Betty Levy Of Petticoat Lane
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Betty
If you walked through the Petticoat Lane Market in the nineteen-twenties, you would frequently have seen Betty Levy with all her sisters playing hopscotch or skipping games in the street. You could easily have distinguished Betty because she was the baby with the mop of curls, and everyone knew Betty’s mother Hannah – famous as the best fish fryer in the Lane.
But maybe you do not remember, because maybe it is just too long ago for you? Yet that was certainly not the case for Betty herself. At ninety-two years of age, she remembered her childhood for me as if it were yesterday and given any opportunity she delighted to break into the same songs she sang then, accompanied by the ingenious lyrics she composed herself.
Betty left Petticoat Lane in 1954 but occasionally when speaking of the Lane, she said “And I’m still here,” and you realised it was a statement which transcended immediate reality, because while Petticoat Lane has changed almost beyond recognition, Betty still carried a world and a society and an ethos that incarnated the Petticoat Lane she knew, the place she always counted as home.
“I was born here, in Rosetta Place off Frying Pan Alley and my mother Hannah before me. My grandparents, Mark and Phoebe Harris, lived in Rosetta Place too and if we went in their flat, they always gave us something to eat.
My family have been here for generations, I always understood they were of Dutch descent. My father, Isaac, worked in Smithfield Market, he sold sweets to the porters and we never starved, so he must have made a living. They called him ‘Kosher’ and he sold the sweets from a basket round his neck. He got them from a small warehouse in Commercial St run by Mr Sam. If we were well behaved, he gave us one.
When I left school at fourteen, I went to work making dresses in Middlesex St, we were taught how to do it at school and I moved from one factory to another to better myself. I made all my family’s clothes, my children and grandchildren, and their bride’s dresses. If you spend your life doing something, you get a talent for it – I got to be as good as anyone at it. And I miss it now, I wouldn’t mind doing it again, part-time.
I was only seven years married when my husband Danny died aged thirty-nine, I think he had a heart attack. I met him at a dance at the Hammersmith Palais. We met dancing, we were both good dancers, not fabulous but pretty good. We were married at the Beaumont St Synagogue and we lived with my family at first. Then we found a house in Milward St, Whitechapel, round the back of the London Hospital. Although I was one of a large family, I only had two children – a boy and a girl, Irene and Stephen. After Danny died, my family offered to support me, but I wanted to be independent. If you’ve got to do it, you do it. I worked making dresses and I kept us, because I didn’t want anyone else to bring up my children.
I love the East End, there’s something in the East End that’s nowhere else. It is my home.”
Four of Betty’s sisters in Rosetta Place c. 1925
“We played among the doorsteps, for hours and hours
We never had gardens, so we couldn’t grow flowers.
Some kids they never had shoes, ’cause their dads were on the booze
But, we all lived together the Christians, the Jews
And the Jewish Free School was in dear old Frying Pan Alley.
Now there is not any doorsteps, they’ve knocked them all down,
They built a tower block where we played around.
The kids don’t play now like we used to,
On everybody’s doorsteps, in the East End of town.”
Betty’s new lyrics to the melody of ‘On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep’
The Levy Sisters. Sally, Phoebe, Lily, Carrie, Jennie, Becky and Betty (in front).
The Mitchell Family, neighbours in Rosetta Place. Betty Mitchell standing with Betty Clasper and little RayRay in front and Anita Mitchell, Barnie Mitchell, Siddy Segal and little Jo in line along the wall.
Some of the Levy grandchildren on the steps of St. Botolph’s Church Bishopsgate c. 1945. Alan, Diana, Bobby, Roy, Richard, Sallyann and little David.
Betty’s grandparents, Mark & Phoebe Harris, Spitalfields, c. 1920
Betty’s mother, Hannah Levy, daughter of Mark & Phoebe Harris, and famous as the best fish fryer in Petticoat Lane.
Betty’s father, Isaac in his ARP uniform.
Hannah Levy and friends in Frying Pan Alley around 1940.
Betty as a Land Army Girl in WWII, based at Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire.
Three Bettys (Levy, Cohen and Hyams) and three American airman at Westcliff-on-Sea c. 1945
At the centre (in a headscarf) is Betty with family and friends at the Coronation 0f Queen Elizabeth II. They slept out in Piccadilly to be sure of getting a prime position.
Betty sings at her ninetieth birthday party at Beaumont St Synagogue
Betty dances with her daughter Irene at the party.
You may also like to read these other stories of Petticoat Lane
The Wax Sellers of Wentworth St
Pamela Freedmam, The Princess Alice
The Dioramas of Petticoat Lane
Thomas Rowlandson’s Cries Of London
Only two more Whitechapel tours remaining on Sunday 20th September and Sunday 18th October. Tours include tea and freshly baked apple strudel at the Whitechapel Gallery. Click here to book
I was passing Abbott & Holder, picture dealers in Museum St, on Thursday when I spied this splendid set of Thomas Rowlandson’s Cries of London from 1799 for sale in the window and – as I stood gazing – Tom Edwards, the proprietor, came out to say ‘hello’. For more than fifteen years I have been publishing sets of Cries of London in these pages but I had never seen this one before, so Tom agreed to let me show them to you here. With Rowlandson there is always more going on than first meets the eye and careful study of the background often reveals a wry commentary.
‘Buy a Trap, a Rat Trap, Buy My Trap’
‘Hot Cross Bunns, Two A Penny Bunns’
‘Do you want any Brick Dust?’
Brick dust was used for polishing pewter
‘All a growing, a growing, here’s Flowers for you’
‘Last dying speech and Confession’
‘Water Cress, come by my Water Cress’
The female water cress sellers from Shoreditch were celebrated fir their independence of spirit.
‘Old Cloaths any old Cloaths’
Old clothes men wearing multiple hats were first drawn my Marcellus Laroon in 1687 and persisted within living memory in London.
‘Buy my Goose, my fat Goose’
Images reproduced courtesy of Abbott & Holder
A Long Way From Spitalfields
Twenty-five years ago this morning, I woke in an apartment in New York City. It was around eight-thirty when my friend called from outside the bank in Midtown, where he had gone to deposit cheques. He had left early to be there at opening time and, as he was standing in line waiting for a teller, he saw on the television that there was a fire in one of the towers at the World Trade Centre.
I got out of bed and climbed up onto the flat roof of the apartment. It was a beautiful day, clear and bright with a blue sky after days of rain and cloud, and the humidity which overwhelms Manhattan in July and August had cleared. Although most people try to avoid New York in the summer, and residents who have the option seek refuge in beach houses, it is my favourite time of year in the City. The one time when the pace slows, languor prevails, and there is peace in the shadowy air-conditioned buildings where people linger to avoid the baking temperature and blinding light outside in the streets.
Summer was drawing to an end and there would be no more of the trips to Long Island that had punctuated my time in the City. Just a week earlier, on Labor Day, which marks the change in the season, the beaches had closed for the year.
I stood on this same roof on July 4th and watched the fleet line up in the East River, admiring the firework display as I ate dinner with friends. Looking across Manhattan that morning, I could see the distant plume of smoke from the westerly of the towers. It did not mean anything to me then, but I was puzzled how it could have happened, so I went downstairs and switched on the television. The television was reporting a plane had crashed into the tower. It was an extraordinary event for which the news anchor had no explanation, and so I went back to bed and dozed again.
I was awoken by the return of my friend who had cycled back from his errand at the bank. People were getting really excited about this fire, he told me, and he switched on the television again. For the first time, I sensed the panic and helplessness which was to envelop the city that day, as the presenters struggled to find words and keep their cool in the face of inexplicable and unprecedented events.
Then came the strangest moment of television I ever saw. Upon the screen, a plane jetted out of nowhere and disappeared into one the towers. “That’s a re-run, you’re seeing here, of the plane hitting the tower that we reported earlier,” commented the news-anchor, only to swallow her words – almost choking – as she exclaimed, “Oh no! That’s not a re-run, that’s another plane.”
Exactly a week earlier, at eight-thirty in the morning, I visited the World Trade Centre accompanying my friend who was applying to an office there for a street traders’ licence. We came through the subway which opened up into a shopping mall and emerged onto the plaza directly beneath the towers. I recalled the first time I came to New York and stood at the top. Stretching my arms between those external struts and gazing down upon Manhattan from such a height, it was as if looking from the window of an aeroplane. My birthday was in a few days and we vowed to return to the top for a celebration, but we did not go back.
Once the second plane hit the towers, the tenor of events changed. Very quickly, reports came in of hijackings and other planes unaccounted for. I went back up onto the roof of the apartment and looked again to confirm the reality of the television news with my own eyes. Now there were two plumes of smoke in the sky, and sirens erupted through the streets as fire crews and police hurtled down the avenues of Manhattan. I returned to the television and stayed there, compelled. I had a pocket email machine and I was able to write messages to everyone in London to let them know I was alright, before the lines went dead.
A campaign was underway, something I could only comprehend through reference to science fiction such as The War of the Worlds. An attack had commenced that morning without indication how long it would last. As I sat there in shock at the accumulating reports of the plane hitting the Pentagon and the crash of United 93, a dread grew inside me. There was no reason to assume that this would not continue all day and it was impossible to know where and when it would end. It felt like the end of the world – there was no way to grasp the nature of what was happening. When I returned to the roof and looked again, the World Trade Centre had gone completely, replaced by a vast black tower of smoke billowing into the blue.
Twenty-one months earlier, I had been in Los Angeles at the time of the Millennium. Somehow, everybody expected a transformation and a new era to begin then. Nobody wanted to admit it was a non-event. But that morning, I realised that I was witnessing the actual moment when one century ended and a different world was born.
For a couple of years, I had been working with producers in Times Sq who were to present a play of mine on Broadway, opening on September 15th 2001. I loved being in New York in those days, it was a true metropolis of glamour and affluence – a world incarnated in the now over-familiar fiction of Sex & the City. Many times I enjoyed Cosmopolitans at the Bowery Bar, the location where Candice Bushnell’s novel, which was the origin of that series, began.
Walking out onto the street on that September day, several miles from the unfolding catastrophe at the World Trade Centre, the scene was not dissimilar from usual, except – as people went about their business – I knew what everyone was thinking. We were all looking at each other in fear and knowing that we could only enact the semblance of routine. I went to the grocery story and bought food for the next few days. On my way back to the apartment, I saw a postcard of the World Trade Centre on a rack and, without thinking, I took the entire stack in hand, went into the store and paid for them.
Back at the apartment, I addressed postcards to everybody in my address book in England and then I went to the Post Office and mailed them all. I still do not understand why I did this, because I never wrote any messages on the cards, yet I knew everyone would realise who sent them and why. In fact, half arrived within ten days and half arrived four months later, intercepted perhaps as suspicious material in the collective paranoia that ensued.
On the first day J.F.Kennedy Airport reopened, I flew back to London, peering from the window of the jet at the smoke still rising from the foot of Manhattan. At once, I went to see my parents in Devon and found them well, but within a week my father died unexpectedly. My mother had dementia and could no longer live alone, so I chose to move back into the family house to care for her. My play never opened on Broadway and I did not have the American career that I so longed for at that time, but after the events I had witnessed it no longer mattered to me.
John Allin, Artist
Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book
Gun St, Spitalfields
John Allin (1934-1991) took to painting while serving a six month prison sentence for receiving some stolen shirts and achieved considerable success in the sixties and seventies with his vivid intricate pictures recalling the East End of his childhood. There is a dreamlike quality to these visions in sharp focus of an emotionalised cityscape, created at a time when the Jewish people were leaving to seek better housing in the suburbs and their culture was fading from those streets which had once been its home.
Returning from National Service in the Merchant Navy, Allin worked in the parks department planting trees, later as a swimming pool attendant and then as a long distance lorry driver – all before his conviction and imprisonment. After discovering his artistic talent, he devoted himself to painting and won attention with his first exhibition in 1969 at the Portal Gallery, specialising in primitive and outsider art. In 1974, he collaborated with Arnold Wesker on a book of reminiscence, “Say Goodbye: You may never see them again” in which he reveals an equivocation about the East End. “I saw it as a place where people lived, earned their living, grew up, moved on … they had dignity … I like painting the past with dignity…” he said in an interview with Wesker, “but what they’ve done to the East End is diabolical! They’ve scuppered it, built and built and torn down and torn out and took lots of identity away and made it into just a concrete nothing… But people go on, don’t they? Eating their eels and giving their custom where they’ve always given their custom … Funny how people can go on and take anything and everything.”
Like Joe Orton in the theatre, Allin’s reputation as an ex-con fuelled his reputation in newspapers and on television but he found there was a price to pay, as he revealed to Wesker, “You know how I started painting don’t you? In prison! Well, when I come out the kids at school give my kid a rough time … the silly bloody journalists didn’t help. ‘Jail-bird becomes painter!’ You’d’ve thought I’d done God knows what … I mean the neighbours used to say things like ‘Look at ‘im! Jail-bird and he’s on telly! Ought to be sent back inside the nick!’ I was the oddity in the district, the lazy fat bastard that paints. Give me a half a chance and I’d move mate.” In fact, Allin joined Gerry Cottle’s Circus, touring as a handyman to create another book, “John Allin’s Circus Life” in 1982.
Although he was the first British recipient of the international Prix Suisse de Peinture Naive award in 1979, the categorisation of Outsider or Primitive artist is no longer adequate to apply to John Allin. More than twenty years after his death, his charismatic paintings deserve to be recognised as sophisticated works which communicate an entire social world through an unapologetically personal and emotionally charged visual vocabulary.
Spitalfields Market, Brushfield St.
Great Synagogue, Brick Lane.
Jewish Soup Kitchen, Brune St.
Christ Church School, Brick Lane.
Heneage St and Brick Lane.
Rothschild Dwellings, Spitalfields.
Whitechapel Rd.
Christ Church Park, Commmercial St.
Wentworth St.
Fashion St with gramophone man in the foreground..
Churchill Walk.
Young Communist League rally, corner of Brick Lane and Old Montague St.
Hessel St.
Snow Scene.
Anti-Fascist Rally at Gardiners’ Corner, 1936.
Cole’s Chicken Shop, Cobb St.
Factory Workers
Paintings copyright © Estate of John Allin
At The Shops With Tony Hall
Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book
In the sixties and seventies when these pictures were taken, every street corner in the East End that was not occupied by a pub was home to a shop offering groceries and general supplies to the residents of the immediate vicinity. The owners of these small shops took on mythic status as all-seeing custodians of local information, offering a counterpoint to the pub as a community meeting place for the exchange of everybody’s business. Shopkeepers were party to the smallest vacillations in the domestic economy of their customers and it was essential for children to curry their good favour if the regular chore of going to fetch a packet of butter or a tin of custard, or any other domestic essential, might be ameliorated by the possibility of reward in the form of sweets, whether there was any change left over or not.
Yet, even in the time these photographs were taken, the small shops were in decline and Tony Hall knew he was capturing the end of a culture, erased by the rise of the chain-stores and the supermarkets. To the aficionado of small shops there are some prize examples here – of businesses that survived beyond their time, receptacles of a certain modest history of shopkeepers. It was a noble history of those who created lives for themselves by working long hours serving the needs of their customers. It was a familiar history of shopkeepers who made a living but not a fortune. Above all, it was a proud history of those who delighted in shopkeeping.
Photographs copyright © Estate of Libby Hall
Images courtesy of the Tony Hall Collection at the Bishopsgate Institute
The East End In The Afternoon
Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields this Saturday 12th September. Click here to book
There is little traffic on the road, children are at play, housewives linger in doorways, old men doze outside the library and, in the distance, a rag and bone man’s cart clatters down the street. This is the East End in the afternoon, as photographed by newspaper artist Tony Hall in the nineteen sixties while wandering with his camera in the quiet hours between shifts on The Evening News in Fleet St.
“Tony cared very much about the sense of community here.” Libby Hall, Tony’s wife, recalled, “He loved the warmth of the East End. And when he photographed buildings it was always for the human element, not just the aesthetic.”
Contemplating Tony’s clear-eyed photos – half a century after they were taken – raises questions about the changes enacted upon the East End in the intervening years. Most obviously, the loss of the pubs and corner shops which Tony portrayed with such affection in pictures that remind us of the importance of these meeting places, drawing people into a close relationship with their immediate environment.
“He photographed the pubs and little shops that he knew were on the edge of disappearing,” Libby Hall confirmed for me, ‘He loved the history of the East End, the Victorian overlap, and the sense that it was the last of Dickens’ London.”
In 1972, Tony Hall left The Evening News and with his new job came a new shift pattern which did not grant him afternoons off – thus drawing his East End photographic odyssey to a close. Yet for one who did not consider himself a photographer, Tony Hall’s opus comprises a tender vision of breathtaking clarity, constructed with purpose and insight as a social record. Speaking of her late husband, Libby Hall emphasises the prescience that lay behind Tony’s wanderings with his camera in the afternoon. “He knew what he was photographing and he recognised the significance of it.” she admitted.
These beautiful streetscapes are a selection of pictures from the legacy of approximately one thousand photographs by Tony Hall held in the archive at the Bishopsgate Institute.
Three Colts Lane
Gunthorpe St
Ridley Rd Market
Stepney Green
Photographs copyright © Libby Hall
Images Courtesy of the Tony Hall Archive at the Bishopsgate Institute
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David Mason, Wilton’s Music Hall
Tickets available for The Gentle Author’s Tour of Spitalfields next Saturday 12th September. Click here to book
When I arrived to meet David Mason in the bar at Wilton’s Music Hall, the only person sitting there was a man who looked so at home I imagined he must be the caretaker, not David. In fact, this was David, who grew up in the flat above Wilton’s when his father was caretaker in the nineteen fifties and – more than half a century after he moved out – he still feels comfortable in the old place.
Although it was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David’s family moved into four rooms up above in 1951, the building was not a music hall then but a Methodist chapel. “My father knew it had been a music hall,” David explained to me, “The story we were told was that Wilton’s was thought to be a place of debauchery, and one day three Methodists walking past were so shocked they bought tickets and kneeled down in front of the stage and prayed that it would one day be a place of worship – and, lo and behold, eighty years later the Methodists got it!”
Even in this incarnation, the old music hall was a place of wonder for a small child, granted free run of the building. “When I was eight, my father had to spend ten nights away in hospital. He said, ‘You’re the man of the house.’ and I had to go round with a torch in the dark checking all the locks at night. It was scary, I thought every single noise was someone creeping up on me,” David recalled affectionately, as we walked through the atmospheric empty theatre yesterday.
In 1951 when David was three, his younger brother and sister, John and Jean, were born unexpectedly as twins and the family could no longer live in two rooms in the Peabody Buildings in John Fisher St. His father, Harry, was offered number three Grace’s Alley by Mr Willis the minister in return for care-taking duties, stoking and lighting the boiler, laying out tables and chairs for prayer meeting and some occasional do it yourself, which included knocking up the little wooden cross for the altar. “My parents were married here in the Old Mahogany Bar,” David told me, gesturing around the empty bar where we sat, “He worked for the Port of London Authority as a docker in St Katherine’s Dock and his nan’s family were sugar bakers, they came from Ship Alley in Wellclose Sq – and my mother’s family came from Backchurch Lane.”
David went to St Paul’s opposite the music hall, a Church of England school presided over by Father Joe Williamson known as ‘Holy Joe.’ “He could walk into a fight in Cable St and kneel down and pray and they would stop brawling,” David assured me. The difference between the Methodism at the chapel and the Church of England practices at school was a source of bewilderment to David at an early age. “I was deeply confused, they covered their cross sometimes but we never did, and ours didn’t have a Jesus on it while theirs did. I asked one of the Methodist sisters why our cross did not have Jesus and she said, ‘We believe Jesus rose from the cross,’ but I think the real reason was that my dad made the cross and he couldn’t carve.”
In those days, the London Docks were still active and Wapping was scattered with bombsites where, as a child, David was free to wander. He remembers ships chandlers and mapmakers in the surrounding streets that were inhabited by a closely-knit community including significant numbers of Greek, Maltese and Turkish people. Before the slum clearance programme, Wellclose Sq and Swedenborg Sq stood lined with shambolic old houses and connected by a warren of alleys, in which was Roy’s sweet shop that David remembers as the last place he spent a farthing.
“My dad said that before the war they used to have a book appreciation club and I remember going with him to a Jewish-owned record shop in Aldgate where he reminisced about the record appreciation society. They had a Boys’ Brigade, Scouts, Magic Lantern Shows and there were Methodist Union meetings where ministers from other religions came to explain their beliefs. When we moved in, there was a still a youth club and there were always old ladies sitting knitting and chatting, but during the fifties they had fewer and fewer prayer meetings and my dad had to open up less and less, until it died.”
“In 1959, we were given fourteen days notice to leave by the Methodists and nobody was willing to help.” David confessed to me,”My dad wasn’t a bible-bashing type, he wasn’t overtly religious even, but he went to church all his life and he carried the soldier’s prayer in the pocket of his battledress jacket. So I think it hurt him after all this time to feel we were being thrown out. The upshoot was we ended up in three rooms belonging to the Port of London Authority near the Woolwich Ferry and that was the end of our contact with this place.”
At fourteen years old, David came back to get his eyes tested at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel and took a stroll alone down to Wapping to see what was going on at his former home, now owned by the GLC. “I rang the bell that said ‘Ring for caretaker’ but no-one answered so I turned to walk away and a gruff voice called, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ I explained that I used to live there and I knew how many steps there were up to the flat, and he let me in, saying, ‘You really did live here, didn’t you?'” Since David left, the building had become a warehouse for rags, guarded by fierce dogs that were described to him by a friend as “all-stations.”
Returning in recent years to witness the re-opening of Wilton’s Music Hall and visit the space he once knew intimately has been an equivocal experience for David, as he confided to me, “The first time I came back there was a lot of strings being pulled in my heart. I never thought I’d stand in the Old Mahogany Bar in the Methodist chapel and have a glass of wine to drink!” These days, David teaches Painting and Decorating at Barking and Dagenham College and now hopes to bring his students along to Wilton’s to repaint the old place one day.
“I have only got happy memories here, we laughed all the time – but when I lived here there didn’t seem to be as much love for the place as there is now, even though it is in such a state” he concluded, “When I come back now it isn’t like the place I grew up in, it’s a foreign country. It wasn’t the best of places then, yet it did have something – you could call it soul.”
Wilton’s Music Hall was known as the Old Mahogany Bar when David grew up here in the fifties.
Davis’s parents, Anne & Harry Mason, were married in the Old Mahogany Bar at Wilton’s.
St Paul’s School Wellclose Sq where David went to school.
St Paul’s School viewed from the living room window at Wilton’s.
The infants class at St Paul’s photographed on the lawn outside Wilton’s – Miss Webb and Father Joe Williamson (known as Holy Joe) officiate. David sits in the front row directly to the right of the sign.
David’s mother and younger brother John on the roof of Wilton’s where they grew tomatoes and flowers.
David with his mother and the twins in the living room at Wilton’s.
David with his nan and the twins. “Her name was Elizer Wiegle and she was of German extraction, and used to attend the Lutheran Church in Alie St.”
David sits on the big staircase at Wilton’s.
Methodist activities at Wilton’s in the fifties.
David recalls reading the theatre’s foundation stone by torchlight with his father as a child.
John Claridge’s portrait of the caretaker at Wilton’s, 1964, after the theatre became a rag store.
Caretaker portrait copyright © Estate of John Claridge
