Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ listed as ‘engine fitter/tobacconist’, suggesting that while he was employing his industrial skills and know-how in one of the factories or works nearby, he’d also seen a business opportunity to make him less dependent on manual labour. He was 55, after all, and more than likely he was tired of the industrial grind of engine fitting – the grease, the grime, the noise – and, conscious of his advancing years, recognised an opportunity to change his and his family’s life. His 15-year-old daughter Olive was, according to the census, the ‘assistant to the tobacconist’ – maybe he was trying to build a future for his family away from the constant grind of relentless daily toil ruled by the factory hooter? Selling tobacco was a respectable trade, there would always be a market for tobacco and cigarettes among the urban working class, and 4 Constance Street was just a few feet from the junction with Connaught Road, meaning it was close to the pub, the railway station and the entrance to the rubber works: all establishments packed with smokers.

      Farther up the street at No. 38 was George Robert Bullard, a 47-year-old from Suffolk employed at the docks by HM Customs and an army pensioner following a long military career. Having enlisted in the Essex Regiment at the age of 18 in 1880, George was posted to Cork in the far south of Ireland, where he met his wife Mary Ellen Kenny, and they were married in Cork the day before New Year’s Eve 1882. Within two years he was in the East Indies and then spent two years in Burma from 1885, followed by four years in India. George arrived in Silvertown at the turn of the twentieth century as drill sergeant for the Institute of Volunteers begun by Colonel Hugh Adams Silver in the 1860s. Mary is listed as a general stores shopkeeper while their son, who went by the unusual name of Ivy Osborne Edward, aged 20, was a general labourer at the Co-op. Ivy was Bengal born and shared his unusual name with his uncle. Ivy had sought to follow his father into the army in 1909, leaving his job as bath attendant at the Tate Institute a couple of hundred yards east of Silvertown (set up by Henry Tate as an alternative social venue to the pub for his employees) with glowing references. Unfortunately Ivy would last barely three months in the military, being discharged on discovery of the heart condition that would kill him at home in Constance Street in 1913 at the age of 24, while George would also lose his wife Mary at home to illness the same year. Another son, Albert, like Ivy born in Burma, had also enlisted in the army in 1909 and would die, buried in a dugout hit by a shell in France, at the end of June 1916.

      In many ways the Bullards exemplify Silvertown, and Constance Street in particular: their employment looks in both directions, towards the factories and the docks as well as establishing a business in Constance Street itself. They had arrived in Silvertown by a circuitous route with a family whose birthplaces ranged from Faisalabad to Warrington. The Bullards have a tantalising back story that spreads way beyond Silvertown’s watery confines of dock and river across the world, while the family, and George in particular, would know great tragedy and premature death. The Bullards’ was a very Silvertown story.

      All along the street are labourers, car men, dockers, gas fitters, instrument makers and their families. The wives seem generally to stay at home but the children, male and female, all seem to be at work by the time they are 14. Other than a couple of domestic servants, the young girls tend to do similar jobs to the boys: factory hands, messengers and packers.

      For most of the men the title is ‘general labourer’, the unskilled, the untrained, those with little more than the strength of their backs and the power in their arms to sell, whether it be ‘on the stones’ outside the dock gates looking for the call to work or making themselves useful in the factories, moving crates or stoking furnaces, exiting the factory gates or the dock gates every night sweaty, filthy and exhausted, maybe, if they’ve a few spare coins in their pockets, calling in at Cundy’s for a glass of beer on the way home.

      The Railway Hotel, for all its description by Dickens’s correspondent as a ‘grim’ place, was a fine, sturdy Victorian building. Standing on the corner of Constance Street and Connaught Road it was an imposing sight. The bar was L-shaped and the room was high-ceilinged, with flamboyant coving and plaster moulding on the ceiling. The first reference to the Railway Hotel is to be found in a local directory from 1855, with the landlord named as William Owston. This seems curious as both Silvertown Station and Constance Street were still nine years away.

      The Railway Hotel would come to be known by another name. Simeon Cundy, the son of a Nottinghamshire coal dealer, had taken over the pub with his wife Elizabeth around 1887. When there was a major strike at the rubber factory the following year the pub became the headquarters of the strike committee, with Eleanor Marx herself attending meetings in the function room upstairs. Mrs Cundy apparently even persuaded the brewery to make a donation to the strikers’ hardship fund.

      Whether the landlord and landlady’s support for the local working people was the reason is long forgotten now, but from those tumultuous days onward the pub was always known as Cundy’s. The Cundys seemed unlikely radicals: Simeon was from a well-off business family and his elder brother John ended up owning swathes of local properties and died a very rich man. Simeon’s name would remain over the door until his death in 1914 when his son, also Simeon, took over until the twenties, when it passed into Mrs Cundy’s family the Saddingtons. But Cundy’s it remained, right into the twenty-first century.

      In 1912 industrial unrest had returned to Cundy’s. The docks were out on strike and the dockers were on the lookout for strike-breakers, known as blacklegs. When Fred Clark walked into Cundy’s one August Saturday afternoon to buy four bottles of beer to take back to his colleagues at the Albert Dock, he was stopped on his way out by a striking docker named Billy Clark. Billy pulled one of the bottles from Fred’s pocket, stood between him and the door and said, ‘You’re blacklegging, aren’t you? Taking the bread from my mouth. Show me your card.’

      Fred, a foot shorter than Billy, swallowed nervously, fumbled in his inside pocket and pulled out his insurance card.

      ‘Not your buggering insurance card,’ spat Billy. ‘Show me your union card.’

      Fred stammered that he wasn’t a member of the union.

      ‘Well in that case,’ said Billy, ‘I want a pint of beer.’

      He stepped back to allow Fred to get to the bar and stood at his shoulder. Lizzy Cundy, who hadn’t heard the exchange, came over to serve him.

      ‘Yes, love, more bottles, is it?’

      ‘No, er, a pint of beer for this gentleman, please,’ said Fred, trying to sound as assured as he could. Billy leaned in behind him and spoke directly into his ear.

      ‘And one for my friend here,’ he said.

      ‘Can you make that two, please?’ called Fred.

      ‘And my other friend, over there,’ continued Billy in a low, menacing voice until Fred had ordered four pints. He paid the money and turned to go.

      ‘I haven’t finished with you yet,’ said Billy Clark through gritted teeth, then grabbed Fred by the shoulder and thrust him hard against the wall.

      ‘Put your hands in the air,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll bloody kill you!’

      Drinkers within earshot fell silent and turned to look as Billy Clark went through Fred’s pockets, pulling out coins and a pocket knife.

      ‘Sit down,’ he said to the petrified Fred, who did as he was told.

      Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own knife. He turned it over in his hand and ran his finger along the blade.

      ‘I’ve a good mind to kill you.’

      ‘Hi, you!’ called Lizzy. ‘We’ll have none of that in here! Leave that man alone!’

      Billy СКАЧАТЬ