They worked long hours for meagre pay, and got out of the East End when better opportunities came along. But London’s immigrant tailors are not forgotten and their memory is currently being celebrated in an exhibition in Bow.

Sam Stockman’s family owned a tailoring business and photographs of its factories are among the artefacts on display at a show exploring the history of the Lea Valley through the textile manufacturing which was the lifeblood of the East End even after the production of silk, calico, jute and printed fabrics died out.

“Stockman Brothers were very big in the Second World War making uniforms and jodhpurs,” says Stockman, who helped his father evolve out of manufacturing after the family factory in Hackney’s Pritchards Road closed down. “We opened a pattern-cutting service in the Commercial Road; plagiarism was everywhere, and people would bring garments to us to copy in several sizes.”

His family were employers rather than poorly-paid piece-workers, and he feels the sweatshop stereotype of East End tailoring factories is an unfair slur: “My grandfather was amenable and very generous, and generosity makes for a happy working environment.”

Yet many in the rag trade laboured in difficult conditions well into the 20th century. Judy Keiner remembers her father’s factory beneath a school on Alie Street in Whitechapel as “a big old cellar, almost completely dark except for some little glass bricks set into the pavement and one bulb. Here, in the late 1940s and early 1950s my father ran his ‘rag’ business, buying offcuts from the tailors.” Wood pulp was so scarce after the war that some of the waste fabric her father diligently collected in huge wheelbarrows, sorted by material and baled up was transported north for use in paper-making.

Tailoring work was so plentiful that even those without experience got employed in the early 20th century, remembers Sylvia Nathan: “My mother’s father came here as a cobbler, but somehow turned himself into a tailor. He would bring work home, and everybody in the family had to participate in some way to get the work out. My aunt was a dressmaker with her own workshop in my grandfather’s house in Burdett Road; I remember that room as a little treasure-trove of fabric, beads and buttons.”

Nathan followed the family tradition against her mother’s wishes, and trained in pattern-making at the Shoreditch College for Garment Trades. In the 1960s she got a job designing her patterns as well as cutting them out and says “It was the most exciting job I’ve ever had.”

Yet in spite of the success stories spawned by the industry —Lee Cooper and Cecil Gee both had East End roots — younger generations aspired to professional careers, and factories emptied out as owners and workers decamped to leafier Essex, Hertfordshire and north London. The move away from tailoring after World War II was prescient as Stockman says: “Competition from abroad made staying in clothes manufacturing very, very difficult indeed.”

 

Raw Materials: Textiles runs till June 24 at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow Road.

www.rawmaterials.bowarts.org