Who were the public of Canning Town’s Public Hall?

This is a photo of an event held at the Canning Town Public Hall organised by Kamal Chunchie’s Coloured Men’s Institute. I came across this gem during my research on the Public Hall. Jonny confirmed that this photo shows the small hall on the ground floor at the back of the building – which he was sure of because Jonny himself remembers working in the space, and being drawn to the leaded windows and ornately carved wooden door frames that still survive today. I learned at Newham Archives that this space, now called the Neighbours Hall, was originally supposed to house a baths until the plan was dropped due to cost. The Neighbour’s Hall that Sylvia Pankhurst was given to speak until they realised far too many people were there to fit. This is perhaps also the earliest known surviving picture of inside the Public Hall and that it depicts a social gathering of black, brown and mixed families of Canning Town is, to me, phenomenal. Among other things, it is another significant glimpse at the wide range of activities that the Public Hall hosted, reflecting the unique (at the time) diversity of the Canning Town public it served.

While researching the history of the building at 105 Barking Road, it was coming across pictures like the one above, along with other stories about the unique communities of Canning Town that had grown up around the Docks, which meant I felt it important to take this opportunity to draw attention to the the communities themselves that interacted with the Canning Town Public Hall from its inception until now.

The growth of Canning Town and its ‘public’

Who were the ‘public’ that the Public Hall was meant to serve and how did this change over time?

Canning Town began as an industrial town, home to dockers, factory workers, and their families that from the mid 19th century, grew up around the Victoria and Albert Docks and the “warehouses of the empire”.

Because of the Docks, there is no place quite like Canning Town and it leads to multi-layered histories of “community” there. From racial riots in 1917, having the largest pre-windrush black population in London, and the existence of many mixed-race families reflected in the nickname of “Draughtsboard Alley”, to the rise and fall of the Docks and all those that relied on it, the Blitz bombing and then rebuilding of Canning Town – the profile of the area changed a lot as a result.

A look at the history of West Ham gives some context to the development of the unique profile of Canning Town. Mark Gorman, local historian, spoke to me about how Canning Town was created:

West Ham to Newham

Shame that as with many areas in East London, ‘development’ also meant the loss of some things. It brought an amount of gentrification and a loss of certain things that were part of the culture. In the case of Canning Town, Rathbone Market is a symbol of that change.

In Neighbourhood 15 film of 1948 it goes into the detail of how Canning Town was going to be regenerated, housing built, communities remade, including that of Neighbourhood 15 or ‘Tidal Basin’ which became the Keir Hardie estate.

Bob shared that the house  where he grew up had a blue plaque on it commemorating it being the 25,000 council house built in that regeneration scheme that began after the war.

Lynda, my fellow community researcher, remembers the Public Hall and its central position opposite the then buzzing Rathbone Market:

From Race Riots to Rock Against Racism: Canning Town is a mixed bag

Because of the Docks there were many black and brown seamen that had stayed (often not out of choice) in Canning Town once the ships that they toiled on brought them from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. In WW1 when men returned to see the presence of the black and brown men they were told had to paraphrase, ‘taken their jobs and women’, racial riots were ignited in the area, this later was reflected in Dockside communities (like Liverpool) in other parts of the country. As hard as it was for the many working people of the area, being black and brown in Canning Town only made it harder.

In the 1920s, Kamal Chunchie, originally from Sri Lanka, founded the Coloured Men’s Institute (CMI) in Tidal Basin. The CMI began primarily for the many Laskars and other seamen of colour and their families to provide some support with the economic and social challenges of the time and place. Many of the Black and Asian seamen that had stayed after their ship docked had married white women and had mixed-race children. Because there were so many mixed-race families living in Crown Street, it became known as ‘Draughtsboard Alley’.

Part of the reason I am drawn to oral history is, as a mixed race East Ender I know from experience how the multi-layered reality of being ‘mixed’ identity is hard to capture and even harder without people’s own testimonies. Without their stories, history relies on a limited set of available information that only tells one part of the story.

Through this project, I am grateful to have found stories of mixed-identity communities (and the response to them) in this country go much further back than I thought.The Mixed Race Museum talks about ‘the growing visibility of racial mixing in Britain’ in the 1920s and the existence of mixed race children, becoming an obsession in the news. With its significant mixed communities, Canning Town became a focus for some of this ‘moral panic’.

Image of Crown Street children, full entry can be seen in full here. Credit: Mixed Race Museum, mixedracemuseum.org.uk

In The Strangers Home film, Amanda Graham from Canning Town explains the way the story of the Crown Street children, including her uncle, had been twisted by the media to stir up tension from the outside in. Just as with the Racial riots of 1917, when men returned from war to be told the ‘laskars’ and other seamen of colour had been stealing their jobs and their women, the papers whipped up fear. A news article of the time had the headline of ‘The Street of Hopeless Children’. But just as Amanda says in the film:

You can watch this brilliant film here:

More recently, still a mixed bag for community

In their interviews for Soundwaves: Music in Newham, Nigel Powers and Deni Francis both mentioned the challenges of being brown or black in Canning Town, especially if you were not ‘from’ there.

The cases of the Newham 7 and later Newham 8, involving the arrest and charge of Asian youths who had fought skinheads carrying out a series of racist attacks on people, shone a light on institutional and everyday racism and galvanised the community to come out in protest and solidarity. The Newham Monitoring Project in a proud tradition of activism, here played an important role in organising the fight against institutional racism in the borough and beyond.

That is the bigger story of Canning Town and Newham – at the same time as there were tensions and divides, that spirit of protest going back to Will Thorne all the way to the Newham 8 defence campaign saw to it that the community (white, black and brown) came out and spoke up.

At the recent launch of the Soundwaves: Music in Newham exhibition I bumped into a fellow volunteer who had done oral history interviews about the inaugural 1976 Rock against Racism gig at the Princess Alice in Forest Gate. She mentioned being grateful to learn that – contradicting their reputation –  many of the big fellas that had provided the security at the event were Dockers. Once again the communities of the docks showed up in solidarity.

Some of the other featured Canning Town venues in Soundwaves oral history project showcase the existence of thriving diverse communities in the area:

• Tidal Basin
• Bentleys
• Fold
• Club Afrique

A Hall for us all

One of the original arguments for having a Public Hall in Canning Town was that the people there should have access to a place where they could gather for socialising, entertainment, and community. As the years have gone on not only has the community around the Public Hall diversified but so over the years has the number of places and spaces where people can meet. Yet, the Public Hall deserves its ‘flowers’. Over many decades of change, Canning Town’s Public Hall has played its part well, and opened its doors to a whole range of us who stood for solidarity, for unity and, of course, sometimes just for fun.

References

(1) https://jtojhumanrights.org.uk/local-stories/local-stories-posts/the-newham-8-police-racism-and-community-action/

(2) Newham 8, https://journeytojustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Newham-8.pdf

(3) The Newham 8, Police Racism and Community Action, https://jtojhumanrights.org.uk/local-stories/local-stories-posts/the-newham-8-police-racism-and-community-action/

Read the other pieces in this series:

A Homage to “The Building Next Door”: The Story of the Canning Town Public Hall

The Building, The Organisation, The People: Community Links in The Old Public Hall