Listen to the following: two extracts from an East End paper of thirty years back:—
Thames Police Court.
John Lyons, who keeps a common lodging-house, which he has neglected to register, appeared before Mr. Ingram in answer to a summons taken out by Inspector Price. J. Kirby, 53A, inspector of common lodging-houses, stated that on Saturday night last he visited defendant's house, which was in a most filthy and dilapidated condition. In the first floor he found a Chinaman sleeping in a cupboard or small closet, filled with cobwebs. The wretched creature was without a shirt, and was covered with a few rags. The Chinaman was apparently in a dying state, and has since expired. An inquest was held on his remains, and it was proved he died of fever, and had been most grossly neglected. The room in which the Chinaman lay was without bedding or furniture. In the second room he found Aby Callighan, an Irishwoman, who said she paid 1s. 6d. a week rent. In the third room was Abdallah, a Lascar, who said he paid 3s. per week, and a Chinaman squatting on a chair smoking. In the fourth room was Dong Yoke, a Chinaman, who said he paid 2s. 6d. per week for the privilege of sleeping on the bare boards; two Lascars on bedsteads smoking opium, and the dead body of a Lascar lying on the floor, and covered with an old rug. In the fifth room was an Asiatic seaman, named Peru, who said he paid 3s. per week, and eleven other Lascars, six of whom were sleeping on bedsteads, three on the floor, and two on chairs. If the house were registered, only four persons would be allowed in the room. The effluvium, caused by smoking opium and the over-crowded state of the room, was most nauseous and intolerable. In the kitchen, which was very damp, he found Sedgoo, who said he had to pay 2s. a week, and eight Chinamen huddled together. The stench here was very bad. If the house were registered, no one would have been allowed to inhabit the kitchen at all. He should say the house was quite unfit for a human habitation. The floors of the rooms, the stairs and passages were in a filthy and dilapidated condition, covered with slime, dirt, and all kinds of odious substances.
The men had been hung up with weights tied to their feet; flogged with a rope; pork, the horror of the Mohammedan, served out to them to eat, and the insult carried further by violently ramming the tail of a pig into their mouths and twisting the entrails of the pig round their necks; they were forced up aloft at the point of the bayonet, and a shirt all gory with Lascar blood was exhibited on the trial, and all this proved in evidence. One man leaped overboard to escape his tormentor; a boat was about to be lowered to save the drowning man, but it was prohibited, and he was left to perish. The captain escaped out of the country, forfeiting his bail and abandoning his ship, leaving his chief officer to be brought to trial and to undergo punishment for his share of this cruel transaction.
In those days you might stand in West India Dock Road, on a June evening, in a dusk of blue and silver, the air heavy with the reek of betel nut, chandu and fried fish; the cottages stewing themselves in their viscid heat. Against the skyline rose Limehouse Church, one of the architectural beauties of London. Yellow men and brown ambled about you, and a melancholy guitar tinkled a melody of lost years. Then, were colour and movement; the whisper of slippered feet; the adventurous uncertainty of shadow; heavy mist, which never lifts from Poplar and Limehouse; strange voices creeping from nowhere; and occasionally the rasp of a gramophone delivering records of interminable Chinese dramas. The soul of the Orient wove its spell about you, until, into this evanescent atmosphere, came a Salvation Army chorus bawling a lot of emphatic stuff about glory and blood, or an organ with "It ain't all lavender!" and at once the clamour and reek of the place caught you.
Thirty years ago—that was its time of roses. Then, indeed, things did happen: things so strong that the perfume of them lingers to this day, and one can, remembering them, sometimes sympathize with those who say "Limehouse" in tones of terror. One of my earliest memories is of the West India Dock Road on a wet November afternoon. A fight was on between a Chink and a Malay. The Chink used a knife in an upward direction, forcefully. The Malay got the Chink down, and jumped with heavy boots on the bleeding yellow face.
Some time ago, when my ways were cast in that district, the boys would loaf at a kind of semi-private music-hall, attached to a public-house, where one of the Westernized Chinks, a San Sam Phung, led the band, and freely admitted all friends who bought him drinks. Every night he climbed to his chair, and his yellow face rose like a November sun over the orchestra-rail. When the conductor's tap turned on the flow of the dozen instruments, which blared rag-tag music, we shifted to the babbling bar and tried to be amused by the show. It was the dustiest thing in entertainment that you can imagine. To this day the hall stinks of snarling song. Dusty jokes we had, dusty music, dusty dresses, dusty girls to wear them, or take them off; and only the flogging of cheap whisky to carry us through the evening. Solemn smokes of cut plug and indifferent cigar swirled in a haze of lilac, and over the opiate air San's fiddle would wail, surging up to the balcony's rim and the cloud of corpse faces that swam above it. More and more mephitic the air would grow, and noisier would become voice and foot and glass; until, with a burst of lights, and the roar of the chord-off from the band, the end would come, and we would tumble out into the great road where were the winking river, and keen air and sanity.
Later, the boys would shuffle along with San Sam Phung to his lodging over a waterside wine-shop, crossing the crazy bridge into the Isle of Dogs. Often, passing at midnight, you might have heard his heart-song trickling from an open window. He cared only for the modern, Italianate stuff, and would play it for hours at a time. Seated in the orchestra, in his second-hand dress-suit and well-oiled hair, he looked about as picturesque as a Bayswater boarding-house. But you should have seen him afterwards, during the day, in his one-room establishment, radiant in spangled dressing-gown and tempestuous hair, a cigarette at his lips, his fiddle at his chin. It was worth sitting up late for. Then his face would shine, if ever a Chink's can, and his bow would tear the soul from the fiddle in a fury of lyricism.
Half his room was filled with a stove, which thrust a long neck of piping ten feet in the wrong direction, and then swerved impulsively to the window. In the corner was a joss. The rest of the room was littered with fiddles and music. Over the stove hung a gaudy view of Amoy. He never tired of talking of Amoy, his home. He longed to get back to it—to flowers, blue waters, white towns. He lived only for the moment when he might tuck his fiddle-case under his arm and return to Amoy, home and beauty. Once started on the tawdry ribaldry which he had to play at the hall, his arm and fingers following mechanically the sheet before him, he would set his fancies free, and, like a flock of rose-winged birds, they took flight to Amoy. Music, for him, was just melody—the graceful surface of things; in a word Amoy. Often he confessed to a terrible fear that he would grow old and die among our swart streets ere he could save enough to return. And he did. Full of the poppy one dark night, he stepped over the edge of a wharf at Millwall. Then, at the inquiry, it was discovered that his nostalgia for Amoy was pure fake. He had never been there. He was born on a boat that crawled up-river one foggy morning, and had never for a day gone out of London.
There were many other delightful creatures of Limehouse whose names lie persistently on the memory. There was Afong, a chimpanzee who ran a pen-yen joint. There was Chinese Emma, in whose establishment one could go "sleigh-riding." There was Shaik Boxhoo, a gentleman who did unpleasant things, and finally got religion and other advantages over his less wily brothers, who got only the jug. Faults they had in plenty, these throwbacks, but their faults were original. Every one of them was a bit of sharp-flavoured character, individual and distinct.
In those days there was a waste patch of wan grass, called The Gardens, near the Quarter, and something like a band performed there once a week. O Carnival, Carnival! There the local crowd would go, and there, to the music of dear Verdi, light feet would clatter about the asphalt walk, and there would happen what happens every Sunday night in those parts of London where are parks, promenades, bandstands and monkeys' parades. In the hot spangled dusk, the groups of girls, brave with best frocks and daring ribbons, would fling their love and their laughter to all who would have them. Through the plaintive music—poor Verdi! how like a wheezy music-box his crinoline melodies sounded, even then!—would swim little ripples of laughter when the girls were caressing or being caressed; and always the lisp of feet and the whisk of darling frocks kissing little black shoes.