Secrets of the Singer Girls (41 page)

Tragically, when war broke out, this phrase took on a whole new meaning.

Many of the women who worked in the then-thriving East End rag trade were suddenly no longer stitching exquisite dresses and delicate children’s wear bound for the
smartest stores ‘Up West’, but instead found themselves sewing army battle dress, surgical field bandages and, once the fighting began, repairing uniforms peppered with bullet
holes.

Much is made of the efforts of munitions workers during the war, but the work of machinists is often overlooked. It must have been hellish repairing uniforms and stitching bandages bound for the
battlefields, to say nothing of how it brought the horrors of war into sharp focus. After all, how could a mother not worry about her serving husband, son or brother, when it might well be his
uniform she was repairing? But for East End women who fell out of the cradle as machinists and for whom hard work was bred in the bone, they tackled the long hours and gruelling workload with great
aplomb and guts. Not that they had much choice even if they did object. The job was classed as ‘essential war work’, and upping and leaving in most cases simply wasn’t an
option.

So instead, they stayed seated behind their Singer sewing machines and they sang their hearts out while they sewed. Singing along to
Music While You Work
or
Workers’
Playtime
on a crackly wireless alleviated the boredom and kept up that all-important morale and work momentum.

‘Oh, the factory singalongs were just wonderful!’ recalled one lady. ‘One woman would start humming a tune, the worker next to her would pick it up, and it would travel down
the line, until the whole factory floor was belting it out at the top of their lungs. “Show Me the Way to Go Home” and “On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep” were favourites or,
if we were feeling sentimental, “Silver Wings in the Moonlight”.’

Some of the younger, more inventive of the women workers also found ways to amuse themselves. Slipping love letters and notes into the pockets of army uniforms or stitching them into the
bandages, out of sight of the ferociously strict foreladies who oversaw the running of the factories, was commonplace. A risqué but doubtless thrilling pastime! What serving soldier aching for news
from the Home Front wouldn’t have been delighted to find a note in his pocket saying, ‘If you’re in the mood, come to me and I’ll be in the nude’? It was an
imaginative response to the lack of young men on the streets of London, and typified the Cockney machinist, who had always been used to trading on her wits.

One has to admire the woman who worked out how to fuse her sewing machine by ‘holding the wheel and keeping her foot down on the treadle’, thus craftily earning herself an extra
ten-minute break, or the lady who proudly told me that she didn’t regard herself as a proper machinist until she had accidentally impaled her finger on the sewing machine needle three times!
Her descriptions of the forelady carefully turning the wheel until the needle was extracted from her thumbnail made me wince, and she said that after she had been deftly bandaged up she was told to
get on with her work.

These two women, like every other machinist I spoke with, calmly worked their way through the raids of the Blitz until the bombs got too close for comfort and they were forced to seek shelter.
The Luftwaffe weren’t going to stop their sewing machines from humming if they could help it!

Today, the East End is unrecognizable, but back then, the streets of Bethnal Green, Bow, Spitalfields, Stepney, Hackney, Aldgate and Whitechapel were teeming with garment factories, all crowded
with women working ‘in the rag’ and struggling to make ends meet through piece work. Many of the women I spoke to preferred piece work, where they were paid a set amount per item they
produced, as it gave them the chance to earn more money.

The blistering poverty of the 1930s and 1940s can never be underestimated. London’s East End was a compelling and mysterious world, a place of gritty hardship, aching hunger and staunch
loyalties, unimaginable to much of today’s pampered society.

The Boundary Estate, built in Bethnal Green, was the world’s first council housing. Strong moral codes of honour governed the cobbled streets and ruled the redoubtable women who lived
cheek by jowl in its terraces and tenements. The Welfare State hadn’t been dreamt up and the streets were filled with the poor and hungry. Children walked about with bare feet or wore shoes
patched up with cardboard. Strips of newspaper were used in place of toilet roll – or, as one woman told me, ‘Mum just dried my bum with a handful of flour’ – and many
ragged children queued for a free breakfast from the East End Mission. The staple diet of many was stale bread dunked in watery Oxo.

Mothers often bore the brunt of extreme poverty and many women in Bethnal Green held down three jobs, from charring (cleaning) to assembling matchboxes, working their fingers to the bone from
morning to night, and somehow managing, against the odds, to raise their children decently and put food in their tummies. It’s little wonder that so many of the machinists I interviewed were
fiercely loyal to their mothers. They had witnessed their mothers’ many sacrifices.

‘My father used to knock my mother about and clout her in front of us kiddies,’ one woman confided in me. ‘She was too scared to leave him. Where would she go? She went without
food so me and my brothers and sisters could eat, she worked so hard to keep the family together. I used to call her the Duchess.’

Despite the phenomenal work ethic and efforts of these mothers, two centuries of uncontrolled development and a large poor population led to chronic overcrowding and by 1931, a census recorded
that 18,156 dwellings were housing 27,978 people in Bethnal Green. Unemployment, low wages and overcrowding were the characteristics of a borough that was the backyard of the richest square mile in
Britain.

A 1936 pre-war report on the health of the Borough of Bethnal Green, which is now held at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, observed wryly: ‘There is a paradox that in a
borough noted as a centre of the boot, shoe and clothing trade, only a reported five per cent of children are well clothed and shod.’

This was a world I needed to attempt to understand in order to write about it with any degree of authenticity. So just how does a mother-of-two who has been lucky enough to lead a comfortable
life with all the trappings of modern convenience attempt to understand a world of teeming slums, and get beyond the nostalgic clichés?

I have written about the memorial to the Bethnal Green Tube disaster in the Author’s Note, but researching more about this tragedy really did open my eyes to the suffering of the people
who lived and worked in the East End during the war.

I went to see the steps that led down to the Underground at Bethnal Green and on a bright spring day, with streams of commuters descending them, it scarcely seemed credible that so many people
perished there in scenes of undiluted horror. But seventy-two years ago, as a war-wearied Britain fought the evils of Nazi Germany, tragedy unfolded on those steps.

Not a single German bomb was dropped in Bethnal Green that evening and scarcely a broken bone was reported, but in the time it took for the air-raid siren to sound, the narrow corridor was
converted into a charnel house as people piled helplessly one on top of the other. After the searchlights went on, an anti-aircraft battery in nearby Victoria Park launched a salvo of new rockets
and, fearing that Hitler had unleashed a new kind of warfare, the crowd surged forward. A mother carrying a baby tripped on the stairs and, like a pack of cards, the shelterers fell one-by-one.

The scenes were unimaginable on that damp, blacked-out and bleak March night in 1943. Faces bulged in terror, slowly turning lilac as the air was forced from their lungs; protective arms thrown
around loved ones squeezed the life out of them. The descriptions I’ve included within the book are harrowing, but they happened.

Reporters tried to bribe children who had witnessed the spine-chilling event to describe what had happened.

For a wartime government obsessed with propaganda and keeping up morale, news of this leaking out would have been disastrous. So instead, the shattered survivors put up, shut up and said
nothing, condemned to carry their silent torment with them to their graves. No counselling, no acknowledgement of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or compensation that today’s
society demands. Their suffering was sealed off like the countless bombsites that peppered the neighbourhood.

It was whilst I was reading through a copy of the memorial service held each year in honour of the victims that I felt compelled to find out more, for there in black and white was a sobering
reminder of precisely how privileged my life truly is. I share a name with one of the victims. Kate Thompson was just one of the women who suffocated to death on those dank, dark steps. It’s
hard to put into words the emotions of seeing your namesake in a grim roll call of death, but it set me thinking and leant a deep poignancy to my research.

Just who was the other Kate Thompson and what led her to flee to the so-called sanctuary of the Underground that fateful evening? Did we share more than just a name? From that moment, I knew
that whatever it took, I would write this book so that Kate, and all the other people who died that night, would have a voice.

Apparently, Kate was down the Black Horse pub in her favourite fur-collared coat when the sirens went off that fateful night. She was also a sixty-three-year-old mother of nine, living in one of
Bethnal Green’s roughest areas when she perished in the disaster. It would have been easy to dismiss Kate as just another victim who’d been battling for survival in the narrow cobbled
streets, but to do so would be foolish, because a closer examination into her life revealed some surprising facts.

Consulting a genealogist, whose job it is to trace back through historical records and piece together family history, provided me with a far more illuminating picture of her life than
hearsay.

Kate Hammersley was born in September 1880 in Poplar, East London – the setting for the popular BBC drama
Call the Midwife
– the impoverished daughter of a cabinet-carver
father. At the age of eighteen, in July 1898, she married a cooper or barrel-maker by the name of William Thompson and moved to Bethnal Green, where she bore him seven sons and two daughters. They
resided at Quinn Square in Russia Lane for most of their married life. Pre-war, Bethnal Green housed some of the worst slums in London and of them, one of the most notorious was Quinn Square, a
place where locals say you never went after dark and policemen only dared visit in pairs.

Booth’s Poverty Map notebooks, written in 1897, singled out the six-storey buildings containing 246 flats as ‘very rough, very poor, very noisy’. Writing in 1928, the
East
End Star
newsletter was less charitable, describing the dwellings as ‘one of the worst of the human rabbit-warrens in East London, these wretched flats house hundreds of men, women and
children under conditions scarcely fit for cattle’.

Some of the flats contained illegal gambling dens and when the police were about, quick-witted residents would whistle off the balconies. ‘There was a lot of whistling in them days,’
one former resident laughingly told me.

The dark tenement block was built around a central square and the mostly two-roomed flats housed large families. One woman I interviewed recalls a mother of twenty-five children looking after
them in just two rooms, making Kate’s nine children seem a fairly modest family.

None of the flats had their own water taps or toilets, and tenants shared facilities on the landing between four families. Washhouse facilities were housed on the roof and the women of the
square had to drag their laundry up six flights of stairs or down to the local bag wash. According to one local resident, the stench from the toilets was unholy. Perhaps that’s why Russia
Lane had its own bathing centre, known as a Personal Cleansing Station, though I’m sure it was referred to by other names. In 1936, records show that 3,831 children attended for infestations
of bugs, mites and nits and a further 1,287 were treated for scabies, or as it was otherwise referred to, The Itch. So far, so depressing.

By August 1938, Kate Thompson and many others lived in a squalid, dilapidated hell-hole. Quinn Square was in a serious state of disrepair. Residents reported broken steps, broken handrails on
the stairs, lavatory doors with no locks and broken facilities in the washhouse. Inside fared no better, with falling ceilings, damp walls, peeling wallpaper and no cupboards to put food in. Not
only that, but the landlords were having a merry time at the tenants’ expense, charging exorbitant rents for such miserly facilities. How did the fiercely house-proud and feisty East End
women put up with this? The answer is, they didn’t.

According to the electoral register, Kate was registered to vote from as early as 1923: highly surprising for those times. Women had only been given the vote five years earlier, in 1918, and
even then, it was only for women over thirty whose husbands were householders. Perhaps it was this interest in politics that led Kate to insist on her right to a decent standard of living. Far from
being a passive victim, Kate and the other residents of the square issued a call to arms and got ready to show the landlords exactly what they were made of. The facilities may have been poor, but
the community spirit was strong. All the residents promptly formed a Tenants Association and, supported by a local Member of Parliament and members of the Council, the tenants of the 246 dwellings
flatly refused to pay their rents until the rapacious landlords reduced them to more reasonable amounts. They also demanded that necessary repairs to the property be carried out. Their argument was
simple: Why pay high rents for broken facilities? Why should they be forced to take their washing elsewhere at added expense? This was in the depression of the 1930s, after all, at a time of
widespread hardship and great unemployment. The added battle must have felt like a kick in the teeth.