Silvertown: An East End family memoir

SILVERTOWN

An East End Family Memoir

Melanie McGrath

Dedication

In memory of my grandparents,

Jenny Fulcher and Leonard Stanley Page

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part Two

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Out of the strong came forth sweetness

Judges 14 and motto of Lyle’s Golden Syrup

Preface

You could say that Jenny Fulcher led a very ordinary life. She grew up, worked, married and had children. Her life was subject to the usual disquiets and worries. She fretted over her debts. She worried for the future. Every so often, lying in bed in the flat dawn light, she would wonder what the point of all the struggle was. And then she would get up and make a pot of tea and get on with it. Sometimes a voice in her head whispered that she was a bad wife and a poor mother. Other times the voice soothed and said she had done her best. From time to time, she wondered if anyone had ever really loved her. A few small comforts kept her going: tinned red salmon, cheap perfume and the scandal stories in Reveille magazine. She loved TV soaps and flowers – freesias and violets in particular. She knitted and sewed patchwork and converted the results into tea cosies. Over the nine decades of her life she made enough tea cosies to cover all the teapots of England.

It was the kind of life that could have belonged to a thousand women living in the mid years of the twentieth century in the East End of London. Except that it didn’t. It belonged to Jenny.

Jenny’s turn in the world began in 1903 in Poplar. The death of Queen Victoria two years earlier had ended an era, but remnants of the old century persisted. Women still wore corsets and horses still pulled hackney carriages. The streets still mostly unlit and as slippery as a snake pit. The East End had a grim reputation, and for the most part it was deserved. In the same year Jenny was born, Jack London visited the place and wrote a book about what he saw. He called it People of the Abyss.

My grandmother Jenny grew up in that Abyss. To be an East Ender then was to be among the lowest of London’s poor, but Jenny never thought of herself as low. To Jenny, there was only respectable and common and by her own account she was respectable. This had nothing to do with money – no one in the East End had much of that; it had to do with blood and conduct.

Jenny was salty and wilful, as thin and prickly as the reeds that once grew where she was born. Her heart was full of tiny thorns, which chafed but were never big enough to make her bleed. Vague feelings drifted about her like mist: bitterness, resentment and rage, mostly. Life was as much a mystery to her as she was to herself. She’d spend hours plotting how to squeeze an extra rasher from the butcher, but on the bigger issues she was helpless. She grasped the details without understanding anything of the general rules. She never had the means to manage her life and so was destined to be bent in the shape of desires, urges and ambitions greater than her own.

All the same, when her face lit up it was like a door swinging out into sunshine. There was something irrepressibly naughty about her. You’d imagine her standing behind your back poking her tongue out at you. She revelled in playing the martyr but was comically bad at the part. She’d insist on giving you the last piece of cake, then reach into her handbag when she thought you weren’t looking, pull out a huge bar of chocolate, stuff it in her mouth all at once and pretend she had a cough and couldn’t talk. Her luxuriant moaning had to be witnessed to be believed. On bad days everything from her kidneys to her knitting cost too much, ached like geronimo or was doing its best to rip her off.

No life is without its joys, though, and Jenny Fulcher harboured two great passions. The first of these was the crystallised juice of an Indian grass, Saccharum officinarum L., otherwise known as sugar. She favoured the bleached, processed, silvery white stuff, in crystal form or cubes. She spooned it into her tea in extravagant quantities and whenever she thought no one was looking, she’d lick a bony finger, dunk it in the sugar bowl and jam it into her mouth. She was partial to biscuits, cakes, marmalade, tarts and chocolate too, but sweets were really her thing. Over the course of her life, thousands of pounds of Army and Navy tablets, barley sugars, candyfloss, Everton mints, Fox’s glacier mints, humbugs, iced gems, jellies, liquorice comfits, Mintoes, nut brittle, orange cremes, pralines, Quality Street, rhubarb and custards, sugared almonds, Toblerone and York’s fruit pastilles, met their sticky end on my grandmother’s sweet tooth. Sugar was both lover and friend. It had the capacity to seduce, and also to keep her company. Her life went sour so quickly she relied on sugar to lend it sweetness. Sugar was the only thing she had the courage to make a grab for. Even after her hearing went she was never quite deaf to the rustling of humbug wrappers. When her sight failed she could still spot a Fry’s Chocolate Crème bar lying on a table top.

Though she didn’t realise it, my grandmother’s other great love was the East End. She moaned about it constantly – the cramped streets with their potholed pavements, the filthy kids and the belching factories – but she hated the thought of leaving, even for a day. She rarely ventured west and seldom troubled herself with whatever lay on the other side of the Thames. Her list of disgruntlements was long but she never really hankered to be anywhere else. The East End was a mother to her, and she had no means to imagine herself without it. She gave up her health for sugar but she gave up everything else for the East End.

Jenny Fulcher had a husband, my grandfather Leonard. He was not one of her passions. On the surface, they didn’t even have much in common. She was the product of the low-lying lanes and turnings of Poplar, where the Thames coils into a teardrop. He came from the sodden terrain of mud and reeds further to the east, from a hamlet sprinkled over the flat fields and rush beds of southern Essex. He was the son of a farm labourer, she the daughter of a journeyman carpenter. She grew up among the factories and tenements sandwiched between the Thames and the West India Docks. He passed his childhood among clouds and a sweep of cabbage fields.

All the same, they shared something beyond the everyday. There was something of the east of England about them both. Their beginnings were bogged down in poverty, their prospects tarnished and their horizons low. They began life on the flat. For years they both looked up at the world, and the world, in its turn, looked down on them.

On the surface, Len Page was all charm and muscular wit. Anyone who didn’t care to look too hard would see a diamond bloke, smartly kitted out, with a military swing to his step. People said he was a bit of a laugh. A right old type. In fact he was several types at once. The guv’nor, the back-slapper, the all-round card, but also the trickster, the slippery fish, the spiv. To tell the truth, Len Page was whatever type would get him where he wanted to go. He was as ambitious as the weeds that push up through concrete. To watch him closely was to watch the hatching and execution of unspoken plans.

Len also had two passions: the country and a woman called June. But there will be time for them later.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

Poplar was built on the back of the sea trade. About six hundred years ago, the place was marked by a single tree standing on lonely marshes and pointing the ancient route from London to Essex. The loops of the Thames at Limehouse Reach in the west and Blackwall Reach in the east protected the area from the worst of the river floods, and in 1512 the East India Company took advantage of its sheltered position to establish a ship-building business at the eastern edge. Very soon after, houses went up on the sloppy soil, craftsmen moved in, then shopkeepers. Oakum merchants arrived, followed by gluemakers, ironmongers, outfitters, manufacturers of naphtha, turpentine, creosote, varnish, linen, tar, timber boards, linseed oil and rubber goods, and Poplar became a town of ropemakers and sailmakers, chandlers, cauterers, uniform-makers, seamen, carpenters, ships’ engineers and, of course, ships.

Poplar was once a place that counted. It was from Brunswick Wharf on its eastern edge that the Virginia Settlers sailed. In 1802 the East India Company, frustrated by the small size of the upstream docks and wharves in the London Pool beside the Tower, carved out two spectacular corridors of impounded water, the East and West India Docks, one on each side of the mouth of the Isle of Dogs. Two-masted tea clippers, brigantines, colliers, packet boats, screw steamers, schooners, riggers, cutters, whalers, wool clippers, shallops, four-masters, dromonds, barges and lighters moored at the quays and wooden dolphins of these broad new docks, half-sunk with barrels of molasses, boxes of bananas, silk, pineapples, parrots, spices, tea, rice, sugar, grain, coffee, cocoa mass, ballast, monkeys, macaws, ivory, alabaster, basalt and asbestos, and discharged their cargoes safely into the warehouses inside the dock walls. It was a great time for trade and the East and West India Docks grew so fast that the bigger ships, the tea clippers and steamers, often found themselves moored for as long as a month at mid-stream anchor, waiting their turn to discharge.

My grandmother’s ancestors were tidal people, Huguenots who were washed first into the East End then into Poplar during the persecution of Protestants by Catholics in France in the 1680s. Afraid for their lives, they sailed up the Thames and found sanctuary in East London. Many gathered in Spitalfields near the City walls; others fanned out among the numerous little villages along the river, hoping to lie low for a while then move back to France once the troubles were done. But over the years of their exile their number multiplied and they stayed. Fuelled by the frantic energy of immigrants with something to prove, they evolved quite naturally into entrepreneurs, working as ragmen, clothiers, silk spinners and dyes-men. At Spitalfields they built silk weaveries and found a way to fix scarlet dye into silk which they then sold back to Catholic cardinals for robes. For more than a hundred years the River Lea ran red with their labours.

They developed English habits and their names gradually Anglicised, but after three hundred years you could still spot an East Ender with Huguenot blood. Take Jenny Fulcher. She was tiny, sallow, with the horse-brown hair of southern women. Her skin would only have to see the sun to turn brick brown. It was an embarrassment to her family. Fer gawd’s sake git some powder on yer face, you’re as black as a woggie-wog, her mother, Sarah, would say whenever the summer came. Having no money for powder, Jenny would salt her skin with bicarb of soda, because there was nothing worse than looking foreign (except being foreign, which was unthinkable).

Poplar is a mess these days. It has lost its civic quality and become little more than a scattering of remnants and cheap offcuts sliced through by the rush of the East India Dock Road and the Northern Approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. The workhouse has gone, and the East India Dock, but if you look carefully, what remains tells a story about how Poplar used to be. At the bottom of Chrisp Street, where a very fine market once stood, the monolithic pile of the Poplar Baths still stands, though the building is derelict and surrounded by razor wire. Along the High Street, between the new-build housing developments and shabby Sixties shopping parades, there remain the architectural remnants of Poplar’s marine and trading past: a customs house, some ancient paintwork advertising a chandlery, an old seamen’s mission. Further east on the Tunnel Approach, the magnificent colonnades of Poplar Library gather dirt from the traffic and its boarded up windows furnish irresistible spaces for taggers and graffiti artists.

By the time Jenny (or Jane, as she was then) is born, Poplar has become filthy and overcrowded, a victim of its own success. Those who can afford it have moved out to more spacious environs further from the dock walls. My great grandfather, John Fulcher, or Frenchie as he was known, his wife, Sarah, and their children live in Ullin Street, between the Cut and the River Lea. Ullin Street is near to Frenchie’s place of work, the Thames Ironworks at Orchard Place. Poplar is jammed with terraces of shabby lets and subdivisions put up by speculators as housing for dockworkers. There are a hundred, even a thousand similar streets stacked along the eastern flank of the city like so much left luggage. They are ugly, redoubtable places, but by no means the worst the East End has to offer.

If you are born there, the docks are the language you speak, the smells you know, the ebb and flow of your life. And so it is with Jane. She grows up beside queues of drays, moving slowly towards the dock gates; beside the twice-daily rush of men struggling to find day work; beside the crush of seamen and foreigners, their strange languages breaking from beneath turbans, yellow faces, pigtails, ice-blue eyes. Jane is aware of the tidal pull of the water before she can even read the tide tables flyposted on the sides of every public house in Poplar. The phalanxes of Port of London Authority policemen, the pawn shops, the bold glances of loose women, the rat nests and dog fights, the boozed-up sailors of a Saturday night, the bustling tradesmen, the drinking dives and gambling holes, the deals made, the greetings and the farewells, the dockers’ pubs and pawnbrokers and seamen’s missions: all these are familiar to her.

In 1903 the Fulcher family are living in the upper two rooms at number 4 Ullin Street. At the southern end of the street sits the bulking, red brick mass of St Michael and All Angels church and beside it, a gloomy vicarage set in a dark little garden. The remainder of the street is lined with poky terraces where it is common for families of seven or eight to be packed into a single room. There are men in Ullin Street who are forced to work night shifts because there is nowhere for them to sleep until their children have gone to school and the beds are free. And not unskilled labourers either, but craftsmen and artisans. The 1891 census shows sailmakers, foundrymen, glass blowers and carpenters, all living on Ullin Street.

Having two rooms between them, the Fulchers are among the more fortunate. The larger of these rooms is an imperfect square of about twelve feet containing an iron bedstead with an ancient horsehair mattress where Frenchie, Sarah and the younger children sleep, a large fireplace in which a coal stove burns whenever there is money for coal, a gas lamp, a table fashioned by Frenchie from fruit crates, a decaying wicker chair and two fruit crate stools. The room is for the most part mildewy and cheerless, smelling of the family’s activities: cooking, bathing, smoking and sex. It is rarely warm enough to open the window and the wooden sashes have in any case swollen with damp and stuck in their frames, though the draught still sails into the room like an unwanted relative. During the autumn and winter Sarah has to lay newspaper over the panes to keep the cold out, and for six months of the year the family live more or less in darkness, the gas lamp on the wall having been deemed an extravagance they can do without.

The second room is much smaller, little more than a box really, and houses another horsehair mattress which has to be shaken of its bedbugs every morning and rolled into a bolster to serve as a seat and a table. All but the youngest of the children, as well as an older female cousin, sleep on this mattress, and though the room has no fire, its small size and busy population keep it warm. In keeping with their relative sizes, Frenchie and Sarah’s room is known as Main Room and this second room Little Room. On occasion, when there is no money for coal or even for a bucket of coal dust, the whole family is obliged to move into Little Room just to keep from freezing.

Downstairs live another family, the Smileys – Jack, Violet and their nine or so children, the number varying according to whether there is a new arrival that year to balance the one or two carried off by the whooping cough or TB. The Smileys are permanently unlucky. If there is a bout of pneumonia going around, then one of the Smileys is bound to get it. If a neighbour’s boy runs amok with a football, then it will be the Smileys’ window which gets broken. If the vicar is doing his rounds, he’ll always knock first on the Smileys’ door.

Jack Smiley works as a hatchman in the East India and his wife takes in washing and sometimes cleans the ships’ galleys at the East India, but it is never enough. The tallyman is a regular visitor at the Smiley residence. So is the rent collector. And the bookies’ boy. Every Monday morning you can set your watch by the appearance of the Smiley children lumbering up the pavement carrying the family sheets and coats to Nathan James Ltd, outfitter and pawnbroker, where they will remain until Friday payday.

The Smileys and the Fulchers share a small concrete back yard with a privy and a standing tap, from where the Fulchers take their water. The privy is a dirty business. In the summer the smell draws egg-filled bluebottles and in the winter the wind sneaks in and freezes their buttocks to the seat. At some point during the previous decade the privy door worked part-way off its hinges leaving a gap the size of a toddler’s hand. But for all that, the plumbing is solid, there are rarely any overspills or seeping pipes, and most of the rats stay away. For those that don’t, the Smileys’ liver-coloured mongrel Bobs does a grand job of disposal, leaving rat tails and other remnants about as proof of his efficacy.

Frenchie Fulcher works as a ships’ carpenter at Thames Ironworks on Bow Creek, and sometimes at the West India dry dock. He is a journeyman without a permanent job and has to shape up each morning before seven in the hope that the foreman at the Ironworks has room for him. If not, he’ll go down to the West India and try to pick up something there. Fulcher is not a heavy man. All the same, he is an angry man and his neat little body conceals the strength of horses. Among dockers with their sloping shoulders, their rickety legs and half-broken backs, Frenchie the carpenter appears upright and dignified. His manner, too, sets him apart. Men less fastidious than Frenchie go to lengths at shape up, laying on their Irish/Polish/Scots origins and playing the blue-eyed boys. But French is above all that. If there is no work on any particular day, he will go home empty-handed and take it out on the kids. He is proud that way.

On a day when he is feeling right with the world Frenchie looks almost regal. His features are neat and well-made: a slender nose, domed a little in the middle but with a thin pinch at the end; wide-set, peaty eyes with a good measure of white in them, the kind of eyes in which daydreams have space to hide; and a generous but not excessive forehead – a testament, so Sarah says, to his good blood. His voice is high but his laughter, when it comes, is unexpectedly deep and clanging, not unlike an anchor dropping on its chain.

Sarah Fulcher is Frenchie’s opposite, a coarse-grained, flap-fleshed woman of wholesome temperament. She is pliant and sweet, with no obvious vices and a handy array of virtues ranging from dressmaking to midwifery. Most important of all, Sarah Fulcher is thrifty. She can sniff out a rotten swede or a poor potato at ten yards. No Chrisp Street costermonger will dare to slink a slimy cabbage or dud carrot into Sarah’s bag because they know her shrieks of latherish rage will echo halfway to the Thames Estuary. Taking money from Sarah Fulcher’s hand is as hard as prising the ring off a rigor mortised finger.

This small reservoir of fierceness is all the more remarkable because in other ways Sarah Fulcher is soft as snow. Her skin is soft and her hair is soft. Her ears have a wispy bloom of hair and fudgy lobes. Her body is as spongy as sausage meat, her lips as plump as spring chicks. Her disposition, too, is spring-like, fresh, sunny and innocent. A little insensitive, even undigested, but never, ever cruel. So sweet is she that the Smiley children all wish she were their mother, because, unlike Mrs Smiley, Sarah only thumps her children when she can’t think of any other way to make them do what they are told.

Sarah’s love for Frenchie is sweetly naïve and unshakeable. Her life is divided into two eras: Before and After Frenchie. Before Frenchie, Sarah Quelch toiled in a scullery for a family Up West. The family was miserable and the scullery was worse. Then Sarah met Frenchie, married him and found herself living in the bright new world of After Frenchie. In the wide open spaces of Sarah’s mind Frenchie is a kind of a god, or at the very least, a saviour. So unquestioning is Sarah’s devotion that she seems not to sense her husband’s deep sighs, his eyes rolled to the heavens. In an obscure corner of his heart Frenchie resents her. Resents his children, too. The wastefulness of them! The toiling that has to be done to keep them all from the poorhouse. Without Sarah and her brood of guzzling children just think where Frenchie might have ended up! As the owner of a timber yard, perhaps, or a chandler’s, or a leather business, or even a cabinetmaker’s shop. Occasionally, when he has had too much to drink, he’ll give voice to his disappointments, but Sarah only smiles at that and blows him a kiss and says, San Fairy Ann, dear, San Fairy Ann, and he will give up trying to explain.

Sarah gives birth to seven children: William, Rosetta, Frances Maud, John, Jane, Edith and Arthur. The eldest, William, is born premature and doomed. He survives for two days and his body is buried without ceremony in the cemetery not far from Ullin Street. (Rosetta does not grow to adulthood either, but we’ll come back to her.) William is never mentioned and the remembrance of him surfaces only occasionally as a faraway look in Sarah’s eye or a twitch on Frenchie’s face, and so Jane is born into a family with a missing part. No photograph of William exists, no sketch or representation of any kind. It is almost as though his very absence is shameful and must not be acknowledged. But acknowledged it is, of course. When Jane is about five or six, she comes across a wooden soldier wrapped in a piece of old sheeting and hidden at the back of the cupboard beside the fire. It is a beautifully carved, old-fashioned kind of soldier with painted eyes and woollen hair and a red wooden jacket around his broad shoulders and Frenchie’s mark carved into his base, and from then on the soldier is William, a little wooden brother who lives in a cupboard and will never grow up.