It’s Monopoly Monday ! and this time it’s the Whitechapel Rd, the only property on the board which is actually in the East End of London, the home of the East London Mosque. Like so much of the east of London it is a vibrant multi-cultural area, blighted to some extent by poverty despite being in full view of the gleaming spires of Mammon in The City.
Whitechapel Rd starts at the corner of Osborn Rd opposite Altab Ali Park – where you will find the oh-so-politically-incorrectly-named fish and chip shop known as …..”Jack the Chipper” – and runs for just over half a mile to the corner of Sidney St, where you will find the “Blind Beggar” pub offering its cheeky Gangster-themed bus tours (led by Micky Goldtooth) ! In between those two points there is so much history, so much life (and death), so much to see….. but why is it called Whitechapel at all ?
Perhaps unsurprisingly there was an actual chapel here – St Mary Matfelon established mid-thirteenth century, built of “clunch” which is a type of rock made of white chalk rubble – hence a white church. The name was certainly in use by 1344 and the church stood in various versions where Altab Ali Park is now…..until 29 December 1940 in what became known as the Second Great Fire of London, when the Luftwaffe were bombing the London Docks and the East End industrial zone and St Mary Matfelon was destroyed.
Altab Ali Park contains some remnants of the original Whitechapel, but it holds memories of another sad loss – that of Altab Ali himself. A young Bangladeshi textile worker who was murdered on 4th May 1978 in a racially motivated killing by 3 teenage National Front supporters. Having run down Brick Lane to escape his attackers he was stabbed in the neck in this very park – at the time still called St Mary’s Park after the church – and was dead on arrival at the Royal London Hospital a few yards away.
Crime and death are not the only stories of interest along the Whitechapel Road and directly opposite the park is the wonderful Whitechapel Art Gallery. A truly surprising experience in this bustling busy business district, the gallery has exhibited some of the great paintings of the modern era: Picasso’s Guernica was here in 1938, Jackson Pollock in 1958 (I know, I know “Jack the Dripper”…..local links – see below), the first art exhibition by Mark Rothko 1961 and the first solo exhibition by Sarah Lucas 2013.
However its status as a gallery in the art world comes from its promotion of the very first British Pop Art exhibition “This Is Tomorrow” in 1956 for which Richard Hamilton created the image (above) “Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?”. An image which broke new ground which would be exploited by Warhol and Lichtenstein. The Whitechapel Art Gallery continues to promote art and creativity generally.
In addition as a result of the bombings in the Second World War which destroyed the original Whitechapel, another local creative business saw a surge in orders. So many churches had been damaged that huge numbers of new bells were needed, and they were made by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, just a few yards along from Altab Ali Park. Until 2017 the oldest surviving manufacturing company in the country, having been established in 1570 and in fact traded from this very site for over 250 years. Scandalously closed and sold off for property development, this historic location is planned to reopen as a 100 room hotel, with the figleaf of a small museum in a “bell-themed” (?) café…… Bells made by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry are found in famous churches across the UK such as Canterbury Cathedral, “Great Tom” at Lincoln Cathedral, the “Clock Bells” at St Paul’s Cathedral, the bells of Westminster Abbey, and are found all over the world from the USA (the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) and Australia to Chennai in India.
However its two most famous bells are not in places of worship. In 1752 at this location on the Whitechapel Rd the original Liberty Bell was cast to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s original constitution and can still be seen today in Independence Hall Philadelphia. But arguably even more famous is Big Ben. Yes, I know everyone thinks the Elizabeth Tower that you can see on Parliament Square is Big Ben but technically…. It is in fact the bell inside the clock tower which is Big Ben itself and it was made in 1858 right here on the Whitechapel Rd.
So far then we have historic churches, an anti-racist park, a truly special gallery and the last great bell foundry. However the elephant in this Whitechapel room is of course the Whitechapel Murders or as everyone knows them the “Jack the Ripper” murders. In 1888 there were 5 murders in just over 2 months: Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols on 31st August, Annie Chapman on 8th September, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on 30th September and finally Mary Kelly on 9th November. These women who died in horribly grim ways around the Whitechapel area have been casually dismissed as prostitutes in much of the written work on this era, while on the other hand there has been a queasy fascination with the scumbag who got away with it, leading to a sort of cartoonish, shorthand “Ripper” concept.
Nonetheless, a recent book, “The Five” by Hallie Rubenhold goes a long way towards redressing the balance, detailing the stories of the individual women and showing that far from being sex workers, these were women who had fallen through the cracks of society from a combination of bad luck, alcoholism and a system heavily dominated by the assumption of male superiority which essentially obliged women to find a man to support them. I thoroughly recommend you read it.
There is another elephant in this room as well, and also to do with a death in about the same era, this time however it’s a man. The Elephant Man. Joseph Merrick suffered from a rare condition which has never been fully identified (possibly Proteus Syndrome) but which caused significant deformity to the right side of his head and body leading to his “stage name” the Elephant Man. He was born in a relatively poor family but looked after with loving care by his mother. However when she died and his father remarried, Joseph’s step mother taunted him over his appearance and he eventually ran away, almost literally, to the circus.
Having been for much of his life an exhibit in various Victorian freak shows, he spent the last 4 years of his life at the Royal London Hospital right here on the Whitechapel Rd. Although Joseph’s appearance was so grotesque that he was not allowed to roam around for fear of scaring the patients, he became a celebrity, with holidays funded by public donations (travelling alone in a darkened train carriage to avoid public attention), was visited by the Princess of Wales, and even attended a Christmas pantomime at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane. (Using the private box of the truly fabulous Angela Burdett-Coutts who we will hear about when we get to the Strand). His skeleton is still kept in a glass case at the Royal London, and was on public display but nowadays can only be viewed by medical students (although apparently Michael Jackson was obsessed with Joseph Merrick and tried to buy the skeleton in the 80s !)
What you can see at the hospital is a model of a church built by Joseph Merrick himself. This is in a museum in the crypt of a 19th-century church on the site which also has a forensic medicine section with material on the Whitechapel Murders and investigations into two other killers, Dr Crippen and John Christie. Founded in 1740, The Royal London has been on this site since 1757, however it was only in 1990 that it acquired the “Royal” prefix, awarded by HM Queen in recognition of its 250th anniversary. If you’ve seen “Call the Midwife” on TV you will have seen the hospital as that is where the midwives trained. It is also where a very famous nurse trained. Edith Cavell was a nurse, working in a hospital in Belgium when it was invaded by Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. She may well have been recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service but she was certainly engaged in helping British & French soldiers and Belgian civilians to escape to Holland (which was neutral at this time). She herself was responsible for rescuing about 60 British and 15 French soldiers, as well as about 100 French and Belgian civilians of military age. As a direct result of this she was arrested by the German occupiers and eventually shot by firing squad in 1915. This judicial murder became a huge propaganda story and was used as a recruiting tactic to encourage young men to go to war.
Our Whitechapel story ends however with two young men who very definitely did NOT want to go to war. The Kray brothers Ronnie and Reggie Kray were the last people imprisoned in the famous Tower of London. The reason for their incarceration was that they had failed to report for duty when called up to the Army for National Service in 1952. Ronnie then punched a corporal at the registration desk and the two of them were “banged up” in the Tower. This was the first of many jail sentences over a long career, eventually ending with imprisonment for life in 1969, partly due to a crime committed at the Blind Beggar pub at the other end of the Whitechapel Rd.
The Krays operated across East London in the 1950s and ‘60s, running protection rackets, committing robberies and managing seedy clubs from their base at mum’s old house on Vallance Rd. This was just off the Whitechapel Rd where a modern housing estate now sits and this area was their “manor” – the area where they considered themselves in charge. They were that bizarre thing – celebrity criminals – rubbing shoulders with Frank Sinatra, Roger Daltrey, Judy Garland, and a group portrait of them and older brother Charlie even appeared in David Bailey’s Box of Pin-ups photography collection in 1965 (above) along with photos of such 60s stellar names as the Beatles, the Stones, David Hockney and Michael Caine.
The Krays were also constantly at war with a rival gang, the Richardsons, who were a Camberwell, South London firm….and it was this more than anything else which was their downfall. It was the 9th of March 1966, Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, the Beatles were about to start recording their Revolver album and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are made for walking” was the UK number one song. On that same day, George Cornell walked into the Blind Beggar pub on the Whitechapel Rd with a couple of associates. The pub was empty except for the bar maid and a 79 year old chap reading a paper. George had grown up in the area, had been childhood friends with the Kray Twins, but had moved to South London as a young man and taken up with the Richardsons. He had also made the fatal error of calling Ronnie Kray “a fat poof” in front of several mutual criminal acquaintances. George was sat on a stool at the bar drinking a light ale, when Ronnie Kray walked in with another gang member. “Well look who it is….” said George, whereupon the other gang member fired two shots into the ceiling of the pub and Ronnie put a pistol to George’s head and shot him dead. The reason it took another three years to convict Ronnie was because there was a culture of fear around these psychopathic murderers. The 79 year old chap in the pub was asked why he refused to give evidence at the time. “I hate the sight of blood” he said, “Especially my own”.
So there you have it murder from the 19th century at one end of the street, murder from the Swinging 60s at the other and a bizarre and fascinating cast of characters in between – that’s Whitechapel Road !
