Former Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman, who has died age 78, discovered East End poverty and Polish ancestry in his family history when he appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? <\/p>
When he was 20, says\u00a0Strictly Come Dancing<\/em> judge Len Goodman at the start of his episode of Who Do You Think You Are?<\/em><\/a>, he couldn\u2019t have given a \u201cmonkey\u2019s armpit\u201d about his family history. The former welder, who took up ballroom dancing because it was a way to meet girls, has changed his mind and wants to learn more about his forebears.<\/p>\n His first stop is Bethnal Green in London\u2019s East End, where Len was brought up. \u201cDoors were never locked, it was lovely, it was a true community,\u201d he remembers. On a visit to his stepmother, Irene, where he\u2019s joined by son James, Len sees old photographs<\/a> and his grandparents\u2019 marriage certificate<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s enough information for Len to start to follow his maternal grandfather\u2019s family line through census records<\/a>. These reveal that his great grandfather, Thomas, was a bricklayer who had at least eight children. \u201cThis is what you got when there was no TV or radio,\u201d quips Len. Going back another generation, the census shows Thomas\u2019s parents, James Eldridge and his wife Sarah, living with 11 children.<\/p>\n But what was life like for them? Tough, suggests a meeting with Sue Donnelly, an archivist who looks after the Charles Booth<\/a> collection. Booth was a Victorian social researcher and philanthropist who\u00a0mapped London according to the living conditions of its inhabitants. In the middle of the 19th century, Bethnal Green was an area of huge poverty. It was also overcrowded, in part because so much housing was knocked down in the 1840s to make way for the railways.<\/p>\n A story of one of Len\u2019s forebears brings the conditions all too vividly alive. In 1889, as an old newspaper<\/a> report reveals, James committed suicide rather than be sent to Bethnal Green\u2019s notorious workhouse<\/a>. Even when Len was a child, he remembers, the family had a \u201cmorbid fear\u201d of the workhouse.<\/p>\n Further research suggests the fear may have been well founded. John Cecil, James Eldridge\u2019s father-in-law, ended his days in Bethnal\u2019s workhouse, dying of asthma in 1866. It\u2019s a story given added poignancy by the fact that John was once a prosperous man, a silk weaver whose father, Daniel, left him property. Sadly,\u00a0the decline of the silk industry in the 19th century\u00a0meant that John lost both his livelihood and his inheritance.<\/p>\n