Ironically, the Machzikei found harassment not so much from gentiles but from non-religious Jews. In 1904 on the Day of Atonement, a day of fasting when a Jew must do no manual work, worshippers taking a break from the service were pelted with bacon sandwiches hurled by members of a Jewish anarchist group driving a food van up and down the street outside. The orthodox Jews in turn pelted the anarchists with stones and broken bottles. The synagogue closed in 1965 and in 1976 was converted into a mosque.
PRITHI CURRY HOUSE, 126 Brick Lane, Spitalfields
The Lord Maitreya, a Bodhisattva or enlightened being intent on saving souls, was expected to appear at this curry house – of all places – on 31 July 1985. Adverts had been printed in the papers for the previous few months explaining that as Christians await the return of Christ, Muslims the Imam Mahdi, Hindus a reincarnation of Krishna, and the Jews the Messiah, those knowledgeable in mysticism would recognise that all those names refer to the same being – the Lord Maitreya – who manifested himself 2,000 years ago in Palestine by overshadowing his disciple Jesus.
Behind the event was the artist Benjamin Crème. When asked how the public would recognise the Maitreya, he responded: ‘When Lord Maitreya appears, it will be as different beings to different people. He will appear as a man to a man, as a woman to a woman. He will appear as a white to a white, as a black to a black, as an Indian to an Indian.’
Crème invited a number of Fleet Street journalists to meet the Maitreya at what was then the Clifton curry house that July day. The journalists waiting for the Maitreya drank lager after lager to pass the time, but no Maitreya appeared. They left, disappointed and drunk. ‘Once again, I am afraid God did not show,’ read the Guardian.
• No. 126 already had an interesting religious history. Here just over 200 years previously the silk weaver Samuel Best, a pauper who lived on bread, cheese and gin tinctured with rhubarb, had announced himself as a prophet, chosen to lead the children of Israel back to Jerusalem.
ST GEORGE-IN-THE-EAST, Cannon Street Road, St George’s
This Nicholas Hawksmoor church by Cable Street was the setting for the ‘No Popery’ riots of 1859 and 1860. Trouble broke out after parishioners discovered that the vicar, Bryan King, had co-founded a secret brotherhood for priests, the Society of the Holy Cross. So angry were they at King for indulging in Romish practices, they pelted the altar with bread and butter, and orange peel, brought in barking dogs to disrupt services, seized the choir stalls, tore down the altar cross and spat on and kicked the clergy. They even urinated on the pews.
The mob would have thrown the Revd King into the docks had his friends not made a cordon across a bridge, enabling him to get to the Mission House safely. The church was forced to close and allowed to reopen only when King promised not to wear ceremonial vestments during Mass. Even when services began again there were often as many as fifty police officers stationed in the wings ready in case of trouble.
→ Riots at St Giles Cathedral, p. 262
SALVATION ARMY BIRTHPLACE, outside the Blind Beggar pub, 337 Whitechapel Road, Whitechapel
One evening in June 1865 William Booth, a tall, fierce-looking revivalist preacher sporting a long black beard down to his chest, heard two missionaries preaching at an open-air meeting outside the Blind Beggar pub. When they invited any Christian bystander to join them, Booth exclaimed: ‘There is heaven in East London for everyone who will stop to think and look to Christ as a personal saviour.’ He told them of the love of God in offering salvation through Jesus Christ in such clear terms that they invited him to take charge of a special mission tent they were holding nearby.
This was the beginning of what became the Salvation Army. Within a year Booth’s mission had more than sixty converts and he was returning home ‘night after night haggard with fatigue’, as his wife Catherine later explained, ‘his clothes torn and bloody, bandages swathing his head where a stone had struck’.
Booth had moved to London in 1849 and drawn up a personal code of conduct which read:
I do promise – my God helping – that I will rise every morning sufficiently early (say 20 minutes before seven o’clock) to wash, dress, and have a few minutes, not less than five, in private prayer. That I will as much as possible avoid all that babbling and idle talking in which I have lately so sinfully indulged. That I will endeavour in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of the bleeding Lamb.
Booth preached regularly across the East End, condemning the usual vices: drinking, gambling, watching cricket and football – anything that people enjoyed but which could lead to unchristian behaviour – surrounded by what a supporter called ‘blaspheming infidels and boisterous drunkards’. In 1878 he reorganised the mission along quasi-military lines and began using the name Salvation Army. His preachers were given military-style ranks such as major and captain, with Booth himself as the general. The Salvation Army’s banner in red, blue and gold sported a sun symbol and the motto ‘Blood and Fire’, the blood that of Christ and the fire that of the Holy Spirit.
Salvation Army bands would march into town ‘to do battle with the Devil and his Hosts and make a special attack on his territory’. Their services provided the model for what became known disparagingly the following century as ‘happy clappy’ – joyous singing, Hallelujahs, beseeching for repentance, hand-clapping. Evil-doers and lost souls flocked to repent, even when the organisation’s enemies, the so-called ‘Skeleton Army’, marching under a skull and crossbones banner, attempted to drive the Salvation Army off the streets. Within ten years Booth had 10,000 officers, and had opened branches in Iceland, Argentina and Germany. By the time he died the Salvation Army had spread to fifty-eight countries worldwide.
TOWER HILL EXECUTION SITE
The hill to the north of the Tower of London was one of the capital’s main sites for religiously motivated executions, along with Smithfield and Tyburn. Its victims include perhaps the most famous of all British martyrs, Thomas More, who has since been canonised by the Catholic Church.
Ancient British tribes treated Tower Hill at the edge of the East End as holy and buried the head of Bran, a Celtic god king, under the ground there. Bran’s head supposedly had magical powers and was interred facing France to ward off invaders. Nevertheless it failed to repel the Romans, who came to London shortly after the death of Christ. It also failed to repel the Saxons, the Danes and the Normans, who took over London at the end of the eleventh century and built what is still the capital’s greatest landmark – the Tower – by the ancient tribes’ sacred hill. Those executed here include:
• John Fisher, 1535
John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, made a famous speech at Paul’s Cross in 1526 denouncing Martin Luther. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535 after opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the king’s wish to make himself head of the English Church. Originally Fisher was supposed to be hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, but Henry magnanimously commuted the sentence to beheading. The corpse was stripped naked and hung on the scaffold till evening when it was thrown into a pit at the nearby church of All Hallows, Barking. Fisher’s head was later stuck on a pole on London Bridge where it remained for a fortnight before being thrown into the Thames.
• Thomas More, 1535
Lawyer, MP and fêted author, More was one of Henry VIII’s leading aides, who resigned the chancellorship when the king declared himself supreme head of the Church in England after the Pope refused to support his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. More continued to argue against Henry’s divorce and the split with