30th January 2009- We visit Hull
We took great-grandmother Edith's postcard collection, and arrived in Hull on a very cold and bitter day. We began by finding the views in Edith's postcards, and on the whole decided that 21st century street furniture left something to be desired. Many of the grand views of Hull from the early 1900s were now gone, instead a conflagration of Primark, giant TV screens and the ubiquitous signage ruled the day. However, the original dock offices hosted a Maritime Museum where we discovered to our excitement a map of “Shipping Routes before 1914”.
We explored Hull further and located Edith's house at 25 Tynemouth St, still extant, but the nearby site of her father Leopold's tailors shop is now a giant DFS store, while the Synagogue on Osborne Street has undergone a transformation into the “Heaven and Hell” club.
We then met historian Dr Nick Evans, who is a specialist on Jewish immigration to Britain between 1880 and 1914. He took us to the Victoria Dock where our great-grandparents Woolf and Gittel Beinart would have arrived from the port of Libau, Latvia after journeying from Rokiskis, Lithuania by cart and train. He described how they would have brought pickled herrings, boiled eggs and other familiar foods on their journey, and would have arrived at the dock cold, tired and disorientated, to be offloaded and put onto horse-drawn carts bound for the station. At the station, the emigrants waiting room (now a pub) would have been the place to get a hot meal and a wash before the onward train trip to London, Southampton and then a ship to South Africa.
We walked and talked, feeling so close and yet so distant from our ancestors, back to the Humber Dock where more affluent passengers from St Petersburg would have arrived, amongst them our great-great-great-grandfather Nicholas Filaratoff, and his daughter Ann. Dr Evans then left us to find our way to the station, and experience for ourselves somewhat of the sense of disorientation and confusion. This was aptly recreated by modern British town planning, and as we hurdled the ring road and dodged the multi-story car parks, I could only imagine the busy industrial dockyards that greeted my ancestors.
Finally we arrived at the station and found the platform specially reserved for emigrants. A plaque commemorates the 2.2 million people who passed through the platform, over 1000 a day onwards to new worlds.
