LONDON; THE EAST END
As interesting as any days that I spent in London were two in the
East End, though I am sorry to add more drabby details to those just
narrated. All my life I had heard of this particular section as grim,
doleful, a center and sea of depraved and depressed life.
“Nothing like the East End of London,” I have heard people say, and
before I left I expected to look over it, of course. My desire to do
so was whetted by a conversation I had with the poet, John Masefield,
who, if I remember rightly, had once lived in the extreme East End of
London, Canningtown. He had talked of the curious physical condition
of the people which he described as “bluggy” or stagnant. Little
intelligence in the first place, according to him, seemed to be
breeding less and less intelligence as time went on. Poverty, lack
of wits, lack of ambition were fostering inbreeding. Such things are
easy to say. No one can really tell. Even more interesting to me was
the proffered information concerning East End amusements--calf-eating
contests, canary-singing contests, whiffet races, pigeon-eating
contests. I was told it would be hard to indicate how simple-minded the
people were in many things and yet how low and dark in their moods,
physical and moral. I got a suggestion of this some days later, when
I discovered in connection with the police courts that every little
while the court-room is cleared in order that terrible, unprintable,
almost unbearable testimony may be taken. What he said to me somehow
suggested the atmosphere of the Whitechapel murders--those demoniac
crimes that had thrilled the world a few years before.
I must confess that my first impression was one of disappointment.
America is strident and its typical “East Side” and slum conditions
are strident also. There is no voiceless degradation that I have ever
seen in America. The East Side of New York is unquestionably one of
the noisiest spots in the world, if not the worst. It is so full of
children--so full of hope too.
I was surprised to find how distinctly different are the two realms of
poverty in New York and London.
On my first visit I took the subway or tube to St. Mary’s Station,
Whitechapel, and getting out, investigated all that region which lies
between there and the Great Eastern Railway Station and Bethnal Green
and Shoreditch. I also reconnoitered Bethnal Green.
It was a chill, gray, January day. The London haze was gray and heavy,
quite depressing. Almost at once I noticed that this region which I was
in, instead of being strident and blatant as in America, was peculiarly
quiet. The houses, as in all parts of London, were exceedingly low, two
and three stories, with occasional four- and five-story buildings for
variation, but all built out of that drab, yellowish-gray brick which
when properly smoked has such a sad and yet effective air. The streets
were not narrow, as in New York’s East Side,--quite the contrary; but
the difference in crowds, color, noise, life, was astounding. In New
York the East Side streets, as I have said, are almost invariably
crowded. Here they were almost empty. The low doors and areaways
oozed occasional figures who were either thin, or shabby, or dirty,
or sickly, but a crowd was not visible anywhere. They seemed to me
to slink along in a half-hearted way and I, for one, experienced no
sense of desperado criminality of any kind--only a low despair. The
people looked too meek--too law-governed. The policeman must be an
immense power in London. Vice?--yes. Poverty?--yes. I saw young boys
and girls with bodies which seemed to me to be but half made up by
nature--half done. They were ambling, lackadaisical, weary-looking.
Low?--yes, in many cases. Filthy?--yes. Savage or dangerous?--not at
all. I noticed the large number of cheap cloth caps worn by the men
and boys and the large number of dull gray shawls wrapped slatternwise
about the shoulders of the women. This world looked sad enough in all
conscience, inexpressibly so, but because of the individual houses
in many instances, the clean streets and the dark tiny shops, not
unendurable--even homey in instances. I ventured to ask a stalwart
London policeman--they are all stalwart in London--“Where are the very
poor in the East End--the poorest there are?”
“Well, most of these people hereabouts have little enough to live on,”
he observed, looking straight before him with that charming soldierly
air the London policemen have--his black strap under his chin.
I walked long distances through such streets as Old Montague, King
Edward, Great Carden, Hope, Brick Lane, Salesworthy, Flower, Dean,
Hare, Fuller, Church Row, Cheshire, Hereford,--a long, long list, too
long to give here, coming out finally at St. John’s Catholic Church at
Bethnal Green and taking a car line for streets still farther out. I
had studied shops, doorways, areas, windows, with constant curiosity.
The only variation I saw to a dead level of sameness, unbroken by
trees, green places or handsome buildings of any kind, were factory
chimneys and endless charitable institutions covering, apparently,
every form of human weakness or deficiency, but looking as if they were
much drearier than the thing they were attempting to cure. One of them
I remember was an institution for the orphans of seamen, and another a
hospital for sick Spanish Jews. The lodging-houses for working-girls
and working-boys were so numerous as to be discouraging and so dreary
looking that I marveled that any boy or girl should endure to live in
them. One could sense all forms of abuse and distress here. It would
spring naturally out of so low a grade of intelligence. Only a Dickens,
guided by the lamp of genius, could get at the inward spirit of these,
and then perhaps it would not avail. Life, in its farthest reaches,
sinks to a sad ugly mess and stays there.
One of the places that I came upon in my perambulations was a public
washhouse, laundry and bath, established by the London County
Council, if I remember rightly, and this interested me greatly. It
was near Winchester Street and looked not unlike a low, one-story,
factory building. Since these things are always fair indications of
neighborhoods, I entered and asked permission to inspect it. I was
directed to the home or apartment of a small martinet of a director
or manager, quite spare and dark and cockney, who frowned on me
quizzically when he opened his door,--a perfect devil of a cheap
superior who was for putting me down with a black look. I could see
that it was one of the natives he was expecting to encounter.
“I would like to look over the laundry and baths,” I said.
“Where do you come from?” he asked.
“America,” I replied.
“Oh! Have you a card?”
I gave him one. He examined it as though by some chance it might reveal
something concerning me. Then he said if I would go round to the other
side he would admit me. I went and waited a considerable time before
he appeared. When he did, it was to lead me with a very uncertain air
first into the room filled with homely bath closets, where you were
charged a penny more or less--according to whether you had soap and
towel or not--and where the tubs were dreary affairs with damp-looking
wooden tops or flanges, and thence into the washroom and laundry-room,
where at this time in the afternoon--about four o’clock--perhaps a
score of women of the neighborhood were either washing or ironing.
Dreary! dreary! dreary! Ghastly! In Italy, later, and southern
France, I saw public washing under the sky, beside a stream or near a
fountain--a broken, picturesque, deliciously archaic fountain in one
instance. Here under gray skies, in a gray neighborhood, and in this
prison-like washroom was one of the most doleful pictures of life
the mind of man could imagine. Always when I think of the English, I
want to go off into some long analysis of their character. We have
so much to learn of life, it seems to me, and among the first things
is the chemistry of the human body. I always marvel at the nature of
the fluids which make up some people. Different climates must produce
different kinds, just as they produce strange kinds of trees and
animals. Here in England this damp, gray climate produces a muggy
sort of soul which you find _au naturel_ only when you walk among the
very poor in such a neighborhood as this. Here in this wash-house I
saw the low English _au naturel_, but no passing commentary such as
this could do them justice. One would have to write a book in order
to present the fine differences. Weakness, lowness of spirit, a vague
comprehension of only the simplest things, combined with a certain
meaty solidarity, gave me the creeps. Here they were, scrubbing or
ironing; strings tied around their protuberant stomachs to keep their
skirts up; clothes the color of lead or darker, and about as cheerful;
hair gray or brownish-black, thin, unkempt; all of them flabby and
weary-looking--about the atmosphere one would find in an American
poorhouse.
They washed here because there were no washing facilities in their own
homes--no stationary tubs, no hot or cold water, no suitable stoves to
boil water on. It was equally true of ironing facilities, the director
told me. They came from blocks away. Some women washed here for whole
vicinities--the more industrious ones. And yet few came here at
that--the more self-respecting stayed away. I learned this after a long
conversation with my guide whose principal commentary was that they
were a worthless lot and that you had to watch them all the time. “If
you don’t,” he said in cockney English, “they won’t keep things clean.
You can’t teach ’em scarcely how to do things right. Now and then they
gets their hands caught.” He was referring to the washing-drums and the
mangles. It was a long story, but all I got out of it was that this
was a dreary world, that he was sick of his position but compelled to
keep it for financial reasons, that he wanted as little as possible to
do with the kind of cattle which he considered these people to be and
that he would prefer to give it up. There was a touch of socialism in
all this--trying to do for the masses--but I argued that perhaps under
more general socialistic conditions things would be better; certainly,
one would have to secure more considerate feelings on the part of
directors and some public approval which would bring out the better
elements. Perhaps under truer socialism, however, public wash-houses
would not be necessary at all. Anyhow, the cry from here to Bond Street
and the Houses of Parliament and the stately world of the Lords seemed
infinitely far. What can society do with the sad, shadowy base on which
it rests?
I came another day to another section of this world, approaching
the East End via Aldgate and Commercial Road, and cutting through
to Bethnal Green via Stepney. I found the same conditions--clean
streets, low gray buildings, shabby people, a large museum whose chief
distinction was that the floor of its central rotunda had been laid by
women convicts!--and towering chimneys. So little life existed in the
streets, generally speaking, that I confess I was depressed. London
is so far flung. There were a great many Jews of Russian, Roumanian
and Slavic extraction, nearly all bearing the marks of poverty and
ignorance, but looking shrewd enough at that, and a great many
physically deteriorated English. The long-bearded Jew with trousers
sagging about his big feet, his small derby hat pulled low over his
ears, his hands folded tightly across his back, was as much in evidence
here as on the East Side in New York. I looked in vain for restaurants
or show places of any kind (saloons, moving pictures, etc.). There were
scarcely any here. This whole vicinity seemed to me to be given up to
the poorest kind of living--sad, drab, gray. No wonder the policeman
said to me: “Most of these people hereabouts have little enough to
live on.” I’m sure of it. Finally, after a third visit, I consulted
with another writer, a reputed authority on the East End, who gave me
a list of particular neighborhoods to look at. If anything exceptional
was to be detected from the appearance of the people, beyond what I
have noted, I could not see it. I found no poor East End costers with
buttons all over their clothes, although they once existed here. I
found no evidence of the overcrowded home life, because I could not get
into the houses to see. Children, it seemed to me, were not nearly so
numerous as in similar areas in American cities. Even a police-court
proceeding I saw in Avon Square was too dull to be interesting. I was
told I might expect the most startling crimes. The two hours I spent
in court developed only drunkenness and adultery. But as my English
literary guide informed me, only time and familiarity with a given
neighborhood would develop anything. I believe this. All I felt was
that in such a dull, sordid, poor-bodied world any depth of filth or
crime might be reached, but who cares to know?