Stop 4: 19 Princelet Street
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Behind the grand façade of Number 19 Princelet Street lies a rich history illuminating the East End immigration story: the Museum of Immigration. This well-preserved house is Europe's only cultural institution devoted to the movement of people in search of a better life, from the Huguenot settlers of the seventeenth century, to the Irish, Jews, Bangladeshis and more recent arrivals. Unfortunately, because of disrepair and lack of funds it is only open on a handful of days a year (for opening days click here). The museum is run entirely by volunteers and is struggling to raise £3 million to open permanently.
Number 19 started off as a home for French Huguenots who arrived in England in the 1700s fleeing religious persecution in Catholic France. With the decline of the British silk weaving industry as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace, the Huguenots moved on and out, and Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine that swept Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, moved in. The Irish provided industrialists with a huge supply of cheap labor and here in East London, the majority worked in the nearby docks and manufactories.
Between 1870 and 1914, thousands of Jewish settlers arrived from Eastern Europe, fleeing appalling conditions, growing anti-Semitism and Tsarist pogroms in Russia. By the 1930s, the Jewish community was well established here in East London, many working in cabinet making, the fur trade and tailoring. Houses like this one, where Huguenots once wove silk, now became workplace and home for Jewish families.
Life was hard for new arrivals and the Jewish community tried to help each other out. One Jewish self-help group called the Loyal United Friends leased rooms here at no 19 which they converted into a synagogue and created a meeting place in the basement where campaigners fighting anti-Semitism could gather.
During this period, Britain was beginning to experience its first challenge to economic dominance. A period of growing economic depression gave rise to massive cuts in workers' living standards and rising unemployment pushed thousands into abject poverty. Hardship contributed to an explosion of 'new unionism' and a strike wave that swept Britain in 1889 involved thousands of women and immigrant workers. The Dockers Strike (the first casual workers strike) and the Match Stick Girls' strike are two famous examples. This was also a period which saw a surge in support for revolutionary political ideas and this part of the East end was seen as a hotbed of radicals, aliens and deviant and dangerous criminal classes.
There is no doubt that the elite in society at this time feared revolution. They hoped to cohere society and subdue political activity by encouraging a patriotic outlook which put workers and elites on the same side and immigrant 'foreigners' on another. In one sense, it is only from the time of the arrival of Irish immigrants that we can really begin to talk of popular racism in Britain at all. Indeed, the ruling elites had contempt for the entire poor and it's worth remembering that the majority of the population (both men and women) were not trusted with the vote until the early 20th Century. Furthermore, much of the UK population still lived pre-industrial lifestyles in tight-knit groups, often just as suspicious of people from a rival town as a stranger from a foreign land – expressing what we might call parochialism rather than racism. It was in the growing industrial cities where employers and politicians began blaming immigrants for keeping wages low, that racism began to win support, dulling, it is suggested, the impact of strikes by setting people against each other.
These 'divide and rule' tactics culminated in the introduction of the first law aimed at controlling immigration into Britain-the Aliens Act of 1905. Aimed at curtailing Jewish immigration, it reflected a concern to ensure immigrants were seen as outsiders, blame immigrants for low pay and forge a sense of nationhood based on a racially distinct Britishness.
