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The role of Ascension Church over the decades is reflected in its
motto “A Church in the community, for the community”. Built (and
rebuilt) as a philanthropic initiative by the Felsted School
Mission Association, the initial building, on the site of the
present-day church, opened in 1887. The congregation grew
substantially and, by 1891, the building could not accommodate it.
A new church was built that was dedicated on Ascension Day, 8th
May 1902. Information provided by the Church’s website indicates
that “in the late 18- and early 1900s it was delivering the kind
of community-based youth work that any church today would be proud
of, including a swimming club which taught the children living
near the notoriously dangerous docks to swim, and a football team,
while the thriving dock community ensured weekly attendances of
over 600 on a Sunday.” Nevertheless, like so many institutions in
the area, the church was affected by the social turbulence linked
to the closure of the Docks in the 1980s. Mass unemployment and
people leaving the area coincided with the need for substantial
repairs to the fabric of the building. Closure, however, was
averted and a new-look Ascension Church building was rededicated
in December 1995.
www.ascensioncc.org.uk/history
William: Yes, the model of the church was an exercise started at Felsted School in Essex which is a private school or public school though you can get in there with a bursary or by passing an exam. It's 400 years old, the school, and I've been there many times and they got the kids who were 11 to build a model of the Ascension church which the school had paid to have built at Custom House to teach the children to read and write. Basically it started out as a wooden shed and eventually they built the church and they always had a link with it, with the East End. The kids built this rough wooden church as an exercise to get 25% of their marks for their exam and I didn't see it for a long time but it was a rough church and left there. It was in a rough state but the kids had done the best they could with it. They did what they thought was right and I saw the vicar he told me about it and I remember it being unloaded off a van and I'd forgotten about it…
A school teacher came with some children from Felsted, the public school, to visit the church regularly and he said it should be in a case. So I said ‘I don't have a case. It needs polymer’. There was somewhere in Canning Town where I could buy polymer. He said ‘I'll leave £100 now, then can you start work on it right away? Can you buy the polymer and the board and make the case and a table for it? So the £100 more than covered it. So I put it on the table and made the glass or the polymer case for it and it's now used to teach the school children. It covers all the aspects of the Ascension church and the area. I went into it and put all the things that happened there. So I made small pictures or little plaques to put over it so everybody knows what happens there. So all the different classes in the church are on there if you look at it and it tells you where it originally came from.
“Down in the busy east of London where the steady rumble of heavy
vans laden with merchandise, the whirr and clang of cranes and the
rattle of winches resound always in the ears of the passer-by,
stand two large gates, which are the entrance to Mecca of the East
End labourer. For here are the docks, whose business, directly or
indirectly, gives employment to a great proportion of the lower
stratum of dwellers in the east” [Dickens, Dock life]. The Royal
Victoria Dock (RVD), originally known as the Victoria Dock, opened
in 1855. One and a quarter mile long, the dock was directly
connected to the railway system and hydraulic power was installed
from the start. It was the first dock built expressly for steam
ships.Such was the role of the Royal Victoria Dock in the import
of foreign grain that, in the first 5 years of the 20th century,
it saw the creation of three giant mills, representing the largest
milling installation in the British Empire. The largest of them,
Vernon & Sons’ Millennium Mills, was able to process 100 sacks per
hour. The Royal Albert Dock opened in 1880. Served by the Great
Eastern Railway, this was a dock equipped hydraulic cranes and
steam winches, capable of handling ships up to 12,000 tons. By
1886, there were in existence in the Port of London 7 enclosed
dock systems, leading to over-provision and, consequentially,
financial difficulties. At a time when technology was advancing
fast, the lack of investment in the port facilities risked making
them inefficient and obsolete. To counteract this situation, the
Port of London Authority (PLA) was created (following the Port of
London Act of 1908). To avert a financially catastrophic situation
for London, the PLA decided to take on a programme of
modernisation. Thus, the King George V Dock was built able to take
vessels of up to 30,000 tons. As regular passenger lines became a
lucrative business, the King George V Dock could berth the biggest
liners of the time. Together with the Royal Victoria and Royal
Albert Docks, when the King George V Dock opened in 1921, it
became part of the largest area of impounded water in the world. A
fourth dock was later planned for the Beckton area by the PLA but
abandoned in the mid 1960s. The Royal Docks achieved their peak in
the 1950s and early 60s, handling mostly deep sea cargo trades
from the British Commonwealth.
www.royaldocks.org.uk/history
Olga: How was it for you a young person working in the docks?
William: Well, I started off on the ships when I was 18 (1959) and I worked as a shore steward on the ships doing the stores. It was casual work, all that work was casual work, and I got on all right with that and I worked on the Royal Mail Lines and the Royal Mail lines had split things in two, there was the shore stewards and the shore crews and I was on the shore stewards and they didn't pay a lot or have a lot of overtime. They was very easy-going, you could sometimes have a couple of easy days in the mess room playing cards with nothing to do, so after 2 years of that I transferred over to the Marine riggers of the Royal Mail which took the place of deep sea crew. Most of the men had already been away at sea. They did all the rigging of the ships when it was in the dock and the moving of the ship. All of that was done by them and I did that and the moving of the ship and the tugs come and you would move the ship with the tug. You would go to stations and move it and then you would tie it up at another birth and you also maintained all the running gear on board, the derricks, which they don’t have any more and all the wiring and all the splicing and the life-boats had to be serviced and everything that the deep-sea crew did, you did, you had to learn it but some of the men knew it because they’d been away from the age of 14 and had been in the second world war and some of their stories were horrific. I put my name down to become a stevedore and I decided it was the thing to do and I’d got to know about it through a friend of a friend who had known me since I was a baby and I worked as a marine rigger up until 1966, no I tell a lie, 1965, and then I got a letter to say I'd been nominated to go to the Dock School for 3 weeks and a 2 week training. Well I had the advantage that I already had training so I was sent to the Dock School in the East India Dock (which is no longer there) and then you passed an exam at the end of it. You did general derrick work and it was to show that you had, that you were able to do derrick work as well as driving - well, I’d already driven winches, so I knew how that worked and at the end of, I think it was 3 weeks they gave you papers for your exam. It wasn't really an exam as it was all done in boxes but if you passed that they give you a book that you could go and work on the Monday for the call which was the men lined up on the pavement every morning, not on the road, but on the pavement. You have to imagine the Docks. They stretched for miles. And you lined up and in the road would be gangers and ship workers (they were called ship workers, the other men) and they would ask for so many men and you would hand your book out and not many would take you as they had regular gangs who stayed together but they were still casual and we had a pool, a national labour pool , it was the same all over the country and if there was no work at all you had to go there and you got money, I think it was 9 pounds 5 shillings less tax and insurance if you dabbed on for 5 days. I never had a full week of dabbing on. Never.
Olga: I was thinking, if you had an uncle or a dad doing the job then that would help?
William: Yes, some of the time it did. But a mate of mine, his father had a gang and he had two sons and the first day he wouldn't pick his sons up. They had to go home. And his mum said to him, said to her husband, ‘Our two my boys were on the stones. Why didn't you pick them up? And he said “No they've got to learn to find the work themselves.
Olga: You said something before about when the machines and forklifts came and when people said, ‘this is the end’.
William:Yes, containerisation.
Olga: Tell me about that.
William: The containerisation started in 1943. The Americans in the war used containers. On one occasion they had planes in them on a ship, on a ship’s deck. They put the planes in containers. This time people in high places did take notice about what happened, what has been done, and so in 1952 the shipowners, they got one man who was the governor of Shaw Saville line as merchant marine and he studied the unloading and loading of cargo on ships across all the shipping lines in the world. But the company got together and he was the best one. He spent 2 years travelling the world at their expense all the ports to make a report on the way the men worked all over the world. Anyway that was 1952, but the initiative was from the American containers. It was an American idea but the British pulled the men out when the first containers came here. They were small ones and the men were blind to what was happening and they were lifted up, put on the quay and the men just unloaded them on the quay, so the men thought, ‘We've got no fear of this’ and I thought, ‘they won't be like this all the time’. ‘No we wouldn't let that happen, we wouldn't let containerisation happen’ but the years rolled by and he came back with his report and told us about containerisation. He come back and I read his report. It’s a book. Obviously, a place like Russia or China wouldn’t be interested because there such a surplus of labour and they done what they was told. And for you in Portugal, Salazar in Portugal. He weren't interested as they could call up slave labour whenever they wanted to and they certainly didn't want to put any money in. So they wanted to carry on as they was. We knew that things wouldn't carry on as they were. Anyway the crunch of the report was that for 500 years cargo been lifted 30 feet. It went up 30 feet and it went down 30 feet for a minimum of 500 years. But there had to be another way and the container was it. So they said that they had to build new ships called cellular ships. So the Americans first built the new ships called Lancer ships. They was part container and part general cargo and after some years of haggling around the world they realised that the old job of being a docker wasn't an attractive one. Some of them, like in Jamaica and in Africa were working for peanuts like slaves so it was really only on the industrial side of the planet like for example Australia, New Zealand and Canada was against it. Of course they had strong unions and America had the teamsters union with Hoffer. He was taken to see one of these new ships and asked what he thought of it. And he said, ‘Fuckin sink it. We can’t have that.’ we thought, ‘What! We can't have that. You could see thousands of job would have to go. That's the demise of the working bloke’ and we said, ‘We can't agree with that.’ You could see there was a lot of jobs that were going to go.
The Sri Murugan Temple in East Ham has been described as a haven
of spirituality and is a tribute to the multiculturality of the
area. The Temple is a large and impressive edifice, built of white
stone and marble all of which were brought across from India. Its
entrance, underneath an ornate 52 foot tower, reveals polished
granite tiles from India and reflect the light carefully designed
to fall delicately around the deities adorned with glowing lamps,
fruits and flowers (The Shady Old Lady, 2019). The Temple’s
journey began humbly in 1975 in a terraced home in London. The
congregation of Tamil-speaking Hindu community raised the £3.5
million to build the Temple on the site acquired in Church Road 22
years ago, which opened in 2005. The Temple reflects what Gregory
et al (2013) describe as a delicate syncretism in its combination
of cultures from east and west, of traditional and modern, merging
with its surroundings in a road that previously housed a Church.
The same note was achieved in its design and construction as the
building follows a symbolic design drawn by Indian architect Sri
Muthiah Sthapathi and chief priest, Sri Naganathsivam Kurukkal in
accordance with Hindu Temple principles, in collaboration with
British architect Terry Freeman and a team of Indian experts to
build this traditional Indian building according to British
planning law.
www.londonsrimurugan.org
Eve: Did you go to the big temple, the Lord Murugan Temple in East Ham?
Brian: Yes I've been there couple of times. I used to go to the big temple in Neasden which is a Gujarati one. If you go to the one in Neasden in my opinion it's even better than The Lord Murugan Temple and they've got a lot of things you can watch. I was very interested in Hinduism growing up. I used to go to the temple in Neasden quite a lot.
Eve: Your parents weren't religious, were they?
Brian: No, they weren't. I had an interest in Islam for a while and then I had an interest in Eastern religions, in Hinduism. I've actually studied Hindi. I studied Hindi for two years during my undergrad work. I don't know how much influence that was, being in the area that I was in. Some people thought it might be. But I don't know how much of an interest I got because of that.
Eve: What was your thesis about?
Brian: My MA dissertation was a completely different topic. My undergraduate dissertation was on the representation of Hasidic Jews in the media which had a bearing on the area which I am in. With religion, when I was growing up, maybe because I was living in a multicultural area and you had a source of exposure maybe you're forced to think about religion, coming from English people and generally not being very religious, but I noticed that religion was a very important part of people's identity when I was growing up and the Muslim community being very strong in their identity and other communities were very strong in their identity in comparison with those of us with no religion perhaps more so than the other side of being a migrant maybe that's where it all comes from that interest.
‘The Burnell Arms pub has been recently replaced by the Lakshmi Temple opposite East Ham underground station’
Jellied eels or in pies with mash and liquor, cockles and winkles are as part of the East End as Cockney and pubs. Since the 18th century, eels, abundant in the polluted Thames were the easy food for poor people, sold in the streets before being brought indoors for pie and mash shops in the late 19th century. At their height, pie and mash shops were as popular as fried chicken or burgers are today. European eels and flounders were the first species to recolonise the Thames Estuary after being considered "biologically dead" in the 1960s. Nowadays, most eels used in Pie and Mash shops come from Holland or Northern Ireland as the eel population in the Thames fell from 1,500 in 2005 to just 50 in 2010. (BBC, 2010). Together with jellied eels, cockles and winkles were common nibbles in pubs. Pub life was an important part of social life in the East End. As in the rest of the UK, where 1 in 5 pubs between 2008 and 2015 were converted into residential properties, pubs in the East End also closed. In London, 1,300 pubs closed in the decade to 2013 (Crerar & Reinwald, 2013). In addition to different forms of keeping in touch with friends, some people suggest that the struggling economy, higher rents, land prices, smoking ban, tighter regulations and competition from supermarkets have all played their part (Boyd-Wallis, 2015), while others blame the pub industry’s restrictive practices for the pubs demise (O'Sullivan, 2013).
Described by Charles Dickens (1880) as “the largest distillery of gas-tar in the world, covering seventeen acres, and which does the creosoting of railway-sleepers, turning out some thirty thousand a week”, the site occupied by the Gas, Light and Coke Company was named after its governor, Simon Adams Beck, and became known as Beckton. Opened in 1870, Beckton supplied gas to over four million Londoners, as well as manufacturing by-products such as creosote, fertilisers, inks and dyes. It was not until the switch to natural gas in 1969 that the works were scaled down. (Willey, 2006).
Amongst the most important factories in Silvertown, were those belonging to Henry Tate & Sons (1877) and Abram Lyle & Sons (1881), whose companies merged in 1921 to form Tate & Lyle, one of the major employers in the area outside of the docks. The newly formed Tate & Lyle maintained both refineries, Tate’s in Silvertown and Lyle’s in Plaistow Wharf, this latter only closing down in the late 1960’s. This decision contributed to the residential growth in these and adjacent areas. Tate & Lyle is a well-known national company which still operates locally at the Silvertown Refinery. The importance of these companies and the social role they played extended beyond the walls of the factory as they provided social programmes and initiatives that continued to be implemented after the merger. In addition to building a social club (the Tate Institute, Silvertown, 1887), Henry Tate was responsible for financing the Tate Gallery in Central London. The Lyles maintained the Margaret Lyle Maternity Wing at the then existing Queen Mary's Hospital as well as Lyle Park, a local riverside facility accessed from Bradfield Road. Tate & Lyle also offered a 6th form scholarship scheme to help the children of poorer families. With the advent of WWII, Tate & Lyle became a focus for female workforce given that, due to war recruitment, women took up the jobs left by the men, doing physically demanding jobs and attaining high status positions. Nowadays, the company employs a much-reduced workforce, as the ‘Sugar Girls’ were replaced by machines. (Barrett & Calvi, 2012; Royal Docks Trust, 1995)
William: When I first went to work, I worked in Tate and Lyle's for 2 years on the refinery.
Eve: What do you think you learnt there?
William: How to work machinery, different types of machinery you were trained to use. The bigger the machine and the more complex the job was you got men's wages for it so you got a man's wage for doing a man's job like working a really complex machine. I learnt a lot there as you used big machines which they taught you. One machine was a wringer and mangle. It was like a huge washing machine with sacks where the sugar was washed out and it used to go through this washing machine which was 40 foot long at least. At the other end was a huge mangle and a boy could work that. You didn't get extra money for that and you'd be standing at the back where the bags go through the mangle and that was difficult because it would be going round and round the rollers or you'd have to get up and reverse it and release the springs to get the sacks out and then it would go down the chute to a drying machine. You were doing that sort of work.
Eve: Do you think those sorts of skills are still learnt?
William: No, the jobs don't even exist. No, then we were loading a thousand tons in the silo. You were shovelling it in and putting it on the conveyor belt. You got a man's wages for that and you had to keep shovelling it one after the other and I used to work 6 to 2, 2 to 10 or 10 to 6 shifts. You got an half hour break but no matter where you was in the refinery you had to run to the canteen, eat your meal and run back ‘cos you was stopped money so all that had to be fitted into that time because they paid for the half hour. If you did the day work you didn't get paid for the half hour because the day work was considered to be 8 till 5. If you did a 13 hour shift on a Saturday and Sunday you got 2 half hour breaks and you worked 12 hours. And I mean work. It was piece work. I worked piece work all my time whilst I was there and you’d be running with sack barrows 3 hundredweight of cube sugar and you’d do that for 12 hours. Everybody smoked them days but they worked hard, they did work hard.
Christopher: I got a job there (Tate and Lyles’) so, since seventeen till now that’s where I’ve been basically I suppose, spent most of my time there.
Eve: What do you do there?
Christopher: It’s not very nice but insulation, so it’s quite itchy, so that’s basically it. It’s also metalwork as well, so we design and make metal as well. That’s the most difficult bit, but other than that, it’s pretty itchy.
Eve: I can imagine. And do you like the company you work for?
Christopher: erm.. For a while I enjoyed it… probably not so much now … even though I’ve been there for a while, it’s got samey samey… I enjoyed it at first but… whether I’ll change I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I’ll change I don’t know whether I’ll stay there or not but… it might change... I might start enjoying it again, you don’t know.
Eve: Yes. Do they provide any opportunities to sort of…do different…?
Christopher: Well, funnily enough, I’m just a contractor so I don’t actually work for Tate and Lyle themselves, but there’s always job offers, they’ve always got job offers to actually work for Tate and Lyle, so I could take one of those opportunities really.