Human Life – Spitalfields Life

At dawn on Easter Tuesday, while most of the world was still sleeping, Contributing Photographer Colin O’Brien & I paid a visit to the Whitechapel Mission which has been caring for the homeless and needy since 1876. The original building, constructed as the “Working Lads Institute” in 1885, still stands next to Whitechapel Underground Station, but these days the Mission operates from a seventies brick and concrete edifice east of the Royal London Hospital.

Whitechapel Rd was desolate at that hour but inside the Mission we encountered a warm community and were touched by the generous welcome we received there. Many of these people had been out on the street all night, yet they immediately included us within the particular camaraderie which exists among those who share comparable experiences of life and attend the day centre here regularly. Between six and eleven each morning, the door is open. Breakfast is served, showers are available, clothes are distributed, there is the opportunity to make phone calls and collect mail, and to seek the necessary advice which could lead to life off the street.

Our guide was Tony Miller, Director of the Mission, who has lived, worked and brought up his family in this building for the last thirty-five years. Charismatic and remarkably fresh-faced for one who opens up his door to the capital’s homeless every day of the year, he explained that if the temperature drops below freezing they offer a refuge for those sleeping rough. In the winter before last, Tony had around one hundred and fifty people sleeping upon every available inch of floor space and, while the other staff were off-duty, he sat watch through the long hours of the night. As a consequence, he contracted a rare and virulent strain of Tuberculosis from which he has only just recovered.

Yet Tony’s passion for the Whitechapel Mission remains undimmed by this grim interlude. “I lost five stone and I still want to make a difference! They started this Mission in 1876 because they were angry that, in their day, there were people without homes and here we are today in 2014 and the problem is still with us,” he declared, filling with emotion, before distinguishing for me some of the strains of humanity who stream through his door daily. There are those who were once living in care – many have mental health problems and around a third grew up in orphanages. There are those who are have no skills and cannot support themselves. There are the angry ones who feel let down and maybe lost their homes – these, Tony says, are the easiest to help. Around a sixth are ex-servicemen without education or skills, and around a third are mentally ill. “The ones that get me the most are those young people who leave the care system without education or prospects and end up on the street within twelve months,” he confided. Last year, the Mission supported one hundred and thirty-four people off the street and into flats, and two hundred people into hostel accommodation.

“Most people want reconnection, but they can live on the streets for twenty years after a row,” Tony assured me, “So, if we can ring up mum and they can say ‘sorry,’ then we’ll happily sub them for a bus ticket home if it means one less person on the street.” As we walked through the cafeteria, diners came up to welcome and engage us in multiple extended conversations, telling their stories and trusting Colin O’Brien to take their pictures.

“These people have validated my life – giving me a purpose and a job, and that makes me guilty because, from other people’s suffering, I live,“ Tony revealed in regret, “It’s a disgrace that this place is still here and it’s still needed, it should have been closed down years ago.”

Tony Miller, resident Director of the Whitechapel Mission for the past thirty-five years

Click here to learn more about The Whitechapel Mission

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Tubby Isaac’s Jellied Eel Stall, Petticoat Lane, c. 1950

After serving as a Gunner in the Royal Artillery in World War II, Cyril Mann returned to live in a tiny flat in Paul St with his wife Mary and small daughter Sylvia in 1946. Close to where the Barbican stands today, this area at the boundary of the City of London had suffered drastic bomb damage and much of it remained a wasteland for decades. Roving around these desolate streets as far east as Spitalfields, Cyril Mann discovered the subject matter for a body of works which became the focus of a major exhibition at the Wildenstein Gallery in 1948.

Losing his hair in his thirties, Cyril Mann had the look of a man older than his years. Through the Depression he had been unemployed and close to starvation, yet thanks to a trust fund set up by Erica Marx he entered the Royal Academy Schools at twenty years old in 1931. For one so young, he had already seen a great deal of life. At twelve, he had been the youngest boy ever to win a scholarship to Nottingham College of Art, before leaving at fifteen to be a missionary in Canada. Quickly abandoning this ambition, he became a logger, a miner and a printer, until returning to London to renew his pursuit of a career as an artist. Ever restless, he moved to Paris after three years at the Royal Academy and there he met his first wife Mary Jervis Read.

Forced to leave his wife and baby when he was called up in 194o, Cyril Mann did not paint at all for the duration of the war. Back in London and battling ill-health, he set out to make up for lost time. The fragmented urban landscape of bombsites that was familiar to Londoners was new to him and, turning his gaze directly into the sun, he sought to paint it transfigured by light. Channelling his turbulent emotion into these works, Cyril Mann strove to discover an equilibrium in the disparate broken elements he saw before him, and many of these paintings are almost monochromatic, as if the light is dissolving the forms into a mirage.

During these years, Cyril Mann’s life underwent dramatic change. He obtained a teaching job at the Central School of Art in 1947 and exhibited at the prestigious Wildenstein Galery, showing his new works in 1948. Yet at the same time, his marriage broke down and he found himself alone, painting in the tiny flat in Paul St. Whilst critically acclaimed, his exhibition was a commercial failure because, in post-war London, nobody wanted to see images of bombsites and consequently these important works became forgotten.

Yet, through his struggle, Cyril Mann’s work as an artist had acquired a new momentum and, after 1950, a bold use of colour returned to his painting. In 1956, he was offered a flat in the newly-built modernist Bevin Court built by Tecton in Islington, where today a plaque commemorates him. In 1964, he moved east to Leyton and then Walthamstow,where he died in 1980.

At a time when all other artists turned away from painting the London streets, Cyril Mann made it his subject. While these pictures may not have suited the taste of the post-war capital, they comprise a unique body of work that witnesses the spirit and topography of these threadbare years. As his second wife, Renske who met Cyril Mann in 1959, assured me, “I believe he is the most significant London painter of the nineteen-forties, post-war.”

Cyril Mann preparing for his exhibition at Wildenstein Gallery in 1948

St Paul’s from Moor Lane, 1948

Cyril in his crowded flat in Paul St, c. 1950

Christ Church Spitalfields seen across bombsites from Scrutton St

Christ Church Spitalfields seen over bombsites from Redchurch St

Bomb site in Paul St with cat, c. 1950

Christ Church Spitalfields seen from Shoreditch

Bomb sites around Paul St, c. 1950

Christ Church Spitalfields from Worship St, c. 1948

Streetscape with red pillar box

East End shop

Trolley bus in Finsbury Sq, c. 1949

Finsbury Sq, c. 1949

Red lamp post, Old St

Bombsite at Old St

Cock & Magpie, Wilson St, Shoreditch

St Michael, Shoreditch, c. 1948

St Michael and St Leonard’s Shoreditch from Leonard St, c. 1950

Angel Islington from City Rd, 1950

St James Church, Pentonville Rd, Islington, 1950

Cyril Mann (1911-1980)

Paintings by Cyril Mann can be seen at Piano Nobile Gallery

Kitty, Amelia (Doll Doll), Jimmy, Gracie & Patricia Jennings, Gifford St, Hoxton c.1930

On Sunday afternoon, I walked over to Columbia Rd Market to get a bunch of flowers for Kathleen – widely known as Kitty – Jennings, who has lived in Hoxton since 1924. I found her in a neat block of private flats near the canal where for many years she lived with her beloved sister Doll Doll, whose ashes now occupy pride of place in a corner of the sitting room.

Once Barbara Jezewska, who grew up in Spitalfields and was Kitty’s neighbour in this building for seventeen years, had made the introductions, we settled down in the afternoon sun to enjoy beigels with salmon and cream cheese while Kitty regaled us with her memories of old Hoxton.

“Thank God we were lucky, we had a father who had a good job, so we always had a good table. There was not a lot of work when I was a kid, but we always got by. We were lucky that we always had good clothes and never got knocked about.

My father, Jim, he was a Fish Porter at Billingsgate Market and he had to work seven days. He was born in the Vinegar Grounds in Hoxton, where they only had one shared tap in the garden for all the cottages, and he was a friendly man who would help anyone. He left for work at four in the morning each day and came back in the early afternoon. We lived on fish. I’m a fish-mullah, I like plaice, jellied eels, Dover sole and middle skate. My poor old mum used to fry fish night and day, she was always at the gas stove.

I was born in Gifford St, Hoxton. There were five of us, four girls and one boy, and we lived in a little three bedroom house. My mother Grace, her life was cooking, washing and housework. She didn’t know anything else.

When my sister Amelia was born, she was so small they laid her in a drawer and we called her ‘Doll Doll.’ They put her in the Queen Elizabeth Children’s Hospital when she had rheumatic fever and she didn’t go to school because of that. She was happy-go-lucky, she was my Doll Doll.

One day, when she was at school, there was an air raid and all the children hid under the tables. They saw a man’s legs walk in and Doll Doll cried out, ‘That’s my dad!’ and her friend asked, ‘How do you recognise him?’ and Doll Doll said, ‘Because he has such shiny shoes.’ He took Doll Doll and said to the teacher, ‘My daughter’s not coming to school any more.’

I was dressmaking from when I left school at fourteen. My first job was at C&A in Shepherdess Walk but I didn’t like it, so I told my mum and left. I left school at Easter and the war came in August. After that, I didn’t go to work at all for five years. Then I went to work in Bishopsgate sewing soldiers’ trousers, I didn’t like that much either so I stayed at home.

Doll Doll and I, we used to love going to Hoxton Hall for concerts every Saturday. It cost threepence a ticket and there was a man called Harry Walker who’d sling you out if you didn’t behave. Afterwards, we’d go to a stall outside run by my uncle and he’d give us sixpence, and we’d go and buy pie and mash and go home afterwards – and that was our Saturday night. We used to go there in the week too and do gym and see plays.

On Friday nights, we’d go to the mission at Coster’s Hall and they’d give you a jug of cocoa and a biscuit, and the next week you’d get a jug of soup. It didn’t cost anything. We used to go there when we were hungry. In the school holidays, we went down to Tower Hill Beach and we’d cut through the market and see my dad, and he’d give us a few bob to buy ice cream.

Me and Doll Doll, we stayed at home with my mum and dad. The other three got married but I didn’t want to. I couldn’t find anybody that I liked, so I stayed at home with mummy and daddy, and I was quite happy with them. When they got old we cared for them at home, without any extra help, until they died. We had understanding guvnors and, Doll Doll and I took alternate weeks off work to care for them.

Doll Doll and I moved into these private flats more than thirty years ago. In those days, it was only women and once, when my neighbour thought her boiler was going to explode, we called the fire brigade. Doll Doll leaned over the balcony and called, ‘Coo-ee, young man! Up here!’

We never went outside Hoxton much when we were young, but – when we grew up – Doll Doll and I went to Florida and Las Vegas. I finally settled down and I didn’t wander no more. I worked as a dressmaker at Blaines in Petticoat Lane for thirty-five years, until it closed forty years ago and I was made redundant.”

Doll Doll, Kitty and their mother Grace

Kitty in her flat in Hoxton

Doll Doll

Kitty places fresh flowers next to Doll Doll’s ashes each week

Kitty at a holiday chalet in Guernsey, 1960

Kitty Jennings with her friend and neighbour of sixteen years, Barbara Jezewska

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“I always trust my work”

One of the most popular characters around Newington Green in recent decades has been Ahmet Kamil. His modest repair shop is firmly established as a local hub where everyone is constantly popping in and out to get news, exchanging the time of day and having their shoes mended while they are about it too. At the end of a fine seventeenth century brick terrace, tucked in beneath a green awning, Ahmet’s premises have not changed for as long as anyone can remember.

Winter is the busy season for Ahmet and rainy days in summer can send people into his shop too, so I took advantage of yesterday’s sunshine to pop over to Newington Green and have a chat with him while the business was quiet. Possessing a soulful charisma and a generous spirit, Ahmet spoke his thoughts to me as he continued with his work and I enjoyed my morning in the peace of his beautiful workshop, offering a calm refuge from the clamour of the traffic outside heading up to Stoke Newington.

“This is a family business, we’ve been here about thirty years – maybe more. My father Sattretin Kamil started it up and passed it onto me, his son. Then I took over and now my son, Tevfik Kamil, will follow me. He hasn’t fully taken over yet but he will do so. He tried other things but he’s not been happy with them, so now he’s got interested in this and has decided to do it.

My father Sattretin made shoes by hand in Cyprus, he learnt it when he was only twelve years old and, after he came to this country at thirty-five, he couldn’t get a job so he decided to make shoes here. But he was advised that mending shoes might be easier and more profitable. He had four shops – in New Cross, Charlton, Hornchurch, and this one, all run by the family. After my father retired, we cut back to just this and the one in Charlton. When my son takes over, he’ll be here and I’ll be in Charlton.

I was twenty-five when I decided to give my father a hand and the business just stuck on me – he didn’t push me into it. Because everything’s done by hand, the more you do, the more you like it. Over the years there has been no real competition. If you trust the quality of your work there will never be any competition. I do everything by hand and my work is quality. There are chains with fifty or hundred branches where they do poor quality shoe repair and key cutting, and charge more money. My customers often complain to me about them. I always trust my work.

Shoes are getting more expensive and people’s habits are changing with time. They’re taking more care of their shoes, not throwing them away and getting a new pair – so there is a tendency to repair. Also, there’s a lot of secondhand shops popping up and people are buying old shoes, but the leather dries out and comes away from the sole, and stilleto heels get brittle and smash – and, as a consequence, they are bringing them to me. There’s a healthy future in it, yet there are easier jobs than this in which you can make better money. I’ve always thought of shoe repair alongside dry-cleaning, those shops make more money for less work. We are under pressure with the rent that is constantly going up and the price of materials, but we try to keep the service as cheap as we can.

Not many people will do shoe repair, you have to be fully committed and make good quality shoe repairs, and the work grows on you. But it’s the most difficult job you can do. It’s dirty and it’s hard work. While I was playing football until the age of thirty-five, I never had any aches and pains, but now standing still I get back ache. It’s midday and I’ve been working since nine o’clock – see how dirty my hands are. I work six days a week all year round. I’ve never had a Saturday off in thirty years. I’d like to go and watch the football, but instead I listen to it on the radio and watch the highlights.

You make a lot of friends. I’ve met a lot of people doing this work and many of my customers call me by my name. I’ve just recently been in hospital for an operation for ten days and my son was running the shop, and everybody was coming round, asking about me, ‘Where is he?’ So they are not just customers. Every year I take four weeks off in August and go back to Cyprus. When I come back again, everyone brings in their shoes. They say, ‘We wouldn’t take them anywhere else.’ They tell me, they wait until I come back because of the friendship. That’s the bond I have with my customers.”

“Because everything’s done by hand, the more you do, the more you like it”

“I’ve never had a Saturday off in thirty years”

“It’s midday and I’ve been working since nine o’clock – see how dirty my hands are”

“You make a lot of friends”

At the end of a fine seventeenth century brick terrace, tucked in beneath a green awning, Ahmet’s premises have not changed for as long as anyone can remember.

Shoe Repairs, 52 Newington Green, N16 9PX

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Matthew Baldacci – “This is what I do and this is what I will be doing”

Since 1830, Petticoat Lane has been known as Middlesex St and yet it is still widely referred to by its earlier name. Such is the enigma of this ancient thoroughfare and market that is recognised more by what it was than what it is. Yet the enduring life of Petticoat Lane is still there to be found, if you look close enough.

Behind a curious concrete staircase that leads nowhere on Middlesex St, you will find MB’s Cafe with faded old photographs upon the walls of Baldacci’s Cafe. M B stands for Matthew Baldacci who runs this cafe and another of the same name round the corner in Harrow Place with his father Peter. Together they are the second and third generations in this family business, begun here by Matthew’s grandfather Umberto.

The original cafes and the street in the photographs where Umberto lived and worked have long gone, lost beneath a brutalist concrete development – the one with the staircase leading nowhere. Yet in spite of this architectural transformation, the Baldacci family and their cafe remain to carry the story of the Lane.

Reflecting the nature of this border territory where the City of London meets the East End, the two Baldacci cafes are oriented to serve customers from both directions. MB’s in Harrow Place is where Matthew greets the City workers by name as they pick up their sandwiches and rolls daily, while MB’s in Middlesex St is where you can find the stalwarts of Petticoat Lane tucking in to their cooked lunches. It was at the latter establishment, hidden discreetly under the stairs, that I met with Peter recently and he filled me in with the Baldacci history.

“It all started with my father Umberto Baldacci, he came over from Italy at fourteen years old and worked in a cafe. He lived in the buildings in Stoney Lane and he opened up his first cafe there in 1932 and they did quite well because he got a second one in the late forties on Petticoat Lane. The one in Stoney Lane was more cooked meals while the one in Petticoat Lane was sandwiches and rolls.

My father was born in 1905 and worked until the end, when he died at seventy-three in 1979. My mother Maria, she worked in the kitchen all day long from early morning and then she cooked his dinner afterwards, that’s how things were in those days – a man expected everything. She worked until three years before she died. When you look back, it wasn’t easy for an Italian woman but I don’t think she’d have wanted anything else. She had come over from Italy at an early age and lived in Kings Cross. I don’t know how they met. My father never went back, he made his home here. I can’t even understand Italian. It’s my one regret that I never learnt Italian.

They built a nice business and he was very happy. The Jewish people made him welcome and it really helped a lot. In school holidays, I used to come and work from the age of thirteen in 1962, maybe earlier, and when I was sixteen I started full time. I started washing up and filing rolls. I loved it. The East End was a very different place then and Petticoat Lane was alive with all different kinds of traders. It was fantastic.

I get up around four-thirty each morning and get down here by five-thirty, I like to be open by six. Then I close by four and I’m home by four-thirty. I can cook, I do everything, if anyone can’t come in I cover for them. I’ve worked in this cafe for twenty-nine years, but I’ve been full time for fifty-three years in total. We’ve got one customer Benny, he’s been coming for seventy years. He lives in Petticoat Tower and comes in each morning for his breakfast. My son Matthew joined me twenty-five years ago and we changed the name to ‘MB’s’.”

At the conclusion of Peter’s tale, Matthew Baldacci arrived fresh from completing the busy lunch service round the corner in Harrow Place. “I started working Sundays when I was fourteen, it was expected but I didn’t not want to do it. I started full time at sixteen, twenty-five years ago.” he revealed, meeting his father’s eyes with a protective smile, “My dad does the book work and I do the running of it. We’re very close.”

Matthew revealed there is a sense of change in the air around Petticoat Lane these days and a hope that it is only a matter of time before the escalating life of Spitalfields and the City will spill over into this backwater bringing increase trade. Thus, after all the transformations that the Baldcaccis have seen through three generations, Matthew remains ebullient for the future. “This is what I do and this is what I will be doing,” he assured me confidently, “I have two sons and it’s a probability that one of them will go into it.”

Peter Baldacci

Umberto Baldacci

Umberto Baldacci’s Cafe in Stoney Lane

Peter outside MB’s Cafe in Harrow Place

MB’s Cafe under the stairs on Middlesex St

Matthew Baldacci

Peter & Matthew Baldacci

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At The Regis Snack Bar, Leadenhall Market

At Mister City Sandwich Bar

At City Corner Cafe

At Arthur’s Cafe

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At Gina’s Restaurant

At Dino’s Cafe

At Rossi’s Cafe

Just a couple of years ago, Peter Bellerby of Bellerby & Co was unable find a proper globe to buy his father for an eightieth birthday present. Now Peter is to be found in his very own globe factory in Stoke Newington and hatching plans to set up another in New York – to meet the growing international demand for globes which he expects to exceed ten times his current output within five years. A man with global ambitions, you might say.

Yet Peter is quietly spoken with deferential good manners and obviously commands great respect from his handful of employees, who also share his enthusiasm and delight in these strange metaphysical baubles which serve as pertinent reminders of our true insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

A concentrated hush prevailed as Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I ascended the old staircase in the former warehouse where we discovered the globemakers at work on the top floor, painstakingly glueing the long strips of paper in the shape of slices of orange peel (or gores as they are properly known) onto the the spheres and tinting them with fine paintbrushes to achieve an immaculate result.

“I get bored easily,” Peter confessed to me, revealing the true source of his compulsion, “But making globes is really the best job you can have, because you have to get into the zone and slow your mind down.”

“Back in the old days, they were incredibly good at making globes but that had been lost,” he continued, “I had nothing to go by.” Disappointed by the degradation of his chosen art over the last century, Peter revealed that, as globes became decorative features rather than functional objects, accuracy was lost – citing an example in which overlapping gores wiped out half of Iceland. “What’s the point of that?,” he queried rhetorically, rolling his eyes in weary disdain.

“People want something that will be with them for life,” he assured me, reaching out his arms around a huge globe as if he were going to embrace it but setting it spinning instead with a beautiful motion, that turned and turned seemingly of its own volition, thanks to the advanced technology of modern bearings.

Even more remarkable are his table-top globes which sit upon a ring with bearings set into it, these spin with a satisfying whirr that evokes the music of the spheres. Through successfully pursuing his unlikely inspiration, Peter Bellerby has established himself as the world leader in the manufacture of globes and brought a new industry to the East End serving a growing export market.

To demonstrate the strength of his plaster of paris casting – yet to my great alarm – Peter placed one on the floor and leapt upon it. Once I had peeled my fingers from my eyes and observed him, balancing there playfully, I thought, “This is a man that bestrides the globe.”

Isis Linguanotto, Globepainter

John Wright, Globemaker

Chloe Dalrymple, Globemaker

Peter Bellerby, on top of the globe

Let us now praise the Lollipop People. Those benign spirits who arrive miraculously twice a day, like guardian angels or fairy godparents, glowing fluorescent, wielding their wands and shepherding their flocks safely across the road to and from school.

When the City of London & Cripplegate Photographic Society approached me offering their services to collaborate with Spitalfields Life, I knew at once that the Lollipop People would be the subject – to my eyes, they are unacknowledged, universally-loved, heroes and heroines who deserve to be celebrated and photographed.

Yet, getting to the right place at the right time and capturing these timid fleeting spirits, proved more challenging than we had anticipated. We discovered that, due to the Education Cuts, the Lollipop People are an endangered species and, such is the unassuming nature of these modest folk, some shunned the lens while others would not give their names.

Thankfully, through tenacity and charm, Cathryn Rees and Jean Jameson were able to produce this slim portfolio of elegant portraits that must serve as the historical record of these hardy, altruistic souls.

Frank Smith at Cubbitt Town School, Isle of Dogs (Photo by Cathryn Rees)

Sabah at Bigland Green School, Limehouse (Photo by Jean Jameson)

Abdul Rif at Caley Primary School, Bow (Photo by Jean Jameson)

At Cyril Jackson Primary School, Limehouse (Photo by Jean Jameson)

Jackie Clarke, St Peter’s School, Wapping (Photo by Cathryn Rees)

At Cyril Jackson Primary School, Limehouse (Photo by Jean Jameson)

Julie Hutchinson at Mayflower School, Poplar (Photo by Cathryn Rees)

Sabah at Bigland Green School, Shadwell (Photo by Jean Jameson)

At Redlands Primary School, Stepney (Photo by Cathryn Rees)

Learn more about City of London & St Giles Photographic Society, London’s oldest photographic society, founded in 1899

Cordelia Tocqueville

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I made the trip over to Leytonstone recently to pay homage to Cordelia – known as ‘Dee’ – Tocqueville, the undisputed queen of East End Lollipop Ladies, who has been out on the street pursuing her selfless task every day, come rain or shine, for as long as anyone can remember. “I took the job at first when my daughter was small, because she was at the school and I could be at home with her in the holidays,” Dee admitted to me, as she scanned the road conscientiously for approaching cars,“Though after the first winter in the rain and cold, I thought, ‘I’m not sticking this!’ but here I am more than forty years later.”

Even at five hundred yards’ distance, we spotted Dee Tocqueville glowing fluorescent at the tricky bend in Francis Rd where it meets Newport Rd outside the school. A lethal configuration that could prove a recipe for carnage and disaster, you might think – if it were not for the benign presence of Dee, wielding her lollipop with imperial authority and ensuring that road safety always prevails. “After all these years, I’m part and parcel of the street furniture,” she confessed to me coyly, before stepping forward purposefully onto the crossing, fixing her eyes upon the windscreen of an approaching car and extending her left hand in a significant gesture honed over decades. Sure enough, at the sight of her imperial sceptre and dazzling fluorescent robes the driver acquiesced to Dee’s command.

We had arrived at three, just before school came out and, over the next half hour, we witnessed a surge of traffic that coincided with the raggle-taggle procession of pupils and their mothers straggling over the crossing, all guaranteed safe passage by Dee. In the midst of this, greetings were exchanged between everyone that crossed and Dee. And once each posse had made it safely to the opposite kerb, Dee retreated with a regal wave to the drivers who had been waiting. Just occasionally, Dee altered the tone of her voice, instructing over-excited children at the opposite kerb to “Wait there please!” while she made sure the way was clear. Once, a car pulled away over the crossing when the children had passed but before they had reached the other side of the road, incurring Dee’s ire. “They’re impatient, aren’t they?” she commented to me, gently shaking her head in sage disappointment at human failing.

Complementing her innate moral authority, Dee is the most self-effacing person you could hope to meet.“It gives you a reason to get up in the morning, and you meet lots of people and make lots of friends,” she informed me simply, when I asked her what she got out of being a Lollipop Lady. Dee was born and grew up fifty yards away in Francis Rd and attended Newport Rd School as a pupil herself, crossing the road every day, until she crossed it for good when she married a man who lived a hundred yards down Newport Rd. Thus it has been a life passed in the vicinity and, when Dee stands upon the crossing, she presides at the centre of her personal universe.“After all these years I’ve been seeing children across the road, I have seen generations pass before me – children and their children and grandchildren. The grandparents remember me and they come back and say, ‘You still here?’” she confided to me fondly.

At three-thirty precisely, the tumult ceased and the road emptied of cars and pedestrians once everyone had gone home for tea. Completing her day’s work Dee stowed the lollipop in its secret home overnight and we accompanied her down Newport Rd to an immaculately-appointed villa where hollyhocks bloomed in the front garden. “I have rheumatism in my right hand where the rain runs down the pole and it’s unfortunate where I have to stand because the sun is in my eyes,” she revealed with stoic indifference, taking off her dark glasses once we had reached the comfort of her private den and she had put her feet up, before adding, “A lot of Boroughs are doing away with Lollipop Ladies, it’s a bad thing.” In the peace of her own home, Dee sighed to herself.

The shelves were lined with books, evidence of Dee’s passion for reading and a table was covered with paraphernalia for making greetings cards, Dee’s hobby. “People don’t recognise me without my uniform,” she declared with a twinkle in her eye, introducing a disclosure,“every Thursday, I go up to Leyton to a cafe with armchairs, and I sit there and read my book for an hour with a cup of coffee – that’s my treat.” Such is the modest secret life of the Lollipop Lady.

“When my husband died, I thought of giving it up,” Dee informed me candidly, “but instead I decided to give up my evening cleaning job for the Council, when I reached seventy, and keep this going. I enjoy doing it because I love to see the children. One year, there was an advert on the television in which a child gave a Lollipop Lady a box of Cadbury’s Roses and I got fifteen boxes that Christmas!”

“After all these years, I’m part and parcel of the street furniture”

Dee puts her feet up in the den at home in Newport Rd

Dee with her brother David in 1959 outside the house in Francis Rd where they grew up

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The first of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

Arful Nessa with her sewing machine table

Rather than the sound of Bow bells, I was born to the whirring of sewing machines in my ear. Throughout most of my childhood, my mother did piecework while my father worked in a sweatshop opposite the beigel shop on Brick Lane, stitching together leather jackets for Mark & Spencer. The factory closed down long ago and now, ironically, the building hosts a Marxist bookshop run by Trotskyites.

Initially my mother’s industrial-grade Brother sewing machine was in the kitchen, in between the sink and the pine wood table. But it took up too much space there and was also considered dangerous, once ambulatory children started populating the house. It was decided that it would be moved to one of the attic rooms on the top floor of our home, following the custom of the Huguenot silk weavers of the past. There the machine lived and there my mother would be found hunched over it, during all hours of the day and often late into the night. She says it was most hard on her back and shoulders, which would ache from the work.

“The men used to work in the factories. I preferred to do it at home because it was less work compared to what they did. They had to work harder,” she explains, “I began before the children were born. I wasn’t doing much at home, so I thought I should try it and earn a little money. Other women were working as machinists then and an old neighbour who had lived on Parfett St taught me how to operate the machine. I couldn’t do pockets, but I did pleats, belts and hems on skirts for women who worked in offices. I took in work for a factory on Cannon St Rd that made suits and another on New Rd that made blouses.”

For a while my mother sewed the lining into jackets and winter coats, working for a short Sikh man who had a clothes shop on Fournier St. He had quick steps and a bunch of heavy keys dangling from the belt on his trousers. The man still owes her money, she recalls. He would give her wages in arrears, promising to pay, but it never materialised. Following him, she worked for another man, who also did not pay. “Where would you go looking for them today?” my mother asks, “Everyone we used to know around here has left. So much has changed.”

I remember the almost-sweet smell of the machine oil, the thick needles, bundles of colourful nylon yarn, piles and piles of skirts in all shades and sizes, the metal bobbin cases and the sound of the sewing machine. When the foot peddle was down, the vibration could be felt throughout the house. Strangely, this provided a sense of comfort – the knowledge that my mother was upstairs and everything in the world was as it should be.

When I was around twenty, my brothers and sisters and I colluded with each other to get rid of the sewing machine. It had lain dormant in the attic room ever since my mother gave up taking in piecework some years previously. The work had slowly become more irregular and less financially rewarding. “When I first started, I was able to earn around seventy-five pence per skirt, then towards the end, when there were many more women working, it dropped to around ten pence per coat.” These were also the days when much of the manufacturing in East London was being shipped out to parts of the world where there was cheaper labour, including Bangladesh and Turkey.

With my mother’s working paraphernalia left as it was, the space resembled Rodinsky’s room – he was the mythical recluse who once lived a few doors down from us in the attic of 19 Princelet St and who had disappeared one day, leaving everything intact. I had an idea to turn our attic into a study, installing my PC which my mother had bought for me from the money she had saved from sewing. With a separate monitor, keyboard and large hard drive, it was almost as big as her Brother sewing machine.

She had always been a hoarder, so we knew that getting rid of it was going to be a delicate and difficult matter. We had given her prior warnings, but these had fallen on deaf ears. Then one night, when she had gone to bed, my siblings and I crept upstairs and, with a lot of effort, detached the head of the sewing machine from the table. Huffing and puffing, we carried it down three flights of stairs and delicately dumped it at the end of our street. We did the same with the table base.

Of course, she discovered the machine was missing the next day and was incredibly upset. She had “spent one hundred and forty pounds on it,” she said. “It still worked,” she said, “why had we not told her, she could have given it to someone at least, instead of it being thrown away” and “what had she done to deserve children who were so wasteful.” After that, I forgot all about the Brother sewing machine that once lived in our attic.

Recently, I returned from a research trip to Dhaka. I am currently writing a book about the people of that city and had interviewed garment workers about their lives and fears. I came home and was speaking to my mother about it when the subject of her earlier life as a machinist came up. And then she announced her revelation.

My mother and our Somali neighbour had managed to rescue the sewing machine from where my brothers, sisters and I had thought we had discarded the thing. The two women had somehow managed to shuffle the table base along, scraping hard along the pavement. But instead of bringing it back to the house, they took it to the neighbour’s, where it was to stay in the garden until they decided what to do with it. The machine head on the other hand was far too heavy for them to carry and they abandoned it.

This disclosure had to be investigated. My mother and I immediately knocked on our neighbour’s door, and asked if it was still there. The neighbour led us to the garden where, hidden behind wooden boarding and tendrils of ivy, we found the sewing machine my mother had spent so many years working on.

Considering it had endured years outdoors, it looked like it was still in relatively good health. Bits of it, such as the bobbin winder and the spool base were slightly rusty, but the address of the showroom on Cambridge Heath Rd where my mother bought it was clearly labelled and the motor looked in working condition.

She is still upset with my brothers and sisters and me for throwing it away. This confused me. “Why would you want to hold onto something that is a source of oppression?” I asked, high-mindedly. “The machine helped to feed and educate my family,” she answered quietly.

My mother then reminded me that my aunt, her sister, also had a Brother sewing machine and made skirts for many years from her kitchen in Bethnal Green. We went to speak to her. She no longer works as a seamstress and has resorted to keeping her dismembered machine on the veranda of her ground floor flat. The table now stores pots and pans, baskets containing seeds and drying leaves. The head was in the bottom drawer of a metal cabinet next to it, wrapped up in a Sainsbury’s shopping bag. My aunt still has some of the cloth which she would make into skirts and she showed me the pleats on a piece of salmon-coloured material.

“Most of the women in this block worked for different factories and one of them taught me how to do it. I worked for a Turkish man on Mare St for around seven years. I would get started around 7am after the morning prayer at 6am. I can’t remember where the skirts were being sold, but they were for well known shops in the West End. In one day, I could work on fifty or sixty pieces. Some days I made around a hundred. I received around forty or fifty pence per piece and could earn around three hundred pounds per week. But it was all irregular, nothing was fixed. My children would help by cutting the loops off when they got home after school. There is no work anymore, but I kept the machine in case I needed to fix things. It still works.”

While I took notes, sitting on the chair she would sit on whilst working, I could hear dregs of conversation between the two sisters, comparing the quality of oranges in Bethnal Green market to Asda and Iceland, as well as recalling what happened to other women whom they both knew that had worked as seamstresses. This industry, now gone, is a piece of the thread that joins the past with the present in the East End and, in turn, unites the people who have come to make this part of London their home.

My aunt with her sewing machine in Bethnal Green

Arful Nessa

You may like to read Delwar Hussain’s other story about his mother

Arful Nessa, Gardener

The second of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

In the early seventies, finding themselves barred by whites-only football teams, a group of undeterred British Bangladeshi players came together and formed their own team. Today that team, the Mohammedan Sporting Club, has become one of the most successful sides in the British Bangladeshi Football League, with the current generation of players winning major local and national titles, and even playing in international tournaments.

It is Sunday morning in Bartlett Park, Poplar, which is surrounded on all sides by housing developments with Canary Wharf looming large over the horizon. I have come to see the Mohammedans play. In their white and blue kit, the members are all shapes, age and sizes. It is no longer dominated by Bengali players, reflecting the changes in the East End. Together, the team looks determined to win the match.

From the first blow of the referee’s whistle, the rivals – another local side – the Hackney Probashis, appear stronger and are on the offensive, outmanoeuvring the Mohammedan’s defences. The ball is passed quickly and skilfully between the players, all in red. A deflection here, a twist there. At one point, the ball flies into a nearby garden. Seconds later, it is lobbed out again, straight back onto the pitch.

On the sideline, Mohammedan supporters clap excitedly. They stand around shouting encouragements in English and a smattering of Sylheti. “Come on boys. Get the ball!” one yells. “He’s out of control. Kitha korer be! [What is he doing]” another hollers. “Hit it! Hit it! Shoooot!” To everyone’s surprise, it is not long before no 7 of the Mohammedans scores the first goal of the match.

As the game rages on, an older man gently pushes a shopping trolley with Bombay Mix for sale along the edge of the pitch. He keeps an eagle eye on the ball, careful to jump out of the way if it comes hurtling towards him. I stand next to some pundits who are discussing tactics. “He doesn’t attack as much, does he?” “Well I suppose he’s accepted his position. With all due respect, he’s not as good as he used to be.”

“It makes a difference to get the first goal of the match,” Juel Miah says, pleased with the way his side is playing. A central mid-fielder, he is currently out of action due to injury. He says that the Mohammedan is a legendary team, likening it to the Manchester United of the British Bangladeshi Football League. A few years ago however, there was turbulence as the older players began retiring and the younger ones took over, but the fortunes of the team have stabilised since then.

“I’ve been a part of the team since I was sixteen. We’ve had good times and we have had really tough times. I love being in the team – the passion, the competitiveness. We have a really good set of friends. Any issues that you may have in your personal life, you forget them on the pitch. When you are playing, it could even be against your own brother – which in the past I have done – the important thing is that this team is your family. We have known each other for so many years and we look out for each other. Everyone sticks together. We have a really good bond.

I support Tottenham. When I was eight, I got the application and was due to try out for the team, but I didn’t go. At the time, British Bengalis didn’t think playing football could be a real job. This is changing a little with the current youth – some are really good players, but they don’t try to become professionals. Uni and education is what people focus on.”

Back on the pitch, one of the Mohammedans kicks the ball into the bushes to kill time. The game plan, one of the pundits explains, is to tire the reds out before giving them a chance to score. Though there is no swearing, the game is not always polite. Whilst tackling another player, no. 5 of the Hackney side is kicked in the leg and is on the ground. The match stops for a minute or two as the referee looks into it. The game resumes. Later, there is another slight altercation. “If you wana do it, we can do it, yeah,” a player challenges, throwing dirt from the pitch onto the back of an opponent. The ref. intervenes and has a cautionary word with them both. Seconds before the half time whistle is blown, the Hackney boys manage to squeeze a ball passed the net, leaving the Mohammedan goalkeeper stunned.

During half-time, over the prerequisite oranges and chewing gum, the manager gives a quick debrief. “Don’t get dragged down to their level,” he says, “you are better than they are.”

“The problem,” another says, “is that we get the ball, make a few passes but then it goes up straight into the air. For the final part, we need quality. As soon as you get it, look up.” The team looks pensive and nervous.

The heat is on in the second half. This time, the blues are on the offensive. With heart rates up at optimum, they narrowly miss out on a number of potential goals. Another one of the reds is down, but it is hard to know whether this is a diversionary tactic, playing for time or genuine. The injured writhes around on the ground, face in agony. The game is stopped again as the ref. sorts it out. Soon enough, the player is up and running.

At one point, the linesman awards a free kick to the reds. The ball is lined up and a powerful kick sees it flying in the direction of the Mohammedan’s goal. A player jumps to header it. Another throws his leg up into the air, outstretched in the same direction. The two look like they will have a meeting, but by the fraction of a second or the split of a hair, they manage to avoid a collision. The ball lands on the ground and finds itself in a tangle of legs, ever threatening and edging towards the goal. It is niftily thwarted.

“Keep pressing, keep pressing,” a fellow team mate barks. In the last few minutes, the Mohamedans score a second goal. The supporters clap jubilantly. A red striker, finding an opening, makes a final attempt, but it goes wide off the post. The final whistle is blown and the blues win, 2-1.

They don’t call it a game of two halves for nothing.

Craig Tomkins, 25 - Striker, mid-field

I am a semi-professional football player, I signed up with the team earlier this week. This is my first game with them and I scored the first goal of the match. It gives you a boost to do so. I looked where the wall was and the keeper had no chance. I don’t understand Bengali but I’m sure I’ll pick it up. I am happy to bring my knowledge and ability to help and teach the other members.

Kamal Khan, 28 - Fall back, right

I joined the Mohammedans because it was my local team. I was fourteen and was part of the senior team by the time I was fifteen. It’s my second home. From a young age I wanted to stay fit and to see my friends. I think I will play a bit more and then I aim to coach. Our team needs a youth team to keep the legacy going so Iqbal, the goalie, and I have set one up. It helps to keep the kids off the streets as well, stops them from going astray. We have around sixteen to eighteen players and have to turn many more away.

Iqbal Hussain, 25 - Goalie

I’ve been part of the team for around ten years. I’ve always played in the same position, it is a very important role and one of the biggest responsibilities. It allows me to play to my strengths. It’s important to have a youth team to sustain the structure and the ethos of the team. We haven’t had this sort of structure in the past. It helps our senior team too with new players coming in, maintaining our reputation.

Sadique Ali, 28 - Left-wing and Manager

A friend introduced me ten years ago. The manager at the time tried me and I got into the B team. I slowly moved up to the A team. The team is a family, we have known each other for so many years. I played in New York some years ago and got the Most Valued Player award. I got lucky. I get a buzz from it. Last year we came fourth in the League and, if we can keep our players fit this year, we definitely have a chance of winning it.

Dmitri Larin, 25 - Centre back

The game was alright today. Although the team was not on-game in the first half, the second half was ours and we got a few more breaks. Eventually, I want to play professional football.

Raju Miah, 28 - Centre, mid-field

I haven’t been playing for four or five seasons. I’m taking a break as I have a groin injury, but I’m hoping to be back in the winter. I’ve been with the team since I was sixteen or seventeen. I have played for other teams in that time but I have always returned. I like the unity and friendships – we stick together. We have history and a lot of other sides envy us. We are trying to get non-Bengalis in to the team, but we also want to keep it local.

Melvin Simpson, 25 - Centre forward

It was a good game. I scored the second goal of the match. This is my first season with the team and I’ve already met a lot of interesting people. I usually play in the Uxbridge league, but playing in the summer league keeps you match fit for the winter.

The Mohammedan Sporting Club

The third of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

Kalina & I sit in a corner of the Brick Lane Bookshop, enclosed by the titles of Alexander McCall Smith, Zadie Smith and the Gentle Author. “I like getting lost in books,” she explains, sporadically playing with a set of keys in her hands and her unruly hair. “I enjoy escaping into stories and not wanting to talk to anybody. I read a lot in French and English, usually fiction and some non-fiction too.” One of the first novels she read in English was “An Equal Music” by Vikram Seth. Set in London, it is about an illicit love affair between a pianist and a violinist. The book has particular poignancy because Kalina is not only the manager of the bookshop, she is a musician herself.

As well as being raised on a musical diet of Beethoven, Shostakovich, Schubert and healthy servings of opera, Kalina’s parents often took her to classical music concerts in Sofia. There was a lone Beatles LP which belonged to her father but, aside from this, she listened to very little else other than classical music until her teens. Schubert’s “Arpeggione Sonata” for the cello became formative and her favourite. At the age of five, when her parents asked whether she would like to learn to play an instrument, Kalina chose the cello – a decision she has never regretted.

She describes the sound as similar to the human voice. “It has a low register and a high register, like a person speaking.” It was also the shape and size of it that she took to, like holding a child. I see this myself, when she is being photographed, posing next to her cello as a mother might stand next to a child in a family portrait.

As a consequence of her decision, Kalina took classes several times a week. She also studied the piano, theory of music, and chamber and orchestra music. She eventually earned herself a place at the only music school in Sofia, named after the Bulgarian composer, Lubomir Pipkov. Bulgaria was still under Communist rule then and its people were experiencing hardship. “I remember we did not have items such as bananas or oranges. Music from the West was difficult to get hold of and there were shortages of milk and water,” she admitted to me.

However, with a French mother, Kalina was lucky because her family were not subject to the same restrictions as others, meaning they were able to travel. Every summer, they went to France to stay with her maternal grandmother, providing Kalina with a sense of the world beyond Bulgaria. While away, she would buy presents for friends back home which they could not find in Sofia. She remembers neighbours considered her family to be privileged, wealthy even. But her parents were working people like others, she says.

Bulgaria, like much of the former USSR, was experiencing dramatic change by the time she became a teenager. Just months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, demonstrators took to the streets of Sofia calling for democratic rule. Kalina was one of these protesters in the throng, marching arm in arm with her father. “People didn’t know anything but Communism,” she says, “We wanted to be able to choose our own government.” The crowds sang revolutionary songs and there was the heady sense of revolt against the status quo.

Yet Kalina was ambivalent as to how much it all concerned her. “At the time, I thought that it didn’t apply to me very much. Remember, I had travelled abroad, but others hadn’t. Many, such as my friends, had never seen mangoes, Cocoa Cola or even people of different ethnicities.”

At the age of eighteen, Kalina had the choice of going to school in France or staying in Sofia. There was no question that she was going to do anything but music. She took her cello to London for audition at the Guildhall. Excitement and nerves were to be her companion. “I had worked so hard for it, practicing for months. I didn’t want to stay in Bulgaria any more – I felt the music scene was stagnant and the political and economic situation was unstable. By then, everyone I studied with was leaving for Germany or America.”

She did a technical exam and played an extract from the First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello by Bach and a second piece by Haydn to show off her abilities, all from memory. “The difficult thing about exams is that regardless of how many months you have practiced, in the ten or twenty minutes that you have, it just has to be the most perfect you can make it.” The years of training paid off. The examiners liked her performance and offered her a four-year bachelor’s degree in music.

The course was to be relentless. Kalina discovered there was a lot more competition than she had experienced in Sofia, likening it to being a professional athlete. “You had to train all the hours and improve each time. I used to practise between three to seven hours each day. It was hard work but enjoyable too.”

But this wasn’t all. Alongside studying, Kalina performed concerts professionally for money, and was a member of a quartet playing wedding gigs and background music at events. She also gave private lessons and did babysitting. This was how she came to meet Bookshop Manager, Denise Jones, and get a Saturday job at East Side Books in Whitechapel before it moved to Brick Lane and got a name change.

Today, Kalina is part of a trio with piano and clarinet, playing Brahms, Beethoven, Faure and lesser known composers. They call themselves “Aubert Trio” – Aubert was the name of her maternal French grandfather who used to make bridges for stringed instruments. “I’ve played in various combinations but chamber music is something I really enjoy. In an orchestra, you are one part of a much bigger group without much of a voice but, in a chamber group, you are usually the only cello. You have a voice and can express yourself, you can say what you want.”

Currently, the trio are working with a composer who is writing a piece for them. Kalina does not practice like an athlete anymore but just an hour or so each day. Considering herself no longer to be a full-time musician, she recognises that she appreciates music much more. “Books and music have always worked together for me. I continue to find inspiration in them both.”

Kalina at Brick Lane Bookshop, 166 Brick Lane

The fourth of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

If ever a real-life Bollywood story was to be set in East London, it should be based upon Naz Choudhury’s own life. It has all the ingredients required – a story overcoming real adversity, demanding steely determination, involving dooshoom dooshoom (Bollywood parlance for fisticuffs), plus glamour, music and dance – a generous amount of it.

Naz grew up in Pauline House, the most distinct of sixties high rise tower blocks off Vallance Rd and a by-word for misguided, outdated urban development, poverty, crime-ridden dilapidation and social alienation.

From here, the thirty-year-old has gone onto become an extremely successful dancer, producer and entrepreneur. He began dancing at family functions and weddings from the age of thirteen and then got involved in local dance events, which he says he never took too seriously. With his mother’s help, he started dancing at annual mela festivals all across east London.

“The dance I do is a form of world dance. It takes its influences from western dance forms and mixes it with that of eastern styles. When you look at what I do, it is urban bollywood, latin bollywood, commercial bollywood which is what most people know, as well as traditional kathak, bharatanatyam and bhangra. I have always enjoyed the freedom of dancing. I enjoy putting on the stage charisma, making people smile, the crowd appreciating what I do, making them go ‘wow’!!

I learnt the language of dance myself. I am full-on self taught. I’ve never had a teacher. What this means is that when I hear a beat, it tells me to move a certain way. It determines whether I go hard, soft, or smooth. I let the beat take me and then I just freestyle, do my own thing.

My biggest influences are Michael Flatley, Coach Carter, the Bollywood actor Salman Khan and Rocky Balboa [the fictional character played by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films]. They are all of my inspirations, Balboa especially because he fights for everything he does. I always think, if I can’t beat myself in order get a step up, what is the point in being here.”

In 2000, Naz attended an audition for a Bollywood dance show in Leicester Sq alongside seven hundred other hopefuls. It was for a place as a backing dancer in a spectacular Bollywood performance at Wembley Arena alongside celebrities and stars from the Bombay film industry. He was seventeen years of age.

“I kept thinking that I was a normal guy from East London. But for two months, I practiced hard on a routine in my bedroom. My neighbours have never really complained. I don’t practice late and I usually play the music on my headphones. After I performed it, I could hear the clapping and the smiles on the judge’s faces. I knew I had done well. I got a place on the show. I went home and practised the moves that we were to do. I was going to master it and be the best. During the rehearsals that followed, the other dancers, who were all older, would come and ask me to help them with the counts. On the night of the show, I met famous actors, actresses and models. It was all so glamorous.”

This jump from dancing at local events in the East End to performing in front of thousands of people was incredible, Naz says – bigger than what he would go on to achieve later in his life. After this, things just blew up, he says. He did a second show and then another one. There were thousands of people attending them. Soon after, Naz formed his own dance group which toured all across Europe.

But, as quickly as everything took off, the jobs fizzled out. He remembers coming back to Pauline House from Spain where he had been performing and found there was nothing else. “How does one go from such a high of feeling alive, to coming back down to earth,” Naz wondered. He suffered from depression for a while. However this was not going to be the only trial he faced.

Naz found local people turning against him because he danced. “Boys from local religious groups would mock and abuse me. I would have massive groups of them threatening and trying to provoke me. It was never a small group of people. They would call me names, say that I was being gay by dancing and a kafir [a non-believer]. They said dancing was wrong. It was against Islam. Some of the stuff they would say was really insulting. I suppose it is because I am different. I am not the same as everyone else around me.

I won’t forget what they did. I had put my blood, sweat and tears into this and here were people trying to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. There was a period when I had to move out of Pauline House because it got really bad. It was becoming a huge challenge to fight these guys whilst at the same time, to fight for work.

But then, being an East London boy, I was never going to back down and let them get away with it. I would also go and throw down with them. I created my own support – I also had people who would take a punch for me or throw one if needs be. Other dancers would come to my support, as would my older brother and his friends. Eventually, I think I won people over. The funny thing is, now some of these guys want to come to my shows and want to shake my hand when they see me.”

Naz picked himself up and started doing small workshops in the borough. Teaching nine to fifteen-year-olds the dance moves he had learnt and mastered. One summer, he trained around forty of them who worked so hard, that he managed to get them a gig at the Millenium Dome. “They killed the performance,” he says, “We all danced our hearts out.”

This proved to be one of the most important moments of his life. From that, he got another booking where he danced with Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan, Arjun Rampal and Shilpa Shetty. The Pakistani popstar Atif Aslam headlined. From 2007, Naz decided to produce his own show. At his first attempt, he sold out the Albert Hall. He was twenty-three years old. This is what he does now, organising large Bollywood, all-singing, all-dancing super shows.

“I love being from where I am. Having my family, my friends and the drama around me. This is my natural habitat. I live in a world that is surreal, glamorous, but I still live with my family. I love it. I feel accepted here and don’t need to please anyone. My mother has constantly helped me. She has always wanted me to be more than I am. I don’t want to show her the stress, just the glamour. But of course she knows that its not all easy. I have achieved all my dreams. I’m just enjoying everything I do now.”

Naz Choudhury at Pauline House

The fifth of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

What was once the caretaker’s yard at George Green’s School on the Isle of Dogs is now a beautiful and thriving community garden, abundant in plants and flowers, as well as fruit and vegetables. It is fringed on all sides by tall trees and even taller high-rise blocks overlook it. Beside one of the far walls of the garden, I meet three figures, dressed in white. Their heads are covered in white helmets with protective meshing over their faces. Resembling astronauts from a sixties science-fiction film, they hunch over four wooden structures – inspecting, examining and searching. These are the beekeepers, checking one of their hives for an elusive queen bee.

Thirty-year-old Lee Diep Chu is a newly qualified teacher and one of the volunteers in charge of the bee colonies here. Lee is a native of the Island and a former student at George Green’s School. Growing up in the eighties, she says that much of the area was derelict with not much going on. The British National Party were very active then and, coming from one of the small pockets of Vietnamese and Chinese communities, Lee says many people lived in fear. But slowly, from the mid-nineties onwards, it began to get better. There was more funding for local-government initiatives focusing on the Island and a lot more done for young people at the School too. Beekeeping emerged out of this particular history of deprivation and development on the Isle of Dogs.

The excitement in Lee’s voice as she explains the world of the honey bees is obvious and infectious and, soon enough, it is easy see why. “If we can’t see the queen, then we look for signs of her eggs and larvae which is what we have been doing,” she explains, “The colony itself knows very quickly if it is queen-less. They can smell that she is no longer there. This means that they go into emergency mode and will quickly rear another queen to replace the missing one.

At first, I thought ‘Ooooo, bees. A bit dangerous, aren’t they?’ It is obviously a common fear. But now I am fascinated by them. I feel very attached and protective over the four colonies that we have set up. I come here after work and on Sundays, smoke the bees or simply watch them. None of us volunteers are experts by any means, we just like doing it. It’s a group effort and really therapeutic.

The colony is like one, large animal and can be seen as a single entity. When a new queen is required, she is chosen from amongst all of the other bees. The colony will feed the chosen one royal jelly for sixteen days until she hatches and will continue to do so throughout her adult life. This enables her to grow larger and fatter than the others. Afterwards, she will fly off into the air and mate with around ten male drones. From that one session, she will be fertile for up to five years allowing her to lay between fifteen hundred to two thousand eggs a day, which she drops into cells.

The worker bees usually begin their lives as house-keeping bees, keeping the hive clean. Some will nurse the new born, their sisters, and produce wax in order to build new combs. Others will guard the hive from intruders such as wasps or hornets, but also larger creatures. Towards the final stages of their lives, the workers forage for pollen and nectar. Whilst the queen can expect to live between two to five years, the life span of the worker bee on the other hand is around six weeks. They eventually die of exhaustion. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t much fun being a queen bee. She is a slave to the colony. Her job is to just lay eggs. If the queen doesn’t do what is expected of her, the other bees will simply kill her off.

The colonies are made up of female bees. The male drones are expected to mate with queens from different hives – they don’t do much else and are pretty useless. In the winter, the females will kill the males off, or at least keep them away from the hive. Then, there will only be a few thousand or so of them left, keeping the hive warm and the queen alive. As beekeepers there is little else we can do to help them then. We try and keep viruses down, such as the varroa virus which is deadly and we give them sugar solution and fondant, but other than that, we just hope and pray that they make it through in to spring. This will be the start of the mating season, when the cycle begins all over again.”

The decline in the bee population have been a cause for concern for a while. Across Europe, estimates suggest that bee numbers have more than halved in recent years, with some species of bees already extinct in the United Kingdom. This is particularly troubling as bees are not just required to produce honey and wax, but crucially to pollinate a third of the food we eat – including many varieties of fruit, vegetables, plants and crops.

Lee explains that “Colony Collapse Disorder” is connected to the overuse of pesticides and new agricultural techniques which are fatal for bee species. However, bee populations in London are thriving. “We don’t know precisely why this is, but it may be because the bees are not exposed to insecticide in the way that they are in the countryside.”

“What about the pollution in London?” I ask, “Why it is that insecticide affects them but pollution doesn’t?” “We don’t know the answer to this,” Lee replies, “yet it could become an issue further down the line.”

Honey has many medicinal benefits, but using locally-produced honey is even better for allergies and especially Hay Fever – since it is local pollen that causes the irritation. Lee uses the honey they get from their bees to treat her own Hay Fever. At the moment, like the rest of the produce grown in the garden, the honey produced by the Isle of Dogs’ bees is used in the George Green’s School café. The local pub and some restaurants also sell the honey, and Lee hopes to sell it more widely.

Manda Helal – Beekeeping volunteer

I am a gardener and I wanted to learn more about bees. I heard there will be a problem with our food if we don’t have enough bees. I like the slowness of it all. Watching the bees, being busy, busy, busy. But the honey itself weighs a tonne – it takes strength. They all look so happy. You don’t see them as individuals, but as a collective. It’s all of them working together that makes it work. If they were to break off from the rest, it wouldn’t work. It’s fascinating.

Jules Robertson - Beekeeping volunteer

Julia is another volunteer who looks after the bees. I used to live in one of the tower blocks that overlooks the garden. I heard about the real crisis that bees are in and that urban beekeeping was the way forward for their survival. There is something about the biodiversity of London that means they can thrive here. So I went looking all over the place for somewhere to do beekeeping. It came as a shock that I didn’t have to go far at all and it was just on my doorstep.

Lee Diep Chu has just written to me to say that one of their hives has reared a new queen which has begun laying eggs, something they are all very excited about.

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The sixth of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

The first time I saw Sina Sparrow’s graphic illustrations was on the staircase of the Hackney Picture House last year. It was a dark, winter’s evening and I had been to see a film on my own. I was walking down the stairs when a series of black and white images leapt out at me.

The illustrations were striking and they were attached to the wall using bulldog clips. All were of men in various states of nudity. Some of them were embracing intimately and others kissed. A few of the drawings had captions with wry comments and observations. They looked like graffiti from toilet walls, but they seemed more thoughtful, considerate, melancholic even. One was of a topless man captioned “He sleeps with everyone but me,” with a heart coloured-in beside the figure.

I tell Sina this when I meet him in Limehouse where he lives and works from his bedroom. He runs Debbie, a monthly club in Bethnal Green, and is tired and sleep deprived. He laughs, which he does easily, often and with volume, telling me he remembers that exhibition vividly – he had split up with a boyfriend and was feeling heartbroken while hanging those pictures on the staircase. “I stood back and looked at my work and thought ‘all of this is so sad. I really hope people connect to it and think it’s fun,’” he recollects, again laughing.

Much of Sina’s work is autobiographical, excavating his own store of experiences, desires and fantasies. It concerns a range of observations on relationships, break-ups, sexuality, pop-culture and loneliness, and also upon the ordinariness of life, the enigma of coincidences, the nature of attraction, the inherent difficulties of living in London and our relationship with technology.

Growing up in Surbiton, Sina was writing and reading comics from an early age. “I love words and pictures and found comics exciting. I was into superheroes such as the X-men, Wonder Woman, Thor, Superman and Batman, Cloak and Dagger and the Justice League. I found the characters all really attractive because they were really powerful and beautiful, and they were fighting for social justice at the same time.”

Sina initially drew his own comics based upon what he was reading and he gave them away to people he knew. Then, around the age of sixteen, he discovered that there were others who were making and photocopying their own zines, and this led him to take his own material more seriously. In his work, he began to address what was happening in his own life, exploring matters to do with identity and bullying – the latter, he says, was especially pivotal.

“I went to an all-boys school and there was a lot of homophobia in the air. I didn’t have very many friends and was bullied quite a lot. Much of it centred upon my sexuality. At the time I didn’t even know what I was, but this did not matter to the bullies. What this period allowed me was a lot of time to work on my art and creative writing. Reading comics such as X-Men helped – this story about mutants is essentially a metaphor for race, sexuality and other forms of difference, and the ways in which people react to that.”

“Boy Crazy Boy” was the first of these zines, taking a sardonic look at everyday incidents which Sina experienced. One of his stories was about a boy Sina had crush on. One day, the boy invites Sina to his house, which he is over the moon about until he discovers that the crush’s boyfriend is there as well, when he didn’t even know he had one.

Sina’s parents are both academics who initially encouraged their son’s enthusiasm for comics but, when it seemed like he wasn’t growing out of them, they became anxious about it. “Comics were thought to be slightly regressive, in relation to ‘real’ art and literature.” They also grew uncomfortable by some of the content when, at thirteen, Sina’s biggest influence was a series called “Love & Rockets” by Mexican-American brothers Gilbert & Jaime Hernandez about two punk girls in a lesbian relationship.

Sina went to art school and did a degree in illustration, but he says it made him feel lost and disillusioned with his work. It took a long time to get back to making comics again. He did a series called “Art Fag – Tales of Love and Loneliness that could be yours,” and a zine called “Pretty Boys Ignore You” which is a series of illustrations that he did in the bars and cafes of Shoreditch and Soho, imagining the stories of strangers he sat next to.

Sina’s work is honest and frank. “It’s about feelings, ambiguous and sometimes negative feelings – I think it is important to talk about the darker side of life,” he admits – but he also hopes his illustrations make people laugh and connect emotionally through humour. “The more specifically I speak about my own life and experiences – ironically – the more universal my work becomes,” he suggests, “Straight people can look at it and say, ‘Oh that’s really romantic’ or ‘I feel like that too.’”

“I don’t want to be hot or cool or – or fabulous,” he said, “I just wanna be me.”

But there was something inside him that burned gently and bright and strong

Drawing for The Melting Ice Caps album cover

Portrait of musician Owen Duff

Sina Sparrow

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Paul Bommer, Illustrator

The seventh of seven stories by Writer & Anthropologist Delwar Hussain, author of Boundaries Undermined, who grew up in Spitalfields

Eliza Begum looks like she is buried under flowers. There are large bundles of roses, gerberas, pink lilies, gypsophila, hydrangeas and chrysanthemums everywhere. This is nothing new. For the last eight years she has been making wedding bouquets from the dining room of her house just off Brick Lane.

This time, however, the order is slightly different. A secondary school in Plaistow is organising a prom night for its final year students and they want flowers – a lot of them. Eliza explains that the theme of the prom is “summer” so everything has to be colourful and bright. They have ordered one hundred and thirty-seven buttonholes, wrapped and pinned with foliage – one hundred and five single red roses, wrapped and ribboned – ten large bouquets and three massive table arrangements.

“I usually make bouquets, corsages, buttonholes, garlands, large displays with fresh flowers, bedroom decorations and headdresses. Holidays and weekends are mental and the main wedding season is obviously spring and summer. It is particularly buzzing then because everyone wants to have their weddings at the same time. I have bookings three months in advance, but then there is always a surge and I often have to refer clients to other bridal florists. Someone will always call me up and say that they need something ASAP. Or two days before an event, I will receive a message saying that they want to add ten more buttonholes to their list. They don’t understand that I have to pre-order the flowers, so then I have to find them somehow. When things get really chaotic, I enrol my husband into it as well. He has become quite nifty at putting the flowers together for buttonholes.

I like working with a client to create the overall look. I work from pictures, ideas or themes that they bring to me. Mostly people tend to want red and white colours. Carnations are durable, so I use them if someone has a particular sort of colour theme. I use celosia, which look a little like velvety brains. At the moment, I am using a lot of peonies and gerberas. The latter come in bright colours, but they don’t last very long. Orchids are my favourite. Each plant is different, unique. They come in all shapes, colours and sizes. They take a lot of skill to grow. I had a white orchid shower bouquet for my own wedding some years ago.

I do an in-house service which involves making fresh flower canopies, draping them around the matrimonial bed. Someone recently wanted me to decorate their horse-drawn carriage. The vehicle itself was like the glass one Cinderella had in the fairy tale. The bride had an image of herself being totally immersed in flowers and emerging out of the carriage with the flowers tumbling out with her. But I couldn’t do it because she called me only a week before the event. I told her that I needed to pre-order the flowers which would take some time and that the carriage hire company may not even give permission for such a thing. In the end, she settled for strings of flowers instead, which I think looked much better.

Since the recession, the price of flowers has gone up and they are much more expensive than what they were. I think it has become harder for people to weigh up the costs and benefits of them. Having said that, people tend to spend quite a lot of money on their weddings anyway and the recession hasn’t changed that. I’ve noticed that people want their flowers to look standard and uniform. They don’t want them to look natural. They don’t want their flowers to smell either. They say it may clash with their perfume, or that they suffer from hay fever.

I got started in it when I was eighteen years old and my older sister was getting married. She wanted a particular design for her bouquet and we went to a florist for a quote. They were asking for eighty pounds. I was shocked and thought I could make it myself. So I did and continued to do so.

I was working as a youth worker at the time and started teaching the young people how to do flower arranging. I was then hired to do various different youth projects related to flowers. From that, people began asking me to do their weddings. It was around then that I also did a professional training course as I wanted to know what I was actually doing.

Afterwards, I would get my flowers delivered directly from Holland. I was young and new to the business and got a little nervous by the large amounts of flowers coming in. I didn’t know how to store them all. I decided to change my flower dealer and to go to the New Spitalfields Market in Leyton and Columbia Rd Flower Market instead. It is much more expensive buying in such a way, but it is less wasteful and I can get the precise numbers that I need.

I have built up a great rapport and relationship with the sellers at Columbia Rd. I have been going there for years now. I can call them before hand and ask them to get me something, or some of them even save me flowers that they think I would like. The advice they give me is really useful too – information on storage, cutting, dying roses blue for example, how to make them last longer, that sort of thing…”

Buying flowers at Columbia Rd Market

To commission flowers from Eliza Begum email eliza25@hotmail.co.uk

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ENVOI FROM DELWAR HUSSAIN

“I would like to thank you, readers, for allowing me to bring to you some amazing stories from East Enders. I really look forward to the next installment.”

James McBarron

When I published Bob Mazzer’s Underground photographs from the seventies and eighties, I was astonished by how many readers got in touch to name people in the pictures, but I never expected it to happen when I published Horace Warner’s photographs of the Spitalfields Nippers from around 1900. Yet Lynne Ellis wrote to say her father James McBarron recognised Celia Compton whom Horace Warner photographed at the age of fifteen in 1901. By the time James knew Celia, as a child in the thirties, she was Mrs Hayday and he encountered her as a money-lender when he was sent to make the weekly repayments on his mother’s loans.

Intrigued by this unexpected connection to a photograph of more than a century ago, I took the train from Fenchurch St down to Stanford Le Hope recently to meet James McBarron and learn more of his story. This is what he told me.

“I am from Hoxton, Shoreditch, I was born in George Sq at the back of Hoxton Sq – it’s not there anymore. There were seven tenements and another building where Mrs Hayday lived, all around a yard with a lamppost in the middle. We attached a rope onto the lamppost and swung on it. We used to have a bonfire there in November and all the families came along. It was like a village and a lot of people were related, and everyone knew each other. We were clannish and there were quite a few families with members in different flats – my grandmother and grandfather lived there in one flat and I had two aunts in another.

Eighty years later I can still remember Mrs Hayday, even though I was only seven, eight or nine at the time. It was in 1936 or thereabouts. She was a money-lender and I was sent by my mother every Sunday to pay sixpence to her, but it didn’t mean anything to me at the time. To my eyes, as young boy, she was overwhelming. I was shown into the bedroom by her daughter and she was always lying there in bed. She took out a book from the bedside and made a note of the money. I recall an impression of crisp white sheets and she had dyed blonde hair. She was a buxom woman, a little blowsy. She smelled of scent – Phul Nana by Grossmith – the only scent I knew as a young boy, the factory was in Newgate St. I was awestruck because she was so unlike any of the other people I knew. There was a never a man there or a Mr Hayday. She was a very nice lady, she said, ‘Hello’ and ‘Say ‘Hello’ to your mum and dad.’ And that was Mrs Hayday.

My father, George, was a carpenter from Sunderland and he served in the Great War. My mother worked at Tom Smith’s Cracker Factory in Old St. My parents met in London and my mother’s family already lived in George Sq. My grandfather, he was an inventor and I admired him very much. He made a little working steam engine, and he tapped the gas main and had a tube with a little flame, so he could light his roll-ups. He played the violin and read music, and he never went to work. My gran used to go round to the pub for a jug of beer and they’d all go upstairs to my grandparents’ flat and play darts, and he’d play the violin.

We kids used to chop firewood to make money. The boys and girls used to go around collecting tea-chests and packing-boxes from the back of all the furniture factories, and say ‘Can we take it away, Mister?’ We chopped it up into sticks and made bundles, and we’d sell them for a penny or a ha-penny. We used to go to Spitalfields Market and ask for ‘Any spunks?’ or ‘Spunky oranges and apples?’ and they’d chuck the fruit that was going bad to us.

We didn’t think we were poor, except there was a family called Laban who were better off than us. He was a bookmaker and had touts. I remember their son had a jacket with pleats in the back and I wanted one like it, but when my mum eventually got me one it wasn’t so good. My father had a blue serge suit and it was pawned each Monday to pay the rent and bought back each Friday when he got paid. On Sundays, we went down to Stephenson’s Bakery in Curtain Rd to get a penny loaf.

When you came out of George Sq, there was a little alleyway leading through to Hoxton Market. There was Marcus the Newsagent, and next to it was Pollock’s and they had toy theatres in the window and these glass bottles with coloured liquid – it was a tiny shop. Next to that was Neville’s where my father bought our boots and shoes. I can remember every shop in the Market. Hoxton St was different then, bustling with stalls and there were barrows selling roasted chestnuts and boiled sheep’s heads.

William was the eldest child in our family, then I was born, then Peter, then Johnny and last of all Margaret. There was twenty-one years between us and she was born while I was away in the army, so she didn’t know me when I came back. I knocked them up at seven in the morning and called, ‘Here’s your boy, back again!’ We had three rooms – two bedrooms and a living room, and that’s why we had to move.

After the war, they moved us up to Haggerston to a new building in Stean St and George Sq was demolished because it was a slum. Everything broke up when people moved out. They took out all our furniture – including a table and chest of drawers my father made – and put it in a closed van and fumigated it because of the bugs. I’ve still got his tool box. It was a ragtag and bobtail existence, but I think we were a little better off than some. “

Celia Compton photographed at age fifteen by Horace Warner in 1901. Years later in 1936, a year after her husband died and when James McBarron was a child, she lived at 5e George Sq and he knew her by her married name of Celia Hayday.

James McBarron with his father’s carpentry box

Margaret & George McBarron in Haggerston

James and his brother Peter

As a boy, James visited Benjamin Pollock’s Toy Theatre shop at 208 Hoxton Old Town

James’ younger brother Johnny in the new flat when the family were rehoused in Stean St, Haggerston, in 1946

James’ elder brother William at the piano

James & June McBarron

James & June McBarron got married in St Leonard’s Shoreditch on 5th June 1954 and celebrated their diamond wedding this summer

James McBarron, 1965

James catches mackerel on holiday in Devon

James & June McBarron’s children, Lynne & Ian, in the sixties

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As a child, I was spellbound by the magic of puppets and it is an enchantment that has never lost its allure, so I was entranced to visit The Little Angel Theatre in Islington recently for the first time. All these years, I knew it was there – sequestered in a hidden square beyond the Green and best approached through a narrow alley overgrown with creepers like a secret cave.

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I were welcomed by Lyndie Wright who co-founded the theatre in 1961 with her husband John in the shell of an abandoned Temperance Chapel. “We bought the theatre for seven hundred and fifty pounds,” she admitted cheerfully, letting us in through the side door,“but we didn’t realise we had bought the workshop and cottage as well.”

More than half a century later, Lyndie still lives in the tiny cottage and we discovered her carving a marionette in the beautiful old workshop. “People travel for hours to get to work, but I just have to walk across the yard,” she exclaimed over her shoulder, absorbed in concentration upon the mysterious process of conjuring a puppet into life. “Carving a marionette is like making a sculpture,” she explained as she worked upon the leg of an indeterminate figure, “each piece has to be a sculpture in its own right and then it all adds up to a bigger sculpture.” In spite of its lack of features, the figure already possessed a presence of its own and as Lyndie turned and fondled it, scrutinising every part like puzzled doctor with a silent patient, there was a curious interaction taking place, as if she were waiting for it to speak.

“I made puppets as a child,” she revealed by way of explanation, when she noticed me observing her fascination. Growing up and going to art school in South Africa, Lyndie applied for a job with John Wright who was already an established puppet master, only to be disappointed that nothing was available. “But then I got a telegram,” she added, “and it was off on an eight month tour including Zimbabwe.”

After the tour, Lyndie came to Britain continue her studies at Central School of Art and John was seeking a location to create a puppet theatre in London. “The chapel had no roof on it and we had to approach the Temperance Society to buy it,” Lyndie recalled, “We did everything ourselves at the beginning, even laying the floorboards and scraping the walls.” Constructed upon a corner of a disused graveyard, they discovered human remains while excavating the chapel to create raked seating as part of the transformation into a theatre with a fly tower and bridge for operating the marionettes. Today, the dignified old frontage stands proudly and the auditorium retains a sense of a sacred space, with attentive children in rows replacing the holy teetotallers of a former age.

“I had intended to return to South Africa, but I had fallen in love with John so there was no going back,” Lyndie confided fondly, “in those days, we sold the tickets, worked the puppets, performed the shows, and then rushed round and made the coffee in the interval – there were just five of us.” At first it was called The Little Angel Marionette Theatre, emphasising the string puppets which were the focus of the repertoire but, as the medium has evolved and performers are now commonly visible to the audience, it became simply The Little Angel Theatre. Yet Lyndie retains a special affection for the marionettes, as the oldest, most-mysterious form of puppetry in which the operators are hidden and a certain magic prevails, lending itself naturally to the telling of stories from mythology and fairytales.

John Wright died in 1991 but the group of five that started with him in Islington in 1961 were collectively responsible for the growth and development in the art of puppetry that has flourished in this country in recent decades, centred upon The Little Angel Theatre. Generations of puppeteers started here and return constantly bringing new ideas, and generations of children who first discovered the wonder of the puppet theatre at The Little Angel come back to share it with their own children.

“The less you show the audience, the more they have to imagine and the more they get out of it,” Lyndie said to me, as we stood together upon the bridge where the puppeteers control the marionettes, high in the fly tower. The theatre was dark and the stage was empty and the flies were hung with scenery ready to descend and the puppets were waiting to spring into life. It was an exciting world of infinite imaginative possibility and I could understand how you might happily spend your life in thrall to it, as Lyndie has done.

Old cue scripts, still up in the flies from productions long ago

Larry, the theatrical cat

Lyndie Wright

Visit The Little Angel Theatre website for details of current productions

Ben Shapiro

In the East End, you are constantly reminded of the people who have left and of the countless thousands who never settled but for whom the place only offered a contingent existence at best, as a staging post on their journey to a better life elsewhere. Ben Shapiro has lived much of his life outside this country, since he left as a youth with his family to go to America where they found the healthier existence they sought, and escaped the racism and poor housing of the East End. Yet now, in later life, after working for many years as a social worker and living in several different continents, he has chosen to return to the country of his formative experience. “I’ve discovered I like England,” he admitted to me simply, almost surprised by his own words.

“I was born in the London Hospital, Whitechapel, in 1934. My mother, Rebecca, was born in Manchester but her parents came from Romania and my father, Isaac (known as Jack), was born in Odessa. He left to go to Austria and met my mother in Belgium. He was a German soldier in World War I and, in 1930, he come to London and worked as a cook and kosher caterer. I discovered that immediately after the war, he went to Ellis Island but he was sent home. In the War, he had been a radio operator whose lungs had been damaged by gas. He spoke four or five languages and became a chef, cooking in expensive hotels and it was from him I learnt never to sign a contract, that a man’s word is his bond. He had an unconscionable temper and by today’s standards we would be called abused children. I once asked my mother if she would leave him and she said, ‘Where would I go with three children?’ I have a younger brother, Charles, who lives in New York now and a younger sister, Frieda, who died three years ago in Los Angeles.

My parents lived in a flat in Brick Lane opposite the Mayfair Cinema, until they got bombed out in World War II. We got bombed out three times. My first school was the Jewish Free School, I went to it until I was four and the war broke out when I was five. My father was in Brick Lane when Mosley tried to march through in 1936 and the Battle of Cable St happened. He remembered throwing bricks at the police. When the war broke, we became luggage tag children and one of my earliest memories was travelling on a train with hundreds of other children to Wales. We lived with a coal miner’s family and, at four or five, he would come home covered in coal dust. His wife would prepare a tin bath of hot water and he would sit in it and she would wash him clean, and then we could all have supper.

Me and my brother were sent back to London when the Blitz was in full swing, but my sister stayed in Aylesbury for the entire duration of the war and the family wanted to adopt her. When I returned with her fifty years later, she met the daughter of the family, her ‘step-sister’ – for the first time since then – and they recognised each other immediately, and fell into each other’s arms.

In London, the four of us lived in a two bedroom flat and my brother and I slept together in one bed. My parents talked Yiddish but they never taught me. In the raids, we took shelter in Whitechapel Underground but my father would never go. He said, ‘I’ve been through one war – if I’m going to die, I’ll die in my bed.’ My father gave me sixpence once to go and see ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ at the cinema, but we got to the steps just as the siren sounded and I waited thirty years to see that film.

Then I was sent off again, evacuated to a Jewish family in Liverpool. On the train there, I met a boy and we decided to ask to be billeted together. We were eight or nine years old and we slept together and, every night, he wet the bed. So we had to hang out our mattress and pyjamas every day to dry them, they didn’t get washed just dried. Once Liverpool became a target for bombing, I got sent home again. After the war, he contacted me and said, he’d had an operation to correct his bladder.

I have distant memories of being sent away again to the countryside, to Ely. When we got to the village green at Haddenham, a man came up to me and asked, ‘Are you Jewish’ and I said, ‘No’ so he said, ‘You can come and live with me then.’ All the children in the school knew I was Jewish and asked ‘Where’s your horns?‘ but I was well cared for and didn’t want to leave in the end. My father never visited or wrote letters, I think it was because he had been in World War I and he was familiar with death, and he could have been killed in the Blitz at any time. If he died, I would have stayed. We were always well fed and I have a theory that my father sent them Black Market food.

Towards end of the war, we were housed by London County Council in Cookham Buildings on the Boundary Estate. I remember looking out of the window and seeing German planes coming overhead. There was flat that was turned into a shelter but we all realised that it would not protect us and, if a bomb dropped, we should all be killed. Above us, there was an obese woman with two children and she never got to the shelter before the all clear sounded.

Our flat was damp due to bomb damage and I caught Rheumatic Fever, and was admitted to the Mildmay Mission Hospital and was at death’s door for two months, and then sent to Greyshall Manor, a convalescent home. After that, we qualified for rehousing and we were the first tenants to move into the newly-built Wheler House in Quaker St in 1949. It was comfortable and centrally heated and we had a bathroom. From there, at fourteen years old, I went to Deal St School. It was where I first experienced racial intimidation and bullying, so I told the teacher and he said, ‘You’re a Jew, aren’t you?’ Eventually, I became Head Prefect, which gave me carte blanche to discipline the other pupils.

During the years at Wheler House, I became friendly with the bottling girls from the Truman Bewery who walked past at six in the morning and six at night. I knew some of the Draymen too and they let me feed the horses. Soon after we moved in, my father wouldn’t give me any pocket money, he said, ‘You’ve got to earn it.’ I went down Brick Lane and enquired at a couple of stalls for a job and I had a strong voice, so a trader said, ‘I need a barker,’ and, for about a year, I became a barker each weekend in Petticoat Lane, crying ‘Get your lovely toys here!’ I was opposite the plate man who threw crockery in the air and next to the chicken plucker.

I worked in the City of London as a junior clerk in Gracechurch St, near the Monument, but I feel – if I had stayed – I would still be junior clerk.

The lady next door, she had a friend from America and she sponsored my brother to go there. So then we all wanted to go and, on June 6th 1953, we went down to Southampton and took a boat to New York and then travelled to Los Angeles. It was for health reasons. My mother had been unwell and my father said it would be a better life, which it turned out to be. I was seventeen years old.”

c.1900, Odessa – My father Isaac is sitting in the centre, he was born around 1896 and left in 1906 during the last great pogrom to go to Vienna

c. 1920, London – My mother Rebecca is on the right with her sister on the left. Her parents were known as Yetta & Maurice

Ben on the left, aged seventeen years old, photographed with his family on the boat going to a new life in America in 1953

Ben and his family were the first people to move into this flat in Wheler House, Quaker St, when the building was newly completed in 1949

Today we remember the celebrated Architect and long-time Spitalfields resident, Sir Richard Cornelius MacCormac, CBE, PPRIBA, FRSA, RA, whose funeral takes place in Christ Church this morning. Just two months ago, he published Two Houses in Spitalfields as a record of the adjoining properties that he and Jocasta Innes inhabited in Heneage St – each manifesting their owners’ contrasted sensibilities yet by their connection emblematic of the personal relationship which bound them together for thirty years.

Sir Richard MacCormac photographed at Southwark Station in 2013 by Dominic Harris

Born in Marylebone in 1938, Richard MacCormac came from a distinguished medical and naval family of Irish origin that included Queen Victoria’s House Physician. As a boy, he built model boats and then did his National Service in the Royal Navy. Possessing a life-long love for sailing, in recent years he owned a 1908 oyster-fishing smack that he sailed on the Thames Estuary.

Passionate to forge a humane version of Modernist architecture, Richard MacCormac worked on social housing projects in Merton in the nineteen-sixties before establishing his own practise in Spitalfields, MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, in 1972. Reconciling an Arts & Crafts appreciation for fine materials with Frank Lloyd’s delight in sympathetic geometry, he designed a series of notable buildings for Oxford & Cambridge colleges, including an accommodation block for Trinity College, Cambridge, that he considered his finest work. More recent projects included Southwark Station and the new Broadacasting House in Portland Place which succeeded in elegantly counterbalancing George Val Myers’ 1935 building, despite the meddling of BBC executives.

In Spitalfields, Richard MacCormac will be fondly remembered for his shrewd intelligence, wit and generosity of spirit. Within one month last year, he and Jocasta Innes each discovered they were afflicted with terminal cancer and both met these tragic circumstances with singular fortitude and strength of character.

Secret door in Richard MacCormac’s house that led to Jocasta Innes’ house

View back from Richard MacCormac’s house towards the secret door

Stairwell with display of medals belonging to Richard MacCormac’s ancestors

Model boat constructed by Richard MacCormac

Richard MacCormac’s library

Folding desk in Richard MacCormac’s study

Hallway of Jocasta Innes’ house

Jocasta Innes’ kitchen

Jocasta Innes’ library with portrait of her mother

Chest in Jocasta Innes’ bedroom

Secret door on the landing in Jocasta Innes’ house leading to Richard MacCormac’s house

“The two Spitalfields houses, and our lives, were bound together, continually touched by our shared interests. They have many characteristics in common – illusion, allusion, surprise, humour and, of course, colour, but with the distinct identities which reflect us both” – Richard MacCormac

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At Jocasta Innes’ House

Ray Newton at the churchyard gate of St Paul’s Shadwell

You do not meet many people who can say they come from Shadwell these days, not in the way that Ray Newton can when he tells you his family have been there since at least 1820 – which is only as far he chooses to probe, yet more than sufficient to claim Shadwell as his place of origin. Ray has dedicated himself to learning the history of Shadwell and, for the past thirty years, he has run the local history trust with Madge Darby who is his counterpart in Wapping.

Between the pair of them they are able to enjoy specialist conversations that trace niceties of historical detail, especially concerning the boundary between their adjoining Thames-side parishes. “Madge will tell you that the Prospect …” Ray began, referring to the ancient Prospect of Whitby riverside pub by its familiar name, “Madge will tell you that the Prospect is in Wapping because, since the early nineteenth century when the Docks were built, the Wapping people have said that you have to cross water to get to Wapping – yet prior to that the Prospect was in Shadwell.”

In confirmation of this assertion, Ray took me round the back of St Paul’s Church in Shadwell and gestured significantly towards a blank wall before turning one hundred and eighty degrees to indicate a route crossing the Basin towards the Thames. “This used to be Fox’s Path, from the Highway down to the Prospect,” he informed me, “it was raised on stilts across the marshes that were here before the Docks.” Thus Ray’s thesis about the shifting boundary of Shadwell and Wapping was proven, though it left me with an unfulfillable yearning to cross Fox’s Path upon the long-gone stilts over the marshes and down to the Prospect of Whitby.

“My father, Thomas Newton, was born in 1904 in Cornwall St off Watney St Market but he lived his early life in Juniper St, which was swarming with hundreds of children then. Although it was a big family, my grandfather John Newton had a good job, he was a foreman in a cold store at Bankside, so my father got educated and he could read and write letters for people in Juniper St. We were lucky because my dad had a secure job and even in the thirties, when there were no jobs, he worked. At twelve years old, my father left school and went to work with my grandfather at the cold store, and his brothers worked there with him too.

When he was fourteen, he went to Broad St Boys’ Club in the Highway that was run by the son of Bombardier Billy Wells (the man who wielded the hammer on the gong at the start of J. Arthur Rank films) and, at eighteen years old, my father became a professional boxer. He fought against Raymond Perrier, the Champion of France, and beat him and he topped the bill in the twenties. He fought all over the East End but, because he was boxer not a fighter, he had trouble with his eye and he had to have an operation. After that, he couldn’t box anymore so he became a manager and ran a gym in Davenport St above the Roebuck.

My mother, Maria Edgecombe, was born in Gravesend. Her mother was a farmer’s daughter who married my grandfather, who was a waterman who came from Shadwell and worked for the Tilbury Dock Company. When it was taken over by the Port of London Authority, he moved out and worked on the Pierhead and they lived in Cable St, where my mother met my father and they had three boys and a girl.

On my dad’s side, they were all dockers and on my mother’s side they all worked for the Port of London Authority. They were different people, because in the docks it was all casual labour whereas the Port of London Authority was regular employment. It was very hard work in the docks but I never met anyone that didn’t love working there. The docks could find a job for anyone.

When the War came, my dad was still working in the cold store and it was a reserved occupation. He joined the Home Guard and his job was to guard the London Dock and the King Edward VII Memorial Park which was the entrance to the Rotherhithe Tunnel – and he was given five rounds of ammunition. I remember him in his uniform because I was born just before the War.

My father was always into everything sporty and boxing was his life so, when his father died, he become a bookmaker and set himself up as a turf accountant and gave up the docks. Next, he decided to be a publican and bought a pub on the Highway opposite Free Trade Wharf called the Cock but, while I was doing National Service, he became ill. At fifty-one, he was told he had lung cancer and had five years to live, and he died at fifty-six.

He was a lad but he wasn’t a criminal. He was a hard man and he could fight anyone just like that, yet he was also very generous. He was into everything, he organised dances and sold tickets. We had a boxing gym in the cellar of the pub and he gave away all the equipment to the St Georges Boxing Club in the church crypt – where they produced a world champion, Terry Marsh. I didn’t want him to give it away because I thought they’d damage it but he said to me, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have no money.’

At twenty-three years old, I took over the pub and I was a publican right on the docks, serving seamen and dockers. So you had to be a little hard – but I’m not. During the days, it was dockers, lightermen and ships’ captains but at nights, and at weekends, local families came. We had a piano player and everyone knew the words, they had competitions – one song in the Saloon Bar then one in the Public Bar. In the Saloon, you could charge what you pleased but in the Public Bar the drinks’ prices were set. Ships’ officers, customs’ men and the management of Free Trade Wharf went into the Saloon and dockers and lightermen went in the Public Bar – they never met, that was the class system.

I ran the pub until it was pulled down to make way for the widening of the Highway and I was rehoused in Gordon House, where I still live today. After the pub came down, I worked for my elder brother – he was a bookmaker – in his betting shops, but it wasn’t me. When he decided to sell the shop in Walthamstow, I stayed 0n and worked for the new people – for the company which became City Tote.

Yet I realised I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life so, at thirty-two, I decided to get an education and, after the shop closed at night, I used to go to evening classes. I enrolled for a basic English class and the teacher said, ‘Write something down so I can look at it,’ and when he saw it he said, ‘This ain’t your class but if you help me with teaching the other students, I’ll mark your essay each week.’ So I got a year of personal tuition. Then I was doing my homework in the betting shop one day, when two young men who were different from the other punters asked what I was doing. I said, ‘I’m doing O levels.’ They were lecturers and they said, ‘We’ll help you with your O levels if you’ll teach us gambling.’ After I did my O levels and A levels, I realised that if I don’t go to university, I’d be disappointed for the rest of my life, so I went to Middlesex Polytechnic and did a four year degree in Social Sciences.

While I was a student, I was working as an Adult Literacy volunteer and after I got my degree I became a lecturer in Social Sciences at West Ham College, but the most rewarding thing I did was teaching partially blind people. After thirty-six years of teaching, I retired and for the past ten years I’ve had an allotment in Cable St Gardens, and I’m secretary of the History of Wapping Trust. I used to teach a Local History class and one day Madge Darby came along, there’s nothing about Wapping she doesn’t know. We have published over twenty books. We have never set out to make money, it is a thing we do for love.

Once upon a time, we were all in the same boat, we all went to the same school, we all went to the same pub, we all had the same doctor and everybody knew everybody. Now nobody knows anybody. I think I was lucky because I worked in a pub at twenty-three and I met the full range of people, and it got me interested in local history.”

Ray upon the steps overlooking Shadwell Basin

Ray shows the stone plaque in the churchyard wall of St Paul’s Shadwell, placed after it was shored up when Shadwell Basin was being excavated between 1828-32 and the church began to slide downhill

Ray pointed out these early nineteenth century doors facing the Highway, in the side of the Vestry at St Paul’s Shadwell, which were once the entrance to Shadwell’s first Fire Station

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Peter Bellerby, Globemaker

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So Long, Sir Richard MacCormac

Ray Newton, Historian Of Shadwell