Barnett Freedman’s Street Scene
Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Click this image to enlarge)
When I first saw Street Scene by Barnett Freedman (Reproduced courtesy of the Tate Gallery), I thought I half-recognised the location as either Whitechapel or Bethnal Green and I delighted in the painting as an evocation of the streetlife of the Jewish East End in the early twentieth century.
Surely that is The George in Bethnal Green Road in the background? In particular, the two ostentatiously dressed woman in their contrasting outfits recalled for me the custom of people to promenade along Aldgate to Whitechapel at weekends in their finery, window shopping and greeting friends, enjoying their social life in public. Indeed, Pearl Binder included a similar pair of young women togged up to the nines in one of her lithographs of Aldgate in the twenties. I also wondered if the shabby old street musician with his violin was a Russian immigrant who had arrived like Barnett Freedman’s parents at the end of the nineteenth century.
Barnett Freedman was born in Lower Chapman St, Stepney Green in 1901. A sickly child who endured extended hospital stays, he was confined to bed between the ages of nine and thirteen, yet managed to educate himself, learning to read, write, play music and draw and paint while sequestered in a hospital ward.
By the age of sixteen, Barnett was earning his living as a draughtsman to a monumental mason for a few shillings a week, while for the next five years he spent his evenings undertaking classes at St Martin’s School of Art. Before long, he moved to an architect’s office, creating attractive drawings from his employer’s rough sketches and, taking the opportunity offered by a surge in demand for the war memorials to hone his skill as a letteringh artist.
With remarkable tenacity and self-belief, Barnett applied over three successive years for a London County Council Scholarship that would enable him to study at the Royal College of Art under the direction of Sir William Rothenstein. Experiencing rejection on each occasion, Barnett summoned the courage to present his portfolio in person to Rothenstein who recognised his talent and applied to the London County Council Chief Inspector himself on behalf of the young artist. As a consequence, a stipend of £120 a year was granted, enabling Barnett to begin his studies full time in 1922.
At the Royal College of Art, Barnett’s talent flourished among fellow students including Edward Bawden, Raymond Coxon, Henry Moore, Vivian Pitchforth and John Tunnard. Yet even after graduating in 1925, he continued to struggle to support himself and in 1929, ill-health prevented him working for a year. This situation as resolved when William Rothenstein took Barnett onto the staff of the Royal College in 1930. In the same year, he married fellow illustrator, Claudia Guercio, and, during the thirties, enjoyed an increasingly successful career as an illustrator and commercial artist.
Barnett’s lithographs for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, published in 1931, were one of many highlights during his long association with Faber and Faber, for whom he also illustrated works by the Brontës, Walter de la Mare, Charles Dickens, Edith Sitwell, William Shakespeare and Leo Tolstoy. As a commercial artist, he undertook prestigious commissions for Ealing Films, the General Post Office, Curwen Press, Shell-Mex, British Petroleum, Josiah Wedgwood and London Transport, earning popular success.
Appointed as an official War Artist, along with Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, Barnett accompanied the expeditionary force in the spring of 1940 before the retreat at Dunkirk, and was awarded a CBE for this work in 1946. Yet Barnett always retained his East End accent and once, when he hailed a taxi to the Athenaeum Club, the incredulous cabbie famously retorted, “What, you?”
Street Scene was painted between 1933 and 1939, and subsequently he reworked the image as a lithograph for Lyons Corner House. Barnett’s son Vince, who was born in 1934, recalled his father working on the picture in the first floor studio of the family home in a back street of Gloucester Rd, West London. Vince revealed to me that the building on the right of the painting was based their house, 11 Canning Place. “The fiddler was to be found at the Gloucester Road end of Canning Place just about every day, and was a figure of some threat to me at the age of four!” he recalled, “The small person on the right, with his nanny Miss Wiggle, is a reference to me!”
No wonder that I was unable to place the location of this painting precisely in the East End because it is not a literal scene at all but a composite of Bethnal Green and Gloucester Road. I often wonder if the East End itself is actually a place or a culture, and this painting proposes an answer to my quandary. Barnett Freedman employed diverse topographic elements create a portrait of a society he knew intimately, constructing an entirely subjective portrayal of his environment and personal heritage. Look in the left top corner of the painting and you will see the artist raising his hat to you, ambling happily along the pavement and eternally at home in his own East End universe. Vincent Freedman summed up his father’s achievement in these words, “A huge optimism and compassion shows itself to me in all his work and life. Humanity was his central driving force.”
The Old George in Bethnal Green
Barnett Freedman’s house at 11 Canning Place, Gloucester Rd
Barnett Freedman in Hyde Park
In Chinese Limehouse
Tong Yin Shung Gun laundry by Stafford Northcote, 1946
Almost nothing remains of London’s first Chinatown in Pennyfields, Limehouse, and even documentary evidence is scarce for this once-thriving community which makes this exhibition The Original Chinatown in Limehouse, Myths & Realities at St Anne’s Limehouse, Three Colt St, E14 8HH, especially important. It opens this Friday March 20th and runs each Thursday to Saturday 10-4pm until July, admission free.
This map from 1745 shows the locations of Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields that became the epicentre of the original Chinatown in London
Portrait of Tan Che Qua, artist, the second-recorded Chinese person to visit England, 1769 -1772. His artwork was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1770
Early twentieth century painting of Limehouse Causeway by an unknown artist
Tsang Sing, born in Hong Kong in 1878, originally a sailor, he became a pastry chef in Chinatown where he met and married his English wife Lilian
Montage of Alison Gill’s Anglo-Chinese family with great-grandfather Tsang Sing’s photo on the left and various relatives – mother, and siblings.
Corner of Pennyfields and West India Dock Road with the H.Doe.Foon. restaurant
A local vicar with two Chinese gentlemen at Turners Buildings, a turning off Pennyfields now covered over by Pennyfields Park
Registration document for Ah Tin, merchant seaman from Canton who came to London in 1904 and settled at 46 Pennyfields in 1924
Ah Tin’s daughter Doris Tin pictured at the Dingle Street school in Poplar. Doris is the girl with dark hair in the second row, second from the left.
Film star Anna May Wong visits Chinatown in 1928
Anna May Wong visits in 1928
One of the many Chinese grocers, this is the Quong Yuen Sing shop at 53 Pennyfields
The Chow Family – Connie and Leslie were both from Chinese/English parents – with daughter Christina. They lived at 48 Pennyfields which was destroyed in one of the first air raids of the Blitz.
Live chicken sold from a barrow outside the Chinese restaurant at 60 Pennyfields
One of the many restaurants in Chinese Limehouse- this is the” East West” in West India Dock Rd – popularly known as the “Up the Steps”
Anglo-Chinese boys play on the street
Anglo-Chinese girls play on the street
The Peking restaurant in West India Dock Road was famed for its fish tanks from which diners could select their supper
A Puka Pu betting slip, a form of bingo popular in Chinese Limehouse
John Olney, Donovan Brothers
Philip Marriage’s photograph of Donovan’s Bags, Crispin St, in 1985
John Olney told me it all began with two brothers, Jeremiah & Dennis O’Donovan, who came to Liverpool from Dublin in the eighteen thirties at the time of the potato famine in Ireland. Dennis took a passage from Liverpool across the Atlantic to seek his fortune with the Hudson Bay Trading Company, while Jeremiah came to the East End and settled in Fireball Court, Aldgate.
It sounds like an adventure story of long ago, yet John imbues it with a vivid present tense quality because Jeremiah was his great-great-grandfather and, to a degree, the nature of John’s own life has been the outcome of these events. The brothers’ tale explains both how he came to be here and why Donovan Brothers continues today in the way it does as a family business.
I was touched by John’s story because it was the first I have heard of the Irish in Spitalfields recounted to me by a descendant. Of the different waves of immigration that have passed through, the Irish are the least acknowledged and the people who have left the least evidence visible today. Yet anyone who walks through Spitalfields knows the building in Crispin St with the fine old signwriting that says “Donovan Brothers – The noted house for paper bags,” this was where the business began that still runs today at the New Spitalfields Market in Leyton.
John and I sat talking in the office of the Market Tenants’ Association in the grey light of early morning, watching as the wholesale fruit & vegetable market wound up for the night and the car park emptied out. There is an innate modesty to this gracious man with a strong physical presence and a discreet, withheld quality that colours the plain telling of his stories. You can tell from his glinting eyes that John’s family possesses an intensity of meaning for him, yet he adopts a quiet unemotional tone while speaking of it which serves to communicate a greater depth of feeling than any overt emotion.
“So you’ve come to hear about the fields…” he said, thinking out loud. By “the fields” John meant Spitalfields, using a term of reference I had not heard before. In its archaic colloquial tone, it spoke eloquently of his relationship to the place where his family dwelled continuously from the eighteen thirties and where he began his lifelong involvement with markets.
“My mother was a Donovan” declared John, outlining his precise connection to the line of descent, “She was one of eight, five boys and three daughters. We were a very close knit family, and it was so exciting for a boy of seven or eight, when I first entered the Spitalfields shop and sat on the counter. My uncle would sit outside with the chicken seller at the corner of Leyden St and reminisce about old times. It was history that was being spoken, you didn’t have to read it in books. My uncle used to end up at the bottom of Whites Row where there used to be a barbers and I would sit outside on the curb with my sweets – and that’s how it was in the old days.
My grandfather Patrick Donovan was one of nine children, he started the business and then the brothers came in and that’s how Donovan Brothers came about. I always knew I had a job to go to in the family business. You did everything. If there was a job there, from sweeping up to serving, you did it. It was second nature. Our motto was politeness cost nothing, I would always say, ‘Good Morning, Mr So & So,’ and my uncle would say to the customer, ‘The boy will take it out for you.’
We ran it as a family business and if there was a problem we dealt with it at once between us. The eldest was my grandfather, the governor, and when he died my uncles took over. The governor tells you what to do but everyone else asks. To everyone that works for me today, I am the governor, but in the family my elderly uncles are still the governors. Like in all family businesses, you could count upon one another. There’s no one person shouldering all the problems at any one time.
Every one of my uncles ran a different market. We were involved in Covent Garden, Borough and Stratford Market as well as Spitalfields. I would go out and make the deliveries. Whichever market I was in, it was always the same, whenever I walked through, traders would come up to me with orders and say ‘Tell your father.’ No-one knew who I was. I was ‘the boy’ and I still am to my uncles, and this makes a family. Because although we do retire as such, there’s no retirement from the family business. You are born on the job. You die on the job.”
John’s two sons and daughter work for Donovan Brothers now, ensuring the family business goes on for another generation. I think we may permit him to enjoy a certain swagger, coming in to work before dawn in all weathers and continuing his pattern of napping twice a day, at the end of the afternoon and in the late evening, thereby sustaining himself with superlative resilience through the extended antisocial hours that market life entails. The market is a world to itself and it is John Olney’s world.
Portrait of John Olney by Mark Jackson
The building in Crispin St retains its signwriting today
In Commercial St, nineteen sixties
John’s shop in the Spitalfields Market, nineteen eighties
John Olney outside his shop in the New Spitalfields Market, Leyton
Portraits of John Olney © Mark Jackson
You may also like to read about
Jimmy Huddart, Spitalfields Market Porter
Peter Thomas, Fruit & Vegetable Supplier
Ivor Robins, Fruit & Vegetable Purveyor
John Olney, Donovan Brothers Ltd
Jim Heppel, New Spitalfields Market
Jeffrey Johnson’s Forgotten Corners
Enigmatic Photographer Jeffrey Johnson deposited a stack of his appealing pictures from the seventies and eighties with Archivist Stefan Dickers at the Bishopsgate Institute , including these photos of forgotten corners in London. I cannot resist the feeling that Jeffrey is one after my own heart when I examine these characterful pictures – a few are familiar places but I am reliant upon my readers to identify the rest.
Apostal’s
Buitifull Buttons
Arlington Way, N1
Broadway Market
Commercial Rd
Royal Exchange, City of London
Royal Exchange, City of London
King’s Cross
King’s Cross
King’s Cross
King’s Cross
King’s Cross
Teeth bought
Brick Lane
Barter St, Holborn
Great Ormond St, Bloomsbury
Little Montague Court, City of London
St Bartholomew’s Close, Smithfield
Albion Buildings
Photographs copyright © Jeffrey Johnson
You may also like to take a look at
The Forgotten Corners of Old London
Mystery Pictures of Brick Lane
On Mothering Sunday
Valerie, my mother
What are you to do on Mothering Sunday if you have no mother? My mother died in 2005 and each year I confront this troubling question when the annual celebration comes around.
If I was religious I might light a candle or lay flowers on a grave, yet neither of these is an acceptable option for me. Contemplating advertisements for Mothering Sunday gifts, I deliberate privately over the tender question as my sense of loss deepens in the approach to this particular day, only for it to dissipate afterwards. This uneasy resolution brings no peace, serving to remind me how much I miss her. It is a feeling which grows with each Mothering Sunday that passes, as the distance in time that separates us increases and the memories fade. I do not expect or wish to ‘get over it,’ I seek to live in peace with my sadness.
I wish she could see where I live now and I could share the joys of my life with her. I have a frustrated instinct to communicate delights, still identifying sights and experiences that I know she would enjoy.
My picture of her has changed. The painful experience of her final years when she was reduced to helpless paralysis by the onset of dementia has been supplanted by a string of fragmentary images from my childhood – especially of returning from school on summer afternoons and discovering her at work in her garden.
I think of how she raised her head when she smiled, tossing her hair in assertion of a frail optimism. ‘Not too bad, thank you!’ she is admitting, lifting her head to the light and assuming a confident smile with a flash of her eyes. This was her default answer to any enquiry into her wellbeing – whether it was a routine or genuine question – and she maintained it through the years, irrespective of actual circumstances. When life was smooth, it was a modest understatement and when troubles beset her, it was a discreet expression of personal resilience. For her, it was a phrase capable of infinite nuance and I do not believe she ever said it in the same way. Yet although I could always appreciate the emotional reality that lay behind her words, I think for everyone but me and my father it was an opaque statement which efficiently closed the line of enquiry, shielding her private self from any probing conversation. From her I learnt the value of maintaining equanimity and keeping a sense of proportion, whatever life brings.
I realise that I was lucky to have a mother who taught me to read before I started school at four years old. Denied the possibility of a university education herself, she encouraged me to fulfil her own thwarted ambitions and – perhaps more than I appreciate – I owe my life as a writer to her. Yet there is so much I could say about my mother that it is almost impossible to write anything. I recognise that the truth of what she means to me is in a region of emotion that is beyond language, but I do know that what she was is part of who I am today.
Increasingly, I am aware that many of those around me also share this situation of no longer having mothers. Perhaps I should buy them all flowers this Mothering Sunday? Certainly if anyone enquires, I shall reply ‘Not too bad, thank you!’ with a smile and raise my head. In that moment, I shall conjure her robust spirit from deep inside me and she will be present, in my demeanour and in my words, this Mothering Sunday.
You may also like to read about
Anthony Cairns’ East End Pubs
CLICK HERE TO BOOK
When I discovered Antony Cairns‘ series of pub portraits, I realised I had found a kindred spirit. His soulful photographs manage to record the death and evoke the life of these lost hostelries simultaneously.
An East Ender who studied photography at the London College of Printing in the nineties, Antony printed these intriguing pictures using the Van Dyke Brown process which was commonly used at the end of the nineteenth century when these pubs were in their prime.
The Albion, Bow Common – (1881-2005)
The Railway Arms, Sutton St – (1881-2001)
The Conqueror, Austin St/Boundary St – (1899-2001)
The Rose, Woolwich
The Flying Scud, Hackney Rd – (1874-1994)
The Crown & Cushion, Market Hill, Woolwich – (1840-2008)
The Victoria, Woolwich Rd, Charlton – (1881-?)
The Tidal Basin, Canning Town – (1862-1997)
The Marquis of Lansdowne – (1838- 2000 & now to be restored)
Photographs copyright © Antony Cairns
You may also like to take a look at
Alex Pink’s East End Pubs, Then & Now
The Tercentenary Of Sir John Vanbrugh
This year is the tercentenary of the death of John Vanbrugh, the playwright-turned-architect who designed Castle Howard and Blenheim. Charles Saumarez Smith, former Director of the National Gallery and an East End resident, has written a biography John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture. Below he writes about Vanbrugh Castle in Greenwich where Vanbrugh lived at the end of his life.
Charles will be talking about Vanbrugh at the Hanbury Hall in Spitalfields next Thursday 19th March. Click here for tickets
Vanbrugh Castle
If you walk up the hill in Greenwich Park from the Queen’s House or from Greenwich itself, you may spot the battlements of a small, fortified castle poking above the park wall and wonder what it is. Is it an eighteenth-century folly? Or the house of a nineteenth-century antiquarian?
Vanbrugh Castle, as the house is called, was built by John Vanbrugh as a rural retreat for himself, his new wife and their family in the early 1720s. He signed a lease for a small plot of land, immediately next door to the park, together with an adjacent twelve-acre field on 3rd March 1718, apparently planning to build a set of houses for himself and members of his close family — his two younger brothers, Charles and Philip, both officers in the Royal Navy, and two younger sisters, Victoria and Robina.
It was just at the moment that Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, was promulgating the importance of designing in an orthodox Palladian style. Burlington travelled out to Italy in the summer of 1719 and returned with vast numbers of Palladio’s drawings which he bought from the owner of the Villa Maser. Vanbrugh was perfectly capable of designing in an orthodox Palladian style if required as he demonstrated in his design for the Temple of the Four Winds, one of his last works at Castle Howard. But for his own house, Vanbrugh decided to design in a pseudo-medieval style with a circular turret attached in front, with a very inconvenient, steep staircase, and two corner towers with battlements. What on earth made him do this?
When he was supervising the construction of Blenheim, Vanbrugh had become very attached to living in the ruins of the medieval Woodstock Manor which still survived in the grounds of Woodstock Park. Vanbrugh adapted them for his own use, introducing new windows and making small-scale repairs, including adding a bog-house. When the Duchess of Marlborough discovered that he had spent money on this, she was livid and ordered the ruins to be demolished. But Vanbrugh held his ground and, possibly unwisely, sent her a long paper in which he described how important these medieval ruins were, how full of historical associations, and that they were an important historical landmark in the view from the new palace.
At almost exactly the time that Vanbrugh was making plans for his new house, he also encouraged his friend, Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle, to build a whole line of medieval fortification on the edge of his estate at Castle Howard. These fortifications are in exactly the same style as Vanbrugh Castle, not intended to be authentically medieval, but in the medieval style, a kind of free-form medievalism in which the house is reduced to a bare geometry.
Vanbrugh not only designed a castle for himself but a number of other buildings nearly, including another large-ish house flanked by turrets for his younger brother, Charles, and a very curious single storey building like a castellated bungalow which was known as ‘The Nunnery’, lived in by his unmarried sisters, although in the early 1720s, it was another brother, Philip, who paid the rates. Maybe all three of them lived there together.
On either side of the Nunnery were two tower houses, known as the White Towers, four stories high in their central section, so, in contrast to the low-level The Nunnery. Imposing, although, as he described the houses in a letter to Lord Carlisle, there was only a single room and closet on each floor. He told Carlisle that he was designing these houses for his sons, although his younger son, John, known as Jack, was dead by 1723.
Plans and outline drawings for these houses survive in a large cache of drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, bought in 1992 with help from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. There are many other outline sketches for small houses in this collection. These are freehand, experimental doodles, in which Vanbrugh tries out different ground-floor room arrangements and how even a small house can be made to look interesting through the use of abstract geometry and with a limited amount of, again abstract, articulation, much in the style of Goose-Pie House which he had built for himself in Whitehall and which Jonathan Swift satirised as being like a mud-pie, copied from children playing in the street.
It seems that in the last few years of his life, when Vanbrugh was no longer involved with Blenheim (he had fallen out terminally with the Duchess of Marlborough in November 1716 and was never allowed back), he focused his attention, instead, on designing smaller houses for himself, his family and friends. It may have been an early form of property development.
An antiquary, William Stukeley, Secretary of the recently established Society of Antiquaries, visited Greenwich in June 1721, not long after Vanbrugh Castle had been built and drew it in exactly the same way that he drew medieval ruins, labelling it ‘Castellum Vanbrugiense apud Grenovicum’. The following August, he returned to draw his brother’s house which he called a ‘castellulum’, a baby castle. It is a very odd idea: an earnest antiquary drawing them as it they were authentic medieval buildings.
Another Scottish antiquary, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, visited in 1727, the year after Vanbrugh’s death. He was equally surprised and wrote:
‘Vanbrugh was a famous architect but of an odd taste. These houses of his consist of great heaps of brick and thick walls but little accommodation within. There is scarcely a room in them above 8 or 10 foot square and some much less. The ornaments are such which the Goths and their successors used to place in Castles and Prisons, viz. battlements, round-towers, little windows and doors. And yet this was the man chosen to build Blenheim House for the Duke of Marlborough!’
Vanbrugh was a very independent-minded man. Was he, when he came to design a house for himself, nostalgic for his youth when he had served in the army? Or was it an elaborate stage-set built to impress his young wife ? He had been a playwright in his youth.
After being kicked out of the ruins of Woodstock Manor by the Duchess of Marlborough, he was no doubt enjoying the fact that he had been able to build a castle for himself, cocking a snook at the Duchess and enjoying the view from his own little castle over Greenwich. I like to imagine him at the gate with his spy-glass.
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Photograph by Charles Saumarez Smith
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
Vanbrugh Castle, drawing by William Stukeley 1722
The Nunnery, drawing by William Stukeley 1721
John Vanbrugh by Godfrey Kneller, c. 1704 and c. 1710 (courtesy of National Portrait Gallery)
Charles Saumarez Smith’s John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture is published by Lund Humphries. A free exhibition of Vanbrugh’s drawings has just opened at Sir John Soane’s Museum.
