I was brought up in the depths of the East End. My father was a stevedore in the London docks, and my mother lived through the London Blitz until she moved away to do war work. In a munitions factory. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I moved away from where I had been brought up when my father took early redundancy from the docks in 1969, one of the first wave of men leaving professions that they had lived for. In my father’s case, for 44 years.
My mother had always wanted to become a seaside landlady, and she realised her ambition, and to his credit, my father complied.
We therefore moved to Bournemouth, and I received a first class grammar school education. But I returned to London to go to university, and in my second year at University College London, the godless college in Gower Street, and in my second year I moved from university rooms in a shared house opposite the university itself, to live in a housing in the East End, not quite where I had been brought up, but nevertheless back to my roots.
Opposite the large block that the co-operative was set up to manage, there was a church, St Mary’s, and for a year I learned to ring the bells in St Mary’s. It was St Mary’s at Bow, but not the St Mary’s. That is in the city, and the one that if you are born within the sound of its bells, you are a Cockney.
And so I was a member of the USSR, the union of secular and socialist ringers. Sometimes I think visiting the pub after a session learning to ring the church bells was as important as ringing the bells.
I lived in the co-operative for several years, until I moved to Yorkshire to further my connection with cooperatives, but this time, to work within a co-operative not just live.
But when I lived at Bow, I Worked for about two years in a local pub, where I felt completely immersed in a culture that was very particular to that part of London.
Every Friday, we had a lock in, in the days when pubs really did close at 11 PM. But from 11 PM until about 1 o’clock in the morning, a pub pianist would entertain with his own particular brand of risque comedy and extraordinary piano playing.
I became very friendly with Jimmy, the pianist, and he always promised that he would show me something of the real East End. And one day he did, when he took me on from the pub to his next gig, which was in an illegal drinking den, at Limehouse, where a boxing gymnasium was suddenly transformed to a late Friday night Speakeasy.
I don’t think I have ever been quite so drunk, and I took with me a friend from university. I don’t think either of us remembered much about that night.
My journey to and from the pub was short but took me past a small local community centre, on which there was a blue plaque, commemorating the visit from Mahatma Gandhi in about 1937. It was the same centre in which Profumo worked for almost 20 years, cleaning the toilets as payback for his disgrace after his affair with Christine Keeler.
It seems as if everywhere in such a community there is history to be discovered.
Just up the road from where I lived, just past Mile End, there is the Blind Beggar, where the Kray twins shot and killed Jack the Hat McVitie. And a bullet is still in the wall over the bar.
A stones throw away is Cable Street, famous for when the Black Shirts led by Mosley were stopped by dockworkers from marching through the East End Jewish Quarter. I like to imagine my father, who would have been around 20 at the time, to have been one of those dockworkers.
It is just around the corner from Wiltons Music Hall, an extraordinary survival which has now been being restored and is once more a venue for performances. Even before it was properly licensed, it was used as the atmospheric set for numerous film settings, and I was fortunate to be able to attend a private party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Sixteen, and they performed a 16th century Oratorio from Venice.
History is everywhere if you look, and I suppose I was fortunate to visit my roots and to be able to see just a little of what still lies beneath the surface.
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