Archival Noise
Micro-histories project
01 AMANDA GRAHAM
London
10/4/25
10/4/25
Collage by Henna Khanom / Images sourced from Wikipedia Commons / Background map from The National Archives
Amanda Graham was born in 1961, in the East End of London. She is a mixed-race woman of West Indian descent. Amanda is a children’s safeguarding officer, having spent four decades in youth and community work in East London.
Her grandfather, Sidney Dudley Graham (c.1897-1977), left Barbados as a young man to work as a seaman for the British Merchant Navy. In 1925, he married Emma Louisa Skingle (1898-1976), a white woman from the East End. The pair settled in West Ham, east London, and Sidney worked as a ship fireman for the British Merchant Navy. This was during the reign of George V, the great-grandfather of Charles III. This was also the height of British Empire, when Britain controlled ¼ of the world’s population.
HK: I would love to hear about your childhood in ‘60s London.
AG: I was born in 1961 in Plaistow, Newham. It wasn’t called Newham then. That only came about in the mid-60s, so when I was born it was still West Ham. On my birth certificate it says, ‘Place of Birth: West Ham’, which I really love, because I’m a West Ham football supporter. I’ve got a very strong sense of belonging to this area. You know I’m an East Ender, and I’m a cockney, as you can hear from the accent. But by the same token, if I look back to childhood, that sense of belonging wasn’t always part of that. I was the eldest of three kids. My dad worked in the docks. He used to work 80 hours a week. In those days, a bit like your zero-hour contract today, they would’ve turned up at the dock gates and wouldn't be guaranteed work. I imagine if you're an immigrant, that's even harder. If you didn't get work, your kids probably are not eating that day. Certainly, some of my peers were hungry, although my parents worked hard to ensure this was not the case in our house, and I can never remember going without.
My mum had 7 sisters and we grew up around all of those aunts. But I think I spent much more of my time with my dad's family, where my cousins were the same kind of mixed-race that I was. I was one of my grandmother’s [Emma Louisa Skingle’s] favourites, actually, because not only was I the eldest of my dad's kids, but I also looked like my dad’s sister, who had passed away when she was quite young, in her 20s. My grandmother was a fierce little woman. And it was quite nice having a champion like that.
HK: How did your grandparents, Sidney Dudley Graham and Emma Louisa Skingle, meet?
AG: My granddad and my nan must’ve met, I imagine, socializing in the local dances and those sorts of things. My nan was quite a defiant sort of woman. It's not a surprise that she'd be the sort of person that stood up against what everyone else said and put two fingers up to the world and go, ‘Well, I'm doing it anyway.’ My grandparents didn’t marry until 1925. Now they started having kids in 1920. Back in those days, for someone to not be married, and have three kids, and then they’re brown as well? My good God! She must have gotten an awful lot of flack.
My dad [Edgar Graham] was born in 1922. My dad was mainly brought up by a friend of the family. A mixed-race woman that we knew as Aunt Clara. She wasn't any blood relation whatsoever. When he was a kid they lived in a street in Canning Town called Crown Street, and locally it was known as Draught Board Alley, because there were a lot of families where the father would be Black and the mum would be white.
HK: I would love to hear more about Aunt Clara.
AG: Right, Aunt Clara. She was great. She was mixed-race. She originated from Lowestoft, on the coast. She was a fascinating character for me. My grandparents were born in the 1890s. She would have been born probably 20 years before that. Her mum had been married twice, so she had white brothers and sisters, three or four of them. She [Clara’s mother] married for a second time but she married a Black guy. I asked Aunt Clara, ‘So what was that like?’ I used to go up to her house when I was at school. She had no kids of her own. She had about three or four mixed-race sisters as well. I said, ‘Was it racist?’ ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘In fact, we were a little bit of a novelty – brown kids growing up there at that time. Nobody treated us badly because we were the only ones, the only mixed-race kids in the area. So we weren't a threat. We weren't seen threatenin’ because we were just part of the area.’ Her theory was, now there's more of us, white people feel more threatened by the influx.
When my dad was born, he went to live with Aunt Clara and he grew up there. Poverty would have played a part. Probably the fact that she [Emma Louisa Skingle] wasn't married, and she’s a white woman knocking out all these mixed-race kids. Aunt Clara was delighted to have my dad to bring up. She even gave him his middle name Ivan. She said, ‘If I'd have had a son, that's what I'd have called him, so that's how he got that name.’ But I used to sit there for hours talking to her. She was fascinating. Very tough woman. Her dad was from the West Indies as well. He was a seaman, similar to my grandad. She wouldn't have had a formal education being born in the time that she was born, but you would’ve considered her a very intelligent, sharp woman.
I've got a really nice photo of my dad, his sister Vera, Violet, and intermixed with other mixed-race kids there. There's also a few white kids there.
Crown Street c.1928. Vera Graham (front row, on the right, with hat); Edgar Graham (next to Vera); Violet Graham (next to Edgar); Sidney Graham (second row, third from right)/ Image (c) Mary Evans Picture Library, cropped
The photo was taken around 1930, so my dad would have been about 8. They look very poor. You can see the clothing for example. They've all got boots on which is quite a blessing for that time. My dad talks about being a bookies runner when he was still a kid at school to earn extra money for boots for his siblings. But you can see, for example, the jacket that my uncle's got is clearly an adult jacket that's been cut down to sort of fit him, not very well. That would have been around the time of the Wall Street crash. My dad left school at the earliest opportunity.
HK: Could you talk more about your father being a bookies runner?
AG: This would have been while he was still at school. There was a lot of illegal betting that went on, on all sorts of things, maybe horses, maybe dogs. They used kids to take the stake and the bet. So he'd be running between the people that wanted to place the bets, take them to the bookie. My dad and his little crew used to be the ones that take the winnings back and they'd earn a little bit of money. He’d use that to contribute towards the household income because they would have been that poor. I remember him complaining once that the money that he'd earned and given to his mum, she bought boots for all of the other kids and left him with the old ones. I suppose she saw him as quite self-sufficient and that he'd earn some more money and get his boots anyway.
24 Crown Street: Sidney Graham (‘Merchant Marine’ and ‘Ships Fireman’); Emma Graham (‘Unpaid Domestic Duties’); Edgar Graham (‘Timber Packer’) / 1939 England and Wales Register, The National Archives
When I was really young, he [Edgar Graham] worked in the dock. That would have been loading and unloading ‘cus the ships would have been stationary. Previously he would have been stoking the engine with coal when he was in the Merchant Navy and going away to sea. That was what he and his brother would have done, which was an incredibly physically difficult, vile job when you think about it. He must have been breathing in coal dust all the time. He told me about the heat because you’re travelling to places where the climate is a lot hotter as well. He stopped going away to sea by the time he settled down and married my mum. But he had spent some time living in Argentina. He taught himself Spanish through reading the comic strips in the newspaper. Every now and again, if we was talking to him, he'd slip into Spanish.
My dad boxed when he was part of the Merchant Navy as well, in Argentina. Him and my uncle were really well known in the local area [in the East End]. It was almost like it was him and his brother were like the local celebrities. But, again, the opportunities that they had would have been very small. They wouldn’t’ve been competing for world or British championships. You wouldn't have been allowed because you weren't white. There would have been a colour bar.
Although my dad would have worked incredibly hard, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to earn more money per hour to make his life easier. That would have been it. There was no progression opportunities. His choice was to work double shifts to make sure that the rent was paid.
When I was a kid, you were known as “half caste”. People thinking that it was normal to call across the street “wog” and “coon” and names like that. I had lots of fights at school. I remember one of the earlier times of someone giving me racial abuse, and me running into my nan [Emma Louisa Skingle] and saying, ‘Nan, guess what they've called me?’ I thought, yeah, wait til you see what she's going to do, because she was fierce. Absolutely fierce. To my surprise, she didn't run out to defend me at all and said,
‘In this family, you have to stick up for yourself. If they're going to call you names, you whack them, and if you don't think you can hit them with your hand or your foot, see that lump of wood? Take that and chase them with that. They won't call you names again.’
At the time, I was outraged and really shocked. How dare she not stick up for me like that? But actually, she was setting me up for what was coming. It was quite a tough environment that I grew up in. There wasn't the mollycoddling type of thing. It was very much expected that you stood your ground and always remembered you're as good as anyone else, but no better than anyone else. I had a lot of fights, you know? And people learnt in the end that that was going to happen when they called you names. I was a tough kid.
HK: When you got into those fights, what were teachers like? Did they intervene?
AG: You learn quite quickly you don't do it in front of adults. I can remember one particular occasion where a girl tried to bully me and had been quite nasty. She was huge, like twice my size. So I hit her with a rounders bat – chased her, in fact. She started running and I thought, great! This is exactly what I wanted. And I remember this girl going and complaining to the teacher, ‘Oh, miss, Amanda's just done...’ and she looked at her and looked at me, this skinny little kid that looked like she had cotton hanging out the ends of her clothing instead of limbs, and she went, ‘Don't be ridiculous, Jacqueline, look at the size of her.’ I used to get away with a lot of things. You learn to be crafty. Where I went to school were Canning Town, Silvertown, Custom House kids. It's a tough environment.
1970 map of Canning Town, Custon House, and Silvertown / Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland CC-BY (NLS) https://maps.nls.uk/view/197236952
When I was a kid, I wouldn't’ve thought of higher education. Definitely not. When you had your careers talk, they'd talk to you about factories. The expectation was that you'd leave school on the Friday and by the Monday, you'd be working in Tate & Lyle’s. For me, Tate & Lyle’s was quite a symbolic thing. When my grandfather came and settled here, the docks and factories would have been the main source of employment. My dad's sisters all worked there [Tate & Lyle’s]. My mum worked there. That's how they got together, because my mum was friends with my dad's sisters. In a way, I don't suppose I'd even exist if it wasn't for Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory. But I wasn't bloody working there. That was a different thing entirely.
For my dad's generation, there would have been far less awareness of things like slavery. You started to read and to become a little bit more aware of history, slavery. You ask questions. They'd shown Roots [1977] on the TV, for God's sake. If that didn't make you curious, what was going to make you curious? I can remember my whole family sitting there and having a visual realisation of some of the things that you might have previously considered fleetingly.
By the time I was thinking about work, Tate & Lyle sugar factory? Forget it. Kids from my background, you’re brought up to be factory fodder in those days. That's why further and higher education wasn't going to be a thing. What was the point when you're going to be packing sugar in the sugar factory or something similar in one of the other factories along that little strip of Silvertown, you know? There was an oil refinery, like the cooking oil refinery Loders. There was also a bone factory down there that made soap. It used to stink terribly. I remember if the wind came in a certain direction, you'd get this awful smell. Dead animals, basically. The carcasses, what they were making the soap from. But there was also a brewery down there, Truman’s. If people didn't work in the docks, they would’ve worked in one of the factories.
But I thought, no, I don't fancy that [Tate & Lyle’s]. I don't fancy it on a number of levels. I don't fancy it because I can see I'm never going to get rich. I'd have to work my fingers to the bone to just about make a living. I don't like the green bloody dungarees that they're all walking around wearing either, because it was like a symbol. You would see the girls in the years above you at school wearing these cotton green dungarees. They had a uniform and they used to wear it in the street, which used to baffle me.
We didn't even wear school uniforms. We wore it when we first went. It cost my family quite a lot of money to buy. Then the older kids came along, they were obviously some of the rougher end of the kids. They made it very clear that if you wear that tomorrow, you're going to get bashed because our mums can't afford it. So don't wear it ‘cus we ain't got it. Anyone who wears it is going to get beaten up, basically. So we didn't wear it. Those bigger kids were far more intimidating than the teachers, so that was that.
When it came to work, there was no way I was walking around in those bloody cotton green overalls. I made it quite clear. I said to the careers teacher,
‘Go back in there and find something else ‘cus I'm not doing that. My granddad came here from Barbados where they make sugar, right? I'm not working in a sugar factory. I’m sure he wanted better for his grandchildren than that. So I'm not doing it.’
The woman was quite annoyed that I had the audacity. The sugar factory’s always been quite symbolic in my life. It's still there. I avoid buying Tate & Lyle sugar. It's very much symbolic of lots of things in life – race, class, lack of opportunity.
I'm not saying I'd change everything. It makes you the person that you are – I'm extremely resilient. You can knock me down as many times and I'm coming back.
HK: With a bat.
AG: Yeah, with a bat. That's one of the things in the East End. The women are tough. A lot of the time, men are quite reckless, to be honest. Some of my friends' dads, their mums would have had to go search for their dad on a Friday night before he drank or bet the money or chased some woman, and didn't come home with any money to feed the kids or pay any of the bills.
I can remember my friends talking about ducking behind the sofa when the tallyman came, and the mum going ‘Shhh!’ ‘cus they ain't got the money to pay him. You would be getting paid in cash, so you'd have a wage packet. Easily spent on a Friday night for a watless man.
HK: It was called a tallyman? What was that?
AG: That would have been where you've either borrowed money from somebody in the community or you've bought goods that you're paying off weekly. My dad was very against that. He used to have a coat in the wardrobe, and he used to put money in that pocket for that bill, money in that pocket for that bill, and that's how we used to save for things that we wanted. So we never had HP or hire purchase – tick or credit, as we would call it now.
HK: You mentioned living in a half-terrace house, with your neighbours, using the same common spaces or hallways.
AG: Yeah, same outside toilet. Didn't have a bathroom, so we didn't share that. We used to have a tin bath we kept in the garden, and we used to have an ascot heater that heated up hot water. Those houses wouldn't have had hot water plumbed in. We didn’t have a boiler. There were limits to the ascot heater, so it'd be alright to have a wash but not a bath. We used to boil up the kettle and lots of pots and pans and you'd have a bath in front of the coal fire in the living room.
My mum was quite a clean freak. If we didn't bathe, we used to have a stand-up wash, which means from top to bottom, standing in a bowl. Or when you're smaller, that would have been in the kitchen sink. I remember at 11, moving into our first council house, that had a bathroom, and that being absolute luxury. No more did I have to go out in the dark being petrified and freezing. When I told my kids, they thought I was lying. ‘They only did things like that in the Victorian days, Mum. What are you telling lies for?’ They did not believe me. But it was true.
HK: What was your grandfather, Sidney Dudley Graham, like?
AG: My granddad was small – smaller in height than me. Tiny, but mighty. Ferocious. I remember him having a very strong West Indian accent, very gruff that you had to listen quite closely to make sure you understood ‘cus we were cockney kids, you know. But he never spoke like a cockney ever. He always retained that strong Bajan accent.
1925 Marriage License between Sidney Graham (‘Bachelor’ and ‘Seaman’, son of Thomas Graham ‘Carpenter’) and Emma Lousia [sic] Skingle (‘Spinster’, daughter of William Skingle ‘Stevedore’). Essex Archives Online, D/P 602/1/34 / Reproduced with permission of the Essex Record Office
HK: Did he ever talk about Barbados?
AG: Not that I can remember. But then he died when I was a teenager. I only wish now I'd have asked more questions because I know nothing. This is why it's important for people to talk about things like history, about race, about class, about what life was like. Because history is written by the winners. It's written by the powerful. Most people are not that. We all learn about the kings and queens. We don't learn about our grandmother that worked her fingers to the bone to bring up five kids, and working in a factory, and going through two World Wars and what that might have meant.
***
Amanda Graham was born in 1961, in the East End of London. She is a mixed-race woman of West Indian descent. Amanda is a children’s safeguarding officer, having spent four decades in youth and community work in East London.
Her grandfather, Sidney Dudley Graham (c.1897-1977), left Barbados as a young man to work as a seaman for the British Merchant Navy. In 1925, he married Emma Louisa Skingle (1898-1976), a white woman from the East End. The pair settled in West Ham, east London, and Sidney worked as a ship fireman for the British Merchant Navy. This was during the reign of George V, the great-grandfather of Charles III. This was also the height of British Empire, when Britain controlled ¼ of the world’s population.
HK: I would love to hear about your childhood in ‘60s London.
AG: I was born in 1961 in Plaistow, Newham. It wasn’t called Newham then. That only came about in the mid-60s, so when I was born it was still West Ham. On my birth certificate it says, ‘Place of Birth: West Ham’, which I really love, because I’m a West Ham football supporter. I’ve got a very strong sense of belonging to this area. You know I’m an East Ender, and I’m a cockney, as you can hear from the accent. But by the same token, if I look back to childhood, that sense of belonging wasn’t always part of that. I was the eldest of three kids. My dad worked in the docks. He used to work 80 hours a week. In those days, a bit like your zero-hour contract today, they would’ve turned up at the dock gates and wouldn't be guaranteed work. I imagine if you're an immigrant, that's even harder. If you didn't get work, your kids probably are not eating that day. Certainly, some of my peers were hungry, although my parents worked hard to ensure this was not the case in our house, and I can never remember going without.
My mum had 7 sisters and we grew up around all of those aunts. But I think I spent much more of my time with my dad's family, where my cousins were the same kind of mixed-race that I was. I was one of my grandmother’s [Emma Louisa Skingle’s] favourites, actually, because not only was I the eldest of my dad's kids, but I also looked like my dad’s sister, who had passed away when she was quite young, in her 20s. My grandmother was a fierce little woman. And it was quite nice having a champion like that.
HK: How did your grandparents, Sidney Dudley Graham and Emma Louisa Skingle, meet?
AG: My granddad and my nan must’ve met, I imagine, socializing in the local dances and those sorts of things. My nan was quite a defiant sort of woman. It's not a surprise that she'd be the sort of person that stood up against what everyone else said and put two fingers up to the world and go, ‘Well, I'm doing it anyway.’ My grandparents didn’t marry until 1925. Now they started having kids in 1920. Back in those days, for someone to not be married, and have three kids, and then they’re brown as well? My good God! She must have gotten an awful lot of flack.
My dad [Edgar Graham] was born in 1922. My dad was mainly brought up by a friend of the family. A mixed-race woman that we knew as Aunt Clara. She wasn't any blood relation whatsoever. When he was a kid they lived in a street in Canning Town called Crown Street, and locally it was known as Draught Board Alley, because there were a lot of families where the father would be Black and the mum would be white.
HK: I would love to hear more about Aunt Clara.
AG: Right, Aunt Clara. She was great. She was mixed-race. She originated from Lowestoft, on the coast. She was a fascinating character for me. My grandparents were born in the 1890s. She would have been born probably 20 years before that. Her mum had been married twice, so she had white brothers and sisters, three or four of them. She [Clara’s mother] married for a second time but she married a Black guy. I asked Aunt Clara, ‘So what was that like?’ I used to go up to her house when I was at school. She had no kids of her own. She had about three or four mixed-race sisters as well. I said, ‘Was it racist?’ ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘In fact, we were a little bit of a novelty – brown kids growing up there at that time. Nobody treated us badly because we were the only ones, the only mixed-race kids in the area. So we weren't a threat. We weren't seen threatenin’ because we were just part of the area.’ Her theory was, now there's more of us, white people feel more threatened by the influx.
When my dad was born, he went to live with Aunt Clara and he grew up there. Poverty would have played a part. Probably the fact that she [Emma Louisa Skingle] wasn't married, and she’s a white woman knocking out all these mixed-race kids. Aunt Clara was delighted to have my dad to bring up. She even gave him his middle name Ivan. She said, ‘If I'd have had a son, that's what I'd have called him, so that's how he got that name.’ But I used to sit there for hours talking to her. She was fascinating. Very tough woman. Her dad was from the West Indies as well. He was a seaman, similar to my grandad. She wouldn't have had a formal education being born in the time that she was born, but you would’ve considered her a very intelligent, sharp woman.
I've got a really nice photo of my dad, his sister Vera, Violet, and intermixed with other mixed-race kids there. There's also a few white kids there.
Crown Street c.1928. Vera Graham (front row, on the right, with hat); Edgar Graham (next to Vera); Violet Graham (next to Edgar); Sidney Graham (second row, third from right)/ Image (c) Mary Evans Picture Library, cropped
The photo was taken around 1930, so my dad would have been about 8. They look very poor. You can see the clothing for example. They've all got boots on which is quite a blessing for that time. My dad talks about being a bookies runner when he was still a kid at school to earn extra money for boots for his siblings. But you can see, for example, the jacket that my uncle's got is clearly an adult jacket that's been cut down to sort of fit him, not very well. That would have been around the time of the Wall Street crash. My dad left school at the earliest opportunity.
HK: Could you talk more about your father being a bookies runner?
AG: This would have been while he was still at school. There was a lot of illegal betting that went on, on all sorts of things, maybe horses, maybe dogs. They used kids to take the stake and the bet. So he'd be running between the people that wanted to place the bets, take them to the bookie. My dad and his little crew used to be the ones that take the winnings back and they'd earn a little bit of money. He’d use that to contribute towards the household income because they would have been that poor. I remember him complaining once that the money that he'd earned and given to his mum, she bought boots for all of the other kids and left him with the old ones. I suppose she saw him as quite self-sufficient and that he'd earn some more money and get his boots anyway.
24 Crown Street: Sidney Graham (‘Merchant Marine’ and ‘Ships Fireman’); Emma Graham (‘Unpaid Domestic Duties’); Edgar Graham (‘Timber Packer’) / 1939 England and Wales Register, The National Archives
When I was really young, he [Edgar Graham] worked in the dock. That would have been loading and unloading ‘cus the ships would have been stationary. Previously he would have been stoking the engine with coal when he was in the Merchant Navy and going away to sea. That was what he and his brother would have done, which was an incredibly physically difficult, vile job when you think about it. He must have been breathing in coal dust all the time. He told me about the heat because you’re travelling to places where the climate is a lot hotter as well. He stopped going away to sea by the time he settled down and married my mum. But he had spent some time living in Argentina. He taught himself Spanish through reading the comic strips in the newspaper. Every now and again, if we was talking to him, he'd slip into Spanish.
My dad boxed when he was part of the Merchant Navy as well, in Argentina. Him and my uncle were really well known in the local area [in the East End]. It was almost like it was him and his brother were like the local celebrities. But, again, the opportunities that they had would have been very small. They wouldn’t’ve been competing for world or British championships. You wouldn't have been allowed because you weren't white. There would have been a colour bar.
Although my dad would have worked incredibly hard, he wouldn't have had the opportunity to earn more money per hour to make his life easier. That would have been it. There was no progression opportunities. His choice was to work double shifts to make sure that the rent was paid.
When I was a kid, you were known as “half caste”. People thinking that it was normal to call across the street “wog” and “coon” and names like that. I had lots of fights at school. I remember one of the earlier times of someone giving me racial abuse, and me running into my nan [Emma Louisa Skingle] and saying, ‘Nan, guess what they've called me?’ I thought, yeah, wait til you see what she's going to do, because she was fierce. Absolutely fierce. To my surprise, she didn't run out to defend me at all and said,
‘In this family, you have to stick up for yourself. If they're going to call you names, you whack them, and if you don't think you can hit them with your hand or your foot, see that lump of wood? Take that and chase them with that. They won't call you names again.’
At the time, I was outraged and really shocked. How dare she not stick up for me like that? But actually, she was setting me up for what was coming. It was quite a tough environment that I grew up in. There wasn't the mollycoddling type of thing. It was very much expected that you stood your ground and always remembered you're as good as anyone else, but no better than anyone else. I had a lot of fights, you know? And people learnt in the end that that was going to happen when they called you names. I was a tough kid.
HK: When you got into those fights, what were teachers like? Did they intervene?
AG: You learn quite quickly you don't do it in front of adults. I can remember one particular occasion where a girl tried to bully me and had been quite nasty. She was huge, like twice my size. So I hit her with a rounders bat – chased her, in fact. She started running and I thought, great! This is exactly what I wanted. And I remember this girl going and complaining to the teacher, ‘Oh, miss, Amanda's just done...’ and she looked at her and looked at me, this skinny little kid that looked like she had cotton hanging out the ends of her clothing instead of limbs, and she went, ‘Don't be ridiculous, Jacqueline, look at the size of her.’ I used to get away with a lot of things. You learn to be crafty. Where I went to school were Canning Town, Silvertown, Custom House kids. It's a tough environment.
1970 map of Canning Town, Custon House, and Silvertown / Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland CC-BY (NLS) https://maps.nls.uk/view/197236952
When I was a kid, I wouldn't’ve thought of higher education. Definitely not. When you had your careers talk, they'd talk to you about factories. The expectation was that you'd leave school on the Friday and by the Monday, you'd be working in Tate & Lyle’s. For me, Tate & Lyle’s was quite a symbolic thing. When my grandfather came and settled here, the docks and factories would have been the main source of employment. My dad's sisters all worked there [Tate & Lyle’s]. My mum worked there. That's how they got together, because my mum was friends with my dad's sisters. In a way, I don't suppose I'd even exist if it wasn't for Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory. But I wasn't bloody working there. That was a different thing entirely.
For my dad's generation, there would have been far less awareness of things like slavery. You started to read and to become a little bit more aware of history, slavery. You ask questions. They'd shown Roots [1977] on the TV, for God's sake. If that didn't make you curious, what was going to make you curious? I can remember my whole family sitting there and having a visual realisation of some of the things that you might have previously considered fleetingly.
By the time I was thinking about work, Tate & Lyle sugar factory? Forget it. Kids from my background, you’re brought up to be factory fodder in those days. That's why further and higher education wasn't going to be a thing. What was the point when you're going to be packing sugar in the sugar factory or something similar in one of the other factories along that little strip of Silvertown, you know? There was an oil refinery, like the cooking oil refinery Loders. There was also a bone factory down there that made soap. It used to stink terribly. I remember if the wind came in a certain direction, you'd get this awful smell. Dead animals, basically. The carcasses, what they were making the soap from. But there was also a brewery down there, Truman’s. If people didn't work in the docks, they would’ve worked in one of the factories.
But I thought, no, I don't fancy that [Tate & Lyle’s]. I don't fancy it on a number of levels. I don't fancy it because I can see I'm never going to get rich. I'd have to work my fingers to the bone to just about make a living. I don't like the green bloody dungarees that they're all walking around wearing either, because it was like a symbol. You would see the girls in the years above you at school wearing these cotton green dungarees. They had a uniform and they used to wear it in the street, which used to baffle me.
We didn't even wear school uniforms. We wore it when we first went. It cost my family quite a lot of money to buy. Then the older kids came along, they were obviously some of the rougher end of the kids. They made it very clear that if you wear that tomorrow, you're going to get bashed because our mums can't afford it. So don't wear it ‘cus we ain't got it. Anyone who wears it is going to get beaten up, basically. So we didn't wear it. Those bigger kids were far more intimidating than the teachers, so that was that.
When it came to work, there was no way I was walking around in those bloody cotton green overalls. I made it quite clear. I said to the careers teacher,
‘Go back in there and find something else ‘cus I'm not doing that. My granddad came here from Barbados where they make sugar, right? I'm not working in a sugar factory. I’m sure he wanted better for his grandchildren than that. So I'm not doing it.’
The woman was quite annoyed that I had the audacity. The sugar factory’s always been quite symbolic in my life. It's still there. I avoid buying Tate & Lyle sugar. It's very much symbolic of lots of things in life – race, class, lack of opportunity.
I'm not saying I'd change everything. It makes you the person that you are – I'm extremely resilient. You can knock me down as many times and I'm coming back.
HK: With a bat.
AG: Yeah, with a bat. That's one of the things in the East End. The women are tough. A lot of the time, men are quite reckless, to be honest. Some of my friends' dads, their mums would have had to go search for their dad on a Friday night before he drank or bet the money or chased some woman, and didn't come home with any money to feed the kids or pay any of the bills.
I can remember my friends talking about ducking behind the sofa when the tallyman came, and the mum going ‘Shhh!’ ‘cus they ain't got the money to pay him. You would be getting paid in cash, so you'd have a wage packet. Easily spent on a Friday night for a watless man.
HK: It was called a tallyman? What was that?
AG: That would have been where you've either borrowed money from somebody in the community or you've bought goods that you're paying off weekly. My dad was very against that. He used to have a coat in the wardrobe, and he used to put money in that pocket for that bill, money in that pocket for that bill, and that's how we used to save for things that we wanted. So we never had HP or hire purchase – tick or credit, as we would call it now.
HK: You mentioned living in a half-terrace house, with your neighbours, using the same common spaces or hallways.
AG: Yeah, same outside toilet. Didn't have a bathroom, so we didn't share that. We used to have a tin bath we kept in the garden, and we used to have an ascot heater that heated up hot water. Those houses wouldn't have had hot water plumbed in. We didn’t have a boiler. There were limits to the ascot heater, so it'd be alright to have a wash but not a bath. We used to boil up the kettle and lots of pots and pans and you'd have a bath in front of the coal fire in the living room.
My mum was quite a clean freak. If we didn't bathe, we used to have a stand-up wash, which means from top to bottom, standing in a bowl. Or when you're smaller, that would have been in the kitchen sink. I remember at 11, moving into our first council house, that had a bathroom, and that being absolute luxury. No more did I have to go out in the dark being petrified and freezing. When I told my kids, they thought I was lying. ‘They only did things like that in the Victorian days, Mum. What are you telling lies for?’ They did not believe me. But it was true.
HK: What was your grandfather, Sidney Dudley Graham, like?
AG: My granddad was small – smaller in height than me. Tiny, but mighty. Ferocious. I remember him having a very strong West Indian accent, very gruff that you had to listen quite closely to make sure you understood ‘cus we were cockney kids, you know. But he never spoke like a cockney ever. He always retained that strong Bajan accent.
1925 Marriage License between Sidney Graham (‘Bachelor’ and ‘Seaman’, son of Thomas Graham ‘Carpenter’) and Emma Lousia [sic] Skingle (‘Spinster’, daughter of William Skingle ‘Stevedore’). Essex Archives Online, D/P 602/1/34 / Reproduced with permission of the Essex Record Office
HK: Did he ever talk about Barbados?
AG: Not that I can remember. But then he died when I was a teenager. I only wish now I'd have asked more questions because I know nothing. This is why it's important for people to talk about things like history, about race, about class, about what life was like. Because history is written by the winners. It's written by the powerful. Most people are not that. We all learn about the kings and queens. We don't learn about our grandmother that worked her fingers to the bone to bring up five kids, and working in a factory, and going through two World Wars and what that might have meant.
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