DEATH OF THE COCKNEY
A BBC film, Last Whites Of The East End, reveals the seismic effects of mass migration on British communities – and how it’s often ethnic minorities who are most worried by it
EVERyTHiNG this area stood for is being eradicated slowly but surely, says this proud, sad fifth generation East Ender. ‘in ten years’ time, there’ll be absolutely no trace of Cockney culture.’ Things used to be different, he says. ‘i miss those days when everyone knew everyone.’ Now his children are growing up with little knowledge of ‘the British way of life’. These days, he says, some schools are more like ‘Africa or Romania’.
He is not being particularly outspoken. in fact, it is hard to find anyone who was born and bred in these streets who would argue with him. No doubt, Shadow Europe Minister Pat Glass — who this week condemned an entire Derbyshire village after a ‘horrible racist’ voter dared to voice concerns about immigration — would like to have him carted off for re-education.
But what is really astonishing is that these remarks come not from some Alf Garnettstyle Cockney dinosaur wailing in to his pint down at the Queen Vic.
They are the thoughts of Usmaan Hussain, a dad with a young family, who is every bit as proud of his East End roots as his Bangladeshi ancestry. He loves West Ham United and has just started up a Muslim prayer group.
And he is one of many Cockneys whose moving lament for a dying way of life is the subject of a powerful documentary next week on BBC1. it will make extremely uncomfortable viewing for all the main political parties, not to mention the local council — which is already disputing some of its assertions. And it seems that there are some within the BBC who are worried about this film, too.
i am sure the channel will issue plenty of health warnings before the start of Last Whites Of The East End. And they won’t be referring to the swearing. if you’re the sort of delicate flower who feels threatened by Germaine Greer’s views on gender change or a statue of Cecil Rhodes, then you should switch channels immediately.
TAKE the story of bus driver Tony Cunningham, 39. He is moving out of the East End, he says, because successive waves of immigration have changed it beyond recognition. ‘White people are given a very, very bad time round here,’ he says. And he is not prepared to raise his baby daughter there.
‘The first thing i think about when i get up is how to get her out of this area,’ explains this gentle giant of a man as he drives through the London Borough of Newham, where a typical primary has to cope with 43 different languages.
‘Charlotte can’t go to these schools. These schools will make her lose her identity.’
Respect has gone, he says, along with manners, Christmas cards and nativity plays. Christmas, he says, is ‘just a holiday’ these days.
We see Tony and his wife househunting out on the fringes of leafy Essex. The estate agent remarks how many people seem to be moving.
‘ We’re running, mate!’ he replies. ‘We’re not moving.’
Tony is a quintessential child of the East End, raised on pie and mash, West Ham and Nan’s tales of the Blitz.
But much as Lefties might like to brush him aside as a moaning throwback from UKiP (or something more extreme), it won’t wash. Because Tony knows all about that great liberal shibboleth, ‘community cohesion’.
His mum was fourth-generation Cockney while his father arrived from Jamaica in the Sixties. ‘ We was called “n*****” when we was growing up,’ he says matter of factly. ‘i had to educate my Nan. She had a cat called the same thing. She didn’t really get the gist of it.’
He has friends from every ethnic minority and is married to Vally, a Romanian who came to Britain in search of a better life in 2007. They met when she hopped on his bus one day.
in other words, Tony needs no lessons in multi-culturalism. But as far as he’s concerned, it has been handled abysmally.
That’s why he thinks the old East End is doomed and why he wants out.
This is a beautifully made film which neither patronises nor sensationalises its subjects. And it does not mince its words — which may explain why the BBC has put it in a late-night slot at 10.45pm and given it minimal pre-publicity.
No doubt, if it was about Tory cuts or the bedroom tax or the arts or was presented by the ubiquitous cross-dressing potter Grayson Perry, it would enjoy loud hurrahs on Newsnight or Radio 4. But i have yet to see a single trailer.
The BBC high-ups would probably prefer it to receive a minimum of fuss. After all, it leaves you realising that the East End we see on its flagship soap, EastEnders, is all wrong.
Albert Square is a fantasy land, a period drama, a time warp in which you might still find old geezers reminiscing about East End life under the Kray Twins. it bears little resemblance to the Newham of today.
Even one of the BBC’s own drama chiefs has admitted, the soap is ‘significantly white com- pared with the real East End’. Now, if the producers of iTV’s Coronation Street filled it with pigeon-fanciers in flat caps with whippets and string round their trouser legs, there would be uproar across the North.
But it’s fine to have a show full of Cockney stereotypes. After all, there aren’t many Cockneys left to complain.
‘Newham is home to a tightknit white working-class community who have lived here for hundreds of years,’ says the opening commentary.
‘But over the past 15 years, something extraordinary has happened to this Cockney tribe. More than half of them have disappeared.’
‘The life that we knew is finished,’ says one elderly old lady at the East Ham Working Men’s Club.
The manager goes further: ‘People who haven’t been back here for many years say: “i can’t believe what’s happened here.”
‘They come out of Upton Park station and [say]: “i could be in Baghdad. ” ’
One old chap puts it another
way: ‘ People who pass opinions about immigration and how wonderful it is for us — they should spend a day or two in Newham. If they think that’s good for England, well I’m a Dutchman.’
We see the fifth-generation Oakman family reduced to tears, as daughter Leanne and her young family prepare to follow the well-worn route out of the East End and over the border in to Essex where her children can grow up ‘with their own people’.
We see Eileen Storey, newly widowed at 90, abandoning the only place she knows for Norfolk.
We meet Darren Loveday, 29, a local boxing champion who grew up here with mum and four siblings. Dad was in the clink and Darren learned to use his fists.
It served him well the day a gang told him: ‘ White boy, drop your phone and walk off.’ He left them all on the floor, whereupon they accused him of racial assault.
The episode spurred him to leave for Essex, too. ‘I hate this f****** area,’ he says, though he still comes back for boxing matches.
Yet this film, made by Lambent Productions, throws up some important positives. The people in it have no problem with the immigrants themselves. It is the system which dismays them.
Eileen Storey talks lovingly of her Somalian neighbours. It is a very poignant moment as she gives them a hug before leaving for East Anglia. ‘I hope my next neighbours are as nice as you are,’ she tells them.
Darren, the angry boxer, doesn’t blame the incomers but the supine authorities. ‘Everyone’s moving in,’ he says. ‘ They’re not taking over. We’re letting them.’ According to the film: ‘Fifteen years of mass immigration and white flight have brought Newham to its tipping point. It now has the lowest white British population of anywhere in the UK.’
According to the latest census, Newham’s white British population has dropped from 34 per cent to 17 per cent in just ten years.
However, Newham council says that this is misleading since the population has increased.
A spokesman points out that the actual number of white British has dropped by a third, not a half — from 82,000 to 52,000 out of a total 308,000.
NEWHAM’S executive mayor, Sir Robin Wales, rejects the idea of an ‘old white working class’ being ‘driven out’. ‘This is London, things are always changing and people move. I have a German mother and a Scottish father.
‘The main thing is that we get on and nearly 90 per cent of people here say they get on well together.’
But the fact remains that only just over half of the borough speak English as their main language.
And it is beyond dispute that the traditional Cockney now accounts for less than one in five of the population.
On present trends, that could soon be less than one in ten. Would you Adam and Eve it? — as absolutely no one says round here. For I have followed the advice of the old boy in the working men’s club.
I have come to spend a day or two in Newham. And I don’t hear a sin- gle word of Cockney rhyming slang from anyone. No one talks about going down the ‘frog and toad’ for a pint at the ‘rub a dub’. You might still come across this sort of banter in chi-chi media joints in fashionable parts of town where a spot of Mockney is good for one’s credentials — ‘Golly, I’m cream-crackered after my yoga class’. But it’s as elusive as a Pearly King singing Roll Out The Barrel here at the Queen’s Market on Green Street.
‘No one uses rhyming slang any more — except in prison,’ says Fahim Chaudhry, 25, who describes himself as ‘a proper Cockney’. He is a great ambassador for East End multi-culturalism, too.
Born in the borough, he is from a Kashmiri family and runs a shop selling African-Caribbean beauty products. He says that life might have been hard for ethnic minorities some years ago when ‘there was a bit of racism’ but not any more.
‘The whites are the minority now. It’s ridiculously small. It’s gone too far the other way,’ he says.
What infuriates him most are immigrants who ‘don’t speak a word of English and don’t bother to try’. So does he actually live round here? ‘No, we moved to Wanstead [on the edge of Essex],’ he says. ‘It’s the best thing we ever did.’
On the other side of the market, Ronnie Hoadley, 63, is the last of the old white fruit ‘n’ veg stallholders — and he hasn’t lived round here for years. How many Cockneys does he serve each day? Blank looks. ‘If I get ten in a week, I’d be amazed.’
A few yards down the road, the Boleyn Ground, former home of West Ham United, dominates the landscape. This grand old stadium is somehow emblematic of the Cockney exodus. This month, the Hammers played their last game here, against Manchester United, ahead of next season’s move to the shiny 2012 Olympic stadium.
For the locals, though, it was like losing a member of the family.
‘Match days have always been very big for us and we have had the same loyal customers for years,’ says Richard Nathan, fourth generation boss of Nathan’s Pie and Mash restaurant just round the corner on Barking Road. ‘Then just before the match, all the fans in here stood up and just started applauding us. It was very emotional.’
HIS pies are all homemade ( and they are superb), the jellied eels are cooked on the premises and the place is immaculate. It’s a proud slice of old East End life which Richard runs with a loyal team including his mother, Chris, and Pam Baldock, who started working here 23 years ago. Without the football club, life is going to be harder for the Nathans.
The dwindling band of Cockneys and the long-established Caribbean community love his food. The Asians and Eastern Europeans, who make up more than half the local population, do not. But Richard, 44, hopes his regulars will keep on coming.
‘One of our busiest days is the day before Mother’s Day. Because you get all these Cockneys who’ve moved out coming back to see their mum or going to the cemetery.’ It’s no surprise to find out where Richard and his young family live. ‘We’ve moved out to Essex,’ he says. ‘People do when they have kids.’
The loss of the football club is going to hit another Cockney staple — the boozer. Ron Bolwell, 78, runs two, the Denmark Arms and the Queen’s. The latter, he says, used to take £12,000 on a West Ham match day. ‘It was the cream which kept us going.’
Without the football club, he says, he might pack up and go back to his native Wales. Migration has already hit business hard. ‘Most Asians don’t drink and a lot of the Eastern Europeans just drink in the street,’ he says. He has recently taken to charging non-drinkers 20p to use the lavatory. ‘Otherwise, they just walk in and pinch a toilet roll.’
Nearby, at the Boleyn Tavern, bar manager Nikita, 30, says that the old East End is long gone. ‘You used to know everyone on your street and you could leave a key on a string.
‘Now, a lot of people don’t speak English and everyone else is terrified of being called a racist,’ she says. Life is much more nuanced and complicated than the likes of Labour’s Pat Glass might think.
‘My family’s all mixed — we’ve got blacks, Filipinos, Scottish,’ says Nikita. ‘But we just can’t keep on letting more people in.’
Finally, just up from the old stadium, I meet Tony Cunningham, the bus driver in the programme. Since the film was made, he has completed the move to Essex. He couldn’t be happier. ‘My wife says I’m a changed man,’ he says. ‘My mum’s still round here but, if it wasn’t for her, I don’t think I’d ever come back. It’s just not the place I knew any more.’
LAST Whites Of The East End, BBC1. Tuesday, 10.45pm.