A Time and a Place: Limehouse, 1933

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A Time and a Place: Limehouse, 1933

IT’S October 1933 and you’re on the corner of the West India Dock Road and King Street, in the heart of London’s Docklands. On your right is a pub with a sign reading, simply, “Charlie Brown’s”. And across the road, almost in the shadow of the London & Blackwall Railway’s low-slung brick viaduct, is another pub with another sign, which also reads “Charlie Brown’s.”

How could this be? The answer lies in the story of Limehouse, a slice of dockside East London that, for more than 30 years at the start of the 20th century, was the capital’s most feverishly fetishized neighbourhood. Why? Because, since the 1880s, Limehouse had been London’s first Chinatown - and that brought with it extraordinary public interest, fuelled by prurience and racism.

At the centre of it all stood Charlie Brown, London’s most remarkable publican, widely acknowledged as the “King of Limehouse”. Charlie ran the Railway Tavern - the pub under the viaduct, and the nearest to the entrance to West India Dock itself - from 1894 until 1932, in that time becoming a figure of national note. When he died at the age of 73, the news featured on the front of both The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express. 16,000 East Londoners turned up to his funeral.

His fame was intimately linked to that of Limehouse. Chinatown, such as it was, consisted of no more than two streets - a chunk of Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, north of West India Dock Road - and 300 residents, there courtesy of the nearby docks. It was nationally famous, though, largely thanks to books by Sax Rohmer (Fu Manchu) and Thomas Burke (Limehouse Nights), which created an underworld out of a dockside community. Everyone from Hollywood stars like Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American film star, to coach parties full of gawkers came to Limehouse in search of sleaze and glamour - and they invariably dropped in at Charlie Brown’s.

Writer JB Priestly was amongst them. In 1929, he joined a group on “an orange-coloured motor coach” for what was advertised as “A Tour of London’s Underworld”. “Our party was chiefly composed of middle-aged American ladies,” he wrote in The Saturday Review. “[In Limehouse] we were not shown any Chinese gambling and opium dens … the picturesque wickedness of the place was left to our imagination.”

They were shown Charlie Brown’s, though, and what a show it must have been. Charlie was an East Ender, a stocky, twinkly-eyed former boxer, with a face to match. He had taken on the Railway Tavern, a Charrington pub, having run the Duke of Cambridge in Whitechapel, and he soon made it legendary. 

A pre-Victorian structure enlarged in 1919, Charlie Brown's was notable for its mechanical piano (“It makes more nations dance than Geneva does,” according to one Chinese observer, Peh Der Chen), its varied clientele - sailors arrived at the West India Dock, 50 yards’ away, from across the planet, and Charlie welcomed them all - and its remarkable collection of antiques and curiosities.

There was Chinese porcelain, bronze Buddhas, a carved wooden canoe, numerous statuettes, an 800-year-old Chinese ebony cabinet, a Renaissance cabinet from Florence, Sèvres porcelain figures, a statuette of Joan of Arc, prehistoric weapons, modern pistols, buffalo horns, opium pipes, stuffed fish, crocodiles and birds, a WW1 German helmet, part of a Zeppelin, and a variety of what were then called monstrosities: a calf with two heads, six legs and three tails, for example, or a dog with two heads and three eyes.

The oddest (and presumably least valuable) stuff was invariably to be found in the boisterous public bar. This was a unique space, more of a dancehall than a bar, filled with sailors from around the world. Its atmosphere is best understood, perhaps, by a clip from Anna May Wong’s 1929 film Piccadilly, which features a pub based on Charlie Brown’s (it begins at about 1.20) - although the real Charlie Brown bristled at the film’s ogreish landlord, who refuses to let a black man dance with a white woman. 

It was often assumed at the time that Charlie’s seafaring customers had given him these items, perhaps in return for a few glasses of beer, but that wasn’t entirely true. In fact, he was a committed antique hunter, known in London’s finest auction rooms, and he kept the very best stuff - Ming-dynasty china, for example, plus an autograph book full of Royals and Hollywood stars - upstairs in the dining room, available for viewing by appointment. 

It’s common now for pubs to be full of curios and keepsakes, gathered during the owner’s working life, but it was clearly more unusual then: Charlie’s, indeed, was maybe the first English pub to be decorated in this way. But he was a pioneer in many ways, from his evident marketing skill (the Oisin Rogers of his day) to his colour-blind attitude.

Unsurprising, then, that his became the West End’s favourite East End pub - although even by the time of his death the appeal of Limehouse itself was beginning to dim. Having lamented the arrival of Chinese residents, the British press then lamented the loss of Chinatown’s criminal glamour, complaining by the early 30s that it wasn’t what it had been.

Charlie Brown’s, though, remained a magnet for sailors, famed - so it was said - in every port in the world. No wonder, then, that when he died, his son (also called Charlie Brown) took the name for his own pub, the Blue Posts, across the road, having filled it with much of his father’s collection. And no surprise that Charlie’s daughter Ethel and son-in-law Tom Chandler, who ran the Railway Tavern, called their pub Charlie Brown’s, too.

The situation persisted until 1936, when growing censoriousness drove them away. Underworlds were no longer in fashion. First, the Chandlers were accused of allowing prostitutes to solicit on the premises (a charge that may or may not have been related to their refusal to pay protection money to the police). They moved on, later running the Fox and Hounds in Forest Gate. 

Then, Charlie Brown Jr was charged with the same thing a year later, and although he beat the rap - magistrates decided that he couldn’t possibly have seen the alleged “suggestive dancing” from behind the bar - he saw the writing on the wall. He went to run the Roundabout in Woodford, and made that Charlie Brown’s too. (The roundabout itself is still called Charlie Brown’s, in fact.)

The original Charlie Brown’s remained one of London’s key pub addresses until well after the war (in the sixties, it opened at 6am for dockworkers, who lined up outside for the ‘call-on’) but it was demolished in the late eighties to make way for the Limehouse Link. By then, the docks were long gone, Canary Wharf was rising out of the ruins and Chinatown had moved to Soho.

Modern-day Limehouse is a very different place. Coach parties don’t come here anymore. Limehouse Causeway is as quiet a road as you’ll find in modern London, while Charlie Brown’s and the Blue Posts, buried under one of London’s most unlovely roads, might as well have never existed. 

Most of Limehouse’s pubs, in fact, are long gone. Of what’s left, The Grapes, co-owned by Ian McKellen and with a marvellous view over the Thames, evokes an earlier era (it featured, somewhat disguised, in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend), while the Clement Attlee, a Craft Beer Co pub, is at the wrong end of Limehouse. Perhaps your best bet is the Star of The East, the last sizable Victorian pub on a stretch once full of them. It can be a lively space - but you’ll have to imagine the sailors, the monstrosities and the twinkly-eyed former boxer who kept London’s most remarkable pub. 

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Event Of The Month: London Pub Explorer Routemaster Tour

Charlie Brown’s may be long gone, but there’s still plenty of pubs to enjoy in the East End - and few better ways to enjoy than on a London Pub Explorer tour. This Saturday, a Routemaster will wend its way eastwards from the Bank of Friendship, one of North London’s best pubs. Tickets are selling fast - but if they’re all gone by the time you read this, keep your eyes peeled for other London Pub Explorer tours. 

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London Beer City is written by journalist Will Hawkes. Feel free to contact me on [email protected]. If you like what you’ve read, please share it with your friends; if you’ve been forwarded this email and enjoyed it, you can sign up here. Thanks for reading! 

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