At midnight on Christmas Eve, I found myself standing inside St Paul’s Cathedral among the the company of several hundred other souls. The vast interior space of the cathedral is a world unto itself when you are within it, as much landscape as architecture, yet when the great clock struck twelve overhead, my thoughts were transported to the rain falling upon the empty streets in the dark city beyond. Perhaps I was thinking of some of these lantern slides created a century ago by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society for lectures at the Bishopsgate Institute?

Until 1962, St Paul’s was the tallest building in London and, in my perception of the city, it will always stand head and shoulders above everything else. Even before I saw it for myself, I already knew the shape of the monstrous dome from innumerable printed images and looming skyline appearances in films. Defying all competition, the great cranium of the dome contains a spiritual force that no other building in London can match.

A true wonder of architecture, St Paul’s never fails to induce awe when you return to it because the reality of its scale always surpasses your expectation – as if the mind itself cannot fully contain the memory of a building of such ambition and scale. No-one can deny the sense of order, with every detail sublimated to Sir Christopher Wren’s grand conception, yet the building defies you.

Although every aspect has its proportion and purpose, the elaborate intricacy expresses something beyond reason or logic. You are within the skull of a sleeping giant, dreaming the history of London, with its glittering panoply and dark episodes. The success of this building is to render everything else marginal, because when you are inside it you feel you are at the centre of the world.

Glass slides courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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The Lantern Slides of Old London

The Nights of Old London

The Signs of Old London

The Markets of Old London

The Pubs of Old London

The Doors of Old London

The Staircases of Old London

The High Days & Holidays of Old London

The Dinners of Old London

The Shops of Old London

The Streets of Old London

The Fogs & Smogs of Old London

The Chambers of Old London

The Tombs of Old London

The Bridges of Old London

The Forgotten Corners of Old London

The Thames of Old London

The Statues & Effigies of Old London

The City Churches of Old London

The Docks of Old London

The Tower of Old London

The Loneliness of Old London

Today we remember Joseph Markovitch who lived his whole life in the East End and died on Boxing Day, just six days short of his eighty-seventh birthday on January 1st. In collaboration with Photographer Martin Usborne, he created  I’ve Lived In East London for Eighty-Six & A Half Years which stands now as his memorial.

Words by Joseph Markovitch & Photographs by Martin Usborne

“This is where I was born, right by Old St roundabout on January 1st, 1927. In those days it wasn’t called a hospital, it was just called a door number, number four or maybe number three. The place where I was born, it was a charity you see. Things were a bit different back then.”

“In the old days, when a man went to see the opera he had on a bowler hat. If you were a man and you walked in the street without a hat on your head you were a lost soul. People don’t wear hats any more … but they wear everything else, don’t they?”

“I worked two years as a cabinet maker in Hemsworth St, just off Hoxton Market. But when my sinuses got bad I went to Hackney Rd, putting rivets on luggage cases. For about twenty years I did that job. My foreman was a bastard. I got paid a pittance. The job was alright apart from that. If I was clever, very clever, I mean very very clever, then I would like to have been an accountant. It’s a very good job. If I was less heavy, you know what I’d like to be? My dream job, I’d like to be a ballet dancer. That would be my dream.”

“A lot of young kids do graffiti around Hoxton. It’s nice. It adds a bit of colour, don’t you think?”

“When I was a kid everyone was a Cockney. Now it’s a real mix. I think it’s a good thing, makes it more interesting. Did you know that I stand still when I get trouble with my chest? Last Saturday, a woman come up to me and said “Are you OK?” and I said, “Why?” She said, “Because you are standing still.” I said, “Oh.” She said she comes from Italy and she is Scots-Canadian, and do you know what? She wanted to help me. Then I dropped a twenty pound note on the bus. A foreign man – I think he was Dutch or French – said, “Mate, you’ve dropped a twenty pound note.” English people don’t do that because they have got betting habits.”

“My mother was a good cook. She made bread pudding. It was the best bread pudding you could have. She was called Janie and I lived with her until she died. I wasn’t going to let her into a home. Your mother should be your best friend. Our best memories were going on a Sunday to Hampstead Heath Fair”

“I like to go to the library on Monday, Tuesday and … Well, I can’t always promise what days I go. I like to read about all the places in the world. I also go to the section on the cinema and I read a book called “The life of the stars.” But I only spend thirty per cent of my time reading. The rest of the time, I like to sit on the sofa and sit quite a long way back so I am almost flat. Did you know that Paul Newman’s father was German-Jewish and that his mother was Hungarian-Catholic? You know Nicholas Cage? He is half-German and half-Italian. What about Joe Pesce? Where are his parents from? I should look it up.”

“I’ve never had a girlfriend. It’s better that way. I have always had very bad catarrh, so it wasn’t possible. And I had to care for my mother. Anyway, if I was married, I might be dead by now. I probably would be, if you think about it. I would have been domineered all my life by a girl and that ain’t good for nobody’s health. I’m too old for that now. I would like to have had a girlfriend but it’s OK. You know what? I’ve had a happy life. That’s the main thing, it’s been a good life.”

“If I try to imagine the future. It’s like watching a film. Pavements will move, nurses will be robots and cars will grow wings…

…you’ve just got to wait. There won’t be any cinemas, just computers in people’s homes. They will make photographs that talk. You will look at a picture of me and you will hear, “Hello, I’m Joseph Markovitch.” and then it will be me telling you about things. Imagine that!”

“I’ve seen the horse and cart, I’ve seen the camera invented, I’ve seen the projector. I never starved.”

“Lots of things make me laugh. Fruit makes me laugh. To see a dog talking makes me laugh. I like to see monkeys throwing coconuts on men’s heads, that’s funny. When you see a man going on to a desert island and he is stranded the monkeys are always friendly. You think the monkey is throwing things at your head but really he is throwing the coconuts for you to eat.”

Photographs copyright © Martin Usborne

Bud Flanagan was born above his family’s fish & chip shop in Hanbury St

Today I publish reminiscences of Spitalfields written in 1961 by Bud Flanagan, the celebrated Music Hall comedian, part of the Crazy Gang and half of the legendary Flanagan & Allen double act. Born as Chaim Reeven Weintrop in 1896 into a Polish immigrant family who ran a fried fish shop in Hanbury St, Bud Flanagan began his performing career as a child in East End End Music Hall and came under the spell of street performers beneath the Braithwaite arches in Wheler St – that later featured in the song by which he and Chesney Allen are most remembered today, “Underneath The Arches.”

In common with Charlie Chaplin, who was his close contemporary and performed in Spitalfields at the Royal Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in 1899 where Bud Flanagan became a Call Boy in 1906, he adopted the persona and ragged costume of the dispossessed, revealing pathos and affectionate humour in the lives of those who were seen as downtrodden and marginal.

“The labyrinth of streets that go to make up the district of Spitalfields are narrow and mean. The hub of my world was the churchyard or, as the locals called it, “Itchy Park,” after the doss house habitues who would sun themselves on the benches or low stone walls that surrounded the park. They would sit there every day, scratching, yawning and looking into space. The cemetery was old and derelict, but it was a reminder that at one time Spitalfields was the centre of the weaving trade because nearly all the tombstones bore the inscription, “weaver.” Most of them were dated 1790-1820 and a few were still upright. Several had fallen over and on our way to school we would hop, skip and jump over them.

Hanbury St – where I was born – crawled rather than ran from Commercial St, where Spitalfields Market stood at one end, to Vallance Rd at the other, an artery that spewed itself into Whitechapel Rd at the other. On one corner stood Godfrey Philips’ tobacco factory, with its large ugly enamel signs, black on yellow, advertising “B. D. V. ” – Best Dark Virginia. It took up  the whole block until the first turning, a narrow lane with little houses and a small sweet shop.

On the next corner was a barber’s shop and a tobacconist’s which my father owned. Next door to us was a kosher restaurant with wonderful smells of hot salt beef and other spicy dishes, then came the only Jewish blacksmith I ever met. His name was Libovitch, a fine black-bearded man, strong as an ox. From seven in the morning until seven at night, Saturdays excepted, you could hear the sound of hammer on anvil all over the street. Horses from the local brewery, Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, were lined up outside his place waiting to be shod.

Then came another court, all alleys and mean streets. Adjoining was Olivestein, the umbrella man, a fruiterer, a grocer, and then Wilkes St. On one side of it was a row of neat little houses and on the other, the brewery taking up streets and streets, sprawling all over the district. On the corner of Wilkes St stood The Weavers’ Arms, a public house owned by Mrs Sarah Cooney, a great friend of Marie Lloyd. She stood out like a tree in a desert of Jews. Stapletons depository, where horses were bought and sold, was next door to a fried fish shop, number fourteen Hanbury St where I was born. Next to that was Rosenthal, tailors and trimming merchants, then a billiard saloon, after that a money-lenders house where once lived the Burdett-Coutts.

Hanbury St was a patchwork of small shops, pubs, church halls, Salvation Army Hostels, doss houses, pubs, factories and sweat shops where tailors with red-rimmed eyes sewed by the gas-mantlelight. It was typical of the Jewish quarters in the nineties. The houses were clean inside but exteriors were shoddy. The street was narrow and ill-lit. The whole of the East End in those days was sinister.

Neighbours who slaved hard at their businesses left the district (once they began to save money) and moved to what was then nearly the country – Stamford Hill, a suburb in North London that was rapidly becoming a haven for the successful Jewish businessman and artisan. It was only a penny tram ride from Spitalfields to Stamford Hill, but often it took a lifetime of savings and struggle to make the move. When they got there, most were like fish out of water, sad at the parting from old friends and missing the old surroundings. Homesick, they even came all the way back to the East End to do their shopping. Eventually they were joined by their old neighbours, who too had crossed into the Promised Land.

Not everyone was lucky enough to move and among the stay-puts were my parents. First of all, they couldn’t afford it, and secondly the fish shop and barber’s made barely enough to keep a big family of five daughters and five sons. I first saw the light of day, if kids are not like kittens, on 14th October 1896. My parents, who had been in the country for years, could hardly be understood when speaking English. When a child was born the Registrar wrote down a rough phonetic version. I was named Chaim Reeven, which is Hebrew for Reuben and became Robert. My father’s name was Weintrop which the Registrar abruptly changed to “Winthrop.”

Ours was a district where the weak went to the wall and you had to keep your eyes open. When my father opened his fried fish shop, the salt cans were chained to each table and to the counter. But, as in every Jewish home, education was important and apart from ordinary school, I attended cheder for Hebrew lessons three nights a week. The East End at that time had several boys’ and girls’ clubs. I joined the Brady, named after a street tucked behind Hanbury St. We had ping pong, gymnastics and chess and it was a treat to get off the streets into the warm and play games without having fights, of which I had my share.

I became interested in conjuring and used to walk to Gamages in High Holborn and look longingly at the tricks they sold but without the coppers to buy them. To raise the money, I took a job as a Call Boy at the Cambridge Music Hall in Commercial St at the age of ten. The job was very handy. When the pros wanted fish & chips – and they wanted them every night –  I went to my father’s shop. There were no wages, only tips, but I was soon able to buy my tricks and those I couldn’t afford I made. When the fish shop was closed on a Sunday, I let the kids in for a farthing, charging the older ones a ha’penny and gave them a show. Mothers would bring their children and soon there was a good sprinkling of grown-ups.

I was making a local name until one Sunday a big rat came out of nowhere and evil-eyed the audience. There were screams and before you could say “Abracadrabra!” the place had emptied. It did not do me any harm but word soon spread, “There are rats in the fish shop,” which was not surprising as we were next to a horse repository with its hay and oats. There wasn’t a morning when the traps had fewer than three or four big ones. I used to watch in fascinated horror as they drowned in a deep tub of water.

That was in 1908, the year the Music Hall artists decided to strike. Being only a call boy, I wasn’t worried by the strikers who picketed the Stage Door trying to persuade the non-strikers to come out. They weren’t really rough, only to the extent if grabbing a bottle of stout or some fish & chips out of my hand and asking whom they were for. I’d tell them and the lot would finish in the gutter. With tears in my eyes, I would run down the long corridor to the Stage Manager at the Prompt Corner and let him know what happened, but mostly I was left alone.

The management who owned the Cambridge also ran the London Music Hall in Shoreditch High St and Collins in Islington. The three halls were known as the L.C.C. – London, Collins & Cambridge. It was at the London that I made my first stage appearance.

Every Saturday at the 2:30pm they had an extra matinee when the acts worked for nothing. The place was packed with a good sprinkling of agents out front to see the fun and maybe pick up an act. The audience were like wolves, all ready for their Roman holiday, booing and jeering at anything they didn’t like. The Stage Manager in the corner, with his hand on the lever, was only too happy to join in the fun and bring down the curtain. The orchestra played with one eye on the music and one eye on the coins or rubbish that would be thrown at some unlucky act on the stage.

I was nearly thirteen and not too bad at manipulating cards and doing other tricks when I went to the London one Saturday afternoon together with my conjuring table and other props. I gave my name as Fargo, the Boy Wizard. The first prize was fifty shillings and a week’s work at the theatre.

The matinee produced some sixteen acts, most old-timers anxious for a week’s job and the cash, together with beginners who had never done a show outside their front room at home. The audience was as rough as ever and, at about 3:30pm, I came on. Being a kid, they were sympathetic towards me, but I was nervous and messed up my first trick. I had to pour water into a tumbler to make it beer and then pour it into another tumbler to make it milk. Alas, in my excitement, I had forgotten to smear the glasses with chemicals and instead of applause came jeers. Foolishly, I then asked to borrow a bowler hat. A bowler in Shoreditch!  There was no such thing in the whole of the East End, let alone at the London Music Hall, Shoreditch. Well, I couldn’t do the trick with a cap and had to drop that illusion.

That started them off. Friends were in front, fellow scouts and Brady boys, but I got the bird. The curtain was rung down. I collected my props and and sneaked out of the Stage Door. There stood my father, waiting for me. A stinging right-hander caught me across the face, my ear is twisted, and I heard him saying, “I’ll give you, working on the Sabbath!” I was punched and pushed all the way home. My props lay somewhere in Shoreditch High St. I never saw them again.

I was growing to be a big boy but still working at the Cambridge. On my one free night, Sunday, we would go to the home of a man named Alf Caplin to sing songs and enjoy ourselves. He was a great pianist and one Sunday we decided to form our own quartet. We rehearsed an act and soon landed an engagement at a Dutch Club called “The Netherlands” situated in Bell Lane. The small stage was at the far end of the room and every Sunday there would be five acts, whose pay packet averaged about five shillings each. Dutch clog dancers and yodellers were the favourites. We called ourselves “The Four Hanburys, Juvenile Songsters,” and as there was plenty of club work in London on Sundays, we hoped to be recommended to other clubs.

We opened in harmony and it was nice bright tune, but after about eight bars the harmony was lost and we were all singing the melody but not not in tune. That was the first and only time I have ever been hit by a Dutch herring. I don’t know whether you have seen one but the brine and skin stick to your fingers when you eat them. So you can imagine what it does when one lands on your face. Several more came and that was the Four Hanburys finale.

Competitions were regular feature of the Music Halls and nearly every week the Cambridge had one. A singer, who also ran a competition, was a nice woman named Dora Lyric, married to a successful agent, Walter Bentley. Well, Dora was appearing at the Cambridge and also running the competition. One night there was scarcity of entrants. In desperation, her husband poked me with his stick and said, “Boy, you go on and sing one of Miss Lyric’s songs.” “Who me?” I echoed, trying to hide my eagerness and looking at the Stage Manager who nodded, “Yes.”

Dora Lyric had a popular song, “If you want to be a Somebody,” and I decided to sing that one. Being the only boy in the competition at that house, I won hands down and was picked for the final on Friday night. At the final, there were ten competitors who had won their respective heats, but I won the competition and that precious thirty shillings.

American acts had been coming over to play the Halls for some time now and they fascinated me with their new style and approach to the public and especially by their way of talking. British artists soon cottoned on and before time there was a spate of imitators of American-style acts, watching them from the gallery and then going round the corner to the Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row, a Sunday market where they sold mostly dogs and canaries. There the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.

I became so interested in the Americans that I decided, after talking with them and reading about the States, that I must go there one day. The year was 1910, I was still at school and had about three months to finish. We were still in Hanbury St and on the day before I was fourteen, I made up my mind I was going to the New World, the place my dad tried to get to and never did. But my first impression of New York was a sad shock – Hanbury St, Spitalfields, seemed like the Mall in comparision…”

Chaim Reeven Weintrop (later known as Bud Flanagan) at the age of two with his brother Simon

The red premises are the former fish and chip run by Bud Flanagan’s family, where the young comedian staged magic shows on Sunday afternoons until a rat appeared and put a stop to it. The yard to the right was where Libovitch the blacksmith shoed the horses from the Truman Brewery.

Wolf & Yetta Weintrop fled Poland in the eighteen-eighties hoping to get to New York but settling in Spitalfields where they ran a fish & chip shop in Hanbury St

“On one corner stood Godfrey Phillips’ tobacco factory, with its large ugly enamel signs”

“Stapletons depository, where horses were bought and sold”

Cambridge Theatre of Varieties in Commercial St where Bid Flanagan was a Call Boy at ten years old

Handbill for Cambridge Theatre of Varieties

Bud Flanagan at the peak of his fame

“The Arches – a long street under a railway which carried the mainline to Liverpool St Station and ran from Commercial St to Club Row, a Sunday market where they sold mostly dogs and canaries. There the pros would practise to mouth-organ acompaniment, night after night, until they had copied the Yanks most intricate steps.”

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Chaplin in Spitalfields & Whitechapel

In the week ten fire stations shut forever – Belsize, Bow, Clerkenwell, Downham, Kingsland, Knightsbridge, Southwark, Silvertown, Westminster & Woolwich - I publish my portrait of Jack Corbett, veteran of Clerkenwell Fire Station, as a tribute to the courage of London’s firefighters.

Jack Corbett, born 1910

“I like the life of a fireman,” boasted Jack Corbett, who is London’s oldest surviving fireman at one hundred and three years old. Based at Clerkenwell Fire Station for the duration of World War II, Jack and his team were fortunate enough to endure the onslaught of the London Blitz without any fatalities. “It was all coincidental because I happened to live within a mile of the station,” he announced dismissively, as if he just fell into it. Yet the same tenacious spirit that sustained him through the bombing has also endowed him with exceptional longevity. “You want to go on living,” was what Jack told himself in the midst of the chaos.

“It’s not easy remembering what you did and didn’t do.” he confessed to me vaguely, casting his mind back over more than a century of personal experiences, “It all seems so bitty trying to put it all together, but it all went like clockwork. It was rather wonderful really.” Jack’s father served in the First World War and, after Jack witnessed the Second World War in London, he cannot escape disappointment now at the persistence of warfare. “It’s a shame after what we went through that people have learnt nothing,” he confided to me in regret. The closure of Clerkenwell Fire Station, the oldest in Britain, meets with his disapproval too, “Modern life demands the police, fire service and ambulance yet, if you cut them, the longer it will take for these services to be applied – and that’s foolhardy.” he said, “Clerkenwell Fire Station is well-situated, in one direction is Kings Cross and in the other direction is the City of London.”

In wartime, as one of the firemen responsible for protecting St Paul’s Cathedral from falling bombs, Jack was given access to the entire structure and once he climbed up alone inside the gold cross upon the very top of the dome. Standing in that enclosed space so high over the city, with a single round glass panel to look out at either end of the cross-piece, was an experience of religious intensity for Jack. And now, at such a venerable age he is able to look back on his own life from an equally elevated perspective through time. “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side. I try to be a man of principle but it’s not easy.” he admitted to me with a shy grin, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke and I’ve always been a Christian.”

In 2000, Jack retired from London to live with his daughter Pamela in Maldon in an old house up above the river, surrounded by a luxuriant well-kept garden.”My parents were ordinary people but they produced a good commodity in me – my mother lived to ninety-three and my father to ninety-one.” he assured me in satisfaction, as we sat together admiring the herbaceous border from the comfort of his private sitting room. “Some people would have written their life, but I’m not that type. I’m not bothered,” Jack whispered, thinking out loud for my benefit – however, for the sake of  the rest of us, I present this account of his story.

“When I left school at fourteen in Woking, I got a job as a guard boy. It was my first proper job, working for a gentleman. But in the thirties there was a financial crisis and quite a lot of people lost their property. So he said to me, ‘I’ll have to let you go.’ I didn’t realise it was the sack. Then, one wet day, I drove him to Woking Station and he said, ‘You probably realise I’ve got a business in London. Would you like to change your job?’ The business was a glass warehouse in Clerkenwell, Pugh Bros off St John St.

Isn’t it strange? I can’t remember the name of the man who gave me my job and brought me up from my lowly life in Woking to London, where I met my wife, and the story of my life proper began there.

I lived at 330 St John St, from my early twenties, when I first came to London and that’s where I met my wife Ivy. I was the lodger and she was the only daughter of the house, and we went to Sadlers’ Wells Theatre for our first date and we got married in 1935 in the Mission Church in Clerkenwell. She worked at a furrier and she was pregnant with our daughter Pamela when the war started. I was keen to get behind an ack-ack gun, but she reminded me I could get assigned anywhere and not to be so quick. My daughter was due in April 1939, not the best time to be born because of the situation with the war, but my baby, my wife and mother-in-law were evacuated to Woking where I had my original home, so that was alright. They couldn’t come back to London – they wanted to but I explained that bombs were dropping.

When I was enlisted, I joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service. They trained you up to a certain level but after the London Fire Brigade lost a lot of their men who were ex-army and ex-navy, when they were called back to the forces, they needed to replace them and I was accepted. So eventually I became a professional. We were always on duty, it was continuous duty during the Blitz, then they granted you four hours break, not every day but when circumstances allowed. Clerkenwell was one of eighty fire stations, so you can imagine the immensity of it. In London, there was a separate water system for the fire service but when that became broken, we had to pump water from the Thames.

I never thought about the danger - I just got on with it, like everybody else.  You’d be a strange person if you didn’t know fear but in any situation, you go in and do your duty to the letter. Often, what I found exciting was that you didn’t know what kind of fire you were going to. The job consisted of extinguishing the fire and rescuing life, and rescuing life was the most important because a building can be rebuilt – your priority was saving lives.

We were being bombed in the docks where  all the food storage was, so we had a job there and ,when we had to go further downstream to extinguish the oil depot, we had to go through the East End where there were lots of houses on fire, and they used to call us names. Once, we heard a group of five bombs approaching Clerkenwell and I thought one must surely be for us, but it hit the building next door. We couldn’t see inside the fire station for the dust and I really thought that one had my name on it.

When things were cooling off, you could take a weekend and I went down to Woking to see my family. Eventually when things quietened, my wife found a house in Finchley and that’s where we had our son and lived for the next sixty years and where my wife died twelve years ago. We’d been married sixty-seven years. We had a grand life if you come to think of it. I wonder what would have happened without the war – I would have continued working at the glassworks. I was moving up, after three years I was appointed manager of the guys who were going out making deliveries of glass.

After the war, I asked for a transfer nearer home, and they transferred me to Hornsey and  I stayed in the fire service until 1965. The average person wanted to get back to ordinary life, but there’d been so much change it wasn’t that easy. You want to go on living and when you have two children, they want to have a life. Now I have eight great-grandchildren, it has all grown like a tree of life from Pamela’s mother.”

Jack Corbett  - “I don’t know what people think of me but I guess I’m a little on the starchy side.”

Jack with Freda and Cousin Dot, 1923

Charles Corbett, Jack’s father

Charles and Ann Corbett, 1944

330 St John St where Jack lived when he came to London and met his wife Ivy. Ivy’s parents lived on the ground floor, and Jack and Ivy lived on the first floor after they married.

Jack aged twenty, 1930

Jack in his first car.

Jack and Ivy, 1934

Jack and Ivy’s marriage at Clerkenwell Mission Chapel, 18th May 1934

Jack (on the far left) joined the City of London Auxiliary Fire Service, 1939

Jack (with his back to the camera) pictured fighting a fire at St Bartholomew’s Hospital during the London Blitz.

High Jinks with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, 1955

Jack returns to Clerkenwell Fire Station, January 2013

Jack with Green Watch at Clerkenwell Fire Station

Jack in his garden in Maldon.

Jack and his daughter Pam

Clerkenwell Fire Station, Britain’s oldest working fire station.

Photograph of Clerkenwell Fire Station copyright © Colin O’Brien

Morris Goldstein, self-portrait

When Raymond Francis showed me these pictures by his father Morris Goldstein – seeking to bring them to a wider audience and reinstate his father’s position among the Whitechapel Boys – I was touched by the tender human observation apparent in Morris’ sympathetic portraits of his fellow East Enders.

The Whitechapel Boys were a group of young Jewish artists from the East End, including the poet Isaac Rosenberg, who showed together at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914 and made a distinctive contribution to British Modernism in the early twentieth century. Yet when the list of those who comprise this group is made – including Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and others – the name of Morris Goldstein is rarely mentioned.

It was the death of Morris Goldstein’s father that forced him to leave the Slade early, in order to earn money to support his family rather than pursue his art, with the outcome that – although he exhibited a significant number of works in the 1914 Whitechapel show – his work has subsequently become unjustly neglected.

The centenary of this exhibition proposes a re-evaluation of the group that became known as the Whitechapel Boys and a re-examination the life and work of those artists who became marginalised. And, thanks to Raymond Francis, I am able to tell Morris Goldstein’s story for the first time.

Born in Poland in 1892 in Pinczow, a small town midway between Krakow and Warsaw, Morris Kugal emigrated to London at the age of six in 1898 with his parents David and Sarah, and his two younger sisters Annie and Jeannie.

Adopting the name Goldstein, the family lived in Redman’s Row, Stepney, where the poet Isaac Rosenberg was a neighbour. Growing up in poverty, Morris quickly came to understand the conflict between his dreams and reality. Although his talent led him to Stepney Green Art School, he knew that the need to leave and earn a living at fourteen years old would prevent him pursuing a career as an artist.

Like Rosenberg, he was obliged to take up an apprenticeship in marquetry but for three years they went together to evening classes in art close to their employment in Bolt Court, Fleet St, where Morris received the gold medal for best work and found himself alongside fellow students including Paul Nash. Determined to become a respected painter, Morris soon fund himself in the company of other aspiring young artists, including Mark Gertler whom he first met at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1908.

Through tenacity and determination, Morris managed to overcome the obstacle of his financial disadvantage by winning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art which he attended alongside other Whitechapel Boys – Isaac Rosenberg, David Bomberg and Mark Gertler in 1912. He applied to the Jewish Education Aid Society in 1908, 1909 and 1911, before being granted twelve shillings and sixpence a week. While at the Slade, Morris and Isaac Rosenberg walked from Mile End to Gower St every day to save money and they often went to study at the Whitechapel Library, doing their homework which entailed sketching and studying the history of art, thus escaping the distractions of home life in the evening.

As this group of young East End artists acquired confidence, they discovered the Cafe Royal in Regent St where they encountered luminaries of the day, including members of the Bloomsbury Group and socialites such as Nancy Cunard and Lady Diana Manners. Morris hailed it as Mecca and recalled making his sixpenny coffee and cake last all day.

Often Morris and Isaac Rosenberg were joined on their walks by David Bomberg and they met Sonia Cohen, a Whitechapel girl brought up in an orphanage, whom they all fell in love with. Meanwhile, Isaac Rosenberg grew increasingly conscious of the burden imposed on his family by his long preparation for a career as a painter. Morris’ mother Sarah Goldstein was a close friend of Hacha Rosenberg, Isaac’s mother, and they commiserated that they knew of young tailors in the neighbourhood earning  fifteen or twenty pounds a week, while their sons brought in nothing. In 1913, Morris’ father’s unexpected death placed the responsibility of becoming the breadwinner upon him and he had to give up his study to replace the income of two pounds a week that David Goldstein had earned as a shoemaker.

He had five works in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Twentieth Century Art Review of Modern Movements in May 1914, along with the other Whitechapel Boys (Rosenberg, Bomberg etc), the only time that this group ever exhibited together. When the First World War broke out in August of that year, Morris sought to enlist but was rejected because he was not yet a naturalised British citizen. David Bomberg was also rejected but Isaac Rosenberg was sent to the Somme where he was killed in April 1918.

During the war, Morris was Art Master at the Toynbee Art Club at Toynbee Hall and the Annual report of 1914 -1915 notes, “classes were well attended, the members being greatly assisted by the guidance and criticism of Mr Morris Goldstein, the art master.”

When the Jewish Education Aid Society wrote to Morris asking for their money back in 1917, he replied on Boxing Day in the following defiant terms -“I am alive and that is a great deal in these days. To be alive is a great benediction – to live through these turbulent times until peace reigns once more upon earth would be the greatest joy of all. My present hope and wish is to live through these times so that after the cessation of hostilities I could put my body and soul into my spiritual work. I am not yet in the army but of course I’m liable to be called up any day now. Let us hope the war will end soon, Believe me to remain, Morris Goldstein”

Morris continued to exhibit at the Whitechapel Gallery’s annual East End Academy until 1960.

Sarah & David Goldstein stand outside the East End boot shop that was the family business, c. 1912

Sarah and David Goldstein with their daughters Annie and Jeannie, and Morris on the right.

Morris Goldstein aged twenty when he went to the Slade in 1912

Morris Goldstein paints the portrait of the Mayor of Stoke Newington in 1960

Sketch of Morris Goldstein’s son, Raymond Francis, sleeping in 1955

Raymond Francis standing at the gates of Stepney Green School where his father was educated

Raymond Francis outside 13 Vallance Rd where his father lived and wrote the letter below.

In 1940, Morris Goldstein wrote to relatives in America seeking help to send his two daughters across the Atlantic to escape the war.

A local landmark, this unusual and attractive nineteenth century terrace 3-11 Vallance Rd in Whitechapel is currently under threat of demolition.

Artwork copyright © Estate of Morris Goldstein

Photograph of Vallance Rd terrace © Alex Pink

Fat cats in the City of London are nothing new as these elegant cartoons of Regency bankers by Richard Dighton that I discovered in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute testify.

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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On Blue Monday, I present my account of the mighty phenomenon that is Rush Hour at Liverpool St Station, complemented by the pictures of Contributing Photographer Simon Mooney, who passes through regularly at that time of the morning and always carries his camera.

At seven, the dark streets of Spitalfields were empty, save the traders waiting outside the market in the rain, yet by then the first commuters were already crossing Liverpool St Station, descending from the trains and walking purposefully into the underground. At this hour before dawn, I found the station hushed and barely anyone spoke, walking swiftly and preoccupied, many were almost sleepwalking – as if they still inhabited the dreams of the night, as if the moment of awakening would be the point of arrival at their destination.

More trains were arriving from eastern counties, each one announced by a loud rattle, thump and hiss, reverberating throughout the cavernous station before another wave of passengers in dark raincoats, and clutching umbrellas and briefcases, poured out into the luminous white concourse. Among a crowd seemingly still intent upon their nocturnal journeys, just a few runners and cyclists punctuated the muted rhythm of the multitude.

Lined up along one side of the vast space, brightly-lit kiosks sold hot drinks – but everyone passed them by, heading for the far end where the escalator creaked, at this hour serving only to transport travellers upward and out of the station. Streaming diagonally from the north-east, where the mainline trains arrive, the primary migration courses towards the City of London at the the south-west corner, drawing all as if by some magnetic force.

Arriving from Walton-on-the-Naze, Thorpe-Le-Soken, Turkey St, Brimsdown, Wivenhoe, Seven Sisters and Silver St, after eight o’clock, the current of humanity is swollen and grown animated, no longer pacing in unison, with more chatting and the occasional smile. The day has broken and the bare murmur of an hour earlier has become the hum of a swarm, teeming through the station. Standing in midst of the current of people when it peaks at eight-thirty, you cannot see through the crush to either end of the station. The momentum of the crowd is palpable, acting upon you as it flows around you like water round a stone in a river. You feel as invisible as a ghost.

You see the masses but you notice the individuals, drawing your attention by a private smile or a fleeting scrap of conversation, and you imagine the dark bedrooms and the alarms that snatched them prematurely from their slumbers, the hot showers that wakened them and the hasty walks to get them to the station.

For a hundred and forty years and throughout the twentieth century, this surging current of humanity has coursed through Liverpool St Station, growing in force. A phenomenon to compete with any migration the natural world has to offer, whether eels, or geese, or even ants, the spectacle of this daily wonder is a fleeting spectre that ebbs and flows, but is entirely incidental to the participants in transit who protect their personal equanimity by resisting the presence of their fellow travellers.

Yet I spot a group of school children in high spirits who are immediately awestruck by the sight of it – as I am – and to them it evokes the magic of the fairground or the carnival, momentarily liberating them to misbehave and play. They recognise the truth of it. With elaborate decorative arches towering overhead, the station is a theatre staging a great epic, performed twice daily, with an infinite cast of characters filling the stage in a chorus of which every one is a leading character, and the drama is called ‘Rush Hour At Liverpool St Station.’

Photographs copyright © Simon Mooney

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Phil Maxwell on the Tube

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Over this last autumn and winter, Colin Rosie has established himself as one of Spitalfields Market’s most celebrated characters. Always debonair in his grey three-piece suit with gloves and sporting a topper, Colin has brought distinction to the market and gets photographed as many as fifty times a day by admiring tourists.

With shiny patent leather shoes, glittering diamond ear studs and waving his tablet computer authoritatively, Colin can tell you everything you wish to know about his carefully selected range of characterful second hand hats.

But less than a year ago, Colin was homeless and living on the streets. Existing like some latter-day ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow,’ even while sleeping on the street, Colin was determined to hold onto his self-respect as manifested in his dapper duds – yet he did not ever expect that his sartorial swagger would become his salvation. As I learnt when I kept him company on a quiet afternoon recently, while he was steaming an old hat to restore its former shape, and he told me his story.

“I was homeless until the end of May 2013 when No Second Night Out, a homeless charity, approached me sleeping outside Victoria Station. They helped me to sign on at a Job Centre and then I got a room in a YMCA hostel. They told me I was the only homeless person they had ever picked up in a top hat! Only I wasn’t actually wearing my top hat at the time because I was sleeping in a doorway and using it as a pillow. I always wear my top hat and, when I signed on at the Job Centre, they asked me if I had ever given any thought to whether I could sell top hats. The gist of it was if I could raise £100 they would lend me £100, so then I bought a lot of top hats and came here in August to the Spitalfields Market, and I’ve been here seven days a week ever since .

I used to have long curly hair but one day I decided to change. I’ve worked all over the world as a photographer and, when I lived in Russia seven years ago, I couldn’t explain to a hairdresser how I wanted my hair cut, so I shaved my head and when I was next back in London I got a top hat. I used to sell my photos here in the Spitalfields Market years ago, so when I was going to sell hats this was my first choice.

I am a Orcadian from Kirkwall and in Orkney, they say, ‘Either you all stay or you all leave.’ None of my family is in Orkney any more, I haven’t lived there for over forty years but I’ve got aunts, uncles and cousins who’ve never left. I’m fifty now and I left Orkney at nine years old, forty-one years ago. I grew up in army bases around the world but, whether I’ve lived in Iceland, Lithuania, Russia or America, I’ve always gravitated back to London.

Just because you are homeless, you don’t have to look homeless. I had gone from being well-off  to having a cardboard box for a bed. I owned only a holdall containing an overcoat, some trousers, a pair of shoes and my top hat. I had just 56p in my pocket. I put on my overcoat and top hat and got into all these fancy hotels to wash and shave. I did whatever I could to keep up appearances but, when everyone was heading home at night, I’d be left walking the streets. My shoes had no soles and I was eating daily in soup kitchens. Most nights, I walked around Kensington & Chelsea, because obviously I stood out like a sore thumb in my top hat and three piece suit, and I found it was safer there. I travel light, I could pack in half an hour because I don’t have many possessions.

I came here to Spitalfields for two months in June and July, getting to know the market before I started in August. I just came along and said I wanted to sell hats but I didn’t have enough for a stall, so I entered into an arrangement with Mal Hallett who let me have a table on his stall. I sold all my eight top hats on the first day, and then I went out and bought more hats and I never looked back. Within three weeks, I was off benefits and in profit. Now Mal & I are business partners – fifty-fifty – and our business is called ‘Last Stop For the Curious.’ I raise money for No Second Night Out – ten per cent of my turn-over goes to them.

I like hats. I wear them and they sell themselves. I’m talking with hatmakers Locke & Co, and Christies have been in touch too. Locke & Co came to see me at the weekend and I’m going to be their only outlet in the East End. I’ve taught myself how hats are made and how to restore them through research, I’ve worked with milliners since I started in the market. I’ve met a lot of milliners, some have even heard about me and come and approached me.

If you think you’ll never suit a hat then you never will and then there are those who collect hats, and everybody else is in between. You can easily tell someone’s shirt or shoe size by looking at them but heads are deceptive, the average head size is 57.”

Colin gets photographed by admirers as many as fifty times a day.

Colin Rosie, Hat Seller in Spitalfields Market

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You enter a disused tramshed in Clapton, climb a ramshackle staircase and discover yourself in the studio of Giorgione, one of the greatest Venetian artists of the High Renaissance, who died in 1510. How can this be? Here in a room of comparable size to one of the smaller chambers at the National Gallery you are confronted with an array of masterpieces – familiar works, like Giorgione’s most famous painting The Tempest, surrounded by others that were thought to be lost, known only by engravings. Potentially the lair of an art thief or a master forger, it is some kind of miracle you have stumbled upon.

Neither thief nor forger, the magus responsible for working this magic is Danny Easterbrook who has devoted the last sixteen years to repainting the canon of works of Giorgione at the rate of three a year, using all the correct pigments and practices of Giorgione’s time. It is an extraordinary project rendered all the more astonishing by its location in this deserted tramshed and thus it is no surprise to discover that Danny is almost as passionate about the building as he is about Giorgione.

“The Tudor palace of Brooke House, dating from 1470, stood across the road from here until it was demolished in 1955,” Danny explained, widening his eyes in wonder, “The stables and coach yard for Brooke House were on this side of the road, becoming the Clapton Coachworks and, in 1873, The Lea Bridge Tramway Depot.”

The tramshed was shut more than a century ago, when the system switched from horsepower to electricity in 1907, and since then the buildings have served as a warehouse for Jack Cohen, the founder of Tesco, and as the home to the Odessa recording studios, employed by Iron Maiden, Dire Straits, The Police and Pete Doherty among others. Until recently, the entire complex was in use as artists’ studios and crafts workshops, but they have all gone now, except Danny and a small company selling foam rubber.

The imminent demolition of the building underscores the melancholy of Giorgione’s dreamlike paintings, that emphasise the transient, ephemeral nature of the world, and colours Danny’s quest to recover something lost centuries ago. Vasari believed Giorgione to be the peer of Leonardo and Michelangelo, yet today only a handful of paintings are ascribed to him and his reputation has faded to an enigma that matches the mysterious nature of his subjects. “We don’t know much about Giorgione, he died young and he’s been obscured by Titian, who was his pupil,” admitted Danny with a frown, “Many of his paintings have been taken away from him and given to Titian.”

“When I came to London from New Zealand in the seventies, I was a bass player,” Danny revealed, speaking of his own past,“but a painter lived across the road and it sparked my interest. Since the late eighties, I’ve been painting and making lutes.” Then he took one from a whole line of different lutes he had made, hanging upon the wall, and began to improvise upon it with the ease of a virtuoso, and I realised I was in the company of a genuine Renaissance man.

A talented individual with a fierce scholarly intelligence, Danny has immersed himself in Venetian culture of Giorgione’s time, exploring the provenance of disputed works, and - in his versions - removing overpainting and images that have been added, in order to get closer to Giorgione. Through his intimate understanding of Giorgione, Danny seeks to restore the reputation of his beloved master by demonstrating the true range of his achievements in painting.

It is an endeavour that sits somewhere in between art history and conceptual art, and Danny’s accomplishment is breathtaking – even manufacturing elaborate gilt frames for each of the paintings in the authentic method. You look around the room and you realise you are seeing something impossible, something even Giorgione never saw – all his works in one room. Through comparison, Danny is beginning to construct a tentative sequence of Giorgione’s paintings and also, through comparison, to establish that paintings misattributed to others are in fact the work of Giorgione.

Ten years ago, Danny spent a year putting a new roof on his studio which is also his home, high up in the former stables of the former tramshed. He has been a good custodian of a dignified old building but now he is forced to leave, he can find nowhere else in Hackney to continue his project and is looking at moving to Wales or the West Country. “When I came here it was cheap and you didn’t have to work a sixty hour week just to pay the rent, it was a perfect space for what I wanted,” he confessed to me regretfully.

Yet it is apparent that Danny’s visionary project will carry him forward wherever he goes. “I believe Giorgione painted sixty or so paintings,” he admitted to me, “and if I live long enough I’ll run out of paintings to paint.”

Danny Easterbrook

Danny Easterbrook’s studio

A corner of the studio

The old stableyard

A blacksmith operated from here until recently

A ring to tether a horse

This foam rubber company is the last business still operating in the tramshed

A hidden passage at the tramshed

A secret yard at the tramshed

The North Metropolitan Tramways Company Depot was opened in 1873

Rails where the trams once ran

Brooke House in the twenties

Brooke House in the eighteen-eighties, drawn in the style of Wenceslas Hollar

Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien

Mannie Blankett

“You can call me ‘Jack Of All Trades’ if you want,” suggested Mannie with a characteristic grin of self-effacement, when I asked his profession, as if he were more concerned to make things easier for me than to assert his accomplishments. Such is the philosophical detachment of one born in 1917, who saw the passage of the twentieth century, who is the last of a family of six children, and is a man at peace with himself.

While the January afternoon light faded outside, I was privileged to spend a few hours with Mannie in the peace of his modern flat looking down upon the Petticoat Lane Market.

“As a youngster, I remember going to the Pavilion Theatre in the Whitechapel Rd and seeing the boxing and wrestling. It was full of people and very popular. That was a long time ago, the end of the thirties, so you can imagine how old I am. The boxing ring was in the middle of the theatre with seats all round and upon the stage. It can’t have been expensive because I didn’t have anything. It must have been pennies. I remember an American boxer came over called ‘Punchy’ Paul Shaffer who knocked out all his opponents in the first round and there was Max Krauser the wrestler, a heavyweight who won all his fights.

I was born in Jamaica St and I left the East End at twenty years old, when the family moved to Stamford Hill in 1937. Jamaica St had all these bug-ridden houses then. We used to call them ‘red bugs,’ and they came out in the summer. Six of us shared a three bedroom house and we had no back garden or bathroom, and we had an outside toilet. Opposite, there was company that did deliveries by horse and cart, collecting and transporting goods. There were few cars around then, very few people had them, just the milkman, the baker and the coalman. I wish I could remember more about the old days. As a kid, my mother used to take me up to Brick Lane to buy clothes and I remember the market in Whitechapel all along Mile End Waste

My parents came from Poland. My father Harry was a furrier who had his own business in the West End and my mother Sarah had six children to bring up. Blankett & Sons had workshops around Oxford St and Soho, and I had a brother who worked there with my father. I went to South St School, then I won a scholarship to Mile End School in Myrdle St and I was supposed to stay until sixteen, but my mother took me out at fourteen. I didn’t want to work as a furrier, instead I worked as a hairdresser all over the East End, before my mother sent me to a hairdressing school to learn my trade for three years but I wasn’t keen on that – the hours were very long, eight in the morning until eight at night – so I went into the family business after all.

I worked there for a couple of years and I learnt all the parts of the trade, making patterns, cutting and nailing. At lunchtimes, I used to go swimming and sunbathing at the Serpentine Lido and I got chatting with the attendant and he said there was a job going as a lifeguard and suggested I apply. I worked at the Lido for five years, it was a seasonal job from Easter until September. At school, I had learnt to swim and won a bronze medal for lifesaving. I was in my late teens and I loved that job. In our English summers, you get weeks of rain and we used to sit and play chess all day.

I always wanted to travel and, one day, I saw an advert in the London Times offering return tickets to India for seventy-five pounds. So I got a ticket and it was to travel overland, so it took a month just to get there! I met this young lady, Pat Evans, and we used to write to each other. When I went to India, I gave up my flat in Blandford St, so she said, ‘When you come back you can stay at my place in Croydon for a night, if you need somewhere.’ I stayed ten years until she died. She used to do a bit of writing, she wrote stories and poems for magazines and had quite a few published. In Croydon, I got a job at the swimming pool in Purley Way, opposite where the old airport and I was there for five years.

I got called up in 1943 for three years and, when I came out, I did a bit of hairdressing and part-time work in the family business to get by. In the sixties, I worked in Housman’s Radical Bookshop in the Caledonian Rd and I was in the Peace Movement. I joined Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and became one of the Committee of One Hundred, including Bertrand Russell, Arnold Wesker, Christopher Logue and Vanessa Redgrave. We had demonstrations and, when they were arrested, we would step in to fill their places – I was arrested a number of times too.

When I was in Croydon, I got friendly with a guy who liked to dress up in uniform and do historical re-enactments, and he told me there was a VE Day Celebration coming up in the East End and they had two big bands playing including one led by Glenn Miller’s brother. So we went along and I met this woman who lived in Petticoat Sq. She was called Rene Rabin and that was twenty-five years ago. That was how I came back to the East End, to live in Middlesex St. Now I’ve lived in Petticoat Lane for twenty years and I like it round here. I have travelled a full circle in my life. ”

Mannie with his sister Anne and their parents Sarah and Harry Blankett in the thirties

The Pavilion Theatre as Mannie knew it in the thirties

In his flat in Petticoat Sq, Mannie Blankett looks down upon the Petticoat Lane Market

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Taking advantage of a rare day of February sunshine yesterday, Doris Kurta took the opportunity to make a return visit to Bacon St where she grew up. “I’ve been back twice since 1938,” she admitted to me in excitement,“but this is the first time I’ve got out of the car. I’m just amazed, it’s a little bit frightening when I think how long ago it was.”

“Kurta isn’t my real name, we don’t even know what it was,” she confessed to me with alacrity, “My father came from a village called Kutna in Poland and he couldn’t speak English when he arrived and we think, when they asked his name, he thought they were asking where he came from so he said, ‘Kutna’ and they wrote down ‘Kurta.’”

Returning to the bustle of the Sunday market in Brick Lane, more than seventy years after she left it behind, offered an unexpected moment of contemplation for Doris. “We were very happy when we moved out,” she assured me unequivocably.

This emotionally-charged location reminded Doris of the fate her parents escaped by coming here. “My father lost all his family in Poland, except a nephew,” she explained, “My mother came from a large family on the border of Hungary and Romania. My grandmother told them, ‘As long as I am alive, the Germans will not take you.’ But, two days after my grandmother died, they came and took them and only one survived.”

Thus Bacon St is a significant address for Doris, even if almost none of the buildings of seventy years ago still stand. Bacon St was Doris’ childhood home and where her family’s fortunes turned around. Both her parents took flight from their homelands in fear yet, when the Kurta family left Bacon St – on 15th January 1938 – they were embarking on a new journey in expectation of a better life, and it was a hope that Doris saw fulfilled.

“I was born in Pelham St in Spitalfields but we moved to Bacon St when I was four months old and that’s where we lived until I was fourteen. Harry, my father, was a ladies’ milliner and Lily, my mother, also worked in millinery – sewing -and that’s how they met. She made everything we wore, even our overcoats. I had this wonderful pink coat that was a hand-me-down from my elder sister and it was still in good condition when I got it, but it wasn’t by the time I had finished with it. I remember there was a factory opposite that caught fire and my father wrapped me in that pink coat and took me to the window to watch. I had one sister, Annetta (known as Nita), an elder brother Sydney (known as Syd or Zelig) and a younger brother, Monty. 42 Bacon St was a huge house, but we lived in a flat with two small rooms for the six of us and a scullery with no running hot water.

At the rear, it sloped down in the yard and there were two cabinet-makers’ workshops, so there was always plenty of sawdust around and the boys used to make see-saws out of the planks left outside at the weekend. But it was a bit rough and my elder brother, Syd, fell off. My younger brother, Monty, couldn’t control the plank and it had a nail in the end which hit him and made a hole right in his head. I’m laughing now but it wasn’t a laughing matter at the time.

The area was mainly Catholic and Jewish in those days, and the Catholic priest was very friendly and he used to come round and try to explain his religion to us. He used to say to my mother, ‘I’m not going to try to convert you because you’ll end up converting me!’ The Catholics and the Jews kept apart but if anyone needed help, they’d go the distance, whoever it was.

Regularly, my mother would fill in forms to get us another flat from the Council but nothing ever came of it until one day a new social worker came round while my brother and I were doing our homework at the kitchen table. He said, ‘Is this where you do your study?’ and my mother said, ‘Look around, do you see anywhere else?’ He gave her a new form to fill out and within a week we moved.

We moved into the very first batch of council flats in Stoke Newington – Millington House in Church St. The rest of the block was empty and we were the first occupants. It was absolute heaven, we had three bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen but, best of all, a bathroom with a separate toilet. When we got there, the family lined up so that I could go into the bathroom first because they knew how important it was to me.

During the war, I worked in Bishopsgate at Cedar & Co, accountants near Liverpool St Station. One day, I was working late on my own on a Friday night and I got locked in. The boss had locked the outer door and I couldn’t get in touch with him because he lived in Surrey, and my own key was at Robert Dyas getting a spare one cut. So I called the Bishopsgate Police Station and told them my predicament. I’ve always carried a book with me so I settled down to read Benighted by J.B. Priestley while I was waiting. But the police and the fire brigade were in competition to get there first and they arrived in no time. I looked out the window to see a crowd had formed outside. They fixed a plank across from the next building and carried me safely over. When the officer asked me what happened, I said, ‘It was malice aforethought.’ I was trying to be funny but he didn’t get the joke because it was during the bombing and he had other things to worry about. One Monday, I came in to work and there was glass all over the place from the blast.

There were so many pubs in Bishopsgate, I would describe them as ‘character-forming.’ I’ve hardly ever been in a pub in all my life. I don’t drink. I’ve seen too much of what drink can do to people. We had two flats on each floor in Bacon St and, opposite us, lived a charming man yet when he was drunk he’d be terrible to his wife. He wouldn’t do it if she was in our flat, so she’d run across the landing when she heard him coming and he wouldn’t cross the threshold but stand and shout at her from outside, until my mother quietened him down. They had family wedding party once in the backyard and he got into fight with the bridegroom and they had to call my mother down to stop them, and she did. She was only five feet tall but she was wonderful. I don’t think I appreciated her enough at the time.

I became an auditor and we had clients who worked in the Spitalfields Market. When I first started, I didn’t know what an auditor was yet I took to it and I worked hard. People didn’t expect to see a woman doing that job but it was the war and they had no choice. It was difficult when the war stopped because the boys came back and expected to return to their jobs, so I just left and went to live in France for a spell. I went there at the invitation of the De Gaulle party and stayed in a house where boys who been in the resistance and survived the death camps were being taken care of. Then I lived in Paris in the Rue de Sevres for a year. I worked in a bank and my French wasn’t very good, so one of the customers asked me to speak in English on the phone. When I put the receiver down, everyone was giggling because apparently I spoke English with a French accent.

I acted with the Bethnal Green Players, we performed in Bethnal Green Tube Station during the war. There was a theatre and a cafe down there. Of course, we only performed comedy. Later I played the lead in G.K.Chesterton’s last play which was completed for us by Dorothy L. Sayers and we performed Shakespeare every summer at the George in Southwark. Arnold Wesker was a member and he always says I encouraged him to carry on with the theatre and it’s because of me he became a playwright!

On December 6th 1995, I moved from Stoke Newington to Edgware, where I live now, and my sister Nita came to live with me after her husband died.”

“I won the cup for gymnastics at the Bethnal Green Girls Club two years running. I didn’t get to keep the cup, but I still have my badge somewhere.”

Harry & Lily Kurta

“This is my mother Lily with her friend”

“Harry my father used to make extra money as a barman at the weekends”

“I am the one holding the blackboard at the centre of this photo of my class at Wood Close School”

“When I was evacuated at the beginning of the war, we were supposed to be sent to Cambridgeshire but me and my brother Monty were sent to Much Hadham in Hertfordshire instead.”

“This is my father with my younger brother Monty  at Millington House in Stoke Newington”

“This is me playing the lead in the premiere of G.K.Chesterton’s last unfinished play,  completed by Dorothy L. Sayers”

“This is me as Ophelia, performing at the George in Southwark”

“This is me playing the role of Mother in Arnold Weskers’ ‘Chicken Soup With Barley.’”

Doris outside 42 Bacon St yesterday, on the site of the building where she grew up

Doris Kurta

Portraits of Doris Kurta copyright © Jeremy Freedman

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In anticipation of his new exhibition The Singing Playground which opens at Rich Mix this Thursday, 6th February, here is my profile of Dan Jones, Rhyme Collector extrordinaire

Dan Jones

This is the amiable Dan Jones who has lived down in Cable St since 1967 and has made it his business to collect children’s rhymes, both here and all over the world since 1948. Dan has many hundreds in transcripts and recordings that are slowly yet inevitably converging into a book of around a thousand rhymes that he has been working on for some years entitled The Singing Playground which will be his magnum opus. He explained that the litany of classic nursery rhymes which adults teach children have barely altered since James Halliwell’s collection The Nursery Rhymes of England of 1842, when they were already old. In contrast, the rhymes composed and passed on by children are constantly changing and it is these that form the subject of Dan’s study.

When you enter the bright red front door of his house in Cable St, you can barely get through the passage because of a huge mural painted by Dan of the playground of St Paul’s School, Wellclose Sq, that is about ten feet tall and twenty feet long. Painted on wooden panels, it is suspended from the wall and jutting forward, which puts you directly at the eye level of many of the children in the painting and, thus confronted,  you see that all the figures are surrounded by rhymes. The effect is magical and one reminiscent of Breughel’s Children’s Games.

As well as collecting rhymes, Dan is a painter who creates affectionately observed murals of children in school playgrounds, all painted in rich natural hues and with such levity and appreciation for the exuberant idiosyncrasy of childhood that I was immediately beguiled. I have always loved the joyful sound of the children playing in the school playground that I can hear from my house, but Dan has found a method to explore and celebrate the specific quality of this intriguing secret world through his scholarship and paintings.

Once you get past the mural, you find yourself in the parlour lined with more paintings. Some even protrude from behind the comfortable armchairs, which are arranged in a horseshoe, like an old-fashioned doctor’s surgery, indicating that Dan lives a very sociable existence and that this room has been the location for innumerable happy gatherings over the last forty years he and his wife, Denise, have lived here. There are bookshelves brimming over with all manner of books devoted to art and social history, and children’s books on the coffee table for the amusement of Dan’s grandchildren, who wander in and out as we are talking.

Rhymes spill out of Dan Jones endlessly and I could have sat all day hearing the fascinating stories of the origins of familiar examples and all their remarkable different versions over time and in different languages. Dan has a paradoxical quality of seeming both young and old at the same time. While displaying a fine white beard and resembling a patriarch in a painting by William Blake, he also possesses the gentle nature and spontaneous enthusiasm of youth. I can understand why children choose to line up in the playground to tell Dan their rhymes, as they do when he arrives in schools, and why old people too, when Dan puts on them on the spot asking “What rhymes do you remember from your youth?”, would summon whole canons of verse from the depths of their memories for him.

The heartening news from the playground that Dan has to report is that the culture of rhymes is alive and kicking, in spite of all the distractions of the modern age. The endless process of repetition and reinvention goes on with ceaseless vigour. Most rhymes accompany action and melody, which means that while the words may change, other elements – especially the melodies - can remain constant over centuries or across continents in different languages and cultures, tracing the historical movements of peoples.

Perhaps the most astounding example Dan gave me was Ching, chang, choller (paper, scissors and stone), a game used to select a random winner or loser, which was depicted in the tomb of a Pharoah four thousand years ago and of which there are versions recorded in ancient Rome, China, Japan, Mongolia, Chile, Korea,Hungary, Sweden, Italy, France and USA. Dan recorded it being played at Columbia Road Primary School. By contrast, I was especially delighted to Learn that Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star was written by Jane and Ann Taylor in Islington in 1806 and to discover the Bengali version recently recorded by Dan at Bangabandhu School in Bethnal Green.

Sometimes, there is a plangent history to a rhyme, of which the children who sing it are unaware. Dan has traced the path of stone-passing games that were carried by slave children in the eighteenth century from West Africa to the Caribbean and then, two centuries later, brought to London by immigrants from the West Indies. Meanwhile, new rhymes constantly arise, as Dan explained, “Some burst forth just in one particular school playground to blossom like a spring flower for a few weeks and then vanish completely.”

Living in Spitalfields, surrounded by old buildings and layers of history, I am always fascinated to consider who has been here before. You have read the tales of the past I have collected from old people, but Dan’s work reveals an awe-inspiring historical continuum of much greater age. There is a compelling poetry to the notion that the oldest thing here could be the elusive and apparently ephemeral games and rhymes that the children are playing in the playground. I love the idea that these joyful rhymes, mostly carried and passed on by girls between the ages of eight and twelve – marginal to the formal culture of society – have survived, outliving everything else, wars and migration of people notwithstanding.

Dan’s wife Denise and his children, Davey, Polly and Sam walk in the foreground of his painting of Christ Church School, Brick Lane in 1982, as reproduced in his book Inky, Pinky, Ponky

Click on the image to enlarge Dan Jones’ painting of St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq, 1977

The Singing Playground an interactive work commissioned by The Museum of Childhood where you can to listen to Dan’s Nursery Rhyme recordings

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Dan Jones & Chris Kelly in the Playground

Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green confessed to me that she has never received a Valentine in her entire life and yet, in spite of this unfortunate example of the random injustice of existence, her faith in the future remains undiminished.

Taking a break from her busy filming schedule, the Viscountess granted me a brief audience this week to reveal her intimate thoughts upon the most romantic day of the year and permit me to take these rare photographs that reveal a candid glimpse into the private life of one of the East End’s most fascinating characters.

This year – for the first time since 1986 – Viscountess Boudica dug our her Valentine paraphernalia of paper hearts, banners, fairylights, candles and other pink stuff to put on this show as an encouragement to the readers of Spitalfields Life. “If there’s someone that you like,” she says, “I want you to send them a card to show them that you care.”

Yet behind the brave public face, lies a personal tale of sadness for the Viscountess. “I think Valentine’s Day is a good idea, but it’s a kind of death when you walk around the town and see the guys with their bunches of flowers, choosing their chocolates and cards, and you think, ‘It should have been me!’” she admitted with a frown, “I used to get this funny feeling inside, that feeling when you want to get hold of someone and give them a cuddle.”

Like those love-lorn troubadours of yore, Viscountess Boudica has mined her unrequited loves as a source of inspiration for her creativity, writing stories, drawing pictures and – most importantly – designing her remarkable outfits that record the progress of her amours. “There is a tinge of sadness after all these years,” she revealed to me, surveying her Valentine’s Day decorations,” but I am inspired to believe there is hope of domestic happiness.”

LEAVE YOUR VALENTINE MESSAGES FOR VISCOUNTESS BOUDICA IN THE COMMENTS BELOW

Be sure to follow Viscountess Boudica’s blog There’s More To Life Than Heaven & Earth

Take a look at

Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances

Viscountess Boudica’s Blog

Viscountess Boudica’s Album

Viscountess Boudica’s Halloween

Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas

Read my original profile of Mark Petty, Trendsetter

and take a look at Mark Petty’s Multicoloured Coats

Mark Petty’s New Outfits

Mark Petty returns to Brick Lane

Peter Sargent

In 1983, when Peter Sargent took on his shop, there were seven other butchers in Bethnal Green but now his is the only one left. Two years ago it looked like Peter’s might go the way of the rest, until he took the initiative of placing a discreet sign on the opposite side of the zebra crossing outside his shop. Directed at those on their way to the supermarket, it said, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco.”

This cheeky intervention raised the ire of the supermarket chain, won Peter a feature in the local paper and drew everyone’s attention to the plain truth that you get better quality meat at a better price at an independent butcher than at a supermarket.“Tesco threatened legal action,” admitted Peter, his eyes gleaming in defiance, “They came over while I was unloading my van to tell me they were serious, but I told them where to go.” Shortly afterwards, it was revealed that Tesco had been selling horsemeat and Peter left a bale of hay outside his shop. “I invited customers to drop it off if they were going across the road,” he revealed to me with a grin of triumph.

This unlikely incident proved to be a turning point for Peter’s business which has been in the ascendancy ever since. “There’s not many of my old East End customers left anymore and I was close to calling it a day,” he confided to me, “but I’ve found that the young people who are moving in, they want to buy their meat from a proper butcher’s shop.”

In celebration of this change of fortune in the local butchery trade, Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I paid a visit behind the counter recently to bring you this report, and we each came away with sawdust on our boots and the gift of a packet of the freshly-made sausages for which Peter’s shop is renowned.

“I started as a Saturday boy in Walthamstow, when I was sixteen, in 1970,” Peter told me, “and then it became a full-time job when I left school at eighteen.” Over the next ten years, Peter worked in each of half a dozen shops belonging to the same owner, including the one in Bethnal Green, until they all shut and he lost his job. Speaking with the bank that his ex-employer was in debt to, Peter agreed to take on the shop and, when they asked if he had a down payment, Peter’s wife Jackie produced ten pounds from her handbag.

Since then, Peter has been working twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his shop in Bethnal Green – arriving around eight each morning after a daily visit to Smithfield to collect supplies. “I love it and I hate it, I can’t leave it alone,” he confessed to me, placing a hand on his chest to indicate the depth of emotion, “it’s very exciting in a Saturday when all the customers arrive, but it can be depressing when nobody comes.”

Peter is supported by fellow butcher Vic Evenett and the pair make an amiable double-act behind the counter, ensuring that an atmosphere of good-humoured anarchy prevails. “I started as a ‘humper’ at Smithfield in 1964 for six years, then I had my own shop in Bow for twenty-three years, then one in Walthamstow Market, Caledonian Rd and Roman Rd, but none of them did very very well because I had to pay too much rent,” Vic informed me, “I came here twenty years ago to help Peter out for a few days and I stayed on.”

In a recent refit, an old advert was discovered pasted onto the wall and Peter had the new tiles placed around it so that customers may see the illustration of his shop when it was a tripe dresser in 1920. Yet Peter will tell you proudly that his shop actually dates from 1860 and he became visibly excited when I began talking about the centuries-old tradition of butchery in Whitechapel. And then he and Vic began exchanging significant glances as I explained how Dick Turpin is sometimes said to have been an apprentice butcher locally.

Thankfully, East Enders old and new took notice of Peter’s sign, “Have a look in butcher’s opposite before you go in Tesco,” and  he and Vic – the last butchers in Bethnal Green – will be able to continue to make an honest living without the necessity of turning highwaymen.

Peter’s sign outside Tesco, July 2012

Excited customers on Saturday morning

Vic Evenett & Peter Sargent

Peter & Vic sold more than five hundred game birds last Christmas

The Butcher’s Shop, 374 Bethnal Green Rd, E2

Photographs copyright © Colin O’Brien

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Can you spot Monty Meth in this photograph of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club Summer camp at Greatstone in Kent in 1939? Wearing the jacket in the front row, Monty is distinguished by his ear-to-ear smile – a distinctive expression of a generous spirit that still graces his visage seventy-five years later.

Already, when this was taken, Monty was attending photography classes given by Harry Tichener, Member of the Royal Photographic Society and Manager of the Boys Club, who took this picture recording that glorious fleeting moment in the last summer before World War II. Today Monty credits his experience at the Club as the first step towards his career in Fleet St, firstly as a Photographer and then as a Journalist, winning him the News Reporter of the Year in 1970. Yet he is equally aware that it could all have turned out very differently.

“There is no doubt that without the Club, I should have become a bit of a ‘tea leaf,’” he confessed to me,“We used to knock things off from shops – I’m not proud of what we did, but you had no choice other than to be one of the boys. Not only did the Club give me some principles, it showed me how to think and act.”

When I visited Monty this week at his home in Oakwood, North London, I found – even at eighty-eight years old – he had already been up since five-thirty and out for his morning swim at six o’clock at the pool, long before I arrived. Monty met me at the Underground station and we walked together through the suburban streets with their carefully-tended gardens to reach the well-appointed home he shares with Betty his wife, where we settled down to chat.

“I was born in Bethnal Green at 10 Columbia Rd, above a barber’s shop where two families shared a few rooms. It was opposite the triangle where taxis waited and my memory is of horses and carts. My mother Millie came to London from Newcastle as a domestic servant to a Jewish family in Stepney and my father Max came from Austria. He was a bread roundsman and that’s how they met. They married in 1918 at New Rd Synagogue and had three sons, Arthur in 1919, Ron in 1921 and me in 1926. We moved from Columbia Rd to a new block of flats opposite the Children’s Hospital in the Hackney Rd in 1938 and I used to go after school to learn Talmud and Torah at the synagogue on the corner of Chance St. Afterwards, at seven o’clock, I used to bunk into the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club in the Blue Anchor on the next corner, and I got thrown out regularly until I was twelve.

In 1938, when I was old enough, I join the Club but I only stayed until 1944 when I went into the Royal Navy, yet I am absolutely certain that my career as a photographer which followed came as a result of my experiences there. I worked on the newsheet with David Roxan who preceded me in Fleet St and became a reporter at the News of the World, and I attended Harry Tichener’s Photography Class. As a result of my contacts with Bernard Collier and Bobby Gray, who were also in his class but had taken jobs at a picture agency in Fleet St called Photopress, I joined the agency when I left school at fourteen years old as a Messenger Boy, delivering photographs to newspapers for ten shillings a week. A year later, the Topical Press Agency offered me double the wages and I stayed with them until I went into the Navy.

When I returned to the Topical Press Agency after the war, I worked first in the dark room and then as a Photographer. I won an award for my work from Encyclopaedia Britannica but, in 1954, I didn’t see a future as a Photographer in Fleet St. I was writing and doing photo-stories for magazines on subjects like the Cornish china clay industry, the trug makers of Herstmonceux and traditional bookbinders, when I took a job as a feature journalist in Leeds. Betty came down from Scotland and we decided to set up home there, until 1965 when I became Industrial Correspondent for the Daily Mail – which was much less right wing in those days.

I was made Industrial Editor and, in 1970, I won Newspaper Reporter of the Year, before being recruited by Beecham as head of Communications where I stayed seventeen years, leaving in 1989 when they were bought by the Americans and became Smith Kline Beecham. Then in my sixties, I started a consultancy business that I ran with a colleague from the Daily Mail until 1999 when I was seventy-four.

I was a good Photographer and a pretty good Journalist. I had a good education and, at ten years old ,we were writing essays – what the Club gave me was the confidence to stand up and speak, I learnt how to take minutes, be part of a committee and accept responsibility.”

Determined to apply his skills to benefit others, Monty took over the Enfield Over-Fifties Forum upon his retirement and built up the membership from seventy to six thousand, mobilising a significant campaigning group to advocate the interests of seniors in his neighbourhood. And, returning to where it all started, Monty became Chairman of the Cambridge & Bethnal Green Old Boys from 2000 until 2012, raising £37,000 for charities dedicated to maintaining the kind of youth club culture from which he once drew such benefit so long ago.

Monty Meth with his Macintosh Classic of 1990, from which he runs the Enfield Over-Fifties Forum

The ‘intruder’ at the Queen’s visit – photograph by Montagu Meth of Topical Press Agency, published in Daily Mirror 4th March 1951

Winston Churchill goes to vote  - photograph by Montagu Meth of Topical Press Agency, published in Daily Telegraph 26th October 1951

10 Columbia Rd where Monty Meth was born above the barber’s shop (now a cafe) in 1926

Monty Meth when he joined the Royal Navy in 1944 at eighteen

Monty (centre) with his brothers, Arthur and Ron

Monty as Industrial Editor of the Daily Mail

Monty is News Reporter of the Year in 1970

Monty and Betty

Monty Meth has asked me to announce that this year’s 90th Cambridge & Bethnal Green Anniversary Dinner on September 1st, celebrating the foundation of the Club in 1924, will also be the last.

You may also like to read these other stories of members of Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys Club

Ron Goldstein

Aubrey Silkoff

Aubrey Goldsmith

Manny Silverman

Lennie Sanders

Maxie Lea

and watch

Cambridge & Bethnal Green Boys’ Club Films

Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien took these portraits at this week’s launch of Bishopsgate Voices, the new oral history CD featuring people from Spitalfields & Bishopsgate, produced by the Bishopsgate Institute.

Alan Griver, Printer & Boxing Coach - “I can remember walking out at lunchtime and seeing a film being shot in Fournier St. It was about the American Revolution and it was supposed to be a Boston street, Boston at that time. All their old buildings had gone, so they couldn’t shoot it in Boston and they looked at Fournier St which looked exactly like one of the roads in Boston. I watched the redcoats marching up and down.”

Alan Griver was born in 1938 on Underwood St. His parents were originally from the Ukraine, his father arriving in London at five years old. Alan’s father worked in the timber trade and later owned a sweet shop on Well St, Hackney. Alan was evacuated to Luton in World War II but returned to attend Holcroft Rd School. He trained to be a Boxer and went on to teach boxing and start his own gymnasium.

Mavis Bullwinkle, Secretary at Royal London Hospital - “You can’t imagine it now, but every fish had a different taste. When you buy fish now, it’s all got the same taste because it’s all been frozen. But you used to get your plaice that used to be as big as that on your plate and it would cost hardly anything.”

Mavis Bullwinkle was born at the London Hospital on 18th May 1932. Her father was a Clerk and her mother worked in the office of a clothing company before leaving to become a Housewife. She attended the Sir John Cass School before being evacuated to Aylesbury and returning to London when she was thirteen. Mavis was Christ Church Sunday school teacher for thirty years and worked as a Short-Term Typist before moving to the London Hospital, where she worked for forty years.

Sid Joseph, Bus Driver & Postman - ‘We used to have a paper man, selling papers, and when I went down there he knew my name. He said… “Tell Mum and Dad that Hitler’s invaded Russia.” I didn’t know what Russia was! I goes, “Is there a place called Russia?” Me mum said, “Yes. Why?” I said, “Hitler’s invaded ‘em”.  I’m not gonna repeat what my mother said.”

Sidney Joseph was born in Windsor House, Wenlock St in 1931. His mother was a Housewife and his father worked as a Porter in Spitalfields Market. The family later moved to Brunswick Buildings, Goulston St and he attended the Jewish Free School. During the war, Sid was first evacuated to Bishops Stortford and then to Padstow. Upon his return to London he attended Christ Church School, leaving at age fourteen to work as a Hatmaker. He completed his two year long National Service, starting at age eighteen, stationed in Dusseldorf. Leaving the army in 1951, Sid came back to the East End, where he worked as a Van Driver delivering smoked salmon, then as a Bus Driver and finally as a Driver for the Post Office.

Lesley Keeper, Machinist & Barmaid - “In the middle of our street, we had a great big square [bomb] debris which led to the next street and all the kids used to play on there and that was our playground. And I always remember Mrs Dexter who lived opposite, she had two daughters Patsy & Jean, and she used to call with arms folded out the top window, ‘Pat! Jean! Go and play nicely on the debris.’”

Lesley Keeper was born on 15th November 1947 at Mile End Hospital. Her father was  a Coalman and her mother was a Machinist. Her first job at age fifteen was at the office of the clothes-making company, Ellis & Goldstein. Lesley later worked at a Chemist in Houndsditch and as a Clerk at Bethnal Green Hospital, before marrying at age eighteen and having two kids before she was twenty.

Norah Pam, Clerical Officer & PA to Director of Redbridge Health Authority - “From the top of the building you could see the red glow in the sky, you could see the planes coming over and the German planes had a completely different sound from ours. You could hear them, you know, chug-chug-chug as they came along – and you’d hear the bombs.”

Norah Pam was born on 31st May 1925 near the Tower of London. She lived at Howard Buildings in Deal St and attended All Saints School. In 1932, she contracted scarlet fever and diphtheria and spent a total of twelve weeks in the isolation ward at the hospital in Homerton. She later attended Sir John Cass School and worked at Ferguson Radio after leaving school. She met her husband, a navy man, in 1948. They married in 1950 and had two children.

Henrietta Keeper, Ballad Singer & Sample Machinist - “My husband died fourteen years ago of emphysema from smoking and he ate a lot of hydrolized fat. So when he died, I threw away the biscuits and I bought a book on Nutrition and studied it, and now I’ve got strong. I only eat wholemeal bread – white bread’s a killer. I am keeping well, to stay alive for the sake of my children because I love them. I don’t want to go the same way my husband did.”

Henrietta Keeper was born and lived her whole life in Bethnal Green, apart from when she evacuated to Little Saxham, near Bury St Edmunds, at the beginning of World War II. Henrietta worked as a Sample Machinist and joined the Tate & Lyle Concert party for thirty years. Today she may still be heard singing each Friday afternoon at E. Pellicci in Bethnal Green.

Reg Denny, Policeman - “You take Commercial St, not too far from here… you’d walk past the wholesale market and most of the time you’d get the sort of sweet smell of the fruit and then the not-so-good smell at the end of the day when you had the stale cabbage and the rotten beetroot and whatnot.”

Reg Denny was born in 1942 in Clapham. His father was in the fruit & vegetable trade, and his mother worked in a sweet shop in Clerkenwell. He moved to the East End in 1961 to join the police, working at the Commercial Rd Station and living in a police hostel nearby.

Emily Shepherd, Waitress, Clerk & Machinist – “And we had the radio on and then Neville Chamberlain came on and I remember him saying, ‘We are at war with Germany.’  I didn’t know what war was all about much but I knew it was gonna be bad, you know.”

Emily Shepherd was born in 1927 in Bethnal Green. Her father was a Horse and Cart Man and her mother was a Cleaner. Emily worked as a Waitress, Clerk & Machinist in a clothing factory and she has never lived outside the East End.

Keith Martin, Bank Officer - ‘Christmas Eve was the day and it was probably highly illegal – even in those days – but the people on the first floor who did all the back office work used to get a barrel for Christmas and they had this keg of beer up there, and people would go and help themselves to it from time to time.’

Keith Martin was born in 1953 in Forest Gate Hospital and brought up on Newcomen Rd, Leytonstone. He lived at home until his marriage at age twenty-six, when he moved to Dagenham. His first job was at a department store in Leytonstone but he later worked for Midland Bank in the City and Canary Wharf.

Joyce Ward, Teacher & Foreign Office Civil Servant – “My oldest aunt was working as a domestic in a large house somewhere or another. She had quite a good job and she always looked extremely smart. One Christmas, she got the chauffeur of her house to drive her to our house. Now can you imagine, the whole street of people poured into the road to see this – it was probably a Rolls Royce or something in front of our house…”

Joyce Ward was born in 1926 at 13 Columbia Rd, her father was a Tailor and her mother a Housewife. She went to school on Virginia Rd and Rusher St, was evacuated to Bishops Stortford, but later returned and attended Clapton County Secondary School. Joyce read Maths at University College and worked in a semi-secret post for the Foreign Office where she met her husband.

Hannah Jacobson, Civil Servant - “I lived with my grandmother… but across the road… my other grandmother lived, my paternal grandmother, she had so many children that I was more over there than with my grandmother because I used to play with them.”

Hannah Jacobson was born in the Maternity Hospital, Hackney in 1927. Her father was a Fishmonger, working all over London and later owning his own shop. Due to her father moving around for work, she attended twenty-five different schools as a child. Between the ages of five and twelve she lived at 22 Eric St, Mile End, where – during the Blitz – a landmine hit her house and her neighbours were killed.

Joy Harris, Dressmaker - “I was fifteen and he was seventeen. And then we got engaged when I was seventeen-and-a-half and got married at nineteen. I was an average age but Larry was probably a bit older to get married. He was twenty-two.”

Joy Harris was born in Barking in 1946. Her father was a Greengrocer who owned two shops and her mother worked in a factory. After leaving school, she had an apprenticeship as a Dressmaker and worked in Fashion St. Later in life, she worked in a hospital for the mentally ill and became an Occupational Therapist.

Larry Harris, Teleclerk in London Docks - “I think we had the last horse and cart that used to come in… The reference for his number plate was HC1, horse and cart one… Very fond memories of it.”

Larry Harris was born in 1943 at home in Dagenham. His father worked as an Electrician and his mother was a Cleaner and then worked at a sweets factory in Clerkenwell. Larry left school at fifteen to work for Arbuck Smith in the City and later for the Port of London Authority in 1959. He worked there for twenty years before joining Tate & Lyle in Silvertown for a further thirty years.

Sandra Scotting, Copyright Executive - “I’d come home from school sometimes and I’d find a crab or a lobster on the floor because my uncle used to work at the fish market. And he’d come home after his shift, put a load of things in the sink… and sometimes they’d get out… There they’d be crawling along the hallway!”

Sandra Scotting was born in Bethnal Green in 1947. Her mother was a Dressmaker and her father a Tailor. The family lived in Crown House on Bonner Rd, moving to Gore Rd in Hackney when Sandra was eleven. She attended Central Foundation Grammar School and trained as a Doctor, working at the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital when she was newly qualified.

Jeff Borsack, Antiques Dealer - “I had to go to the poor board with my grandmother so that they could give me a uniform to go to the school. That was the dire straits we were in. And I always remember overhearing a lady say to the other gentlemen on the panel… “Children like this shouldn’t go to grammar school.” And I think that actually gave me quite a steely resolve in my life, that I was going to show this woman that children like me could benefit from it.”

Jeff Borsack was born on City Rd in 1937. After his parents died in the Blitz, Jeff went to live with his grandmother until he was evacuated to Berkhamstead. Upon his return to London, he attended Central Foundation Grammar School and studied Hebrew in the evenings, before taking Accountancy and Law at university. He became an Antiques Dealer with an office in Stamford Hill and has worked in markets throughout London.

Linda Simmons, Charities Administrator - “There’s one [rhyme] I remember – I can’t remember the beginning of it – but it ended “Betty Grable is a star. S. T. A. R.” Well, the thing was, we still used to say “Betty Grable is a star” but none of us had ever seen Betty Grable because she was a wartime pin-up, you know.”

Linda Simmons was born in 1949 to a Docker father and a Machinist mother. She spent her childhood in Bethnal Green and for the first three years of her life she lived with her grandparents on Chiltern St, later moving to a council flat in Teesdale St. Linda attended Christ’s Hospital School in Sussex for two years, retuning to the East End to attend John Howard Girls’ Grammar School. She later went on to Oxford University to read English and met her husband, before returning to London to work in publishing until leaving work to raise two children. Later, she returned to work for the Citizens’ Advice Bureau in 1981 and volunteered for the Terrence Higgins Trust, then joined for the Central London Action on Street Health, supporting sex workers, drug users and homeless people.

Copies of the CD cost £5 and are available to purchase at the Bishopsgate Library or may be ordered direct from Stefan.Dickers@bishopsgate.org.uk

Portraits copyright © Colin O’Brien

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Alan works at his flatbed offsetting proofing press in Charlotte Rd, Shoreditch

When Master Printer Alan Cox came to Shoreditch more than thirty years ago, he was surrounded by other print trades and furniture manufacturing workshops, but today he is the last artisan still in business on Charlotte Rd. So – before Alan closes up his shop for good at the end of the summer – I took the opportunity of accompanying Adam Dant on a visit to watch him at work, printing the limited edition of Adam’s Map of the Coffee Houses.

You enter a small door in an unmarked shop front and walk into a huge room with a magnificent old worn brick floor and an elaborate wooden roof that has not been painted in a generation. Two tall Brunswick green doors open onto the street, where the cart once came in with deliveries of timber for the furniture factory and then carried the finished items off to showrooms in the West End.

In the centre of the studio sits Alan’s flatbed offsetting proofing press where he produces limited editions of prints for artists. It is a painstaking manual process as Alan rolls the machine back and forth, positioning each sheet carefully and then removing it to place upon a slowly-growing stack. Adam’s prints had already been through the press once to acquire the coffee-brown background tone and we came to witness the second plate which would apply the black lines of his drawing to complete the work.

With relaxed concentration, Alan rolled the press slowly back and forth, producing the last few prints as Adam watched. Then we convened around the stack and, once Adam had given his approval, we settled down in a quiet corner of the print shop upon a couple of bar stools from the Bricklayers Arms for a celebratory cuppa, as Alan told me his story.

“I came here in 1979. One day, I walked past and I saw this guy moving all this machinery out of here. He was selling up after fifty years, so I asked him to give me ring. It’s a strange triangular building, filling the corner space where Charlotte Rd meets Great Eastern St. Across the road was the National Front headquarters, and there was a lot of shouting and bottle smashing in those days. There were no bars, only the Barley Mow and the Bricklayers Arms which closed at the weekends, so it was pretty dire for night life.

I’ve been printing by lithography since the sixties. At first, I had a little print shop in Jubilee St, Whitechapel, and next door was a kosher chicken shop. We got woken to the sound of them slitting the chickens’ throats, but it was a friendly Jewish community even if the neighbourhood was run down. I moved to London in 1961 to study at Central School of Art and was only just setting up after leaving college in 1963. I taught at various colleges, but having a print shop was a way to do my own work and making a living, without getting drawn into the politics.

The print shop got me involved with lots of other artists. It’s interesting to work with other people, because you never work for them – they always ask your opinion as a printmaker and you work together. If John Hoyland asked my opinion, I used to say, ‘Cover it in black’ - I remember once he did that, and it looked fantastic because it wasn’t solid black and all the colours underneath came through in a subtle way. But some artists are very prima-donna-ish and can be bloody awkward.

I started doing lithography because I like working with colour and brushes in a painterly kind of way, and I found etching a little reductive. At Central, I did some screen-printing but everyone else wanted to do it too, so the studio was always busy whereas hardly anyone used the lithography studio – and it was always possible to get on a press and print my own work.

By the mid-seventies, I had moved down to Butler’s Wharf and was getting a lot of recognition, and I had four people working with me on five presses, so I invited different artists to do monotypes. Nobody did it then but now everybody does it! Degas had done small ones in brown but I encouraged artists to do large ones in colour – I worked with Stephen Buckley, John Hoyland and Jim Dine among others. Howard Hodgkin came and did some small ones and then some very big ones.

You can run off four hundred prints in a good hard day’s work on my flatbed offset proofing press but I’d rather do two hundred. I am on the cusp of closing up. It’s quite physically and mentally demanding, because you have to pay attention to every detail. It’s been interesting, but I’m going to to shut the studio down at the end of the summer. I’ll still continue to make work, I won’t be hibernating in the loft!”

Alan Cox & Adam Dant

Damping the plate

Placing the print with the brown tone awaiting the second plate with the black lines

Alan & Adam scrutinise the finished prints

Click on the map to enlarge and read the stories of the Coffee Houses

Copies of Adam Dant’s Limited Edition of his MAP OF THE COFFEE HOUSES printed by Alan Cox can be obtained direct from adamdant@gmail.com

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Unlike the hermit monks of the medieval priory that once stood upon this site, the current Brothers at the Charterhouse are a sociable bunch and thus I was able to pay a visit upon Hilary Haydon, the third-most senior Brother, who took me on a tour of the accommodation this week.

Seniority – in this instance – is based upon how long a Brother has been resident at the Charterhouse, not age. Yet Hilary has a rather more vivid way of expressing it. Gesturing to the pigeon holes for mail, he explained that as residents die the labels of those remaining get moved up. “You start here and then you move along, until you drop off the end,” he informed me with startling alacrity.

It made me realise that residence in the Charterhouse affects the Brothers’ sense of time – inhabiting these ancient stone walls induces a certain philosophical perspective upon mortality, setting the span of an individual’s life against the centuries of history that have passed here. It is both a consolation and an encouragement to recognise the beauty of the fleeting moment, as manifest in the immaculately-tended gardens alive with bluebells and tulips this week, and as illustrated upon the tomb of Thomas Sutton – the benefactor – by bubbles, symbolising the transitory nature of fame.

Upon a bright spring day, I crossed the wide lawn that sets the Charterhouse apart from the clamour of Smithfield, aware that my diagonal path, bisecting the velvet greensward, passed over the largest plague pit in the City of London in which sixty-thousand victims of the Black Death were interred. Arriving at the entrance, I cast my eyes up to the fifteenth century gatehouse of the former Carthusian Priory. Henry VIII met with greater resistance from the monks here than any other religious order and thus he had John Houghton, the prior, cut in four and his right arm nailed to the door.

Yet this grim history seemed an insubstantial dream, as I entered to discover Hilary Haydon waiting in the gatehouse to greet me and looking rather dapper in a linen jacket, ideally suiting the warmth of the April afternoon. He led me along stone passages and into hidden courtyards, through the cloisters and the Great Hall and the chapel, with its flamboyant monument of fairground showiness for Thomas Sutton.

My wonder at the quality, age and proportion of the architecture was compounded by my delight at the finely-conceived planting schemes of the gardens and it was not difficult to envisage this elaborate complex as a Renaissance palace, which it became for the Howard family through three generations until they sold it to Sutton in 1611. The wealthiest commoner in England, he endowed his fortune upon a school and almshouses here, entitled ‘King James’ Hospital in Charterhouse.’ Daniel Defoe described it as “the noblest gift that ever was given for charity, bu any one man, public or private, in this nation.”

Four centuries later, the school has moved out to Goldalming, leaving Smithfield in 1872, yet the almshouses still flourish – offering sheltered accommodation to forty Brothers. Formerly a barrister in the City, Hilary came here seventeen years ago when he became a widower. “I have never regretted it,” he assured me with an emphatic grin, “Meals appear, your room is cleaned and the community is supportive.” Hilary revealed to me that among the Brothers, there are solicitors, barristers and priests, as well as an actor currently understudying for ‘The Woman in Black,’ the stage manager of the original production of ‘Oliver!’ and – as we entered the refectory – he introduced a distinguished-looking gentleman as the ballet critic of The Sunday Times.

Each morning, the Brothers are woken by the chapel bell at ten to eight. “I use it as an alarm clock,” confessed Hilary in a whisper, “I attend chapel only for funerals and when I read the lesson.” Breakfast follows in the Great Hall at eight-twenty, succeeded by morning coffee at eleven, lunch at one and afternoon tea at three – and thus time is measured out in the benign conditions of the Charterhouse. “A very silent brother who sat next to me came into lunch one day and died beside me,” Hilary admitted, “As it happens, there was a doctor who was only at the other side of the table and he was across the table like lightning – it was a beautiful way to go.”

The fifteenth century gate to the monastery is encompassed by an eighteenth century structure

Doorway and cubby hole for passing food through at the entrance to the former priory, dissolved in the fifteen-forties and  bricked up ever since.

Graffiti from the days this was the refectory for Charterhouse School

Chimney piece of the three graces and a chest that may have belonged to Thomas Sutton

The Great Hall

Bluebells and an ancient fig tree just coming into leaf at the entrance to the Charterhouse

Looking through to the chapel, with the relic of a door damaged an incendiary bomb

Thomas Sutton, the founder, has lain here for four centuries

Bubbles symbolise the futility of wordly fame

Vestments await the priest in the chapel

Graffiti carved by the bored schoolboys of the eighteen-fifties in the chapel

Note the spelling of “Clarkenwell” upon the memorial stone set into the floor

In the chapel

Eighteenth century dwelling built over the ancient gatehouse

Hilary Haydon in the cloister at the Charterhouse - “It’s always cool in here”

Tours of the Charterhouse are available by clicking here

Aldersgate takes its name from one of the ancient gateways to the City of London that formerly divided the street into “within” and “without.” Here Shakespeare once owned property and, in later days, John Wesley had a religious experience which led to the founding of Methodism.

Yet Aldersgate does not declare its history readily, dominated now by the Barbican and Golden Lane Estates. Although Crescent House still harbours a string of independent shops which tell their own modest story of the family businesses that have lined this street for centuries – as Contributing Photographer Patricia Niven & I found out when we went calling recently.

John Horwood, Greengrocer

“My dad Harry, his old shop used to be opposite Barbican Underground station,” explained John, “He got moved out in 1964, when they were building the Barbican, and he opened up here in Crescent House in 1965 – but William, my grandfather, he had a shop before that in Goswell Rd.”

John was standing amidst a fine array of high-quality fruit and vegetables that testify to the three generations of experience which lie behind him and also to his nightly visits to Covent Garden Market, topping up the stock daily to keep everything fresh. Mystified why people visit the supermarkets that surround him to buy inferior produce at higher prices, John is proud that he has kept faith in the trade he grew up in. It is a matter of honour for him. Consequently, John has loyal customers who once visited his father’s shop and still buy their vegetables from John regularly today, including several retired nurses from St Bart’s Hospital who live locally – one of whom, Nancy, is ninety-six.

“Five nights a week, I get up at quarter past one and and I am at the market by quarter to two, then I get back here around five thirty and. after preparation, I am ready to open at eight,” he admitted to me proudly, “In the past, this shop had five or six people in it but now there’s just me.”

John’s greengrocer’s shop is one of the most appealing I have visited, not for the overtly demonstrative nature of his displays but because everything is chosen and arranged with such care and attention. “I attempt to find the best and I have a big range of fruit,” he assured me with twinkly eyes and quiet enthusiasm, ” I have artichokes and chicory at present, which are very popular with the Italian travel agents across the road.”

These days, John supplements his business by selling a splendid variety of plants alongside clay flowerpots, watering cans and compost, fulfilling the demand from residents of surrounding flats who cultivate window boxes and pot plants upon their sills. So, if you are in Aldersgate, I urge you to seek out John Horwood, a dignified professional and the last of the gentleman grocers in this corner of London.

Marc, Peter, Betty, Paul & Simon Benscher, three generations in hardware

If you were of the Do-It -Yourself frame of mind and you walked into City Hardware in Aldersgate, then you might have an experience of religious intensity – comparable with that of John Wesley three centuries ago – in response to the mind-boggling range of ironmongery that may be obtained here, supplied by the Benscher family.

Simon Benscher who runs the company with his brother Paul told me they have four hundred corporate clients, and his son Marc fitted all the locks at the Olympics – which is mighty impressive for a business started by their parents Peter & Betty in 1965, selling china, glass and fancy goods from a single shop in the same parade. Originally, Peter & Betty were publicans in Poplar who were sick of getting up at four in the morning and wanted a quieter life.

“Simon joined the business from school but I worked in retail in the West End for fifteen years before I started working for the family,” explained Paul, who spends his days behind the counter while his brother Simon handles the paperwork. “He’s office based, I’m counter based,” admitted Paul, outlining the demarcation of responsibility and acting careworn in an exaggerated fashion when his brother appeared waving an invoice. “We’re just a classic Jewish matriarchal family,” Simon announced, by means of explanation, as Paul telephoned his wife, Sonia, who speaks five languages, for an impromptu translation on behalf of a customer with no English. “I do enjoy serving the public,” Simon assured me, “I’ve served everyone from Princess Anne down.”

The two enterprising brothers took over premises close to their parents’ shop and never looked back. And fifty years after they set up their own shop, Peter & Betty are still involved in the family business.“They turn up twice a week and tell us what we’re doing wrong!” confided Simon affectionately.

Paul Benscher

Simon Benscher

Photographs copyright © Patricia Niven

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Today we preview the second in Hoxton Minipress‘ Photo Stories series Madeleine Waller’s East London Swimmers featuring the hardy souls from London Fields Lido.

Laura, Performance Artist

“I’m a countryside girl, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Devon and always swam in the sea. So being in London can be very intense, but swimming in winter in an outdoor pool feels like reconnecting with nature.”

Paul, Bus Driver

“No-one taught me how to swim, I just watched other people and got on with it. I like to push myself – ninety to a hundred lengths of the pool. I have a few hours off between shifts of driving the bus and I find swimming helps me relax. The thing about driving in London is that no one seems to care whereas swimming is about taking pride in yourself. You have to have discipline. If you are good at something then go for it because we aren’t here forever.”

Karina, Travel Agent

“This pool doesn’t have the chlorine that makes your hair go green like some public pools. I love all the sensations – the water surrounding you, the different temperatures you feel, going in, going out and stepping into the cold from the heat – particularly in winter. It allows me to cope with being in the city.

Nick, Property Developer

“I got into swimming after getting caught up in the tsunami in Thailand. I was on a family holiday when the wave came in and I managed to grab my son from his pram and leg it up a hill. I looked back and saw the pram disappear. When I returned home. I had a fear of open water so I entered a race in Lake Windermere and my passion for long distance swimming was born. Last year I swam from Spain to Morocco. Next I’m swimming from Robben Island to Cape Town.”

Kathryn, Office Worker

“I used to go to a lot of alternative clubs. Now I feel I’ve got too old for that and I’ve taken to regular swimming – it becomes an addiction. When I first started, the endorphins kicked in after sixteen laps. Today I feel good after eleven and a half kilometres. My longest swim was the length of Lake Windermere in eight hours and twenty minutes without a break. Sometimes when I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming of swimming. It’s happiness.”

Mike, Jazz Musician

“When I was thirty. I nearly drowned in a garden swimming pool. People watching thought I was having fun until a twelve-year-old saved me. I have always loved the water but I didn’t learn to swim until I was forty-four. It felt like I was learning to fly – conquering a new element. Now when I swim I get pretty much the same feeling. It never goes away.”

Dane, Entrepreneur

“I learnt to swim because I went to South Africa and wanted to swim with sharks but they wouldn’t let me because I couldn’t swim fifty yards. Now I swim almost everyday. The water has a cleansing process. I can let go and totally be me. At this point in my life, I’m the number one priority.”

London Fields Lido

Click to buy EAST LONDON SWIMMERS BY MADELEINE WALLER direct from Hoxton Minipress

Photographs copyright © Madeleine Waller

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