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Poplar Memories: Life in the East End
Author(s): John Hector (Author)
- Publisher: The History Press
- Publication Date: 1 Aug. 2010
- Language: English
- Print length: 128 pages
- ISBN-10: 075245823X
- ISBN-13: 9780752458236
Book Description
Poplar Memories is a vivid impression of Cockney London before and during the Second World War, set in a teeming, rundown docklands neighbourhood famous for being, well, one end of the Blackwall Tunnell. John Hector’s spellbinding account of his early life in the 1920s and ’30s conjures up a vanished era when simplicity and happiness went hand-in-hand. Halcyon days of ‘talking pictures’ and pavement buskers, Saturday night knees-ups round the piano, eel and pie stalls, chimneysweeps, ‘boxers’, Clarnico’s toffees and Lloyd Loom furniture, and a little shop called Woolworth’s selling ‘nothing over sixpence’ – unless it’s a shilling. All this was to disappear forever in the horrors of the Blitz. The author was disabled by infantile paralysis – yet he became School Captain and embarked on a successful career at 14, surviving extreme poverty, panel doctors, dockers’ riots and Hitler’s Luftwaffe with an unshakeable belief in the ordinary people of Poplar.
Editorial Reviews
Review
JOHN HECTOR was and Eastender born and bred. He lived through the blitz, the poverty and the hardship of the 1930s and ’40s and recalls it here, warts-and-all, in his memoir.
About the Author
John Hector was and Eastender born and bred. He lived through the blitz, the poverty, and the hardship of the 1930s and ’40s and recalls it here, warts-and-all, in his memoir.
