The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor the History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – Youtube

The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor The History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – YouTube Slide 1 – George Duckworth was no stranger to the poverty of Victorian east London. Although educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had, in 1892, began working with the philanthropist and social reformer, Charles Booth, investigating the living and working conditions of inner London. As he walked round the streets of Spitalfields with Sergeant French of Whitechapel Police, in March 1898, Duckworth found plenty of destitution to record in his notebook. Slide 2 – At the Roman Catholic Convent of Mercy and Providence Night Refuge, on the corner of Artillery Lane and Bell Lane, where now there is student accommodation and several small businesses, he saw thirty men and two women, ‘a set of scoundrels’ according to Sergeant French, queuing at separate entrances for a bed for the night. It was only 1 PM and the doors would not be open for another three hours. Bell Lane was one of the most overcrowded areas in all London. On average, 800 people were crammed into each acre here, compared to about fifty people per acre in London as a whole. Slide 3 – Duckworth noted that Dorset Street, just around the corner, was filled with thieves, prostitutes and dirty, unkempt residents; it was, he thought, the worst street he had seen so far in his perambulation of London. Little Paternoster Row was hardly any better: here, in a street with broken windows, he found ragged women and children wearing toeless boots. Duckworth believed that for vice, it would have been hard to find worse streets anywhere in London and that, on the whole, the people who lived in this area were vicious, semi- criminals. Slide 4 – Booth and his researchers were also interested in the religious character of the areas they investigated. According to Duckworth, everyone in Tenter Street was Jewish, and Wentworth Street, packed with the stalls of Petticoat Lane Market, the home of the schmutter trade, was, in his words, ‘more like a foreign market scene than anything English’. One year after Duckworth’s report, George Arkell, another of Booth’s researchers, drew up a map of Jewish east London. Slide 5 – The majority of inhabitants in any street coloured blue on the map were Jewish; in those streets coloured dark blue, it was estimated that between 95 and 100 per cent of the residents were Jews. As we can clearly see here, Spitalfields and Whitechapel were the heart of Jewish East London. In 1850, London’s Jewish population had been small, perhaps just twenty to twenty-five thousand people, and predominantly wealthy. By 1900, the number of Jews living in London had more than doubled as Russian and Polish Jews fled pogroms in eastern Europe. These refugees were, on the whole, poor and therefore they settled in the East End of London where housing was cheap and where work in sweatshops was easy to find. By 1901, there were over 42,000 Russians and Poles living in Stepney. This population would have made it the sixth biggest town in Poland and by far the majority of them were Jewish. The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor The History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – YouTube Slide 6 – As well as housing and employment, this was a community that needed shared, public facilities too. Shown by the yellow arrow in this map, was Sandy’s Row Synagogue; now the oldest surviving Ashkenazi synagogue in London. At the time, it had one of the largest congregations in the East End and it was just one of at least thirty-five synagogues serving the religious and social needs of the local Jewish community. On Bell Lane itself, shown by the green arrow, was the Jewish Free School. This had been founded in 1732 and had moved to the East End in 1822. As the Jewish population of East London increased, so did the school roll, until at one time it had as many as 4000 pupils making it the largest school anywhere in the world. It was not the only local school for Jewish children. At least sixteen schools in east London observed Jewish holidays and had Jewish instruction. At the top of Middlesex Street, shown here by the red arrow, was the home of the Jewish Board of Guardians, a charity which dispensed relief to, and supported the health and education needs of, poor Jews. Slide 7 – The board assessed all those who applied for relief. All applicants would be interviewed and visited by members of the board. This led some critics to complain that the Board was unsympathetic or discriminatory, but these sorts of complaints have ever been levelled at every system of welfare or poor relief. The Board had to show its benefactors that it was managing their donations responsibly and that help was given to those most in need. The board came to manage the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor which had been founded in January 1854. The kitchen was open from Monday to Thursday throughout the winter months. Those who wished to use the kitchen would apply to the Board of Guardians and, if their application was approved, they would be given a ticket which they would present at the kitchen. There, they would be given bread, kosher margarine, soups and stews. Slide 8 – Originally located elsewhere in Spitalfields, in December 1902, the Soup Kitchen moved to new premises in Butler Street, which in 1937 was renamed Brune Street, shown here by the orange arrow. Slide 9 – The new brick and terracotta building was designed by Lewis Solomon. It housed a shop on the left and the soup kitchen on the right. Still clearly visible on the cornice is the inscription ‘Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor’, with the year of its opening given according to both the Jewish and Christian calendars. Also still in evidence are the engravings marking the entrance, on the right of the soup kitchen, and the exit on the left. Slide 10 – Although, in a silent film which was shot in 1934, those using the kitchen queue up to enter through the door marked Way Out. Buildings are often never used quite in the way they were designed. Gentiles who could not use the kitchen would sometimes gather outside and ask those leaving for bread. The kitchen was in great demand. In its first six years, it distributed over 650 tons of bread and over 162 tons of meat were used to prepare The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor The History of London, Dr Ian Stone – Website – Blog – YouTube soups. In the winter of 1907-8, it provided food to an estimated 8000 people; by 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the numbers using the kitchen had risen to 4000 each night. The video, shot two years later, shows just how busy the kitchen would be inside, as people squashed up next to each other on packed benches. Slide 11 – The opening of the kitchen each December became something of an event in itself. In 1908, John Charles Bell, the Lord Mayor of London, formally opened the kitchen in the presence of at least three members of Parliament. Donors and subscribers, mostly wealthy Jews, would often be invited along to opening nights each year too. With the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War, however, charitable provision such as this was increasingly understood to be the responsibility of the state. Slide 12 – At the same time, as living standards rose, demand for the kitchen’s services fell, but even well into the 1950s the kitchen would still feed thousands of people over the course of the winter. But with each year that passed after the War, more and more of east London’s Jews moved out of the area. With the decline in population, there was less need for the community’s institutions. Destroyed by enemy action during the War, the Jewish Free School re-opened in Camden in 1958. One by one the synagogues closed or relocated. Sandy’s Row is the last remaining synagogue in Spitalfields and one of only a handful in the East End. In the 1990s, even its future seemed in doubt and, at this time, the Jewish Board of Guardians amalgamated with several other charities. It is no surprise, then that in 1992, the decision was taken to close the soup kitchen for good. Slide 13 – Although the kitchen no longer provides food to poor local residents, there is still plenty of poverty and deprivation in London’s East End. The modern visitor does not need to look very hard to find iniquity and vice either: a stroll down Brick Lane on a Saturday night should easily do the trick. But the area has also changed a great deal. The Jewish community has long since dispersed, in many ways replaced, first, by Bangladeshi immigrants and, more recently, by arrivals from Europe. Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Bethnal Green, the historic East End of London, are today all located in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. In the census of 2011, 43% of the population of the borough declared that they had been born outside Britain and only a little over 30% identified as White British. But as Ian Dench and others have argued, the Bangladeshis may be the last immigrant minority who make the traditional East End of London their home. An influx of professional middle-class people, attracted by the area’s central location and lively atmosphere, has transformed the East End.

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