Jack Kerouac's London - 1957

Jack Kerouac, 1957 - by Jerry Yulsman

“Paris is a woman but London is an independent man puffing his pipe in a pub.” – Jack Kerouac.

Fifty years ago this month, early on the morning of October 21^st 1969, the writer Jack Kerouac passed away aged 47. A little over a decade before his death the publication of his second novel, On The Road (1957), based on the real-life events of a madcap road trip across America made with his close buddy, Neal Cassady, catapulted him to fame. The book, which was initially drafted on a single continuous teletype roll without margins or paragraph breaks in a three week Benzedrine fuelled marathon, notoriously defined a generation – the ‘Beat Generation.’

On the eve of his success in February 1957 he boarded a Yugoslavian ship, the Slovenia (probably the Jugolinija freighter, Slovenija, built in 1951), leaving Brooklyn on a twelve day crossing bound for Tangier in Morocco. He and a somewhat unfriendly Yugoslavian woman were the only passengers on board the freighter. While crossing the Atlantic the ship encountered a large storm which tossed the boat about quite a bit. Watching the towering wall-like waves descending on the ship from his porthole, Kerouac had to pad the length of his bunk with pillows in order to wedge himself in and prevent him from being thrown out of it. Once the storm abated he spent his time befriending the ship’s two cats. Eventually the ship sighted land. Kerouac at first thought the mountains he could see on the thin line of the horizon was Africa but later found out it was actually the coast of Spain. 

Slovenija, built 1951

In Tangier he stayed with his friend, the writer, William S. Burroughs. Burroughs was living in exile having accidentally shot his wife at a party in Mexico City in 1951, so the story goes, when playing a trick which went wrong. The couple’s party-piece was supposedly a William Tell-like game in which Burroughs wife, Joan, balanced a whisky glass upon her head and Burroughs, a gun enthusiast, would shoot it off. The couple were both drunk and high at the time of the incident, and their relationship was also somewhat strained. The exact details of how Joan’s death occurred are sketchy. Burroughs later skipped over the border to Mexico and so was convicted of manslaughter in absentia for killing Joan.

Tangier, Morocco, 1957 - by Allen Ginsberg (Getty Museum)

In Tangier Kerouac and Burroughs spent their time wandering around the town, the beach, and the surrounding hills, getting high or writing in their digs. There was also another ex-pat American writer, a long-established resident in Tangier, Paul Bowles – author of one of my most favourite novels, The Sheltering Sky (1947). Even though Kerouac stayed in Tangier for around a month his account of this trip doesn’t mention Bowles, who had little to do with Burroughs at that time – much to Burroughs chagrin. Bowles was very likely away travelling and so it seems unlikely that Kerouac met Bowles during his stay in Morocco. However, a few years later the luminaries of the so-called ‘Beat Generation’ en masse descended on Tangier – Bowles wasn’t overly impressed with the new American counter-culture trend, writing to his parents in 1961: “Everyday one sees more and more beards and filthy blue jeans, and the girls look like escapees from lunatic asylums, with white lipstick and black smeared around their eyes, and matted hair hanging around their shoulders. The leaders of the ‘movement’ have moved their headquarters here.” Here Bowles is referring to Burroughs, and the poets, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso – but Tangier wasn’t the Beats’ headquarters for long as all three moved on soon afterwards. Bowles did meet Kerouac some years later in New York, Jack giving him a signed copy of his novel, The Subterraneans.

Kerouac in Tangier, 1957 - by William S. Burroughs

Leaving Tangier by boat again, this time travelling fourth class – a decision Kerouac came to regret somewhat, as once on board he discovered the five dollars he’d saved on the fare meant he was not provided with either food or a bunk throughout the passage to the south coast of France. From Marseilles Kerouac planned to hitchhike his way north to Paris, but soon found this wasn’t going to be a viable way to travel as no one stopped to pick him up, so instead he took a series of buses and trains. Travelling through Provence to Arles and Avignon, the landscape evoking thoughts and reveries of famous artists, such as Van Gogh and Cezanne, as well as poets and writers, such as Rimbaud, Flaubert, Balzac, Genet and Celine. In Paris he wandered, similarly in awe of the city’s “Proustian showgoers” hailing cabs on the boulevards, passing through Saint-Germain-des-Prés – erstwhile haunt of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – spending his time getting footsore tramping around the endless galleries of the Louvre, again revelling in his descriptions of the paintings he saw there. “Fragonard, so delicate next to Van Dyck, and a big smoky Rubens (La Mort de Dido). – But the Rubens got better as I looked, the muscle tones in cream and pink, the rimshot luminous eyes, the dull purple velvet robe on the bed.” Haunting bookshops, and presumably the famous bouquinistes along the River Seine, near Notre Dame. Enchanted by the Sacré Coeur in Monmartre. He seems to have relished the charm of eating simple fare – coffee and pastries for breakfast; onion soup, fresh bread, pâté, and “thin stemmed glasses” of red wine for dinner. Everywhere he goes compulsively commenting on the beautiful women he sees. 

Sacré-Cœur, Montmartre, Paris, 1957 - By Inge Morath

From Paris he set off for London. He had just enough money in his pocket to see him across the English Channel, intending to pick up a royalty cheque from his London publisher when he arrived. “Swiftly we left the French shore and after a spate of blank water we began to see green carpets and meadows stopped abruptly as with a pencil line at chalk cliffs, and it was that sceptered isle, England, springtime in England.” – As with Paris, he was already in love with the idea of London before he reached it. Invoking pilgrim-like thoughts in anticipation of its mysterious, Dickensian atmosphere. Imagining himself exploring the city’s twisting streets and alleys in the thick ‘pea-souper’ London fog, like a character in a Sherlock Holmes story. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

 

Arriving by rail at Victoria Station he had an impromptu brush with the law, finding himself suddenly accosted by a group of London “Bobbies.” As he describes it this was probably because he was unshaved and “looked like a bum,” but also because he arrived in close proximity to a “Negro” fellow (Kerouac’s word) who seemed to be somewhat mentally unstable. His travelling companion, who he’d seen on the same boat from France but whom he didn’t actually know, had no passport or other travel documents and so was duly hauled off by the Police. It’s interesting to note that this was also the time of the arrival of the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – people from the dominions of the British Empire in the Caribbean who were officially invited to settle in the UK; many of whom similarly had no documentation, a fact which has recently caused significant controversy and injustice with the heavy-handed and overtly racist bureaucracy of the ‘hostile environment’ initiated by Theresa May’s Tory government, shamefully seeking to expel them and their descendants from the UK irrespective of their long and decent law abiding contributions to cosmopolitan British society over the last six decades. Kerouac defined the Beats as “sympathetic” – relating himself to all struggling peoples – the working class, the underprivileged, the down and outs – the vast underclass of society who are all simply trying to make their way in the world, free of the shackles and the burdens of conformity and prejudice. 

Victoria Station, London - 1956

Arriving at Victoria with scant money on him, Kerouac soon found himself in deepening hot water, with a British immigration officer questioning him closely. He only managed to convince the man that he really was a writer when scrabbling in his rucksack he managed to produce a magazine article about himself and the writer, Henry Miller. This sufficiently impressed the officer, who claimed the British authorities had also recently detained Miller too! – And so, with genuine relief, Kerouac suddenly found himself free to go. He set out on foot, tramping his way, via Buckingham Palace, to the Strand.

The Strand - Street of Ink, 1969 - by Ron Embleton

In my late teens and early twenties I read a lot of books by, and about, Jack Kerouac. I used to write a lot of poems when I was at Sixth Form College too. It was a creative time for my friends and me, a sort of Dead Poets Society. We mainly circulated our poems in a kind of handwritten samizdat, with a few getting published in the college’s weekly newsletter. A friend in my Classics class asked me one day if I liked Jack Kerouac. “Never heard of him, who he?” – I replied. The friend thrust a copy of Maggie Cassidy (1959) into my hands and said: “You need to read him.” The friend was right. I was instantly hooked. There was something about the lyrical oddity in the way Kerouac wrote which seemed to zap straight to the centre of my mind. I didn’t always understand all of the things that he was saying, but I liked the way he was saying it. His writing thrummed with an energy and intensity. The words seemed to rocket along at a pace which was both thrilling and intoxicating. I loved the way that whatever Kerouac was scribbling about (or pounding out on his typewriter) he always seemed to be on the move, and he had a band of close friends with whom he clearly forged deep and lasting almost spiritual connections – this seemed to click with me and how I perceived my own friends. 

Silent film footage of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg et al in New York, 1959

Kerouac’s books spoke about freedom, escape, creativity, exploration, openness, spirituality, hedonism, love, anguish, despair, poverty, the feeling of being trapped – but knowing that one day you’d exceed the horizon and excel into the limitless future. All things could happen and probably would, given time, inclination, personal drive, ambition, faith and belief. All the things that seem so vital and so appealing to a youthful adolescent with similar fledgling literary ambitions. All the things which characterise that first awakening, and the possibilities which seem so limitless and abundant at that time of life. Exploring who you are, who you might be, what you might do, and where you might go, both alone and in the company of your closest friends. Kerouac’s world, and more importantly his prose and his poetry, seemed to sing itself electric about all of these things, the most vitally important themes of life. Even though he was essentially of my grandparents’ generation, he was exploring and encapsulating a zeitgeist which remains eternal. He has distilled what it means to be young and alive to the world lived at large. The timelessness of the jazz age and the distinctly American lyrical-tone he used to describe it all only adds to the sense of 'cool' – at the time, making it all the more appealing to the staid boringness of my English suburban upbringing.

One of the things about his books, especially novels like On The Road, Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, or The Vanity of Duluoz, which was most appealing was the idea that you could just get into a beat-up old car and drive and drive and drive across the vast expanse of America, disappearing into a land of endless adventure. By comparison the UK seemed very small and hemmed in, hence why his books lent themselves so greatly to the imagination. But happily I remember reading his collection of travel sketches, Lonesome Traveler (1960), in the summer when I was transitioning between Sixth Form and University, when I first read his account of his “Big Trip to Europe” in 1957. This was the first thing he’d written which I felt I could actually relate to, because here he was in my city, walking the streets that I knew, exploring my world and describing it in words which I could really properly get to grips with. This was clearly the piece which would connect me most closely to him as a person and as a writer. And the line that was key for me was when he describes reaching Saint Paul’s Cathedral on that first walk from Victoria Station – “… where it got too Johnsonianly sad. – So I turned back, tired, and went into the King Lud pub for a sixpenny Welsh rarebit and a stout.”

Ludgate Hill, c.1890 (Science Museum, London)

 

The thought that I could go and find the very pub in which Kerouac had drunk a pint of stout was too exciting to believe. Guinness was one of my top tipples at the time and the idea that I could find this very same pub and sit there sipping a pint of the ‘Liffey Water,’ just as he had done, was thrilling. But this was in the days before the internet. In order to find the pub I’d have to go there and wander about in search of it. Which is exactly what I did. Wandering down Ludgate Hill seemed a good place to start, but every pub thereabouts seemed to have a name far removed from that of the eponymous King Lud. It was becoming rather baffling and so I eventually asked a passer-by, someone who looked like he might appreciate a good pub and so be somewhat knowledgeable upon the subject and perhaps the locale too. “Yes,” he said, “that name rings a bell. I think it’s down there, on the corner.” And then, just as he was about to turn and go on his way, he added: “I think it might have changed its name though.” 

The King Lud, Ludgate Circus, c.1900

My sketch of the King Lud (Hogshead), 3 March 1995

He was right. There was a pub there, but it was called The Hogshead at Ludgate. Pubs in the early 1990s were beginning to struggle financially. The Wetherspoons phenomenon meant that many breweries were merging and turning their pubs into branded chains. Each one identikit and in essence absolutely boring and characterless. Hogshead was no exception. I walked through the door to find a vast open interior with a long continuous bar running down the left-hand side of the room. It was a beer hall of the most modern sort, essentially designed to pack in as many people as possible for televised football matches. A vast, echoey space with sanded-down floorboards and distressed wood panelling, attempting to fool everyone that it was old when in all likelihood it had been genuinely old before its modern make-over. So many lovely old Victorian pubs have succumbed to this architectural-business-rationale-driven plague. It’s criminal. The King Lud it seemed was just such a victim. The old pub gone and rebuilt with just its façade preserved for posterity. Nevertheless, I bought myself a pint of Guinness and found a table at the very back of the pub, which was a bit cosier than the front. Taking a sip I wondered what it would have been like when Kerouac stopped here. Welsh rarebit sadly was very definitely no longer on the menu.

Looking up the King Lud on the 'interweb' today there still seem to be a lot of fond memories of this pub circulating. It apparently, very proudly trumpeted its claim to be the actual place of origin for Welsh rarebit – although many people very much doubt this fact. Lots of British pubs like to make grand claims such as this, and some more than others manage to stick fast in the local folklore forevermore. It seems probable that the King Lud was gutted and refurbished when the railway viaduct which ran very close behind the building was completely dismantled and removed – but essentially the façade is just as it was when the pub was built in the late 19^th century. The carved wooden faces of King Lud himself still looked down from the lintels above the doors. They must have seen Kerouac entering the pub, just as they'd watched over me.

Interestingly, Kerouac mentions that the ruins of “Hitler’s blitz” were still visible in the area surrounding Saint Paul’s. Contemporary photographs taken by Hans Richard Griebe capture perfectly the atmosphere Kerouac describes (see here). From the early 1990s up to the present day, the area has been significantly redeveloped – Kerouac and Griebe would hardly recognise it today. And the Hogshead, the former King Lud, itself – where, thereafter, I often used to drink during my undergraduate days – is very sadly no longer a pub at all today. The stout and the Welsh rarebit are now both long gone.

Another location Kerouac describes is the hotel where he stayed, near Leicester Square – “… I got a fifteen-bob room in the Mapleton Hotel (in the attic) and had a long divine sleep with the window open, in the morning the carillons blowing all of an hour round eleven and the maid bringing in a tray of toast, butter, marmalade, hot milk and a pot of coffee as I lay there amazed.” – This building still survives, and although no longer called the Mapleton a part of it at least is still a functioning hotel. Sadly the ground floor street-front, chock-full with little shops selling tourist souvenirs and bureau de changes, manages to obscure the old building entirely. A Pathé newsreel from 1951, showing the fire brigade rescuing a woman from the hotel's parapet, gives an idea as to what the hotel used to look like (see here) – but, as the newsreel footage has no commentary, it’s not clear how or why the woman came to be stuck out on the hotel’s roof and required rescuing. The incident clearly seems to have drawn a crowd of concerned onlookers. It’s certainly the busiest part of London town. A short walk away is Piccadilly Circus where walking back to the Mapleton one night, perhaps after savouring the illicit delights of nearby Soho (which he certainly knew thereof), Kerouac got talking to some Teddy Boys who jokingly asked him if, as a fellow American, he personally knew the famous jazz musician, Gerry Mulligan. Curiously Kerouac doesn't mention the fact that there was a very popular "all-nighter"  jazz club in the basement of the Mapleton Hotel, called 'Club Americana' (see here). Although, thinking about it, perhaps that's why he was still in bed at 11am when the maid brought in his breakfast of toast and marmalade!

Piccadilly Circus, c.1950s

Teddy Boys - London, 1955 (Associated Press)

Kerouac mentions looking up the French heraldic shield of his ancestral family name at the British Museum and finding the family motto which accompanied it suitably ‘Beat’ – “Love, work and suffer.” He doesn’t mention it, but I imagine his route from the Mapleton to the BM could very well have been a stroll up the Charing Cross Road, famous for London’s bookshops (sadly now much depleted) – where at the time another American writer was engaged in a wonderfully eccentric correspondence with a British bookseller. Helene Hanff’s letters to Frank Doel were published in 1970 as a book, 84 Charing Cross Road. Writing from New York to place orders for obscure books on English literature with the booksellers, Mark’s & Co., where Frank Doel worked, she and Doel struck up an unlikely long distance friendship which slowly grew over time with Hanff eventually sending him, his family, and his co-workers food parcels to supplement the wartime rationing which continued in Britain long after the end of the Second World War. Sadly she never got to meet Doel in person. He died in 1968. She did, however, make the trip to London just after 84 Charing Cross Road was published – just in time to see the empty shop, which had recently closed down. This trip is entertainingly described in Hanff’s book, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973). Reading Hanff and Kerouac as a native Brit, it is interesting to see London and the British from a distinctly American point of view – both writers seem to fixate with good-natured glee upon the British vernacular, parodying the British accent a la Dick Van Dyke in the Disney film, Mary Poppins.

The British Museum, c.1950s

The Old Vic, Waterloo

Before Kerouac left London he returned to Saint Paul’s and experienced a small epiphany whilst listening to the choir there singing Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion on Good Friday – “Holy Bach spoke to me and in front of me was a magnificent marble bas-relief showing Christ and three Roman soldiers listening: ‘And he spake unto them do violence to no man, nor accuse any falsely, and be content with thy wages.’” He also took in a play. “At the last moment I discovered the Old Vic while waiting for my boat train to Southampton. – The performance was Antony and Cleopatra. – It was a marvellously smooth and beautiful performance, Cleopatra’s words and sobbings more beautiful than music …” – From this we can likely infer that he left London from Waterloo Station rather than Victoria. The cast of Antony and Cleopatra at the Old Vic in 1957 starred Keith Michell, Margaret Whiting, and Derek Godfrey – the last of whom later starred in the same theatre as Oberon alongside Judi Dench and Frankie Howerd in a Midsummer Night’s Dream in the following season. Seeing Shakespeare performed on the stage in the Bard’s native land was for Kerouac the perfect end to his literary pilgrimage through France and England. Little did he know that it was also the prelude to his own elevation to the pantheon of literary greats. 

Saint Paul's Cathedral, 1954 - by Hans Richard Griebe

Shortly after he returned to the United States his second and most famous novel, On The Road, was published and a review written by Gilbert Millstein for the New York Times catapulted Kerouac into the public consciousness. His life was never the same again. As is true of other extremely sensitive artists – essentially introspective people inadvertently wrong-footed by the success of their own talents – fame was something which didn’t sit so well with Kerouac. After years spent drifting in various jobs, trying to make ends meet, scrapping together enough money to pay for the next trip and the next adventure, he was still deep-down inside a struggling writer. A man more accustomed to obscurity, longing for greatness and recognition. He was much more used to observing the world, but now that he’d finally made it and found that the world was watching him so acutely in its turn, things were suddenly sent wildly off kilter. Despite the successful subsequent publication of his prolific backlog of other writings thereafter, many of which had previously been rejected by various publishers, this intense literary spotlight precipitated a sad decade of decline. He passed away, a victim of his own despondency made manifest in frequent bouts of unrestrained alcoholism, a little over a decade after that “Big Trip to Europe” in which he had wandered so freely and so unknown through the streets of Tangier, Paris, and London. At heart, a true lonesome traveller, summing up the essence of his life: – “Railroad work, sea work, mysticism, mountain work, lasciviousness, solipsism, self-indulgence, bullfights, drugs, churches, art museums, streets of cities, a mishmash of life as lived by an independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.” – Amen.

 Jack Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show, 1959

Postscript: In 2012, the original teletype manuscript – “The Scroll” – the first draft of On The Road was put on display for a short time at the British Library in London (see here). I went to see it. It was a fascinating thing to behold, especially given the almost mythical status this document has accrued over time, making it a kind of mystical modern-day holy relic in its own right – if only Jack could have known on that day when he looked up his ancestral coat of arms in the British Museum Library that one day his inspired 'spontaneous prose' magnum opus would be displayed by the same institution in its new home just a few blocks up the street from the BM in Bloomsbury. I wonder what he would have thought of that? – Rather fittingly, for a writer who had been proud to work for a short time as a railroad brakeman in California (as he describes in another essay in Lonesome Traveler – “The Railroad Earth”), the present site of the British Library was a railway stockyard at the time he visited London.

A London 'Bobby' on Ludgate Hill, c.1950s

~

A newly revised version of the essay above was published in September 2023 as a limited edition 'chapbook' by Beat Scene Magazine, titled JACK KEROUAC: LONESOME TRAVELLER IN LONDON – 1957. For more information, please click here.

If you are interested in seeing what Kerouac’s 1957 walk through London looks like today (in January 2025), eminent psychogeographer, John Rogers, has posted his own video diary retracing the walk and telling of his similar fascination with this Kerouac-London connection: – which you can watch here. I highly recommend John’s YouTube channel, it’s one of my favourites with lots more to explore, particularly of London and its surrounding areas.

Family Trees - Retracing My East End Roots

Recently a couple of things have got me thinking about my family history. One of them is this remarkable photograph. It shows a German Luftwaffe Heinkel III bomber flying over London during the Blitz on 7^th September 1940. It’s a striking image, and particularly so for me for several reasons.

Firstly, my current home is located just beneath the right wing tip of the bomber. That small grey rectangular area located at 2 o’clock from the black cross on the wing is Limehouse Basin. If you look to the top right corner of Limehouse Basin you can see (and so trace) a diagonal line heading northeast, up to the top edge of the photo – this is a canal, called the Limehouse Cut (the oldest of London's canals, dug in 1769), which connects the Basin to the River Lea at Bow Creek (just beyond the edge of this photograph). Heading directly south from that far end of Limehouse Cut is a road called Teviot Street, where my grandmother (née Garard) on my father’s side of the family lived at No. 6, close to the church of Saint Michael and All Angels. Having pored long over old Ordnance Survey maps of this area I think I’m fairly sure I can make out where this is when I enlarge this grainy old black and white photo.

The second notable thing which strikes me when contemplating this image is that my grandmother is probably down there somewhere at that very moment, sitting in an air raid shelter (one such shelter still exists on Fawe Street, not too far from where my grandmother lived). The photograph was apparently taken at 18:48 German time which would be 17:48, an hour earlier by London clocks. My grandmother might well have been on her way home from work at that time. It was the first of two heavy bombing raids that day, the second coming after dark guided by the lights from the fires of the first which continued to rage below and could be seen over ten miles away. According to Ulrich Steinhilper, one of the German fighter pilots escorting the raid, that first wave consisted of some 1,000 aircraft, stacked at 2,000 feet intervals (see here). The first bombing raid lasted about an hour and a half, the second under the cover of darkness lasted much longer, over 8 hours. It must have been an awful experience.

RAF 149 Squadron briefing, c.1939-1941

The third notable thing that strikes me is the date the photo was taken – 7^th September 1940. It’s particularly poignant to me because my grandfather died exactly a year later on the night of 7^th September 1941. He was just 23 years old. A volunteer reserve air gunner in a Wellington bomber (X9705, OJ-J) with a mixed crew of British and Canadian airmen (149 Squadron; Fortis Nocte – Strong by Night), shot down during an Allied bombing raid on the German capital, Berlin. 197 aircraft went out on the raid and 15 were lost, my grandfather’s being one of those 15. He and my grandmother had only been married a few months. 

I had a brief, truly heart-stopping moment when I first found the photograph above (see here), because the crashed Wellington IA bomber it pictures, being watched over by a Nazi officer from the German Luftwaffe, has the same OJ-J markings as my grandfather’s; but it turns out this photo was taken in April 1940 in Denmark (see here). The crew (which didn’t include my grandfather) survived this particular crash, but the aircraft obviously didn’t, and so presumably OJ-J was later reassigned to a newly built Wellington IC, which my grandfather later crewed. Records from 1941 seem to indicate that all of my grandfather’s crew were killed in the crash itself, but their bodies must have been recovered from the wreckage as they each have individual graves which are still carefully tended in the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery near Kleve in Germany, not far from the Dutch border.

Stanley Chamberlain, my grandfather is seated on the far right

I’ve seen 149 Squadron, which operated out of RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, referred to as the ‘East India’ Squadron, which I assume is a reference to the East India Docks in London. Several members of my family, including my grandmother, have visited my grandfather’s grave. I’ve yet to visit myself, but I hope to do so one day. Strange to think that when I do I shall be more than twice his age when he died.

Poplar Dock

It’s often the case that by the time we are old enough to want to know more about our grandparent’s lives they are sadly no longer around to ask. I have so many questions I’d like to ask them, but it’s often the case when people are alive that living memories are just that – a part of everyday life. No one thinks much of it. Snippets get told here and there, some things are remembered, passed on, some inadvertently become altered and so two or more family members later recall the facts differently; endless debates and speculations ensue. If only they’d taken the time to write something down, even just a few dates, addresses and facts. 

Teviot Street (centre)

My sister recalls that when she was studying for her degree, living in a block of flats not far from Teviot Street in Bromley-by-Bow, our grandmother had told my sister how she remembered walking down the Mile End Road, stepping over the hose pipes being used to extinguish the fires after those awful bombing raids during the Blitz. And I remember my other set of grandparents on my mother’s side of the family surprising us all one day with a sudden recollection. They were visiting me in my old flat when I lived in Stoke Newington, when my grandmother turned to my grandfather and said: “Your family lived round the corner from here, didn’t they?” – This was news to all of us, I’d lived there for several years and we’d had no idea that our family had a connection to Stoke Newington before. My grandfather remembered the names of two streets nearby. Later I looked them up on some old maps and compared them to my modern A-Z. One had long since disappeared under a new housing estate, but the other still existed just the same. It was a strange feeling to walk down that road, looking at the old Victorian terrace houses, trying to picture my forebears living there near enough a century before.

John Keats

This unexpected recollection prompted my Mum to get my grandfather to draw his family tree, listing all the names and dates he could remember. She then later used this as the basis from which to track down more family records at the National Archives, managing to trace one family line back to 1670! – Curiously enough, that line could also connect us to the family of the poet, John Keats … something which I’m really keen to look further into at some point when I get the time.

Six generations back from mine we have a William Keates who married Sophia Jennings in 1803 at St. Clement Danes Church on the Strand, which I happen to walk past everyday on my way to work. John Keats parents were Thomas Keates and Frances Jennings, married in 1794. Looking at various biographies of the poet, it is clear that John Keats’ family tree has proved very difficult to definitively trace, but it does seem apparent that the association between the Keats and Jennings families was a long one, with possible connections going back several generations. The two names so closely connected in both our family trees, and around the same time, could of course simply be a pure coincidence; but, if so, I think it would perhaps be more amazing that they aren’t connected than finding that they are! – Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but it’s certainly an interesting research project for the future.

Another family connection to St. Clement Danes on the Strand is that it's the RAF Church. My brother visited the Church a few years ago and found our grandfather's name written in the book of remembrance for the old 'East India' 149 Squadron.

Bryant & May Match Factory (top centre), Morville Street (centre left), 1921.

I too have delved a little into the census records relating to my family, usually as a way of killing time at the National Archives whilst waiting for documents I’ve ordered as part of my PhD research to be delivered. In doing so I discovered that in 1911 my great grandparents (the Chamberlains) lived at 52 Morville Street in Bow, just a couple of streets away from the Registry Office where my wife and I got married. Curiously enough, just down the road from the Registry Office, which used to be known as Bromley Vestry Hall, there's a Charles Chamberlain listed on one of the First World War memorials inside Bow Church. My grandfather had an older brother called Charles, but the two can't be the same person as the birth dates recorded don't match. Our Charles would have been too young to have served in the First World War. There's a possibility though, I suppose, that we might still be related - maybe one day I'll find the records to work it all out one way or the other.*

Bromley Vestry Hall (on the left) & The Bow Bells Pub (centre).

All Saints Church, Poplar, c.1908.

My grandparents were married in 1941 at All Saints Church in Poplar, a short walk from Teviot Street. The crypt of the church was often used as an air raid shelter during the Blitz (see here). Towards the end of the War the church took a direct hit from a V2 rocket, hence the interior of the church today looks very different to how my grandparents would have known it.

Interior of All Saints Church, Poplar - looking towards the altar, 1941.

Interior of All Saints Church, Poplar - looking towards the organ, 1941.

Several years after the War ended my grandmother remarried and her second marriage took place at Bow Registry Office. It's amazing to think how – even though my immediate family had long since moved away from the area, and we’d long ago lost touch with all the different strands of the family descending from those great grandparents on the Chamberlain side – here we were, my wife and I, circling back through time to the same place, getting married in the same building as my grandmother. Family history unwittingly coming full circle. I'm sure my grandmother would have been pleased.

Bromley Vestry Hall, 1879.

Morville Street (upper middle-left), Bromley Vestry Hall (marked by red tab)

Sadly the streets where these two branches of my family lived – the Garards in Teviot Street, and the Chamberlains in Morville Street – have long since been bulldozed and built over anew. Our end of Teviot Street, as in the actual roadway itself, has entirely disappeared, but the church of Saint Michael and All Angels is still there – no longer a church, it’s since been converted into flats. But it is still possible to get a time-travelling glimpse inside this church and of the surrounding neighbourhood. A wonderful documentary, made in 1974, gives a window into the East End as my grandparents would probably have recognised it.

 Fly a Flag for Poplar (1974)

Fly a Flag for Poplar is billed as a “cinéma-vérité” style documentary, which a typically sneery reviewer writing about the film for Time Out rather drolly translates as “the cinema of boredom.” How anyone can watch this fly-on-the-wall look at the lives of a local community now and not see its historical value is beyond me. What a closed mind! – I think it’s fascinating. It made me feel rather proud, and certainly it helped me to feel a lot more closely connected to my East End roots. It’s mentioned in the film that the church of Saint Michael and All Angels was a focal meeting point for a grassroots, radical socialist movement that campaigned to improve the rights of the local working class and to fight the endemic poverty of this part of London (see here). I can’t help wondering how this history might have directly touched on the lives of my family living immediately next door to where it all happened on Teviot Street. It may all have been just hearsay by the time they lived there, but even still, as the film shows, it had a proud legacy that was long remembered locally. Surely they must have known about it, even if they weren't directly involved.

Teviot Street, 1916.

So much of our everyday lives and the locations where we live change and transform over time, often incrementally by immeasurably small degrees, such that we don’t realise things have altered or disappeared until long after they are gone. I don’t mean to mawkishly echo Rutger Hauer’s famous line in Bladerunner, about so many lives “lost in time, like tears in rain,” but it is rather melancholy to think how we, very ordinary folk, often know so little about the lives of our immediate forebears only a couple of generations before us, let alone those far farther back in time. Attempting to trace our ancestors through official records – census returns, birth, baptism, marriage, and death certificates – such documents only ever reveal a limited glimpse of their lives. It’s a great feeling to locate them, but in doing so it often prompts more questions; and these are often tantalisingly left hanging, unanswered. It can be hard sometimes to link things up coherently. It’s easy to make misconnections and only later realise we’ve been following a false trail.

When I first looked at the 1911 census I found several households named Chamberlain in the Poplar area, and very clearly they couldn’t all be related. I knew my great grandfather had worked for the Metropolitan Water Board (which coincidentally gave us another connection to Stoke Newington, as he ended his long career working on the reservoirs near Green Lanes). I’ve since found records of Chamberlains working on the canals around Bow and the River Lea a couple of generations earlier from 1809 to 1871. Some were even toll collectors at Limehouse Lock for a time (see here). Such affinities are tempting to speculate might well be connected, but until I find the records that definitively link births and marriages, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, nothing can be assumed.

Church of St. Michael & All Angels, with Teviot Street on the right, c.1909.

That’s why I think it is important that we should take more time to write something down about our own lives now, annotating the backs of photos, listing the places where we’ve made our homes, so that those who come after us can one day take a little walk down memory lane should they wish to. If (or when) we ever have kids of our own I think this is definitely something which I will do – it might not interest them so much, as they will be closer to it all through the present proximity of hearsay and reminiscence, but their kids – my grandkids, and the generations that follow – they might well find it a fascinating window into a world long gone which otherwise they might not even be able to begin to imagine for themselves. Maybe in several decades time my descendants might themselves go wandering the streets of Limehouse and Stoke Newington in search of places long since gone which were once so immediate and familiar to me, just as I have done in search of my grandparents and great grandparents. We’ve no idea what the future holds in store, but there’s no reason why we can’t try to preserve something of our pasts to pass on, as our history is the one thing that we truly have in common. Who we are and where we come from. It’s what connects us.

My grandparents, Stanley & Eleanor Chamberlain

One of the reasons so few old buildings remain standing in East London is the extent to which the bombing raids of the Blitz completely destroyed homes and businesses. The photo below is a close-up view of Saint Michael and All Angels Church taken from the air in 1946. If you scan across the wider image (see here) you’ll notice great swathes of housing which have been cleared away having been destroyed in the air raids, but if you zoom in on the houses still standing you’ll notice that many of the buildings which remain are derelict with their windows blown out. In truth they stand like empty islands lost amidst the wastes. Walking the streets today, looking at all the modern redevelopment in conjunction with examining old maps of the area from before the war, it’s hard not to be struck by two very stark facts: first, how densely packed the low-level Victorian housing tenements of the area were; and, secondly, how so many of these terraces succumbed to the intensity of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped by Nazi planes intent on destroying the nearby London Docks. Rebuilding efforts began in connection with the Festival of Britain in 1951 (see here), but it wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that the redevelopment and regeneration of the East End really got going. We hear a lot about that wartime spirit, especially the dogged pluck of those living in the East End taking the brunt of the Luftwaffe’s aggression, but this belies a very brutal reality which still reverberates even today. The Allies might have won the War, but the post-war recovery took a lot longer than most people usually credit.

Saint Michael & All Angels Church, on the corner of Saint Leonard's Road (left) & Teviot Street (right), 1946.

On the corner of Teviot Street and Saint Leonard's Road, in front of Saint Michael and All Angels Church, stands a memorial to commemorate local residents who served and fell in the First World War. On this memorial the name of Henry Bradley caught my eye. My grandmother's mother's maiden name was Bradley. So given the very close proximity of this memorial to where she used to live, I can't help wondering if there might be a family connection here?

WW1 Memorial, St. Leonard's Road, Poplar.

WW1 Memorial, St. Leonard's Road.

Looking up Henry Bradley's name on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission records I found that he is buried in Dunkirk. He was a Sapper in the Royal Engineers, and the son of Charles and Margaret Bradley of Limehouse - hence, I imagine, why he is also commemorated on the memorial in the churchyard at Saint Anne's Church, Limehouse. He was married to Annie R. Bradley, and they lived at 20 Mauve Street, which was just around the corner from the memorial (again, Mauve Street has since been lost to redevelopment). He died on 2nd September 1917, aged 24. His CWGC record notes he was involved with "inland water transport", so perhaps there might be another vocational connection close to my forebears? ... It's definitely a lead to pursue when I next get a chance to do some proper research into this branch of the family tree at the National Archives.

The Memorial was unveiled by the Duke of York on 4th December 1920.

The former Church of Saint Michael and All Angels, viewed from what was formerly Teviot Street, 2019.

* * *

First World War Memorial in the churchyard of St. Anne's, Limehouse.

Henry Bradley's name inscribed on the War Memorial in St. Anne's Churchyard, Limehouse.

When I went in search of Henry Bradley on the War Memorial in the churchyard of Saint Anne's Church, Limehouse, I made an unexpected discovery. Most of the old gravestones have been moved to the outer edges of the churchyard where they now stand stacked against the perimeter wall and iron railings. I decided to take a closer look at these simply to see if I might find any other Bradleys named.

Old gravestones stacked around the edge of Limehouse Churchyard.

I walked from the back of the church round to the front, scanning the much weathered inscriptions, the majority of which were completely effaced by the passage of time and the erosion of the elements. But in the northwest corner of the churchyard, close to the old Town Hall and the bus stop on Commercial Road, I came across one of the few gravestones still standing (possibly?) in situ. Like the rest it was heavily weathered but as I looked I began to make out the letters of a very familiar name - Chamberlain.

The gravestone of John & Mary Chamberlain & their grandchildren, Edward & Elizabeth.

The closer I looked the more confident I became as to what I was reading: the following names emerged - John Chamberlain, his wife Mary Chamberlain, and their grandson, Edward, who died aged just eleven weeks, and their granddaughter, Elizabeth, died aged ten.

The entrance to St. Anne's Churchyard from Church Row (now Newell Street).

I think it could well be likely that this is the gravestone of the first of what I assume is at least three generations of Chamberlains who worked variously as toll collectors and lock keepers on the River Lea and at Bow and Limehouse Locks from 1802 to at least 1871 (see here). The gravestone suggests 1809 as the year of John Chamberlain's death, which would match with the death of the first of two John Chamberlains to work on the locks (died 22nd June 1809). I'm guessing his son was Edward, who also married a Mary, and had a son, also named John, who similarly worked on the locks like his father. Edward was a long serving employee on the river and canal, appointed in 1825 he retired in 1867 and lived out his last years (until he died in 1869) at No. 16 Church Row (now Newell Street) just a short walk away, in the shadow of Saint Anne's Church tower.

Map showing Limehouse Cut, St. Anne's Church & Church Row, 1799.

Henry Chamberlain's History of London, 1770 - St. Anne's Church, Limehouse (top right).

 ~

Holy Trinity Mile End WW1 Memorial Tablet.

* Since writing the above, I have had some very kind correspondence with Andrew Sargent and Elaine Palmer, who have researched and written about the war memorials now in Bow Church. The tablet which commemorates Charles Chamberlain originally came from Holy Trinity Mile End, on Morgan Street, not too far from Morville Street. However, Saint Stephen's North Bow on Tredegar Street was just around the corner from Morville Street - so if my Chamberlain line is connected to any church nearby, it would most likely be Saint Stephen's. The CWGC record for Charles Chamberlain, commemorated at Holy Trinity, indicates he originally hailed from Lancashire, whereas my great grandfather appears to have been born in Gateshead, County Durham - so any possible connections between the two don't seem immediately apparent. Tracing genealogies can be inherently convoluted. One needs to put in a lot of time and concerted effort, but certainly the few facts I have been able to ascertain so far have really fired my interest to find out more and see what I can definitively trace – what I have found so far in old records, maps and photographs, as well as on foot, simply walking the traces of these lost streets, has definitely given me a deeper, personal connection to the place which, for the last fifteen years or so, I have come to think of as my home – a place where my roots are far deeper than I first realised.

Site of the former Limehouse Lock with the old lock workers cottages still standing.

 

Update: Since posting the article above I have had a chance to spend a bit of time sifting back through the public records relating to my family with quite a bit of success.

It turns out the Bradleys and the Garards were quite well established families in the Bromley/Poplar area, but my great-great grandfather on the Bradley side originally hails from Chatham, Kent.

The Hockleys also seem to be well established, living on the Isle of Dogs - although great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother respectively hail from Great Dunmow and Writtle, Essex.

Much to my surprise I've had the most success tracing back the Chamberlain line. As I mentioned above my great grandfather was born in Gateshead, Durham - but this has turned out to be a bit of a red herring, as most of his siblings were born in Eastbourne, Sussex. His father (my great-great grandfather) and elder brother, however, were born in the village of West Bergholt on the Essex/Suffolk border, not far from Colchester. And this, very happily, is where I hit a seam of genealogical gold in terms of records - it appears this is the place where my line of Chamberlains really have their roots. I've managed to establish that my great-great-great grandparents were married in the Church of St Mary the Virgin, West Bergholt. There are a great number records for births, marriages and deaths for numerous Chamberlains relating to this village going back to at least 1760, but there are also records of that family name going back to 1597! - Trying to link up all these records though looks set to be quite a challenge, if indeed they do all link up; consequently I think it will take quite a bit more time and effort!

But, that said, it has been a fantastically rewarding task simply to have made a start and found all these names of my various forbears, linking many of them to addresses and in some cases to buildings and churches still standing. Amazing to think that for all these years my family has known very little about the Chamberlains that preceded us, and now here we are potentially back as far as the 1500s! ... Any connection to the Limehouse lock keepers hasn't immediately leapt out of these records. My great grandfather may well have been the first of our Chamberlains to move to the East End when he married my great grandmother (Hockley) at Christ Church, Isle of Dogs. The lock keepers could perhaps be cousins or more distantly related, I suppose - but as I've observed before, there were a lot of Chamberlains in the East End at that time, many of whom clearly hail from other more distant parts of the country. So the chances we're not connected to them after all seem fairly high.

As for Sapper Henry Bradley, again no immediate link leapt out - except that our Bradleys are all living at addresses very close to Mauve Street at exactly the same time he was living there with his wife, Annie. So if there is a link it maybe a collateral one, perhaps going back a generation or two - but it's not something I can yet be confident about; more archival sleuthing is needed. But all of this will have to wait a while ... Such genealogical dabbling is really a fun diversion or a busman's holiday from the research I really should be doing, namely my PhD! - I'm sure I'll return to my roots again, but all in good time ...

Also on 'Waymarks'

'No Time For More Notes' - A Diary of the Great War 

"Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ In Water"

Wellington Bombers, 1942 - British Pathe News

Click on the images above to view their source.