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The Gentle Author’s Coin Collection

March 19, 2024
by the gentle author

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Join me on Easter Monday, April 1st, for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF THE CITY OF LONDON. Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at 2pm. We will walk eastward together through the Square Mile to explore the wonders and the wickedness of the City. Photo courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

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In 1999, I bought a coin from a street trader at the time of the excavation of the Roman cemetery in Spitalfields. In 1576, John Stow wrote about the Roman coins that were dug up here in Spitalfields and I suspect mine came from the same source. A visit to the British Museum confirmed that the coin had been minted in London and the piercing was done in the Roman era when it was the custom to wear coins as amulets. Somebody wore this coin in London all those centuries ago and although I will never know who they were, now I wear it for them on a string around my neck, to give me a sense of perspective.

As you can see, my collection has grown as I have discovered that coin collectors are eager to dispose of pierced coins at low prices and I have taken on the responsibility of wearing them on behalf of their previous owners.

It was only when the string broke in Princelet St one dark night in the rain at Christmas and I found myself scrabbling in the gutter to retrieve them all that I realised how much they mean to me.

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Coin of the Emperor Arcadius minted in London

Figure of Minerva upon the reverse

Silver sixpence minted at the Tower of London, 1569

Head of Queen Elizabeth and Tudor rose

Silver sixpence minted at the Tower of London, 1602

Head of Elizabeth

Silver sixpence, 1676

Head of Charles II

Farthing, 1749

Head of George II

Silver sixpence, 1758

Head of George II

Young Queen Victoria

Half Farthing, 1844

Head of Queen Victoria

Silver sixpence, 1896

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Bishopsgate Tavern Tokens

The Gates Of The City Of London

March 18, 2024
by the gentle author

Join me on Easter Monday, April 1st, for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF THE CITY OF LONDON. Meet me on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral at 2pm. We will walk eastward together through the Square Mile to explore the wonders and the wickedness of the City.

CLICK HERE TO BOOK YOUR TICKET

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The City Gates As They Appeared Before They Were Torn Down, engraved for Harrison’s History of London 1775

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I am delighted to show you this eighteenth century print that I came across in the Spitalfields Market for a couple of pounds with the plangent title “The City Gates As They Appeared Before They Were Torn Down.”

Printed in 1775, this plate recorded venerable edifices that had been demolished in recent decades and was reproduced in Harrison’s History of London, a publication notable for featuring Death and an Hourglass upon the title page as if to emphasise the mutable, ever-changing nature of the capital and the brief nature of our residence in it.

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Moorgate (demolished 1761)

Aldgate (demolished 1761)

Bishopsgate (demolished 1760)

Cripplegate (demolished 1760)

Ludgate (demolished 1760)

Newgate (demolished 1767)

Aldersgate (demolished 1617)

Bridgegate (demolished 1762)

Sixteenth century figures of King Lud and his sons that formerly stood upon Ludgate, and stowed ever since in an alley at the side of St Dunstan in the West, Fleet St

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The Gates of Old London

On Sunday Morning

March 17, 2024
by the gentle author

On Sunday – when I was a child – my father always took me out for the morning. It was a routine. He led me by the hand down by the river or we took the car. Either way, we always arrived at the same place.

He might have a bath before departure and sometimes I walked into the bathroom to surprise him there lying in six inches of soapy water. Meanwhile downstairs, my mother perched lightly in the worn velvet armchair to skim through the newspaper. Then there were elaborate discussions between them, prior to our leaving, to negotiate the exact time of our return, and I understood this was because the timing and preparation of a Sunday lunch was a complex affair. My father took me out of the house the better to allow my mother to concentrate single-mindedly upon this precise task and she was grateful for that opportunity, I believed. It was only much later that I grew to realise how much she detested cooking and housework.

A mile upstream there was a house on the other riverbank, the last but one in a terrace and the front door gave directly onto the street. This was our regular destination. When we crossed the river at this point by car, we took the large bridge entwined with gryphons cast in iron. On the times we walked, we crossed downstream at the suspension footbridge and my father’s strength was always great enough to make the entire structure swing.

Even after all this time, I can remember the name of the woman who lived in the narrow house by the river because my father would tell my mother quite openly that he was going to visit her, and her daughters. For she had many daughters, and all preoccupied with grooming themselves it seemed. I never managed to count them because every week the number of her daughters changed, or so it appeared. Each had some activity, whether it was washing her hair or manicuring her nails, that we would discover her engaged with upon our arrival. These women shared an attitude of languor, as if they were always weary, but perhaps that was just how they were on Sunday, the day of rest. It was an exclusively female environment and I never recalled any other male present when I went to visit with my father on those Sunday mornings.

To this day, the house remains, one of only three remnants of an entire terrace. Once on a visit, years later, I stood outside the house in the snow, and contemplated knocking on the door and asking if the woman still lived there. But I did not. Why should I? What would I ask? What could I say? The house looked blank, like a face. Even this is now a memory to me, that I recalled once again after another ten years had gone by and I glanced from a taxi window to notice the house, almost dispassionately, in passing.

There was a table with a bench seat in an alcove which extended around three sides, like on a ship, so that sometimes as I sat drinking my orange squash while the women smoked their cigarettes, I found myself surrounded and unable to get down even if I chose. At an almost horizontal angle, the morning sunlight illuminated this scene from a window in the rear of the alcove and gave the smoke visible curling forms in the air. After a little time, sitting there, I became aware that my father was absent, that he had gone upstairs with one of the women. I knew this because I heard their eager footsteps ascending.

On one particular day, I sat at the end of the bench with my back to the wall. The staircase was directly on the other side of this thin wall and the women at the table were involved in an especially absorbing conversation that morning, and I could hear my father’s laughter at the top of the stairs. Curiosity took me. I slipped off the bench, placed my feet on the floor and began to climb the dark little staircase.

I could see the lighted room at the top. The door was wide open and standing before the end of the bed was my father and one of the daughters. They were having a happy time, both laughing and leaning back with their hands on each other’s thighs. My father was lifting the woman’s skirt and she liked it. Yet my presence brought activities to a close in the bedroom that morning. It was a disappointment, something vanished from the room as I walked into it but I did not know what it was. That was the last time my father took me to that house, perhaps the last time he visited. Though I could not say what happened on those Sunday mornings when I chose to stay with my mother.

We ate wonderful Sunday lunches, so that whatever anxiety I had absorbed from my father, as we returned without speaking on that particular Sunday morning, was dispelled by anticipation as we entered the steamy kitchen with its windows clouded by condensation and its smells of cabbage and potatoes boiling.

My mother was absent from the scene, so I ran upstairs in a surge of delight – calling to find her – and there she was, standing at the head of the bed changing the sheets. I entered the bedroom smiling with my arms outstretched and, laughing, tried to lift the hem of her pleated skirt just as I saw my father do in that other house on the other side of the river. I do not recall if my father had followed or if he saw this scene, only that my mother smiled in a puzzled fashion, ran her hands down her legs to her knees, took my hand and led me downstairs to the kitchen where she checked the progress of the different elements of the lunch. For in spite of herself, she was a very good cook and the ritual of those beautiful meals proved the high point of our existence at that time.

The events of that Sunday morning long ago when my father took me to the narrow house with the dark staircase by the river only came back to me as a complete memory in adulthood, but in that instant I understood their meaning. I took a strange pleasure in this knowledge that had been newly granted. I understood what kind of house it was and who the “daughters” were. I was grateful that my father had taken me there, and from then on I could only continue to wonder at what else this clue might reveal of my parents’ lives, and of my own nature.

Smithfield Slang

March 16, 2024
by the gentle author

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Jonathon Green, the foremost lexicographer of slang, introduces his predecessor Robert Copland who is believed to have recorded slang for the first time at the entrance to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield in the sixteenth century.

Jonathon Green in Smithfield

After forty years as a lexicographer of slang, everything appears through the gaudy, gruesome, grubby prism of the vulgar tongue, the resolutely oppositional vocabulary I call the ‘counter-language.’ Even Smithfield, which has taken life from its hosting of dead flesh – both human and animal – for eight-hundred years and is now facing cultural extinction at the hands of ever-vampiric, philistine greed.

Occasionally, I like to walk there in the early hours, dodging the abattoir trucks and glorying in this longevity, but glorying above all that across the way, outside St Bartholemew’s Hospital, the first devotee of my craft assembled the first slang ‘dictionary’. It is not quite a dictionary, just a few words included in a lengthy narrative poem, and it is not exactly slang, as spoken by the mass, but simply the ‘cant,’ or criminal jargon of wandering beggars. Yet even slang lexicographers need a creation myth and this is it. That Barts was founded by Rahere, who may have played jester to Henry I, compounds the pleasure – for what else does slang do but let wit murmur doubt in the ears of complacent power?

The poem’s author was Robert Copland, a printer, bookseller and stationer, of whom we know frustratingly little beyond a professional life spanning the years 1508-47. He worked primarily as an assistant to the printer Wynkyn de Worde who, in turn, had been William Caxton’s principle assistant from 1476 until the master-printer’s death c.1491. Indeed Copland claimed to have worked for Caxton too. In the preface to his book Kynge Apollyon of Thyre (1510) he states that he gladly follows ‘the trace of my mayster Caxton, begyninge with small storyes and pamfletes, and so to other,’ but given their respective dates, this relationship is more likely figurative than factual.

By 1547, it would seem that Copland in his turn had taken on the role of London’s leading printer, although this position had fallen upon him through chronology – de Worde had died in 1535 – rather than any particularly outstanding talent. Andrew Borde, writing that year in Prognostications or The Pryncyples of Astronamye, mentions ‘old Robert Copland… the eldist printer of Ingland.’ Somewhat later, writing in his Bibliographica Poetica, the eccentric eighteenth-century antiquary Joseph Ritson described him as ‘the father of his profession’ but this was overly generous. Still, the Dictionary of National Biography credits his contribution to the evolution of printing and, in The xij Fruytes of the Holy Ghost (1535), he uses the comma stop for the first time in a black letter book. Prior to that, the virgule (a thin sloping or upright line occurring in medieval manuscripts either denoting the caesura or as a punctuation-mark) or dash was the norm. He worked at times with his brother William who may have been that same William Copland who as church-warden of St Mary Bow donated a new bell, the Bow-bell, which chimed fifth in the ring. It was heard every night at nine, cheering the London apprentices, who on hearing the Bow-bell knew their day’s work was over. And to be within the sound of that bell, as would become traditional, was to mark one a true Londoner, a Cockney.

Copland’s catalogue ranged widely, including the first English translation of the surgeon Galen (1542) and the scatological Jyl of Braintford’s Testament (c.1535),  an early repository of the fart joke. Sometime between 1529 and 1534, Copland created the work for which he remains known. The Hye Way to the Spytell-Hous, loosely translated as ‘The Road to the Charity Clinic’- a spytell house being a form of charity foundation, dealing specifically with the poor and indigent and especially with those suffering from a variety of foul diseases. It is a verse dialogue, supposedly conducted  between Copland and the Spytell House Porter. Bart’s is not specified, but it has always been the assumed backdrop and it would have been a short walk from the printer’s shop at the sign of the Rose Garland near the Fleet bridge.

Trapped in the hospital porch by a snow storm, Copland strikes up a conversation with the Porter, taking as their subject the crowd of beggars who besiege the Spytell House ‘Scabby and scurvy, pock-eaten flesh and rind / Lousy and scald [scabby], and peeléd [naked] like an apes / With scantly a rag for to cover their shapes, / Breechless, barefooted, all stinking with dirt.’ The pair discuss why some are allowed in and others rejected and, within this framework, Copland notes and the Porter describes the various categories of beggars and thieves, as well as the tricks and frauds that are their stock in trade.

The Hye Way falls into two halves, the first focussing on beggars, the second on fools. Whatever the source of the ‘criminological’ verses, the second half would appear to have been influenced by Robert de Balzac, one of the minor French writers whose work Copland would have known, and author of Le Chemin de l’Ospital (The Road to the Hospital) 1502. And while de Balzac’s catalogue of fools does not deal in crime, it undoubtedly gave the English author his title.

Copland provides vivid descriptions of a wide range of what would become known as ‘the canting crew’ – ‘diddering and doddering, leaning on their staves, / Saying “Good master, for your mother’s blessing, / Give us a halfpenny.”’ Some, explains the Porter, are justified in their beggary, others are not.

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By day on stilts or Stooping on crutches
And so dissimule as false loitering slowches,
With bloody clouts all about their leg,
And placers [plasters] on their skin when they go beg.
Some counterfeit lepry, and other some
Put soap in their mouth to make it scum,
And fall down as Saint Cornelys’ evil [epilepsy].
These deceits they use worse than any devil;
And when they be in their own company,
They be as whole as either you or I.
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The Porter also describes such ‘nightingales of Newgate’ (the great prison was but a stone’s-throw from Bart’s) as those who claim to have been imprisoned in France ‘and had been there seven years in durance,’ or falsely imprisoned in London only to face poverty on their release. And explains how, once enough money has been earned, all such villains repair to brothels and taverns, dressing up in far from ragged finery and making ‘gaudy cheer.’  There are false scholars, and quack doctors, and – inevitably – corrupt clergy, whom the Porter characterises as monks, driven from the dissolved monasteries and posing as Pardoners. And as his descriptions reach their end, the Porter offers a list.

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For by letters they name them as they be
P a Pardoner; Clewner a C;
R a Roger; A an Aurium, and a Sapient.
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The clewner, a senior villain, may be linked to the Gaelic cluainear, a cunning fellow, a hypocrite, Erse cluanaire, a seducer, a flatterer, or Manx cleaynagh, a tempter.  The Roger pretended to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge. pronounced with a hard ‘g’, the word is ostensibly a version of Southern-English rogue, but may be linked to Gaelic ruaigair, a pursuer, a hunter, and Lowland Scottish rugger, an outlaw. The aurium is a fake priest, possibly from Latin aurius, an ear (i.e. that which hears confession), and the sapient a travelling quack, from Latin sapiens, a wise man, a term also found, with the same meaning, in the Liber Vagatorum.

In all, Copland’s verses offer fifty-one examples of cant. Among them are apple squire, a pimp – bouse, alcohol and bousy drunken – callet, a whore – cove, a man – darkmans, the night – dell, a young female tramp, still perhaps a virgin but seen as an embryonic whore – dock, to have sex, especially to deflower – gan, the mouth – instrument, the penis – jere, excremen – lift, to steal – make, a halfpenny – nab-cheat, a hat – nase, drunken – nug, to enjoy sexual foreplay – patrico, a priest or wandering beggar posing as one – peck, to eat – poke, a wallet or purse – poll, to rob by trickery rather than violence –prancer, a horse-thief – ruffler, a villain, of the ‘first rank of canters’ who posed as a discharged soldier though equally likely might have been a former servant – tour, to spy on and win, a penny.

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Public execution at Smithfield, 1546

Etching of Robert Copland, possibly early nineteenth century  (Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)

Robert Copland’s printer’s device

Robert Copland’s The Hye Way To The Spyttell House (1529-1534)

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Cockney Cats

March 15, 2024
by the gentle author

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Click here to book your walk through the City of London

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These are Cockney Cats by Warren Tute, with photographs by Felix Fonteyn from 1953, in the archive at Bishopsgate Institute

Micky is the centre of the Day family of Copley St in the parish of Stepney. The whole family pamper him and have a wonderful time

Bill on weekdays, William on Sundays, the cat at the Bricklayers Arms in Commercial Rd has a wonderful life since the Guv’nor Jim Meade was once a Dumb Animals’ Food Purveyor. At seventy-seven Jim looks back on a long and distinguished life in Stepney during his thirty-two years as Guv’nor.

Yeoman Warder Clark & Pickles on Tower Green

On duty at the Tower of London

The tail-less cat of the guardroom who came out to watch Pickles being photographed

Min, Port of London Authority cat has many friends among the dockers and very good ratting at night

Min of the magnificent whiskers has made her home in the office of K Warehouse in the Milwall Docks

Customs & Excise cat guards the Queen’s Warehouse and is paid a Treasury Allowance of sixpence a day

Mitzi has the run of her ship from the lifeboats to the Officers’ Mess

Old Bill the railway cat, his favourite position is the entrance to Blackfriars Station

Old Bill takes cover when necessary in the rush hour

Tibs the Great (1950-64), the official Post Office cat at Headquarters, does not normally live in this 1856 pillarbox

This cat’s curiosity unearthed a box of ancient stamps and seals, some dating back to Queen Anne

Minnie the Stock Exchange cat was a self-willed and determined kitten who adopted the dealing floor as her own preserve

Minnie enjoys the banter in the tea room

Tiger of The Times is the best office cat in Fleet St

Tiger of The Times is equally at ease whether in the Board Room …

… or doing his rounds in the Print Room

Sneaking back into Lloyds of London is difficult even for the resident cat

Cecil is the Front of House cat at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Cecil is very elusive in his many hiding places from which he has to be coaxed by the Royal Waiter before the performance can begin

When thirteen people sit down to dine at the Savoy and the thirteenth guest is Jimmy Edwards, almost anything can happen. The famous black cat is invited to occupy the fourteenth place so that everyone can enjoy the sparkling conversation.

Bill at the Tower of London (1935-47)

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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The Old River Thames

March 14, 2024
by the gentle author

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There is a dark and glistening river that flows through my dreams – it is the old river Thames, carrying away the filth and debris of the city and, in return, delivering the riches of the world upon the flood tide rising. How much I should like to have known London as it is recorded in these photographs – with a strong current of maritime life at its heart.

The broad expanse of water in Central London is curiously empty today, yet a century ago when many of these magic lantern slides from the Bishopsgate Institute were taken for the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, it was a teeming thoroughfare with wharves and jetties lining the banks. In the (reversed) glass slide above, you see barges unloading their cargo next to the Houses of Parliament and you might deduce that this method of transport could provide an answer to the congestion problems of our own era, if it were not for the fact that all the wharves have gone long ago.

Each day the tide goes up and down by twenty feet. For half the day, the water flows in one direction and for the other half in the other direction, with a strange moment of stillness in between while the tide turns. Such is the surge engendered that the force of the current at the centre presents a formidable challenge to a lone rower and would defeat any swimmer. In spite of our attempt to tame it with the flood barrier, the Thames manifests a force of nature that deserves our respect, especially as the water level rises year by year.

You might think that the river has become merely a conduit for drainage and an itinerary for tourist trips these days, yet do not forget that this mighty river is the very reason for the location of London, here on the banks of the Thames.

Shipping near Tower Bridge, c. 1910

St Paul’s Cathedral from the river, c. 1920

Tower of London from the river, c. 1910

Wandsworth Creek, c, 1920

Off Woolwich, c.1920

Greenwich pier, c. 1920

Steamboat pier at Chelsea, c. 1870

St Paul’s Cathedral from Bankside, c. 1920

Billingsgate Market, c. 1910

Houses of Parliament from South Bank, c. 1910

Tower of London from the Thames, c.1910

Ice floes on the Thames, c. 1920

St Paul’s Cathedral from Bankside, c. 1910

Victoria Embankment, c. 1920

Oxford & Cambridge Boat Race at Putney Bridge, c. 1910

St Paul’s Cathedral from Waterloo Bridge, c. 1920

London Docks, c. 1920

Customs House,  c. 1910

Lots Rd and Battersea Bridge, c. 1910

Somerset House was on the riverfront until the Victoria Embankment was constructed in 1870.

Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute

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Along The River Lea

March 13, 2024
by the gentle author

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Taking advantage of recent spring sunshine to escape the city and seek some fresh air, I wandered along the river bank from Bow as far as Tottenham Hale

At Cody Dock

Sir Corbet Woodall (1841-1916), Gas Engineer and Governor of the Gas Light and Coke Company, with two of his historic gasometers at Bow

At Bow Lock

Looking towards the tidal mill at Three Mills Island

At Three Mills Island

Who can identify this water fowl?

Old Ford Lock

Beneath the Eastway

Sculling on the Hackney Cut

At Lea Bridge

Barge cat

The Anchor & Hope

Looking towards Clapton

The Lea Rowing Club

At Tottenham Lock

Two Thames Barges at Tottenham Hale

Coal & diesel delivery barge

At Stonebridge Lock

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