Spitalfields Life

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IN THE MIDST OF LIFE I WAKE in the dark city of my dreaming. It is the bellman that wakes me before dawn, crying wearily ‘Past three o’clock and a cold frosty morning,’ before he stumbles away with lamp in hand and mutt in tow through the gloomy passage. In the distance of my half-waking, I hear ‘Buy a dish of flounders’ and ‘Give you good morrow, my masters,’ before I fall back into my slumber again.

At sunrise, the streets are already teeming. ‘Fine Seville oranges, fine lemons, fine,’ cries the orange woman. ‘Buy any milk below,’ cries the dairy maid as a chorus of hawkers fills the street calling like birds chattering in trees – ‘Wood to cleave’ – ‘Fine hot cakes’ – ‘Hot eel pies’ – ‘ Buy any garlic’ – ‘Good sausages’ – ‘New sprats new’ – ‘Buy any buttons’ – ‘Featherbeds to dry’ – ‘Clove water, stomach water’ – Ripe walnuts ripe’ and Quick winkles, quick, quick, quick.’ I close the casement, bar the shutter, pull the curtain and wrap the pillow round my ears to resist the clamour.

When I wake again, it is daybreak and there is a tumult of Criers beneath my window – ‘Have you any work for a tinker?’ – ‘Buy a fine singing bird’ – ‘Sixpence a pound, fair cherries’ – ‘Any baking pears?’ – ‘Old shoes for new brooms’ – ‘Twelve pence a peck, oysters’ – ‘Lights for the cats, liver for the dogs’ – ‘Buy an almanac’ – ‘Hot spiced gingerbread’ – ‘Two bunches a penny, primroses’ – ‘Buy a barrel of samphire’ – ‘Pity the poor prisoners’ and ‘What is’t ye lack?’

I rise and walk into the street. Now they cry ‘Banana, banana, banana’ – Lamb biriani, Chicken biriani, one pound’ – ‘Standard, standard’ – ‘Come on ladies, come on ladies, one pound fish, one pound fish.’ There are fake DVD hawkers, gypsies with lucky heather, Big Issue sellers, whisperers offering ‘a smoke,’ nitrous oxide pedlars, evangelists, street dancers, ticket touts, curry touts, charity canvassers and human statues. They are offering free samples of wood-fired pizza, frappuccinos and frozen yoghurt.

Five hundred years of Cries of London passed in the street while I was dozing.

Cries of London 1600, reproduced from Samuel Pepys’ Album © Magdalene College, Cambridge

Costermonger by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

Pedlar by Marcellus Laroon, 1687 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

‘Two Bunches a Penny, Primroses, Two Bunches a Penny!’ The Primrose Seller by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

‘Strawberries, Scarlet Strawberries’ by Francis Wheatley, 1793 (image courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

Hair Brooms outside Shoreditch Church by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

Showman with a raree show at Hyde Park Corner by William Marshall Craig, 1804 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

‘Rabbit, Rabbit – Nice fat Rabbit!’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

‘Lilies of the Valley, Sweet Lilies of the Valley’ by Luke Clennell 1812 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

Pickled Cucumbers by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

The Flying Pie Man by John Thomas Smith, 1816 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

London boardmen & women by George Scharf 1825-33 © British Museum

Long Song Seller, engraved from a photograph by Richard Beard, 1851 (courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)

The dispossessed and those with no other income were always able to cry their wares for sale in London. By turning their presence into performance with their Cries, they claimed the streets as their theatre – winning the lasting affections of generations of Londoners and embodying the soul of the city in the popular imagination. Thus, through time, the culture of the capital’s street Cries became integral to the distinctive identity of London.

Undertaking interviews with stallholders in Spitalfields, Brick Lane, Columbia Road and other East End markets in recent years led me to consider the cultural legacy of urban street trading. While this phenomenon might appear transitory and fleeting, I discovered a venerable tradition in the Cries of London. Yet even this genre of popular illustrated prints, which began in the seventeenth century, was itself preceded by verse such as London Lackpenny attributed to the fifteenth century poet John Lydgate that drew upon an earlier oral culture of hawkers’ Cries. From medieval times, the great number of Cries in London became recognised by travellers throughout Europe as indicative of the infinite variety of life in the British capital.

Given the former ubiquity of the Cries of London, the sophistication of many of the images, their significance as social history, and their existence as almost the only portraits of working people in London through four centuries, it astonishes me that there has been little attention paid to this subject and so I have set out to reclaim this devalued cultural tradition.

I take my cue from Samuel Pepys who pasted three sets of Cries into his albums of London & Westminster in a chronological sequence spanning a century, thereby permitting an assessment of the evolution of the style of the prints as well as social change in the capital in his era. In my book, I have supplemented these with another dozen series published over the following centuries which trace the development of the Cries right into our own time. My policy has been to collate a personal selection of those that delight me, those that speak most eloquently of the life of the street and those created by artists who demonstrated an affinity with the Criers.

Through the narrow urban thoroughfares and byways, hawkers announced their wares by calling out a repeated phrase that grew familiar to their customers, who learned to recognise the Cries of those from whom they bought regularly. By nature of repetition, these Cries acquired a musical quality as hawkers improvised upon the sounds of the words, evolving phrases into songs. Commonly, Cries also became unintelligible to those who did not already know what was being sold. Sometimes the outcome was melodic and lyrical, drawing the appreciation of bystanders, and at other times discordant and raucous as hawkers strained their voices to be heard across the longest distance.

Over time, certain Cries became widely adopted, and it is in written accounts and songbooks that we find the earliest records. Print collections of pictures of Criers also became known as ‘Cries’ and although the oldest set in London dates from around 1600, there are those from Paris which predate these by a century. Characteristically, the Cries represented peripatetic street traders or pedlars, yet other street characters were also included from the start. At first, the Cries were supplemented by the bellman and the town crier, but then preachers, beggars, musicians, performers were added as the notion of the Cries of London became expanded by artists and print sellers seeking greater novelty through elaborating upon the original premise.

Before the age of traffic, the streets of London offered a common public space for all manner of activity, trading, commerce, sport, entertainment and political rallies. Yet this arena of possibility, which is the primary source of the capital’s cultural vitality has also invited the consistent attention of those who seek policing and social control upon the premise of protecting citizens from each other, guarding against crime and preventing civil unrest. It suits the interest of those who would rule the city that, in London, street traders have always been perceived as equivocal characters with an identity barely distinguished from vagrants. Thus the suspicion that their itinerant nature facilitated thieving and illicit dealing, or that women might be selling their bodies as as well as their legitimate wares has never been dispelled.

Like the internet, the notion of the street as a space where people may communicate and do business freely can be profoundly threatening to some. It is a tension institutionalised in this country through the issuing of licences to traders, criminalising those denied such official endorsement, while on the continent of Europe the right to sell in the street is automatically granted to every citizen. Depending upon your point of view, the itinerants are those who bring life to the city through their occupation of its streets or they are outcasts who have no place in a developed modern urban environment.

When I interviewed Tony Purser on his last afternoon after fifty-two years selling flowers outside Fenchurch Street Station in the City of London, he admitted to me that as a boy he assisted his father Alfie, and, before licences were granted in 1962, they were both regularly arrested. Their stock was confiscated, they were charged three shillings and spent the night in the cells at Bishopsgate Police Station, before going back to trade again next day.

Street trading proposes an interpretation of the ancient myth of London as a city paved with gold that is not without truth. Many large British corporate retailers including Tesco, started by Jack Cohen in 1919, Marks & Spencer, started by Michael Marks in 1884, owe their origin to single stalls in markets – emphasising the value of street trading to wider economic development.

In the twentieth century, the Cries of London found their way onto cigarette cards, chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, tea towels, silk scarves, dinner services and, famously, tins of Yardley talcum powder from 1912 onwards, becoming divorced from the reality they once represented as time went by, copied and recopied by different artists.

Yet the sentimentally cheerful tones applied by hand to prints that were contrived to appeal to the casual purchaser, chime with the resilience required by traders selling in the street. And it is our respect for their spirit and resourcefulness which may account for the long lasting popularity of these poignant images of the self-respecting poor who turned their trades into performances. Even now, it is impossible to hear the cries of market traders and newspaper sellers without succumbing to their spell, as the last reverberations of a great cacophonous symphony echoing across time and through the streets of London.

Surely none can resist the romance of the Cries of London and the raffish appeal of the liberty of vagabondage, of those who had no indenture or task master, and who travelled wide throughout the city, witnessing the spectacle of its streets, speaking with a wide variety of customers, and seeing life. In the densely-populated neighbourhoods, it was the itinerants’ cries that marked the times of day and announced the changing seasons of the year. Before the motorcar, their calls were a constant of street life in London. Before advertising, their songs were the jingles that announced of the latest, freshest produce or appealing gimcrack. Before radio, television and internet, they were the harbingers of news, and gossip, and novelty ballads. These itinerants had nothing but they had possession of the city.

The Cries of London have taught me the essential truth of London street traders down through the centuries, and it is one that still holds today – they do not need your sympathy, they only want your respect, and your money.

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