Julius Berwin in London Census 1851

In the 1851 Census of Jews in London I found Julius Berwin listed as a shoe maker living at #1 Great Alie Street, White Chapel. No spouse or child. Born 1832. The only Berwin listed.

What was Great Alie Street like in 1851? Was it a Jewish section of London? Who lived there, high class or low class people? He lived at #1. That seems like an important place.

I have been to London many times but this is the first record I have found of such an early settler. He may be a relation to me and possibly the forerunner of the big clan of Berwin lawyers and businessmen of today.

Thanks for your comments!

Dan Berwin Brockman
Chicago

I have found where Great Alie Street was and that part of Whitechapel was most definitely heavily Jewish, and (unless I’m very much mistaken) it was a centre of the rag trade, probably garment sweat shops and the tobacco trades, cigars and cigarettes.

There is a Wikipedia entry on Alie Street of which it states that Great Alie Street was one part and it refers to a tenterground, which was a public drying ground for textiles, which fits in with the clothing (there is now a smaller garden called Drapery Square there). There would have been quite a few shoemakers and bootmakers (I’m guessing there was a degree of specialisation because people are listed as one or the other in census returns). It was a pretty poor immigrant area, close to the docks. If you look on a current map, you will see that Alie Street still exists and it is less than a quarter of a mile North of Saint Catherine’s Dock which is next to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. Many immigrants are likely to have arrived there (the Dock, not the Tower) and the housing would have been multiple occupancy houses, probably built speculatively for a middle class that decided it could do better by letting it out by the room than living in it, so multiple families in what were supposed to be single family homes.

There was a synagogue on Great Alie Street but there were probably synagogues every couple of blocks. There were also Jewish community facilities including baths, social centres and hospitals. From memory, I would say that much of the area had been built in in early 1700s and got redeveloped in the second half of the 1800s and again in the 1930s and again from the 1990s. Some of the original housing and other building remains. My bank’s London HQ was on the corner of Prescot Street and Leman Street (previously lemon Street) until about 20 years ago, in a 1930s Art Deco building. Quite a few of my mother’s (Sephardic) family lived around there (one was a bookmaker) and it was close to Bevis Marks, the main Sephardic Synagogue but I’m guessing Great Alie Street was Ashkenazi. Although the area was mainly poor, many of the children of the poor immigrants went on to become successful professsionals, politicians, business people. One of my mother’s cousins, Samuel Gompers I believe - sorry, doing this from memory), who lived around there became President of the US cigar makers union and then of the AFL, while his cousin in London (Brommie Santen) did the same with the tobacco workers union here. Somewhere I have seen a picture (on someone else’s site) of the two of them rolling cigars in a London factory.

Does that help?

Bernard Miller on Geni