back
to Tell Tales Joyce Auvache
The main industry that I remember along the river Lea was coal and timber coming out of the docks mainly off-loaded off the docks and piers along the Thameside and they then went up the Lea with the cargo in barges. This was when Stratford Gas Works was there, they took a lot of coal, and some did go by truck and rail on the other side of the canal. They had a special crane that hung out over the river that picked up coal from the barges and also from the trucks opposite.
On many days you would see thirty to fifty barges waiting to go out and waiting to go in the same way and they did their turn as the tide went up and down. This was usually along the Lea, there used to be a lot of furniture making factories around Hackney and Old Ford. We were not allowed to play anywhere near most of the factories, but we used to run down the paths shouting to the bargemen, there was a sweet factory I can not remember exactly where on the Lea, but we would try to hang round there and get sweets. The women who worked there used to throw sweets from the windows at the bargemen and sometimes they would then throw them to us. We would hang round there for hours begging the bargemen to throw the sweets to us. By Percy Daltons my brother and some of his friends would try to jump on the barges it was very dangerous and then get off at Percy Daltons that was only with some of the bargemen that they got to know I was very young then and a bit of a tom boy as I was the only girl, my big brother was made to take me with him by our mother.
The boys would try to jump on and off the barges, some of the bargemen would give them rides and as they went by Percy Daltons they would get given peanuts and we would make sure that we ate them before we got home.
We used to have lots of fun playing by the river we would run after the barges all the way down passed Hackney and sometime even further. Some of the boys would go swimming when the weather was very hot. I did not like swimming in the river it always looked to dirty and I would get in trouble when I got home if my clothes were really dirty and muddy. My mum was quite strict about that, we were poor but she said there was no excuse for being dirty.
At the end of Carpenters Road there was a factory that used lots of chemicals in everything, mainly it was a bluish type of mess they made and in went the rubbish as well and that also went down the river in the barges, that was really smelly.
We had a wonderful life in the East End. We were poor really, but we didn’t realise it because my mother at Christmas time and Easter time, we always had a new outfit, which wasn’t paid for straight away, we used to have a man come to the door and my mother used to pay weekly. We always looked nice. My mother had to pawn her wedding ring and she used to go to a shop called Pullens in Roman Road and one of us went to collect her ring one day it and we lost it on the way home.