show; the mockery of the Cockney exquisite or dandy, a knock-off Beau Brummel; and the unmistakable whiff of racism and anti-Semitism – and did it by touching on characters the readers would know from Charles Dickens’ hugely successful serial stories. Rogue Riderhood is “a low-class waterside character” from Our Mutual Friend, and the journalist chooses one of the great writers more controversial characters – for “modern Fagin” read Jew. Anti-Semitism was everywhere, if not everywhere accepted. Beatrice Webb, a tireless social worker and philanthropist in the Whitechapel slums alongside her cousin Charles Booth, described East End Jews as “grasping” and “profit-seeking” (Beatrice came from a family who had grown rich on trade). And journalist Arnold White, who turned his investigations in Whitechapel into the book The Problems of a Great City, in 1886, went a step further. White, who had political pretensions, standing as a Liberal candidate for Mile End that same year, took the typical Victorian Rogue Riderhood from Our Mutal Friend view of the East End as a ‘problem’ to be solved. He narrowed it down. The problem with the East End, decided White, was the Jews. White’s writing portrayed East End Jews as “dirty” and “insanitary”. He campaigned furiously to stop the influx of Jews from Russia. In an eccentric ploy, he gathered a group of newly arrived Jewish immigrants (or “greeners”), handpicking the apparently dimmest and most dissolute, to appear before a Commons committee. In return for perjuring themselves, admitting to imaginary crimes and perversions, he promised them help in returning home or onward to America. It was a crude device, and expertly dismantled by his opposing number, the Tower Hamlets MP Samuel Montagu. White would carry on his campaign until his death in the 1920s, becoming an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics. Montagu meanwhile, who represented the consituency from 1885 until 1901, fought a constant battle, meeting hysteria with common sense. A couple of years later he would be writing to the London press to defuse the anti-Semitic hysteria around the Whitechapel Murders, and the hunt for an easy scapegoat. The Irish, though they blended in more easily than “dark-bearded men in Russian- Polish dress”, got a similarly rough ride. To Charles Booth “neither the Irish nor their [Catholic] faith had much to commend them”. Rather disheartening to be described by a journalist as “that worst and lowest state of all, that lowest deep beneath even imagination cannot conceive a lower – that sink of moral pollution in which wallow the lowest dregs of English society”. Pretty low then, though the writer did admit that “the vast army of Irish toil or Irish misery” concentrated in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel had been forced there by “the accursed Land system” which had driven them from Ireland. And there was some romanticisation in the picture Henry Mayhew drew from interviewing Irish people in the 1850s. “These girls have a yellow, oily look and are… slight and delicate, but they can carry immense loads of sacking on their heads.” And at the height of the Whitechapel Murders, speculation mounted that the killer might be an Irish immigrant. It seemed the maniac must be an outsider (toffs and doctors and visiting sailors were other popular suspects). Heaven forbid it was an indigenous East Ender. But still… all reporters seemed to find in the East End was the despised lower-class foreigner. So where could you find the chirpy Cockney of popular myth? By the late 1800s the music hall was the entertainment of choice, with the middle and upper classes coming down to Whitechapel to consume a very English construction – the cheeky chappy (or woman) on stage, singing bawdy songs, cracking risque jokes and taking the mickey out of the poverty in which they found themselves. Mocking the coppers, doing moonlight flits when the rent was due, and always looking after his own (while enjoying quite a lot to drink). This character (which in fact owed plenty to Jewish wisecracking humour) was refined over the early decades of the new century, and became a staple of movies up to and during the Second World War. During that conflict, the plucky Cockney, who would see Hitler off with a sarcastic comment and a boot up the backside, was everywhere in patriotic films. He and she were the “archetypal Cockneys” – always a bit of an invention and now lost to time as much as the Huguenots, the Irish and Jewish incomers, and the multitude of others. The East End, as ever, was changing all the time. With thanks to London’s Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D Gray, published by Bloomsbury Academic, £14.99. The Graphic focused largely on crime and scandal 27 OCTOBER – 2 NOVEMBER 2014 N E W S F R O M T O W E R H A M LETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13
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