EAST LONDON IMMIGRATION
by Catherine Haill, V & A
The East End received waves of immigrants during the 19th century, and its theatres often reflected their tastes. Many settled there because it was close to the docks where they had landed, and offered basic cheap accommodation, and casual labour. Some were fleeing religious persecution, and others were looking for a new start, and more profitable opportunities. However poor and squalid the East End in the 19th century, it could still promise refuge or advancement for many.
The earliest East End immigrants were French Protestants known as Huguenots. They fled to various protestant countries in the late 17th century to escape persecution when their religion was outlawed by the Catholic King Louis XIV. Many settled in Spitalfields as paupers, but brought silk-weaving to the area since many were from towns in France specialising in these skills, including Lyons, the centre of the French silk-weaving industry. When industrialisation threatened their trade in the late 18th century however, many were in difficulties. A contemporary commentator noted:
`the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts.'
By the 1830s many successful Huguenots had moved out of the East End, while others went to the adjacent but cheaper Bethnal Green. The Weaver of Lyons, a new play at The Pavilion Theatre in 1855, was clearly written with their interests in mind.
The Irish were the next large-scale wave of East End immigrants. With a predominantly agricultural economy at home, many Irishmen had come to London in the 18th century for better-paid agricultural work in the summer and casual labour along the river in winter. Thousands more left Ireland for America in the 1840s due to low pay at home and the failure of the potato crops leading to the Irish famine. Others came to England, especially Liverpool and London. The Irish population burgeoned in the East End between 1841 and 1851 where labouring jobs were available on canals, roads, railways and docks. The East End Irish revelled in memories of `the old country' evoked by Irish plays, jigs and songs at local theatres and music halls. The Pavilion Theatre, 28 July 1860, featured a feast of Irish entertainment, including a painted backcloth of the Lakes of Killarney by moonlight.
There was a Jewish community in London since the mid 17th century, but a new influx came after the collapse of Poland in 1835 when Jews were barred from professions and trades. By 1871 the East End was home to about 1,000 Dutch or Polish Jews. Another wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came to Spitalfields and Whitechapel in the 1880s, when the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in Russia in 1881 was followed by legalised discrimination and vicious atrocities against Jewish people. They lived and worked together in Whitechapel, Mile End, Stepney and Spitalfields. It was no coincidence that the Pavilion Theatre's Dick Whittington, 26 December 1881, represented the character Alderman Fitzwarren as a successful Jewish mercer or textiles merchant, and a money-lender.
The Jewish community liked Music Hall, but since Yiddish was the native language of many foreign-born Jewish immigrants, the Pavilion Theatre presented Yiddish drama in the early 20th century. The plays were highly emotional, stressing the virtues and values of the immigrants' lost homeland, and sometimes starring actors who had made their names in Poland and New York. A Ukrainian girl who immigrated to the East End in 1913 remembered the packed Pavilion audiences on Saturday nights, and seeing:
`.. very good Yiddish plays. Real, you know, serious plays, not rubbish.... Sometimes if there was something special on (like Morris Maskovitch or Jacob Adler `the Jewish Irving') I'd go on a Monday night, but mostly it was Saturday evening.'
More images on this theme
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Search Terms
Subject Terms: Emigration and immigration,Ireland,Yiddish theatre,Yiddish drama,Jews,Keyword Terms: Irish,Jewish,
East London Theatre Archive
