JEWISH
EAST END OF LONDON PHOTO GALLERY & COMMENTARY
London's East End Synagogues, cemeteries and more......
My personal journey through the Jewish East End of London
Harold Pollins has sent me the following article
about his family:
The Polonskys of Pelham Street
Harold's paternal family - a posed 1888/89 studio
photograph
My pocket diary includes, on each day, a historical
item. Among the examples are these, chosen at random. There is
nothing unexpected in the one for March 15, the ides of March -
‘Julius
Caesar murdered 44 BC’
- but that for the next day is a piece of new, if trivial,
information for me:
‘American
physicist Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid fuelled rocket
1926’.
Surprisingly, August 4th, the day Britain entered the Great War in
1914, only refers to the fact that
‘Dom
Perignon invents champagne 1693’.
And September 3rd, the day Britain declared war on Germany in 1939,
records : ‘Malcolm
Campbell set land speed record 301.13mph 1935’.
I was idly looking at such entries when one pulled me
up. It was for 6th August and commemorated the fact that
’Jack
the Ripper’s
first victim stabbed to death 1888’.
I was fairly familiar with the Jack the Ripper story although I
haven’t
bothered to look into the question of the identity of the murderer.
What interested me was that the date was just a few weeks after my
father was born, in the same general district as the murders. He was
born in June in Pelham Street, off Brick Lane, the first in my
paternal family to be born in Britain. His parents were Hyman and
Golda Polonsky and they had very recently arrived from Slonim, in
the Gubernia of Grodno, in what is now Belarus. They came with two
daughters, Annie, born about 1883 and Julia, born about 1886. When
exactly they arrived is unknown, although there is a family rumour
that Golda was pregnant with my father on the journey. Clearly they
arrived sometime between the births of Julia in about 1886 and my
father in 1888, probably in 1887.
They obviously knew very little if any English so my
father’s
birth was registered, not as Pizer [sc Pesach] Polonsky but as
Palousky, and his mother’s
maiden name was written as Brokyer rather than Brooker. There is
another story that when the two daughters enrolled at school, all
were confused, and instead of Polonsky being put forward as their
surname, somehow it was written down as Hyman, the forename of their
father, thus as Annie and Julie Hyman. Nevertheless the two girls
became anglicised very quickly. I remember aunt Annie as being
somewhat posh, and distant, although she married, irregularly, her
uncle. Aunt Julia had as I recall, a standard London working-class
accent.
I can only imagine how the parents felt, having
arrived in a land of freedom, to have settled in an area where some
madman was going around killing prostitutes, in a most monstrous
way. The area was certainly insalubrious. The family lived in Pelham
Street for about ten years before moving round the corner to
Vallance Road. My father used to tell me that they had lived in a
house whose windows in the top storey were very wide, to allow light
in for the silk-weavers, for this was Spitalfields which had housed
large numbers of such workers. I was surprised when he told me this
because I thought that by that time, in the late 19th century,
hand-loom silk-weaving had died out. Yet the 1891 Census, listed two
women silk-weavers, a mother and her daughter, living in what must
have been the 3rd, top, storey of the family house.
As it happens there was a contemporary report on
certain immigrant Jews living in Pelham Street. It was contained in
the journal The Lancet, the doctors’
publication. It appeared on 3 May 1884, and was entitled,
‘Report
of the Special Sanitary Commission on the Polish Colony of Jew
Tailors’.
It reported that
‘Tailoring
of the poorest description will be seen more especially in
Pelham-street, Spitalfields. This is a peculiar and miserable
thoroughfare, nearly every one of the small low-class houses, on
either side of the street, contains one or two workrooms. At all
hours of the day and night the street resounds with the rattle and
whirr of the innumerable sewing machines, the windows shine with the
flare of gas, but the street is comparatively deserted. There are
but one or two Christians in the whole of the street, and these are
at least as poor and miserable as their Jew neighbours’.
The title of the report indicates its main focus; it
was concerned primarily with living conditions - the state of
houses, and sanitation in general - and especially of the tailors
and their families. In general the description of overcrowding, and
of general dirt was similar to many such accounts of the
newly-arrived East European Jews in the late 19th century. Yet I
have a photograph of the Polonsky family, showing my grandparents,
two girls (my aunts Annie and Julia) and a baby who must have been
my father. It was therefore taken in 1888 or early 1889. They are
all well dressed and their appearance does not chime well with the
descriptions in the report. But then, my grandfather was not a
tailor, but a cabinet-maker. I wondered who else was living in the
street, apart from tailors.
The Census of 1881 was the nearest such document to
the Lancet report. Although
the early 1880s saw an increased Jewish immigration from Russia, I
doubt if things changed dramatically in Pelham Street between 1881
and 1884. At the 1881 Census there 40 dwellings in the street and
the total number of residents was 514. Of these as many as 123 were
non-Jews, rather more than the 'one or two'. in the report. 391 were
Jews and it was true that the main occupation was tailoring. There
were 108 tailors and tailoresses but if one listed all those in the
needle trades, including the making of headwear, in the fur trades,
dressmakers and others, there was a total of 129. Now, as many as
173 Jews were in some form of employment, so that 44 were in other
trades. The street contained 11 Jewish cabinet-makers and 12 in the
boot and shoe industry. Others were in a variety of occupations -
two tin workers, three glaziers (a well-known Jewish immigrant
occupation), a cigar maker, a stick dresser, a rag dealer, a
hairdresser, and - surprisingly - a domestic servant. There was a
'shopkeeper', trade unspecified, a master cabinet maker, and a
grocer. There were also 4 teachers - a pupil teacher (probably at
the nearby Jews' Free School) - a schoolmaster, a teacher of Hebrew,
and a teacher of English. One can associate with them in that
category a Foreign Letter Writer.
These statistics do not say anything their conditions
of life or the reported filth in the neighbourhood. But as well as
the handful of people of a slightly higher social status one comes
across the odd surprise. Next door to Joseph Gluckstein, a rag
dealer, lived Lewis Levy, a 35-year old tailor, with his wife Leah,
a tailoress, and five children - the oldest, also called Leah, was a
button-hole maker - the other four children being aged between one
year and 13. The household was completed by a lodger, a 'machiner'
(the male equivalent of a machinist) and also an Irishwoman, aged
49, with the unusual first name of Allen (presumably a mishearing of
Ellen) - and this is the odd part - she was a live-in domestic
servant. Even allowing for the fact that domestic servants were paid
little, the existence of one in the midst of this slum gives reason
to pause.
As I said, my family arrived later in the decade of
the 1880s, and the first Census in which they appeared was that of
1891. Had things changed by then, in view of continuing Jewish
immigration? At 34 Pelham Street, where my family lived, there were
three separate households, two of them composed of Jewish
immigrants. The Simons family had a grocer's shop, the widowed
mother having a son and daughter, and the household also contained a
nephew who was a tailor's machinist, and two female boarders - one
who made button holes in shirts, the other being a capmaker. Then
there was my family of six: by this time another son had been born.
Grandfather was an employed cabinet maker and there were two other
employed cabinet makers as boarders. And, as mentioned earlier,
there were two London-born, non-Jewish women silk weavers.
There were now 508 inhabitants of Pelham Street of
whom 440, a slightly higher proportion than in 1881, were Jews but
there remained 68 non-Jews; they had not moved out because of the
Jewish influx. 188 Jews were in employment of which the largest
group was in the needle trades, amounting to 107 - a smaller
proportion than in 1881, 27 were in boot-making, and 22 in
cabinet-making. The remaining 32 were in a variety of occupations;
as well as the 'traditional' ones of hawker, baker, cigarette maker,
there were new ones: blacksmith, diamond polisher, gas fitter,
marble mason, hairdresser, printer and shop assistants. There also a
washerwoman and a domestic servant. Higher status jobs included 2
master tailors, 2 grocers, and 4 teachers.
I suppose the general statistics might mean that
during the 1880s Pelham Street marginally went up in the world but
it would be wrong for the Polonsky family to claim the
responsibility for that.
