Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly
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brother John ended up owning swathes of local properties and died a very rich man. Simeon’s name would remain over the door until his death in 1914 when his son, also Simeon, took over until the twenties, when it passed into Mrs Cundy’s family the Saddingtons. But Cundy’s it remained, right into the twenty-first century.
In 1912 industrial unrest had returned to Cundy’s. The docks were out on strike and the dockers were on the lookout for strike-breakers, known as blacklegs. When Fred Clark walked into Cundy’s one August Saturday afternoon to buy four bottles of beer to take back to his colleagues at the Albert Dock, he was stopped on his way out by a striking docker named Billy Clark. Billy pulled one of the bottles from Fred’s pocket, stood between him and the door and said, ‘You’re blacklegging, aren’t you? Taking the bread from my mouth. Show me your card.’
Fred, a foot shorter than Billy, swallowed nervously, fumbled in his inside pocket and pulled out his insurance card.
‘Not your buggering insurance card,’ spat Billy. ‘Show me your union card.’
Fred stammered that he wasn’t a member of the union.
‘Well in that case,’ said Billy, ‘I want a pint of beer.’
He stepped back to allow Fred to get to the bar and stood at his shoulder. Lizzy Cundy, who hadn’t heard the exchange, came over to serve him.
‘Yes, love, more bottles, is it?’
‘No, er, a pint of beer for this gentleman, please,’ said Fred, trying to sound as assured as he could. Billy leaned in behind him and spoke directly into his ear.
‘And one for my friend here,’ he said.
‘Can you make that two, please?’ called Fred.
‘And my other friend, over there,’ continued Billy in a low, menacing voice until Fred had ordered four pints. He paid the money and turned to go.
‘I haven’t finished with you yet,’ said Billy Clark through gritted teeth, then grabbed Fred by the shoulder and thrust him hard against the wall.
‘Put your hands in the air,’ he barked, ‘or I’ll bloody kill you!’
Drinkers within earshot fell silent and turned to look as Billy Clark went through Fred’s pockets, pulling out coins and a pocket knife.
‘Sit down,’ he said to the petrified Fred, who did as he was told.
Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out his own knife. He turned it over in his hand and ran his finger along the blade.
‘I’ve a good mind to kill you.’
‘Hi, you!’ called Lizzy. ‘We’ll have none of that in here! Leave that man alone!’
Billy swung round to face her.
‘But … he’s a blackleg!’
More men turned to face the confrontation and a few moved towards Billy Clark.
‘He … he’s not in the union,’ said Billy, suddenly uncertain, looking from face to face, appealing to the men to share his burning sense of injustice. Two men jumped forward and grabbed Billy’s arms. The knife dropped to the floor.
‘I couldn’t care less if he’s Blackbeard,’ called Lizzy from behind the bar. ‘You don’t pull out a knife in Cundy’s.’
The men bundled Billy out of the door. A couple of minutes later they returned and one of them handed Fred his knife and his money.
‘Thank you,’ said Fred, breathing hard. ‘I think you just saved my life.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said one of the men. ‘Now get out of Silvertown, you fucking blackleg.’
This, then, was Silvertown on the eve of the First World War, an island of the disparate, a hellish insular outpost of fiery furnaces, giant boiling vats, noxious fumes, belching chimneys, dirty smogs that made your eyes run and your nose sting, a metropolis of clanking, screeching machinery and a raw, quick-witted, downtrodden populace, raised on inequality and with little to show for their long hours of endless toil beyond a couple of dank rooms in a house where the air is always damp, fungus grows through the wallpaper and there are four children to a bed.
On the face of it this was a slum among slums, streets of houses with no roads, no pavements, no gas and little lighting. So damp was Silvertown as the buried marshes tried to rise to the surface again with, the thoroughfares a permanence of puddles, that some people wondered whether Silvertown folk at the turn of the twentieth century had webbed feet. It was almost as if the place had risen from the depths and could be drawn back down again, back among the drowned of centuries.
Yet magical, world-changing things happened in Silvertown, most of it achieved via the hands and broad backs of the dockers and labourers of the locality, the people who’d come from near and far to settle in that choking, muddy place by the river. These were proud people, strong people, people whose lifelong struggles had taught them to stick together, to look out for one another. Their collective experiences, whether in the shipyards of Scotland, the steelworks of South Wales, the flat farmlands of East Anglia or beyond, had taught them all that together they were strongest. Their accents might differ and their trades might differ, but the people of Silvertown were always united.
These were island people, people of the water – two of the main businesses on Constance Street in 1914 were even run by families called Marsh and Reed – bound together by their half-natural, half-artificial shoreline as much as their shared histories and experiences.
War was coming. Just as Silvertown and Constance Street had begun to find themselves, to assert an identity, a chain of events was underway that would challenge everything.
Oh, and the Greenwoods were on their way.
Nell Painter had always had a good, sensible head on her shoulders, even as a child. ‘Bright as a button, this one,’ her father would say as he sat her on his knee and rubbed the tip of her nose with his forefinger. ‘Reckon she’ll go far.’
Nell was his favourite; that was clear, and had been since the day she was born at home in Stratford, then a burgeoning railway town on the eastern outskirts of London around four miles north of Silvertown, in the freezing January of 1878. Billy Painter could rough and tumble a bit with his baby sons Christopher and William, but he doted on Nell. As soon as he came through the door at the end of the day he’d seek her out, lifting her from whatever she was doing and carrying her to the chair, the plaster dust getting up her nose and making her sneeze.
Her mother Harriet would scold him for not changing his clothes as soon as he came in, or at least not brushing himself down before he came through the door, but nothing would come between Billy Painter and his Nell.
‘Been thinking of you all day, gel,’ he’d say, brushing the curls away from her forehead. ‘Thinking, “I’ll make these walls as smooth as my Nellie’s cheek,” I was.’
In his eyes she could do no wrong.
‘Sometimes, Billy Painter, I think you love that girl more than you love me,’ Harriet would complain.
‘Sometimes, Aitch, I think I do,’ he’d smile.
Nell’s childhood was hard but happy, typical of the times. The relentless, steamroller progress of the industrial revolution showed no sign of abating and, with thousands being drawn to the cities in search of work, houses being built across the east end of London in unprecedented numbers, Billy was never short of plastering work. ‘Stratford’s the place to be,’ he’d say. ‘There’ll always be work around here. It’s the railway, see? The station brings people here, the depot gives them work. We’ll be all right here, Aitch.’ Billy was a good plasterer, reliable, skilled and well thought of, and sometimes had to turn work away as he was so busy.
Harriet