Farewell To The East End

following day. The nuns had seen it all before, and sometimes a great deal worse. It was a violent area. However – and we all agreed on this – overall we saw far more goodness and kindness and open-handed generosity than the opposite.
    On reflection it was surprising there was not more violence in the tenements, because people lived so close to each other. There was no privacy, no chance of solitude, seldom even quiet. Nerves must frequently have been stretched to breaking point within the family and between neighbours. Domestic violence was regarded as a fact of life. Even in the 1950s it was accepted that men beat their wives. We often saw women with bruises or black eyes, or limping. They never complained to the police: ‘keep out o’ the way o’ coppers’ was the rule. They may have talked about it among themselves, but in an attitude of resignation, rather than complaint. Times were changing, however, and the younger women, those of the post-war generation, were certainly developing more independence. But the older women accepted it all. The saying was ‘If ’e don’t beat yer, ’e don’t love yer.’ Twisted logic if ever there was some, but it was a belief widely held on to.
    Life was not easy for the men either. They worked desperately hard and were accustomed to harsh treatment from their employers – it was just accepted as an aspect of their employment. The majority of Poplar men were dockers, and traditionally dockers were treated as beasts of burden, and expendable at that. Such treatment would brutalise any man. Yet the vast majority were not brutes; they were decent hardworking blokes who brought home most of their money to their wives and tried to live as good husbands and fathers. But, for all their hard work, they did not seem to get much peace or comfort in their homes, because of the overcrowding and too many children. What man, after ten or twelve hours of hard manual labour, would look forward to returning home to two or three small rooms with half a dozen kids running around? It was a matriarchal society, and ‘home’ was for women and children. The men were often made to feel like outsiders in their own homes.
    Consequently the men spent most of their time in each other’s company – all day at work and in the evenings meeting their mates at the Working Men’s Clubs, the numerous Seamen’s Clubs, the dog races, football, speedway and pubs. Pub life was convivial and provided the welcome and good cheer that home so frequently did not. Pubs also provided alcohol, which relaxed tired muscles, soothed frayed tempers and consoled the yearning for hopes and dreams long since abandoned.

THE MASTER’S ARMS

    Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

    I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, by John Keats

    The Master’s Arms in Poplar had seen much history in its hundred years. It was a freehold, started by old Ben Masterton in 1850, and passed from father to son over four generations. Many of the big breweries had tried to buy the family out, but they were a stubborn lot, the Mastertons, and in spite of the difficulties of running a freehold, not to mention the financial insecurity, they had always refused to sell, preferring shaky independence to safe wage earning. It was said that old Ben, with his one sound leg and one wooden one, had fallen off a trading vessel when drunk, and the ship had sailed away without him. He had nothing else to do but indulge his favourite activity, so he started a drinking house, which became a firm favourite among the seamen. He married a local girl who enjoyed the bawdy life, and she bore fourteen children, six of whom survived childhood. Old Ben ultimately expired in an alcoholic stupor, as everyone had said he would, and two of his sons took over the business, at the time of the economic depression in the 1880s, when it was nearly impossible to get work in the docks, and thousands starved as a result. In times of hardship pubs always flourish, and people will always drink, whatever the suffering of their families.
    When the Jack the Ripper furore broke out in 1888, and the area became the centre for ghoulish visitors, the two brothers decided to expand their cramped premises, smarten up the dingy interior and put a few macabre pictures and posters on the walls