Читать книгу Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End - Charlie Connelly, Charlie Connelly - Страница 17

Constance Street was about as well-to-do as Silvertown got. Having been one of the first streets in the area, located close to the Silver’s works and the station and with the Railway Hotel at the end of the street, it was almost inevitable that Constance Street would be at the very heart of the community. The houses were well built for the area, and their bay windows made them easily adaptable as shops. Hence the street soon began to attract tradespeople, people with aspirations, as well as the urban working class. The census returns for 1911 show a street that mixed residential properties and commercial ones and gives a fascinating insight into the heart of a working-class community of the times. At No. 4, for example, was David Jones, 55 years old, from Newport in the industrial heartland of South Wales. His occupation is listed as ‘engine fitter/tobacconist’, suggesting that while he was employing his industrial skills and know-how in one of the factories or works nearby, he’d also seen a business opportunity to make him less dependent on manual labour. He was 55, after all, and more than likely he was tired of the industrial grind of engine fitting – the grease, the grime, the noise – and, conscious of his advancing years, recognised an opportunity to change his and his family’s life. His 15-year-old daughter Olive was, according to the census, the ‘assistant to the tobacconist’ – maybe he was trying to build a future for his family away from the constant grind of relentless daily toil ruled by the factory hooter? Selling tobacco was a respectable trade, there would always be a market for tobacco and cigarettes among the urban working class, and 4 Constance Street was just a few feet from the junction with Connaught Road, meaning it was close to the pub, the railway station and the entrance to the rubber works: all establishments packed with smokers.

Farther up the street at No. 38 was George Robert Bullard, a 47-year-old from Suffolk employed at the docks by HM Customs and an army pensioner following a long military career. Having enlisted in the Essex Regiment at the age of 18 in 1880, George was posted to Cork in the far south of Ireland, where he met his wife Mary Ellen Kenny, and they were married in Cork the day before New Year’s Eve 1882. Within two years he was in the East Indies and then spent two years in Burma from 1885, followed by four years in India. George arrived in Silvertown at the turn of the twentieth century as drill sergeant for the Institute of Volunteers begun by Colonel Hugh Adams Silver in the 1860s. Mary is listed as a general stores shopkeeper while their son, who went by the unusual name of Ivy Osborne Edward, aged 20, was a general labourer at the Co-op. Ivy was Bengal born and shared his unusual name with his uncle. Ivy had sought to follow his father into the army in 1909, leaving his job as bath attendant at the Tate Institute a couple of hundred yards east of Silvertown (set up by Henry Tate as an alternative social venue to the pub for his employees) with glowing references. Unfortunately Ivy would last barely three months in the military, being discharged on discovery of the heart condition that would kill him at home in Constance Street in 1913 at the age of 24, while George would also lose his wife Mary at home to illness the same year. Another son, Albert, like Ivy born in Burma, had also enlisted in the army in 1909 and would die, buried in a dugout hit by a shell in France, at the end of June 1916.

In many ways the Bullards exemplify Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular: their employment looks in both directions, towards the factories and the docks as well as establishing a business in Constance Street itself. They had arrived in Silvertown by a circuitous route with a family whose birthplaces ranged from Faisalabad to Warrington. The Bullards have a tantalising back story that spreads way beyond Silvertown’s watery confines of dock and river across the world, while the family, and George in particular, would know great tragedy and premature death. The Bullards’ was a very Silvertown story.

All along the street are labourers, car men, dockers, gas fitters, instrument makers and their families. The wives seem generally to stay at home but the children, male and female, all seem to be at work by the time they are 14. Other than a couple of domestic servants, the young girls tend to do similar jobs to the boys: factory hands, messengers and packers.

For most of the men the title is ‘general labourer’, the unskilled, the untrained, those with little more than the strength of their backs and the power in their arms to sell, whether it be ‘on the stones’ outside the dock gates looking for the call to work or making themselves useful in the factories, moving crates or stoking furnaces, exiting the factory gates or the dock gates every night sweaty, filthy and exhausted, maybe, if they’ve a few spare coins in their pockets, calling in at Cundy’s for a glass of beer on the way home.

The Railway Hotel, for all its description by Dickens’s correspondent as a ‘grim’ place, was a fine, sturdy Victorian building. Standing on the corner of Constance Street and Connaught Road it was an imposing sight. The bar was L-shaped and the room was high-ceilinged, with flamboyant coving and plaster moulding on the ceiling. The first reference to the Railway Hotel is to be found in a local directory from 1855, with the landlord named as William Owston. This seems curious as both Silvertown Station and Constance Street were still nine years away.

The Railway Hotel would come to be known by another name. Simeon Cundy, the son of a Nottinghamshire coal dealer, had taken over the pub with his wife Elizabeth around 1887. When there was a major strike at the rubber factory the following year the pub became the headquarters of the strike committee, with Eleanor Marx herself attending meetings in the function room upstairs. Mrs Cundy apparently even persuaded the brewery to make a donation to the strikers’ hardship fund.

Whether the landlord and landlady’s support for the local working people was the reason is long forgotten now, but from those tumultuous days onward the pub was always known as Cundy’s. The Cundys seemed unlikely radicals: Simeon was from a well-off business family and his elder brother John ended up owning swathes of local properties and died a very rich man. Simeon’s name would remain over the door until his death in 1914 when his son, also Simeon, took over until the twenties, when it passed into Mrs Cundy’s family the Saddingtons. But Cundy’s it remained, right into the twenty-first century.

In 1912 industrial unrest had returned to Cundy’s. The docks were out on strike and the dockers were on the lookout for strike-breakers, known as blacklegs. When Fred Clark walked into Cundy’s one August Saturday afternoon to buy four bottles of beer to take back to his colleagues at the Albert Dock, he was stopped on his way out by a striking docker named Billy Clark. Billy pulled one of the bottles from Fred’s pocket, stood between him and the door and said, ‘You’re blacklegging, aren’t you? Taking the bread from my mouth. Show me your card.’

Fred, a foot shorter than Billy, swallowed nervously, fumbled in his inside pocket and pulled out his insurance card.

‘Not your buggering insurance card,’ spat Billy. ‘Show me your union card.’

Fred stammered that he wasn’t a member of the union.

‘Well in that case,’ said Billy, ‘I want a pint of beer.’

He stepped back to allow Fred to get to the bar and stood at his shoulder. Lizzy Cundy, who hadn’t heard the exchange, came over to serve him.

‘Yes, love, more bottles, is it?’

‘No, er, a pint of beer for this gentleman, please,’ said Fred, trying to sound as assured as he could. Billy leaned in behind him and spoke directly into his ear.

‘And one for my friend here,’ he said.

‘Can you make that two, please?’ called Fred.

‘And my other friend, over there,’ continued Billy in a low, menacing voice until Fred had ordered four pints. He paid the money and turned to go.

‘I haven’t finished with you yet,’ said Billy Clark through gritted teeth, then grabbed Fred by the shoulder and thrust him hard against the wall.

‘Put your hands in the air,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll bloody kill you!’

Drinkers within earshot fell silent and turned to look as Billy Clark went through Fred’s pockets, pulling out coins and a pocket knife.

‘Sit down,’ he said to the petrified Fred, who did as he was told.

Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own knife. He turned it over in his hand and ran his finger along the blade.

‘I’ve a good mind to kill you.’

‘Hi, you!’ called Lizzy. ‘We’ll have none of that in here! Leave that man alone!’

Billy swung round to face her.

‘But … he’s a blackleg!’

More men turned to face the confrontation and a few moved towards Billy Clark.

‘He … he’s not in the union,’ said Billy, suddenly uncertain, looking from face to face, appealing to the men to share his burning sense of injustice. Two men jumped forward and grabbed Billy’s arms. The knife dropped to the floor.

‘I couldn’t care less if he’s Blackbeard,’ called Lizzy from behind the bar. ‘You don’t pull out a knife in Cundy’s.’

The men bundled Billy out of the door. A couple of minutes later they returned and one of them handed Fred his knife and his money.

‘Thank you,’ said Fred, breathing hard. ‘I think you just saved my life.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ said one of the men. ‘Now get out of Silvertown, you fucking blackleg.’

This, then, was Silvertown on the eve of the First World War, an island of the disparate, a hellish insular outpost of fiery furnaces, giant boiling vats, noxious fumes, belching chimneys, dirty smogs that made your eyes run and your nose sting, a metropolis of clanking, screeching machinery and a raw, quick-witted, downtrodden populace, raised on inequality and with little to show for their long hours of endless toil beyond a couple of dank rooms in a house where the air is always damp, fungus grows through the wallpaper and there are four children to a bed.

On the face of it this was a slum among slums, streets of houses with no roads, no pavements, no gas and little lighting. So damp was Silvertown as the buried marshes tried to rise to the surface again with, the thoroughfares a permanence of puddles, that some people wondered whether Silvertown folk at the turn of the twentieth century had webbed feet. It was almost as if the place had risen from the depths and could be drawn back down again, back among the drowned of centuries.

Yet magical, world-changing things happened in Silvertown, most of it achieved via the hands and broad backs of the dockers and labourers of the locality, the people who’d come from near and far to settle in that choking, muddy place by the river. These were proud people, strong people, people whose lifelong struggles had taught them to stick together, to look out for one another. Their collective experiences, whether in the shipyards of Scotland, the steelworks of South Wales, the flat farmlands of East Anglia or beyond, had taught them all that together they were strongest. Their accents might differ and their trades might differ, but the people of Silvertown were always united.

These were island people, people of the water – two of the main businesses on Constance Street in 1914 were even run by families called Marsh and Reed – bound together by their half-natural, half-artificial shoreline as much as their shared histories and experiences.

War was coming. Just as Silvertown and Constance Street had begun to find themselves, to assert an identity, a chain of events was underway that would challenge everything.

Oh, and the Greenwoods were on their way.