Kate Thompson - The Stepney Doorstep Society: The remarkable true story of the women who ruled the East End through war and peace

This book is respectfully dedicated to my grandmothers, Joyce Thompson and Monica Bird, who lived and fought their way through the Second World War in the factory and at home. Formidable women, the pair of them!

We are grateful to the following for granting us permission to include their photographs in this book:

The way history has traditionally been taught, youd be forgiven for thinking that women werent invented until the twentieth century. So often history is presented as a long list of men making laws, waging wars, leading industry, or pioneering new inventions. Where are the women? Off making the tea, presumably. Or perhaps they popped to the shops and just missed the Norman Conquest, or the invention of the steam engine.

Until very recently women were second-class citizens in Britain, seen as naturally inferior to men. And sadly our history books, our museums and our monuments reflect that. While there are statues of women all over the place, most of them are allegorical Justice and Liberty, for example and pretty much all the rest are royal. In fact, fewer than 3 per cent of the statues in the UK represent real, named women who didnt sport a coronet.

At the East End Womens Museum we want to balance the history books, and put some of those missing women back in the picture. That means telling womens extraordinary stories, but telling the ordinary ones too, because history is much more than kings and queens, wars and laws. And, in fact as this brilliant book shows some of the most surprising, entertaining, moving and inspiring stories are found on our own doorstep, and the streets we call home.

These wonderful stories about women from East Londons past are full of strength and craftiness, compassion and anger, dignity, courage and good humour. Its not all rosy. In times of adversity some seem to have survived and thrived by sheer force of will alone. But as the old saying goes, Women are like teabags. You never know how strong they are until theyre in hot water.

Most of the women who appear in this book probably never expected to find themselves here. I think its likely they were too busy fixing problems in the here and now to think much about their legacy, and spent more time thinking about their family, friends, colleagues and neighbours than about themselves.

But they are here not because they were famous, or rich, or royal, or because they invented a new kind of aeroplane, or led a successful military campaign. They are remembered here because they touched the lives of those around them. Their legacy is in their communities, in their families. And this book is a chance for the rest of us to share in those memories, and celebrate the countless women in the East End and beyond who will never have a statue, but probably deserve one.

By Professor Dick Hobbs, award-winning sociologist of East London and author of Lush Life: Constructing Organised Crime in the UK, and Policing the 2012 London Olympics: Legacy and Social Exclusion.

East London, the place that Jack London christened the awful east, was dominated by poverty, disease, high levels of infant mortality and casual work.

While casual work was not fazed out of the London docks until the late 1960s, it took the German Luftwaffe to kick-start the post-war slum clearance programmes that decimated the tight-knit communities where socialism and fascism had once resided side by side.

It was the post-war rehousing of East End communities that drew the attention of social scientists, and when Michael Young and Peter Willmott published their seminal Family and Kinship in East London in 1957, the focus rested firmly on the role of women. For it was they who took up the task of keeping the extended family together when it spread from Bethnal Green to suburban housing estates. However, this new focus was actually a modern portrait of a phenomenon that had been created long before the working classes infiltrated Essex.

In the nineteenth century Henry Mayhew commented on the plight of East Londons seamstresses working for ever shrinking piece rates, and home workers in particular found themselves running a family and working long hours for a declining return in cramped, dirty conditions where disease was a fact of life.

These home workers were part of an army of women working in the rag trade, in cigarette and match factories and in flour and sugar refineries. Womens work was not for pin money. The insecurity of dock work, and the low pay that was common across all sectors, ensured that female earnings were essential to keeping the family fed, clothed and sheltered in an environment where conflict in the workplace, in the home and on the street was the norm.

Violence was part of the everyday narrative of family and working life, and while many local men had heavy hands, East End women could also dish it out. In the battle for day-to-day respect, women would fight in the street like men, and would often match male bullies who tried it on with family members. Responsibility for control of the family and the maintenance of hard-won respectability rested with these matriarchs. These were tough, resilient women whose stories are too often told via an over ripe-sentimentality and one-dimensional stereotypes.

We lack a vocabulary to understand the complexity of working-class womens lives, and the unique realities of the East Ends political economy have ensured that the culture of East End women is particularly resistant to lazy clich.

In giving voice to these clich-defying lives, Kate Thompson has gone some way to unearthing the hidden history of the twentieth century. War, death, disease, defiance and ever-changing networks of dependence frame these amazingly rich lives. We will not see their likes again.

An unnerving silence fell over the courtyard as a woman in her late fifties stepped out on to her balcony. Dressed in a starched white apron, she cut a formidable figure against the gloom of the Bethnal Green tenement block. In her left hand was a placard; in her right, a scalding hot potato. The turban that sat atop her head cast her face into shadow, but her eyes glittered with a dark defiance. Her name was Kate Thompson and she was ready to go to war.

Her voice pierced the still of the fetid summer afternoon: Less rent, more repairs! Using her placard like a baton, she drummed out her anthem, causing a flock of pigeons roosting on the wash-house roof to flap into the skies in alarm.

Less rent, more repairs! Less rent, more repairs! More voices from the surrounding balconies and courtyard beneath joined the chant and soon the sound of the East End tribe pulsed off the dung-stained cobbles.

Go on, get out of it! Kate bellowed.

She lifted an arm as strong as a butchers hook and sent the hot potato sailing over the edge of the balcony in a perfect arc. It landed with ruthless accuracy right in the privates of an unsuspecting bailiff, who crashed to his knees on the floor of the courtyard.

Pandemonium broke out as the visiting landlord, Mr Smart, and his bailiffs were assailed from all sides. Ear-splitting howls filled the courtyard as they were set upon by an apron-clad army, pummelling them with their placards and pelting them with stale cakes from Mrs Selbys grocery shop in the square. The women on the balconies above went wild, showering the men in rotten vegetables and insults. This was an East End sisterhood in action!