Alfred Gotts commentary continued:

When I was a young man, see, I was interested in animals, like pigeons. Any animal, don’t matter what it was, and your friends were the same, you mixed with one another. Everywhere you went there was pigeon fanciers round this district, hundreds and hundreds. I had a pair of gold – don’t see many of ‘em now- these was a variety of pigeon called a dipper, they fly for hours and hours without coming down, you know, once you feed ‘em, and they fly oh long hours, very long hours, and I had a pair of these lovely bronze coloured – they’re bronze and you look at ‘em it looks like they’re bronze. These North of England Tiplers, and I couldn’t breed with ‘em, they didn’t breed, you know what I mean, they laid eggs but they were unfertile always. They must have been inbred, a pair.

Well anyhow, a man wanted to buy ‘em off of me, and he was a baker. And he lived in this very street, Exmouth Street it was called then. Just across Stepney Way was a pub there, a well-known pub, they used to have a skittle alley out in the back, and I heard this man wanted to buy these two Tiplers so I took ‘em to him. So, I said, ‘I hear you want to buy my two Tiplers.’ He said, yes, he says, ‘I’ll buy ‘em.’ Well I says, ‘how much are you willing to give me for ‘em?’ He said ‘ one and six’. Straight out. That’s ninepence each see. I showed ‘em to him I said, ‘look, would you give me ninepence each for ‘em would you?’ So he says ‘yes’. So I undone their little basket and I let ‘em fly. I said now look, ‘you catch ‘em you can have ‘em for nothing’. Yeh, I said, you catch ’em you can have ‘em for nothing. You know when they come down, perhaps eight or nine hours afterwards. ‘Course they don’t go to nowhere else, only where they live.

Most of my friends were pigeon fanciers. If you’re a boxer you mix with boxers you see. Wherever they go you know one another, you’ve got hundreds of friends. Every tradesman knows his own, you meet one another in the merchants, like I was a shoemaker, I used to be in the grinding shops up Whitechapel, everywhere you went people sold round the East End, scores and scores of leather merchants. There’s not one there now. In Whitechapel Road, just there by the station was two. One was opposite the station, it’s a dairy now, next to the post office, that dairy was the leather merchants, Andrews and then further up was another, a big firm. Along Whitechapel Road in the back turnings was leather merchants you know. Established businesses, but now it’s all gone. Don’t know what happened to our trade, it’s all gone.

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