Linda Wilkinson, ex-Head Girl at Central Foundation School in Spital Sq, remembers former Headmistress Elaine Dunford who inspired an entire generation of young women in the East End

Elaine at twenty-one

My first memory of Mrs Elaine Dunford, Headmistress of Central Foundation School for Girls in Spital Sq, was in 1963. Somehow – miraculously even – I had passed my 11 Plus in Maths but failed in English, yet nonetheless she invited me for interview.

It was a Grammar School and I had set my heart on going there, but my failure to pass part of the exam had put my acceptance in jeopardy. My mother was definitely against me attending the school since I was a nervous child and she was concerned that all that education would “worry your brain,” as she put it.

Yet, on a warm summer’s day, she and I were ushered into the school and the Headmistress’s Office. Neither mum nor I were prepared for the person we met. To date, teachers had been stuffy and sometimes scruffy, and definitely not anything like the beautiful elegant creature who welcomed us into her sanctum.

Due to my mother’s resistance, the interview did not go well. Finally, Elaine asked her to wait outside whilst she and I had a ‘private’ word. She didn’t quiz me on my English but on my hopes and aspirations for my future. She was funny, softly-spoken and I sensed she was kind too. When, some fifty-two years later, she passed away on 12th July 2015 – I felt strangely bereft.

She had not been a constant presence in my life, indeed I never saw her after I left school in 1970. Yet as I thought about my reaction, I realised that it was not Elaine herself but the way she had helped me see the world and my place in it that had been a constant. I was not alone in my feelings, as revealed by the comments on our Central Foundation School Old Girls’ Facebook page and I began to wonder where this woman, who had touched so many lives, came from.

She had been born Elaine Prevett in 1929 and attended the Fulneck Moravian School in Leeds before studying English at University College, London. This was at a time when university places were automatically given by preference to men who had missed out on education due to the First World War. Elaine was one of only two women in the intake that year. She came to our school as a student teacher and, by 1955, was the Head of the English Department. In 1961, aged thirty-one, she became the youngest headmistress in London and possibly in the entire country.

The school was small by today’s standards, at any one time there were only around four hundred and eighty of us. The intake was predominantly from the East End, with a few girls from out of London, and one third of pupils were Jewish.

Elaine once told me that we were both exhilarating and terrifying to teach, as we were all so clever that she never knew what questions we would ask. She ran a tight ship of staff and somehow managed to navigate the difficult task of maintaining harmony between older teachers and the trendy young ones of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ generation.

She was progressive in a quiet non-confrontational manner. She was a Humanist and our assemblies were not the dry-as-dust events suffered by our friends at other schools. It was not that God was never mentioned but presented in a different manner. She read us C S Lewis’ Perelandra, plus The Diary of Anne Frank, also Ruth First, and a host of other writing. At the heart of these readings always lay a moral message of fairness and caring for others.

As a teacher, Elaine was mesmeric and she insisted on teaching every class at least once a year, despite a heavy work load as Headmistress. She made Shakespeare sing in a way I have seldom encountered since.

Elaine also instigated sex education at Central Foundation School and when she overheard a group of girls, who after they been through the course were still unsure of how the ‘seed’ got to the ‘egg,’ she ushered them into the nearest empty room. Fifteen minutes later, they emerged having learnt what copulation was in no uncertain terms.

I had the privilege of being Head Girl and so I got to know another Elaine, distinct from the awesome creature wearing her gown who swept along the school corridors at speed – a more relaxed but, nonetheless, impressive character.

Some aspects of her marriage were not going well and on occasion she was upset by this. She knew I would never relay anything outside her office and that understanding went both ways. It was during the year that I began to grow up, I confronted by own limitations and she gave me the tools to overcome them. Although she never forgave me for spending the Head Girl’s prize money on a pair of boots and a handbag, rather than books.

For my part, I never told anyone until much later of the time we both had a cold and were required to sing or speak at the Christmas Service in our church of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate. Her suggestion of a snifter of brandy to loosen up the vocal chords got a little out of hand – for me at least. We survived though, and I sang Once in Royal David’s City with what I hope was aplomb.

Since Elaine’s death, stories of a more personal nature have emerged. If pupil’s family situation was particularly difficult or violent, she would had them come to live with her for periods of time. She also personally supported the families of girls who were having emotional or financial problems. Her friendships with some pupils extended long after they had left school and some were still in contact at the time of her death.

I suspect we shall never see her like again and I would like to close this eulogy with these extracts from letters that I read at her funeral. It was put together by Elspeth Parris from recollections by pupils through the years.

“In person, your elegance and poise gave us an example that we could aspire to and the intellect you imparted to us allowed us to move forward in the world in a way many of us could never have imagined.”

“You were caring when we were in trouble and, in a world which often seemed to have an attitude that children were by nature ‘bad’ and needed that ‘badness’ worked or even beaten out of them, you believed that children were basically good. It was that caring, above all else, that has given you such a firm and important place in all our hearts.”

“In a world that, for most of us, had at least some dark places, you, as teacher, as Headmistress, but above all, simply as yourself, were a beacon of light. And for that, we thank you with all our hearts.”

Elaine ended her days in Rye where she had moved with her second husband Colin Robertson. It was a love match sadly cut short by his premature death. We understand Elaine’s death at eighty-six years old from Alzheimer’s disease was peaceful. Her coffin was a woven basketwork casket festooned with lilies. Just as she had been in her life, it was elegant and apposite.

Elaine as a young woman

Elaine’s marriage to Steven Dunford

Elaine Dunford (1929-2015)

Central Foundation School for Girls, Spital Sq

A London memorial service for Elaine Dunford (Robertson) is being organised by her former pupils on October 17th - any enquiries regarding this may be directed to lindaswilkinson@gmail.com

Bishopsgate Institute is collecting a digital archive of memorabilia from Central Foundation School for Girls. If you have photographs, reports, magazines or any other material that the Institute can copy for the archive, please contact archivist stefan.dickers@bishopsgate.org.uk

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Syd Shelton’s new exhibition ROCK AGAINST RACISM organised by Autograph ABP opens at Rivington Place in Shoreditch on 2nd October and runs until 5th December

Brick Lane 1978

Photographer Syd Shelton‘s enduring fascination with the East End was sparked by a childhood visit from Yorkshire with an uncle and aunt more than fifty years ago. “My cousin was was working in a mission somewhere off Bethnal Green Rd,” Syd recalled, “It was a scary part of London then and I remember my uncle looked out of the window every few minutes to check the wheels were still on his car!”

“The day I left college in 1968, I came down to London and I have worked here ever since, photographing continuously in Hackney and Tower Hamlets,” Syd admitted to me.

In the seventies, Syd became one of the founders of Rock Against Racism, using music as a force for social cohesion, and his photographs of this era include many affectionate images of racial harmony alongside a record of the culture of racism . “It was an exciting time when, after the death of Altab Ali, the Asian community stood up to be counted and the people of the East End became militant against the National Front,” he explained, “In 1981, I got a studio in the Kingsland Rd and I only gave it up recently because the rents became too expensive.”

Syd’s portraits of East Enders span four decades yet he did not set out consciously to document social change. “I never started this as a project, it’s only when I looked back that I realised I had taken swathes of pictures of people in the East End,” he explained, “So now I come back and spend a day on the streets each week to continue.”

“I say I am not a documentary photographer, because I like to talk to people before I take my picture to see what I can coax out of them,” he qualified,“Taking photos is what makes my heart beat.”

Bethnal Green 1980

Linda, Kingsland Rd 1981

Bethnal Green 1980

Bagger, Cambridge Heath Rd 1979

Columbia Rd 1978

Jubilee St, 1979

Petticoat Lane 1981

Brick Lane 1978

Aldgate East 1979

Brick Lane 1980

Hoxton 1979

Tower Hamlets 1981

Brick Lane 1976

Jubilee St 1977

Brick Lane 1978

School Cleaners’ Strike 1978

Petticoat Lane 1978

David Widgery, Limehouse 1981

Sisters, Bow 1984

Sisters, Tower Hamlets 1988

Bow Scrapyard 1984

Ridley Rd Market 1992

Ridley Rd Market 1992

Ridley Rd Market 1995

Whitechapel 2013

Shadwell 2013

Brick Lane 2013

Dalston Lane 2013

Bethnal Green 2013

Photographs copyright © Syd Shelton

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In Wapping, where once there were hundreds of warehouses packed with exotic treasures, I had mistakenly believed there were no longer any such wonders left to be discovered – until I came upon Walter Reginald, the East End’s largest sheepskin & leather merchants, tucked away behind Machine Mart at 100, The Highway.

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I went to investigate, and we were intoxicated by the smell of leather in its infinite variety of colours and finishes, brought from all over the world and crammed into this well-ordered storehouse. This is where designers come to seek material for manufacturing coats, belts and bags, and costume-makers source fleeces and hides to dress film actors in epic mythological dramas, yet also where anyone can walk in and buy a sheepskin.

“We are London’s leather heaven,” declared Jill Saxony widening her eyes in dizzy excitement. She has presided over the company since her husband Raymond Farbey’s death in 2008, assisted by her glamorous daughters Natalie & Bianca, and supported by a loyal team of long-term staff including co-director Malcolm Proops who has been there thirty years. The prevailing atmosphere is that of a small well-run family hotel where everyone goes about their business with relaxed efficiently yet all have time to answer questions and enjoy a chat with customers, most of whom return regularly.

Walter Reginald was established seventy years ago by Walter Weiss, who had fled to this country from Austria before the war, and his company merged with Jill’s husband’s company in the eighties. Today, Jill maintains a discreet presence in the office, while Natalie & Bianca hold court out in the warehouse attending to the customers and maintaining a constant stream of good-humoured sisterly banter.

Orders are laid out across a huge table, presenting swathes of sensuous colour to please the eye while more options are brought from each corner of the warehouse to present an embarrassment of choices. There is a compelling theatre to this process of rolling and unrolling large pieces of leather, expressed in gasps of wonder and delight as unexpected colours are revealed with a dramatic flourish and customers clasp their hands in pleasure, inspired by the potential of such luxurious materials.

The spectacle of all the fleeces at Walter Reginald reminded me that my old sheepskin waistcoat might not last another winter. When I acquired it in New York City twenty years ago, the waistcoat was already thirty years old and now it has become brittle and ragged. Yet over all these winters I have come to rely upon its warmth.

To my amazement and gratitude, Natalie was able to match the colour and quality of the fleece and Bianca directed me to someone who could make a replica. So thanks to Walter Reginald and the last warehouse of wonders in Wapping, I can relax, secure in the knowledge I am ready to face the winter weather, snug in my sheepskin waistcoat for many years to come.

The staff at Walter Reginald

Natalie Saxony-Farbey, General Manager

Barry Francis, Sales Manager

Bianca Nilsson, Director

Malcolm Proops, Director, has been with the company for thirty years

Danny McMullen, Warehouse Apprentice

Bianca, Natalie and their mother Jill

My sheepskin waistcoat made from fleeces supplied by Walter Reginald

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Walter Reginald, 100 The Highway, St George-in-the-East, E1 2BX

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Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney gained rare access to Haggerston Pool which has been sitting unused for fifteen years and produced this photoessay of a journey through the building.

Readers are encouraged to attend the public meeting on Thursday 8th October at 7pm to discuss the future of the Grade II listed building at VLC Centre (next to the pool), Whiston Rd, E2 8BN, where an exhibition of competing proposals will be open to view from 6pm.

At the opening ceremony, Alderman E J Wakeling, Vice-Chair of the Baths Committee, swam a length of the pool underwater

Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney

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Our friends at Hoxton Mini Press have just published MAKERS OF EAST LONDON written by Kate Trediggen, a survey of craftsmen and women working in the East End – and today we publish a gallery of portraits of the makers by Charlotte Schreiber selected from the book

Steve McEwan makes handbells at Whitechapel Bell Foundry

Andreas Hudelmayer makes violins, violas & cellos in Clerkenwell

Daniel Harris weaves tweed in Clapton

Nicola Tassie makes ceramics in Hoxton

Ray Court makes neon signs in Walthamstow

Sebastian Tarek makes shoes in Hoxton

Katherine May works with textiles in Homerton

Walter Berwick makes spectacles at Algha Works in Hackney Wick

Richard Ince makes umbrellas at James Ince & Son in Cambridge Heath

Naomi Paul crochets lamps in Cambridge Heath

Barn the Spoon carves spoons in Bethnal Green & Stepney

Ray Rawlings makes pointe shoes at Freed of London in Well St

Kyla McCallum makes origami lamps in Bow

Casting sculpture at AB Fine Art Foundry in Poplar

Casting sculpture at AB Fine Art Foundry in Poplar

Gareth Neal makes furniture in Dalston

Graham Bignell, Beatrice Bless & Richard Ardagh at New North Press in Hoxton

James Kennedy makes bicycles in De Beauvoir

Simon Day makes furniture in Dalston

Photographs copyright © Charlotte Schreiber

Click here to buy a copy of MAKERS OF EAST LONDON direct from Hoxton Mini Press

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Today I preview the Fish Harvest Festival which will take place this year on Sunday 11th October at 11am at St Mary-At-Hill, the Billingsgate Church, Lovat Lane, Eastcheap, EC3R 8EE

Frank David, Billingsgate Porter for sixty years

Thomas à Becket was the first rector of St Mary-at-Hill in the City of London, the ancient church upon a rise above the old Billingsgate Market, where each year at this season the Harvest Festival of the Sea is celebrated – to give thanks for the fish of the deep that we all delight to eat, and which have sustained a culture of porters and fishmongers here for centuries.

The market itself may have moved out to the Isle of Dogs in 1982, but that does not stop the senior porters and fishmongers making an annual pilgrimage back up the cobbled hill where, as young men, they once wheeled barrows of fish in the dawn. For one day a year, this glorious church designed by Sir Christopher Wren is recast as a fishmonger’s shop, with an artful display of gleaming fish and other exotic ocean creatures spilling out of the porch, causing the worn marble tombstones to glisten, and imparting an unmistakeably fishy aroma to the entire building. Yet it all serves to make the men from Billingsgate feel at home, in their chosen watery element.

Frank David and Billy Hallet, two senior porters in white overalls, both took off their hats – or “bobbins” as they are called – to greet me. These unique pieces of headgear once enabled the porters to balance stacks of fish boxes upon their heads, while the brim protected them from any spillage. Frank – a veteran of eighty-four years old – who was a porter for sixty years from the age of eighteen, showed me the bobbin he had worn throughout his career, originally worn by his grandfather Jim David in Billingsgate in the eighteen nineties and then passed down by his father Tim David.

Of sturdy wooden construction, covered with canvas and bitumen, stitched and studded, these curious glossy black artefacts seemed almost to have a life of their own. “When you had twelve boxes of kippers on your head, you knew you’d got it on,” quipped Billy, displaying his “brand new” hat, made only in the nineteen thirties. A mere stripling of sixty-eight, still fit and healthy, Billy started his career at Christmas 1959 in the old Billingsgate market carrying boxes on his bobbin and wheeling barrows of fish up the incline past St Mary-at-Hill to the trucks waiting in Eastcheap. Caustic that the City of London revoked the porters’ licences after more than one hundred and thirty years, “Our traditions are disappearing,” he confided to me in the churchyard, rolling his eyes and striking a suitably elegiac Autumnal note.

Proudly attending the spectacular display of fish in the porch, I met Eddie Hill, a fishmonger who started his career in 1948. He recalled the good times after the war when fish was cheap and you could walk across Lowestoft harbour stepping from one herring boat to the next. “My father said, ‘We’re fishing the ocean dry and one day it’ll be a luxury item,’” he told me, lowering his voice, “And he was right, now it has come to pass.” Charlie Caisey, a fishmonger who once ran the fish shop opposite Harrods, employing thirty-five staff, showed me his daybook from 1967 when he was trading in the old Billingsgate market. “No-one would believe it now!” he exclaimed, wondering at the low prices evidenced by his own handwriting, “We had four people then who made living out of  just selling parsley and two who made a living out of just washing fishboxes.”

By now, the swelling tones of the organ installed by William Hill in 1848 were summoning us all to sit beneath Wren’s cupola and the Billingsgate men, in their overalls, modestly occupied the back row as the dignitaries of the City, in their dark suits and fur trimmed robes, processed to take their seats at the front. We all sang and prayed together as the church became a great lantern illuminated by shifting patterns of autumn sunshine, while the bones of the dead slumbered peacefully beneath our feet. The verses referring to “those who go down the sea in ships and occupy themselves upon the great waters,” and the lyrics of “For those in peril on the sea” reminded us of the plain reality upon which the trade is based, as we sat in the elegantly proportioned classical space and the smell of fish drifted among us upon the currents of air.

In spite of sombre regrets at the loss of stocks in the ocean and unease over the changes in the industry, all were unified in wonder at miracle of the harvest of our oceans and by their love of fish – manifest in the delight we shared to see such an extravagant variety displayed upon the slab in the church. And I enjoyed my own personal Harvest Festival of the Sea in Spitalfields for the next week, thanks to the large bag of fresh fish that Eddie Hill slipped into my hand as I left the church.

St Mary-at-Hill was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1677

Senior fishmongers from Billingsgate worked from dawn to prepare the display of fish in the church

Fishmonger Charlie Caisey’s market book from 1967

Charlie Caisey explains the varieties of fish to the curious

Gary Hooper, President of the National Federation of Fishmongers, welcomes guests to the church

Frank David and Billy Hallet, Billingsgate Porters

Frank’s “bobbin” is a hundred and twenty years old and Billy’s is “brand new” from the nineteen thirties

Billy Hallet’s porter’s badge, now revoked by the City of London

Jim Shrubb, Beadle of Billingsgate with friends

The mace of Billingsgate, made in 1669

John White (President & Alderman), Michael Welbank (Master) and John Bowman (Secretary) of the Billingsgate Ward Club

Crudgie, Sailor, Biker and Historian

Dennis Ranstead, Sidesman Emeritus and Graham Mundy, Church Warden of St Mary-at-Hill

Senior Porters and Fishmongers of Billingsgate

Frank sweeps up the parsley at the end of the service

The cobbled hill leading down from the church to the old Billingsgate Market

Frank David with the “bobbin” first worn by his grandfather Jim David at Billingsgate in the 1890s

Photographs copyright © Ashley Jordan Gordon

As part of the CRIES OF LONDON events at Bishopsgate Institute, we are staging a CHIT CHAT with traders from Billingsgate on November 4th at 7pm. Tickets are free. Click here to book yours.

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Mavis Bullwinkle at Hanbury Hall

I hope Mavis Bullwinkle will not be too embarrassed if I reveal to you that, of all those who attended the unveiling of the Huguenot Plaque yesterday, it was she whose involvement with the Hanbury Hall extends the longest. Mavis’ uncle Albert was caretaker there before the war in the thirties and Mavis confessed to me that, as child, she remembers performing plays with her cousins on the stage after-hours, when she returned from being an evacuee at the end of the war. In 1951 at the age of nineteen, Mavis joined the weekly bible class there when her own church, All Saints Spitalfields, was demolished and then she graduated to the role of Sunday School teacher which occupied her each weekend until 1981.

Mavis may not herself be a Huguenot but, as a local resident for more than eighty years, she has come to embody a certain continuity in the neighbourhood and her generosity of spirit is emblematic of the best tradition of Spitalfields. As you can imagine, there was no shortage of Huguenot descendants yesterday to remember the quarter of a million refugees who came to Britain in the seventeenth century and, in particular, the twenty thousand who came to Spitalfields.

The Hanbury Hall was originally built as a Huguenot Chapel in 1719 then extended to the street and converted as a church hall for Christ Church in 1887 and now has been newly restored with flats on the top. Yesterday’s unveiling of the plaque was the culmination of three years of Huguenots of Spitalfields festivals organised by Charlie De Wet which were attended by more than twenty thousand people and the plaque of twenty Delft tiles designed by Paul Bommer is the legacy of this project.

As we all sat in the three hundred year old hall and listened to the story of the Huguenots, how they fled their home country in fear of their lives, of the refugee camps that were created here and of the charities that raised funds, the parallel to the contemporary crisis became inescapable. At the conclusion of the three year Huguenots of Spitafields festival which has brought light to the unexpected contributions of the Huguenots to British society, I think we all recognised that as one story ended another was just beginning.

Paul Bommer’s Huguenot Plaque

Charlie de Wet, Director of the Huguenot Festival for the last three years

Rev Andy Rider, Rector of Christ Church, leads the service of thanksgiving

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Today I publish my interview with Roland Collins as a tribute to the late-blooming artist who drew Spitalfields and the East End in the fifties and died on Sunday at the fine old age of ninety-seven years

Roland Collins

Ninety-seven year old artist Roland Collins lived with his wife Connie in a converted sweetshop south of the river that he crammed with singular confections, both his own works and a lifetime’s collection of ill-considered trifles. Curious that I had come from Spitalfields to see him, Roland reached over to a cabinet and pulled out the relevant file of press cuttings, beginning with his clipping from the Telegraph entitled ‘The Romance of the Weavers,’ dated 1935.

“Some time in the forties, I had a job to design a lamp for a company at 37  Spital Sq” he revealed, as if he had just remembered something that happened last week,“They were clearing out the cellar and they said, ‘Would you like this big old table?’ so I took it to my studio in Percy St and had it there forty years, but I don’t think they ever produced my lamp. I followed that house for a while and I remember when it came up for sale at £70,000, but I didn’t have the money or I’d be living there now.”

As early as the thirties, Roland visited the East End in the footsteps of James McNeill Whistler, drawing the riverside, then, returning after the war, he followed the Hawksmoor churches to paint the scenes below. “I’ve always been interested in that area,” he admitted wistfully, “I remember one of my first excursions to see the French Synagogue in Fournier St.”

Of prodigious talent yet modest demeanour, Roland Collins was an artist who quietly followed his personal enthusiasms, especially in architecture and all aspects of London lore, creating a significant body of paintings while supporting himself as designer throughout his working life. “I was designing everything,” he assured me, searching his mind and seizing upon a random example, “I did record sleeves, I did the sleeve for Decca for the first Long-Playing record ever produced.”

From his painting accepted at the Royal Academy in 1937 at the age of nineteen, Roland’s pictures were distinguished by a bold use of colour and dramatic asymmetric compositions that revealed a strong sense of abstract design. Absorbing the diverse currents of British art in the mid-twentieth century, he refined his own distinctive style at his studio in Percy St – at the heart of the artistic and cultural milieu that defined Fitzrovia in the fifties. “I used to take my painting bag and stool, and go down to Bankside.” he recalled fondly, “It was a favourite place to paint, especially the Old Red Lion Brewery and the Shot Tower before it was pulled down for the Festival of Britain – they called it the ‘Shot Tower’ because they used to drop lead shot from the top into water at the bottom to harden them.”

Looking back over his nine decades, surrounded by the evidence of his achievements, Roland was not complacent about the long journey he had undertaken to reach his point of arrival – the glorious equilibrium of his life when I met him.

“I come from Kensal Rise and I was brought up through Maida Vale.” he told me, “On my father’s side, they were cheesemakers from Cambridgeshire and he came to London to work as a clerk for the Great Central Railway at Marylebone. Because I was good at Art at Kilburn Grammar School, I went to St Martin’s School of Art in the Charing Cross Rd studying life drawing, modelling, design and lettering. My father was always very supportive. Then I got a job in the studio at the London Press Exchange and I worked there for a number of years, until the war came along and spoiled everything.

I registered as a Conscientious Objector and was given light agricultural work, but I had a doubtful lung so nothing much materialised out of it. Back in London, I was doing a painting of the Nash terraces in Regent’s Park when a policeman came along and I was taken back to the station for questioning. I discovered that there were military people based in those terraces and they wanted to know why I was interested in it.

Eventually, my love of architecture led me to a studio at 29 Percy Studio where I painted for the next forty years, after work and at weekends. I freelanced for a while until I got a job at the Scientific Publicity Agency in Fleet St and that was the beginnings of my career in advertising, I obviously didn’t make much money and it was difficult work to like.”

Yet Roland never let go of his personal work and, once he retired, he devoted himself full-time to his painting, submitting regularly to group shows but reluctant to launch out into solo exhibitions – until reaching the age of ninety.

In the next two years, he enjoyed a sell-out show at a gallery in Sussex at Mascalls Gallery and an equally successful one in Cork St at Browse & Darby. Suddenly, after a lifetime of tenacious creativity, his long-awaited and well-deserved moment arrived, and I consider my self privileged to have witnessed the glorious apotheosis of Roland Collins.

Brushfield St, Spitalfields, 1951-60 (Courtesy of Museum of London)

Columbia Market, Columbia Rd (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St George in the East, Wapping, 1958 (Courtesy of Electric Egg)

Mechanical Path, Deptford (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

Fish Barrow, Canning Town (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St Michael Paternoster Royal, City of London (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St Anne’s, Limehouse (Courtesy of Browse & Darby)

St John, Wapping, 1938

St John, Wapping, 1938

Spark’s Yard, Wapping

Images copyright © Roland Collins

Over recent months, I have been collaborating with designer DAVID PEARSON to produce two books to delight you through the forthcoming winter months. Today, I invite you to join me in celebrating the publication of the first of these, BADDELEY BROTHERS at St Bride Printing Library, Fleet St, on October 15th at 7pm, with CRIES OF LONDON to follow in November.

Specialist printers & envelope makers, Baddeley Brothers have been established in the East End since the eighteen-twenties, yet before this they were clockmakers in the North of England since the sixteen-fifties, and it has been my great delight to write an account of the dramatic story spanning four centuries of how Baddeleys created one of today’s foremost printing companies. In six chapters, I trace the emergence of the modern culture of design and print from the journeyman clockmakers, die sinkers, letter cutters, engravers and artisans of the eighteenth century right up until the present day through the story of one family.

David Pearson has worked with Baddeley Brothers to compose typographic samples exploiting their astonishing bravura printing techniques, engraving, embossing, foiling, debossing etc which will be tipped-in to all the copies of this beautiful book. Lucinda Rogers has done series of ink drawings of the printers and envelope makers at work at Baddeley Brothers factory in London Fields. Adam Dant has drawn a fold-out map which shows the locations of Baddeleys’ print works around the City of London and East End in the last two hundred years.

Please come along to ST BRIDE INSTITUTE, off Fleet St, on THURSDAY 15th OCTOBER at 7pm for drinks and book signing, as well as the opportunity to try working an embossing machine and make a your own sample to take home.

NUMBERS ARE LIMITED SO PLEASE CLICK TO REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE TICKET

Jim Roche at the Heidelberg platen press

Gita Patel & Wendy Arundel and-folding & glueing envelopes

Gary Cline setting up the envelope machine

Jon Webster cutting a force

Working a manual die-stamping machine

Paul King running a four-colour crest on the auto die-stamping press

Magnifying glass and tools

Jon Webster die-stamping a crest

Danny Ede running the foiling machine

Typographic designs by David Pearson and drawings by Lucinda Rogers

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More than ten years have passed since my father died at this time of year, yet thoughts of mortality enter my mind as the nights begin to draw in and I face the spiritual challenge of another long dark winter ahead. So Luke Clennell’s splendid DANCE OF DEATH engravings inspired by Hans Holbein suit my mordant sensibility at this season.

First published in 1825 as the work of ‘Mr Bewick’, they have only recently been identified for me as the work of Thomas Bewick’s apprentice Luke Clennell by historian Dr Ruth Richardson.

In recent weeks, I have presented his Cries of London and London Melodies in these pages, ascribed to their creator for the first time, and I am delighted to draw attention to the inspired work of this unjustly neglected artist whose engravings I am including in my CRIES OF LONDON published in November.

The Desolation

The Queen

The Pope

The Cardinal

The Elector

The Canon

The Canoness

The Priest

The Mendicant Friar

The Councillor or Magistrate

The Astrologer

The Physician

The Merchant

The Wreck

The Swiss Soldier

The Charioteer or Waggoner

The Porter

The Fool

The Miser

The Gamesters

The Drunkards

The Beggar

The Thief

The Newly Married Pair

The Husband

The Wife

The Child

The Old Man

The Old Woman

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Luke Clennell’s London Melodies

Luke Clennell’s Cries of London

Today I present an extract from my new book BADDELEY BROTHERS published on 15th October

Observe all the diners looking snappy and quite resplendent in their finery at a fancy dinner in 1956 to celebrate the centenary of Baddeley Brothers. Envelope makers, die sinkers and engravers present themselves to the camera with dignity and poise. Some of these people had stayed with the company, supplying commercial stationery to the City of London throughout the war, while others had returned afterwards as veterans to make a new start.

Baddeley Brothers’ factory in Moor Lane was destroyed in the Blitz of 1940 but, by 1946, David Baddeley had acquired the lease to 92 & 94 Paul St in Shoreditch, permitting the print works to leave temporary premises in Bishopsgate, opposite Liverpool St Station, where they had operated during hostilities. Like others in the company, David Baddeley never spoke about his service career, yet he had commanded a squadron of North Sea minesweepers on the East Coast off Harwich. They were old steam trawlers run by skippers who were barely susceptible to naval disciple yet he had to lead them into mined waters.

Thus, returning to the world of wholesale commercial stationery, David Baddeley did not suffer fools gladly and expected his jobs to take priority in the works. A few years later when his nephews, David & Roger Pertwee, walked into this building, most of the working practices and the arrangement of the workplace still followed those established in the nineteenth century. Although we cannot go back in time to see it for ourselves, David & Roger were able to describe for me what they discovered inside.

On the top floor sat a row of seven or eight engravers working at their benches, each with an anglepoise light and a magnifying glass. These engravers each had different specialities – one did various forms of script, especially copperplate, another did the different range of lettering styles for titles, another worked the pantograph which scaled letters up and down from the designs onto the metal plate, another did ‘ordinary’ lettering for addresses and lists of directors, and there was an ‘artist’ who could do preliminary drawings and illuminations, graphic lettering and elaborate calligraphic styles. They all took great pride in their work.

Ken Roddis, the foreman engraver, was in his sixties then. He always wore a suit and tie, and had joined the company at fourteen in 1920. Ken organised who was to going to engrave which part of a complete design according to their best skills. Everyone was paid by piecework  - so much per letter – and Roger always understood from Ken that this was how they got through the Depression of the thirties, by being careful to share out the work fairly so that everyone got enough to live.

Below the engravers, on the third floor, they did edge-gilding for cards, interleaving them with fine tissue and packed them. On the second floor, there were die-stamping machines and a hand die-stamping press, as well as litho and copperplate printing, and, on the first floor, there were offices divided by glass partitions. This was where you found Stan Woolley, the office manager, who had served in the Navy with David Baddeley and been recruited to Baddelely Brothers at the end of the war.

On the same floor, Charlie Ewin ran the litho department for fifty years. “He lived at the top of Shoreditch High Street on the right hand side by the church,” David Pertwee remembered, “Charlie’d say to me, ‘Come and have a drink on Saturday night,’ and I’d say, ‘Alright Charlie!’ and I’d have a fantastic evening. On Monday, I’d ask him, ‘Did you have a good weekend, Charlie?’ and, ’Yes,’ he’d say, ‘I picked a fight with the wife because she wouldn’t go out with me, so I stayed out the whole time the pubs were open.” Then I’d see him hanging onto the railings by Shoreditch Church to find his way home.”

“He used to take all the high pressure jobs like menus and table plans,” Roger added, “and every so often it would get too much for him and the whole lot would go up in the air. He was a great friend actually. He was never ever late, and you’d never notice he’d been on the tonk.”

When David Pertwee first arrived in 1956, Bill Steer was the factory manager, running both premises. “He was a small man, a bit like a ferret and a little brow beaten by my uncle I think,” David admitted to me,”My uncle relied upon him but as he grew older, he grew less reliable and there were three pubs in between our Paul St and Tabernacle St factories. Even so, he was a very good long-standing employee.”

With the development of trade in the City of London, extra capacity was required for modern machines and more room for envelope-makers to work. Thus, another factory in Tabernacle St was acquired in 1952, less than five minutes walk away. Most significantly, it had a coke furnace in the basement where dies could be softened and hardened, which meant that this essential part of the work need no longer be sent out. One of Roger’s first jobs was to order the coke for the furnace which was fired up every Tuesday and Thursday. On those days, there was always a film of smoke and an acrid smell – the whiff of cyanide – which told Roger that the hardening of dies was in progress.

At first, a rubbing was taken of the die as it was when it was received. Engraved dies are hardened with cyanide but equally they can be softened by exposure to heat. Once this is done, the original design may be scraped out and re-engraved before hardening again, and this process can be repeated over and over as required until the die becomes too worn and needs replacing.

The dies to be hardened were put into steel boxes and the cyanide was heated in a steel pot. Then the dies would be dipped in it for a second and cooled in a bucket of water afterwards. This achieved a surface of hardened steel and they were known as ‘case-hardened.’

To soften the dies again, they were put into a steel box known as a ‘saggar’, packed with layers of charcoal and sealed with fine clay, before being left in the furnace overnight. Thus the hardening of dies always came first and the softening was done at the end of the day.

The basement was also used for envelope-cutting, for guillotining and as a paper warehouse. The paper was delivered down a chute. The men would open up the cellar door and reams of paper would be thrown down from the lorry and stacked away. Roger remembers how, in the sixties, the men would stand under the trapdoor and watch the young women going by in their miniskirts. “Hackney girls started off working in overalls,” Roger confided to me, “but once they got the chance they started dressing up, as factory spaces around Old St were converted to offices and clerical work replaced manufacturing.”

On the ground and first floors were the new automatic die-stamping machines with five or six men minding them on each floor. Yet in spite of this new mechanisation, there was still Charlie Davis, an experience hand die-stamper who had been with Baddeley Brothers for his whole working life. If a crest consisted of five or six colours that had to be in register, his skill was such that, if you wanted two hundred and fifty copies, it was quicker for him to do it than a machine.

The second floor and third floors were a female preserve ruled by Mary Brandon who ran the department, as successor to the legendary Mrs Carter, with five or six women devoted to envelope-making and hand-folding. Mary Brandon came from another envelope-maker in Croydon who went out of business and was an expert at making any sort of envelope asked of her, whether a tissue-lined or gusseted or any other style.

Violet Rogers, who worked at Baddeley Brothers into her seventies and eventually retired in 1993, still talked about the bomb in December 1940. “We all turned up to work the next day but we could only get to the end of Moor Lane,” she remembered, “and they told us we couldn’t get any further.”

As the photographs of Baddeley Brothers’ dinners reveal, the opportunity for regular celebration was not neglected as the age of austerity passed away. “David Baddeley may have been a blunt Victorian,” Roger confessed to me,”but he was good at talking and mixing with people and, every year or so, he’d say, ’It’s time we had a firm’s dinner’ and we’d have it in one of the large eateries in Copthall Avenue in the City.”

Held on a Friday night, these dinners were formal affairs done in style with engraved invitations, at which employees dressed up and brought their husbands and wives, all the pensioners came back for a reunion, and speeches and votes of thanks were made. “It was a bit stilted to start with, but then after a couple of drinks people relaxed and had fun,” Roger recalled fondly, “I think everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and there was a free bar which was open afterwards until either it was getting out of hand or people went home.”

The responsibility fell upon David & Roger to stay to the end of these parties. “There would be a bit of a sing song, and there was always one or two who went the extra mile, but no fighting, we all behaved ourselves,” David assured me.

“As a junior director, I was essentially an errand boy,” Roger concluded, “but it was apparent to me that the company was getting going in the sixties and had regained the momentum it lost in the war.”

Charlie Davis, hand die-stamping

David Bates working a proofing press

Graham Donaldson, engraver

Graham Donaldson scrutinises his work

Mary Brandon folding envelopes by hand

Alan Reeves, envelope maker

Baddeley Brothers at IPEX (International Print Exhibition) 1960

BADDELEY BROTHERS will be launched at St Bride Printing Library, Fleet St, on Thursday October 15th at 7pm

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Upon the Origins of Baddeley Brothers

JJ Baddeley, Die Sinker & Lord Mayor

Sitting on a pontoon before the Millennium Mills in Royal Victoria Dock, with her proud crimson breast evoking the bird that is her namesake, SS Robin is the oldest complete steam coaster in the world. Constructed just a few miles away by Mackenzie, MacAlpine & Co at Orchard Yard, Bow, in 1890 alongside her sister ship SS Rook, she was fitted out in East India Dock and equipped with an engine in Dundee. There were once fifteen hundred of these vessels chugging up and down the coastline of the British Isles, competing with the railway to deliver bulk cargoes such as grain, coal, iron ore and china clay – but today only SS Robin survives to tell the story of this lost maritime endeavour.

Beneath an occluded sky with rain blowing in the wind, I visited SS Robin yesterday within the shadow of Spiler’s derelict Millennium Mills, like some great cliff looming overhead. Repair to the hull of the steam coaster reveals the damage that time has wrought, yet lines of sturdy nineteenth century rivets, once heated and thrown by children, remain visible alongside modern repairs. Of squat design and robust workmanship, these ships were only designed to withstand ten years of use, and SS Robin was sold off to a Spanish owner in 1900 but continued to work the Altantic coastal route from Bilbao for a further seventy-four years, under the guise of ‘Maria.’

“She is as significant a vessel as Cutty Sark,” Matt Friday, who works for the trust set up to care for SS Robin, assured me, “She is just twenty years younger and the last of her class.” SS Robin was due to be broken up in September 1974 but instead, once her final cargo was unloaded in Bilbao in May of that year, she was purchased by the Maritime Trust and steamed back up the English Channel and the Thames to London in June, where she was moored at St Katharine Dock.

In spite of major restoration, SS Robin fell into neglect and, by 1991, had been moved down river to East India Dock. Sold for the sum of just one pound, she was used as a floating gallery for several years until, as this century dawned, it became clear more restoration work was required and the old vessel was no longer seaworthy. 80% of her steelwork would need to be replaced to make her shipshape again and so SS Robin was transferred permanently to a pontoon which permits retention of the original fabric.

When I visited yesterday, a thick layer of asphalt was being removed from the deck – formerly installed as a waterproofing agent, it had become a medium for water to enter the structure. Walking around the pontoon, the elegant sculptural form of the hull was magnificent to behold, while down below, the original cylinders and pistons of the triple expansion engine remain. In spite of its modest origin, this is a vessel of distinguished design and sitting in the vast emptiness of Royal Victoria Dock, once the largest working dock in the world, SS Robin – the last of the ‘dirty British coasters’ – provides the necessary catalyst to evoke the history and meaning of this extraordinary place.

SS Robin in Lerwick (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)

SS Robin in River Douro, Porto, under the guise of ‘Maria’ (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)

Undergoing restoration in the seventies (Courtesy of SS Robin Trust)

At St Katharine Docks in the eighties (Courtesy of Ambrose Greenway)

SS Robin’s neighbour in Royal Victoria Dock is a lightship

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

from Cargoes by John Masefield

Learn more from SS Robin Trust

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Aboard Thames Sailing Barge Repertor

Among the Lightermen

Bobby Prentice, Waterman & Lighterman

On the day of the opening of Sarah Gavron’s film SUFFRAGETTE which dramatises the contribution of women in the East End to the Suffrage Movement, we present Researcher Vicky Stewart & Designer Adam Tuck‘s map of some key events in the struggle in Bethnal Green, Roman Rd & Bow

Click to enlarge and see the map in the detail

The closure of W F Arber & Co Ltd, after one hundred and seventeen years in the Roman Rd, inspired me to look further at Gary Arber’s story of his grandmother, Emily Arber, organising the free printing of handbills and posters for the Suffragette movement. Just what was going on locally, who were involved, and how were these Suffragettes organised?

Nothing prepared me for what I discovered. My knowledge of Suffragette activity was limited to stories of upper middle class ladies marching behind Mrs Pankhurst, waving ‘Votes for Women’ banners, being imprisoned, getting force-fed, and then eventually securing the vote. In part this was true – Mrs Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel believed middle class women had the education and influence to bring about the necessary change, but Sylvia disagreed and insisted it was only direct action by working class women that could win the vote.

In 1912, Sylvia Pankhurst came to Bow as representative of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to campaign for local MP George Lansbury, who had resigned his seat in parliament to fight a by-election on the issue of votes for women. Although Lansbury lost the election, he continued to support Sylvia who decided to stay in the East End and do everything in her power to carry on the fight – not only to champion the cause of Suffrage but also to challenge injustice and alleviate suffering wherever she could.

She opened her first WSPU Headquarters in Bow Rd in 1912 but moved to Roman Rd when forming the East London Federation, whose policy was to “combine large-scale public demonstrations with public militancy… [to attract] immediate arrest.”

In January 1914, Christabel asked Sylvia to change the name of the ELF and separate from the WSPU, and the organisation became the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) with new headquarters in Old Ford Rd.

What amazes me about this story is the number of women – often with active support of husbands or sons – who, despite harsh poverty and large families, gave huge support to Sylvia and the campaign. They risked assault and often were beaten by policemen at rallies, on marches and at meetings. They risked being sent to Holloway and subjected to force-feeding. They risked the anger and abuse of those who did not support Women’s’ Suffrage.

So who were these women and what do we know of them? Below you can read extracts from Sylvia Pankhurst’s books, ‘The Suffragette Movement’ and ‘The Home Front’, which locate their actions in the East End.

- Vicky Stewart

6

Victoria Park “On Sunday, May 25th 1913, was held ‘Women’s May Day’ in East London. The Members of Bow, Bromley, Poplar, and neighbouring districts had prepared for it for many weeks past and had made hundreds of almond branches, which were carried in a great procession with purple, white and green flags, and caps of Liberty flaunting above them from the East India Dock gates by winding ways, to Victoria Park. A vast crowd of people – the biggest ever seen in East London – assembled  …..  to hear the speakers from twenty platforms.”

12

288 Old Ford Rd was home to Israel Zangwill, political activist and strong supporter of Sylvia and the Suffragette movement.

13

304 Old Ford Rd was home to Mrs Fischer where meetings were held .

7

Old Ford Rd was the route taken by the Suffragettes May Day processions to Victoria Park when they met with violence from the police at the gates and suffered many injuries.

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8

400 Old Ford Rd became the third headquarters of the East London Federation of Suffragettes  in 1914. A Women’s Hall was built on land behind which was used for a cost-price restaurant which provided nutritious meals for a pittance to women suffering from the huge rise in food prices in the early months of the war.

9

438 Old Ford Rd,  The Mother’s Arms The ELFS set up another creche and baby clinic on this street, staffed by trained nurses and developed upon Montessori lines. This was housed in a converted pub called The Gunmaker’s Arms, whose name was changed to The Mother’s Arms.

1

Roman Rd “I decided to take the risk of opening a permanent East End headquarters in Bow … Miss Emerson and I went down there together one frosty Friday morning in February to hunt for an office. The sun was like a red ball in the misty, whitey-grey sky. Market stalls, covered with cheerful pink and yellow rhubarb, cabbages, oranges and all sorts of other interesting things, lined both sides of the narrow Roman Rd. ‘The Roman’ , as they call it, was crowded with busy kindly people. I had always liked Bow. That morning my heart warmed to it for ever.”

3

159 Roman Rd, (now 459) Arber & Co Ltd, Printing Works where Suffragette handbills were printed under the supervision of Emily Arber.

5

152 Roman Rd In 1912, tickets were available from this house, home of Mrs Margaret Mitchell, second-hand clothes dealer, for a demonstration in Bow Palace with Mrs Pankhurst and George Lansbury.

10 & 11

45 Norman Rd (now Norman Grove) A toy factory was opened in October 1914 to provide women with an income whilst their husbands were at War. They were paid a living wage and could put their children into the nursery further down the road.

4

Roman Rd Market The East London Federation of Suffragettes ran a stall in the market, decorated with posters and selling their newspaper, The Women’s Dreadnought – a “medium through which working women, however unlettered, might express themselves and find their interests defended.”

15

103 St Stephen’s Rd was home to George Lansbury and his family.

16

St Stephen’s Rd “On November 5th 1913, on my way to a Meeting to inaugurate the People’s Army, I happened to call at Mr Lansbury’s house in St Stephen’s Rd. The house was immediately surrounded by detectives and policemen and there seemed no possibility of mistake. But the people of Bow, on hearing of the trouble, came flocking out of the Baths where they had assembled. In the confusion that ensued the detectives dragged Miss Daisy Lansbury off in a taxi, and I went free.

When the police authorities realised their mistake, and learnt that I was actually speaking at the Baths, they sent hundreds of men to take me, but though they met the people in the Roman Rd as they came from the Meeting I escaped. Miss Emerson was again struck on the head, this time by a uniformed constable, and fell to the ground unconscious. Many other people were badly hurt. The people replied with spirit. Two mounted policemen were unhorsed and many others were disabled.”

19

28 Ford Rd “The members had begged me, if ever I should be imprisoned under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, to come down to them in the East End, in order that they might protect me, they would not let me be taken back to prison without a struggle as the others had been, they assured me.

On the night of my arrest Zelie Emerson had pressed into my hand an address: ‘Mr and Mrs Payne, 28 Ford Rd, Bow.’ Thither I was now driven in a taxi with two wardresses. As the cab slowed down perforce among the marketing throngs in the Roman Road, friends recognised me, and rushed to the roadway, cheering and waving their hands. Mrs Payne was waiting for me on the doorstep. It was a typical little East End house in a typical little street, the front door opening directly from the pavement, with not an inch of ground to withdraw its windows from the passers-by. I was welcomed by the kindest of kind people, shoemaking home-workers, who carried me in with the utmost tenderness.

They had put their double bed for me in the little front parlour on the ground floor next the street, and had tied up the door knocker. For three days they stopped their work that I might not be disturbed by the noise of their tools. Yet there was no quiet. The detectives, notified of my release, had arrived before me. A hostile crowd collected. A woman flung one of the clogs she wore at the wash-tub at a detectives head. The ‘Cats’, as a hundred angry voices called them, retired to the nearby public-houses, there were several of these havens within a stone’s throw, as there usually are in the East End.

Yet, even though the detectives were out of sight, people were constantly stopping before the house to discuss the Movement and my imprisonment. Children gathered, with prattling treble. If anyone called at the house, or a vehicle stopped before it, detectives at once came hastening forth, a storm of hostile voices. Here indeed was no peace. My hosts carried me upstairs to their own bedroom, at the back of the house, hastily prepared, a small room, longer but scarcely wider than a prison cell – my home when out of prison for many months to come.  (…)

In that little room I slept, wrote, interviewed the Press and personalities of all sorts, and presently edited a weekly paper. Its walls were covered with a cheap, drab paper, with an etching of a ship in full sail, and two old fashioned colour prints of a little girl at her morning and evening prayers. From the window by my bed, I could see the steeple of St Stephen’s Church and the belfry of its school, a jumble of red-tiled roofs, darkened by smoke and age, the dull brick of the walls and the new whitewash of some of the backyards in the next street.

Our colours were nailed to the wall behind my bed, and a flag of purple, white and green was displayed from an opposite dwelling, where pots of scarlet geraniums hung on the whitewashed wall of the yard below, and a beautiful girl with smooth, dark hair and a white bodice would come out to delight my eyes in helping her mother at the wash-tub. The next yard was a fish curers’. An old lady with a chenille net on her grey hair would be passing in and out of the smoke-house, preparing the sawdust fires. A man with his shirt sleeves rolled up would be splitting herrings, and another hooking them on to rods balanced on boards and packing-cases, till the yard was filled, and gleamed with them like a coat of mail. Close by, tall sunflowers were growing, and garments of many colours hung out to dry. Next door to us they bred pigeons and cocks and hens, which cooed and crowed and clucked in the early hours. Two doors away a woman supported a paralysed husband and a number of young children by making shirts at 8d a dozen. Opposite, on the other side of Ford St, was a poor widow with a family of little ones. The detectives endeavoured to hire a room from her, that they might watch me unobserved. “It will be a small fortune to you while it lasts!” they told her. Bravely she refused with disdain, “Money wouldn’t do me any good if I was to hurt that young woman!” The same proposal was made and rejected at every house in Ford Rd.

Flowers and presents of all kinds were showered on me by kindly neighbours. One woman wrote to say that she did not see why I should ever go back to prison when every woman could buy a rolling pin for a penny.”

2

321 Roman Rd, Second Headquarters of the East London Federation “We decided to take a shop and house at 321 Roman Rd at a weekly rental of 14s 6d a week. It was the only shop to let in the road. The shop window was broken right across, and was only held together by putty. The landlord would not put in new glass, nor would he repair the many holes in the shop and passage flooring because he thought we would only stay a short time. But all such things have since been done.

Plenty of friends at once rallied round us. Women …. came in and scrubbed the floors and cleaned the windows. Mrs Wise, who kept the sweetshop next door, lent us a trestle table for a counter and helped us to put up purple, white and green flags. Her little boy took down the shutters for us every morning, and put them up each night, and her little girls often came in to sweep.”

20

Bow Rd – Sylvia described it as ‘dingy Bow Rd.’

25

The George Lansbury Memorial – Elected to parliament in 1910, he resigned his seat in 1912 to campaign for women’s suffrage, and was briefly imprisoned after publicly supporting militant action.

George Lansbury

26

The Minnie Lansbury Clock is at the Bow Rd near the junction with Alfred St. Minnie Lansbury was the daughter-in-law of George Lansbury, and very actively supported the campaign and was in Holloway. She died at the age of thirty-two.

Minnie Lansbury is congratulated on her way to be arrested at Poplar Town Hall

14

Bow Rd Police Station The police were horrifyingly brutal towards Suffragettes when on demonstrations and then, once arrested and tried, they would often receive excessively harsh prison sentences. Hunger striking was in protest against the government’s failure to treat them as political prisoners.

Mrs Parsons told Asquith - “We do protest when we go along in processions that suddenly without a word of warning we are pounced upon by detectives and bludgeoned and women are called names by cowardly detectives, when nobody is about. There was one old lady of seventy who was with us the other day, who was knocked to the ground and kicked. She is a shirtmaker and is forced to work on a machine and she has been in the most awful agony. These men are not fit to help rule the country while we have no say in the matter.” (From the Woman’s Dreadnought.)

Under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ hunger strikers were released when their lives was in danger so as to recuperate before returning to finish their sentences. They told tales of dreadful brutality during force-feeding in Holloway.

17 & 18

13 Tomlin’s Grove “When the procession turned out of Bow Rd into Tomlin’s Grove they found that the street lamps were not lighted and that a strong force of police were waiting in the dark before the house of Councillor Le Manquais. Just as the people at the head of the procession reached the house, the policemen closed around them and arrested Miss Emerson, Miss Godfrey and seven men, two of whom were not in the procession, but were going home to tea in the opposite direction.

At the same moment twenty mounted police came riding down upon the people from the far end of Tomlin’s Grove, and twenty more from the Bow Rd. The people were all unarmed. … There were cries and shrieks and people ran panic-stricken into the little front gardens of the houses in the Grove.

But wherever the people stopped the police hunted them away. I was told that an old woman who saw the police beating the people in her garden was so much upset that she fell down in a fit and died without regaining consciousness. A boy of eighteen was so brutally kicked and trampled on that he had to be carried to the infirmary for treatment. A publican who was passing was knocked down and kicked and one of his ribs was broken. Even the bandsmen were not spared. The police threw their instruments over the garden walls. The big drummer was knocked down and so badly used that he is still on the list for sick insurance benefit. Mr Atkinson, a labourer, was severely handled and was then arrested. In the charge room Inspector Potter was said to have blacked his eye.”

21

198 Bow Rd was the first Headquarters of the First Headquarters of the East London Federation, 1912. When Sylvia first arrived in Bow she rented an empty baker’s shop at 198 Bow Rd. She used a platform to paint “VOTES FOR WOMEN” in gold across the frontage and addressed the crowds from here.

22

The Obelisk, Bromley High St “On the following Monday, February 17th (1913) we held a meeting at the Obelisk, a mean-looking monument in a dreary, almost unlighted open space near Bow Church.

Our platform, a high, uncovered cart, was pitched against the dark wall of a dismal council school in the teeth of a bitter wind. Already a little knot of people had gathered; women holding their dark garments closely about them, shivering and talking of the cold, four or five police constables and a couple of Inspectors. We climbed into the cart and watched the crowd growing, the men and women turning from the footpaths to join the mass. … I said I knew it to be a hard thing for men and women to risk imprisonment in such a neighbourhood, where most of them were labouring under the steepest economic pressure, yet I pleaded for some of the women of Bow to join us in showing themselves prepared to make a sacrifice to secure enfranchisement …

… After it was over Mrs Watkins, Mrs Moore, Miss Annie Lansbury, and I broke an undertaker’s window. Willie Lansbury, George Lansbury’s eldest son, who had promised his wife to go to prison instead of her because she had tubercular tendencies and could not leave their little daughter only two years old, broke a window in the Bromley Public Hall.

I was seized by two policemen, three other women were seized. We were dragged, resisting, along the Bow Rd, the crowd cheering and running with us. We were sent to prison without an option of fine.

There were four others inside with me: Annie Lansbury and her brother Will, pale, delicate Mrs. Watkins, a widow struggling to maintain herself by sweated sewing-machine work, and young Mrs. Moore. A moment later little Zelie Emerson was bundled in, flushed and triumphant – she had broken the window of the Liberal Club.

That was the beginning of Militancy in East London. Miss Emerson, Mrs Watkins and I decided to do the hunger-strike, and hoped that we should soon be out to work again. But although Mrs Watkins was released after ten days, Miss Emerson and I were forcibly fed, and she was kept in for seven weeks although she had developed appendicitis, and I for five. When we were once free we found that we were too ill to do anything at all for some weeks.

But we need not have feared that the work would slacken without us. A tremendous flame of enthusiasm had burst forth in the East End. Great meetings were held, and during our imprisonment long processions marched eight times the six miles to cheer us in Holloway, and several times also to Brixton goal, where Mr Will Lansbury was imprisoned. The people of East London, with Miss Dalgleish to help them, certainly kept the purple, white and green flag flying …”

23

Bromley Public Hall, Bow Rd “On February 14th [1913] … we held a meeting in the Bromley Public Hall, Bow Road, and from it led a procession round the district. …To make sure of imprisonment, I broke a window in the police station … Daisy Lansbury was accused of catching a policeman by the belt, but the charge was dismissed. Zelie Emerson and I went to prison … .and began the hunger and thirst strike … On release we rushed back to the shop, found Mrs Lake scrubbing the table, and it crowded with members arranging to march to Holloway Prison to cheer us next day.”

24

Bow Palace, 156 Bow Rd was built at the rear of the Three Cups public house and had a capacity of two thousand.

“One Sunday afternoon I spoke in Bow Palace and marched openly with the people of Bow Rd. When I spoke from the window afterwards, a veritable forest of sticks was waved by the crowd. …

While I was in prison after my arrest in Shoreditch …. a Meeting …. was held in Bow Palace on Sunday afternoon, December 14th. After the Meeting it was arranged to go in procession around the district and to hoot outside the houses of hostile Borough Councillors.”

Sylvia Pankhurst – Women over the age of twenty-one were eventually enfranchised in 1928

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Maps reproduced courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

Postcard reproduced courtesy of Libby Hall Collection at Bishopsgate Institute

Photograph of Suffragette in Holloway courtesy of LSE Women’s Library

Copy of The Women’s Dreadnought courtesy of Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives

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Last Days at W F Arber & Co Ltd

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A few years have passed since I first walked through the gate off Mile End Rd into the quiet enclave of London’s oldest almshouses at Trinity Green where cats preside over a green lawn shaded by gnarly trees and enfolded by two lines of seventeenth-century brick cottages that glow in the October sunlight.

This extraordinary survival of Sir William Ogbourne’s seafarers’ almshouses from 1695 is almost solely due to the efforts of CR Ashbee, pioneer of the Conservation movement in this country and founder of the Guild of Handicrafts in Bow, who rescued them from demolition in 1895. It was the first historic building in the East End to be saved and exists today as an early example of the benign provision of social dwellings.

Regrettably, my return was at the invitation of the residents who wish to draw attention to the spiral of neglect by the council and to the imminent threat of a tower of luxury flats overshadowing Trinity Green, about which they have received no consultation. Built on top of Sainsburys in Whitechapel, they told me this proposed block will be as tall as Centrepoint.

After post-war restoration, the almshouses were handed over to the council, pursuing an enlightened policy of reusing these historic buildings for social housing, and celebrated by a visit of the Queen in 1963. More recently, many of the flats have been sold to private owners although the council still owns many of the dwellings and the chapel, and is responsible for the green which is a public park.

The residents wanted to show me how the council is failing in its duty of care to this grade I listed property. Cast your eyes along the front wall and you notice that four stone ball finials have gone missing. Step inside the gate and a vacant council-owned dwelling has water damage where a cistern was allowed to overflow for months. Next door, at another of the council-owned cottages, a ball has been removed from the pediment years ago and not replaced, while the pediment itself has been needlessly pierced by a flue outlet which could have been sited at the rear of the building.

I visited the chapel for the first time and discovered one of the East End’s finest architectural spaces. Within living memory, this chapel used as a satellite for St Anne’s, Underwood Rd. Today, although it retains its magnificent original features – its panelling, cornice and octagonal vestibule – it is a municipal meeting room marred by stacks of ugly furniture, corporate carpet and strip lighting. Most-disappointingly, the pair of seventeenth century brass chandeliers have gone in recent years leaving just the chains on which they once hung. Outside upon the stone steps, crude repairs in concrete will exacerbate problems with the ageing stonework over time.

With poignant symbolism, the hands have been removed from the clock face on the top of the chapel. If you step in through the main gates from Mile End Rd and cast your eyes upwards, this clock appears to meet your gaze as the central focus of Sir William Ogbourne’s entire architectural conception.

After it was saved by CR Ashbee at the end of the nineteenth century and restored for social housing in the twentieth century, I hope we shall not be the generation that presides over the decay of Trinity Green, leaving it to languish for future generations in the shadow of a monstrous tower.

A pair of quaint narrow terraces face each other across a green off the Mile End Rd in Whitechapel. Although they are lined up neatly like ships’ cabins, only the model boats upon the street frontage remain as evidence that these were built for as almshouses for mariners. But, if you step closer and crane your neck, a stone plaque high on the wall proclaims their noble origin thus, “THIS ALMES HOUSE wherein twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders of Ships, or ye Widows of such are maintain’d, was built by ye CORP. of TRINITY HOUSE, ano 1695. The Ground was given by Capt. HENY MUDD of Rattcliff an Elder Brother, whose Widow did alfo Contribute.”

Even today, a certain atmosphere of repose hangs upon this small enclave, protected from the pandemonium of East London traffic by trees and delicate emerald green railings – now a preserve of cats and flowerpots and twisted old trees and lawns strewn with dandelions and daisies – where it is easy to imagine those “twenty-eight decay’d Masters & Commanders” who once sat around here competing to outdo each other with oft-repeated tales of high adventures upon the seven seas.

The architect was Sir William Ogbourne, and his design was ship-shape in its elegant organisation, fourteen dwellings on either side, each one with three rooms stacked up on top of the other, all arranged around a chapel at the centre to provide spiritual navigation. It was a rigorous structure enlivened by lyrical flourishes, elaborately carved corbels above each door, model boats and stone balls topping off the edifice, and luxuriant stone crests adorning the brick work.

In the nineteenth century, a tall mast stood at the centre of the green to complete the whole endeavour as an approximation of a ship upon dry land – complementing the concave walls at the front in place of a hull and the raised chapel in the aft where the poop deck would be. Just a mile from the docks, it was the perfect spot for Masters & Commanders to enjoy their decay, and it might have sailed on majestically, if it had not been sunk by the bombing in 1943, that destroyed part of the chapel and the rear eight cottages. Taken over by the LCC, Trinity Green is now a mixture of private and public dwellings where everyone gets along peaceably, unified in their appreciation of this favoured spot.

One of the guardians of Trinity Green

This stone ball was removed from the roof of a council owned cottage and never replaced, meanwhile a vent punctures the cornice of this grade 1 listed building

While this council owned cottage sits empty, the water tank has leaked for months damaging brick work

Council owned property to the left and privately owned property to the right reveal comparative levels of maintenance

Unappreciated interior of the chapel, where seventeenth century chandeliers have recently been removed leaving just the chains

Finely carved wooden cornice in the chapel

After three hundred years, the hands have recently been removed from the clock face

When I visited in 2011, the hands were still on the clock at Trinity Green

The proposed tower of luxury flats as tall as Centrepoint that threatens Whitechapel & Trinity Green

Letter by Charles Robert Ashbee, designer & founder of the School of Handicraft in Bow, to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings about the Trinity Almshouses.

Trinity Almshouses, Mile End Rd, 1695

CR Ashbee letter published courtesy of Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings

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CR Ashbee in the East End

Several years ago, I attended a Bunny Girls Reunion at The Grapes in Limehouse hosted by ex-Bunny Barbara Haigh and to my amazement I was invited back this year as a guest of honour …

Old friends, Bunny Cherry & Bunny Odette

On Sunday afternoon, while the rest of London was tidying up leaves in the garden, taking tea, visiting the markets or enjoying a bracing autumn walk, I was at the Hippodrome Casino in Leicester Sq with Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven attending the Bunny Girls & Playboy Models Reunion.

The doorman gives you a deferential nod when you step from the milling tourist crowd over the threshold of the casino and the coat check woman bids you “Good afternoon!” as you pass through the passageway that leads into the vast gaming room. The proscenium and the elaborate plasterwork from the Edwardian theatre loom overhead, framing the auditorium that once hosted the “Talk of the Town,” where today excited gamblers throng around the roulette wheel and the baize tables where blackjack, craps and baccarat are played.

You ascend a winding staircase and acquire a glass of champagne, and you find yourself on another level and in another world. It is a poignant universe of nostalgia and recollection, where those who once based their public identities upon their youthful beauty gather to revisit and assess that experience, and rekindle the friendships and camaraderie forged a lifetime ago in the unlikely environment of the Playboy Club.

Presiding over the gathering of these evanescent spirits were the Oberon & Titania of this shadowy realm – Victor Lownes, the mythic lothario who opened the Playboy Club in Park Lane in 1966, now frail in his mid-eighties yet twinkling with genial humour, and his paramour, Marilyn Cole, the first full frontal Playboy centrefold, still sassy and commanding in physical presence.

In these more puritanical times, former Bunnies are aware of those who might judge them harshly yet they are unanimously unapologetic about their choice to become part of Playboy and their right to that choice. No-one voiced any regrets  except one woman who confessed to me wistfully, “I wish I could go back and do it all over again.”

“Emmeline Pankhurst would have been proud of us!” asserted Marilyn with proud audacity, disarming me with her cultural reference while drawing raucous cheers from the crowd, “We were pioneers for equality – at the Playboy Club, the women all earned more than the men.”

A certain autumnal melancholy coloured the proceedings that afternoon, arising perhaps from a collective realisation of the transience of youth and physical beauty as commodified by Playboy. With unnecessary modesty, one woman confided to me that she was touched that anyone would be interested to take her portrait today and, as with other reunions, there were those who were absent never to return and quietly mourned by their fellows.

My enduring impression will be of astonishment at the vitality of these women. In spite of the changes that time has wrought and which are common to all humanity, they still have an abundance of spirit and charisma. Exhausted after a couple of hours chatting, I sat quietly in the corner to wonder at their stamina. Whatever life has dealt them, these women have not lost their star quality.

Regrettably, I do not think I could ever be a Bunny Girl because, alongside other obvious insufficiencies, I do not have the effervescence. When I confessed this weary realisation to Marilyn Cole at the end of Sunday’s long afternoon of mingling, she looked me in the eye and gave a surprising response. “That’s because you actually listen to what people say,” she informed me with a forgiving smile.

Marilyn Cole – “We were pioneers of equality!”

Bunny Marlon AKA Patricia Robson - “I was a cockney from Stepney and I went from there to the Bahamas!”

Bunny Monique AKA Mary Phillips -‘”I started as a Bunny at seventeen and was a croupier at eighteen. All the famous people were there and as a Bunny Girl you were a celebrity in your own right”

Bunny Kim AKA Therese Hyland – “I came from a boring office job and it opened my eyes”

Bunny Modesty AKA Bee Cassen - “I learnt Black Jack & was dealing roulette in the Officers’ Mess”

Bunny Sheen  AKA Sheen Doran - “Forty years later, I still have so many friends from Playboy”

Danny Conti, Doorman - “I worked in the Car Park on Park Lane and they came over and asked me if I’d like to be doorman at the Playboy Club”

Bunnie Bobbie AKA Eileen Wilson

Bunny Zoe AKA Mary Sharina -”I’m a librarian now and no-one’s interested but if I tell them I was a Bunny, they say ‘Really?’”

Chris Shuter, Craps Dealer - “I used to have a big house with a swimming pool and all the girls came over”

Bunny Ruth AKA Elaine Murray

Bunny Elayne AKA Elaine Kingston – “I was the only Bunny DJ”

Kenny Houng, PR man - “I brought in all the big players from the Far East who would lose two or three million a night.”

Bunny Joni AKA Ann Oliver – “As a nice girl, I had a bit of trouble with my parents but they came in for dinner and thoroughly approved”

Bunny Joan AKA Joan Lawrence - “I was the first woman to manage a casino in Britain”

Bunny Cherry AKA Yvonne Johnson

Bunny Odette AKA Lorraine Palmer

Marilyn Cole & Victor Lownes

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

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Nicholas’ first major solo show is at Millinery Works in Islington from today until November 15th

Princelet St

Ever since I came upon Nicholas Borden working at his easel in the snow on Vallance Rd in Bethnal Green a few years ago, I have been captivated by his painting. In a quietly subversive way, Nicholas has created his own distinctive way of viewing the city that entirely re-invents urban landscape painting. Sensitive to the spirit of place yet equally alive to the abstract and colourist potential of his subjects, his pictures possess a freshness of vision that is as unique as it is unexpected. Hardened by his years as a freshwater fisherman, he is curiously impervious to the English weather and you know that – like Joseph Mallord Turner or John Constable before him – each of these paintings is the outcome of a battle with the elements that Nicholas Borden won.

Fleur de Lys St

Middlesex St

Spitalfields from Petticoat Lane

Shoreditch High St

Durant St, Bethnal Green

Regents Canal

Wilton Way, Hackney

At the Royal Exchange

Queen Victoria St

Charing Cross Station

Charing Cross Rd

Shaftesbury Ave

In Cambridge Circus

Paintings copyright © Nicholas Borden

You may like to take a look at more of Nicholas Borden’s work

Nicholas Borden’s East End View

Nicholas Borden’s Winter Paintings

Nicholas Borden’s Spring Paintings

Nicholas Borden, Artist

Hairdresser, Ben Jonson Rd, 2001

It is my pleasure to publish this selection of the remarkable paintings and drawings created by Doreen Fletcher in the East End between 1983 and 2003, seen publicly for the very first time.

“I was discouraged by the lack of interest,” admitted Doreen to me plainly, explaining why she gave up after twenty years of doing this work. For the past decade, all these pictures have sat in Doreen’s attic until I persuaded her to take them out yesterday and let me photograph them for publication here.

Doreen came to the East End in 1983 from West London. “My marriage broke up and I met someone new who lived in Clemence St, E14,” she revealed, “it was like another world in those days.” Yet Doreen immediately warmed to her new home and felt inspired to paint. “I loved the light, it seemed so sharp and clear in the East End, and it reminded me of the working class streets in the Midlands where I grew up,” she confided to me, “It disturbed me to see these shops and pubs closing and being boarded up, so I thought, ‘I must make a record of this,’ and it gave me a purpose.”

For twenty years, Doreen conscientiously sent off transparencies of her pictures to galleries, magazines and competitions, only to receive universal rejection. As a consequence, she forsook her artwork entirely in 2003 and took a managerial job, and did no painting for the next ten years. But eventually, Doreen had enough of this too and has recently rediscovered her exceptional forgotten talent.

Many of Doreen’s pictures exist as the only record of places that have long gone and I publish her work today in the hope that she will now receive the recognition she deserves, not just for outstanding quality of her painting but also for her brave perseverance in pursuing her clear-eyed vision of the East End in spite of the lack of any interest or support.

Bartlett Park, 1990

Terminus Restaurant, 1984

Bus Stop, Mile End, 1983

Terrace in Commercial Rd under snow, 2003

Shops in Commercial Rd, 2003

Snow in Mile End Park, 1986

Laundrette, Ben Jonson Rd, 2001

The Lino Shop, 2001

Caird & Rayner Building, Commercial Rd, 2001

Rene’s Cafe, 1986

SS Robin, 1996

Benji’s Mile End, 1992

Railway Bridge, 1990

St Matthias Church, 1990

The Albion Pub, 1992

Turner’s Rd, 1998

The Condemned House, 1983

Leslie’s Grocer, Turner’s Rd, 1983 (Pencil Drawing)

Newsagents, Canning Town, 1991 (Coloured Crayon Drawing)

Bridge Wharf, 1984 (Pencil Drawing)

Pubali Cafe, Commercial Rd, 1990 (Coloured Crayon Drawing)

Ice Crean Van, 1990 (Coloured Crayon Drawing)

Images copyright © Doreen Fletcher

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Marc Gooderham, Artist

I worked through last night to send my CRIES OF LONDON book to the printer today and I am proud to announce it will be published on 26th November. Here I present a film by Contributing Filmmaker Sebastian Sharples on the subject of the Cries, alongside my interview with Tony Hawkins – the retired pedlar who inspired me to study the history and politics of street trading.

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Tony Hawkins testified to me that he sold peanuts and roasted chestnuts in the West End streets for ten years but – after getting arrested and roughed up by the police eighty-seven times – his health failed and he retired.

Whereas Tony used to visit Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, regularly to buy thousands of bags for his thriving business, after retirement he came simply to pass the time of day with his old friend Paul Gardner. And it was Paul who effected my introduction to Tony, a man with a defiant strength of character, frail physically yet energised by moral courage. Brandishing the dog-eared stack of paperwork from his eighty-seven court cases, he was immensely proud that he won every one and it was proven he never broke the law once.

Tony’s pitiful catalogue of his wrangles with Westminster Council – who went to extreme lengths just to prevent him peddling nuts in Piccadilly – reveal that the age-old ambivalence and prejudice against those who seek to make a modest living by trading in the street persists to the present day.

“I was unemployed as a labourer in Manchester, so I started off as a pedlar. I sold socks, balloons – anything really. A pedlar trades as he travels, and the will to support myself and the bright lights brought me to London. I was peddling around the West End selling peanuts mostly but also chestnuts. I sold flags at football matches too, Chelsea and Arsenal.

“In the nineteen-eighties, a sergeant took me to Bow Street Magistrates Court for selling peanuts in Piccadilly. So I went along, it was no big deal. I admitted I was trading and I was a licenced pedlar.

“In Court, they were amazed because thay hadn’t seen many pedlars, there were only half a dozen in the West End. I won the case and I went to shake the sergeant’s hand afterwards, but he pushed me away and said it wasn’t the end of it. He told me he’d do everything in his power to make sure I never worked again and he hounded me after that. He said, “If you’re going to do it again, we will arrest you again,” and I’ve been arrested more than eighty times and spent nights in cells. I’ve been roughed up so many times by policemen and council enforcement officers that I had to get a hidden camera because I feared for my safety.

“They confiscated my stock and equipment from me every time I was charged with the offence of street trading without a licence, when I had a Pedlar’s Licence issued in accordance with the Pedlar’s Act of 1871. The original Act was passed in the eighteenth century so that veteran soldiers could trade in fish, fruit, vegetables and victuals, and be distinguished from vagabonds. Anyone over the age of seventeen can get a pedlar’s licence as long as you have no criminal record. According to the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, every person in this country has the right to trade.

“I went to the High Court once when they found against me and the judge overturned it in my favour. But then in 2000 they brought in the Westminster Act because of people like myself. Westminster Council juggled  the words so that it states that pedlars are only allowed to go door-to-door.

“Prior to that Act, we were allowed to peddle lawfully anywhere in the United Kingdom but now the Act is also being used to stop pedlars in Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, Warrington and Balham. Yet Acts and Statutes are not laws, they are rules for the governance, accepted only by consent of the populace.

“Once, I went to get my stuff back from Westminster Council and I met the Manager of Licencing & Street Enforcement. I asked him, “Why do you continue to waste the money of the council tax payers with so many cases against me when you haven’t won a single one?”

“Your lawyer, Mr Barca, I’m sick of him,” he said, “He only represents the lower end of the market like you, and pimps and prostitutes.” Later, he denied it and said he had a witness too, but I had recorded him and he had to pay four thousand pounds in damages to Mr Barca.

“After being hounded by the council and the police so many times, I’ve become narked and with good reason. Over the years, it has cost me a fortune to pay the legal costs. I had to work to earn all the money to pay for it. I regard myself as downtrodden because I was never allowed to benefit from my hard work, but if I had been allowed to continue trading, I could have owned a house by now and have some money in the bank.”

People say to me,“Why have you done it?” I have done it because I believe in the right to trade freely as a human right.”

Tony is now retired, living comfortably in sheltered housing, and has become a self-taught yet highly articulate expert in the law regarding pedlars and street trading, and he is involved with the Pedlars Information & Resource Centre.

Despite losing his health and his livelihood, Tony has acquired moral stature, passionate to support others suffering similar harassment because they exercise their right to sell in the street. With exceptional perseverance, acting out of a love of liberty and a refusal to be intimidated by authority, Tony Hawkins is an unacknowledged hero of the London streets.

Click here to find out more about the CRIES OF LONDON season I have devised for BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE

On Monday 2nd November at 9am, The Gentle Author’s CRIES OF LONDON exhibition opens at Bishopsgate Institute and runs during the Institute’s opening hours until January 29th, 2016

On Tuesday 3rd November at 7:30pm, Phil Maxwell gives a MAGIC LANTERN SHOW at Bishopsgate Institute – showing his photography of BRICK LANE since 1981 and tracing the changing nature of the street from a place of work to a place of recreation. Click here to book

On Thursday 5th November at 6:30pm, Charles Pertwee & The Gentle Author are at Waterstones, Trafalgar Sq, talking about Baddeley Brothers and the history of printing in London over the last two hundred years, and signing copies of BADDELEY BROTHERS. Admission is free but booking essential, ring 020 7839 4411 or email trafalgarsq@waterstones.com

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If there is any problem viewing the film please click this link

(Please note the BILLINGSGATE MARKET CHIT-CHAT at Bishopsgate Institute on Wednesday 4th November is completely sold out)

Near Battlebridge, Middlesex

Once November closes in, I get the urge to go to ground, hiding myself away in some remote cabin and not straying from the fireside until spring shows. With this in mind, John Thomas Smith’s twenty etchings of extravagantly rustic cottages published as Remarks On Rural Scenery Of Various Features & Specific Beauties In Cottage Scenery in 1797 suit my autumnal fantasy ideally.

Born in the back of a Hackney carriage in 1766, Smith grew into an artist consumed by London, as his inspiration, his subject matter and his life. At first, he drew the old streets and buildings that were due for demolition at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ancient Topography of London and Antiquities of London, savouring every detail of their shambolic architecture with loving attention. Later, he turned his attention to London streetlife, the hawkers and the outcast poor, portrayed in Vagabondiana and Remarkable Beggars, creating lively and sympathetic portraits of those who scraped a living out of nothing but resourcefulness. By contrast, these rural cottages were a rare excursion into the bucolic world for Smith, although you only have to look at the locations to see that he did not travel too far from the capital to find them.

“Of all the pictoresque subjects, the English cottage seems to have obtained the least share of particular notice,” wrote Smith in his introduction to these plates, which included John Constable and William Blake among the subscribers, “Palaces, castles, churches, monastic ruins and ecclesiastical structures have been elaborately and very interestingly described with all their characteristic distinctions while the objects comprehended by the term ‘cottage scenery’ have by no means been honoured with equal attention.”

While emphasising that beauty was equally to be found in humble as well as in stately homes, Smith also understood the irony that a well-kept dwelling offered less picturesque subject matter than a derelict hovel. “I am, however, by no means cottage-mad,” he admitted, acknowledging the poverty of the living conditions, “But the unrepaired accidents of wind and rain offer far greater allurements to the painter’s eye, than more neat, regular or formal arrangements could possibly have done.”

Some of these pastoral dwellings were in places now absorbed into Central London and others in outlying villages that lie beneath suburbs today. Yet the paradox is that these etchings are the origin of the romantic image of the English country cottage which has occupied such a cherished position in the collective imagination ever since, and thus many of the suburban homes that have now obliterated these rural locations were designed to evoke this potent rural fantasy.

On Scotland Green, Ponder’s End

Near Deptford, Kent

At Clandon, Surrey – formerly the residence of Mr John Woolderidge, the Clandon Poet

In Bury St, Edmonton

Near Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath

In Green St, Enfield Highway

Near Palmer’s Green, Edmonton

Near Ranelagh, Chelsea

In Green St, Enfield Highway

At Ponder’s End, Near Enfield

On Merrow Common, Surrey

At Cobham, Surrey – in the hop gardens

Near Bull’s Cross, Enfield

In Bury St, Edmonton

On Millbank, Westminster

Near Edmonton Church

Near Chelsea Bridge

In Green St, Enfield Highway

Lady Plomer’s Place on the summit of Hawke’s Bill Wood, Epping Forest

You may also like to take a look at these other works by John Thomas Smith

John Thomas Smith’s Ancient Topography of London

John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of London

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II

John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III

John Thomas Smith’s Remarkable Beggars