INTRODUCTION
The story of an area like Petticoat Lane can be told through the lives of remarkable people. They might have lived or worked in the area, been born there, realised their dreams there, or campaigned for its interests or for its residents. But whatever their links they were in their own and different ways, ‘trailblazers’, helping to give the area character, identity and distinction.
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AYUB ALI MASTER
Ayub Ali Master was born in 1880 and arrived in London from British India in 1919-20. According to the community members interviewed by Carole Adams in her 1987 book, Across Seven Seas and Thirteen Rivers, he was a well-known social reformer, politician and businessman who did a lot to improve the lives of British Asians in the area.
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When he came to England, he set up the Shah Jalal Restaurant at 76 Commercial Street, in the heart of the Spitalfields area. Shah Jalal was a 13th century saint famed amongst Bengal’s Muslims because he conquered Sylhet for Islam. The restaurant served as a hub for Asian migrants to London, with Ayub Ali often offering shelter and food to newly arrived Bangladeshis. The building survives as part of a mid-19th group of shops and houses adjoining the south side of Christ Church.
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Ayub Ali was politically active and, as well as the restaurant which served as a hub for the early Bengali community, he also set up a boarding house in his home at 13 Sandy's Row offering support and advice for people arriving from British India. Tower Hamlets now has the largest British Bangladeshi communities outside of Bangladesh.
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In 1943, Ayub Ali set up the Indian Seamen's Welfare League with Shah Abdul Majid Qureshi. The League provided support to Asian Seamen arriving in London and offered social activities for men to meet fellow community members. Because of his political and community work, Ayub Ali Master is considered to be a pioneer of the large Asian community seen in East London today.
Petticoat Lane Market, 2006. Copyright Andrew Dunn
SAMUEL AND HENRIETTA BARNETT
Henrietta Barnett, alongside her husband Samuel Barnett, significantly influenced housing and social reform in London's East End during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1873, the Barnetts moved to Whitechapel, where Samuel became the vicar of St. Jude's church on Commercial Street. Confronted with severe poverty and overcrowded living conditions, they initiated several projects aimed at improving the lives of the local population.​ One of their most notable contributions was their establishment in 1884 of Toynbee Hall. As the first "University Settlement," Toynbee Hall provided a space where educated individuals lived among the poor to better understand and address social issues. While not directly a housing project, this initiative fostered community development and highlighted the need for improved living conditions in the East End. ​
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Samuel Barnett was also closely involved in the founding in 1901 of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Its object was to enrich the lives of people of the area through offering access to ‘the finest art in the world’, displayed in a gallery – designed by Charles Harrison Townsend – that was itself a work of art.
PRINCE MONOLULU
Prince Monolulu was born Peter Carl McKay in the Danish West Indies, although claimed to be the chief of the Falasha tribe of Abyssinia, Ethiopia. He first rose to prominence in the UK when he successfully picked the winning horse in the 1920 Derby. He won approximately £8000, which equates to around £400,000 in today’s money!
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He dressed in flamboyant and colourful clothes with feathered headdresses which echoed the African cultures he claimed to lead. He styled himself as a ‘Prince’ in the hope that he would be noticed, and it worked. He regularly featured in newsreel footage, and has therefore been coined the ‘most famous Black man of his time’.
Copyright Clara Ely & Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
Copyright Clara Ely & Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives
MIKE STERN
Mike Stern was a market trader who was famous on Petticoat Lane for his loud, enchanting calls and flamboyant dress, including a large feathered hat which he was often pictured wearing.
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The area’s strong Jewish traditions meant that Petticoat Lane Market traded on a Sunday, rather than the Jewish sabbath of Saturday. However, this upset non-Jewish residents and visitors to the area. In the mid-1930s there were campaigns to limit Sunday trading on Market. Mike Stern led the successful campaign to continue Sunday trading, arguing that on Sundays many Jewish customers would travel to the area to buy Jewish food and goods.
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Mike was also instrumental in anti-Nazi protesting in east London, leading a march of 50,000 Jews into Hyde Park to protest ‘Hitlerism’. He was also the President of the Street Trader’s Association and stood up for the rights of traders across the East End.
Mike Stern, by Mr Douglas, issued by W.A. & A.C. Churchman, colour relief halftone cigarette card, 1938
NPG D49184
Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London
PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Phillis Wheatley was a young African American writer who was abducted from the west coast of Africa in about 1760, when aged seven or eight, and sold into slavery in Boston, in the United States. She was bought by a John Wheatley to wait upon his wife Susanna. For slave-owners, the Wheatleys were relatively enlightened. They gave the girl the family name and soon, delighted by her precious talents at reading and writing, undertook her education and liberated her from drudgery. This was virtually unprecedented in colonial American slave-owning society. By the age of twelve, Wheatley was reading Greek and Latin classics in their original language and started to blossom as a poet, influenced by English writers such as John Milton and Alexander Pope as well as by Homer and Virgil. By the age of 14, she had composed her first poem and the Wheatley believed her work could be published. This seemed an almost impossible task in Boston so, in 1773, Phillis travelled to London with the Wheatley’s eldest son. In Aldgate, on the corner of Petticoat Lane, they found a bookseller and publisher called Archibald Ball who, in September 1773, published twenty-seven of her poems under the title Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral.
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This gave her almost instant celebrity in London, and in Boston when she returned. Prominent figures such as George Washington praised her work. The Wheatleys freed her and she married a free-African American. She continued to write but did not prosper. Her husband was confined in jail for debt, her three children died young and she was reduced to poverty. She died in Boston in 1784, at the age of about 31, and was buried in any anonymous pauper’s grave.
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But her poems had dazzled London and colonial America when published in the 1770s, and her character had impressed many. Although her time in London was brief, her personal history and the high quality of her works were evidence of the evils inflicted by the institution of slavery and of the individual hopes and talents that slavery crushed. It is certain that her example, and her works, made a contribution to the outlawing of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807 and of slavery in 1833. In the United States, emancipation did not happen until 1865, following a bitter Civil War. And although Wheatley’s works were by then nearly a hundred years old she was – and remains – an inspiration for all seeking equality and freedom.
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In July 2019, the site of the Archibald Bell bookshop (8 Aldgate, now the location of the Dorsett City Hotel) was marked by a commemorative plaque honouring her.
Researched and written by Susan