Maundy Thursday
Echoes of the East End, Venetia Murray (1989)
We get Maundy Thursday off work so I headed to Barbican Library to catch up on some reading and writing. This book was on the ‘Returned Today’ shelves (I always like to look at these shelves – you never know what you’ll find).
Echoes of the East End contains chapters from ‘ordinary’ people describing their lives in the East End of London in the early years of the twentieth century. We meet girls who grew up on ‘The Island’ (area of housing demolished in 1970) in Clapton E5 and others who lived in Hoxton N1. This is an East End still receiving heavy immigration and a mix of communities finding their feet with ‘native’ Londoners (some of these a generation or two from elsewhere; some of them with deep roots to the area in which they lived).
Some of it is is grim in its description of grinding poverty, inevitable hunger and seemingly endless threats of violence. It seems clichéd to say that these tales are tempered with heart-warming tales of community and neighbourliness, but they are. And there are scholarships won to the local grammar school and birthday celebrations and street parties held on the occasion of King George V and Queen Mary’s Jubilee (1935).
There are also fabulous pictures and descriptions of work and church outings. Much as in the pictures at the Tate Exhibition (in my earlier post Disappearing London:1) these pictures tell us so much of the social history of the time and I sit and pore over the faces and clothes of those lined up for the picture.
