The World of Hetty Jane Owen

Hetty-Jane Owen lived on until 1953, when she finally succumbed to cancer on May 1st. Queen Elizabeth II was to be crowned just a month later, and a new era would begin, indeed had already begun. Reconstructing the East End of London would take decades, and by the end of the process, luxury apartments overlooked the wharves of the Robinsons, and the life of the West India Docks was commemorated in a brand new museum. The ties of the family with these areas were by now permanently severed, and a new wave of immigrants from the old empire and new commonwealth made their way into the East End, bringing with them the traditions and culture of South East Asia, the Caribbean, Africa and elsewhere. In this at least, the East End somehow maintained its historic drawing power.

At the end of the day, the story of Hetty Jane Owen is itself a story of migration, and the break-up and reformation of communities. It began with an inexplicable chance meeting between an Irish girl of good family from County Down, and an Essex farmer exploring his options in the East End. Contacts then developed with the docklands community, populated again by migrants who had come down to East London to take advantage of the burgeoning trade empire of the British, and concluded with the injection of a blast of Calvanistic Methodism from the Welsh valleys. This last infusion brought into the family, the blood of the old Brittonic peoples, who had been subjugated so many centuries before by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, immigrants from Northern Europe, also seeking to find new opportunities in the British Isles, just as, later, French Normans, like the Hadzors were to do. And this in brief is what Hetty Jane Owen brought into the Eldridge family.