Meet Uncle Gandhi, they said
Extraordinary stories from Britain’s first council estate
I thought he was a funny little man – i had no idea who he was emily saville, 99 on MahatMa gandhi visit
When Indian civil rights hero Mahatma Gandhi visited England in 1931, he was offered a suite at the Savoy. Instead, he opted to stay in the East End and visit Becontree – Britain’s first council estate, built for the working-class heroes of the First World War.
An experiment in modern living, this was the start of a new vision for families who had spent generations in the slums.
Gandhi found it inspirational. “Love surrounded me here,” he wrote in the visitors’ book at Kingsley Hall, the church and community centre that hosted his visit.
Emily Saville’s dad had been wounded at the Battle of the Somme, meaning they qualified for a home on Becontree, She was eight when Gandhi visited.
Her mum was in the Women’s Fellowship at Kingsley Hall. Now 99, she asks her son John to move her wheelchair to one of the build
ing’s side exits. “He was standing exactly here,” she remembers.
“I shook his hand. ‘Meet Uncle Gandhi’, they said. I thought he was a funny little man – we’d never seen anyone like him
“I had no idea who he was.” This is just one of many fascinating stories we uncovered during a Daily Mirror project celebrating 100 years of the Becontree estate, which this week culminates in a short film commissioned and researched by the Daily Mirror.
A collaboration between us and film students at Barking and Dagenham College and Northern Heart Films – Becontree: 100 Years – opened the Romford Film Festival on Thursday night at the Premiere Cinema.
Our film is nominated for two festival awards – best documentary and best local film – with juries’ verdicts due next week.
The Becontree area is named after a huge tree that once spread across the heath, and belonged to a man called Beoha.
At four square miles and housing 100,000 people, the estate is still the biggest in Britain. Though hundreds of miles from the Scottish border, it has its own bagpipe band – the Dagenham Girl Pipers.
The world’s first female pipe band was set up in 1930 by a Scottish vicar who trained girls from his Sunday school. Fearing damage to his reputation, Rev Joseph Waddington Graves originally trained the girls in secret.
At their peak, they played at 400 events a year all over the globe, including for Winston Churchill.
Pipe Majors Lily Tillot, who has been a piper for 56 years, and Carol Deacon, in her 50th year as a piper, play on the soundtrack to our film. “I’ve been to Singapore, Oman, the Middle East, all over Europe, South Africa,” Lily tells us.
“I used to live on the Becontree estate myself. I remember the friendliness and the sense that every house was the same.
“In the 1930s when Ford was here, it was the place to be.”
The rest of the soundtrack comes from another legend of the Borough, Billy Bragg, whose mum lived on the Becontree estate.
The Bard of Barking donated his 1983 song To Have and Have Not, about growing up in the area. the passing of the 1919 Housing Act, which let London County Council build outside its territory, the Standing Committee on the Housing of the Working Classes resolved to build 29,000 dwellings to accommodate 145,000 people within five years.
The homes were desperately needed by families displaced by slum clearances in the East End – and by wounded and traumatised soldiers coming back from the horrors of the Great War.
People moved into the first homes on Chittys Lane at the tail end of 1921 – the first time many had lived with electricity, running water, inside toilets and gardens.
By the time of the official completion ceremony in Parsloes Park on July 13, 1935, the Becontree estate was home to 120,000 people.
Famous people hailing from the estate include 1966 World CupAfter
winning manager Sir Alf Ramsey and Martin Peters who scored the second goal in the final.
Another England manager, Terry Venables lived here, as did legend Jimmy Greaves and England ace PaulInce.
Actor and comic Dudley Moore learned to play the piano at Kingner sley Hall. Entertainer Max Bygraves
sang in the Fiddlers pub, while singer Sandie Shaw went to the local secondary school.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey grew up on the Becontree estate too.
It’s not bad for an area snobs dubbed Corned Beef Estate after the supposed cheap diet of residents. Today, the estate has new struggles and new strengths. It is the second most deprived borough in London, Barking and Dagenham, and in the top 10 nationally.
With the local car industry decimated in modern times, in many ways it’s a “Red Wall town” – outside the Red Wall.
Yet despite Margaret Thatcher’s best efforts with right to buy, Becontree remains an incredible community.
Almost universally, the people we spoke to for the film said how proud they were to be from Becontree. Newcomers were at pains to stress how welcome they felt.
Zaphira Kapnisis, 50, whose partner Chris is the Director of Kingsley Hall, said: “The first people to live here were a generation of war heroes and that still comes across on the estate.”
Chris added: “There is a such a rich heritage here, that’s being celebrated during the centenary. Families moved here from the East End of London – bringing with them some of the challenges of the slums and social issues and injustices. But also the way people support one other.” Barking and Dagenham students filmed many of the short movie’s contributors themselves. Lecturer David Bennett said: “Most of the students working on the film were born and bred in Becontree and had no idea that it was an estate, let alone the world’s largest.
“Making the film has altered their image of the place.” Most of Becontree was open fields when Emily Saville arrived as a young child. She spent the Second World War making military uniforms in local factories. In 2022, in Kingsley Hall, where Emily met her late husband Bill – and saw Mahatma Gandhi – there is a social supermarket and a food and clothing bank in place of those fields Emily remembers. Right now, the pandemic’s weight is lifting from the area, and much like its original inhabitants, people are emerging shellshocked into sunshine. We met security guard Steve Wright, 43, visiting the garden he planted at Kingsley Hall in memory of his late wife, Sarah. “Becontree is a place I love,” he said. “A place my kids have grown up in and my wife loved. I’m happy to be here.
It has its ups and downs, but it’s filled with love, and it’s really including. “There’s a joy to being here – it’s not just a place to live, it’s a huge family.”
■ Watch Becontree: 100 Years from 2pm today at facebook.com/ dailymirror/live.
■ romfordfilmfestival.com.