Contents
Cover
About the Author
Illustrations
Plates
Maps
Figures
Title Page
Introduction to the Pimlico Edition
1 Two beginnings
Impressions
The Flower and Dean St rookery
The Cross Act and demolition
The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Co. Ltd
Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings
Jack the Ripper and the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood
2 Home
‘More like warehouses than homes’
‘We had it very nice’
‘Not much of a kitchen there at all’
‘I don’t know where my mother put us’
Rebuke and repression
‘Rothschilds was luxury’
3 Community
Introduction
1. In the Buildings
The playground and the gate
The immigrant community
‘But they kept a Jewish house’
A community of class
‘At Rothschild we were like one family’
2. In the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood
Stairs and railings
‘Where the shopping was’
4 Beyond the pale
‘It was all non-Jewish at the top end’
‘You’re not going in that bloomin’ churchyard to play!’
‘Do I remember Dosset St? Not ’alf!’
Anti-Semitism
‘The Shabas goy’
5 Growing up
‘Incubator Row’
Parents and children
The Kaplan family
School days
Out of school days
Young men and women
6 Work
Jewish workers and the East End economy
1. In the workshops
Tailors
Tailoresses
Cabinet makers
Cap-makers and milliners
2. In the factory
Cigarette makers
3. In the home
Homework
4. Buying and selling
Shop assistant
Street-sellers, pedlars, and tallymen
7 Conclusions: Politics and class
The creation of a Jewish working class
Class consciousness in Rothschild Buildings
Individualism
Disintegration
Picture Section
Notes
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Acknowledgments
Copyright
One evening, in the summer of 1902, Jack London went for a walk through the main streets of the East End. It was part of his exploration of this ‘under-world of London’,1 an exploration characteristically full of both insight and blindness which found its way into print as People of the Abyss a year later.2
Last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel, and still continuing south, down Leman Street to the docks. And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.
If, at the beginning of his walk, Jack London had turned into any one of three narrow streets running left out of Commercial St he would have come across some living places which were considered more fit than most for East End men and women.
At that time, much of Flower and Dean St, Thrawl St and Wentworth St (east) was quite new. Twenty years of demolition and rebuilding had produced one of those colonies of model working-class dwellings which were to be found tucked away behind many of the capital’s commercial thoroughfares, much as the old slum districts had been before them. This area, though, was unusual. The streets were narrower and the tenements more densely packed here than elsewhere. And they were home to a different population from that which peopled the abyss of Jack London’s explorations. If he had turned down, for example, Flower and Dean St on that summer evening, what ‘living places’ would he have seen?
Inside the narrow entrance, like a slit between the high walls of the Commercial St warehouses on either side, the street widens perceptibly but still not enough to temper the oppressive closeness of the tall tenements to right and left. In front of him the street stretches like a deep valley, ending in another slit at the far end where some older houses close in on each other before letting the cobbles escape into Brick Lane. To the left, reaching six storeys into the sky and eight blocks into the distance, are Nathaniel Dwellings, their red-brick fronts already darkened by ten years’ exposure to the London soot. On the right, dominating the street, are the seven cliff-like storeys of Rothschild Buildings, five years blacker and unrelieved by any of the attempts at decoration which adorn the newer flats.
Walking down Flower and Dean St and turning right into Lolesworth St, Rothschild Buildings are still towering over our explorer’s right shoulder, casting deep shadow over the newer, more fancy buildings on the other side of the street. And on reaching Thrawl St and heading right for Commercial St, they are still there, higher even than the equally oppressive Lolesworth Buildings which glare at them across the narrow cobbled way. Turning at the brick and terracotta arch which announces the Thrawl St entrance of Rothschild Buildings and looking back the way he came, he can see more buildings. As he had walked down Lolesworth St he had seen yet more in front of him, even facing him in Wentworth St. As far as he can see, which in these streets is not far at all, stretch the tenement blocks which are the new homes for the people of proletarian London.
But as striking as the buildings – even more so, because these are unusual only in their intensity – are the people. In four streets live some 5,000 men, women and children. And to a stranger, like our explorer, this is the most remarkable thing of all because the large majority are foreign immigrants from the Jewish settlements of Eastern Europe. For this part of what Jew and Gentile alike call The Ghetto ‘is one of the most un-English spots in the British Isles.’3
The people here are different. Some of the men wear long black gaberdines and black hats, have long beards and ringlets of greased hair hanging over their ears. Even the workmen in normal dress coming home from a day at the bench look somehow foreign in appearance. On the landings of the buildings, sitting out on chairs and enjoying the streets, are women young and old with richly coloured shawls round their heads, calling out to children below or other women in balconies across the street; or watching an intense game of cards between men too old to work; or returning the quizzical stares of our explorer. Around him, from above as well as from all sides comes a babel of noise in a foreign language which sounds like German; or mainly so, because the children talk to each other in English, but with an accent, and some adults speak pure cockney. These, not so foreign-looking, are in a minority. Even the smells are different, the cooking smells from 1,000 rooms locked in the narrow streets, ‘a blended and suffocating odour, as of fried onions and burnt bones, dirty clothing and stale fish, decaying vegetables and over-ripe fruit’ as Robert Blatchford has described ‘the Yiddish country’.4 The shop windows are adorned with inscriptions in a strange lettering which also catches the eye on a discarded newspaper in the stone gutter. Every London backstreet has children but never has our explorer seen so many as in these streets of tenements; and again they look different, foreign, even though they play the same street games as usual, perhaps better dressed than in other poor districts – bare feet are rarer here. And again, the odd word (perhaps addressed to him!) is in a language the stranger does not understand.
Not all the people of the area are like this, because at the bottom ends of both Flower and Dean St and Thrawl St, where the houses are older and grimier, he can see men and women sitting on the pavements or lounging at the open door of the Frying Pan public house. These are the people of East End fable, ‘a different race of people’, as Jack London himself calls them, ironically in this context; ‘short of stature, and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance’.5 They are not of the area although they live on its edge looking in, crowded out by the foreign tenement-dwellers.
Our explorer leaves with his impressions. Impressions are all that any stranger can take away with him from an area as much divorced from his own experience as this. He may record them faithfully, but at the end they are interesting as much for what they tell us about him as about the area he describes. Our task, then, is to enter behind the impressions, behind the walls and landings, shawls and gaberdines which form the outside of Rothschild Buildings and the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood, and which had already, by the time Jack London walked past them, been there for fifteen years.
The story of how Rothschild Buildings came to be as they were in 1902 has not one beginning but two. They are separated by 1,000 miles and cultures a world apart. One begins in the comfortable middle-class drawing rooms of Victorian England; the other in the farms, market towns and cities which housed the Jewish population of Russia in Europe.
Within a short distance . . . of the heart and centre of the City of London there has existed for the past fifty years, and still exists and flourishes what is perhaps the foulest and most dangerous street in the whole metropolis.6
That was how James Greenwood described Flower and Dean St in one of this journalist’s many tirades7 against the street and its neighbourhood. For in the early 1870s, a decade and a half before Rothschild Buildings were built, that part of Spitalfields was generally recognised as the most menacing working-class area in London. The old Flower and Dean St area was among the last of the London ‘rookeries’ (see Map II).
The reality of life for the people who lived in the streets laid out by John Flower, Gowen Deane8 and other local artisans 200 years before need not concern us here. The problems of existence for the unskilled casual labouring class of the Flower and Dean St area and others like it has been fully described elsewhere.9 But for the middle classes who waged a tireless war against the twenty-seven courts, streets and alleys packed into the ‘square quarter of a mile’10 of the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood, realities of life in the ranks of Victorian London’s reserve army of labour were both unimportant and inconvenient. For it was not the reality but the image which provoked church and state into doing battle with sledgehammers and pick-axes. The real Flower and Dean St problem revolved around casual or seasonal employment, starvation wages, a heartless system of poor relief and brutalising living conditions, but these were far less threatening than the symptoms they spawned. What concerned the middle classes were street crime, prostitution, the threat of revolt, expensive pauperism, infectious disease spreading to respectable London – the whole panoply of shame of this ‘boldest blotch on the face’11 of the capital of the civilised world.
More than anything it was the area’s common lodging houses and their roving population which were responsible for its notoriety. There were more common lodging house beds here than in any other quarter in London. Flower and Dean St’s thirty-one lodging houses in 1871 housed no fewer than 902 people (the total population of the street was 1,078). One person in three was a young man between 15 and 30 years old. Of the 308 women, 200 were aged between 15 and 40.12
The relationship between common lodging houses and crime and prostitution had long been established.13 Their large shifting populations gave some anonymity to the man or woman wanting to escape the attention of the police. It was said that they were the recruiting places for ‘gangs’; they trained children in the skills of crime and vice; they played an important role in the economy of crime, for their keepers were often receivers of stolen property.14
Although the area was known as a ‘thief-preserve’15 where pickpockets and thieves of all descriptions could find shelter, it was most notorious for its relationship with street crime.16
Flower and Dean Street, Spitalfields, is associated in most people’s minds with vice, immorality and crime in their most hideous shapes, and rightly so, for . . . there is no street in any other part of this great Metropolis that has for its inhabitants a like number of the dangerous class. Other streets there are even in its neighbourhood that vie with it in poverty, squalor and vice, but Flower and Dean Street has a character all its own. For to its tenements resort mostly that class of criminals the most daring and the most to be feared – the men who commit robberies accompanied with acts of violence.
It was largely because of this area that Whitechapel had the highest number of assaults on police in London;17 and again, Flower and Dean St itself was the most dangerous,18
it being useless for the police to follow beyond a certain point, even when they happen to appear on the scene, as the houses communicate with one another, and a man pursued can run in and out, like a rabbit in a warren. Nor is it always safe for the police to venture here alone. Not long ago a member of the force was attacked with an iron crowbar, and he lay for some time in the London Hospital, seriously injured.
The area’s relationship with prostitution was just as well established. John Binny, Mayhew’s collaborator, and some friends visited the area three times in 1860 or 1861, accompanied by local police officers for safety.19
We called at a house in George Street [Lolesworth St], principally occupied by females from 18 to 30 years of age, all prostitutes. In Thrall Street we entered a lodging-house where we saw about thirty persons of both sexes. . . . Here we saw one prostitute, with a remarkably beautiful child on her knee, seated at her afternoon meal. . . . We next went to a brothel in Wentworth Street, kept by a woman, a notorious character. She has been repeatedly in custody for robbing drunken men, and her husband is now in prison for felony. . . . We passed on to Lower Keate Street, and on going into a low lodging-house there we saw a number of young prostitutes, pickpockets and sneaks.
These women were as tough as the men. They were fighting women, with their favourite weapon the hat-pin or the kitchen knife. They, too, would set upon drunken men in the street, beating them up and robbing them.20
October 6th [1885] – Disturbance in Fashion Street. Three women had been knocking about a drunken man, who had a nasty gash on the left eye and was bleeding profusely.
Or they would lure men into the lodging houses where protectors would assault unsuspecting clients, as when a Swedish sailor was robbed of £4 and his trousers by an 18-year-old Flower and Dean St girl and her companions.21 Small wonder that the district was considered ‘one of the most notorious rookeries for infamous characters in the metropolis’.22
Such was the Flower and Dean St area by the early 1870s. The challenge to society which areas like Flower and Dean St embodied was complex and operated on many levels. But on any level it was a challenge which shot fear into the very bowels of the Victorian middle classes.23
We fear them for what they are, – beds of pestilence, where the fever is generated which shall be propagated to distant parts of the town, – rendezvous of vice, whose effects we feel in street robberies and deeds of crime, – blots resting upon our national repute for religion and charity. Still they are dangerous, not so much on account of what they are, as what they may be; – they are not only the haunts where pauperism recruits its strength – not only the lurking places, but the nurseries of felons. A future generation of thieves is there hatched from the viper’s egg, who shall one day astonish London by their monstrous birth.
It was left to James Greenwood to ask, with Old Testament fervour, one angry question.24
Why should these breeding places of disease and vice and all manner of abomination be permitted to cumber the earth?
The destruction of the London rookeries occupied more and better minds than Greenwood’s. A half-hearted attempt to destroy the Flower and Dean St area had already been made. In the late 1830s the passion for ‘ventilating’ the criminal slums of the capital stimulated considerable demolition for the next two decades. Wide new roads would be cut through the slums, letting in air, light and police and, most important of all, disturbing the inhabitants from their old haunts. The Spitalfields rookery did not escape. About 1,300 people25 were evicted from the line of what is now Commercial St, separating Petticoat Lane and Brick Lane and demolishing many notorious courts and alleys. That the road, when built, was useless as a commercial thoroughfare for nearly twenty years because it was not extended far enough northwards was largely irrelevant. Its main purpose had been to displace ‘the dangerous classes’ and this in part had been done.
But by the early 1870s it was obvious that Commercial St had failed to destroy the rookery. Nor were any of the agencies responsible for social improvement making sufficient impact. The voluntary societies for combating immorality, the police, the poor law and sanitary authorities – all were ineffective in meeting the challenge posed by the Flower and Dean St area. Charity, ideology, religion and coercion had failed to control the rookery. Only its destruction, the removal of its houses, its secret courts and hidden alleys could do away with this menacing threat to middle-class security.
From the time of the Paris Commune onwards, the pressure for a comprehensive redevelopment policy for slum areas grew to invincible proportions. The radical middle classes were united in the move towards reforms which would enable local authorities to deal with areas like Flower and Dean St. Reports were written and released with much publicity;26 parliament was lobbied;27 questions were asked by influential reformers on the floor of the House of Commons;28 respected philanthropists bombarded weighty journals with copy.29 Such pressure could not go unheeded by the government for long.
On 8 February 1875, Richard Cross, the new Conservative Home Secretary, presented what was later to be the Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act to parliament. This was no mere housing reform. It was designed to be an answer to the challenge of the criminal slum districts. In advocating the reform, which contained a potentially controversial expansion of the state’s powers of compulsory purchase, the effects on crime and prostitution in areas which already had similar powers were stressed with the aid of detailed statistics.30 With such arguments in its favour the Bill provoked almost no opposition, and the Cross Act received the Royal Assent at the end of June 1875.
It had an immediate effect on the East End of London. Its passage through parliament had been watched with keen interest by members of the Whitechapel Board of Guardians, already notorious among the East End casual poor for their ruthless operation of the Poor Laws.31 The Guardians were solidly representative of the local bourgeoisie. One of their most influential members was the Rev. Samuel Barnett, Rector of St Jude’s, Whitechapel, whose parish shared the Flower and Dean St rookery with Christ Church, Spitalfields. He was a zealous reformer and friend of Octavia Hill, who had been an able and articulate propagandist for the new Act. Samuel Barnett knew the Cross Act and the philosophy behind it well. In particular, he knew that under its powers twelve ratepayers could officially represent an area as ‘unhealthy’ and so demand that it be destroyed.
Just before Christmas 1875, Barnett gave the Guardians advance notice of his intention to bring up the question of having the Flower and Dean St area demolished under the Cross Act. He met with general concurrence. On 25 January 1876, the Whitechapel Board of Guardians, not content with half-measures, formally resolved to represent the whole of the area from Fashion St to Whitechapel High St as an ‘unhealthy area’. Eleven days later, Dr John Liddle, the Whitechapel Medical Officer of Health, received an official representation signed by Barnett and sixteen other Guardians, recommending the destruction of an area at that time home to an estimated 4,354 people. All of them would be made homeless if the Guardians’ plea were accepted. The representation gave figures for the area’s death and sickness rates, and concluded ‘That the said Area is fruitful of sickness, misery, pauperism and crime within the Whitechapel Union.’32
Dr Liddle was one of the most respected Medical Officers of Health in London. He had already made other representations under the Act and he had been a member of the Committee which had inaugurated these powers back in 1873, so he knew better than most how far he could legally support the Guardians. But the criteria he had to use were based firmly on legal and public health principles. He could not, under the Cross Act, secure the demolition of an immoral or unsavoury area; only one where the houses were not fit to live in. This was a crucial contradiction between the theory of the Act and its practice. For ironically, the common lodging houses – the morally objectionable part of the area’s housing stock – were the least likely to be considered unfit for habitation by Dr Liddle. Since 1851 they had been under supervision by the police and although their control was not all that it might have been they still ensured that cleanliness and repair would have been better in the lodging houses than in many other places. The possibility of prosecution by the police and withdrawal of a keeper’s licence was a good incentive to maintain minimum standards. There was no such pressure on the slum landlords of Whitechapel who only had two hard-pressed sanitary inspectors to contend with. So the worst properties – in Liddle’s terms at least – were the old seventeenth-century tenement houses and the ramshackle wood and brick one- or two-storey cottages of the area’s courts and alleys.
This contradiction was to save two-thirds of the Flower and Dean St rookery, and that the most notorious part, from destruction. Liddle removed Fashion St, Thrawl St, half of George St and Wentworth St, and no less than three-quarters of Flower and Dean St itself (among others) from the Guardians’ representation when he forwarded it to the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) for action.33
The MBW didn’t need to consider the matter for long. A severe epidemic of typhus fever (news of which reached the Home Office) broke out in Flower and Dean St and it effectively cut discussion short. The Metropolitan Board soon resolved to make an ‘Improvement Scheme’ for the demolition of a substantial part of the area.34 Over 1,800 people were to be made homeless, although working-class dwellings were to be built on the cleared land. To effect this the MBW would sell the vacant sites to private companies who would build in accordance with the Board’s byelaws. When combined with the clearances in the Goulston St area across Commercial St, this was to be the grandest and costliest slum clearance scheme ever to be carried out by the Metropolitan Board of Works; only at the end of the century were the London County Council to attempt anything as ambitious – in the Boundary St area Bethnal Green. The Improvement Scheme was approved with minor amendments, published and signed by Cross himself on 14 May 1877. It had taken the Guardians more than a year to get so far.
And then – nothing. Nothing was to happen for the next five years. Evictions were delayed largely because the authorities fought shy of creating homelessness in the midst of a trade depression which was hitting the East End particularly hard. Local Improvement Schemes could have put 13,000 people on the streets of East London within a year and the MBW recoiled from the prospect.35 It was decided that the Flower and Dean St area was to be dealt with later, after schemes submitted earlier had been completed.
After yet further delays demolition in the Flower and Dean St area eventually took place in the autumn of 1883. A quarter of the most notorious street in London was all that was cleared; with it went other places of similar character – Upper and Lower Keate Streets, Keate Court, Wilson’s Place, Sugar Loaf Court, Crown Court, New Court, parts of George St, George Yard and Wentworth St. The rookery had not been destroyed but a vital limb had been torn off. About a third of its population had been removed. Many inaccessible courts and alleys had gone, and policing was now easier in the remaining parts. But much of the worst still remained – including the majority of common lodging houses. In practice, the Cross Act had not been able to satisfy the demands of the shopkeepers, employers and clergymen of the Whitechapel Guardians and the Metropolitan Board of Works.
And now other problems arose. The unhealthy parts of the neighbourhood were no more. Empty sites lay between the narrow old streets of the Flower and Dean St area. But who was going to build homes there for the working classes? And how could the authorities be sure that the new dwellings would not be occupied by the same class as the old slums; would not still perpetuate the rookery? The answers to these questions in fact lay 1,000 miles away in Eastern Europe, where events which shattered the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement were to have momentous repercussions on the streets of the East End of London.
There had been quite a large Jewish population on the borders of the Flower and Dean St area for some years. The 1860s in particular had seen important encroachments on the territory of the English and Irish casual poor. Inkhorn Court, described as ‘a fair sample of an Irish colony’36 in 1861, was almost entirely occupied by Polish Jews ten years later, as was Commercial Place. Dutch Jews dominated Tewkesbury Buildings and Fashion Court. And about half the population of Fashion St and New Court, Spitalfields were Dutch or Polish Jews by 1871. In total they numbered about 1,000 people.37
This colonisation had not had a great effect on the Flower and Dean St rookery, although its boundaries had shrunk in response to the pressure from outside. But in the years following the declaration of the Improvement Scheme, the nature of this pressure underwent an immense change. At the same time as the Metropolitan Board of Works were buying up unfit housing in the area, at the same time as the demolition men’s carts and waggons were salvaging timber and sound bricks from the ruins, an unparalleled stream of foreign Jews from Eastern Europe were making their way into Whitechapel and Spitalfields.
The assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 sparked off an eruption of violence against Russian Jewry. The officially inspired pogroms of that year gave way to the May Laws of 1882 which legalised discrimination in business and personal freedom. Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement reached a peak that summer.38 Out of the hundreds of thousands who left Lithuania and the Ukraine, Galicia, Austria, Volhynia and Poland, several thousand immigrants settled close to the eastern borders of the City among their more established co-religionists. They were the harbingers of an influx which was to change the history of the East End.
Emigration from Eastern Europe must be seen within the context of an acute economic dislocation affecting the Jewish settlements, a crisis we shall discuss in more detail in the final chapter for it was to have a profound effect on the later development of the people of Rothschild Buildings. The year 1881 was not a starting-point, although to many, because of the large number of immigrants involved, it seemed to be.
It was these large numbers of immigrants and their economic and social conditions in the East End which inspired resentment and concern among many of the long-standing Anglo-Jewish bourgeoisie. Behind their attempts to send families back to Eastern Europe (2,301 in 1881–5 alone), or on to America or the colonies (881 in the same period),39 or to dissuade them from coming in the first place,40 lay a great fear. It was candidly expressed in an editorial in the Jewish Chronicle, the official organ of middle-class Anglo-Jewry, as early as 12 August 1881.41
Our fair fame is bound up with theirs; the outside world is not capable of making minute discrimination between Jew and Jew, and forms its opinions of Jews in general as much, if not more, from them than from the Anglicised portion of the Community.
Reports of the social conditions among the new immigrants crowding into Whitechapel’s tenement houses, already long-saturated with people, seemed to confirm the Jewish Chronicle’s worst fears. In 1883 a survey revealed that nearly 24 per cent of the Jewish population of London, or 10,000 people, were in receipt of some sort of casual relief from poverty.42
Most cases of pauperism among Jews were relieved by the Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor, formed in 1859. These Guardians were more enlightened than many contemporary Poor Law authorities, but they were still firmly representative of the established Jewish middle class in England. Their seventeen founder-members had been lawyers, businessmen, financiers and other professional men.43 Much of the responsibility for providing for impoverished immigrants would devolve upon them; and indirectly, so would the welfare of middle-class Anglo-Jewry. To achieve this, the Guardians had to ensure that as far as possible immigrants did not become a charge on the local poor rates but were aided from the ‘Community’s’ own charitable funds. But as the drain on poor relief grew – to the accompaniment of tirades against the immigrants’ living conditions – the Guardians were forced to turn their attention to prevention rather than cure.
In early 1884 they set up a Sanitary Committee under the chairmanship of their President. At the Committee’s second meeting in May,44 the head of the ‘Royal Family’ of Anglo-Jewry45 accepted an invitation to join them. This was Baron Nathan Mayer Rothschild, soon to be made 1st Lord Rothschild of Tring.
Through 1884 the Sanitary Committee and their full-time sanitary inspector kept up a running battle with the Whitechapel District Board of Works, the local authority for much of the Jewish East End. In October they forwarded a letter – ‘a continuous outpour of condemnation and complaint’ – to the District Board, inferring incompetence and dereliction of duty. The angered Whitechapel members replied that they had done all in their power but that the local housing problem had ‘been greatly intensified by the arrival within the district of a vast number of foreign Jews’. Indeed, the Whitechapel sanitary inspectors were completely occupied in trying to remedy ‘the filthy conditions of the rooms, yards and water closets occupied and used by those people’.46
With responsibility for the problem passed back firmly to the Jewish community, it appeared that something more was required to achieve a lasting improvement in the dwellings of the immigrant poor, and to ease competition with native workers for house room. Early in 1885 Rothschild was able to reinforce this view when he was appointed Chairman of an East End Enquiry Commission, set up by the influential Council of the United Synagogue.
The Enquiry Commission’s Report concluded that the condition of the ‘poorer classes of the community’ had to be remedied in two ways. First, the immigrants must be Anglicised: ‘steps must be taken to cause the foreign poor upon arrival to imbibe notions proper to civilised life in this country.’ And second, ‘the physical conditions of the poor and their surroundings must be improved.’ In fact, as the Report pointed out, the two aims were intimately linked, for new homes ‘constitute the greatest of all available means for improving the condition, physical, moral, and social of the Jewish poor.’47
At present, the houses occupied by the Jewish poor . . . are for the most part barely fit, and many utterly unfit, for human habitation. . . . It has become a matter of pressing necessity that healthy homes be provided at such rentals as the poor can pay. It is not suggested or desired that such houses should be erected by eleemosynary aid, but on strictly commercial principles. . . . The Committee believe that if rentals were based on a nett return of 4%, excellent accommodation . . . could be provided at a rental not exceeding five shillings per week.
The Report strongly recommended that a company be at once established to put these policies into effect. The Jewish Chronicle carried the Report in full and gave its conclusions unequivocal support.
It was envisaged that any healthy homes for the Jewish poor would be in the form of tenement blocks. They were to become as much a part of working-class life as the slums had been, provided, as the slums before them, by the middle classes – inspired this time by self-interested benevolence rather than vulgar profit.
Large blocks of tenement dwellings had been part of the London street scene since the late 1840s. They were high brick and concrete structures designed to accommodate as many people to the acre as possible in order to utilise fully expensive inner city sites. Generally, they gave accommodation to the skilled worker at rents which could yield a profitable return to the capitalist. Sound commercial principles had to be obeyed and unvarnished philanthropy was frowned upon. And so a reasonable dividend had to be paid to investors but not as much as could be gained from more speculative concerns; the difference between a rack-renting landlord and a ‘philanthropist’ was perhaps 6 per cent per annum. The boom in dwellings companies in the 1860s and early 1870s was such that by the year of the Cross Act some twenty-eight organisations or individuals had built tenements for nearly 7,000 London families of the artisan class.48
The recommendation to establish such a dwellings company for Jewish tenants had been signed by Rothschild, who was its most prestigious supporter in the debate that followed. His interest in housing for the poor perhaps had sentimental (as well as commercial and philanthropic) origins. His mother, Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild, ‘a true friend and benefactor to the poor’,49 was reported to have urged on her deathbed in March 1884 that her son devote his energies to improving the housing of Jewish workers.50 Having made public the aim of a dwellings company to be supported by the whole of the Anglo-Jewish bourgeoisie, he had gone some way to achieving that end. But Rothschild was rich and powerful enough to act alone. And this he did.
On 9 March, six days after the Report had been formally presented to the United Synagogue, there was a meeting at Rothschild’s banking house in the City. Rothschild himself was in the chair. Around him were clustered the aristocracy of Anglo-Jewry: Lionel Cohen (President of the Jewish Board of Guardians), F. D. Mocatta (the philanthropic bullion-broker), Claude Montefiore (the wealthy Biblical scholar and philanthropist), Samuel Montagu (later Lord Swaythling, MP for Whitechapel), N. S. Joseph (the future architect of Rothschild Buildings), and fourteen others. After discussing the Report’s recommendations they resolved that day to form a building company. It was to be called The Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company. Its capital was to be £40,000 with 1,600 share issues of £25 each producing an annual dividend of 4 per cent. Within four days the Jewish Chronicle could report that half that sum had already been privately subscribed.51
But this promising financial beginning was to be misleading. Rothschild himself had invested £10,000, a much larger sum than others would risk, and an advertising and fund-raising campaign had soon to be launched. In fact, all the shares were not taken up for another two years, when a loan of £8,000 was granted by the Jews’ Free School, another recipient of Rothschild’s largesse.52
All this was not to distract the Company from its main task. The first meeting of directors, with Rothschild again in the chair, was held in July 1885. A Memorandum of Association, issued soon after, stated the Company’s objectives:53
To provide the industrial classes with more commodious and healthy lodgings and dwellings than those which they now inhabit, giving them the maximum of accommodation for the minimum rent compatible with the yielding of a nett £4 per cent per annum dividend upon the paid-up Capital of the Company.
To achieve this the Company would buy freehold or leasehold land, cleared of buildings or not, and would erect new dwellings. It was thus prepared to take upon itself the role of the Metropolitan Board of Works, if necessary clearing the slums as well as building new homes. This was no idle promise. After Rothschild Buildings had been lived in for five years Flower and Dean St was to feel its effects in a way significant for the history of the rookery.
Until the 1890s, philanthropic and semi-philanthropic companies like the Four Per Cent were the sole providers of London’s non-speculative working-class housing. The Metropolitan Board of Works were generally forbidden by the Cross Act to build on the sites they had cleared by compulsory powers. Vacant land had to be sold to the dwellings companies, although building control remained in the hands of the Board of Works.
But prospective purchasers were hard to find. The optimism of 1873, when it was believed that clearance would release a fount of goodwill among capitalists and divert funds into dwellings for the poor,54 had been sadly misplaced. Few companies were in the market at the prices which the MBW, with angry ratepayers at their throats, were forced to charge. Thus it was that one of the largest sites cleared in the Flower and Dean St area remained unsold for nearly two years after clearance, inhabited from time to time by itinerant tinkers and other travellers, much to the vexation of local tradesmen.55
When the United Synagogue’s Commission had recommended the formation of a dwellings company they had pointed to this as a suitable site, ‘in the heart of the Jewish quarter’, and available at that very time for building. It had been previously occupied by the south side of Flower and Dean St (to George St), Wilson’s Place, Lower Keate St, the north sides of Keate Court and Upper Keate St, and the east side of George St, and could more truly have been described as being in the heart of the Flower and Dean St rookery. N. S. Joseph, an architect with impeccable Anglo-Jewish connections, had advised the Commission that the site could provide good accommodation for 186 families. When he helped found the Four Per Cent at the meeting of 9 March, it made good sense that the new company should approach the MBW with a view to purchasing the Flower and Dean St site, where a preliminary assessment had already proved satisfactory. If the company were successful in building there, dwellings on this site would significantly expand the boundaries of the Jewish East End.
Again, Rothschild took the first step alone. On 8 May 1885, the MBW agreed to sell the site to him personally,56 two months before the first formal meeting of the Four Per Cent’s directors. The cost was £7,000. Next month Gladstone’s dissolution honours announced that Rothschild was the first professing Jew to be made a Peer of the Realm.
N. S. Joseph worked on his designs for the new dwellings for another five months before they won the approval of the MBW in October. He had submitted plans which originally included provision for workshops in the roof space at attic level. These had been rejected by the MBW but, when the drawings were passed to the Home Office, Joseph was requested to reinstate the workshops in January 1886. Other minor amendments were to be made, but eventually the plans received Ministerial consent.57 Approval of tenders by the Four Per Cent and the Home Office took until June, after which time purchase of the site could actually be completed. To get to the stage where building could commence had taken sixteen months from the beginning of the United Synagogue’s enquiry; the Whitechapel Guardians had stimulated clearance of the area ten years before.
The model buildings which N. S. Joseph had designed were to be called Charlotte de Rothschild Dwellings, in memory of Lord Rothschild’s mother. The tenants, less grandiose, would know them as Rothschild Buildings. They were two parallel blocks of flats, six storeys high above semi-basements, joined by a narrower block fronting George St (renamed Lolesworth St in 1893). The two main buildings fronted both Flower and Dean St and Thrawl St. Their façades were austere cliffs of yellow brick, relieved at intervals by open staircases; the only attempts at decoration were two courses of red brick between the windows, terracotta keystones to the window arches (their floral patterns soon to be obliterated by grime), and fancy wrought ironwork to staircases and landings. They were built to last. Excavations alone for the reinforced concrete foundations cost £1,000. The superstructure was carefully designed to prevent spread of fire, and so floors were of reinforced concrete on rolled iron joists. External walls and some party walls were one and a half bricks thick. Yet they were also built very much with economy in mind. At each stage of construction costs were kept as low as possible, leading to maintenance problems within the relatively short term.
The parallel buildings were arranged in four blocks each. These blocks were bisected by the open staircase and landings, which also acted as ventilating shaft and light well. From each landing opened four flats, built almost back-to-back but with limited cross-ventilation on to the open staircases. Typically, these were two-roomed dwellings, each with WC and scullery (see Figure 1).
As originally constructed, there were 198 flats arranged as shown in Table 1. Contrary to all previous assurances, it was found that a rent of more than 5s. in most cases was required to give the Company’s shareholders their 4 per cent. There were also the thirty workshops in the attics at about 5s. 9d. per week; these, however, proved impossible to let and were soon converted to flats. By 1900 the Buildings could accommodate up to 228 families in 477 rooms, although because of some families renting two flats this figure was rarely if ever reached. Their total cost, including the price of land, reached £40,148 10s. 1d.58
From the outside these grim, towering buildings, especially when seen from the quarter-acre courtyard, starkly stated their purpose of providing homes for the Victorian working class. Their function was to provide the maximum number of sanitary dwellings as cheaply as possible. Ruthless utilitarianism pared away all that was not absolutely necessary to attain that end. The final results, it appeared, had achieved their prescribed function and nothing more. But Rothschild Buildings, the ugly offspring of a reluctant paternalism, were to be much more than their architect, owners and builders had ever imagined.
Rothschild Buildings were opened on 2 April 1887 and within a month many flats had been let.59 The first tenants, mainly Jewish immigrant workers but among them five policemen and a clergyman,60 settled in to their new neighbourhood. As yet, however, there were few real neighbours, because the area was a mixture of old and new, the new tenements overlooking the crumbling pantile roofs of the old lodging houses around them. Events in the first full year of occupation were to change all that.
During the autumn of 1888 the first tenants of Rothschild Buildings were caught up in a world of tense excitement. During the daytime, the streets around the Buildings were filled with sightseers, newspapermen and angry locals. Animated discussion took place in street-corner groups and a small crowd was often gathered outside the police station in Commercial St. At night the streets were unnaturally quiet. Shopkeepers complained that61
Evening business [has] become practically extinct in many trades, women finding themselves unable to pass through the streets without an escort.
In their place roamed over fifty vigilante patrols, with men carrying ‘police whistles and stout cudgels’,62 and there was a marked increase in the number of police on duty. On the second weekend in September the daytime crowds turned their attention to the local immigrant population. Jews were threatened, abused and assaulted.63 The authorities feared extensive rioting.
The cause of this anti-Jewish sentiment was the discovery of Jack the Ripper’s second victim and the belief that a Jew must be responsible for the outrage – that the murders were ‘foreign to the English style in crime’.64 The people of Whitechapel, ‘driven . . . nearly crazy’65 by these appalling events, gave the East End Jews a difficult time for a few days, after which things returned to normal. But for the first tenants of the Buildings the murders had a special significance. They could not have been closer to the true scene of Jack the Ripper’s crimes. For they were near-neighbours of the women who died; some would possibly have known one or more of them, by sight at least. And the murders heralded a period of great change which was to leave its mark on the Flower and Dean St area for the next eighty years.
Jack the Ripper is accredited with the murders of five Whitechapel prostitutes in the autumn of 1888. All five were closely acquainted with the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood. Polly Nichols was living at 18 Thrawl St, a registered common lodging house, shortly before she was murdered in Bucks Row (now Durward St) Whitechapel. Immediately prior to her death on 31 August, it was said that she was ‘living in Flowery Dean St’.66 ‘Dark Annie’ Chapman, murdered in Hanbury St on 8 September, lived at 35 Dorset St but had been well known in lodging houses throughout Spitalfields.67 Elizabeth Stride, murdered in Berner St on 30 September, was staying in 32 Flower and Dean St (opposite Rothschild Buildings) where she had lodged ‘off and on’ for six years. Catherine Eddowes, murdered in Mitre Square on the same night as ‘Long Liz’ Stride, lived with her common law husband – a market labourer called Kelly – at 55 Flower and Dean St. Eddowes and Kelly had lived in the street for seven years,68 mainly at Wilkinson’s lodging house, and Eddowes’s sister lived nearby at 6 Thrawl St. The final victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was murdered at her home in Miller’s Court, Dorset St, on 9 November. For some time before she had lived with a man in Lolesworth St.69
Nothing could have described more eloquently the failure of slum clearance to destroy the social and moral evils the Whitechapel Guardians had complained of twelve years before. The existence of such an area, the lifestyle of the five charwomen-cum-street-sellers-cum-prostitutes, above all the horrifying mystery surrounding the murders, shook the very foundations of Victorian middle-class society. ‘There is only one topic today throughout all England’,70 wrote W. T. Stead in the Pall Mall Gazette, and that topic was the Whitechapel murders. They appeared to crystallise the doubts and fears of urban society which were beginning to find expression in the 1880s. Reaction ranged through doubt about the social mores which could produce these awful events; doubt about the efficacy of religion; fear of revolution and the destruction of society; an overwhelming feeling of guilt that the conditions exposed by the victims’ inquests should be tolerated ‘in what is boastfully called the capital of the civilised world’.71 Only a few conservative journals pleaded that there was little need for concern as the victims were ‘miserable women’ who ‘preferred the excess of degradation to entering the workhouse.’72
Among the innumerable cures for these ills with which the leader columns were filled and correspondence pages bombarded during those few feverish weeks, were practical solutions for the Spitalfields problem. Besides the pleas for more clergymen, more policemen, more middle-class ‘slummers’, more night shelters where poor women could sleep and laundries where they could work, one theme was consistently stated. How could housing conditions be improved? And the most popular means of improvement was not new; the lodging houses must be destroyed and artisans’ dwellings put in their place.
Large-scale redevelopment was Jack the Ripper’s most important legacy to the Flower and Dean St neighbourhood. In a leading article the Daily Telegraph wrung the consciences of the middle class in a plea for capital to be diverted into working-class housing. Characteristically, the appeal to philanthropy was tempered with avarice.73
Not only by demolishing slums and rebuilding them should we save all these lives; not only should we protect the community at large from infectious diseases; not only should we go far to extirpate crime and to provide London artisans with plenty of employment; but there is a safe and certain four per cent to be made out of the business – at the very least.
Concurrently with the campaign to clear this ‘morally insanitary’74The Times75