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politics
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs Part 2, by Jane McChrystal.
Nellie Cressall on The Isle of Dogs
Part 2.
Jane McChrystal.
Link to Part 1.
At the end of part one of this article, we saw the arrival of Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs. The move took place in 1923, two years after her heroic stand during the Poplar Rates Rebellion, and signalled a new phase in her life as an activist, as well as radical changes in her domestic circumstances.
Fifteen Macquarie Way on The Chapel House Estate would become her home for the next fifty years. Previously, “home” had consisted of one cramped accommodation after another in the East End, made up of two rooms lacking both running water and sanitation. Although she declared herself content with these arrangements, Fifteen Macquarie Way must have transformed the lives of Nellie and her family.
They now had a whole two storey house to themselves. The upper floor provided separate sleeping quarters and a bathroom with a fixed bath in place and a gas supply to heat water for it. There would be no more boiling water on the range to fill a tin bath or visits to the municipal bathing facilities.
Downstairs, the back room with a coal-fired range would have formed the centre of family life and activity. The scullery attached was Nellie’s domain, where she did the weekly wash every Monday. While this was an exhausting task, which involved heating gallons of water in a contraption known as a “copper”, and then washing, rinsing and wringing everything by hand, the direct supply of running water to the house must have eased the labour entailed in keeping the family clean and presentable to some extent.
The second room at the front of the house was the place for knick-knacks, the good furniture, pictures, rugs and maybe even a piano, where Nellie, her family and friends could gather for sing-songs and celebrations.
A large back garden gave the children their own space to play in and Nellie somewhere to hang all that washing. In her previous dwellings, Nellie would have stepped straight out from her front door onto the pavement, whereas Fifteen Macquarie Way was divided from the road by a decent expanse of green guarded by a picket fence. Number Fifteen was the end of a terrace of four houses.
The Chapel House Estate was constructed between 1920-23 along garden city lines, with a layout designed by Harley Hackford, Poplar Council’s Engineer and Surveyor. Houses were arranged in small groups set out along curving roads to provide their new residents with a salubrious environment they could only have dreamt of in their tightly-packed, sooty terraces and tenements.
Each house was built of traditional material and ornamental details, such as the brickwork surrounding the first storey window frames based on the neo-Georgian town house, were applied by the architect, Sir Frank Barnes. This style was an unusual choice at a time when other architects tended to employ the model of the rural cottage in the design of garden cities like Welwyn and Letchworth.
This upturn in Nellie’s domestic circumstances coincided with her graduation from rates rebel to seasoned campaigner on behalf of the people of Poplar, a position rewarded with mayoralty of the borough in 1943.
In 1945 she was invited to take her place on the national stage as a member of the British Lord Chancellor’s Divorce Committee, set up to investigate the reasons for a dramatic increase in the nation’s divorce rate towards the end of the Second World War.
A contemporary news-cutting, headed “Motherly Advice” is illustrated with a picture of a police constable showing Nellie the way to a meeting in Westminster. The report that goes with it describes her as a “63 year- old housewife of Poplar, poor area of London’s East End, who brought up a family of seven on £1/2/6 (£1, 12 and a half pence)” and not only manages to erase her identity as a political activist but also get the size of her family wrong. Some things never change.
A speech she made at the Labour Party National Conference at Scarborough in 1951 was nominated by the finest made at the event by Aneurin Bevan. She took the opportunity to praise the radical improvement made to ordinary people’s standard of living since The First World War and deliver a gentle rebuke to younger couples who came and complained to her about the price of electricity and being housed in shared accommodation.
The Island History Trust holds photographs of Nellie attending local pageants, meeting her old friend Clement Attlee and going to Buckingham Palace to meet Queen Elizabeth with a local scout troupe. In 1959 she was made a Freeman of Poplar in honour of her long service to the borough. Naturally her appearance alters with age, but over the years her calm, watchful expression remains the same.
After the move to the Isle of Dogs Nellie’s family grew to eight children. George died in 1951 but she carried on with life as an activist well into her old age. She died in 1973 when she was 90 under the care of one of her many grandchildren.
She is commemorated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets by the street named after her “Nellie Cressall Way” in Bow.
Post script: Fifteen Macquarie Way today.
On a glorious morning in May I set off across the Westferry Road to track down Nellie Cressall’s former home on the Chapel House Estate. It’s still there and easily recognisable from photographs taken when she lived there. Macquarie Way’s houses were built to last. Designation as a Conservation Area has ensured the preservation of the layout of the streets and prevented developers from constructing anything which would alter the residents’ views from their homes.
Macquarie Way today is even greener than it was when Nellie and her family moved there. The trees on the street are enormous. Looking over fences and boundary walls you see gardens filled with shrubs, bushes and even more trees. Small brown birds are everywhere.
It’s quiet, but busy. Super-market vans are making home deliveries and tradesmen refurbishing houses inside and out. Women, who look as if they’re on their way to one of the Isle’s many Pilates classes, are out and about. A young male Goth, whose black garments are topped off with an embroidered, satin kimono, passes by.
But a lot has changed. Number fifteen’s front garden is rather unkempt with tall grass and plentiful weeds, though the house still looks in good nick. This kind of minor neglect is typical of those front gardens which have not been paved over to provide off-street parking, although in one property a resident seems to have been fly tipping on their own patch.
For many years after the construction of the estate the council would have insisted that residents keep the facades and fences completely uniform, right down to the colour of the front door. Once they started to buy their houses in the 1980’s, under Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme, variations were bound to start appearing on Macquarie Way.
Houses without drives are divided from the street by a variety of walls and fences. House with drives have undergone further modifications, such as the addition of a Georgian-style porch complete with pediment, which would not look out of place in Sunningdale.
But the most dramatic consequence of the Right to Buy scheme is revealed by an internet search of recent property sales in the area. Last year a house in Macquarie way was sold for £900,000. What on earth would Nellie have made of that?
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
You can see more about Nellie Cressall’s life and work at: islandhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/nellie-frances-cressall/ on Mick Lemmerman’s treasure trove of blog posts: Isle of Dogs Past Life Past Lives
There is more information about the history of the Chapel House Estate in Tower Hamlets’ guides to the management of its conservation areas at:
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“Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham”, by Jon Bloomfield. Review by Jane McChrystal.
“Our City: Migrants and the Making of Modern Birmingham” by Jon Bloomfield.
Published by Unbound, 2019, ISBN 9781783527169, 285pp. £18.99.
Review by Jane McChrystal.
Although Jon Bloomfield intended “Our City” for a general audience, I think some of our elected representatives could learn a lot from it. Unfortunately, “Our City” isn’t likely to appeal to the kind of populist politician who tapped into a nasty streak of racism in the British population to persuade 51.9% of them to vote for leaving Europe in the 2016 referendum. Nor will it attract the attention of anyone who is only prepared to discuss migration in strictly polarised terms. For everyone else, Bloomfield provides a balanced report on life today for Birmingham’s first- and second-generation migrants and their impact on the city they live in.
For those of us of a certain age, Birmingham will always be linked with Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech given at the Conservative Political Centre in 1968. His speech coincided with an upsurge in support for right wing extremism driven by the National Front, which lasted well into the 1970’s.
The city has been home to Bloomfield for more than forty years and he has worked in various departments of Birmingham City Council, where he also headed its European and International Division at one point, so he isn’t just a detached observer.
That said, “Our City” combines solid research with substantial statistical data, which is brought to life by the material he gathered from forty-six interviews with people, who talked to him about their experiences of life and work in the city.
The group he interviewed come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds. Twenty-five have their origins in Pakistan and India, while the rest have their roots in Africa, The West Indies, Europe and China. They talk with Bloomfield about employment, health care, education, city politics, racism, religion, relationships and social mobility. They are largely positive about life in Birmingham and the way they’ve been able to settle and adjust without losing their cultural identity. A number of interviewees show a real sense of pride in their ability to contribute and make a difference to the city they now call home.
“Our City” is enlivened by vignettes drawn from his time as a public servant and Bloomfield’s family background mirrors some of the experiences of the people he is writing about, which surely adds a further dimension to his understanding of their lives.
His grandparents fled from Poland to the East End of London in the wake of the Pogroms unleashed on Jewish people after the assassination of Czar Alexander III. He has followed the well-known migrant path to a better life, pushed along by parental aspiration and hard work during a period filled with opportunities for a sound education and prospects of gaining employment in a worthwhile job.
Bloomfield doesn’t avoid contentious issues and quickly dispatches the well-worn assertion that Eastern Europeans came here with the sole intention of signing on for benefits in Chapter 6 “Doing the Work that Nobody Else Wants to Do”. It was, in fact, Tony Blair’s endorsement of the individual’s right to opt out the European Work Time Directive in 1998, which brought them here, attracted by the chance to work unrestricted hours for wages, which compared favourably with what they could earn at home.
He is clear that the kind of “live and let live thinking” which turns a blind eye to “illiberal practices under the guise of cultural liberalism” (p.175) is at the heart of a number of the city’s problems. He doesn’t have much time for politicians who have consistently refused to address conflict between those who seek to impose their religious beliefs on others and those who operate within the secular tradition, on the grounds that any challenge to the faith of a particular ethnic group amounts to discrimination against the group itself, and believe they should just be left to get on with it.
This supine attitude is particularly problematic in a city where 21.8% of the population follows the Muslim faith and ignores the widespread influence of Imams, trained in Saudi Arabia, who are on a mission to spread Sharia law wherever they go in the world, backed by the bottomless wealth of the ruling Wahhabi Nationalists. It has also fostered the growth of monocultural interest groups within the city’s political system and the cronyism that goes with it.
In a climate where nuanced debate about migration has become almost impossible, Bloomfield acknowledges that is usually the worst-off who experience the sharp end of poorly regulated migration, with the strains it places on housing, education and other services, and is prepared to consider managing numbers of migrants to this country.
If you feel offended by this idea and disinclined to read “Our City”, I’d like to point you to the last chapter “Creating the Open City”, where he states:
“Twenty-first Century European cities are multi-ethnic and they will continue to be so. There is no going back to the 1950’s” (p.229).
He reminds the “they come over here and…” contingent that it was the British Government who actively encouraged migration from India, The West Indies and Ireland to fill staff shortages as the welfare state grew and grew after the Second World War.
Migrants have transformed Birmingham’s cultural landscape, especially the music and food scenes. At the same time, the people who arrived in search of a better life seem to have found it, as Bloomfield’s interviewees attest. They have also come to appreciate the availability of free education and health care together with the freedom of expression they enjoy in the city.
Despite a generally optimistic view of migration and Birmingham’s future, Bloomfield warns politicians, policy makers and all Brummies of the dangers of closing off the city to the outside world. When much of the city’s recent success has depended on investment by European companies, Brexit could have dire consequences for the most disenfranchised members of its migrant communities. A decline in the economy and increased unemployment would hit them hardest, and put the dream shared by generations of migrants everywhere even further out of their reach.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs Part 1, by Jane McChrystal.
Nellie Cressall on the Isle of Dogs
Part 1
In 1962 The Westinghouse Corporation made a documentary film exploring the state of the nation as Britain continued to register the aftershocks of war, adjusted to the loss of empire and witnessed the erosion of its status as a world-class industrial nation. Designed for the better understanding of American, Canadian and Australian audiences, the Brits hated it when it was broadcast here – perhaps we didn’t like the somewhat portentous tone – but today it looks like a pretty accurate portrait of what was going on. The makers of “Postscript to Empire Britain” also recorded the voice of one important figure in the history of East End activism, which would never have been heard again, if they had not captured it for us.
About six minutes in we catch sight of Mrs. Nellie Cressall as she enters Mr. Hart’s grocery shop at 114 Manchester Road, The Isle of Dogs. The voice-over describes her, incorrectly, as a former mayor of the Isle and she has been drafted in to exchange opposing views of its inhabitants with the grocer.
Mrs Cressall speaks clearly about the virtues of her close-knit, working class community, whereas Mr. Hart bemoans the people’s narrow perspective and unwillingness to adapt to the changing world beyond the Isle.
Mr Hart gazes steadily at the camera as he speaks, while Mrs. Cressall scans his face as she weighs up his words and carefully considers her responses. She has shrewd eyes. Nellie is the epitome of working- class pride and respectability in her smart two-piece costume and matching veiled hat, finished off with an elegant two-tone handbag.
Nellie appeared in “Postscript to Empire Britain” at the age of 78 when she had been living in Macquarie Way on the Isle of Dogs for nearly forty years. She did indeed hold the office of mayor, for the London Borough of Poplar on behalf of the Labour Party in 1943, but she was part of a much broader history of activism in the East End of London in the first decades of the Twentieth Century and played a significant role.
Her career as an activist began in 1906 when she joined the Independent Labour Party. In 1907 Clement Attlee, future Prime Minister, came knocking at the door of her home in Tomlin’s Terrace intent upon forging a link with the local Labour Party, and so began a friendship which was to last all their lives.
Through her work with George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party between 1932-35, she met Sylvia Pankhurst who had arrived in the East End in 1912 to support his unsuccessful campaign to enter Parliament on the Votes for Women ticket. In 1913 Nellie joined Sylvia’s newly established East London Federation of Suffragettes.
Nellie’s motivation was quite simple. She could not understand why mothers weren’t allowed make important decisions over their children’s lives, such as authorising vaccinations, which fell to the father; why women earned half as much as men for doing the same jobs. She wanted to right these wrongs.
Nellie took part in the amazing work ELFS carried out for the people of the East End during the First World War. As well as continuing to campaign for women’s suffrage throughout, they launched a programme to relieve the privations inflicted by war within days of its outbreak. They provided milk for hungry babies and free medical care for children from a network of distribution centres and clinics. Adults could get nourishing meals from the cost-price restaurants they set up. They ran a toy factory where women worked in decent conditions for fair pay and a nursery run along Montessori lines took care of their children while they worked. Unlike their fellow suffragettes of the mainstream Women’s Social and Political Union, ELFS were staunch pacifists who participated in the anti-war movement.
Perhaps her finest hour came with the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921. In 1919 Nellie and George Lansbury were elected to Poplar Council where Labour held majority of 39 out of 42 seats. Lansbury was outraged that the London County Council levied a precept on Poplar’s rate payers equal to that demanded from the inhabitants of Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, when Poplar’s residents could afford so little and were in such great need. He refused to pay and was imprisoned along with his fellow councillors: daughter-in-law Minnie, her close friend Nellie, Susan Lawrence, Julia Scurr and Jennie Mackay.
Nellie had five children at the time and was far advanced into another pregnancy with her son, Sam, when she went to jail. The prison authorities put her in the hospital wing, where she was locked in a room next to a woman who constantly cried out in distress and another who committed suicide. She was entirely forgotten for twenty-four hours. When reports of this shocking negligence reached the outside, they stirred up sympathy for the rebels and attracted odium to the London County Council and British government.
Nellie spent three weeks in gaol. She could have been released sooner but she refused to go, compelled by her sense of loyalty to the others, who were to remain inside for a total of six weeks. In the end, she only left prison at the insistence of Harry Gosling, leader of the LCC’s Labour Group.
No-one was more surprised than George Lansbury when Poplar Council prevailed, as he had initiated the rebellion with no expectation of success. Sadly, Minnie never recovered from the ordeal of incarceration. Her health was ruined by a bout of pneumonia while she was in prison and she died a year later, aged 32. A photo of the funeral shows Nellie at the front of the cortege which followed her friend to her grave in the Jewish Cemetery in East Ham. Nellie had the good fortune to go on and live a long life as an activist and become the matriarch of a vast extended family, which included eight children of her own.
Nellie herself was born as Nellie Frances Wilson in 1882 and shortly after, the Wilson family moved to Leyton. The next record of her in the 1901 census shows that she worked as an ironer in a Laundry in the years before marriage. Nellie married George Joseph Cressall in 1904 at St. Dunstan’s Church, Stepney.
Over the next decade they had five different addresses, where they lived in one cramped accommodation after another with their growing family. Such impermanence was a common feature of working-class life and we might look askance at how families coped with this degree of instability and wonder how on earth they managed, especially when their homes had no sanitation or running water. Nellie was more sanguine and recalled living contentedly in “two nice little rooms” during her years on the move. The final change of address in 1923 was to transform her domestic circumstances. You can read about it in part 2 of this article, together with an account of her later years as an activist.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
Postscript to Empire Britain is available free to view on the BFI website:
player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-postscript-to-empire-britain-in-transition-1962-online
You can see more about Nellie Cressall’s life and work at: islandhistory.wordpress.com/2017/10/11/nellie-frances-cressall/ on Mick Lemmerman’s treasure trove of blog posts: Isle of Dogs Past Life Past Lives
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East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth. By Jane McChrystal.
East End Suffragettes: the photographs of Norah Smyth
An Exhibition at the Four Corners Gallery, Roman Road
If you can get along to Bethnal Green in the next three weeks, I highly recommend a visit to this exhibition of photographs. They document a dramatic period in the history of the East London, when Sylvia Pankhurst moved in and set up the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1914 at 400 Old Ford Road, which also served as home to her and her companion, Norah. The exhibition follows on from the recreation of the Women’s Hall at 400 Old Ford Road staged over summer last year at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (londongrip.co.uk/2018/05/east-london-federation-of-suffragettes-event-at-tower-hamlets-local-history-library-and-archive/).
Norah’s photographs show the splendid work ELFS carried out for the people of the East End during the First World War – running Cost Price restaurants for people suffering from food shortages, milk distribution centres for hungry babies and clinics for children with no access to free health care. They even set up a toy factory to provide women with the opportunity to earn a fair wage in decent working conditions. There are processions, pageants and anti-war protests. We also see how the Russian Revolution spurred Sylvia and other members of ELFS on to a wider socialist programme after women over the age of thirty won the vote in 1918.
Her portrayals of East Enders have a warmth lacking in the images created by other photographers who came to the East End to capture a spectacle of poverty and deprivation for the appalled gaze of those who lived outside. Her subjects engage with her as one who lives among them, looking steadily at the camera, without embarrassment or any obvious desire to please.
Four Corners’ exhibition offers us the rare opportunity to view important moments in the history East London history, captured as they occurred, which can usually only be seen at the International Institute of Social History (/www.socialhistory.org/) in Holland, where they are stored.
Contemporaries reported that Norah was every bit as energetic and capable as Sylvia Pankhurst, and yet her contribution to women’s suffrage is very little known. Likewise, there is scant acknowledgment of her place in the history of English photography.
It’s hard to say why this should be, but it could be something to do with Norah’s self-effacing nature, evident in the omission of any credits for the many photographs she published in the Woman’s Dreadnought, ELFS’ official newspaper. Such reticence was not par for the course. Christina Broom, the far more famous photographer of the mainstream Women’s Social and Political Union, etched her name on every one of her photographic plates. Nor was her philanthropic contribution commemorated, unlike that of other benefactors such as William Booth and Richard Green, even though she spent the entire fortune she inherited from her father on the people of the East End.
So far, visitor numbers have exceeded the organisers’ expectations and comments in the visitors’ book are full praise for this skilfully curated assemblage of a unique collection. Originally it was intended for display until 9th February but fortunately for potential visitors it can now be seen for a further week.
Norah Smyth’s photographs are on display at Four Corners
121 Roman Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN
From 2nd November – 16th February 2019
Tues – Sat: 11.00-18.00 daily. Admission free. Closed Mondays.
www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/East-End-Suffragettes
There is a catalogue to accompany the exhibition written by Carla Mitchell and Helen Trompeteler, which reproduces many of the images displayed and has been an invaluable source of information for this article.
Jane McChrystal © 2019.
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Celebration of the East London Federation of Suffragettes
Announcing a Celebration of the East London Federation of Suffragettes in Mile End, 29th May – 20th October, 2018
As Londongrip’s readers are no doubt aware, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, the first step on the road to suffrage for women and the outcome of more than fifty years’ struggle, which would end with the Equal Franchise Act in 1928, when all women over the age of twenty one were given the vote.
The East End of London was a crucible for radical ideas and activism, including the women’s suffrage movement, fired in part by the deprivation and inequality experienced by so many of its inhabitants. 400 Old Ford Road in Bow served as the headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes and the home of its leader, Sylvia Pankhurst, from 1914-1924.
A celebration of their achievements will take place in Tower Hamlets from May onwards, including a recreation of the Women’s Hall, which was housed in Old Ford Road, together with an exhibition of the life and work of the ordinary women whose role in winning the vote has been obscured by history so far. The exhibition will be staged at the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive in Bancroft Road. Further details appear on the website of the East London Women’s Museum, as well as a complete programme of events* taking place elsewhere.
A large group of volunteers is needed to set up and run the exhibition. They will participate in all sorts of activities, from constructing the Women’s Hall to serving food from a pop-up kitchen. Other volunteers will be responsible for running a series of public events linking the problems endured by people of the East End in the early Twentieth Century, such as poor housing and food poverty, with the experiences of many who live in similar conditions today.
Descriptions of all the roles open to volunteers can be found on the website of the East London Women’s Museum*. Anyone who takes part will have a chance to shine a light on the unique contribution made by women of the East London Federation to the cause of women’s suffrage. The Federation was a dissident group which broke away from the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1914.
The WSPU believed firmly in the necessity to keep women of “quality” at the forefront of the struggle. They also suspended their campaign during the First World War to put their full weight behind the war effort. By contrast, the working class women of the East London Federation intensified their efforts to improve the lot of women, as part of a mission to bring social justice for all. Immensely practical, they worked to ensure that children were fed and cared for properly throughout the war and with notable entrepreneurial flair, even founded a cooperative toy factory to take advantage of the absence of German toys from the English market-place.
Jane McChrystal © 2018.
*eastendwomensmuseum.org/the-womens-hall
London Grip Poetry Review – Ian McMillan
August 26, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, politics, year 2019 • Tags: books, poetry, politics, Stuart Henson • 0 Comments
Stuart Henson wonders about the title but in other respects finds that the sharp-pointed humour in Ian McMillan’s new chapbook penetrates most of its targets. More →