The Real East End. Burke Thomas
quite well that ignorance of general matters is not confined to East End boys of fourteen. This ignorance could have been equally well illustrated by scores of examples from among our other “future rulers”—boys of eighteen of his own social rank. If the author thinks all boys of good family are enlightened, and all working-boys dense, any employer can correct him. Again, one of our “intellectual” novelists recorded recently, with a note of wonder, that on his visiting a Whitechapel home the daughters of the house were reading Marcel Proust and a volume of Tchekov’s comedies. Why the wonder? Would he have expressed wonder if the same thing had happened in Hampstead? If not, why in this case? Was it due to that ignorance of actual life which is the cause and essence of the intellectuals? Or was it a virtuous presumption that all those who were not lucky enough to be born in “nice” quarters are necessarily witless; that grace and culture are to be expected only in the sons of Balliol? Last year an amiable Divine surprised all informed people by a similar attitude. He announced, with some show, that he had been “Down” to the East End, and had made a discovery. He had discovered that the East End girl washed herself and dressed neatly!
But there are plenty like these people, clotted with half-formed prejudice, and unable to see anything outside their preconceived notions as any part of the real world; always “discovering” things which other people have always known. While the amiable Divine was about his exploring, he might have ventured a little farther into the terrible jungle. He would not then have told the story he did tell of a young girl of to-day, which began with her addressing another girl—“O crikey, ’Arriet . . .” There may be some very aged women in the East End whose name is Harriet, but I will bet the Divine all my cigarette coupons that he can’t produce a young East End girl of that name, or one who uses the slang of thirty years ago. The names current in the East End to-day are the names current in any other part of London, and the young girls are mainly Joans, Bettys, Viviens, Dorises, Barbaras, Sylvias, and Evelyns. He also put the word “spicy” into the mouth of an East End girl. That again he could not have heard. Any girl of to-day, whether East End or West End, who wanted to convey what that word used to convey, would use a word borrowed from an American talkie.
The Shadwell or Spitalfields girl is, indeed, no different from any other London girl. You will see her any day in the offices of the City and the shops of the West—bright, pretty, shingled, lipsticked and celanesed; and you will see nothing about her to suggest the awful Shadwell or Spitalfields of your imagination. You may see one type of her in the evenings, setting out from her East End streets, with other girls and young men, all in full evening clothes, for a West End restaurant or a West End dance-hall. And if you exchanged her cheap frocks for the real thing, and put her in the hands of a Bond Street hairdresser, and then set her among a number of the Bright Young Things of Mayfair, the only notable difference would be that the Bright Young Things would have uglier and noisier manners. You may label her “East End Girl” if you like, but the phrase has no more significance than “Clapham Girl” or “Hampstead Girl” or “Wimbledon Girl.” If you can perceive anything that does mark her, it is that she is a little sharper and more common-sensible than her fellows from some other quarters. These virtues are of her streets.
It is the custom in all cities that the rich select for residence the western end of the city, leaving the poor and the strugglers to camp in the east. Something symbolical here, perhaps—the moving process of the suns. Certainly there is a tang of morning about these haggard streets, and their social note, derived from the people, is one of temperate jubilee. The stronger element is the people, and you feel that at any moment this element is likely to wipe the haggard streets from the vision and achieve complete jubilee. Seldom do you see here the frigid, bored faces that you see west of the Royal Exchange. The people are not expressive; their acceptance of life is never vocal, and neither their faces nor their figures are effervescent. It is in the strong, rough-shod tone that you perceive their rich vitality and their gusto for living. They are never tired of life, for they never try to accelerate its tempo. They take it as it comes, and every day is a promise and not a mere repetition of a thousand yesterdays. Watch the crowds coming from the Rivoli or the People’s Palace, or from the Palaseum or La Bohème cinemas. Calm faces. Firm pulses. Delight in everyday things. No need of cocktails to whip up energy or interest. No need of the dull prod of freak parties or foolish treasure-hunts. No cold withdrawal from their neighbours. Life has not spoilt their humanity by a blunting variety of interest; they are openly concerned about each other and about you. No outer signs of poverty. They haven’t much money, but they do see life, and they keep an appetite for it. The girls, as I say, are marcelled and are dressed in quick copies of Hanover Square—fashion travels even more swiftly than bad news—and the young men are dressed in smart “suitings,” perhaps a shade too smart, and have had smart hair-cuts. Only the elderly are dowdy, and many even of these run to furs and Ciro necklaces. There may be no solid background to this outer smartness, but in itself it is a sign of a vitality that is making the tired and overburdened middle classes wonder. Out of this district came the vital minds of H. M. Tomlinson, of Alfred Wolmark, artist, Solomon, pianist, James Rodker, critic, David Bomberg, artist, Noah Elstein and Ernest George, dramatists, Moysheh Oyved, Yiddish poet, Clare Cameron, nature essayist, and Professor Thomas Okey; and more are coming and will continue to come. For further proof of the intelligent impulses that operate here independent of the missionaries, you have only to visit the Bethnal Green and Whitechapel Art exhibitions of the pictures of local working-men. Many of the pictures originally shown there are now in national art collections. The assumption that the East End is peopled by illiterates is dispelled by a brief glance at the facts. The free libraries, of which Stepney alone has four, are always busy; they have nearly 90,000 volumes in constant circulation. Various literary and social circles, composed of young people who support the more popular literary papers, hold regular meetings through the winter season at which some serious writer is the guest, and the People’s Palace concerts of chamber music and modern orchestral works are always packed.
Enterprise and genius are born of the mixture of breeds, and in these streets all European races and some Asiatic races have mingled and married outside their race. This bit of London has always been the first bit of London that the poor immigrant saw, and it is the instinct of the wanderer to make his first camp where he lands. So here, in the Tower Hamlets, they camped, meaning to move to the hinterland next week. But they didn’t move, and the camp became a settlement in which they built some shreds of their own country, if only with national musical instruments and national song, and national forms of religious worship. And here they are to-day—Russians, Danes, Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, Armenians, Chinese, Hindoos, Malays, Germans, Roumanians, Swedes and Irish—so mixed and so married that the district is a small America, and the young East End man of to-day may have a Syrian grandfather and an Irish grandmother, and a German Jew for a father. Hence the vitality and the alert perception and the talent.
Its most visible commodities are food, clothes, and jewellery, and these almost give the history of the district. They show the mind of the immigrant, of the wanderer at last ashore. His first thought is for food to maintain strength. Then clothes for warmth. Then jewellery as a handy means of carrying his wealth. Then, when his life is more or less settled, these things assume another proportion; they represent his standing in the community—good feeding, good clothes, and decoration. And so these three commodities become basic commodities and the lowest common measure of success or failure.
I have said that its dusk and its night have a quality of their own, and indeed for me they have. Night, which is everywhere mysterious, is here something more. It is evocative. This may derive from the presence of the river and its long-travelled ships of all countries, or from the fact that more of the old London survives here than elsewhere; or from its peculiar topography. Look at the map and mark how its streets and lanes wander and twist in purposeless convolutions. If the reeling English drunkard made the rolling English road, then the streets and alleys of the East End must have been blazed by a lunatic who had been bitten by Tarantula. Or maybe they were born of the errant footsteps of the first foreign refugees wandering blindly across the marshes for some friendly spot where they might set down their bundles and rest