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  Similarly attracted by the street-credible poverty were the exiled leaders of what was then the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Lenin was a regular visitor to the area, and it was on Whitechapel Road that Stalin met Trotsky for the first time, an encounter which may later have flashed through Leon’s mind along with that ice pick. Stalin stayed at Tower House – a seven-floor tramps’ hostel whose abandoned Gothic bulk still looms over the area like something out of Scooby-Doo – during the 1907 Fifth RSDLP congress in a hall on Whitechapel Road, a momentous meeting which consolidated the Bolsheviks’ supremacy over rival party factions. The hall has gone, but check out what’s gone up in its place, comrades: Whitechapel Road’s only McDonald’s.

  Josef, Vlad and the boys wouldn’t have had any trouble blending in: near the docks and offering plenty of unskilled employment, Whitechapel has always attracted immigrants and refugees. African slaves were a common sight on its streets, and in 1763 John Edenbergh, his profession listed as ‘a black’, was hanged for stealing horses in the parish. The Chinese, though concentrated slightly to the south, were also Whitechapel regulars: in 1805, the funeral of the first British-naturalised Chinese, ‘John Anthony’, was attended by 2,000 of his former countrymen. By the late nineteenth century, the pioneering social researcher Charles Booth described Whitechapel as ‘the Eldorado of the East, a gathering together of poor fortune seekers; its streets full of buying and selling, the poor living on the poor’. And by then he was only really talking about one ethnic group.

  Jews had for centuries regularly attempted to settle in East London, and just as regularly been murderously ejected. The first reported pogrom was in 1189, and less than a hundred years later a more rigorous onslaught completely wiped the Jewish presence off the London map. It was many centuries before they tentatively returned, though not tentatively enough to prevent ‘Jew baiting’ being considered ‘a sport, like cock fighting’ as late as the 1750s.

  With that sort of reception lying in wait it would clearly take some especially brutal foreign persecution to drive you up the Thames, but when precisely this happened on a tragic scale in Eastern Europe in the late 1880s the numbers of Ashkenazi Jewish refugees on the streets of East London abruptly swelled.

  The effect on Whitechapel Road was extraordinary. After cornering the market in second-hand clothes at Petticoat Lane market, Jewish entrepreneurs set up rag-trade factories and retail outlets all along Whitechapel Road and the streets behind. By the thirties, any gaps in between these had been filled with an eclectic range of Jewish-run enterprises: Sol Goldstein cycle dealer, Jacob Cohen trunk maker, Abraham Gold wholesale tobacconist. The Pavilion music hall became the Yiddish Theatre. The Houndsditch Warehouse was known, to Harold Clunn at least, as ‘the Jewish Selfridge’s’. Half of Britain’s Jewish population, estimated at 165,000, lived in or around Whitechapel; with 4,300 pupils, the Jewish Free School near the top of Whitechapel Road wasn’t just the biggest school in London or even Britain, but the largest educational establishment of any kind anywhere on earth.

  Leafing through local history documents it had been touching to see how keenly Whitechapel’s Jews endeavoured to honour their adopted homeland and its customs: there were ‘Kosher coaches’ to the Derby, and Jewish Scout troops (the 33rd Stepney); the 1935 Jubilee procession was routed along Whitechapel Road at local request and at Christmas the East End’s two Jewish dailies were full of adverts placed by local businesses toasting the King. Barnett’s on Middlesex Street had a royal warrant for providing the kosher meat to Buck House when one of the Rothschilds went to dinner there, and local rag traders fought over contracts for the honour of supplying the army with its uniforms. I saw a photograph of the Prince of Wales inspecting a bagpipe-toting Jewish Lad’s Brigade at St James’s Palace in the mid-thirties and almost blurted out: ‘Watch that one – he’ll be playing Monopoly with Adolf in a couple of years.’ (Spare a thought for the Reich’s beauty contest judges.)

  It didn’t work, of course: as early as 1886 the Pall Mall Gazette was claiming that ‘Foreign Jews of no nationality whatever are becoming a pest and a menace to the poor native-born East Ender’. Few were interested in stories detailing the horrendous poverty endured by almost all of Whitechapel’s Jews: the anecdotes I read featured tales of sleeping four to a sofa, of households that could only afford to cover their bare floorboards in lino if they sent at least three family members out to work. Suppers were cooked in the local baker’s oven for tuppence, and eaten out in a communal yard as there wasn’t enough space inside their tenement homes to seat the whole family. But for large sections of the British media the prosperous Jewish businesses that fronted Whitechapel Road told the whole story: introducing his overview of the thoroughfare, Harold Clunn could only restrain himself for two sentences before blurting out his stupendous rant about ‘homes appropriated and businesses snowed under’ by ‘this invasion of Jews’.

  I was beginning to understand just how contentious a choice for the board Whitechapel had been. Poverty, prostitution, abdomen-scouring serial killers – and, just months after Monopoly’s debut on British shelves, an almost full-blown race riot.

  Spurred on by the Daily Mail and his friends in high places, on 4 October 1936 Oswald Mosley organised a Blackshirt parade through the East End, passing the top of Whitechapel Road at Gardiner’s department store. The climate had been heated for months: in deliberate emulation of events in Germany, Jewish shop windows were regularly smashed, and Jews spat at and beaten if they dared to stray from their Whitechapel heartland. Mosley’s marchers never in fact made it to Gardiner’s, repelled by ‘the greatest East End crowd in living memory’, but his British Union of Fascists still polled 19 per cent of the vote in the following year’s elections and for Whitechapel’s Jews enough was enough. Those who could afford to had already gone: the borough’s population fell by 25,000 in the twenties as wealthier families moved out north or east, lured by ads such as those I’d seen in the Jewish Chronicle headed, ‘Pleasant homes in Finchley: near synagogue, full-sized garage’.

  The Yiddish Theatre closed in 1937, and soon only the poor and elderly were left behind: unemployed Jewish tailors, their careers ruined by mechanisation, touted glumly for work outside the clothing shops, and I saw a memorable photo of a Morris Traveller being unveiled in the livery of Stepney Borough’s kosher meals-on-wheels service. Whitechapel’s cowkeeper – caretaker of forty dairy cattle supplying kosher milk – held out until the fifties, and the Jewish Hospital for another couple of decades. The Jewish Free School was blitzed off the East End map, along with a fifth of all the area’s buildings; last year, its nearest geographical successor, Swanley School on Brady Street, had eight hundred pupils in its registers. Two were Jewish.

  As I turned into Whitechapel Road, I sensed it was right up my alley. I suppose it was Charles Booth’s thing about the gathering together of poor fortune seekers that cheered me, even though I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for most of the displayed merchandise I came across. The rag trade remains the area’s defining commercial concern, the street-front ‘trade only’ outlets now in Bengali hands. One shop specialised in big and very bad pants, another in holdalls the size of telephone boxes, another in ‘a genuine English mesh classic’, perhaps more familiar to you as the string vest.

  It was silk-weaving French Huguenot refugees who inaugurated Whitechapel’s association with the manufacture of clothing back in the early eighteenth century. Never a career for the idle or greedy, working in an East End sweatshop was especially tough in the thirties, when a Factory Inspector’s report concluded drily that the ‘weekly limit of working hours is often that set by human endurance’.

  But despite all the poverty, Whitechapel Road in the thirties fancied itself as a genuine rival to Oxford Street. The East End, indeed, was never shy to take on the West: Gardiner’s was happy to be styled ‘the Harrods of the East End’ just as Brick Lane, still more ambitiously, billed itself ‘the East End Bond Street’. And yet looking at the phot
os and reading the local history the back-up is there: with five floors and a clock tower Gardiner’s certainly looked the part, and the concerns in between were largely what you’d have found Up West: jewellers, umbrella re-coverers, a Lyons Corner House. Dolled-up mothers pushed gleaming prams down pavements crowded with well-dressed shoppers and promenaders, perhaps pausing to look at the watches or snap up a bale of straw at . . . Well, hang on there just a moment, Straw?

  The West End Whitechapel had tried to emulate, I realised, was the West End of half a century before. The Haymarket just down Piccadilly closed in the nineteenth century, but Whitechapel’s held out until 1928 – and only then not due to a decline in demand for horse fuel but because the LCC was worried about traffic congestion. There had once been breweries around Oxford Street, but those in Whitechapel comfortably outlasted them: three, all huge, were still going well into the seventies and the last didn’t close until 1989.

  If it’s commercial anachronisms you want, nowhere is the area’s passion for such things indulged more fulsomely than within the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, founded in 1420 and, I was astonished to learn, still knocking out them big ding-dongs today as the oldest manufacturing concern in the realm. Before I forget, let me urge you now to grant your patronage to this establishment, which almost uniquely in my experience achieves all of the positive aspects of the working museum without any of the blighting drawbacks – most particularly entrance fees and irritating souvenirs. (Scratch that last one: I’ve just remembered the handbell cookie cutters.)

  But what a lot of history to squeeze into one place. Twenty-six monarchs have come and gone since the foundry’s establishment, and at least one of them – George V – has paid a visit. All would have been familiar with the sonic output of their products: if it’s famous and it goes bong, it was cast here. St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey ring the hours out on Whitechapel bells; the Liberty Bell, an icon of Independence to all Americans, was carted down to the nearby docks, still warm, in 1752. And you walk into the foundry’s Dickensian offices through a life-size outline of the most famous bell of all, the 13-ton job which, as every pedant knows, is itself known as Big Ben.

  Better still than the informative display is the fact that the foundry is still doing exactly what it has always done. I peeked out of the tiny visitors’ reception room: to the right a bald man in a pinstripe suit sat beneath a loudly ticking clock in a cosily panelled office, carefully skewering invoices on to one of those desk spikes; straight ahead, behind a stout clocking-on machine, men in blue overalls traversed a flagstone courtyard overhung with block-and-tackle yardarms and pulleys and arrestingly furnished with many large bells, some behind a sign reading ‘HOT’ (as I had just learnt, Big Ben took twenty days to cool).

  Once they’d flogged the bell it replaced for scrap, Big Ben only cost £572 – there’s one I should have kept in reserve for my price index. These days, such heritage craftsmanship doesn’t come cheap: a 2-foot diameter bell is £3,450, and though that includes all your basic campanological accessories – clapper, clapper staple and a 40-foot rope ending, as you’d obviously expect, in a premium ding-dong, with a sally – it takes no account of p&p, which in the circumstances isn’t likely to be settled with an s.a.e., unless maybe the ‘e’ was an elephant.

  But if the bell foundry is the acceptable face of Whitechapel Road’s sense of tradition, then its uglier, stubbled countenance is skulking about down the other end. Dorest Street might have been shamed by association with a notorious murder into changing its name, but the Blind Beggar – hardly a come-on-in sobriquet in the first place – seeks instead to reminisce fondly upon, one might even say cynically profit from, the tawdry homicide that made it famous.

  Make that two. In the late nineteenth century, the Blind Beggar – then as now a substantial pub in a prominent location – was the headquarters of an eponymous gang of pickpockets and bullies, who one afternoon in 1891 taunted a passing Jewish couple with such persistence that having failed to goad the elderly husband into a fight, a gang member stabbed him fatally through the eye with an umbrella. Ready for a Blind Beggar baseball cap yet? No? Let’s fast forward then, to 1968, and the brooding gang rivalry between the Richardsons and the Krays (in geographical terms, the Old Kent Road versus Whitechapel). There’s a bit of a to-do about the division of Soho’s pornographic retail opportunities, and – whoops – there goes the senior Richardson, George Cornell, calling Ronnie Kray a ‘fat poofter’. And now here comes Ron, striding into the Blind Beggar where he’s heard George is enjoying a bold off-his-manor pint, and George pipes up, ‘Well, look who’s here’, and then Ronnie lowers his head into George’s lap and with a contented smile on his lips falls happily asleep . . . sorry, shoots him straight between the eyes and runs away. The police turn up and all the bar staff and patrons say blimey, you’re absolutely right, officer, there is a dead man by the pool table.

  Drivers were pointing the Blind Beggar out to their saucer-eyed passengers as they queued at the lights out front, and walking into the pub’s gloomy fug I was unable not to feel concerned. Fat I was not, but a typically lackadaisical approach to hair care might easily elicit the second half of George’s fatal insult, and I wasn’t sure how much retaliation I could get in first, even with the board’s sharpest corner.

  Beneath the display cases of Blind Beggar merchandise, groups of men wearing polo shirts designed to emphasise stomach bulk and tattoos slumped on vinyl Chesterfield sofas around low tables full of pints. Every face was jowled and white, every close-cropped hairline in full recession; unintelligibly mumbled conversations were punctuated with vindictive laughter delivered in club-style slow rumbles. A sign read: ‘SMOKING POLICY: SMOKING ALLOWED THROUGHOUT’. Not a joyously welcoming establishment, perhaps, but I shouldn’t have fretted. Studying the jackets thrown over the arms of most sofas, I gathered I was confronting the rather less worrisome omertà based on honour amongst postmen.

  I had a half – it was 3.30, for heaven’s sake – and sipped it slowly, there in Whitechapel Road’s final bastion of love-your-old-mum, you-ain’t-seen-me, whelk-stall bullshit Cockneyism. It all seemed woefully dour and rather bitter, sharing nothing with the raucous knees-ups I’d read about in the Mass Observation reports. ‘Every pub roared with singing . . . all danced with tremendous gusto,’ noted one observer, peeking into Whitechapel hostelries decorated with barrels and hanging joints of meat. I drained my small and, as I now saw, poofy glass and walked towards the door. In the thirties the Blind Beggar was run by a Jewish landlord, Leon Molen; Kray is an Austrian name and the twins had Irish, Romany and Jewish blood. And, come to think of it, wasn’t ‘oi’, that catch-all Cockney call-sign, of Yiddish origin? None of these facts, of course, was congruent with the Blind Beggar’s mythology, as was emphasised as I followed two waddling whelk eaters out into the street and a trio of jack-the-lad Asian boys with gelled hair swaggered past in front of us. ‘Think they own the fucking place,’ grunted one shiftless fatty to the other, and, I thought, that would be because they do.

  The street market, amply accommodated by the broad pavements of yet another former Roman road, was pulling in its stock as drizzle began to fall: chilli bouquests and huge fronds of coriander alongside the usual stacks of watered-down washing-up liquid, sell-by-last-month biscuits and in-car phone chargers.

  Wandering rather mindlessly along Whitechapel High Street into the oncoming rush of home-bound commuters streaming out of the City, I wondered if it would be the same for the Bengalis: all in and all out again in a couple of generations. Though they haven’t quite made Whitechapel Road their own in such an all-encompassing way, what’s known locally as Bangla Town is Britain’s largest Bengali community and the parallels with the old Jewish population remain compelling. Synagogue to mosque, kosher to halal: the places of worship, clothes shops, takeaways and market stalls had changed hands almost as seamlessly and swiftly as a Monopoly set swap. And inevitably, the racists had switched targets just as smartly: that original ‘white c
hapel’ churchyard is now the Altab Ali Park, named in honour of a young rag trader murdered there in 1978.

  So dedicated were my ruminations upon these matters that I walked straight past Aldgate East Tube station; a happy oversight, in fact, as looking about my unfamiliar surroundings I spotted a little stall whose jolly blue signboard rang a bell as loud as any knocked out by the foundry up the road. Tubby Isaacs. An East End legend. Seafood seller of long standing – established, in fact, as the signboard’s small print revealed, in 1919. And listed amongst Tubby’s marine offerings, handsomely trumping both whelk and winkle, was a preserved delicacy I had yet to experience, and I surely couldn’t leave the brown set without doing so: the jellied eel.

  Tubby, or at least the aged keeper of his flame, was a man of inappropriately modest build in a flat cap and glasses. Looking as if he’d just shuffled off the set of a nostalgic sitcom – one that I’m afraid might have to be called Last of the Summer Brine – here, clearly, was a fellow with a tale or two to tell about the old days. The surname suggested he might even be of Whitechapel’s Monopoly-era faith, though of course unless he brought this up I’d never know. ‘So – Jewish at all?’ isn’t a question that’s ever going to be easy to slip matily into a brief discourse with a stranger.

  Intending to cross that hurdle when we got there, I found another rearing formidably up in front of it. That I had never previously sampled a jellied eel, I realised, was no simple accident of birth or demography; like ladies’ fingers or a Brown Derby, jellied eels fall into that category of foodstuffs whose names alone pulled one’s imagination and appetite in all sorts of incompatible directions. That I was hungry was not in doubt – never mind an eel, after a good seven miles of up-and-down Whitechapel action, I should have had room for a jellied owl – but even forming the request in my mind had my stomach yanking its drawstrings tightly in. Tubby didn’t fish for eels, I thought, just heaved a shopping trolley into some stinkingly industrial canal and saw what was caught in the mesh when he hoisted it out a couple of months later. I blew hard, drew my tongue lightly across my upper lip and stepped up to the counter.