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Now that Whitechapel Station has been completely rebuilt and the new Elizabeth Line is fully operational, few remember how it used to be half a century ago but photographer Philip Cunningham recorded the vanished streets and yards that once occupied this lost corner

Winthrop St

“I first started taking photographs of Winthrop St and Woods Buildings in Whitechapel in the mid-seventies. I remember the first time I went to Winthrop St on a cold frosty morning with a bright blue sky. A woman came out of one of the houses and asked what I was doing. ‘Photographing the streets,’ I said. ‘You’d better hurry up they’re coming down!’ she replied. She was right, within a few months they were gone.

‘Comprehensive Development’ was the only philosophy pursued by the London County Council and Greater London Council for rebuilding London after the war. Their planners complained that too much pre-war building was left, making comprehensive planning really difficult. Yet it would not have taken much imagination to have incorporated streets like these within any new development, creating a richer and more diverse urban landscape.

Even Mile End Place, where I lived in my grandfather’s house, was designated for demolition in 1968 to become a car park for Queen Mary College. Fortunately, the council did not have enough money to build flats for us to be decanted into so our street was saved.”

Winthrop St

Durward St School was built in 1876 and eventually restored by the Spitalfields Trust in 1990

Winthrop St

Winthrop St

Winthrop St

Winthrop St

Woods Buildings looking towards Whitechapel Market

“Woods Buildings was a subject I photographed over and over, it always held that feeling for me of Dickens’ London. To the left, as you approached the arch under the buildings, was a urinal and when I climbed the wall to take a look, it appeared to be for public use but had been bricked up. It must have been quite intimidating to pass through that passage at night.”

‘We live here, it’s not a toilet’

Entrance to Woods Buildings in Whitechapel Market

“By 1984, the land opposite Woods Buildings on the north side comprised a combination of wasteland and sheds where a boot fair would be held every Sunday. It was licensed by the Council and very popular. One Sunday, I observed a group of Romanians selling secondhand clothes just outside the compound which did not go down well with the gatekeepers as they had not paid a fee. There followed a quite violent fracas, although fortunately no one was seriously hurt and only a little blood spilt. I felt sorry for the children, it must have been frightening for them. Those were desperate days!”

Durward St

Photographs copyright © Philip Cunningham

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Philip Cunningham’s East End Portraits

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Philip Cunningham at Mile End Place

I am proud to publish these excerpts from GRAVE STORIES by a graduate of my writing course. The author, known as ‘Gravedigger’ invites you to visit the graveyard with the promise that ‘all of human life is here’ and tells the stories of the inhabitants.

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I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.

Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

SARAH SIDDONS (1755-1831)

Eighteenth century London’s best-known tragedienne, Sarah was the daughter of Roger Kemble, an actor-manager and at eighteen she married William Siddons, an actor in the touring theatre company. Sarah inspired ‘Siddons Mania,’ an extraordinary celebrity culture and allegedly left her audience in tears and some in hysterics.

Click here to read the full story of Sarah Siddons

JEREMY BENTHAM (1745-1832)

Born in Spitalfields, Jeremy Bentham advocated changes in the law to give women equal rights including suffrage, the right to public office and the right to divorce on the same terms as men, also to decriminalise homosexuality, to make slavery a crime and to protect animals from unnecessary suffering.

Click here to read the full story of Jeremy Bentham

ALFRED (1873-1945) & ADA SALTER (1866-1942)

Alfred became known as ‘the poor man’s doctor’ by charging sixpence for consultations, waiving his fee if people were unable to pay and introducing a mutual health insurance scheme in Bermondsey, described as the ‘NHS before the NHS.’ Ada was elected as Mayor, replacing the union jack with a red flag at the town hall. She campaigned against air pollution, through the establishment of a green belt and urban gardening, and in two years nine thousand trees were planted in Bermondsey.

Click here to read the full story of Alfred & Ada Salter

CAPTAIN THOMAS CORAM (1668-1751)

Thomas Coram was a ship builder and sea captain. Born in Lyme Regis, he went to sea at the age of eleven, building successful businesses in America and in London, before establishing the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury that bears his name today.

Click here to read the full story of Captain Thomas Coram

JOHN BETJEMAN (1906-1984)

John Betjeman’s passions encompassed Victorian gothic architecture, steam trains, the English countryside and seaside, provincial towns and country churches, and the cosy, banal miscellany of buttered toast, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, Liberty lampshades and Hillman Imps.

Click here to read the full story of John Betjeman

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I decided to take advantage of the October sunshine by enjoying an excursion to Chiswick House. I have to confess that it is thirty years since I visited, in the footsteps of the writer Denton Welch who came here in the thirties with a picnic including a hardboiled egg and a piece of fruitcake. It was a great consolation to encounter these gardens again, like a old friend that has not been changed by the years.

William Kent’s garden was inspired by the paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, and seeing it illuminated by the perfectly crystalline autumn sunlight this week, I could not resist the feeling I was exploring an eternal landscape that was outside time. I half expected to turn a corner of a box hedge and discover Denton with his blanket spread out upon the grass, waiting for me with a picnic for two of hardboiled eggs and fruitcake.

I can think of no better place to lose an afternoon in London than these gardens, why did I take thirty years to go back?

The Doric Column with Venus on the top at the centre of the Rosary

Sculpture of a lioness by Pieter Scheemakers, 1733

The Ionic Temple and Obelisk, 1722

In the Excedra

Herm in the Excedra

A Sphinx beneath the Lebanon Cedar

Classical villa designed by Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington

Designed by Inigo Jones for Beaufort House in Chelsea in 1621, this gateway was acquired by Lord Burlington in 1738 from his friend Hans Sloan

Bust of Caesar Augustus

The Corinthian capitals on the portico were carved by John Boson

Andreas Palladio by by John Michael Rysbrack

Inigo Jones by John Michael Rysbrack

In the Italian Garden

The Conservatory was designed by Samuel Ware and completed in 1813

Geraniums overwintering

The Classic Bridge, attributed to James Wyatt, was built for the 5th Duke of Devonshire in 1774

The Ionic Temple

Bust of Napoleon in the Rustic House designed by Lord Burlington about 1719

The Eye Catcher installed in 1970

The Cascade by William Kent

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At Fulham Palace

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In my opinion, Jim Howett is the best dressed man in Spitalfields. Here he is with a characteristically shy smile, sitting on a seventeen-twenties staircase in a houses in Fournier St he was restoring for the Spitalfields Trust. Jim was entirely at home in this shabby yet elegantly proportioned old house, a specifically localised environment that over time has become his natural habitat and is now the place you are most likely to find him.

For years, I admired Jim’s artisan clothing whenever I caught glimpses of him, always crossing Commercial St and disappearing through the market or off down Folgate St preoccupied with some enigmatic intent. When we were introduced, I discovered that Jim sleeps each night in the attic at Dennis Severs’ House and crosses the market every day to work in Fournier St with Marianna Kennedy, designing the furniture and lamps that have become ubiquitous in the houses around Spitalfields. I also learnt Jim is responsible for a significant number of the most appealing shopfronts in the neighbourhood.

At first, I assumed Jim was Irish on account of his soft vowels and quietly spoken manner, almost whispering sometimes, even swallowing his words before he utters them, and thereby drawing your attention to listen, concentrating to gather both what is said and what is unspoken. Such is the nature of his mind that Jim will begin a sentence and then pursue a digression that leads to another and yet another – though such is the intelligence of the man, that when he leads you back to the resolution of the original thought, it acquires a more precise import on account of all the qualifications and counter arguments. Without a doubt, Jim is a consummate prose talker.

Jim’s origins lie in Ohio in the foothills of the Appalachians, where he grew up in Salem. But Jim’s father worked in international development and in the nineteen-sixties the family moved to the Congo and then his father was transferred Vietnam, with the family ending up in London in 1967. Jim studied at the Architectural Association under the tutelage of Dan Cruickshank, subsequently working for a few years in prehistoric archaeology, before deciding to study at the London College of Furniture which was then in Commercial Rd.

Renting a room on Brick Lane, Jim dropped a card to his former tutor who wrote back to say he had just bought a house in Elder St full of broken furniture, so Jim set up a workbench in Dan’s basement to undertake the repairs.

“Dennis Severs knocked upon the door one day, looking for Dan,” Jim told me. “He said he’d just bought a house round the corner and wanted to do tours, and we thought he was crazy but we helped him set it up. I made the shutters, the partition with the arch in the dining room and I copied the fireplace from one in Princelet St.” he added, revealing the origin of his own involvement with 18 Folgate St, where today he is the sole resident. Before long, Jim was sharing a workshop with Marianna Kennedy and ceramicist Simon Pettet in Gibraltar Walk, sharing aspirations to create new work inspired by historical models by applying traditional craft skills. They found themselves amidst a community centred around the restoration of the eighteenth century houses, dubbed ‘Neo-Georgians’ by the media –  a moment recorded today in the collection of magazines and photo features, illustrating the renaissance of Spitalfields, that Jim keeps in a box in his workshop.

Jim taught himself furniture making by copying a Hepplewhite chair – constructing four versions until he could get the proportion right – before he discovered that there was no market for them because dealers considered them too dangerously close to the originals as to approach fakes. Yet this irony, which was to hamper Jim’s early career as a furniture maker, served as a lesson in the significance of proportion in engaging with historical designs.

When Jim won a commission to design an armoire for Julie Christie, he thought he had found the path to success. “She gave me tip of half the value of my commission fee and I thought ‘This is as good as it gets’, but she remains the best client I ever had.” admits Jim, wistfully recognising the severely limited market for custom-built new furniture in antique styles. “I used to make these pieces and have no money left over to buy coffee afterwards,” he declared with a shrug.

The renovation of Spitalfields gave Jim the opportunity to become one of those who has created the visual language of our streets, through his subtle approach to restoring the integrity of old shopfronts that have been damaged or altered. Perhaps the most famous are A.Gold and Verdes in Brushfields St, 1 & 3 Fournier St and 86 Commercial St. In these and numerous other examples, through conscientious research, Jim has been responsible for retaining the quality of vernacular detail and proportion that makes this Spitalfields, rather than any other place. The beauty of Jim’s work is that these buildings now look as if they had always been like they are today.

Yet Jim is quick to emphasise that he is not an architect, explaining that his work requires both more detailed knowledge of traditional building techniques and less ego, resisting the urge to add personal embellishments. “The difference between me and architects, working on historic buildings is that I restrict myself to organising the space. I believe if a building has survived for two hundred years, it has survived because it has certain qualities. The reason, I don’t put my finger in the pie is because I can express myself in other things.”

While Jim spoke, he produced file after file of photographs, plans and maps, spreading them out upon the table in his workshop to create a huge collage, whilst maintaining an extraordinary monologue of interwoven stories about the people, the place and the buildings. I was fascinated by Jim’s collection of maps, spanning the last five hundred years in Spitalfields and I realised that he carries in his mind a concrete picture of how the place has evolved. When I have seen him walking around, he is walking in awareness of all the incarnations of this small parish, the buildings that have come and gone through past centuries.

It fired my imagination when Jim took me into the cellar of 15 Fournier St and pointed out the path across the yard belonging to the sixteenth century building that stood there before the eighteenth century house was built, telling me about the pieces of charred wood they found, because this was where debris was dumped after the Fire of London in 1666.

Simon Pettet portrayed Jim on one of his tiles as a fly on the wall, reflecting Jim’s omnipresence in Spitalfields. “I think if my father had not taken us to the Congo, I should still be there in Salem, Ohio,” confessed Jim with a weary smile, “because at heart I am a localist.” Jim showed me the missing finger on his left hand, sliced off while cutting a mitre from left to right, a mark that today he regards as the proud badge of his carpenter’s trade. In his work and through his modest personal presence, Jim has become an inextricable part of the identity of Spitalfields –  after more than forty years, I hope we may now describe him as a local.

Jim at Jocasta Innes’ house in Heneage St, 1990

Jim with Dennis Severs and Simon Pettet, pictured in a magazine feature of 1991

Jim modelling his calfskin apron, 1991

Jim pictured in the penurious weavers’ garret at Dennis Severs’ House that today is his bedroom

In the Victorian Parlour at Dennis Severs’ House

Hoisting up the new cornice in Commercial St

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Readers may recall that I visited Brunswick House in Vauxhall to interview Adrian Amos, the founder of London Architectural Salvage & Supply Company (LASSCO), earlier this year. It was my pleasure to return later in the summer to write a feature about his secret garret in this astonishing eighteenth-century Palladian mansion, marooned today amidst a forest of towers, for The World of Interiors with photographs by Rachel Ferriman.

Click here to read my feature about Brunswick House in The World of Interiors

Adrian Amos

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Adrian Amos, Architectural Salvage Dealer

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Years ago, I became enraptured by a hundred-year-old collection of four thousand lantern slides. They were once used for educational lectures by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society at the Bishopsgate Institute in Spitalfields. When Stefan Dickers became archivist there, he discovered the slides in dusty old boxes – abandoned and forgotten since they became obselete. Yet over the last decade, it has become apparent that these slides, which were ignored for so long, are one of the greatest treasures in the collection.

When I was first offered the opportunity of publishing these lantern slides which have been unseen for generations, I was overwhelmed by the number of pictures and did not know where to start. The first to catch my fancy were the ancient signs and symbols, dating from an era before street numbering located addresses and lettered signs advertised trades to Londoners.

Before long, I grew spellbound by the slide collection because, alongside the famous landmarks and grand occasions of state, there were pictures of forgotten corners and of ordinary people going about their business. It was a delight to discover hundreds of images of things that people do not usually photograph and I was charmed to realise that the anonymous photographers of the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society were as interested in pubs as they were in churches.

The more I studied the glass slides, the more joy I found in these arcane pictures, since every one contained the rich potential of hidden stories, seducing the imagination to flights of fancy regarding the ever-interesting subject of Old London. Once I had published The Signs of Old London, I realised there were many other such sets to be found among the slides, as a result of the systematic recording of London which underscored the original project by the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society, a hundred years ago.

I do not chose not to clean them up or remove imperfections and dirt, or standardise the colour to black or a uniform sepia, either. Instead, I cherish the subtle variations of hues present in these slides and savour the beautiful colour contrasts between them, when laid side by side. There is a melancholic poetry in these shabby images, in which their damage and their imperfections speak of their history, and I have come to glory in the patina and murk.

In the Inns of Court

At Eltham Palace

At Euston Station

The Anchor at Bankside

Crocodiles at the Natural History Museum

Reading Room at the British Museum

Chelsea Pensioner

In Fleet St

In Fleet St

St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell

Between the inner & outer dome of St Paul’s

Along the Embankment

The Old Dick Whittington, Clothfair, Smithfield

Firemen take a tea break

Lightermen on the Thames

Flood in Water St, Tower of London

The White Tower, London’s oldest building

Glass slides courtesy of Bishopsgate Institute

Take a look at these sets of the glass slides of Old London

The Signs of Old London

The Markets of Old London

The Pubs of Old London

A few places are available for my course HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches from Richard Fuest, eat cakes baked to historic recipes by Townhouse and learn how to write your own blog. Click here for details

Dennis Gents Hair Stylist, note the razor blade sign

Ron’s Gents Hairdressers, Three Colts Lane, Bethnal Green, is still there but has changed from ‘Hairdresser’ to ‘Barber.’

His & Hers, ‘Executive Mood’ and ‘Avant Garde Mood’ hairstyles offered

June’s Ladies Hair Stylist. STE was the code for Stepney Green, letters were replaced by numbers around 1966.

Dave & Syd Strong, Gent’s Hairdresser

Gent’s Hairdresser moving into Ladies’ Hairdressing

Gent’s Hair Stylist, Puma Court, Spitalfields, run by Kyriacos Cleovoulou from 1962 until 2005.

Apples, Hair Stylist

Peter, Individual Gents Hair Stylist

The Saloon, customers peering out from the left of the window

Gentlemen’s Hairdressing Salon, Carter Lane, City of London

Mario’s Men’s Hairstylist

Hairdresser at 10 Laystall Street, Clerkenwell, with a plaque commemorating Giuseppe Mazzini as ‘the apostle of modern democracy inspired young Italy with the ideal of independence, unity and regeneration of his country.’

The Pleasant Gent’s Hairdresser is still going in Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell

Photographs copyright © A London Inheritance

Follow A LONDON INHERITANCE, A Private History of a Public City

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At Clapton Beauty Parlour

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Lew Lessen, Barber

HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ: 6th & 7th February 2027

This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.

“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author

COURSE STRUCTURE

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world.

SALIENT DETAILS

The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 6-7th February, running from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.

Lunch will be catered by Richard Fuest and tea, coffee & cakes by the Townhouse are included within the course fee of £350.

Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours

The poet Andy Stroman sent me these reminiscences of his childhood in Whitechapel in the nineteen-fifties

Andy Stroman aged four on the doorstep in Milward St

My brothers Paul, Howard and myself occupied one bedroom at 17 Milward St, Whitechapel, behind the London Hospital. We had three single beds and Paul was the furthest away from the door while Howard was in the middle. I was nearest to the door.

On Saturday, we would have a lie-in while Howard went to work at Burlington Cameras in Burlington Arcade up in the West End. Paul used to sleep with his head almost upside down so his nose was pointing in the air. I would wake up and lob a pillow at Paul shouting, ‘Wake up coconut shy!’ Paul’s head was pointing just like a coconut at the fairground. By this time it was half past twelve in the afternoon. Then we would both get up and have our cereal and make our way to the  municipal public baths on the Mile End Rd not far from Stepney Green Station.

I used to look forward to our once-a-week hot bath where I could have a sing-song and talk to Paul who was in the next cubicle. As you might have gathered we had no bath at home just a little sink in the scullery, and our only source of heating was one coal fire in the television room. The latter was our main source of evening entertainment and, if cowboy films were on and the cowboys shooting their guns off, the large mice would come out of their holes and frantically dance round the room. In that little telly room on a Friday night we used to each have our little tray of five or six monkey nuts in the shells.

There was my Mum, Auntie Rae, Paul and myself. My dad being a cab driver was out working and my oldest brother Howard out having fun up in the West End. An outside toilet in the backyard was a haven for peace, although I got frightened going out there at night so used to run out the back door and into the toilet and vice versa.

I kept getting repeated sickness, particularly in the chest, and you can guess how cold our house was in the wintertime. It used to be freezing in our bedroom and we had a bucket in the centre of the room to catch the drips that came from the ceiling.

Once, my Uncle Davey came to visit us when I was in bed. He entered with my Mum, looked concerned and said something in a quiet voice to my Mum. I heard a little bit of it. He said, ‘His feet are sticking out towards the door and the angel will come along and pull him out towards Heaven. We need to move his bed so his feet don’t point out like this.’ All three beds in the room were rearranged so my feet were pointing inwards and my head was near the window so I could breathe fresh air.

I do remember my Baba (my grandmother Milka from Vilna in Lithuania) singing to me before sleep when I was nervous. Sadly, she died before I was two and my mother took the death very badly, as all of us did. Milka was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.

I used to wake up in winter to see ice had formed on the window panes and in summer I heard the fights coming from the pub on the corner, the Oxford Arms. My favourite was hearing ‘I’m a better man than you are, Paddy.’ Bang! ‘Oh no, you’re not.’ Bang! It was there my Mum would send me as a boy with an empty bottle and some money to get a full bottle of Guinness. A man would lift me up in the air, and I would pass the money and the empty bottle to the barmaid, and in return be given a new bottle and then run home.

When I used to visit my grandmother’s best friend Byla at 15 Milward St at the behest of my Mum, it felt even colder in there, though I loved to go and listen to her stories about Poland. How she washed clothes in the river for her grandparents and herself. There were many poor peasants in the village.

We used to sit in the scullery, the same type of scullery we all had. When Byla had finished talking she would slowly open a drawer and give me a Cadbury’s bar of Dairy Milk chocolate. I still remember the sound of her Big Ben clock with its black face and yellow numbers and hands, loudly ticking on the mantelpiece.

Byla was so thin but so clever. She lived alone and walked with a stick. She spoke with a wobbly voice and both her eyes were bloodshot. Her house was the last house in Milward St to be demolished. The social worker came from the Jewish Hospital in Stepney Green to make her sign the papers so she ended up in care. She was put in a North London care home where I pleaded with the manager to return her to Whitechapel. Byla was not pleased with me and made me say ‘sorry’ to the manager, which I did, though I only saw her one more time because after six weeks she had died.

Mum and Dad, Howard, Paul and myself on holiday. I am the baby.

With Mrs Gerson at Alice Model Nursery, Stepney Green 1956. I am holding the flowers which I presented to the Queen Mother.

My elder brother Howard took this of me when he grew obsessed with photography and developing pictures at home

My Auntie Rae on the left and my Mum on the right

My dear Baba – May she rest in peace – Milka Cohen, one of the cleverest and kindest women I ever met. She was a social worker for women of the street who came to see her with their problems.

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Andy Stroman, Poet of Stepney

From Andy Stroman’s Album

Andy Stroman Remembers His Uncle Barney

With more than seventy of her portraits in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, we are proud to count Lucinda as a Spitalfields Life Contributing Photographer.

Self portrait by Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, 1987

Stephen Calloway, Art Historian 1989

Dame Wendy Hiller, Actor 1988

Edward Greenfield, Music Critic 2004

Emma Witter, Artist 2025

Delwar Hussein, Anthropologist 2013

Sandra Esqulant, Landlady of The Golden Heart 2000

Des De Silva, Joiner 2021

Howard Morgan, Artist 1987

Eileen Agar, Painter & Photographer 1987

Sir Ben Okri, Novelist, & Sir Derek Walcott, Poet 2004

Dame Sian Phillips, Actor 2013

Sir Solly Zuckerman, Scientist 1990

Imtiaz Dharker, Poet 2015

Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, Boxer 1988

Marianna Kennedy, Artist 2011

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Philosopher 1988

Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies

Click here to order a copy of PORTRAITS

I am proud to publish these excerpts from CHERRY’S CACHE by Cherry Gilchrist, a graduate of my writing course. Cherry set out to research and bring alive the lives of her forebears and her account of Ned Despard is a fascinating example of this. Ned was a man who through his sense of decency found himself fatally at odds with the spirit of his age.

Follow CHERRY’S CACHE

I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 6th & 7th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.

Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

Ned Despard by George Romney

I wanted to learn all that I could about my cousin Colonel Edward Marcus Despard (1751-1803), an Irishman of Huguenot descent whom I shall call ‘Ned’. My role here is to draw your attention to his story and celebrate my discovery of him as a relative. I will begin with the end.

On Monday February 21st, 1803, Ned was executed. A crowd of some twenty thousand people gathered to watch him go to his death on a scaffold erected on what is now the South Bank, condemned as a conspirator against King and Country. He asked permission to make a final speech and spoke passionately on the subject of justice and equality. He was then executed, by hanging and decapitation, on a charge of treason.

The evidence against him was flimsy at best and false at worst. He received small mercy in that his sentence of being ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ – the last man in legal history to receive this sentence – was repealed at short notice to remove the barbaric ‘drawing and quartering’. Even though he had loyal friends, such as his old comrade-in-arms Horatio Nelson, they could not commute his sentence further.

Ned was condemned as a dangerous revolutionary, the charge against him being that he was planning to kill the King and overthrow the government. Yet this was a man who had been loyal to the British Crown through thick and thin, though since returning to London, he had kept company with radicals and was certainly interested in ideals of equality and reform. And in those days, that proved enough to hang him.

He was singled out for infamy at a time when Britain was gripped with paranoia about a possible revolution. The government feared that the French Revolution of 1789 might be replicated on British soil. Youthful idealism for revolution, embraced by the Romantic poets Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth, was no longer acceptable.

Ned had served the British Government faithfully, fighting bravely as a comrade alongside Nelson in campaigns in the Caribbean and Central America, where they managed to recapture Fort Immaculada from the Spanish. Both men suffered disease and hardship in the process.

Afterwards, Ned proved himself as a responsible and conscientious governor in Honduras, and only came back to England when he was completely out of funds, trying to reclaim the expenses owed to him, which he had subsidised out of his own pocket, including providing hurricane relief to the population.

He married Catherine Gordon, a black woman from Jamaica, a bold act at the time, especially when he returned to London with her. Mixed marriages, as opposed to concubinage, were certainly not the norm at the turn of the nineteenth century. One of the reports against him sneered that when Ned was seized from home to be taken to court, he had been ‘found in bed with a black woman’ without mention that she was his lawful wife. Even some of the Despard family and their descendants spoke of her being a housekeeper rather than acknowledging her true position.

In fact, Catherine was an educated woman, her mother had been a ‘free woman’, so neither she nor her daughter was a slave. And Catherine was capable of mixing in upper circles of society. She petitioned for her husband tirelessly during the years he was kept in prison pending his final trial. One of her letters survives, a plea that he should be kept in better conditions.

During his time as First Commissioner & Governor in what is now Honduras, Ned insisted on fairness for all the peoples of his colony, irrespective of their status or colour. He had some awkward folk to deal with – Baymen guarding their plantations and Shoremen with semi-legal trade. There were Maroons, who were runaway slaves, plus Irish convicts and people of assorted ethnicities, including indigenous peoples, all with their different desires and objectives.

Ned’s insistence that there should be equality between people of different colour and race did not go down well with everyone in the colonies. Ironically, when challenged about this, he said that as British law did not discriminate between races, neither would he in its territories.

So were these his Huguenot values coming to the fore, carried through the generations? And did these values later inform Ned’s gallows speech with which I leave you?

‘Fellow Citizens, I come here as you see, after having served my country, faithfully, honourably, and usefully served it, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest l am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me. But, though His Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do, that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to Liberty, and to Justice. Because I have been a friend to the poor, and the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding, my fate, and the fate of those, who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principle of Freedom, of Humanity, and of Justice, will finally triumph over Falsehood, Tyranny, and Delusion, and every principle hostile to the interests of the human race.’

A mahogany plantation in Honduras

Published account of the trial of Ned Despard

Account from the Aberdeen Press & Journal of Catherine Despard being refused admission to visit her husband

Ned Despard at the gallows

The execution of Ned Despard