Part 5

This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo, the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle, and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows, tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham, Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw, attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be purchased there in these days.

What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the "chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel must not be too greatly insisted upon. They may easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave lives--all the braver that they are not flaunted in the face of the world--exist in the cheerless and unromantic grey streets that lead off the main road. The domestic virtues flourish here as well as--if not better than--in the West End. The heroes and heroines of everyday life--the greater in their heroism that they do not know of it--live in hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved dulness of the streets to right and left of Whitechapel Road and of the Mile End Road, that go with so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to Bow.

XII

LET the Londoner who has never been "down East," and so is given to speaking contemptuously of it, take a journey down the Whitechapel and Mile End Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both in respect of roadway and foot-pavements, those noble thoroughfares are endowed. The London he has already known owns no streets so wide, save only in the isolated and unimportant instance of Langham Place; while, although it cannot be said that, taken individually, the houses of the great East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet there is a certain interesting quality in the roads as a whole, lacking elsewhere. This, doubtless, is partly explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's garb, and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners who throng the pavements.

A strangely-named public-house--the "Grave Maurice"--is one of the landmarks of the Whitechapel Road. Many have set themselves the task of finding the origin of that sign and its meaning; but their efforts have been baulked by the very multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or otherwise. The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice," Prince Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known Prince Rupert, the dashing cavalier, but a difficulty arises from the fact that there was another "Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person of the equally well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau, who died of grief when the Spanish overran Holland and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end here, for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice" in one of his plays, written at least thirty years before the time of those princes, in a passage which reads as though it were the usual nickname at that period for an officer.

Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign we come to the beginning of the Mile End Road, one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed with the close of the Coaching Age. Rowlandson has left us an excellent view of Mile End Turnpike as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses, groups of rustic cottages and a background of trees, to show how rural were the surroundings towards the close of the eighteenth century; while maps of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by fields, with "Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary and the ducking-pond itself close behind, where the scolds and shrews of that age were soused.

The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete as the rack, the thumb-screw, and other ingenious devices of the "good old times"; but most towns a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool; while, if they had no official pond for the purpose, any dirty pool would serve, and the dirtier it were the better it was esteemed.

"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces of Wood, with their two Ends embrace the Chair, which hangs between them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be, that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."

One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the event of a lifetime.

The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.

Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.

Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main. It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.

There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex. The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.

XIII

AT last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow" alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.

"Bow," says the _Ambulator_ of 1774, "is a village a little to the east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce, and treasured accordingly. Whitsters--that is to say, bleachers of linen--and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.

Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never afterwards regains until the suburbs are passed and the open country reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were, over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst he rises, absurdly eloquent.

Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name is an interesting piece of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction, continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels, swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow" Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or "bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest, of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.

The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning "the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford on the Essex side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.

The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations, to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant. Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.

Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo an extensive cobbling process; a treatment, by the way, continued through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.

In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February 14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.

XIV

"FAREWELL, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest Conscience was once drowned."

Thus says Will Kemp, in his _Nine Days' Wonder_, the account of a dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills, and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to Stratford.

Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animals the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet, if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."

We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road. Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road, and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like a misgiving."

Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the "Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which, like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination to be first over Bow Bridge on the way up to London, and, by consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford Bridge.

Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative, but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us leave it for places less sophisticated.

The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached, where he says that their hooves formed an arch over him and that he narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that he is talking of horses.

Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named the "Cauliflower"--probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding market-gardens of the neighbourhood--to the long, straight perspective of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban "villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb, created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines have been provided for the increased train services. "Seven Kings" is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily records no such meeting, but there was no _Court Circular_ in those times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked, except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash. The stream still crosses the highway, but civilisation has put it in a pipe and tucked it away underground.

A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.

Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and demanding--_not_ his money or his life, as in the old formula, but--a halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is for half the price of a drink.

"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening tramp.

"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within sight--but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"